by Susie Kelly
When we went off to find somewhere to eat, we discovered a strangely fractured town. It seemed to me to have no heart, but several disconnected limbs. Some parts were on one side of the river, and some parts on the other. I had expected a great deal of Château-Thierry, both because of its wartime history and as the birthplace of one of France’s most revered writers, Jean de la Fontaine. Every French schoolchild can probably quote verbatim at least one of La Fontaine’s fables. Surely we would find crafty foxes, industrious ants, feckless grasshoppers, silly sheep, wily wolves, torpid hares and harried tortoises on every street corner? In topiary, wrought iron, paintings, statues, flowerbeds? But if there were any they were hidden well away. We couldn’t find any signs at all, apart from the McDonalds giant squirrel, and I don’t think that was related to La Fontaine in any way. We thought we might have discovered something when we came across the Jean de la Fontaine museum, tucked away discreetly. However a passing French pedestrian told us that it contained nothing of any interest at all and advised us not to waste our time visiting it. It isn’t like a French town to miss any opportunity to attract and enchant visitors, but from what we saw Château-Thierry had done so.
Another son of the town was the infamous and enigmatic Henri Déricourt, a pilot, and secret agent for the British Special Operations Executive ‘Prosper’ network during WWII. Déricourt was responsible for organising the flights in and out of France of SOE agents, but when the whole network was captured by the Gestapo he was suspected of having betrayed them to the Germans. After the war he was tried in France for treason, but acquitted due to lack of evidence. As well as being suspected of being a double agent, there were suggestions that Déricourt was also in the pay of the SIS [British Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6]. Whether he was a traitor nobody has yet been able to prove or disprove, and he remains a very controversial and unfathomable character. He supposedly and quite conveniently died in an air crash in Laos in 1962, although his body was never found. There was no memorial to him in Château-Thierry.
Because we burned a great deal of energy during the day we always had enormous appetites, so the perpetual question in our minds as each day began to fade, was always “What Are We Going To Eat Tonight?” We could find nowhere attractive or inviting to eat in the town, so opted for McDonalds which although it didn’t reach great epicurean heights, at least was clean and provided those all-important spotless toilets and wash basins.
Later we cycled around looking for something to admire in Château-Thierry. Maybe it has never recovered from the centuries of fighting there; maybe we were looking in the wrong places; maybe it grew weary of rebuilding and simply gave up, or perhaps it had never been a place of great charm. It seemed as if no effort had been expended to welcome visitors, but rather as if the town would simply be grateful to be left alone.
Perhaps they had never been very hospitable people. For the Royal captives, never knowing what kind of reception to expect from the towns where they stopped must have been nerve-wracking. Would it be respect and affection as in Châlons, or hatred, insults and threatened violence as in Epernay? I thought how terrified they must have been, especially the children, each time the carriage halted. Château-Thierry offered them jeers and gibes, and demanded that the young Dauphin shout: “Vive la nation!” which shocked even the deputies of the National Assembly.
Over the centuries Château-Thierry had seen invasions by Vikings, Huns and the rotten English, as well as civil wars in the 16th and 17th centuries. Napoléon had given the Prussians and Russians a good bashing here in 1814. But its name is best known for the events of June 1918.
In May 1918 the Germans were once again advancing quickly towards Paris and had taken Château-Thierry. The inhabitants were fleeing, taking with them the few possessions they could carry. In his wartime memoirs [Fighting the Flying Circus, 1919] American fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker recalled events as he witnessed them in Paris.
He described the pitiful sight of exhausted, tattered and travel-stained refugees trudging along in their thousands in search of safety and succour in the capital. From the very old to the youngest children, all in a state of bewilderment and fear, and carrying with them a strange assortment of precious possessions ranging from gardening tools to bird cages and umbrellas.
These people must have wondered what would become of them, and despaired of ever see their homes again.
But just as the German tide had been turned back at Meaux in 1914 by the Parisian taxis, it was about to be on the receiving end of another nasty surprise in Château-Thierry. The ‘doughboys’ arrived from the United States.
Why the American Expeditionary Force troops were known by this strange term nobody seems to be able to explain. Originally ‘doughboy’ referred only to the infantry. But as the war progressed the name was applied to all American servicemen including, rather to their chagrin, the Marines. By the outbreak of WWII, the expression had been replaced by G.I. or simply ‘Yank’.
If ‘doughboy’ evokes an image of soft and wobbly lads it couldn’t be more misleading. Those green American troops displayed outstanding heroism. Despite sustaining terrible casualties, for six weeks they fought around the town, and succeeded in destroying the German-held Marne salient – the triangle contained within Reims, Soissons and Château-Thierry. They forced the enemy to retreat. By the time the three-week long battle of Belleau Wood was over, having changed hands between the Germans and Americans six times, the German threat to Paris was ended. The doughboys had claimed their place in history.
Much has been written in American military history about Château-Thierry; but amongst all the battles and phantoms, romance had blossomed for some. The town’s name is immortalised in a song written by Irving Berlin’s brother-in-law in 1919. Part of it goes:
There’s a girl in Château-Thierry
One September I’ll remember,
Never to forget
Battle weary Château-Thierry,
That was where we met,
‘Mong the ruins I still can see,
Suzette smiling out on me,
Somehow it just had to be;
This love that bids me tell you:
There’s a girl in Château-Thierry,
A girl who waits for me.
There’s a weary heart made cheery,
By love and victory.
And her buddy boy’s devotion,
Burns a trail across the ocean,
To Château-Thierry, where she waits for me.
Words by E Ray Goetz – 1919
I wondered if any of those wartime romances had endured.
The rigid stubble pushing up under the inflatable mattress turned it into a bed of nails, and in conjunction with the heat transformed the tent into a torture chamber. After a supremely uncomfortable night we were keen to get going. We returned their chairs to our kind neighbours, then packed up and loaded our bikes and set off for our next stop. As we rode away from the campsite, on the other side of the fence the young girls were still walking up and down the riverside pushing their prams and puffing on their cigarettes.
We debated whether we would visit the American Memorial, a few miles off our route. But the day was already hot, the memorial was up a hill, we had a very long ride ahead. And we were carrying too many sad memories from Dormans.
No more than a couple of miles from the town many beautiful, elegant houses sat in well-tended gardens beside the Marne. The air was rich with the fragrance of the velvety roses that flourish in the region. For half an hour or so we cycled along effortlessly on a neat path beside the opal green river.
When the houses and gardens ran out, the path deteriorated into what appeared to be a long-disused tractor track. Deep, concrete-hard parallel ruts were separated by a narrow central raised strip covered with long, slithery grass. We couldn’t cycle on the strip because the edges were hidden by the grass, so we had instead to follow the ruts. Sometimes we passed a jogger gasping along the track, scowling because we protruded over
the central path and forced them into a rut. I had noticed while walkers and other cyclists were friendly, joggers invariably looked grudging and slightly angry and never offered or returned greetings. I’m not surprised, as I’ve always thought it a pretty miserable pursuit.
We battered our way through the jungular undergrowth beside the river, bouncing over rocks and tussocks. It was extraordinarily hard work keeping the wheels in the ruts. My head ached from the fierceness of concentrating. My hands dripped perspiration, and when I tried to change gear they slipped on the handles. The long grass poked through our wheel spokes, frequently tangling itself so thoroughly that the wheels were brought to a sudden halt. I was first to fall off. I had recognised that this was going to be inevitable before long. There was nothing I could do to prevent it happening – it was only a question of time. Momentarily I lost the rut; the wheel, enmeshed in the grass, bounced off a rock-hard tussock. The whole machine toppled sideways, its weight dragging me over with it. I suffered nothing worse than two deep scratches inside my leg, but Terry had to haul the loaded bike off me. I lay there pinned to the ground like an overturned tortoise, on the edge of hysteria, undecided whether to scream with laughter or weep with frustration.
Soon afterwards I heard a clatter and looked round to see that Terry had also crashed to the ground, but was bouncing back up again, uninjured. Cycling on this path was such a challenge that we found ourselves bursting into laughter every so often as we ducked beneath overhanging branches or brushed past brambles and nettles. Sometimes we caught across the field to our right brief glimpses of the road. With the heat-haze shimmering over it like smoke, and the awful hills growing out of it, we agreed that as gruelling as this terrain was it was preferable to slogging along on melting tarmac and up perpendicular slopes. However, what we gained in exchange for avoiding the inclines was paid for in distance. The river here is very sinuous, looping through the countryside like a gigantic, benevolent green serpent, and our ride was long.
“Let’s take a break,” Terry suggested. We propped the bikes against a tree, mopped our faces, and sank down in the shade. The air hung heavily without the benefit of the meanest breeze.
It was so peaceful. The undergrowth lush, the air sweet and hot. There was not a rustle in the trees, not a tinkle from the water; not a bird, not an insect, not a footstep. No traffic noise. In the sunlight, in the shadow, in the sky, on the ground, all around was eerily silent. I closed my eyes. Terry took a notepad from his pocket and started writing. A few minutes later, he handed it to me. “Read this,” he said.
‘Our wheel spokes swirled as we cycled through the silent pain, forgotten phantoms, in sunlight. The silent screams in the silent air, the silent dead, the silent soldiers, the silent roar of the silent guns.’
“Think,” he said, “of the ghosts surrounding us. Beneath the ground, and up in the skies. How many spirits linger, watching us as we move, but forever trapped here.”
“I was thinking exactly the same,” I said. “It’s very strange, sitting here now. It’s unnaturally silent, as if every living creature is holding its breath. Can you imagine what it must have been like here during the war?”
Even in our lightweight, high-tech cycling clothing today’s heat was oppressive and sapped our energy. How must it have been for men in thick battle-dress and heavy boots, carrying loaded packs and cumbersome weapons, and fighting for their lives? What was it like in bitter winters when the churned mud froze into ruts that they had to negotiate, or in driving rain that saturated their clothing? The peaceful, safe countryside in which we were sitting had been utterly devastated by artillery, the trees broken down, the ground piled high with dead and wounded. That we were actually sitting on ground where countless men had suffered the most murderous warfare ever known, where they had died in their hundreds of thousands, was impossible to comprehend.
Dressed like the cast of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, sporting jaunty little caps, postbox red trousers and blue tailcoats embellished with shiny brass buttons, the poorly armed French infantry had made perfect targets. Resplendent in uniforms unchanged since the battle of Waterloo, the cavalry’s shiny breastplates and plumed helmets were beautifully conspicuous. They fell like hay before a scythe, pushed forward by their generals whose orders were that the men must hold their ground at any cost. There would be no retreat. There would be no retreat. Guns ahead of them, picking them off, guns behind them to shoot any man who turned from battle.
From England came little boys who had lied about their age in order to enlist, seduced by misplaced idealism, the great lie ‘Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori’, [It is sweet and right to die for your country] and visions of glory. When they cracked on the battlefield they received no mercy from their own: death by firing squad awaited them – even those still officially too young to have enlisted.
The 15,000 British officers, men from superior social backgrounds who could sit well in the saddle and knew how to order from a menu, found that in this new and terrible warfare impeccable accents and savoir faire were no protection from enemy fire. Their numbers were whittled away until there were none left among their class to fill the spaces. So a new breed was born, the ‘temporary gentlemen’ – promoted to officer status from the middle classes for the duration of the war. They were whittled away too, as were all colours, ages, sizes, creeds and classes trapped in the same nightmare. Their lives were coloured pins in the hands of politicians and military tacticians playing out their games.
In England the public had no idea of the reality of what their armies were enduring. There was no sympathy for the shell-shocked. Wounded men were expected to be champing at the bit to return to the battlefield once they were mended. Featherbrained females carried in their reticules white feathers, symbols of cowardice, to hand to any able-bodied man not in uniform. It was a handy way to get rid of unwanted suitors, too.
The British high command had been unimpressed when the Maxim machine gun was demonstrated in 1885 – some officers regarded it as an ungentlemanly and unsporting weapon. The Germans had no such qualms and by 1914 they were far better and more heavily equipped than the French and English. One machine gun could do the work of about 80 rifles. Day upon day men watched their comrades die in swathes, and waited for their turn to follow them.
Could we visualise the sights of dead and wounded, imagine the noises of whistling shells, rattling gunfire, bellowed orders, pants, groans and screams of pain? Could we share the terror of men in trenches being strafed from the air and attacked by the sinister new enemy, gas, invisible and silent, while they waited for the dreaded order to go over the top? Could we imagine wounded men and animals waiting for somebody to find them, to help them, to ease their pain? Could we feel any of the emotions that had swirled and festered along the banks of the Marne during those four mad years of WWI? Could we imagine the smells of sweat and dirt and human waste, or the feeling of rats running on our bodies while we tried to sleep in trenches filled with cold water?
Sitting in this silent sunshine, beside a tranquil river, no, of course we could not. It was entirely beyond the scope of our imagination. And yet, even it today’s sunshine, you could feel in the air around you that the past lingered here. It was almost tangible.
There’s a poem called A Girl’s Song written by Katharine Tynan in 1918, and the first lines say:
The Meuse and Marne have little waves;
The slender poplars o’er them lean.
One day they will forget the graves
That give the grass its living green.
Such prophetic words, because there is not one sign, no speck of evidence, of the horrors that had taken place on every inch of land around and beneath where we sat. Nature has erased them, replacing them with those tall poplars, thick hedges and lush undergrowth nourished by the contents of the soil beneath them. We continued sitting in silence, silent ourselves, thinking our own thoughts of the past, until the heat, the irritating flies and the hardness of the ground persuaded us t
o move on.
Despite our brief rest we were very hot and thirsty, so when a church spire peered out from the other side of a field of stubble Terry said: “Let’s go and find a drink.” The only way to reach the village was by dragging our bikes across the lumps and ridges of the field. Our shoes filled with thick dust, the stubble scratched our legs and clouds of midges danced around our faces. The only sign of life in the village was a faint clink from the bar. The church was locked, but we found a stone bench outside in the tiny sliver of shade provided by a thin and dusty tree. Terry bought us two ice-cold shandies, which became stickily warm in the few seconds it took to drink them. Even the act of simply sitting was exhausting, so we plodded back to the river and continued our ride.
Lurking in the undergrowth beside the track we noticed very old milestones, their inscriptions worn away. I thought this path could well be a remnant of what had been the original road along which the royal prisoners travelled back to Paris. If we were riding in their wheel-tracks, they would have looked upon the same stretch of river and the same contours of the land.
The track continued to fight us every inch of the way. Nettles stretched out to swipe our legs, the grass clutched at the wheels and the ruts harboured hidden rocks. My bike bounced so violently that sometimes I was bucked from the saddle and my feet flew off the pedals. The machine was developing some alarming rattles. Eventually we had to admit that we were defeated by the struggle, and fearing that we would never reach our destination that night we took to the hills and heat of the road. Alternating between hard pushes up and fast, windblown runs down, we arrived in the village of Saâcy, the westernmost end of the Champagne area of the Marne valley, and slumped down to eat our lunch on a stone bench in a deserted street.
Like all the other towns and villages at this time of day, at this time of year, the inhabitants were cool and comfortable behind their shutters. Only mad English people were to be seen out. It was eerily still and quiet, like a Western film where the bandits are hiding out on the rooftops of the various buildings waiting to ambush the sheriff. Or vice versa. All that was missing was a roll of tumbleweed and a creaking ‘Saloon’ sign.