When the guns were silent, the Aisne Valley in the spring of 1915 seemed almost unruffled by the conflict. One British reconnaissance pilot flew over the lines into the occupied region, and wondered where the war had gone: ‘Far behind, in enemy territory, I saw factories with smoking chimneys and pleasantly normal villages. I counted six plumes of steam from equally normal trains.’
In Villeret, frogs rasped in the ponds down by the crossroads, and the priest came every second Sunday to say Mass. In the past, ‘the three pretty bells pealed happily in the tower, calling the faithful to sacred prayer’, but no longer, for like all church bells in the occupied region they had been taken away to be melted down in aid of the German war effort. The congregation had swelled with the war, and if the British soldiers discreetly joined the choir to add their devotions to those of their protectors, the curé Véron did not seem to notice. The people worked the fields, and the steady clack of the shuttles rattled up from the cellars. Antoinette Foulon continued to teach her thirty pupils in the village school and tend the roses that grew outside it. In her schoolroom the hungry children sang patriotic marching songs that the German authorities would doubtless have silenced had they fully understood the meaning of the words:
Où t’en vas-tu, soldat de France,
Tout équipé, prêt au combat.
Où t’en vas-tu, petit soldat?
C’est comme il plaît à la Patrie, Je n’ai qu’à suivre les tambours.
Gloire au drapeau,
Gloire au drapeau.
J’aimerais bien revoir la France,
Mais bravement mourir est beau.
Where are you going, soldier of France,
Kitted out, ready for battle?
Where are you going, little soldier?
Wherever the Fatherland orders,
I have only to follow the drums.
Glory to the flag,
Glory to the flag.
I would love to see France again.
But a brave death is beautiful.
Overlaying the ancient sounds of Villeret, came newer, but increasingly familiar ones. The crump of high explosive from the front was absorbed into the daily rhythms, a part of the tonal landscape accepted and for the most part ignored by occupier and occupied alike. Ernst Jünger, the celebrated German writer, war hero, nihilist and militarist, recalled hearing from behind the lines the ‘slow pulsation of the machinery of the front, a tune to which long years were to accustom us’. Very occasionally stray shells fired by accident or wildly off course would provide sanguinary reminders of the war’s proximity. Marie-Thérèse Dessenne described to her daughter how she was returning from Lelong’s bakery one morning when ‘a shell landed on a German who was walking ahead of her. She saw his head land first, and then the body.’
François Theillier would have fumed at the way the six German reconnaissance planes, stationed at the new military aerodrome on the plateau opposite the Château de Grand Priel, sent the game running for cover with their manoeuvres. In the village it was said that among the German officers enjoying the comforts of Theillier’s château was a handsome German flying ace who had shot down scores of French and British planes. That a certain romance was beginning to attach to some of the occupiers was only one reflection of a time knocked out of alignment in which the old certainties were reversing. The fertile land was tended in the way it always had been, but now under the orders, and for the benefit, of the foreign invaders. As Henri Lelong recorded: ‘The Germans made everyone in the village work for them. The crops of potatoes, wheat and beet were grown in the fields, but then sent off to Germany.’ By command of Major Evers, everyone in Villeret was required to aid the German war effort, ‘under the surveillance of the corporal and his four sentries’.
With their own (albeit forged) identity papers, Digby and the other soldiers were now officially part of the Villeret community, and since their faces were as familiar to the German sentries as those of any other villager, they, too, were marched out to the fields. ‘They left the village and went to work, joining the columns of civilian labourers, under the very noses of the enemy soldiers who, for a long time, never suspected a thing.’ Perhaps the sight of the British men digging undetected next to them in the fields gave renewed hope to the people of Villeret, who now lived in a world of ever weightier repression and privation. But for the fugitives, the days spent in the spring sunshine must have come as a relief, after a winter of captivity and anxiety, crushed into attic and cellar or sweltering behind the village bread oven. Tom Donohoe had spent his childhood extracting potatoes from the fields around Killybandrick, so it was no hardship to do the same in Villeret. Martin, still pasty from pneumonia but regaining strength, worked alongside him in the fields.
Early in 1915, the people of Le Câtelet found themselves mulling over the most bizarre command yet to emanate from the indefatigable Major Evers: ‘The officers have heard a cock crowing in the village. These are evidently concealed chickens. The owners must come forward and surrender them, or they will be severely punished.’ Nothing edible or valuable should be hidden, under the occupiers’ philosophy, and any attempt to do so was tantamount to armed resistance. It was, remarked one inhabitant, ‘a return to the cruelty and morality of the Dark Ages’. The keeping of gold Louis d’Or pieces was forbidden; passes to visit other villages were henceforth to be issued only in ‘cases of extreme seriousness’. No tree could be felled. ‘With the cellars pillaged and exhausted, they desperately sought possible hiding places for wine,’ and any house thought to be concealing supplies of alcohol was liable to sudden search.
Nothing was too insignificant to escape the grasping reach of the Evers regime. A typical requisition order, to a bourgeois family in nearby Vendhuile, read: ‘You are required to provide, as soon as possible, potato plates, vegetable plates, cups, coffee bowls with matching saucers, flat plates, curved plates, sauceboats, coffee makers, table cloths in good condition, white napkins, toiletry table, a night table, a toiletry service, a chamber pot, tables, armchairs, dining chairs …’ For the humbler folk of Villeret the demands were more simple, and more devastating: pots, pans, lamps, mattresses, axes, scythes, nails, brushes, cooking oil, leather, grease, geese and paper all poured into the gaping maw of the German invader. Emile Foulon’s great elm was felled and planked, followed by the walnut trees lining the graveyard which were cut down and dragged away to make German rifle butts.
By mid-1915, white bread could not be found anywhere in the locality, other than on the German officers’ tables, and in Villeret Lelong’s oven went cold for lack of flour and fuel, forcing the villagers to seek other forms of nourishment. ‘The continual surveillance could not prevent the inhabitants from venturing out at night and gathering whatever grain they could find in sacks. This was then ground in coffee grinders and used to create a sort of coarse bread … Some of the scavengers were caught by the German dragoons, and beaten up.’ Evers heard about the use of coffee grinders and immediately ordered, with towering pettiness, that all such machines be confiscated. This removal of ‘a tool by which a starving people kept itself alive’ was noted down as ‘a particularly cruel method of deprivation’. When Evers was told that requisitioning and rationing had reduced some communities to near starvation, his reply (no doubt intentionally, for he had spent part of his education in Paris) recalled the apocryphal remark attributed to Marie-Antoinette: ‘Let them eat salad and potatoes,’ he said.
The mayor of Villeret noted that the food situation improved slightly in ‘June 1915, when we began to receive some meagre American rations’, courtesy of Herbert Hoover. The businessman who would eventually become America’s 31st President played an important role in keeping Villeret alive through his Commission for Relief in Belgium – the international civilian relief effort which collected food and cash from local committees in neutral countries, principally the US, and then distributed vital supplies to Belgium and the occupied regions of northern France. Hoover’s ‘miracle of scientific organisation
’, as Lord Curzon called it, became markedly less scientific as its network approached the battle zones. Often the supplies did not get through, despite German promises to let the convoys pass. Villeret had once taken pride in its self-sufficiency; now, on the irregular occasions when the trucks arrived offering a few packets of donated food, it was enough to bring the village inhabitants pouring into the street, hands outstretched.
As the soldiers found in the trenches, even terror can become routine. The British fugitives and their protectors lived under permanent threat of exposure, arrest and summary death, and yet, as the months passed, their fear began to recede. The men could never relax, but they could at least begin to breathe. Initially the village people had openly stared at them and refused to understand when they spoke, but gradually the French came not merely to accept their presence but to regard them, in some way, as trophies of resistance: ‘Our Englishmen’. Curiosity and mistrust gave way to familiarity, and then to guarded affection. The refugees were at once exotic and vulnerable, and in a village now composed largely of women they brought out a variety of instincts: maternal, patriotic, adoptive, romantic and complex.
William Thorpe, the Liverpudlian with the atrocious French accent and gentle manner, became a special favourite. Some of the younger men threw themselves into the task of becoming Frenchmen, but Thorpe literally carried his past around with him in the form of the photographs of his three children, which he continued to show to everyone, certain that he would eventually return to them. In the Villeret code of values, family was of paramount importance: the village gave him the nickname ‘Papa’. ‘He was a serious fellow,’ one recalled with approval.
The young Irishmen were also popular. Willie O’Sullivan’s horseplay made the village girls giggle, although older heads shook and called him hardi, or reckless and impudent. Thomas Donohoe both ate like a horse and worked like one. David Martin, the onetime cook, often lent a hand in Villeret’s kitchens. ‘He was particularly good at making hot chocolate,’ and so whenever anyone in the village happened to obtain some of that precious commodity, the Irish cook was called in.
But it was Robert Digby who provoked the most interest, and gossip. Digby had a poise that set him apart from the others. Back in England the Digby brothers had often joked of being related to the aristocratic Digby family of Dorset, although there appears to be no link whatsoever. But Digby brought the fanciful story of his ‘forebears’ with him to Villeret, thereby boosting his status, socially and militarily: ‘He was a nobleman, an aristocrat related to the King of England.’ He awarded himself the rank of sergeant, and eight decades later, the mythology has refused to die: ‘He was an officer, from a great military family.’ In this remote peasant village, stripped of its natural defences, and most of its native men, Robert Digby must have seemed like an alien deity, and he evidently played up to the role. ‘He was so handsome. The women thought a lot of him’, recalls one. When Marie-Thérèse Dessenne gave birth to her fourth child, in the spring of 1915, she named the boy Robert. ‘She loved Digby. She thought of him almost as a grown-up son,’ said her daughter. While Digby easily charmed the women of Villeret, young and old, some of the men were rather less smitten.
It is possible that Claire Dessenne first caught Private Digby’s eye when he had arrived dishevelled on the family’s doorstep back in August 1914, but most sources agree that the affair began in Marie Coulette’s kitchen early in 1915. It was an unlikely place for love to bloom. Digby and the other men crammed around the table alongside the Dessennes, who usually spoke nothing but Villeret patois (as distinct from Saint-Quentin patois, or even Hargicourt patois), at high volume. The noise was deafening, for Marie Coulette ‘was always laughing and shouting’. She and Marie-Thérèse doled out from a vast pot whatever had been hoarded, cadged or filched during the day. ‘It usually wasn’t much, just potatoes in a soup,’ and her twenty-year-old granddaughter passed the bowls around.
Vivacious, slender and alluring, Claire Dessenne was almost as out of place in dowdy Villeret as Robert Digby. Before the war, she had been employed in the cloth factory at Hargicourt but now, like all the women in the village, she was forced to work in the fields under the surveillance of German soldiers. She gave them a hard time: ‘Germany Kaput!’ she would shout at the sentries.‘La France va gagner la guerre!’ France will win the war. Such insolence was liable to dire punishment, but no German sentry would report a girl so pretty. Claire loved to dance, and she was proud of her looks and her auburn locks. ‘Her hair was very long, chestnut-coloured, and she wore it twisted into a chignon, a looping bun known as a “double-eight”.’ Like the other women, she clattered around in wooden sabots and sometimes galoshes, but even in her long peasant dress ‘reaching to the floor’ and ragged shawl, she was the belle of Villeret society. Achille Poëtte, the postman, was said to be among those in love with Claire, and he was often to be found lingering at the Dessenne front door. ‘You could hear him coming, shouting: “Ma p’ti’ Tiot”, my darling, in patois.’ Claire barely gave Achille the time of day, which may only have made him more ardent.
Digby still lodged at night with Suzanne Boitelle, but spent more and more of his time at the Dessenne household, a place of animated conversation, fierce arguments and pungent smells, far removed from his own genteel upbringing in the British colonies. The other Englishmen moved from one family to another, depending on who had the resources to feed them, but Digby no longer went with them preferring, for reasons that were fast becoming plain, to dine at the Dessenne table.
The Dessenne women, in almost every case, dominated their menfolk: Marie Coulette, puffing on her pipe and bellowing merrily, ruled the roost. Next in the line was Marie-Thérèse, Florency’s wife, a gentler creature than her mother-in-law, but with a similar resilience. ‘Even when she was carrying tiny children, she went out to pull beets from the frozen fields.’ At the age of forty, Marie-Thérèse had already worked hard enough for two lives, but she looked half her age as a result of an accident that is tempting to see as apocryphal and symbolic of the remarkable goodness of her soul. She was eleven and working as a scullery maid for a wealthy lawyer in Péronne when her face and arms had been horribly burned in a kitchen fire. After six months in a hospital she emerged with a face still blackened and badly disfigured. Her daughter recalled her mother’s version of events: ‘One day, several months later, she was eating a piece of chicken and the bone stuck in her lip. She pulled, and the skin from her entire face peeled off in one go. She was terrified. But underneath she had the most beautiful complexion, perfectly pink, perfectly soft. As she grew older her skin was always lovely, with barely a wrinkle.’
Claire’s mother, Eugénie, was also a formidable power in the Dessenne ménage, with beetling brows and strong views, an odd contrast to Claire’s father, Jules, now fighting somewhere in Alsace. Jules, was a burly, happy man with an enormous appetite and grotesque table manners which had earned him the nickname ‘Le Boeuf’, The Bull. ‘When he sat down at the table, they closed the shutters to stop anyone from seeing the spectacle,’ his nephew recalled. Claire had inherited her mother’s forthright manner and her father’s hunger for life, and the combination did not always sit well with her neighbours: ‘She had a mouth on her, that one, and she wasn’t afraid of anyone. She was a liability.’
The Dessenne men were, by contrast, a pallid lot. Léon Recolet, Marie Coulette’s brother, ought by rights to have been head of the household, but was more than happy to yield authority to his sister, spending most of his time in the village cafés or gossiping in the square. Some dismissed him as a simpleton.
Tall, cadaverous Florency had a stout heart, but the rest of him was distinctly passive. His record book for military service in 1902 offered this assessment of his talents: ‘Can’t read, can’t write, can’t swim.’ But there was one job at which Florency excelled. He called himself a mason, but as everyone in Villeret knew, he was really a professional tobacco smuggler. His methods were rudimentary, but effective. ‘My
father would leave at night and travel by cart up to the Belgian border,’ his daughter Louise remembered. The most direct route to Belgium was still the ancient Roman road. At a prearranged spot on the frontier, ‘they would send the dog across carrying two bags strapped to its sides. My father and another man would wait, in hiding. When the dog came back across the border, the bags were filled with tobacco.’ Working with a Belgian accomplice, Florency had ‘imported’ contraband for years, which he then sold for a substantial profit. Everyone in Villeret bought from him, since Florency’s tobacco was cheaper than the legal stuff, and good quality. His daughters were sent off to distribute the haul to various customers around the village, and Florency’s clientele extended as far as Hargicourt and Le Câtelet. Marie Coulette took a cut of the profits. ‘My father really enjoyed the smuggling,’ Florency’s daughter said. ‘He was like a big child, playing cops and robbers. He even sold to the gendarmes, when they weren’t chasing him.’ Before the war, Florency had enjoyed a happy and profitable existence: pottering around the village by day, smuggling by night and practising archery every Sunday afternoon behind the café.
Florency had once worked as a well digger and ‘because he knew how to clean wells, the families were always getting him to come and clean out their toilets. Since he didn’t really know how to say no, he always did it … he was a kind man, too kind.’ Florency had his uses, but friends and neighbours agreed that ‘it was his wife, Marie-Thérèse, who wore the trousers’.
A Foreign Field Page 10