Céline had died, possibly from a combination of exhaustion and drink, when Suzanne was still a child, and the orphan was brought up by Elise Lelong, her older half-sister. Suzanne was closer in age to the Lelong children, Lucien and Clothilde, and Elise’s sense of her own position in Villeret society was disturbed by the presence of Suzanne, an illegitimate half-sister, eighteen years her junior and living proof of her mother’s wild ways. Suzanne appears to have been treated as little better than a servant in the Lelong household. When she married Paul Boitelle and moved out to live in his house, barely forty yards away, Suzanne was probably as relieved as Elise, although she continued to work for the Lelong family, delivering the bread. The baker’s wife never ceased to look down on her bastard half-sister: when the latter gave birth to Guy in May 1913, Elise Lelong insisted on calling the child ‘Etienne’, since ‘she considered Guy to be a very pagan name’.
A second son, Roger, was born the following June, but Suzanne’s taste of domestic happiness was brief. In August 1914 Paul Boitelle was mobilised and sent to the front, and barely a month later, the infant Roger died from Spanish influenza. It was a sadly depleted household that Robert Digby secretly moved into in November 1914, and Suzanne was grateful for the distraction of her secret lodger. Digby told her stories of his family and his childhood in India; for both of them it was a chance to wander far from Villeret, the battlefields and the perpetual fear of discovery.
The war, it was generally agreed in the winter of 1914 – 15, could not last very much longer, but the rumble of guns from the front only seemed to increase, as did the flood of new orders and demands from Le Câtelet. There was no news of any sort, merely rumour, some good, some bad, none accurate. In the waning months of 1914, the grip of winter and the German military machine tightened around Villeret. In December, any young men in the locality aged between eighteen and twenty who had not been mobilised before the invasion, including a dozen from Villeret, were rounded up and marched off in forced labour gangs. ‘They were harshly treated,’ the mayor reported; tuberculosis was rife, and more than half never returned. That same month, rationing was imposed with cards to show how much bread and meat each inhabitant was permitted. Every household was ordered to post on its door a precise list of all occupants. All French citizens, the orders read, must carry a formal identity card.
The fugitives had been installed less than a month when, as the mayor later recalled, ‘the occupation of Villeret began in earnest’ with the arrival of the 15th Campaign Artillery Regiment and the 8Ist Infantry Regiment. Suddenly the German soldiery – wide-eyed, haggard, their complexions pallid from the front line – outnumbered the villagers. They were billeted on every house, including those in which the were hiding, and they took whatever they wanted. German quartermasters scrawled the number of men and officers to be allotted to each house on the door lintels, the first rash of official military graffiti. Alexis Morel, once one of the richest men in the village, watched gloomily as his stock of food was gradually devoured by the German troops, noting every fresh depredation: ‘December 16, one black cow; December 21, 6 × 450-kilo bags of flour and 100 litres of peas …’
For weeks, the British soldiers were imprisoned in their funk-holes, silent, still and scared, surviving on whatever could be smuggled to them under cover of darkness without alerting the Germans. Poëtte, still acting as a sort of village postman even though there was no mail to deliver, ferried messages between the soldiers. Digby passed the time by reading books smuggled to him from Emile Foulon’s library: he pored over leather-bound histories of ancient Greece and Rome recalling his classical education, the novels of Balzac and, appropriately enough given his circumstances, Maquet’s History of the Dungeon at Vincennes. But the volume with most obvious practical use for a man contemplating escape through enemy-held territory was Foulon’s Guide to Northern France and the Low Countries, complete with detailed maps and landmarks. Digby had enough time on his hands to memorise every tiny town and back road between Villeret and the Dutch coast.
If the ‘Englishmen’ of Villeret found themselves in cramped and trying circumstances, their situation was at least more comfortable than that of Private Patrick Fowler, the British Hussar who had spent most of the winter ‘in dread of every living soul’, living off whatever he could scavenge from the woods around Bertry – a town to the north-east of Le Câtelet, on the very edge of the territory under the control of Major Evers. Fowler had eventually been discovered hiding in the woods by Louis Basquin, a woodcutter rejected by the French army on account of his tubercular condition who was in search of a heroic deed. Basquin led the fugitive to the small cottage belonging to his mother-in-law, Marie Belmont-Gobert, and her twenty-year-old daughter Angele. Although Bertry was some distance from the front line, the town was an important staging area for German troops. Indeed, some twenty soldiers were already billeted in the upstairs rooms of the cottage. Madame Belmont-Gobert therefore acted swiftly, taking a decision that is unique in the annals of warfare. She put the soldier in her cupboard. The widow was poor, but the cupboard was her finest possession, a bulky oak armoire, five-and-a-half feet high, twenty inches deep, with shelves on one side and on the other, a space to hang clothes or conceal a fairly small cavalryman. It was, nonetheless, a cupboard, and Patrick Fowler’s home for the rest of his war.
For the fugitives and their protectors in occupied France, expecting discovery and possible death at any moment, the permanent presence of so many German troops was a nerve-raddling ordeal. Even those French citizens without British soldiers hidden behind ovens, in cupboards or attics recoiled at the way every protected corner of their old lives was now invaded, liable to desecration and seizure:
The most private rooms were violated, the best were taken by the officers, the kitchens were commandeered. There was no longer even the simple satisfaction of being master of one’s own home, of enjoying family life in peace … Either it was men stationed in the rear or on prolonged rest, or else the continual coming and going of regiments heading to or, worse, coming back from the battlefront, nerves in shreds, their hair standing on end, desperate for rest and recreation. Soldiers covered in mud poured into the houses by the dozen, sometimes even kicking the proprietor out of his own bed.
The Germans often accused the French of hiding their wine stocks, and cellars were searched time and again. Some complained that the occupying troops fouled the bedrooms, lewdly eyed the village girls, and lit such extravagant fires in the grates that the floorboards ignited.
And yet a few households, including some in Villeret, offered the Germans a cautious, curious welcome. The infantrymen of the 81st Regiment, from a corps of hardened warriors that had participated in no fewer than eight wars against France since 1690, were particularly polite. ‘At this time, the enemy did not cause any problems, indeed quite the opposite. Because the soldiers had their meals in the people’s homes, many families profited greatly from the leftovers.’ The Germans were not too bad, some said, and since they were clearly going to eat every scrap of food in the place anyway, it made sense to try to eat it with them.
Others found that some of the German soldiers were, in the flesh, unexpectedly human. In the Château de Grand Priel the domestics found serving the German officers not much different from serving François Theillier, except that the Germans hunted and ate rather less. One German officer was so impressed by his lavish surroundings that he photographed the rooms in the occupied château to send to his friends and family back home, showing off the great table beneath chandeliers, bottles of champagne chilled and opened, the bedrooms with their ornate coverings and a pretty French serving girl – pictured smiling in the kitchen and apparently not at all put out to be included in the photograph album of an enemy invader.
As she had anticipated, Jeanne Magniez also found herself playing unwilling hostess to numerous German officers, who never imagined that hiding directly overhead in the Hargival mansion were two teenage British soldiers. ‘They were confined to a ro
om from which they could scramble into the attic through a trap door at the first sign of danger. They could only move about at night, or when the house was not full of billeted soldiers, which was rarely.’ To Jeanne’s disgust, a German officer appeared one morning and informed her that every horse in her stables had been commandeered by the German army, leaving only the animals necessary for farm work. She had just enough time to remove Georges’s thoroughbred, Flirt, from his stall, before German stablehands arrived to carry out the order. On the rare occasions that Jack Hardy and his fellow refugee dared to venture outside, ‘they walked around the garden, where my husband’s horse kept them company for he, too, was a fugitive, hidden from German eyes by means of a large haystack’. It is a moot point whether Jeanne Magniez would rather have surrendered her beloved horse, or her two young guests.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Rendezvous
Early in 1915 the German troops that had been billeted in Villeret since December finally headed east, and Digby and the others cautiously re-emerged from their hiding places. A precarious air of normality returned. The village men still worked the phosphate mine, but now under German supervision. In addition to the Orstkommandant and his staff, too busy counting eggs to pay much attention to the villagers’ faces, ‘Our garrison now consisted of a corporal and four dragoons who remained in place and whose role was that of policemen’. They installed themselves in Emile Foulon’s home, moving the farmer and his daughter into an outhouse. Candlelit dinner chez Foulon was now a thing of the past.
There were sporadic moments of tension between these ‘police’ and the villagers, and on one occasion ‘an old man of eighty-two was thrown to the ground by one of the soldiers’. But the Germans stationed permanently in Villeret were not looking for trouble, and gradually the fugitives felt confident enough to spend more time out in the daylight. During the intervening weeks of semi-captivity there had been opportunity to learn a smattering of the local tongue, rehearse their stories and get used to their new identities. The men’s protectors were impressed by how swiftly the soldiers had picked up French, and Foulon’s English-French dictionary was on hand to surmount any serious linguistic hurdles. Robert Digby had spent much of the winter crafting fake identity papers, and each of the men could now pass for a Villeret peasant, at least to the eyes of an incurious German dragoon.
As for the villagers not directly involved in the conspiracy, Marie-Thérèse Dessenne observed: ‘It’s nothing to do with anyone else who we have in our home.’ But in a village where gossip was the traditional community pastime, the sudden appearance of these rather odd-looking and taciturn strangers cannot have gone unnoticed. Martin’s height and Digby’s fair colouring, not to mention their accents, immediately marked them out as strangers. Unfairly, it was later charged that the British soldiers had not made sufficient efforts to blend in: ‘They never altered their physical appearance, which was playing with fire.’
The previous November the village elders had agreed that, once Digby and his companions had been sufficiently ‘Villeretised’, they would be safer (and certainly more comfortable) living in the open. The drawback to the plan was an obvious one since it was only a question of time, and loose talk, before the entire village became aware of their identities. The people of Villeret had already displayed courage in abundance, but what had been the conspiracy of a handful would now become a secret shared by the entire village, which any member of the community could betray at any moment, by design or accident. In the meantime, the soldiers could only hope that the war would end, the line would break, or some other way might be found to cross over into Allied-held territory.
There were only two potential escape routes. The first was to head north-west, cross into Belgium, and try then to get through to Holland across the electrically wired frontier. This had been hard enough for fugitive soldiers to achieve in the first, confused days of the war, but now, with the German military structure in place, with roadblocks and sentries demanding identity papers and travel permits at every crossroads, it seemed barely possible.
The alternative was, if anything, even more daunting. The Allied armies might be just a few miles away to the west and south, but between them and Villeret were ranged countless enemy troops, fields of barbed wire and the hostile subterranean labyrinth of the trenches. Even if, by some miracle, the men managed to sneak past those obstacles and into no-man’s land, they risked being shot dead by their own side as they approached the Allied lines. Had not cunning Germans been heard to shout, ‘Don’t shoot! English!’ before launching an attack? Almost completely cut off from news of the war, Digby and the others cannot have known quite how hard it would be to rejoin their armies, and, plainly, they did not care to find out. Only fools or heroes would have attempted such a feat, and there is no evidence that these men fell into either category. A particularly steely British court martial might have looked on the fugitives as men who had abandoned the flag, and had them shot. Perhaps they were, in a sense, deserters, but they were clearly not cowards. At any time they could have surrendered, resigning themselves to imprisonment but at least escaping the threat of death: instead, they waited.
The men reacted in different ways to their strange captivity. Taciturn Corporal John Edwards became withdrawn and seldom ventured outside. Some speculated that the strain was slowly driving him mad. Willie Thorpe, by contrast, had never been much of a soldier, and seemed almost happy to be out of uniform. ‘He would play with the village children for hours, doing conjuring tricks,’ the people recalled. Donohoe and Martin – a Catholic from County Cavan and an Ulster Protestant – had never been great pals when they were in the ranks of the Irish Fusiliers, but as the weeks went by they became inseparable. When the younger man came down with what appeared to be chronic and life-threatening pneumonia, Donohoe tenderly nursed him through the illness, feeding him the best morsels of his own meagre portion of food. Martin emerged from the sweat-soaked straw of his bed emaciated, and more attached than ever to his fellow countryman.
Of all the soldiers, Robert Digby seemed most in tune with his new home. Villeret may have offered him the freedom that his strict British military upbringing had denied him. He had always craved adventure and chafed at convention; here were excitement and abnormality in excess. Digby absorbed, and was absorbed into, Villeret in a way unlike any of the other fugitives. The Parisian accent he had picked up in the bars of Montparnasse was now overlaid with the guttural twang of Picardy. He learned the slang terms for the local crops, the best method for snaring a rabbit in Trocmé woods and, with the help of Marie Coulette’s gnarled fingers, the way to thread a Villeret loom. From Suzanne Boitelle, he learned who was related to whom, whose children belonged in which house, and which families had sons and husbands at the war. ‘It’s almost like he was running for mayor,’ one latter-day villager remarked wryly. Digby’s had been a wandering life so far: shifting from one colonial post to another as a child, a failed business, a dominating father and a smothering mother, a stab at soldiering. But in Villeret, an inhospitable terrain of fear and deprivation, Digby began to put down roots, while hourly hoping for escape.
The fugitives saw something of the conditions at the battle front and the nature of the war they were missing from the physical state of the German troops as they lurched into Villeret to rest. Six months earlier, somewhere to the west, Robert Digby had been parted from his brother, and Thomas Digby now fought a war of familiar horror – an obscene war of mud, lice, excrement, of death in stagnant ditches, meaningless sorties and courageous, long-forgotten raids, pointless offensives and counter-attacks. While the Villeret soldiers learned French and rustic village ways, their comrades were being slaughtered in numbers too grotesque to comprehend.
In March the British kicked off the spring offensive with the attack on Neuve-Chapelle in the Artois sector, twenty miles south of Ypres and forty miles north of Péronne. The initial onslaught was a success, but then halted in confusion. By the time the advance resumed the Germans h
ad been reinforced. Over 12,000 British and some 8,000 Germans were killed or wounded; most of the ground captured was immediately retaken. The offensive at Neuve-Chapelle was, nonetheless, considered a success. A month earlier the French attacked in Champagne: 50,000 dead, for a mere mile of territory, barely a bend in the line. Even when the generals were not organising major offensives, the French army alone lost soldiers at the rate of 100,000 a month. In the less active Picardy sector, the boom of the Howitzers could be heard in Saint-Quentin. Men were blown into pieces so small that they often simply vanished.
Thomas Digby did not trouble his family, already distraught over the disappearance of the beloved elder son, with letters detailing life in the trenches. Thomas’s war records, like so many others, have been destroyed, burned when the German bombers of a later war blitzed London. But in one rare flash of anger he let slip to a cousin how much he had hated the ‘pure Hell of it’. Thomas would never have laid down his gun or spoken out against the war, yet even he found himself wondering whether, given his father’s accelerating mental illness and his brother’s uncertain fate, the King might let him go home. No doubt he believed Robert to be dead, or at best captured. Hunkered in a world infested by vermin, with rotting duckboard underfoot, Private Thomas Digby thought he was the lucky one.
‘The landscape in front of us was similar in character to the one behind us, but mysterious with its unknown quality of being “behind the Boche line”,’ wrote Siegfried Sassoon. As he gazed across the battle line, Thomas Digby prayed, often and fervently, that his brother had survived somewhere in that other world. ‘I still had hope,’ he later wrote. Their circumstances could hardly have been more different, yet in some strange way the brothers were both suspended in the limbo of war, with the line of the trenches a distorting mirror between them: stuck in the Picardy earth, fearful to go forward, unable to go back, imagining deliverance on good days, expecting to die on the others.
A Foreign Field Page 9
