Faced with the prospect of returning to the trenches, some German soldiers were loath to leave their French billets, however humble. ‘They could not hide their anguish at leaving,’ recalled one inhabitant of Le Câtelet. ‘A horrible vision obsessed them: death, dreadful death, beneath the bullets, in a foreign land far from their families. The officers were no less upset than their men as they bade adieu to their hosts: some could not hold back tears.’ It was getting harder to hate all Germans. ‘After a time, a shared agony brought together the suffering soldiers and the suffering people.’
France under occupation was a confused and confusing place. In April the official German schools inspector, a rotund pedant by the name of Uppenkamp, waddled into the village school at Bellicourt and demanded to know why at eight in the morning the children were not working at their desks as they would be in a German school. From behind her own desk, the headmistress, Claire Hénin, replied sharply that ‘under the rules issued by the French schools inspectorate, classes begin at nine’.
‘I am your inspector, you do not have another,’ spluttered Uppenkamp.
Mademoiselle Hénin rose to her feet, fixed him with a look that had reduced successive generations of schoolchildren to tears, and declared: ‘Monsieur, you forget that we are an occupied country, not a conquered one.’
The schoolmistress, defiantly singing the Marseillaise at full volume, was immediately arrested, taken to Saint-Quentin, tried by the military court and deported to Germany, where she would spend the rest of the war.
Local opinion was divided over the matter. Some declared Mademoiselle Hénin a heroine, who had made a ‘glorious and valiant’ stand; others thought that going to prison for the sake of an extra hour of school was ridiculous; and some pointed out that the school had been closed and the entire community punished because of the teacher’s gesture of defiance. ‘She lacked the sense to control her indignation and anger in front of the enemy,’ one villager remarked, while another argued that since it was impossible to beat back the German horde, one should learn to live with them: ‘In her place, I would have kept my mouth shut and spent the night in my own bed.’
For every voice urging accommodation, another urged resistance. All across the occupied region, small groups of men and women were meeting in secret, to undermine the invaders, organise acts of sabotage and pass on information. But even the resisters urged prudence over defiance: ‘Under the regime of terror which we are undergoing,’ declared the secretly printed and wittily titled Journal des Occupés … inoccupés (literally the ‘Newspaper of the Occupied People … with nothing to do’), ‘we must understand how to dare, but we must dare with caution, with moderation, without rashness.’
While the French under occupation scrabbled to survive, wrestling with unpalatable choices, and the frontline soldiers lost their minds, their humanity and their lives, Germans such as Major Karl Evers with the good fortune to have permanent postings in the rear, were learning to live in France with no difficulty whatsoever. Evers was enjoying an existence close to that of the feudal prince who had ruled the area a millennium earlier, with every available comfort taken as his due. ‘I’m paid 1,000 marks a month to hunt pheasants,’ he once remarked. ‘I can’t complain.’
Unlike the fighting men, the administrative officials never ran short of drink, since Evers was in a position to intercept stocks destined for officers in the line. ‘Women of easy virtue’ were brought in from Saint-Quentin, and then ‘shipped back before dawn’. When one mayor dared to complain of such immoral behaviour, Evers issued a characteristic riposte, and an order: ‘I forbid you to reprimand women who wish to be agreeable to the officers.’ While the local inhabitants lived on grey bread, rotting potatoes and thin soup, the invaders appeared in French eyes to be pursuing a life of leisure and stupendous Bacchanalian excess: ‘Country walks, hunting trips, orgies: everything took place amid copious quantities of drink, toasting public holidays, their various birthdays, victories cheered to the rafters, medals and promotions. Even their administrative work seemed like just another sport, since it consisted of daily depredations and searches, without hindrance or limit.’ Emile Foulon’s piano was confiscated, shipped by cart to Le Câtelet, and installed in the German officers’ mess to provide nightly entertainment.
The administrators of Le Câtelet indulged not only their appetites, but also their foibles: Jeanne Magniez was astonished one day when she looked out of her window to see the Gentian Judge Grumme, the ‘Big Red Turkey’, floating down the River Escaut, stark naked, with a fishing rod in his hand. As she later remarked to her nephew: ‘Grumme was a very odd man, but rather fun.’
Evers, too, had made himself entirely at home in the Lege household; indeed, he was becoming so attached to the land and his new way of life that he began, bizarrely, to wonder whether to make a permanent home there when German victory finally materialised. ‘Evers himself dreamed of personally running Bellevue Farm at Beaurevoir [just outside Le Câtelet]. “This will be my farm,” he used to say.’ Considenng himself an agricultural expert, for reasons that nobody else could divine, Evers decided early in 1915 that he would teach the local peasantry something about farming. ‘He organised the planting of real German potatoes, imported from Germany by cart. We would be shown what a real harvest of real potatoes was like, genuine Pomeranian potatoes.’ The crop was a disaster, and when the mayor of Beaurevoir pointed out that the harvest was only a fraction of what it had been the year before, he was fined, and then, when he protested again, locked in a cell for ‘an entire weekend and forced to eat German marmalade … a concoction that defied analysis and which even the German soldiers said was disgusting’.
Evers was all-powerful, or believed he should be, and like many little dictators who exercise arbitrary control over others, his spreading corruption and self-indulgence came with a poisonous admixture of paranoia. The preening major was convinced that the people were concealing from him not only supplies of food but also fugitives, and he was correct on both counts. The curé of Nauroy, in one of the more impressive acts of smuggling, managed to keep twelve pigs undetected for nearly a year; others developed techniques for evading German efforts to keep track of every person, animal and grain of wheat. ‘When a sheep died of illness, the Kommandant insisted that before it could be removed from the register the body had to be produced.’ To bypass the system, ‘every dead sheep would be presented successively by five different villages’. Since Evers could not tell the difference between one dead sheep and another, each village could officially remove one sheep from its list, having butchered and shared out a healthy animal.
Evers’s main response to rule evasion was to create even more rules. ‘For four years the Kommandant of Le Câtelet never for a single day ceased to demand declarations, accounts, lists of animals, people, crops, descriptions of everything in existence, or not in existence … snowed under by statistics and lists of what had been requisitioned, Kommandant Evers himself eventually found that he had not a clue of the real picture.’ But still the Evers machine continued to scour under every hedgerow. In July 1915, the people of Villeret were informed that ‘every fruit, gooseberry, raspberry and blackberry must be individually accounted for’.
The Kommandant was so preoccupied with tallying his lists of wild fruits and animals that he tended to overlook basic supplies. Finally, Jeanne Magniez decided she could tolerate no more demands to list her chinaware when the most important things in life were being ignored. She stormed into his office to complain that the ‘working horses on the Delacourt family farm at Gouy were not getting enough to eat’. Evers, aware that Jeanne was popular with some of the more senior, army officers, immediately attended to the matter. ‘She terrified the Germans; Jeanne Magniez had a nerve.’
Evers suffered from the instinctive and mounting fear that despite all his efforts, fugitive soldiers, enemy spies, arms caches and clandestine information networks were flourishing under his nose. In November 1915, German counter-intelligence uncovered
three distinct spy networks in Northern France and Belgium, including one operated by the wife of a French officer who had been trained in Paris and then secretly sent over the lines into the occupied zone. A series of attacks on military trains prompted yet another decree threatening the death penalty against anyone involved in sabotage.
All forms of communication, and even the keeping of diaries, was ‘treated, on principle, as evidence of espionage’. Anyone found carrying a letter would be arrested and imprisoned. For all Evers’s determination to seal off every village from its neighbour, a trickle of news eventually seeped through, by word of mouth or more ingenious means. In mid-April the Le Câtelet lawyer managed to get his hands on a copy of Le Figaro, already more than five weeks out of date, which had been floated over the lines from unoccupied France using a balloon: this was the first authentic news about the war to reach the canton since the start of the war.
Balloons and carrier pigeons were the best methods of passing information and propaganda across the lines and, as the war progressed, the Allies developed a method for the two in conjunction to gather information on conditions and troop movements in occupied France. Balloons, from which a cage containing a carrier pigeon was suspended, would be floated high across the front line when the wind was in the right direction. Attached to the bird’s leg was a note, in French, asking whoever found it either to take it to a certain spot (where it could be picked up by an agent on the ground) or else to fill in the answers to a series of questions – about troop movements in the area, the morale of soldiers and so on – and then reattach it and release the homing pigeon to fly back over the line.
Pigeons brought out the most neurotic streak in Major Evers. In July 1915, a farmer was dragged before Judge Grumme in Le Câtelet and told that two carrier pigeons had been found on his property. The dead birds were produced as evidence, and in vain did the man point out that these were not carrier pigeons but birds raised for food. ‘A German soldier who claimed to be a pigeon expert insisted that the birds had been crossbred with carrier pigeons and could have been used to send messages … after which, for having raised two bastard pigeons, the man was condemned to two years’ imprisonment in Germany.’ Pigeons of whatever breed were then banned, and anyone found to have been secretly keeping pigeons would be arrested, and shot. (This rule nearly deprived the world of a vaccination against tuberculosis. Albert Calmette, founder of the Pasteur Institute and a distinguished scientist in occupied Lille, was arrested and sentenced to death for failing to surrender his ‘research team of pigeons’. He was only released after a German doctor interceded on his behalf. Calmette survived the war, continued his research, and eventually won recognition as the middle initial of the BCG vaccine.)
But what truly obsessed Evers was the (well-founded) belief that enemy soldiers, who might use this or some other method to pass information back to their superiors, were being hidden by French sympathisers. In April it was announced that a couple in Joncourt had been arrested for hiding ‘a fugitive English soldier wanted by the German authorities’. The prisoner, it was reported, ‘only escaped the firing squad because he betrayed the people who had hidden him’. The woman was fined 2,000 marks and her husband was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in Germany.
Despite having Germans billeted within feet of his hiding place, Patrick Fowler remained secure in his cupboard in Madame Belmont-Gobert’s cottage in Bertry. But the sartorial disguise of Private David Cruikshank had proved less durable. The Scotsman, who had adopted women’s clothing and now went by the name of ‘Mademoiselle Louise’, was also betrayed and captured, allegedly at the instigation of ‘a woman who had been rejected by the soldier and took revenge in the worst possible way’.
Cruikshank was thrown into the cellar of an abandoned convent, tried by a German military court, and condemned to death, a sentence that was commuted to twenty years in prison at the pleading of his protector, Julie-Célestine Baudhuin, who was herself sentenced to ten years in jail. Others were less fortunate.
In February, two lorry-loads of German troops, accompanied by mounted police, arrived in the village of Iron, some fifteen miles to the west of Villeret, where they surrounded the mill and farm belonging to Auguste Chalandre. Inside were eleven British soldiers who had been hidden and fed by the Chalandre family for the previous six months. They emerged with their hands in the air, having been betrayed by a neighbour. The prisoners were led away to Guise, the German administrative centre adjacent to Le Câtelet, and the village inhabitants were lined up to watch as Chalandre’s house was burned to the ground. On 25 February, Auguste Chalandre and the British soldiers, the youngest just seventeen years old, were taken to the château at Guise, lined up beside a large pit, and shot by firing squad.
In the wake of such incidents, Major Evers peppered the district with threats, in both English and French, warning of the fate awaiting enemy soldiers and anyone who aided them. He made no distinction between soldiers left behind from the retreat, and military agents purposely sent across the lines by the enemy. All were spies. ‘Any men who have worn military uniform and who do not come forward by 7.00 p.m. on June 5, 1915, will be shot’; ‘Soldiers who do not surrender as prisoners of war will suffer the death penalty, and their protectors and the mayor responsible will each be fined 15,000 marks’. July 3, 1915: ‘Inhabitants, on pain of execution, must not give help or clothes to any English soldiers who may be in the region.’ And so on, without consistency but with an insistence that gradually ground itself into the mind of every French citizen.
Evers may have been a bully and an upstart, but he was not a fool. He knew that human frailty could be manipulated for political purposes, that time, fear and want could erode the will to fight, and that today’s hardy résistant might be fashioned into tomorrow’s willing collaborateur. Such techniques would be put to horribly efficient use by the next generation of Germans to occupy France.
The changing political chemistry across the occupied region was particularly notable in Villeret, where Claire Dessenne’s pregnancy had produced a subtle but increasingly unstable reaction. The British soldiers were no longer quite so simply viewed as symbols of defiance in the face of a nameless, faceless and brutal German invader. The Germans had taken on human faces, some of them rather sympathetic ones; while Robert Digby had become, more obviously with every day, Claire’s sole property. ‘Everyone knew who the father was,’ recalled one villager. Digby’s glamour had faded perceptibly. ‘He made himself a part of the village,’ it was observed and, as such, he was now exposed to its spite as well as its generosity. Eugénie Dessenne, the unhappy mother of the mother-to-be, was not the only person in Villeret to wish the English soldier had allowed his affections to alight elsewhere, or not at all. The old animosities festered again, and the whispering began.
CHAPTER NINE
Sparks of Life
The baby growing inside Claire Dessenne was not the only sign that new life was coming to Villeret. From his trench Lieutentant Rosenhainer marvelled at the fecundity of the Picardy countryside. ‘We felt spring’s arrival everywhere. With a magic hand it had produced the most luscious green, violets and spring flowers were already in bloom. We could literally feel buds swelling and leaves and blossoms bursting open.’
The German troops billeted on the village through the winter had been welcomed by some for the extra food they brought, but in a few instances, evidently, their reception had been even warmer. At least two other women were pregnant, carrying the children of German soldiers. One of the expectant mothers was Marie Sauvage, Claire’s cousin, contemporary and friend, whose family lived just a hundred yards away down the rue d’En Bas. Marie had married young, to Richard Sauvage, one of the first Villeret men to leave for the front. It was never clear whether the father of Marie’s child was one of the Germans permanently stationed in Villeret, an officer from the château keen to exercise his borrowed droit de seigneur, one of the ‘birds of passage’ relaxing after a stint at the front or, the most lik
ely possibility, a soldier of the artillery regiment stationed in Villeret during the winter of 1914. No one in the village much cared to find out and, as it had over the centuries, Villeret closed ranks around yet another natural child, while quietly wondering what Richard Sauvage would make of the infant bearing his name if he ever got home.
In the village, Claire’s pregnancy was seen by some as a mark of honour. Conversely, there is no evidence to suggest that the women impregnated by Germans were considered traitors, at least not yet. Ernst Jünger, the German writer who would find himself carried into Villeret on a stretcher before long, believed that the weavers of northern France were a particularly dissolute breed. ‘It was agricultural, and yet there was a loom in nearly every house. The inhabitants did not appeal to me. They were dirty and of a very low moral development,’ he sniffed. ‘Our relations with the civil population were, to a great extent, of an undesirable familiarity. Venus deprived Mars of many servants.’ Yet the German philosopher understood the urge to seize a moment of comfort amid the surrealities of war: ‘The little pleasures that life offered, took on an unimagined enhancement from the increasing thunder of the guns and from the destiny whose oppression never left one’s mind. The colours were more affecting. The wish to knit oneself with life in enjoyment was more urgent. For the thought crept into everyone’s mind: “Perhaps this is the last spring you will see.”’
Villeret had a long and fairly broad-minded history of illegitimacy – indeed, the first archival document to mention the village records an inquiry by the mayor of Saint-Quentin in 1240 into a ‘question of parentage’ concerning one ‘Rogier of Villier’ – but there is no evidence to suggest that the village folk were markedly more promiscuous than those of any other rural community. In later years, what would become known as ‘collaboration horizontale’ was cited by those determined to paint the inhabitants of the occupied territories as ‘Les Boches du Nord’, suggesting, quite unfairly, that they had been happy to welcome the invaders into their homes and beds. There was even a bizarre rumour that Adolf Hitler, a signals runner and volunteer with the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment, might have fathered a child in northern France, a suggestion for which there is not a scrap of evidence.
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