Robert Digby had been welcomed into the Dessenne household from the moment he lurched through their door the previous summer. His natural ebullience chimed with that of Marie Coulette, and a strong bond had developed between the Englishman and the peasant clan. This was now reinforced and complicated by the accident of passion.
The manner in which Robert Digby and Claire Dessenne fell in love has entered Dessenne family myth. It is recalled, appropriately, as the sound of a cannon shot: ‘They fell for one another: Bouml Just like that.’
Such love was a new experience to both. The village was agreed that Claire, despite the strenuous efforts of several village Romeos, ‘had never known a man before’. And whatever girlfriends Digby may have had before the war, none had been serious enough to warrant introduction to his family. Digby’s earlier life had been marked by a tension between the dictates of his tight-laced upbringing and his more romantic inclinations. He had been taught and trained to do the right thing, but nothing in his Victorian education or experience told him what to do when faced with love in circumstances of such overwhelming danger. So he followed his heart. Digby must have been aware that a love affair with Claire would substantially increase the risk to them both, to his fellow soldiers and to the entire village; but he was unwilling, and perhaps unable to stop it. Claire, too, must have wondered whether her feelings were leading her, and her family, towards destruction.
Robert Digby, or Robert Boitelle as he was now described on his faked identity papers, helped Claire carry in the wood for the fire, and his portions of food seemed a little more generous than those of the other men. He lingered after the evening meal, waiting until the hour of curfew before hurrying from the Dessenne house in the rue d’En Bas and returning to the attic in Suzanne Boitelle’s tiny home. Claire and Digby could be spotted chatting happily together down by the ponds. He promised to teach her to speak English; she helped him master patois, and laughed at his accent. For a time Robert Digby may have forgotten about the war as entirely as it had forgotten about him. Willie Thorpe, who considered himself an authority on the joys of love and marriage, was wholehearted in his support for the match, but some of the other soldiers began to question whether Digby’s ardour was not to prove his undoing, and theirs.
The village girls were quick to spot what was afoot, and so were Claire’s older relatives. Marie Coulette merely shrugged. Affairs outside marriage were hardly unknown in Villeret and, in fact, common in the Dessenne family. There was a village saying, much repeated: ‘God said behave, but he didn’t say how.’
Claire’s mother, Eugénie, was markedly less sanguine about the attentions being paid to her daughter. But Marie Virginie née Dupuis (universally known as ‘Eugénie’) was hardly in the strongest moral position in this regard. Claire herself had been born out of wedlock when Eugénie was twenty-three, and it was not until the girl was four years old that Jules ‘Le Boeuf’ Dessenne had finally wed Eugénie.
Robert Digby was not in a position to marry her daughter, but Eugenie’s objections were probably more practical than moral. Digby, a hunted fugitive in occupied territory, likely to be captured and executed at any moment, was hardly the ideal long-term marriage prospect. Mother and daughter had never been close, and Claire made no secret of her belief that her mother paid more attention to her younger sister and brother, Marie and Jules, a view that was backed up by others: ‘Claire was much more like her grandmother, Marie Coulette. In contrast, Eugénie was an aggressive type, and dour. Of the three children, it was Claire who got least affection.’
Claire modelled herself on her grandmother: ‘Marie Coulette was a tough old bird, but a woman with a grip on life. Claire took after her, particularly in her sense of humour. They both liked to laugh and joke; Eugénie was more serious, and more strict.’
The obvious mutual attraction between Robert Digby and Claire Dessenne now set mother and daughter on a collision course, with Eugénie loudly complaining that this lunatic flirtation would get them all killed. She stopped talking to Digby altogether, and did her best to put an end to the affair before it began. ‘Emile, Claire’s sixteen-year-old cousin, was given strict instructions to act as a chaperone and not let her and Digby out of his sight.’ Julie, another Dessenne cousin, was also recruited to spy on the couple and report back to her aunt. ‘Claire did everything she could to shake them off,’ and Emile swiftly turned collaborator. Claire and Digby would quietly disappear into Florency Dessenne’s hayloft, while Emile acted as a lookout below, to warn of the approach of any Germans, or Claire’s angry mother.
Marie-Thérèse, though fond of Robert Digby, also disapproved, and wondered aloud why Claire was flinging herself at the Englishman. ‘She looked askance at the whole thing. Claire imposed herself; she would make the other men come down from the hayloft so she could be with her lover.’ But Suzanne Boitelle, also the product of illicit romance, appears to have supported the love affair, and may have acted as another willing accomplice. As a trysting place, her attic could not have been more convenient. Digby had already managed to evade the German army. Getting past Eugénie Dessenne was child’s play.
On 15 February 1915, Kaiser Wilhelm II himself passed through Villeret and Hargicourt, on his way to Saint-Quentin, as part of a grand inspection of the German lines linked to the celebration of his fifty-sixth birthday. His motorcade swept through ‘without stopping’, noted the mayor of Hargicourt, with regret. ‘There was no time to see him.’ Here was the most savoury of ironies: the all-powerful, all-feted Kaiser, displaying his military muscle and lifting a superior gloved hand to the awed French men and women lining the roads of the land he now occupied; while, a few yards away, an enemy soldier made love in the hay to a young French girl.
Before the British Expeditionary Force set sail for France, Lord Kitchener had issued a salutary warning to the troops: ‘In this new experience you may find temptation in both wine and women. You must entirely resist both temptations, and, while treating all women with proper courtesy, you should avoid all intimacy.’ But Robert Digby and Claire Dessenne were now entwined in love, just as the armies were locked in war, and there was nothing Lord Kitchener, the Kaiser or Eugénie Dessenne could do to stop them.
The German sentry posted on the edge of the village would turn a blind eye, villagers recalled, when the couple slipped out into the fields and climbed to the rise to look down on the village. Shortly before the war, the view had inspired one traveller to lyricism, and even in 1915, when the sound of crickets eclipsed the groaning guns at dusk, Villeret must have seemed a charming place for lovers, ‘with its undulating folds of landscape, its little copses and woods, its gentle slopes, its crops of wheat, rye and hay, dotted here and there with poppies, their red petals in June contrasting with the green of wheatfields and the oatfields speckled with little yellow flowers. It is such a picturesque vision of rural nature that you will be captivated, you will stop to contemplate, and admire.’
In May, the Allies attacked the German lines to the north, the French at Vimy Ridge, the British at Aubers Ridge, with negligible military results, but with 100,000 French and 60,000 British losses. Robert Digby wooed Claire Dessenne with urgency. The novelist Frederic Manning, who fought on the Somme and the Ancre, wrote of the romantic passion unleashed by war: ‘In the shuddering revulsion from death, one turns instinctively to love as an act which seems to affirm the completeness of being.’
In the trenches and behind the lines, men and women struggled to hold or recreate fragments of an ordinary life – a letter from home, a pot of jam, a kiss – to remind them of their own humanity. It was this, the juxtaposition of the normal and the abominable, that gave this war its peculiar, horrific character, what one writer on the Great War has called the ‘ironic proximity of violence and disaster to safety, to meaning, and to love.’
As one Villeret villager observed, ‘There was no dancing in Villeret at this time, during the war.’ But in the dusty Dessenne cow byre, Robert and Claire twirled around to her favou
rite dances, ‘the waltz, the polka, the mazurka’, while Thorpe, Donohoe and Martin clapped and stamped.
The June poppies were out, splashing arterial scarlet across the green fields, when a development that had been known to Claire and suspected by her mother for several weeks, became apparent to the villagers of Villeret: Claire Dessenne was carrying the Englishman’s child.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Aren’t Those Things Flowers?
The Digby brothers, on either side of the line, both caught the pungent whiff of mouldy hay that spring. While Robert Digby had been courting Claire in the Dessenne hayloft, a distinctive odour was heading on the wind towards the Allied trenches. In April Germany had launched the first successful chlorine gas attack, north of Ypres, sending a ten-foot-high cloud of lethal lichen-green vapour into the opposite trenches. Thousands coughed themselves to death. The use of chlorine by the German ‘Stinkpioniere’ units was followed by asphyxiating phosgene gas, carbon oxychloride, treacherously invisible and twenty times more deadly. Phosgene did not kill immediately. Death came painfully by drowning, after the victim had retched up several pints of yellow mucus. The first warning of a gas attack, followed by a frantic scramble for gas masks, might be just the faintest tang on the breeze, murderous but beguilingly familiar: the smell, in Thomas Digby’s words, of rotting straw.
By June, the British Third Army agreed to occupy parts of the line hitherto held by the French, and moved down to defend the line from north of the Somme, due west of Villeret. The fugitives were now closer to their own army than at any time since they had lost their units in August 1914. While Robert Digby looked to the west, and wondered whether his brother was still alive, Thomas Digby clutched his gun and faced east. Thomas detested the war, but his few pronouncements on the subject suggest he never questioned it or doubted its moral purpose. He was a devout man, patriotic, romantic in the most conventional way, awed by God and King as only those born before the war could be, and as those who came after never could be again. He followed the rules laid down by parent, schoolmaster, officer and Bible, and he never did less than he was expected to do. He was the sort of Englishman extolled by Sir Henry Newbolt: steadfast, polite, incurious and never seriously doubting that it was his allotted role to ‘play up, and play the game’.
Not far from the trenches in which Thomas Digby crouched, an American poet and French foreign legionnaire called Alan Seeger composed a poem that precisely caught the robust fatalism of the hour: the wistful, idealised acceptance of a date with death, expressed in simple rhymes. Seeger had been among the first Americans to join up, marching off to battle in 1914 at the age of twenty-six.
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air …
God knows ‘twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear …
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death.
The moral absolutes that still steered the likes of Thomas Digby and Alan Seeger were fast disappearing behind the German lines, where relations between the British fugitives, their protectors and the German invaders were undergoing subtle and complex evolution. The initial occupation, although harsh and terrifying, had been ethically unambiguous for those who suddenly found themselves under German rule. The Boche, les Pruscots (as the Prussians were dismissed in slang), were savages, objects of disdain as well as fear: protecting the fugitive soldiers was a patriotic duty; the war would be over soon; life would return to normal. But as another summer came and went, and the hunger gnawed more deeply, each of those comforting assumptions became fragile, indistinct, shifting and treacherous. The Boche might be beasts collectively, but individually they were human, several were courteous and some were even attractive. The British soldiers in Villeret had become obligations, and feeding them a chore that left other, French stomachs even emptier. Claire’s swelling belly was only the most visible sign that new calculations and considerations would have to be made.
On either side of the trenches, the soldiers marvelled at the adaptability of the French whose lives had been so invaded. ‘You’d think these Frenchies had lived in a war for years and years,’ remarks a character in Her Privates We, the soldier Frederic Manning’s novel of trench life. Those who had thought the battle could never come now wondered if it would ever leave. Even the dogs were banned from barking, and then suddenly taxed. Many dog owners were forced to kill their animals since they had no money to pay the tax. Florency Dessenne worried that his German shepherd dog might draw lethal attention to the house; a single bark could bring the Germans bursting in when the Englishmen were inside. One day, the dog disappeared. Foulon’s spaniel, whom Digby had befriended, also vanished.
Jeanne Magniez’s home in Hargival mansion had now become one of the most popular billets for German officers, due in part to its feisty and amusing proprietress. With her house permanently filled with Germans, Jeanne was increasingly concerned for the safety of the two teenage soldiers hidden in an upstairs room. One accidental footfall, one officer with particularly acute hearing, and these friendly German officers could put all of them in front of a firing squad. ‘They went through some horribly dangerous moments,’ she wrote. ‘As a last resort, I gave up my own bedroom to them.’ Surely no officer or search party would dare to break into the private quarters of a respectable and wealthy Frenchwoman? Inevitably there were those who gossiped that at least one officer had already been welcomed into her bedroom. ‘Finally, the day arrived when my home and farm became, from cellar to attic, a veritable German barracks, and it was completely impossible to hide the two young men any longer … they would have to give themselves up. But who to?’
Jeanne was not about to let her wards fall into the hands of Major Evers. ‘The Kommandant of Le Câtelet had a reputation as an evil man, but the one over at Ronssoy was said to be a good fellow, with a reasonable nature.’ Ronssoy was just five miles or so to the west, on the other side of the canal, but getting there without official passes or transport, and with two Englishmen in tow, was a daunting prospect even for Jeanne Magniez. ‘But it was to Ronssoy that Mademoiselle de Becquevort and I set out, once again leading our two protégés, having succeeded, in spite of the numerous sentries, in getting them across the bridge at Vendhuile.’ Jack Hardy and his companion were left in a wood to surrender to the reputedly tender-hearted Kommandant of Ronssoy, when the women were safely away from the area. Jeanne and Anne retraced their steps and arrived back at Hargival before dawn.
Jeanne was able to relax for the first time in a year, but her relief lasted only a few hours. That night she found herself wondering whether she had risked her life for a pair of ungrateful traitors. ‘The very same day, some officers from the German command-post at Ronssoy came to pay a visit to their compatriots staying at Hargival. One that I had met before greeted me with the words: “Your two Englishmen arrived safely”.’ Jeanne was profoundly shocked, and briefly terrified. ‘It was only by God’s good grace that I managed to prevent myself from raising my eyebrows.’ The two young men whom she had protected and fed for month after month had, it seemed, blithely told their story to the Germans as soon as they were in captivity. Was it possible? ‘Had my two young Englishmen, without a care, turned informers and given away their place of refuge?’ she pondered. Nothing came of the officer’s apparently nonchalant remark, yet for the first time Jeanne began to wonder whether the British soldiers, for whom she had put herself in mortal danger, were worthy of the sacrifice. What might the others, still lurking in Villeret, not do to protect their own skins?
If the appeal of the fugitive Englishmen was fading somewhat, then the Germans were also ceasing to be painted in lurid colours as murderers and looters. The strain was taking a toll on occupiers and occupied
alike. Early in 1915, word went around the district that a young German officer, in despair at having to order his men back to the front, had set fire to himself and burned to death. A few months later the body of another German was found floating in the canal. Some could not bear the transformation in themselves, like the narrator of All Quiet on the Western Front who suddenly catches sight of his own brutalised soul:
A little soldier and a kindly voice, and if anyone were to caress him, he probably wouldn’t understand the gesture any more, that soldier with the big boots and a heart that has been buried alive, a soldier who marches because he is wearing marching boots and who has forgotten everything except marching. Aren’t those things flowers, over there on the horizon, in a landscape so calm and quiet that the soldier could weep? Are those not images that he has not exactly lost, because he never had them to lose, confusing images, but nevertheless of things that can no longer be his? Are they not his twenty years of life?
The villagers began sifting the German forces into different groups. The Prussians were the worst, it was generally agreed, ‘imbued with the ancient spirit of race’. The soldiers from the Bavarian Alps, with ‘gold earrings and knives in their boots’ were given ‘to screaming like wild animals’, but on the whole the Bavarians were more sympathetic and could sometimes be heard complaining that they were being deployed as cannon fodder, ‘human sacrifices … under Prussian hegemony’. The ordinary German foot-soldier, weary and homesick, was often more to be pitied than loathed. A few of the invaders would ‘offer around cigars, on occasion, or even food to the people in whose houses they were lodged’, although the more patriotic types insisted they only accepted such gifts in order ‘to throw them in the fire’ later. One or two of the more congenial German soldiers earned the gratitude of the French villagers by agreeing to pass on messages to relatives and friends in neighbouring communities. ‘It was hard to maintain an absolutely cold and distant attitude and a blanket refusal to speak to the invaders – although many managed to affect one – when they were involved in every aspect of our existence.’ As Ernst Rosenhainer perceptively observed: ‘Under the circumstances, the people have little choice but to be friendly to us.’
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