Emile was a figure of some amusement in Villeret, nicknamed ‘The Fat One’, since he had managed to stay remarkably portly during the months of privation while everyone else grew emaciated. He was a wary man, nearly seventy years old, and the last place he wanted to be was in a dank wood with a dangerous fugitive in the middle of a war. He also wanted his son back. Emile Marié explained to Digby that he had been summoned to a meeting with the Kommandant in Le Câtelet, who had ‘promised to spare the life’ of the fourth fugitive soldier if he surrendered promptly. In his next breath, however, Major Evers had talked of ‘dreadful reprisals against the village and those who had helped the enemy soldiers’. Whoever betrayed Digby had certainly informed Evers about Claire and Hélène, and when the Kommandant spoke of retribution he was surely making a direct threat to the two people the Englishman loved most. Claire and Hélène were effectively hostages.
War forges a few heroes and villains, but mostly it thrusts ordinary, frail people into impossible positions not of their making, forcing upon them choices or compromises they could never have anticipated. As the recent history of Villeret showed, some had responded to those choices with an instinctive courage, while others had not. A few seemed guided by some inner compass of rectitude, but at least one person, for whatever reason, had chosen what seemed an easier, safer and less lofty path. Now it was Digby’s turn to choose. He could have kept running, leaving behind Villeret, his lover and their child. With his proven survival skills he could easily have reached a neighbouring district in the occupied zone, outside the vindictive reach of Karl Evers. Alone, he might even have made a clean escape. The alternative was self-sacrifice, in the hope that this would protect the woman and child he adored and the village that had sheltered him. Emile had told him of the sentences already handed down to the other three men, and he must have known that to put himself in the hands of Evers would invite almost certain death. A few months earlier he might still have chosen the first route, and turned his back on Villeret. Until he found himself in the village, there was little in Digby’s past to suggest he had the makings of a hero, or a martyr. But when he faced his choice, he does not seem to have seen a choice there at all.
On 22 May, Digby emerged from the woods and walked slowly back into Villeret. He could not stop to say farewell at the Dessenne household, for fear of drawing further attention to his lover and child. Claire did not have to watch him pass along the rue d’En Bas for the last time. That morning, she had been rounded up with the other able-bodied villagers and marched off to the fields under guard. One of the Dessennes recalled that on ‘the day of the arrest she had to work, just like every other day, there was no respite. But she knew that Emile Marié had persuaded Digby to give himself up. She knew what was going to happen. She was distraught.’
Digby knocked on the door of the Mariés’ home, and ‘Emile Marié, the new mayor of Villeret, led him off to the command post’.
A few hours later, Digby was facing the Le Câtelet military court, accused of spying and passing on German military secrets on behalf of enemy powers. He flatly denied the charges but admitted that it was he, and not Léon Lelong, who had forged the passes carried by the four British soldiers. In less than an hour, the trial was over. Just as Digby had anticipated, Evers’s promise of clemency was not honoured. Indeed, it may never have been made. Robert Digby was sentenced to death by firing squad.
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
That evening Marie Coulette retrieved the soldiers’ uniforms from their latest hiding place, and had them delivered to Le Câtelet prison where the four soldiers were reunited in a single cell. Digby put on the British army-issue boots he had not worn since he first stumbled into Villeret. Made from Indian roan leather, the British boot was as distinctive as it was comfortable. To have worn them while he was on the run would have given him away at once, but now they could replace the old pair of sabots he had borrowed from Florency Dessenne.
The following day Judge Grumme received word from the military council at Saint-Quentin confirming the sentences on Thorpe, Donohoe and Martin. At 4.30 that afternoon, the judge appeared in the fetid cell and ‘read aloud to the first three Englishmen the sentence of death’. The execution, he said, would take place the following day.
Henri Serpebois, the local saddlemaker and mechanic, and the only civilian in Le Câtelet who still had a horse and cart, was summoned to the Kommandant’s office and told to stand ready to transport three execution posts to the moat beneath the ruins of the ancient castle. Ernest Lambert, the carpenter, was also brought before Major Evers: ‘He told me to make three coffins – I had already furnished him with 1,200,’ Lambert later recalled grimly. ‘He also told me to plant the three execution posts, which were three old carriage shafts.’
News that the Englishmen were to be put to death the following day had spread rapidly through Le Câtelet and on to Villeret. There were those who said that French civilians should have refused to carry out such dishonourable work. Henri Serpebois, however, did not resist. His young son had contracted pneumonia in 1914, and the child’s life had been saved by the attentions of a German doctor. ‘From that moment he always had a certain respect for the Germans.’ But Ernest Lambert was made of less malleable stuff, and moreover had a certain position to uphold in society. ‘He had a sharp tongue and an exuberant personality, and he was seen almost as a sacred figure in the village.’ Lambert, the father of nine children, had a mass of wiry black hair, a large heart and, most eye-catchingly, a hunchback. ‘The local people often came to touch his hump, to bring them good luck. Ernest never minded.’ Lambert loudly objected that providing coffins for the Kommandant was one thing, but planting posts to shoot three Allied soldiers was another. ‘The officer told me that I would install those posts because my life depended on it. I left, escorted by two soldiers.’
As Lambert began sawing the pine planks to make the coffins, Willie Thorpe, Thomas Donohoe and David Martin made their own preparations. The Abbé Morelle from Gouy, who had bandaged Digby’s wounds two years earlier, arrived wearing his soutane and broad-brimmed black hat and was permitted to pray with Donohoe, the only Catholic. He was followed to the jail by the Protestant pasteur of Nauroy, Cheminé, who spent several hours talking quietly with Thorpe and Martin, the Ulster Protestant. When the priests departed, anguish set in.
‘That night was a dreadful one, for the three Englishmen let out a stream of curses and lamentations.’ The sounds of despair wafted over to the German canteen, where the German ‘officers were indulging in a debauch’. Grumme staggered to his feet, and ‘the military judge, very drunk, came over to crow cynically at their misfortune, dancing around in front of them and yelling about the coffins that were being made for them’. In the neighbouring cells, the prisoners from Villeret – Suzanne Boitelle, Parfait Marié and the others – as well as ‘several other inhabitants of Le Câtelet who also found themselves incarcerated’, listened to the abuse in shocked silence. Grumme was joined by other officers ‘who came to insult their victims’. If the bizarrely cruel performance by the ‘humane’ Grumme was intended to cause the condemned men still greater distress, it seems to have had the opposite effect.
No longer cursing, the three men sat down to write letters of adieu to their families. Donohoe and Martin were not letter-writing men, so Robert Digby helped them, although he felt certain, wrongly as matters turned out, that the letters would be ‘confiscated from the hands of Abbé Morelle and Pasteur Cheminé’ as soon as they left the cells. Together the men wrote to Jeanne Magniez, their earliest protector. As Henri Godé, mayor of Le Câtelet, observed: ‘It was a touching detail, to the honour of the three soldiers, demonstrating the dignity of that tragic night.’ This letter was smuggled out, along with the others written in the condemned cell, and ‘delivered to Madame Magniez after the war’.
‘They had not forgotten her,’ the official municipal historian observed approvingly. But, oddly, she
seemed to want to forget them. Jeanne Magniez kept everything relating to her war, including complimentary little notes from German officers. This letter, however, appears to have been destroyed. Perhaps, for whatever reason, it was too painful to keep. The letters were given to the curé, who forwarded them to Henri Godé for safekeeping.
David Martin wrote to his father in Athern Street, the Belfast home where he had grown up, and Thomas Donohoe bade farewell to Bridie, his girl still waiting for him in the distant hills of County Cavan. William Thorpe was a more literate man, having passed his certificate of education just a few months before coming to France. Garrulous to a fault, Willie had much to tell his beloved wife and children, but for heartbroken ‘Papa’ Thorpe the words would not come. His letter was a simple mantra of pain, love and loss. On two sheets of paper, Over and over again’, he wrote just three sentences:
‘Darling wife and children. Brave British soldier. Not afraid to die.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
Remember Me
At three o’clock on the afternoon of 27 May 1916, the hunchbacked carpenter Ernest Lambert waited by the moat beneath the crumbling ramparts of Le Câtelet’s medieval fortress. Serpebois had delivered the coffins, and Lambert had planted the execution posts in the chalky soil, a yard from the wall. ‘It was a beautiful afternoon,’ the carpenter later recalled. He surveyed the newly made coffins, ‘not much more than pine boxes,’ and felt a wave of disgust. ‘I took care to hide them in the bushes, so the Englishmen would not have to see them when they arrived.’
An hour before the time of execution, the garde champêtre walked slowly along the main street, ringing his bell. The villagers of Le Câtelet had been ordered to stay inside their homes, but half an hour later, Sister Saint-Etienne, one of the four remaining Sisters of Providence who had tended the wounded in the earliest days of the war, appeared furtively from around the castle wall ‘with some flowers to place at the foot of the execution posts’. Lambert watched nervously as the nun approached in her long blue chasuble and black veil, and suffered the confusion of conscience that had plagued Villeret for the previous two years. ‘I merely pointed out to her that I would be held responsible for laying the flowers, and she took them away again.’ Lambert sat down in the bright sunshine to wait for the condemned men and their executioners, and wondered if he was doing the right thing. ‘I had no choice,’ he told himself. ‘I could not have refused.’
The final hours in the cell the men spent ‘praying, singing songs and writing to their families’. As the guard assembled outside the prison, Thorpe, Donohoe and Martin solemnly shook hands with Robert Digby, and were marched outside. Dressed in khaki once more, they had their hands tied and they were loaded on to a low cart. Defiant now, after the terror of the previous evening, they ‘left the cells singing Scottish tunes, hymns and parodies of German songs’, but then fell silent as the cart creaked over the cobbles, ‘surrounded by German military police and followed by a squad of twenty-four infantrymen’. Henriette Legé, eight years old, stood at the window of her father’s study and watched the grisly procession pass: ‘The street was deserted. I remember it was quite quiet, then the horses’ hooves, and then still again.’ Her father studied the faces of the condemned men: ‘Their expressions were resolute, and they nodded their heads to us as they passed, in salutation.’
Lambert watched the troop approach in the haze of the late afternoon sun. ‘The Englishmen arrived, their heads high and their expressions proud. They faced the firing squad bravely.’ Before they were bound to the posts, the three men shook hands. David Martin was lashed to the middle post, with Thorpe at his left shoulder and Donohoe to his right. None wore blindfolds. Somewhat strangely, they chose this moment to offer a chorus of thanks to one of their earliest protectors: ‘At the foot of the execution posts, they blessed Madame Magniez of Hargival.’ Then the firing squad of twelve men stepped forward.
According to one account, it was at this point that Thorpe’s spirit buckled under the strain, and he began sobbing for the children he would never see again: ‘Papa put on a poor show in the face of death,’ it was said. But that account was flatly contradicted by Lambert who pointed out that he was, ‘the only French eyewitness to the execution’. According to the carpenter, Thorpe died as he had lived, more for fatherhood than soldiering, but courageously: when the executioners opened fire, the other two men were killed instantly, but ‘one of the Englishmen, the smallest and oldest (Willie, the father of the family) was only wounded. So, in silence, without any other supplication, he lifted up three fingers of one hand, spread apart, to signify that he had three young children. The commander of the firing squad walked up to him, and finished him off with a revolver bullet in the ear.’
Down in the town, every inhabitant was listening intently through the crepuscular stillness, from behind shutters and doors. Léon Lege recorded: ‘Many heard the report of the rifles which put an end to the worldly sufferings of these poor martyrs of war. They died bravely; one of them cried out a few words in his own language: “Long Live England! Down with Germany!’”
If their ears had not been ringing from the gunfire, Lambert and the German executioners might have heard the stifled sobs of an angry little French boy, for Lambert, whatever he might believe, was not the only local witness to the execution. Georges Mercier, the six-year-old son of a Le Câtelet labourer, was hiding under a bush with his older cousin Eugène, 200 yards up the slope with a clear view down to the castle wall. As the rifles fired he had tried to leap up and cry out – he did not know exactly what he meant to shout, but the worst thing he could think of to shame those ‘murdering bastards’ – but Eugène pulled him down and clamped a hand over his mouth.
The head of the firing squad was anxious to finish the business, and no sooner had the three men slumped to the ground than Lambert was pushed forward. ‘Despite the horror, I was made to put the bodies into the coffins at once, even though the corpses were all warm, almost living, their muscles still contracting. The Germans told me to hurry and angrily berated me for having hidden the coffins from sight out of humanity. They kicked me brutally.’ In constructing the coffins, Lambert had not calculated for the lanky Irishman, David Martin. Little Willie Thorpe and Thomas Donohoe fitted snugly enough, but Martin’s legs hung over the end. No matter how he tried, the carpenter could not close the lid. The head of the execution squad shoved him aside: ‘With two blows of his heel, the officer broke the man’s legs and stuffed them inside the box.’
The coffins were loaded on to Serpebois’s wagon and ‘a quarter of an hour after the execution the funeral cortège returned and deposited the bodies at the cemetery’. The German troops dispersed. Pasteur Cheminé read from the Bible as Ernest Lambert bent his arched back under a darkening sky and buried three soldiers in Le Câtelet’s tiny graveyard, beside the Escaut River that flowed down towards Hargival.
An hour after the execution, the prisoners from Villeret – Parfait Marié, Achille Poëtte, Suzanne Boitelle and the Dessennes, Florency and Marie-Thérèse – were taken in chains from Le Câtelet prison and led towards the train station for the journey to Germany, to begin serving their long prison sentences. Marie-Thérèse was still breastfeeding her son Robert. ‘He was weaned in the most brutal way.’ Suzanne Boitelle, deprived of one child as the war began and now separated from another, was given permission to embrace three-year-old Guy before she, too, was led away, sobbing. Elise Lelong, the ever-superior baker’s wife, reprimanded her half-sister for her weakness. ‘Stop crying. What, weep in front of these people?’ she said, pointing theatrically at the German guards. ‘I would rather make myself sick from the effort I am making to keep the tears back.’ Suzanne Boitelle needed no lessons in courage from Elise Lelong but, unfortunately, her response is not recorded.
The following day was Sunday, and the Abbé Morelle, clad in black vestments of mourning, made his way slowly to the church. The grave of the three soldiers was ‘covered in an immense pile of flowers’, and ‘the c
hurch was packed’. Major Evers could stop them from watching an execution, but he had not yet forbidden the people to worship, and every able-bodied person was there: Cabaret the teacher, Lege the notary, Godé the mayor, Lambert the carpenter and Serpebois the mechanic. The entire community, including many not seen in church for years, turned out to hear ‘the Mass for the dead, read by the curé for the three Englishmen, in an atmosphere of unspeakable emotion’.
Alice Delabranche, the daughter of the pharmacist, recorded the outpouring of sorrow and anger in her diary:
Their grave was submerged in flowers, and some bouquets were tied with the tricolore ribbon. The pile of wildflowers and wreaths grew so large that even the German officers came to stare at it, becoming such an object of curiosity that, on the 29th, the Kommandant summoned the acting mayor to get him to ban this profusion of flowers and to ensure that no such demonstration was made in the future. A sentry was placed at the entrance to the graveyard, and nobody was allowed to come in.
Every flower, Evers surely knew, was a small blooming of defiance, a gesture of support for the one remaining English soldier who yet languished in Le Câtelet prison and whose death was set for the next evening.
Robert Digby had heard the volley of gunfire from down by the old fort and the shouts of his friends before they died, and he had listened to the creaking tumbril bringing their coffins back to the graveyard. He had listened the following morning as the church, just a few hundred yards away, reverberated to the singing of a defiant congregation.
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