Clara Boitelle, Claire’s aunt and the unofficial village midwife, was summoned to Marie Coulette’s kitchen, and at two o’clock on the morning of 14 November, exactly nine months after the Kaiser had passed through Villeret, came the sound, unfamiliar since the war began, of a newborn child, a baby girl born to the smell of gunpowder.
CHAPTER TEN
The Englishman’s Daughter
Before she was an hour old, the battlefield child sparked conflict. Robert Digby held his tiny daughter in his arms as Claire slept, but the child’s grandmother Eugénie refused to embrace her. She held back, thin-lipped and angry. Finally her fear and disapproval boiled over.
‘Digby wanted to go to the mayor’s office and officially recognise the child as his own, but he was told, “You must be mad – an Englishman appears on the books at the mairie and we’re all dead.’” Digby also insisted that the child be named Ellen, ‘after his mother’.
After prolonged argument, a compromise was reached: the child would be called Hélène, and since Claire was still too weak to go to the mairie, it fell to Eugénie Dessenne, the child’s next closest relative who had done her best to prevent precisely this eventuality, to make the formal declaration of her birth. The arrival of Hélène Claire Dessenne was noted on the municipal ledger at nine o’clock that morning, signed by Florency Dessenne, her great uncle, and Claire’s cousin Jules Carpentier. The document was witnessed and authenticated by Parfait Marié. With neither parent there to recognise her, Hélène was simply described as ‘enfant naturelle’. She would later complain that she was, officially speaking, ‘a nothing, non-existent’, but in some ways the title was the right one, for nothing could have been more natural, in those unnatural circumstances, than the manner of her creation.
Digby was thrilled with his little daughter. William ‘Papa’ Thorpe, that most paternal of soldiers, was ready to give advice, but Digby proved to be a natural father to the natural child: ‘He was really proud of her, and he spent all his time attending to her. He would walk around the village with the child, showing her off.’ People said they could see Digby’s colouring and his bright blue eyes in the little girl: ‘They were as alike as two drops of water, it was uncanny.’ Digby called the baby ‘my little cockatoo’ and, when he was sure no Germans were in earshot, he sang English songs to her. Marie Coulette was also fiercely proud and defensive of her tiny great-grandchild: ‘If anyone handled the baby wrongly she growled at them and ground her teeth. One day Jean Dessenne, one of Florency’s children, accidentally dropped the child, and Marie Coulette fetched him a clout on the head and yelled: “You be careful with our Tiot.”’
Claire and Robert, more deeply in love then ever, not married and with no practical prospect of becoming so, took to calling one another ‘husband’ and ‘wife’, and meant it. ‘She was our secret,’ one villager said, and for a time, the birth of Hélène seemed to reunite the community. But before long the murmuring began again, louder than before.
The winter was a harsh one, and the Germans seemed bent on starving and freezing Villeret to death. On New Year’s Eve the German military police staged a raid on Trocmé wood: ‘thirty people from Villeret who were collecting fallen wood for their fires were arrested and thrown into prison in Le Câtelet’.
During the six months before Hélène’s birth, with the most intensive fighting elsewhere on the front, the village had been forced to accommodate relatively small groups of Germans, but the year’s end saw a sudden influx of additional troops. The soldiers usually stayed about a week to recuperate and then headed to the front, returning a few weeks later in very different shape. Gone were the affable soldiers who had distributed leftovers and flirted with the girls. ‘They came back exhausted from the Somme front, their numbers decimated and their morale in tatters.’ The heavy troop concentration continued until the end of January, when many battalions ‘headed to Verdun to take part in the offensive of February 1916’.
Crouching in his trench that winter just a few miles from Villeret, Ernst Rosenhainer recorded: ‘Rain, nothing but rain. The trenches gradually turn to watery ditches. We have to take hoes and spades and try to stabilise the trench walls, again and again. Nothing is safe from the rats. They devour the bread along with backpacks and at night they flit across our covers. We suffer greatly from the wet.’ Rotated out of the line, the German lieutenant gazed on the destruction wrought by allied shells as he marched back to the rear camp. ‘How much prosperity, happiness and peaceful comfort have been lost?’ he wondered. Rosenhainer felt a twinge of something like regret as he marched away to the Verdun killing fields, leaving the muddy maze he had helped dig into the fields of Picardy. ‘How much labour and love had gone into finishing those trenches; how much hard work by the sweat of our brow? But also a lot of blood.’
Looking at the faces of the German soldiers imprinted with the grim shadows of trench warfare, some villagers felt doubly resentful of the English fugitives. Here were warriors, albeit enemies, facing hardship and death just over the horizon, while their English counterparts were being kept in safety and enjoying, in one case, all the pleasures of family life. ‘They were okay, they had enough to eat, they were warm, they even had women. These men were just fine in Villeret.’
Some in the village declined to see the men as cowards and deserters, and gave them the benefit of the doubt: ‘They refused to give themselves up, hoping from day to day to get through the front lines and rejoin their comrades,’ one sympathetic villager recorded. But even their most staunch supporters were beginning to wonder whether the men would ever leave, and their descendants are wondering still: ‘They had five, ten opportunities to get away. Why did they stay so long? It’s a reasonable question.’
It is. The villagers themselves had found ways to evade the German attempts to monitor and control their movements, and spy networks successfully moved their agents around the occupied zone. As late as 1916 other stranded soldiers were still managing to struggle through Belgium to safety. ‘What I never understood,’ ponders Marie Dessenne, one of Florency’s daughters, ‘is why my father, who knew all the back roads, all the routes for smuggling contraband, did not help them to get away and into Belgium … perhaps there were too many German troops around.’ From time to time the younger soldiers headed off on brief reconnaissance trips to test the possibility of escape. Even after the birth of Hélène, Digby would sometimes slip away, alone, for as much as a day at a time. ‘They wanted to get through by going north, but always came back to Villeret, where they had made some close attachments,’ the town notary later recalled, delicately.
Claire’s passionate relationship with Digby had cast the other soldiers, in some eyes, in a new and threatening light. No longer were they simply unfortunate allies in need of help, but instead potential predators, young vagabonds with nothing to lose. ‘They were being looked after, warm and snug, with full bellies, while others did the fighting. And when night fell, they went running after the girls.’ Undoubtedly, some of the women were simply jealous of Claire and her handsome, attentive lover. The attitude of the remaining Villeret men may have been tinged with envy as they watched an outsider capture the most beautiful girl in the place, getting away with what was rightfully theirs. As one villager remarked: ‘We would have had stones thrown at us if we went chasing after girls in Hargicourt; but this Englishman, he turns up and goes off with a village girl. That wasn’t right.’
On 2 February 1916 the 2nd Squadron of the 2nd Regiment of Uhlans arrived in Villeret and turned the village into their rear camp. Now inured to the bewildering ebb and flow of soldiers, the people were not unwelcoming. ‘The inhabitants had no complaints about this troop, which remained in place until mid-June, for the Germans contented themselves with making all the able-bodied men work in the fields and on the roads.’ The first cavalrymen to thunder into the village in pursuit of Robert Digby back in August 1914 had been the harbingers of mass invasion, and the same was true of their reappearance in 1916. Over the coming m
onths, German troops poured into the region and into Villeret in ever-increasing numbers.
The writer Ernst Jünger was one of them. He recalled the local inhabitants as ‘timid, pitiful creatures who had suffered bitterly from the war’, and described how the battle-bruised German troops would descend on the villages behind the lines and take them over ‘like a mighty parasite’.
There were only a few uneasy and unkempt civilians to be seen. Everywhere there were soldiers in worn and torn coats, with tanned faces and thick beards, who went to and fro with long swinging strides, or lounged in small groups by the cottage doors assailing newcomers with chaff … All the available space had to be made full use of. The gardens were partly occupied with huts and temporary dwellings of one sort and another … dragoons watered their horses in the village pond, infantry training went on in the gardens, and all over the meadows soldiers lay and sunned themselves. Nothing was kept that did not serve a military purpose. Hedges and fences were broken down or removed altogether to give better communications. Roofs fell in and all that was burnable went for fuel … in the whole village there were no boundaries and no personal possessions.
Through his smuggling Florency Dessenne had managed to put aside some substantial savings before the war – a box of gold Louis d’Or coins, which was hidden behind the stove. In the early days, the additional food needed for the soldiers could be begged and borrowed, but now it had to be bought at considerable expense. ‘I spent the lot, to feed the Englishmen,’ Florency Dessenne would later claim.
The wisdom of teaching Digby and his companions to live as French peasants was now apparent, for there were almost no hiding places left. The German troops were steadily stripping Villeret and other villages down to their skeletons. In Bertry, Patrick Fowler was beginning to suffer, not surprisingly, from his long incarceration in the Belmont-Gobert armoire. At night he was able to get out and stretch his legs, so long as there were no Germans in the house; but during the day he remained cooped up in the dark. Fowler was already forty when he began his strange captivity, and despite the attentions of the Bertry pharmacist, who was let in on the conspiracy, he was often ill. When there were Germans in residence, the women would leave the shelved side of the cupboard open, to give the impression that it was shelved throughout, and a hole was cut in the side, through which food could be passed without opening the door. The house was often searched, but Fowler was never detected, partly thanks to his protector’s canny understanding of the male soldier’s psychology: ‘When a German was making straight for the cupboard, Madame Belmont-Gobert would play her last card. She would draw attention to the photograph of her second daughter, Euphémie. Euphémie was good-looking. Furthermore, she was safely away in Marseilles, and she was a sure draw. The Germans forgot the cupboard and crowded round the photograph with eager inquiries as to where the young lady was to be found.’
Even at night, with soldiers billeted in the house, Fowler could not relax, for the hungry men would sometimes ‘creep down to steal the potatoes that were kept on top of the wardrobe’. Madame Belmont-Gobert began to suffer nervous attacks from the strain, particularly when the family was ordered out of the house and into a smaller building. The armoire, with Fowler crouched inside, was loaded on to a horse and cart with the help of her son-in-law, Louis Basquin. Ailing and terrified, Fowler felt his depression lighten briefly when he learned that a fellow cavalryman of the 11th Hussars, Corporal Herbert Hull, was also in hiding in Bertry. The two men met one night in the town cemetery, and talked of planning an escape to Holland. But late in 1915, Hull was betrayed, tried and shot. Fowler, surely more convinced than ever that a similar fate would soon be his, returned sadly to his cupboard.
In Villeret, the British fugitives were no longer hiding from the enemy but living alongside them, cheek by jowl, sharing food, rooms, and even conversation. This was the time for the English soldiers to shrink into the remaining shadows, but the previous eighteen months spent in Villeret had had its effects. Old ‘Papa’ Thorpe and Robert Digby might be happy to sit out the war pretending to be French villagers, but the younger soldiers were finding life in Villeret dull and frustrating. ‘They became bored, and began to take risks,’ the mayor noted sourly. Each of the soldiers had learned enough patois to conduct a conversation with the villagers and respond to orders from the German overseers, but to anyone with an ear to hear, the foreign accent beneath the French words was ‘perfectly obvious’.
One morning, as the villagers were being marched to the fields to work, Willie O’Sullivan sauntered out of the line and casually asked one of the guards, in patois, if he could have a light for his cigarette. This was duly produced and O’Sullivan strolled, winking, back to his place in the column. Many in the village had long looked askance at the young Irishman’s antics, considering him ‘rash’ at best, and possibly ‘mad’. The village elders were aghast, remonstrating that such ‘imprudence must certainly destroy us all’.
Digby accosted O’Sullivan that night, berating him as an idiot who would end up killing everybody. A fight was prevented only by the intercession of Willie Thorpe. In the first days of flight, Digby had exercised his natural authority over the others but this had subtly begun to wane since his absorption into the Dessenne family. Thorpe, Donohoe and Martin still looked up to Digby as ‘chief of their band’. But the other men no longer felt the same compulsion to follow his lead. The hot-headed O’Sullivan, in particular, was determined to challenge Digby and ‘seemed to enjoy playing with fire’. He egged on the other young men, and to show off to the village girls, they made it ‘a favourite sport to light their cigarettes from the cigars of soldiers passing through the village, while speaking picard to them’.
Digby did his best to soothe the mounting resentment over such behaviour, by apologising to the village leaders and stressing his ‘deep gratitude for all their help’ at every opportunity. But opinion against the Englishmen, who seemed so careless of the danger to their hosts, hardened dramatically as German soldiers poured into Villeret, making discovery and reprisal ever more likely. Soon, the ‘village was bursting with troops who lodged everywhere, even the attics – exhausted soldiers returning from the front and fresh troops going back up the line. Without being maltreated, the people were no longer in control of their own homes; every family was often obliged to take refuge in a single room, which was very often itself invaded by the soldiers.’
Claire Dessenne struggled to act as calmly and normally as possible in a terrifying situation. When the baby Hélène got an infection in her finger, Claire accosted a German military doctor who was temporarily lodged in the village and demanded that he treat the infant. ‘She was afraid of nothing.’
As the mayor recorded, ‘This was the worst time for the village.’ Major Evers grew more extreme and dictatorial in his belief that the people were hiding food, guns and, most important, the enemy. He also knew they mocked him behind their shutters. On 11 April a rabbit was stolen from the private hutches Major Evers had ordered built behind the Legé house, sending the Kommandant into a substantial rage. ‘The thief was robbed,’ the locals remarked with pleasure. Evers concluded that this was an act of open defiance, one of several in recent months.
The weird German military vet had felt compelled to ‘horsewhip a man in Gouy who failed to salute him’, so Evers had promptly reissued the diktat that all German officers must be saluted, noting that failure to do so would result in ‘punishment for the individual and his community’. The thirty people already in Le Câtelet prison for forgetting or refusing to salute, including a seventy-seven-year-old man, were brought out en masse and forced to march around the square, saluting a German corporal as they passed. As an afterthought, Evers announced that the saluting of German staff cars was also obligatory, even when these were empty of passengers, and ordered that local inhabitants should get out of the way whenever a German approached. Here was an echo of the lordly Theillier. ‘The doffing of hats was not enough, the pavement must also be surrendered
to officers.’
To many, Evers appeared increasingly unhinged, most notably in his manic and mounting preoccupation with espionage. ‘These German gentlemen tended to see spies and conspiracies everywhere,’ one French municipal official in Hargicourt observed, but in the case of Evers, paranoia was approaching psychosis. Through informers Evers learned that a spy network was in operation across the region, with its hub in one of the smaller villages under his control. Villeret had hitherto caught his attention only as a rustic settlement on the way to the hunting grounds of the Château de Grand Priel, but from early in 1916, he and his counter-intelligence agents began to focus their attention on the village. Evers was entirely correct in his suspicions that Villeret was harbouring enemy agents, but these spies were French.
The Marié brothers – Victor and his younger brother, Marius – had been born and raised in the village, a weaver’s sons, and they were ‘Villeret to the bone.’ Cousins of acting Mayor Parfait Marié, they were as fly as he was ponderous and honest, and the brothers were known throughout the region as a pair of notorious rascals. Victor, who was thirty-seven years old in 1914, had a home and family in Cambrai. Marius, ten years his junior, lived in Le Verguier on the other side of the château from Villeret, where he had a reputation as a bruiser ‘who always carried a gun and wasn’t slow to pull it out’. After the war, Marius was described as a ‘man of rare sang-froid, made of stern stuff and, what is more, with a most independent cast of mind.’
Like Florency Dessenne, the Mariés were contraband smugglers, but on a far more sophisticated scale. Victor’s house was purpose-built for secrecy, with concealed hiding places in the roof and a hidden tunnel leading from the cellar. An historian of wartime intelligence described Victor Marié as ‘one of those characters who love to lead their lives at a swinging pace, audacious, arrogant and possessed of a bold self-confidence that can so often enable such people to outface other, less assured spirits. These qualities aside, he was not above double-crossing anybody, and one of his favourite occupations in life was to run rings round those in authority.’
A Foreign Field Page 14
