A Foreign Field

by Ben MacIntyre

  After the war, the official French historians of the occupation tied themselves in knots trying to explain the baby boom in a region where most husbands and fathers were fighting at the front. ‘Every case was different … No absolute judgement is possible,’ they concluded, for the ‘obscure magnetism of men for women … is a well known, classic and eternal form of weakness’. Some offered the oddly modern, even feminist, rationalisation that sleeping with the enemy could be seen as a patriotic act: in such liaisons, ‘both sexes were on the same footing, since there was no distinction between an offensive sex which takes and possesses and the defensive sex which is taken and possessed. The French women who had commerce with Germans could congratulate themselves for having dominated and subjugated them.’ A few observers took comfort in the reflection that, ‘indisputably, the very few women who abandoned themselves to the Germans would uniformly have preferred to give pleasure to a French man’, while others maintained that the women were victims, forced into sexual relations with the oppressor by the spectre of hunger and misery. ‘They took what they could get.’

  That last observation probably came closest to the general view in Villeret, at least while the war was still in progress, and it remains the view today, as expressed by a latter-day member of the Dessenne clan: ‘Almost all the young men had gone. There were only old men and the heads of families left. Five years without a man is a long time. Of course the women slept with Germans.’ As W. H. Auden once wrote: ‘In times of war even the crudest kind of positive affection between persons seems extraordinarily beautiful, a noble symbol of the peace and forgiveness of which the whole world stands so desperately in need.’

  And love came in unexpected forms: between friend and foe, between soldier and civilian, and between comrades. Erich Maria Remarque depicted two German soldiers in gentle communion amid the violence. ‘We don’t talk much, but we have a greater and more gentle consideration for each other than I should think even lovers do. We are just two human beings, two tiny sparks of life; outside there is just the night, and all around us, death.’ He might have been describing the war-deepened friendship of the Irishmen, Thomas Donohoe and David Martin.

  Both Claire Dessenne and her cousin Marie had seized love where they found it. The fathers of the Villeret babies might have been enemies at the moment when they were conceived, but the children spawned by rival armies would eventually grow into close friends.

  Curé Crépaux of Aubencheul was troubled by the blurring of the battle lines. He had resolved to have nothing to do with the German officer billeted in his home, but the man had such an ‘open and intelligent face’ that the curate felt he could not turn down his invitation to dinner. The German officers had been warm, intelligent, abstemious and polite to the servants, while their commander, a fifty-year-old from Alsace, had been the ‘very model of moderation and German courtesy’. ‘He didn’t hide his regard for the French people, but by contrast displayed a profound dislike for the English, whom he accused of starting the war out of pure greed and a desire to dominate the universe in order to enhance their commercial power.’ The curé left dinner flattered and impressed, but confused.

  At Hargival, Jeanne Magniez was also finding it harder to distinguish friend from foe as the war progressed. With the English soldiers and the threat of sudden exposure removed, Jeanne found the company of educated German officers perfectly tolerable, indeed, rather pleasant. Once they got over the initial surprise of being treated not as fearsome invaders but as equals if not inferiors, the German officers came to revel in Jeanne’s sharp wit and charming conversation. She took photographs of them playing cards and listening to gramophone records in her elegant salon.

  Jeanne enjoyed conversations with the eccentric Grumme, but there was one German whose company she found particularly convivial, a cavalry officer by the name of Wilhelm Richter, an aristocratic farmer from Hünvingen who shared her equestrian passion and love of the land. She referred to him affectionately as ‘Mon Vieux’, my dear old fellow. There is a photograph in Jeanne Magniez’s collection, among the dogs and horses, taken in the back garden of Hargival in the summer of 1915, which shows Jeanne standing beside a plump and pleasant-faced German officer. The German is gazing at the camera, but Jeanne’s head is averted, an unreadable expression on her face. Was she looking away out of embarrassment, was the sun in her eyes, or was she declining to look in the lens to dissociate herself from the man beside her? Whatever the answer, she kept the photograph for the rest of her life.

  Although Jeanne had tried to get messages to her husband Georges, on the other side of the line, she had received not a single word from him since he left for the war. Intensely religious, Georges Magniez wished away a part of his war by imagining a ‘daily communion’ with his distant wife. His diary written from the front line is that of a man concerned not just for the safety of his beloved, but also, perhaps, for her virtue. His grim experiences as an artillery officer could hardly have been further removed from the polite international conversation taking place in the drawing room at Hargival, but every time he escaped death, Georges wondered about his wife:

  It is madness, another ten horses killed, torn to pieces, bits of skin and flesh scattered around for 100 metres … A terrible bombardment all day … Crossing over the station bridge, a shell whistled over me and landed two metres away, the entire platoon was enveloped in black smoke, and the horses bolted. The explosion was so close that we didn’t even get hit by the debris from the crater, which flew overhead. A few more metres and we’d have got it. How to thank God and Notre Dame de Lourdes? It is truly miraculous. Oh yes, they continue to watch over me, and my Jeanne. They brought us together, let them not separate us now …

  On a few days’ leave in Paris, Georges was forced to listen to the couple in the adjoining room making love with abandon.‘A memorable night,’ he noted wryly.‘I heard everything, from the preliminaries to the finale.’ That set him to thinking about Jeanne.‘I had hoped to be here with her,’ he wrote in his notebook. ‘The next time I come to Paris it will be with her.’

  In May 1915, one of Jeanne’s letters finally got through, smuggled out of the occupied zone through Belgium and Holland by an unnamed ‘intermediary,’ possibly one of Jeanne’s new German friends. Georges immediately dispatched a letter back by the same route:

  At last I have heard something from you after nine months of silence. Now I can live again, I can see that the Lord is protecting you and everything I hear leads me to believe that you are getting through this ordeal with all your honour intact. I got so angry with you, being left in absolute ignorance of what was happening to you, and you will never know how much I have suffered to be in such anguish, you are all my life to me, and I never lost hope … I know you are brave, as you promised to be when I left, and I want to find a Jeanne just as I left her. Your task is to get another note to me, just a single line, if only you knew how much I miss you. Say that we only live for one another. If only we had never parted. Courage, my beloved little woman, the thoughts and love of your Georges are always with you, every morning I commune with you, what joy it will be to be reunited. Do not let anyone forget Georges. I embrace you, my own dear Jeanne, with all my heart, with all my soul, how much I love you, if you only knew how much …

  Perhaps this was just the anguished letter of an adoring husband in hourly danger of death, but there is something unsettling in the wording. What reason did Georges have to wonder about his wife’s honour, to doubt that his ‘beloved little woman’ would be the same when, or if, he returned? Jeanne hid Georges’s pained love letter inside the knot of an oak beam in the granary at Hargival.

  Just as the invisible barrier separating German from French began to crumble, so did the unspoken alliance that, in the first days of occupation, had united all French citizens against the German invader. A thin and vicious trickle of anonymous denunciations began to arrive on the desk of Major Evers. ‘Every enemy invasion, every revolution provides an opportunity for old gr
ievances to bubble to the surface, compounded in modern times by envy and class hatred,’ the official local historian of the war reflected, noting that ‘the few instances of individual weakness were insignificant compared with the collective attitude of resistance and pride’. At first, the unsigned letters were principally of an economic nature, aimed at shifting the weight of requisitioning on to other shoulders: ‘The looters were pushed towards other doors than one’s own: Monsieur So-and-So has more wine than I; another person has good rooms and fresh sheets.’

  The rich were another target, with many letter writers believing that the wealthy were not bearing their share of the burden of occupation. François Theillier, as the wealthiest man in the region, became a general focus of resentment. ‘In 1915 this rich landowner was the victim of some twenty anonymous denunciations on the subject of his car, which had apparently been concealed in a silo of beet, and which the public claimed was filled with gold.’ In Saint-Quentin, the Kommandant received ‘another pile of written accusations, aimed at the millionaire’. Evers did not find the gold-filled car, because no such thing existed, but he was ‘all smiles at having found so many willing tattle-tales at his service’.

  In Villeret, the ‘Englishmen’ who had once united the community were slowly, almost imperceptibly, pulling it apart. There were still those, like Marie Coulette and Suzanne Boitelle (who had recently learned that her husband, Paul, was a prisoner-of-war in Germany), who never wavered in defence of the fugitives, and who still regarded the German occupiers as barbarians, to be resisted by any and every means. That spirit was not confined to those directly involved in the conspiracy to hide the soldiers. In July, an elderly Villeret matron was arrested and sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment for turning on a German officer as he rode through the town and calling him a ‘filthy Prussian and a snivelling pig … which was no less than the truth, for the nose of the “Herr Doktor” never stopped running’.

  But others were more inclined to caution, notably Parfait Marié, who, as the acting mayor, would be held directly responsible for any acts of resistance among his constituents. As Henri Lelong pointed out, ‘the invaders were not that brutal. Certainly, they handed out the odd blow here and there with their cudgels, but these really were the exception.’ Parfait Marié and others, including Claire’s mother, Eugénie, argued that it was wiser to live with the Germans than to die trying to defy them. The baker and his wife, Léon and Elise Lelong, continued to provide food for the Englishmen, but their former warmth and concern were replaced by a marked chill. Elise made little effort to disguise her opinion that Claire Dessenne was a shameless trollop, and she forbade her daughter, Clothilde, to speak to her.

  By the beginning of May the population of the village was draining away as fast as its resolve, when it was announced that all ‘bouches inutiles’, useless mouths who could do little work and were a strain on resources, could be repatriated to unoccupied France. On 8 May, eighty-two villagers, mostly women and children, assembled in the school courtyard at Villeret. That afternoon they were loaded on to trains at Hargicourt station and more than a week later, after an exhausting journey via Saint-Quentin, Mézières in the Ardennes and Bern in Switzerland, they arrived in the Landes town of Mont-de-Marsan. They were finally free of German domination, but it would be another three years before any of them saw Villeret again. Claire Dessenne, now three months pregnant, could have joined the exodus, but she elected to stay. ‘She and the Englishman were besotted with each other, they would not be parted. There was a strange calm about Claire; when she made up her mind, that was that.’ Some thought Claire’s decision to stay was foolish and irresponsible, and a further threat to the community, since as long as she was in the village, the Englishmen and the danger they represented would remain, too. ‘It was all Claire’s fault: they stayed because of her, putting everyone in peril, the mayor, her family, everyone.’ Others blamed Robert Digby for taking advantage of a ‘foolish virgin’: ‘Claire was only twenty, and you don’t have much in your head at that age. You do things you might regret later.’ There is no evidence that Robert Digby and Claire Dessenne were aware that their love affair had become a wedge dividing friends, families, and neighbours, infecting old wounds, and if they knew they did not care, for with the blithe blindness of love they were focused only on each other, and the coming baby.

  In September the Allied offensive was renewed in Artois and Champagne, with even larger armies, but no greater success than before. After a massive preliminary bombardment the Germans knew what was coming next. At Loos, to the north, the British choked on their own gas when it drifted backwards, and were then thrashed by machine-gun fire as they advanced. The German gunners were so appalled by their own butchery, they called a unilateral ceasefire to allow injured survivors to get back to their trenches. French casualties after the similarly fruitless offensive in Champagne, in the west, numbered nearly 150,000.

  As the ‘corpse fields’ of the Western front grew ever more abundant, Robert and Claire talked avidly about the life they would make together after the war. Digby said he would buy a small farm near Villeret, if his parents would loan him the money, and go back to raising chickens. He wondered what his mother, Ellen Digby of Totton, Hampshire, would think if she knew she was about to become a grandmother in Villeret, Aisne. Now, when he talked to Claire of escape, he spoke in terms of fleeing as a family. Willie ‘Papa’ Thorpe set about building a crib for the child. A few doors away Marie Sauvage was also growing heavy: two women, two fathers, two enemies, and a strange alliance of motherhood.

  Claire was ready to go into labour when English bombs began falling on Villeret. The villagers stood gaping in wonder as a dogfight took place in the summer skies over their homes, ending when the German pilot shot down the British plane and then landed at Grand Priel aerodrome. ‘The pilot jumped into a car, drove to where the English plane had crashed and paid homage to its brave pilot.’ The people of Villeret discussed the aerial battle with the German soldiers stationed in the village, and they all agreed that the downed English pilot had been ‘a brave man, who should be saluted with respect’. October saw another dogfight, over to the west, in which two British pilots were shot down and taken prisoner.

  Following these losses, the Royal Flying Corps concluded that the time had come to attack the aerodrome outside Villeret, and on 11 November 1915, three squadrons from the 3rd Wing, near Albert, dispatched ‘all available aircraft to attack the aerodrome simultaneously, each squadron providing its own escort’. From the ground, the villagers counted twenty-three planes above Villeret. Half the attacking planes carried a reduced load of bombs and a passenger-gunner, while the remainder carried only the pilot and a full arsenal of bombs.

  The raid, from the British point of view, was an unmitigated disaster. ‘At reconnaissance height there was a very high wind and over the German lines the weather was thick and cloudy and navigation very difficult.’ Several of the planes and their escorts became lost in the confusion, some released their bombs over the village instead of the airfield and enemy planes intercepted others. One British aircraft was shot down and its pilot captured. Another, flown by one Lieutenant Harvey, was on the point of returning to base when it had the misfortune to be picked up in the sights of Hauptmann Hans-Joachim Buddecke, who, at twenty-six, was already one of the most celebrated aces in the German airforce. (Buddecke’s aerial exploits, including the shooting down of Second Lieutenant W. Lawrence, the brother of T.E. Lawrence [of Arabia], earned him an Iron Cross, the nickname ‘The Hunting Falcon’, an early death at the age of twenty-eight, and a grand funeral in Berlin in March 1918.) Lieutenant Harvey came down in a field outside Villeret and was captured. He died in an internment camp in Switzerland, just four days before the Armistice. The RFC report was understandably gloomy: ‘Few planes found the objective, all machines had great difficulty in finding their way back. Very little damage was done.’ It did not look quite that way from Villeret.

  Elise Lelong never forgot, or
tired of telling, how her house had been bombed. ‘We were about to sit down to eat when the bomb landed and blew off the roof above the window in the dining room,’ she told her grandson. ‘There was glass everywhere. Nobody ate that day, and everyone rushed to hide in the woods. They stayed there for a while, with the rest of the population, and then returned to the house.’ Miraculously, none of the villagers was injured in the abortive bombing raid, and the damage was swiftly repaired, but it had brought the war a giant step closer to Villeret. Later, it was claimed that the Lelong house had been damaged by a wayward German bombardment, but in reality, as Elise well knew, these were British bombs, and their arrival did nothing to endear Digby and his companions to the baker’s wife.

  Two days later, Claire Dessenne’s labour pains began. Her cries echoed down the empty village street and were heard by all, signalling new hope to some, and fresh danger to others. After three generations the event still evokes the same conflicting emotions, in the same street in northern France, just behind the trench line. ‘We were very proud of that little girl, she belonged to the whole village,’ says one inhabitant of Villeret; another wonders,: ‘What was an English soldier doing fathering bastards with French girls when he should have been fighting Germans?’