A Foreign Field

by Ben MacIntyre

  As the soldiers burrowed down along both sides of the Western Front, so the Germans pervaded the lives and homes of the local inhabitants. Sandwiched between the front lines and the occupied areas behind, this strip of territory became a strange no-man’s land for those who remained there, deprived of all rights and information, pinned down by the crushing weight of the conflict. No aspect of daily life was left untouched, unregulated or unmolested; the troops came in on numberless waves, and so did the rules. Within a few months, Germany succeeded in transforming occupied France into what the future US president Herbert Hoover described as ‘a vast concentration camp’ in which survival was increasingly difficult, and escape nearly impossible.

  Major Karl Evers – or Etappen-Kommandant 8/X of the 2nd Etappen-Inspektion, to give him his full title – had been a wholly undistinguished magistrate before the war in the town of Celle, near Hanover. The administration of this small but important area of occupied France was a job precisely suited to his limited imagination, casual cruelty and obsession with bureaucratic minutiae. His tasks were to ensure that the civilian population did not impede the German war effort, to flush out spies, to provide adequate billets in the scattered villages for the thousands of troops heading back and forth to the front, and to extract from the land and its people whatever could be of use, value or pleasure. A minor functionary who now found himself the seigneur of Le Câtelet and an area of about ten square miles around it, Evers plunged into the job with relish.

  In Le Câtelet, the villagers watched with foreboding as the German imperial flag was raised above the police station, now the headquarters of the military police, ‘telling everyone that there were, henceforth, no rights and no liberties’. A command post was officially established on 19 October, ‘when soldiers requisitioned furniture to set up their offices’. Here Evers called together all the mayors of the region, including Parfait Marié of Villeret, and ‘delivered a lecture in a language that was almost French, describing the various duties that were now incumbent on them, on pain of death. He played the tyrant. Every morning officials of each commune were required to come, whatever the distance, to the dictator’s office to … be told of his decisions, receive instructions and particularly orders for requisitions, with the required quantities, of horses, livestock, carts, wine, food, bed linen, money and so on.’

  Over the coming months and years, hundreds of thousands of German soldiers would pass through the villages behind the lines, staying at most a week or two to rest and recuperate before returning to battle. But Major Evers and his men were a constant presence, investigating, regulating, punishing and plundering. In the journal he kept throughout the war, Joseph Cabaret, the schoolteacher, described the new German ruler of the region: ‘Of medium height, he looked well over fifty years old but liked to pose as a bit of a dandy. He was a Lutheran, but there was nothing very religious about him and he displayed a particular loathing for priests.’

  Evers could be charming when the occasion suited. ‘Initially, he displayed a certain affability, but this was soon stripped away to reveal his profound mendacity and, when drunk, he became excessively brutal, arrogant and insufferable. Low of height and low of morals, he was less slovenly than others, but dryly ruthless, in the Prussian manner.’ Another elderly resident of Le Câtelet was pithier in her assessment: ‘He was wicked.’

  Under the command of Major Evers came an array of lesser military officials, ‘little people thrown into authority by the war’, in Cabaret’s words. Even taking into account the locals’ understandable tendency to caricature them, the German occupiers appear to have been a bizarre bunch: a second in command from Münster named Flemming, ‘a young squirt, fatuous, pretentious and pedantic’; a judicial clerk named Bode, considered ‘a ferocious troublemaker’, and Captain Deutsche, the organiser of forced labour, who was ‘responsible for overseeing agriculture, stables, granaries, barns, timber-cutting and open-air inspections of horses, mules and asses’. Variously nicknamed ‘The Pig’ and ‘The Bull Dog’, Deutsche swiftly made himself one of the most hated of the occupying officials by meddling in every aspect of village life, and drinking all day. ‘He was a fantastic drunk who could absorb ten litres of beer at one sitting.’ To their number would be added the peculiar military vet, Lieutenant Fischer, a former café pianist who, when not tending sick animals, ‘liked to creep up on cats sleeping in the sun, and shoot them’.

  Perhaps the most intriguing, and certainly the oddest of the German administrators was the military judge, Hans Grumme. Lanky and awkward, with a tuft of reddish hair that refused to lie down, Grumme was nicknamed ‘The Big Red Turkey’, though regarded as almost human by some of the locals. ‘His attitude was less detestable, and he sometimes showed respect for the French people, even when passing sentence on them.’ A lawyer from Wennigsen, outside Hanover, he had an offbeat, dark sense of humour. It was Grumme who had knocked on Léon Legé’s door and announced the arrival of the ‘Barbarians’.

  Carrying out Evers’s commands, and permanently stationed in Le Câtelet, was a brigade of military police and a squad of sentries which together ‘terrorised the population: their principal role consisted of confiscating food for the Kommandant and his men, and keeping the best bits for themselves. They seemed to enjoy great freedom of action and arbitrary power.’ Evers liked to claim that every rule and order came directly to him from the German High Command, but in reality he was a power unto himself, basing his decisions and regulations on little more than whim.

  All along the front line, the various Kommandanten of the different zones made up ad hoc laws, issuing varying proclamations on the same subject at different times, often contradicting one another and sometimes themselves. Orders were issued irrespective of whether they were enforceable, let alone logical or, still less, fair. Evers was, in many ways, a classic bureaucrat, treating the trivial and the vital with the same leaden seriousness, and insisting that obedience to the rules was the single guiding principle, except when applied to himself.

  The bulk of the officers had installed themselves in the château at Le Câtelet, unaware that the owner, the elderly spinster Mademoiselle Founder d’Alincourt, was secretly hosting another guest in the attic, one Emmanuel Le Hérissé, a French cavalry officer who had been shot in the foot during the retreat from Mons, and taken in, tended and hidden by the châtelaine. Evers himself chose to take up residence in the substantial home of Léon Lege, the town notary. ‘The windows looked out over the gendarmerie, and the view made it easier for him to keep an eye on everything.’ Lege did his best to make this unwelcome and demanding resident as uncomfortable as possible. ‘Every time Evers walked into a room where he was, Lege would walk out of the other door.’ But his daughter, Henriette, recalled a more genial side to Major Evers: ‘He used to give me chocolate bars.’

  The locals received their first taste of Evers-style administration on 29 September, when posters were pasted outside every mairie under his control: ‘All eggs are for German officers,’ it declared, and then added, by way of clarification, ‘civilians are forbidden to eat eggs’. A week later, demonstrating Evers’s uncanny knack for juxtaposing the absurd and the severe, it was announced that the canton of Le Câtelet would be required to pay 8,600 francs in ‘war contributions’, with the explanation that since they were no longer paying any tax to the French government the inhabitants had nothing to complain about.

  Over the next few months Evers and his minions unleashed volley after volley of prohibitions, sequestrations and petty orders. Gradually, the German machine also took over the local industry: Monsieur de Becquevort’s brewery in Vendhuile was dismantled; the phosphate from the mines around Hargicourt was diverted to Germany, and within weeks the woods around Hargival, where Jeanne Magniez had loved to ride, began to be cut down to line the trenches. Brass was confiscated for shell casings, and iron was requisitioned to make barbed wire. The demands began slowly, and became steadily more rapacious as the war dragged on and Germany’s needs grew acute. In
Villeret it was Parfait Marie’s unhappy task to sign the paperwork for every item taken by the Germans, his once-perfect copperplate becoming more slapdash and forlorn with each fresh requisition order he signed. The Germans even seemed to view the people with a utilitarian eye; one villager later recalled the arrival of an administrative officer whose notions of physical purity foreshadowed those of the Nazis a generation later: ‘He saw all the mentally sick people in Villeret, the mineworkers addicted to the drink blanche, and said he was going to have them all shot because they were no use to the German soldiers and were extra mouths to feed. He was only persuaded not to do so by the mayor.’

  Evers and his fellow Kommandanten were convinced from the outset – entirely correctly – that enemy soldiers and others with the potential to damage the German war effort were lurking in occupied France. A similar attitude prevailed briefly on the other side of the line, where some German stragglers had also been left behind when the German army retreated from the Mame. Unlike the British or French fugitives in German-occupied France, the Germans trapped on the wrong side of the line could not hope for local aid. Most were swiftly rounded up, and although proclamations were issued in German and French warning that ‘all enemy soldiers not surrendering at once would be treated as spies and shot if found with weapons in their hands’, there is no evidence that this threat ever needed to be carried out.

  Evers had been installed for only a few weeks when, in mid-October 1914, ‘the manhunt for soldiers who had been left behind began in earnest … From the outset, an exact inventory of the male population was the Kommandant’s main preoccupation, for he was most concerned about hidden soldiers.’ On 22 October, the mayors were summoned to Le Câtelet and handed the following proclamation, a masterpiece of administrative gibberish:

  1. All mayors are required to present, at once, a register of all men living in their community: a) men liable to military service b) men not liable to military service c) men belonging to the French army (deserters etc.).

  2. All mayors will forfeit their lives, and the community its property, if any man enrolled in the army is allowed to leave the community; any inhabitant found without the correct authorisation will be shot as a spy.

  3. All cars, bicycles, arms, ammunition and carrier pigeons must be handed in to the Kommandant’s office by 25 October. Anyone who, after that time, is found in possession of any of the above will be shot.

  4. All mayors are required to arrest or disarm English, French or Belgian soldiers. Mayors who conceal the presence of such soldiers will be shot. Inhabitants who hide them will be hanged. A very large fine will be levied on the community, or else the entire village will be burned down.

  This was vintage Evers: he knew that it was impossible to round up, in three days, every revolver and bullet in such a vast area. The random nature of his threats is shown in his indecision over whether it would be more useful to burn or fine offending villages. In this rural community every household had at least one gun, and most had several. Emile Foulon of Villeret, a retired cavalry officer, possessed a veritable arsenal comprising three shotguns, one revolver, three antique pistols, three sabres, one rapier, one sword-stick and a dagger.

  Much of what Evers decreed was completely unenforceable, yet there was also a sinister psychology underpinning his orders: if the threatened punishment was sufficiently dire, and the demands were sufficiently extravagant, then someone, eventually, would come forward and reveal the whereabouts of a fugitive soldier. Once an example had been set and punishment meted out with due severity, others would follow. The swaggering Kommandant of Le Câtelet saw enemy agents everywhere, and weeding them out became his obsession. An intelligence officer, working in conjunction with members of the Secret Military Police disguised as civilians, was made responsible not only for debriefing German spies when these succeeded in crossing back over the lines, but for counter-intelligence operations across the entire rear zone. This was no easy task, for the officer had a staff of only six, of whom three spoke not a word of French.

  Major Evers was a hunter, and not just of men: like many officers on both sides in the conflict, he viewed the war as a sort of jolly bloodsport, and also as an opportunity to enjoy the hunt in a country teeming with game. The woods around the Hargival estate were overflowing with rabbit, partridge, deer, pheasant and woodcock and so it was there, every afternoon, that the German officers repaired to enjoy some sport. Robert Digby and his band now found themselves under fire once again. ‘The officers from the Command Post in Le Câtelet came to hunt every day around their hiding place,’ Jeanne Magniez wrote. ‘The Germans even used the walls of the Pêcherie for target practice with their revolvers, without for one moment imagining that eight [actually, nine] Englishmen were behind the walls, their ears out on stalks.’

  The soldiers might have been able to remain invisible beneath the noses of the German officers, but the comings and goings at the Magniez fishing lodge did not escape notice in the locality, where Evers’s threats were beginning to have the desired effect. ‘An inhabitant of Vendhuile, having solved the living mystery of the Pêcherie, tipped off the mayor, who became deeply alarmed.’ Monsieur Luquet, the mayor of Vendhuile, had every reason to fear German reprisals. Just weeks earlier, he had found himself begging a German officer not to burn the village after Oscar Dupuis had shot and wounded two German soldiers. The mayor had finally dissuaded the officer, General Thaddeus von Jarowski, from carrying out his punitive orders by giving his personal commitment that there would be no further acts of resistance. ‘I have strongly recommended that all people under my administration retain the utmost calm,’ he told the general, who finally agreed to spare the village on condition that every person in the parish gave ‘a promise of passivity’.

  Luquet finally screwed up his courage to intervene, although he still did not dare to confront the formidable mistress of Hargival in person. ‘On 1 November, he sent me a formal order to evacuate the fugitives from the place,’ Jeanne recalled. ‘For eight days I refused, but then I had to give in, faced with the anger of my compatriots who knew what was going on and who were appalled by what they called my imprudence and the peril to which they said I was exposing the village.’

  Jeanne was not the type of woman to pay much attention to her faint-hearted neighbours, but she was aware that if gossip about the residents of the Pêcherie was already spreading through Vendhuile, then it would only be a matter of time before it reached the ears of the Kommandant. There was another, equally practical reason why the men would be safer elsewhere. Digging in for a long war, the German military authorities had begun taking over all the substantial houses in the area as officers’ billets.

  In Le Câtelet, Mademoiselle Fournier d’Alincourt was becoming increasingly concerned about the wounded French officer in her rafters, for her ‘château was infested with Germans and decidedly unsafe’. The chevalier Le Hérissé, following a long tradition of evasion, was ‘lent some female clothes, and dressed himself up as a young woman of good family’. Bundled into a cart belonging to one of the Le Câtelet shopkeepers, who pretended that the passenger was his sick daughter, the Breton officer was successfully driven to Saint-Quentin where, showing rather less gumption than his protectors, he immediately surrendered to the Germans.

  The vast Château de Grand Priel above Villeret, which had been so swiftly vacated by François Theillier on the first night of the invasion, was also transformed into sumptuous quarters for German officers, who marvelled at the rich furnishings as they tucked into Theillier’s extensive selection of game and the wines from his deep cellar. Jeanne Magniez knew that her spacious home, and possibly even the Pêcherie itself, would shortly lose what remained of its ‘tranquillity’. ‘On horseback with Mlle de Becquevort, I rode around all the deserted farms and houses in the area searching for a refuge for my protégés, but with no success. I could see no alternative, for the moment, other than hiding them in a small hunting lodge belonging to my brother-in-law [Victor] Carlier, deep in
the woods next to Villeret.’

  After six weeks in the Pêcherie, Private Digby and his companions were on the move again, but this time through a region inundated with German troops. Weeks of enforced inertia suddenly gave way to a burst of activity, and renewed fear. In the middle of the night of 8 November, wrote Jeanne Magniez, ‘I sent the poor fellows on their way.’ Laying a long ladder provided by their patroness across the narrowest point of the fast-flowing river, the men crossed the Escaut near the Pêcherie and then headed south towards the mouth of the Riqueval tunnel.

  The souterrain at Riqueval is a remarkable feat of Napoleonic engineering, a tunnel carved through the hill that runs for four miles, taking the Saint-Quentin canal from just west of Le Câtelet, underneath the village of Bony, to a point a mile and a half east of Villeret. In time, the Germans would convert this into a huge underground barracks capable of holding 3,000 men. By laying planks across the canal they converted the tunnel into a cavern, damp and eerie with the water running below, but virtually impregnable to attack and protected at either end by machine guns. In the early days of the war, the place was deserted. Above it ran a long line of trees.