Using the trees as cover, the men followed Jeanne’s detailed directions and by dawn they had reached Trocmé woods near Villeret and the comparative safety of the hunting cabin. Jeanne Magniez, who was not going to see her wards go hungry in their new accommodation, appeared on horseback a few hours later, accompanied by Anne de Becquevort and her teenage servant driving a small cart: ‘I brought them some food, and a barrel of beer,’ she recorded. David Martin, the former cook, set about making a meal, while the others warily began exploring their new hiding place. It was Robert Digby’s second sojourn in the woods outside Villeret. At night, he could slip out to the spot just beyond the tree line, where John Sligo had been killed weeks earlier, and look down on the little village that had first taken him in.
The easy pace of life in Villeret had been shattered in the preceding weeks, as Evers’s reign plunged the village into a new world of edicts, threats and fear. A place that had lived by its own rules for centuries was now under regulation of an intensity few had imagined possible. The butcher Cardon was turned out of his home on the crossroads, the largest in the village, to make way for the offices of a German Orstkommandant named Scholl, one of Deutsche’s underlings who set about Organising’ the local agriculture or, rather, plundering it. Before the war, Emile Foulon had been one of the most prosperous men in Villeret, with his military pension, more than four hectares of land, three horses, four cows, one hundred chickens and twenty ducks. Suddenly his possessions were no longer his own: within a month, Scholl had deprived him of one horse, two cows, his prize bull, ‘chickens on various occasions’, the entire crop of clover, and what few beets he had been able to harvest before the troops arrived. The old soldier watched as his 400-bottle wine cellar was loaded into one of his mule wagons, and confiscated.
Parfait Marié trudged to Le Câtelet every day and returned with fresh orders, threats and demands from the Kommandant. In the space of just a few months the people of Villeret and their neighbours found they were no longer permitted to light fires in the fields, look at aircraft, leave home after seven o’clock at night, gather in groups of more than three people, hang laundry on washing lines, display a light visible in the window at night, gather fallen wood more than six centimetres in diameter, or travel to the next village without a pass. Hunting was also banned, but the villagers had been taking game from François Theillier’s acres and the woods around Hargival for as long as anyone could remember, and as yet the Germans were not in a position to stop them.
On 15 November, Arthur Tordeux and Desiré Dubuis were poaching rabbits when they discovered Digby and his eight companions in the Trocmé woods. After a week in the tiny cabin, the men’s nerves were already horribly frayed, ‘because the local inhabitants were continually in the copse, gathering wood for their fires’. For several days, Dubuis and Tordeux brought food to the fugitives, but swiftly they concluded that ‘their situation was becoming impossible’; the men were too numerous and too close to Villeret, and the hunting cabin was too small to serve as a long-term hiding place. Jeanne Magniez called a meeting with the village elders: the British soldiers were now a shared problem, she declared, and the time had come ‘to change methods’ to ensure they were not captured by the enemy. No one raised an objection, or pointed out that by merely discussing how to conceal the soldiers they were courting death. ‘Why should they undertake the risk?’ a British general later wondered, as he recorded the instinctive French actions in defence of British soldiers. ‘Yet they did … A long drawn-out martyrdom of suspense, the daily risking of their lives for another, was [now] their existence.’
Among those present at the meeting were Tordeux, Dubuis and Florency Dessenne, the mason who had found Digby on his doorstep three months earlier, along with his mother, the redoubtable widow Marie Coulette. Parfait Marié was also let in on the secret since, as acting mayor, he had the most to lose if the men were discovered. Léon Lelong, the baker, was also there, along with several other senior village figures, including Emile Foulon.
Lelong, a balding, habitually plaintive man with disappointed eyes, swiftly pointed out the obvious: the nine fugitives amounted to ‘a veritable garrison’ in their midst. Together, they were immediately identifiable, but separated, they might just be made to blend into the scenery, at least until they could be moved elsewhere. It was therefore agreed that the group should be split up and lodged in different houses around the village; that way if one was discovered the others might still escape detection. The second part of the plan was more ambitious. After prolonged discussion, it was decided that ‘it would be more sensible, and less trying for the men, to be mixed in with the population as fully as possible’. The people of Villeret would act as human camouflage, if the soldiers could be taught to ‘live as country people, without trying to hide’.
Some of the new arrivals would be easier to conceal than others: Robert Digby, as a French-speaker, could already pass for a native, except to a native. Thorpe, with his darker looks and squat build, was quite similar to the Villeret physical type. The tall Irishman David Martin, on the other hand, towered over everyone else in the village and would stick out ‘like a poplar in a pond’. Rosy-cheeked Thomas Donohoe, Irish to the roots of his reddish hair, also had a telltale habit of whistling Irish songs, out of tune. The most obviously conspicuous members of the group, however, were the two youngest soldiers. Jack Hardy and his friend were still teenagers; every German sentry would wonder why two healthy men of evidently mobilisable age and too young to be heads of households were not at the front. They would be questioned constantly, and since neither spoke more than a smattering of French, they were serious liabilities. Jeanne Magniez stepped in: ‘It was feared that the two youngest would never pass undetected, so they returned with me to Hargival. In defiance of both the military and civilian rules laid down by the Germans, I installed them, in strictest secrecy, in my own house. None of my servants, with the exception of my serving maid, had a clue they were there.’
The remaining men emerged from Trocmé woods that night and took up residence in the village. ‘They were each given civilian clothes and their uniforms were buried,’ as their new hosts set about the courageous but daunting task of turning seven English and Irish soldiers into northern French peasants.
CHAPTER SIX
Battle Lines
The Englishmen arrived in Villeret at the same time as the hunger. The village had never been as rich as Le Câtelet or Hargicourt, but it had not experienced real want since the war in 1871. With the demand for grain in the run-up to war, and now a spate of requisitioning from the new German authorities, food stocks were running perilously low before the onset of winter. What remained had to be strictly accounted for and was liable to summary confiscation. In Villeret, ‘as everywhere else, mattresses, linen, gold, copper, food of all sorts, animals and so on were requisitioned, and numerous searches were carried out by the enemy to get their hands on what they wanted’.
Evers and his minions developed an increasingly Byzantine regulatory system to ensure that not a single chicken, egg or bushel of wheat went unnoted. In the German ledgers there were entries for pigs over 100 kilos and pigs under 100 kilos; sows, suckling pigs; pigs aged from four weeks to six months, and so on. All hens were required to lay one, and then two eggs per day, each to be handed over to the German authorities; all female rabbits must be listed; even the domestic cats and dogs had to be numbered, and then kept inside or they would be killed, apparently to ensure they did not run in front of German vehicles.
The Kommandant also considered himself to be an expert on matters agricultural, although his grasp of animal husbandry seemed a little shaky. Orders that every cockerel must produce an egg, every wild rabbit must be counted and all molehills flattened met with astonishment, and then discreet hilarity. ‘You got the feeling they would demand that hens to do the goose-step and marshal the swallows into regiments,’ one local remarked, as the avalanche of restrictions and rules smothered the area.
Dwind
ling food stocks, the ban on hunting, tight monitoring of existing supplies and the mounting demands of the German invaders meant that by November 1914 there was barely enough to go around in Villeret when seven more adult male mouths were secretly added to the community. ‘Lelong agreed to provide the bread’ needed to keep the men alive, and Marie Coulette declared that she would arrange the rest, for if Evers could resort to arbitrary measures to fill the stomachs of his army, so could she. ‘They had to be fed, even though there was nothing to eat and food had to be sent off with those who were working in the phosphate mine. Marie Coulette couldn’t feed them on her own, so it had to be properly organised.’ It was a brave neighbour who dared to argue with Marie Coulette for, as her granddaughter observed, ‘She was a hard one. Elle n’avait pas la langue dans sa poche … She didn’t keep her tongue in her pocket.’ As a child, Florency Dessenne had only once defied his mother: he swore at her. ‘She picked up a hatchet, and threw it at him. Florency dodged the axe, but it stuck in the door of the barn. It stayed there a long time.’ Thereafter, for the rest of his life, Florency did exactly what his mother told him.
While their hiding places were being prepared, the soldiers were hidden first in an empty building on the farm known as the Petit Priel, and then in the granary behind the Dessenne household, where ‘they slept in the straw’. Many would later claim credit for sheltering the British soldiers, but as yet their presence was initially known only to a few. Even the priest, who came every other week to preach in the church on the rise beside the village, remained in ignorance of his new parishioners.
The conspirators threw themselves into the task with an energy all the more remarkable for being, as yet, unquestioning. Marie Coulette collected civilian clothes from women whose husbands were away at the front. Emile Foulon and his schoolteacher daughter, Antoinette, concealed extra supplies of wheat and dried vegetables in their barn. Léon Lelong surreptitiously baked extra loaves, which his half sister-in-law, Suzanne Boitelle, delivered to the men in a covered basket. The refugee soldiers started to grow their moustaches long, in the Villeret manner, and the distinctions between the fighting men of one land and the peasants of another slowly began to blur.
Like most small rural communities, the village was riven with feuds so ancient no one could quite remember how they had started. The sprawling Marié clan, with the parsonical Parfait at the head, cordially disdained the Lelongs, and neither family had a good word to say of the Foulons, believing they had ideas above their station just because he had a bit of money and Antoinette wore a crêpe hat to church; the Bochards gossiped about the Morels, who bad-mouthed the Marié family as a clutch of schemers and liars. In peacetime, Marie Coulette had maintained a permanent, low-level conflict with most of her neighbours. ‘Our house was a house of God and anyone was welcome there, except the people of Villeret,’ recalled her granddaughter. ‘In the village, everyone kept an eye on everyone else all the time.’ Villeret was famous for the complexity and venom of its internecine vendettas, which were sometimes taken to comic lengths. ‘Once Florency and Marie Coulette happened to drop in on Clara Bochard and smelled something cooking. They asked Clara what she was making. “Nothing,” she replied. So Florency and Marie Coulette stayed there, talking, until whatever was in the oven had burned to a cinder. She was too mean to share the dish she had made, so she preferred to let it burn rather than surrender any of it.’
Relations between Marie Coulette and Elise Lelong, matriarch of the Lelong clan, were particularly uncomfortable. Elise had always considered herself a cut above the uncouth and boisterous Marie Coulette. Tubby and short, with salt-and-pepper hair and a moustache that somehow added to her grandeur, Elise had a ‘strong character and a fine spirit’. She was not only the baker’s wife, and thus a woman of some standing, but also a former schoolmistress with firm opinions on everything. Her cousin ran Villeret’s only industrial concern, a tiny factory employing three workers and two young women to produce a fine hessian cloth with a large and loud machine that had been built in England. The cloth was then shipped from Hargicourt by rail to Paris to make patterned wallpaper for smart bourgeois homes, a fact which Elise considered an additional boost to her social status, even though the machine had been silent since the start of war. Elise Lelong had high hopes for her daughter Clothilde, a somewhat podgy but lively teenager whom she dressed in velvet dresses with lace cuffs and collars. The Lelongs regarded the Dessennes as common smugglers who did not go to church; the Dessennes thought the Lelongs gave themselves airs, and ought to mind their own business. ‘Their curtains were always twitching, they were forever spying on us from behind their windows,’ recalled one of the Dessenne clan.
These traditional animosities, stoked by Achille Poëtte, the postman who gossiped to and about everyone, were as much a part of the glue that held the village together as the belief that Hargicourt, half a mile down the valley, was another country populated by Huguenot bandits. The arrival of the British soldiers, however, had unified the village as never before, and the old rivalries were temporarily suppressed in the effort to shield the men from a common enemy.
It would be months before the military gait of the fugitives could be adapted to the clog-clad shuffle of the Villeret villagers, and even longer before they had absorbed enough of the Picardy patois to fool a German sentry. In the meantime, they were concealed, scattered among the homes of the conspirators. Initially, social relations were severely strained by the language barrier. ‘The Englishmen were very polite, but they said absolutely nothing at all. None of us knew how to speak English, and they only spoke a little French,’ Louise Dessenne, Florency’s younger daughter, recalled. The families took turns to feed the men and slowly, with sign language and goodwill on both sides, they settled into a routine.
One of the most sought-after dining spots was in the Foulon household, where the men would sit at a large oak table beneath a grand brass chandelier with nine candles. Emile Foulon was a wealthy man by Villeret standards, and also a cultivated one, with a library of fifty volumes ranging from treatises on botany and horse-breeding to the novels of Victor Hugo and works of history. He and his daughter could also speak some English, and their home was among the most comfortable and well-appointed in the village, with fine furniture and possessions, including oriental silhouettes by Alfred d’Ancre, a Reaumur barometer and a stuffed fox in a glass case. Emile even owned a bowler hat, and twelve pairs of shoes in a village where most people clopped around in wooden sabots. It was a relief for the men to be able to converse in their own tongue, and a positive pleasure to be able to look across the dinner table at twenty-one-year-old Antoinette, who was not only clever, vivacious and a fine cook, but remarkably pretty, to boot. After dinner, if the coast was clear, the men would sit in Foulon’s garden beneath the great elm tree, two-and-a-half metres across the base, or wander through his orchard among cherry, apple and Duchesse d’Angou-lême pear trees neatly trained into espaliers against the garden wall.
The luxuries of the Foulon home stood in contrast to the more austere surroundings of the Dessenne establishment. Louise Dessenne, Florency’s daughter, described her wartime childhood in this typical Picardy home:
We all lived in four rooms, the children sleeping together on wooden beds, and the adults in the kitchen. The floor was of red tiles, and the walls were hung with cloth. There were no decorations, no pictures, and no books. Every room had a single window, and the kitchen had a charcoal stove. At table we mostly ate beans and potatoes. In the morning it was coffee with milk or chicory, and some bread; in the evening it was soup, a little cheese – Marolles, now, there was a cheese! There was no running water, the toilet was outside the back door, and we washed in a big tub on the stove. There was always a pot of coffee on the hob. In the evening, we lit an oil lamp, or candles. But my father said we had to make economies, so we did not keep the lamps lit for long. We would stay around the fire. Every evening a German guard would walk down the street, bellowing, when the curfew went int
o force. As he went back up the road, Maman would open the curtain a chink and say: ‘Look, there goes a rabid dog.’
Long before curfew, the fugitives would have thanked their hosts and slipped off to their various hideouts around the village: the cellar of the Dessenne house, Parfait Marie’s woodshed and, most ingenious of all, in the space behind Léon Lelong’s wood-fired oven. ‘The bread oven was built towards the middle of the largest room in the house, with a concealed area between the partition and the exterior. The Germans never even suspected there was this gap. Lelong put in a mattress, and two of the Englishmen slept here. They were hot, but invisible.’
Robert Digby moved gratefully into the attic of the house occupied by Suzanne Boitelle and her two-year-old son Guy. This was not the most commodious of sanctuaries, nor the safest, being rather too close to the building occupied by Orstkommandant Scholl, but it was among the most welcoming.
Marie Suzanne Laurence had married Paul Boitelle two years before the war, when she was nineteen. Suzanne’s mother, Céline, had been widely considered the most ‘immoral’ woman in Villeret. Céline bore several children within marriage, one of whom was Elise Lelong, the wife of Léon Lelong the baker. But after her husband’s death, Céline had enjoyed a series of romantic liaisons and produced at least two illegitimate children by different fathers, each of whom was given her maiden name, Laurence. Suzanne never knew who her own father was, and it is entirely possible that Céline had only a vague notion herself. Suzanne had dark eyes ‘like two pistols’, and black hair. Some said she was the product of Celine’s lightning dalliance with a passing gypsy pedlar. Years later, two of her descendants were found to carry a minor genetic malady peculiar to southern Europe.
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