The tiny cell window looked out over the valley in the direction of Villeret and beyond it towards the front line, where a war was taking place without him. Digby was quite alone, and yet his family, both the one he was born into and the one he had now made, were tantalisingly close at hand. Somewhere over there were Claire and Hélène, imprisoned, like him, by a battle that must have seemed insignificant beside their private tragedy. And somewhere beyond Villeret on the Allied side of the line, where British troops were already massing for the Somme offensive, was his brother Thomas, a creature of the trenches, unaware that his kin was only now facing a death which, in its loneliness and inevitability, was perhaps even more ghastly than the sudden oblivion from a direct shell hit. Claire could not even say farewell since, under the bureaucratic hell forged by Karl Evers, ‘she could not get a pass’. The war had flung them together, and now it had wrenched them apart.
‘Another execution post was planted in the castle moat by the carpenter, in exactly the same place.’ Pasteur Cheminé of Nauroy was ‘sick at heart and bedridden after the previous execution’, but the wretched man hauled himself out of his bed, and at around six o’clock he entered Digby’s cell, to ‘undertake the honour of preparing him for death’. Digby did his best to comfort the distraught pasteur, who reported that the Englishman ‘displayed much courage, as befits the son of an officer’. Digby asked him to act as Hélène’s parrain de guerre, her ‘godfather of war’, when her own father was dead. Pasteur Cheminé readily agreed.
In front of the priest, Digby maintained a brave stance, but it was to the French jailer, who brought him food, that the Englishman opened his heart: ‘He said that death meant nothing to him, but that he was broken-hearted to be leaving behind a little girl, born of a love affair with a young woman from Villeret.’ On a sheet of paper he scribbled his ‘last wishes’, and handed it to the pasteur to pass on to Henri Godé, the mayor, with a plea to send the message on to his family if he could. In the note he again ‘expressed the desire that his parents should recognise the child, as he himself had done’.
Tuesday 30 May 1916 was another glorious early-summer day, clear and still, ‘with butterflies everywhere’. The slaughter at Verdun still raged, and the pace of blood-letting had accelerated on the Somme front since British troops had taken over that sector from the French a few months earlier. On the very day Digby prepared to die, one English officer watched from a distance as the armies exchanged shells and found that the ‘colour effects were a sheer joy to watch: according as a shell burst in coal, chalk or soil, there was a dust fountain of black, white or terracotta, or a mixture of two of these; and there were woolly air bursts that rolled out in whorls – grey-black, pure white, and lemon. Sometimes there was a hint of the human soil on which shells were falling when a large, flaccid thing rose in the spout, and one was sorry for the men there, whichever side they were on.’
Le Câtelet and Villeret were but a few miles from the colourful carnage, yet here death still possessed an intimacy, and a face. This was, one diarist noted, ‘a day of dread and anguish that the people will always guard in the memory, over and above the days of invasion’. Word leaked out that Major Evers had tricked Digby into surrendering with a promise that his life would be saved. The Englishman ‘didn’t take into account the deceitfulness of the Germans, who never missed an opportunity to cover themselves with opprobrium’, one villager observed grimly. Evers was determined to make the soldiers, and Villeret, pay dearly for their defiance. The lawyer Lege concluded: ‘The Kommandant appears to have exaggerated or falsified the facts, to take revenge against the English soldiers who had lived under his nose for two years, a fact which had certainly humiliated him, putting a dent in his Teutonic pride.’ The infamy of the Germans was familiar, but there were other, even more chilling rumours circulating, to the effect that ‘the Kommandant did not appear to have played the principal role’ in the events leading up to the capture of the British soldiers. The villagers passed on the hearsay quietly, or jotted oblique notes in their journals, but they all agreed: it was French, and not German perfidy that had passed Digby into the hands of his executioners.
Pasteur Cheminé, ashen and distressed, reappeared at Digby’s cell, prayed silently and then departed. Digby picked up the pen again. As dusk approached, he wrote three letters. The first was to his mother, the strait-laced Ellen Digby, after whom he had named his child. For nearly two years, Digby had existed entirely without military discipline: he had lived like an animal in the woods, ditched his uniform and gun, found love and fathered a child. The errant romantic in Digby had always tussled with the obedient soldier-son; had he obeyed his training and the dictates of duty he would not have fallen in love, and would perhaps not now be facing death. Digby’s heart had brought him to the condemned cell, but this last letter to his mother reflected his other, conventional side: it is a stoic’s statement, precisely tracing the expected cadences of patriotism, martial martyrdom, and mother-love. The English officer who would later pass the letter on to Ellen Digby found its sentiments ‘brave and noble’, but the suppression of emotion is agonising.
Dear Mother,
Sad news for you. I surrendered to the German authorities on the 22nd of May, 1916. I have been hiding since the 2nd September, 1914, in the village of Villeret. Lost my army on the 27th August, 1914, after having been wounded in the left forearm at Villers, not far from here. I went to the hospital to have it attended to and in the meantime my army retired. Misfortunate. I have just received my verdict and am not disappointed, as it is what I expected from them. Condemned to death to be shot at 10.5 p.m. this evening. Be brave and do not let this trouble you too much, as I die happy for King and Country. Give a farewell kiss to my brother Thomas and my darling sister Flo. Goodbye. God bless you, and render you happy in your old days. The last dying wish of your son,
Robert Digby
Misfortunate; sad news: I have a rendezvous with Death. His words have an echo of Alan Seeger’s lofty embrace of martyrdom. ‘If it must be, let it come,’ the American foreign legionnaire had written home just a few months earlier. ‘Why flinch? It is by far the noblest form in which death can come. It is in a sense almost a privilege …’
Digby knew his audience, and Ellen Digby did not like a fuss.
The condemned man’s words in his next letter were equally carefully chosen. Eugénie Dessenne, Claire’s mother, had disapproved of Digby from the outset. She had done her best to scupper the affair and made no secret of her view that the Englishmen had plunged her village and family into mortal danger. Digby had every reason to dislike and distrust Eugénie, but after his death Claire would need her mother’s support. It was time to call a truce, and Digby addressed his old adversary as the grandmother of his child.
My dear Grand-mère,
Tomorrow morning, when you wake up, think of poor Robert who is dead. I will have been shot at 10.05 (German time) against the walls of the château. I will die happy and contented for my country and my King, and also for France. One thing makes me happy, which is to know that you have not suffered the same fate as I. Poor Claire and my child will now be left behind without me, but never think ill of her or of my little one. Look after her well, and tell your family to do the same. I want her to have a good grandmother in her life.
Midway through the letter, Digby suddenly switched tone and began speaking to Claire and Marie Coulette, his most forthright defenders. Although the letter was addressed to Eugénie Dessenne, it was intended to be understood by her mother and daughter. His self-control wavered.
Claire, I know you will read this letter to your grandmother. I wish I had never stayed in Villeret to bring such misery into your lives. Look after yourselves always, and reflect that your husband died bravely for a just cause. Remember me to Florency and Marie-Thérèse and tell the child not to weep for me, for I have brought her into a world of such unhappiness. Remember me to all in Villeret. I have asked the pasteur of Nauroy (who has been with me for the last fo
ur hours) if he will place my body in the graveyard at Villeret after the war. That is my wish.
Goodbye, and thank you.
Your friend,
Robert
The tone of this letter, written in French, was distinctly strange. Addressing Eugénie, Digby appeared contrite and remorseful, but this was also a letter of instruction, leaving its recipient in no doubt that her duty lay in protecting the daughter and granddaughter he was leaving behind.
It was past eight o’clock and the cell was growing murky when Robert Digby began to write to Claire Dessenne. This was the shortest of the three letters, and the saddest. He wrote quickly, again in French, for time was running short. In two years he had become what no one who knew him before 1914 could have anticipated: a Frenchman, with a French family in a tiny French village.
My darling Claire,
This is the last letter of my life. I am condemned to die by firing squad at five past ten tonight. Farewell, and never forget Robert, who dies happy and satisfied for France and for my own country. I kiss you. Embrace my baby girl and later, when she is grown, tell her the truth about her father, who has died contented. Send the letter I have already written for my mother. I have given another letter for my family to the pasteur, because the Germans have intercepted the letters of my comrades.
Farewell,
Your loving Robert
The letter ended abruptly, for the execution squad had assembled in the street outside the jail. Pasteur Cheminé, ‘sick with horror’, entered the cell to administer a final blessing. Whereas his comrades had been carried to their deaths on a wagon, Digby marched in his standard army-issue English boots. The villagers once more peered silently from behind shutters. ‘All you could hear was the tramp of the boots on the cobbles,’ remembered little Henriette Lege. Digby had no companion with whom he could sing fortifying songs, and he had much to occupy his mind. Lambert was waiting, and this time he had been unable to hide the coffin. If Digby saw it, his oddly serene expression did not change. ‘He was very calm, and allowed himself to be strapped to the post without a word,’ wrote Ernest Lambert.
The old war-scarred fortress was, and remains, a serene place at twilight when, as one local writer noted in the years just before the war, ‘birds from all over the countryside gather under the great trees and bushes covering the ramparts to sing a most delightful chorus: the warbler, the chaffinch, the goldcrest, the nightingale and the blackbird. If a sound breaks the solitude here, it is not the fanfare of war, the crackling of the fusillade, and the cries of the wounded, but birdsong, sweet and harmonious.’
It was late, but the chorus was still in full flow when eight German soldiers stepped forward, took aim, and killed Robert Digby.
The eye of one member of the firing squad came to rest on the dead soldier’s shiny boots. ‘They were beautiful brown boots, brand-new,’ remembered Lambert. As the carpenter was laying Digby in the coffin, the German stopped him and began to unlace what the Germans called Blüchers, the French brodequins, the British dice boxes, and all sides revered equally, for, as the soldier-novelist Frederic Manning wrote: ‘If a sword were the symbol of battle, boots were certainly symbols of war.’
‘I stopped him by slamming the lid with a bang. In a rage, the soldier kicked me hard in the kidneys: I felt the pain for ages afterwards.’ The hunchback carpenter later admitted what everyone in the village knew: that he had taken the boots himself. ‘They were precious things at that time.’
Major Evers, angered by the public emotion over the executed men and as ever a slave to an ‘archaic militarist mentality’, had given orders that no more than one wreath could be placed on each grave, ‘or a fine would be imposed’. Alice Delabranche, the pharmacist’s daughter, recorded the Kommandant’s reaction to the fresh wave of grief. ‘There were too many flowers, he said, and he ordered the municipality to ensure a more reasonable display in future, with just a few bouquets from time to time.’ Le Câtelet was rebellious, for ‘instead of terror he inspired contempt’, and henceforth, ‘whenever Evers was passing, everyone would slam their doors and windows and leave the street deserted. The Kommandant was furious, but the inhabitants, enraged by this succession of futile murders, did not stop their demonstrations.’
Digby’s last wish, to be laid to rest in Villeret, his home, was denied to him. On the orders of Major Evers he was buried apart from his comrades, away from the road in the furthest corner of Le Câtelet cemetery, to prevent any more demonstrations of floral insubordination and exhibitions of public mourning. The citizens obeyed the letter of the command and flatly defied the spirit: only one wreath was laid on each of the four graves, but each was a massive one, a vast woven canopy of flowers gathered from the surrounding fields and hedgerows that completely obscured the mounds of freshly dug earth. After the flowers had wilted, the people put up a simple wooden cross over Digby’s grave, with his identity discs attached, to mark the spot in the corner of a foreign field: ‘In that rich earth, a richer dust concealed.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Somme
For weeks before the great battle started, wrote the mayor of Villeret, ‘one sensed that the British and French offensive on the Somme was coming soon’.
The British now had tanks, the Germans had swapped the Gothic pointed Pickelhaube headgear for more modern steel helmets, but the bloodletting was medieval. In the days before the attack, British guns began shelling the German lines in preparation for the largest single battle man had ever fought. The noise could be heard on the coast of Sussex, a hundred miles away. In Villeret, it was deafening. Every building quaked, every shutter shook and the air itself seemed to warp and reverberate as a million shells were hurled at the Gentian line by 1,537 artillery pieces. The guns were ‘louder than ever before, and everything rattled’, wrote the pharmacist’s daughter. The children of Villeret – among them Hélène Dessenne, the Englishman’s daughter, and Marie Sauvage’s half-German child – were clutched to their mothers. Some villagers hid in the cellars, others took to the woods. ‘It was a deafening thunder, all night, rolling up from the valley. But somehow, I know it sounds strange, you got used to it after a while.’
In Saint-Quentin, experts would feel the trembling glass in the window panes and claim they knew which of the heavy guns were in use. On 1 July 1916, in ‘heavenly’ sunshine, as Siegfried Sassoon recalled, the British advanced along a thirteen-mile front. The volunteers of Kitchener’s new army were considered too raw to charge. So they were ordered to walk towards the German lines. Captain Nevill of the 8th East Surreys had bought four footballs while on leave, and offered a prize for the first platoon to dribble one into the German trenches. ‘A good kick. The ball rose and travelled well towards the German line. That seemed to be the signal to advance.’ Twenty thousand died before sunset, Captain Nevill among the first.
Villeret was eerily empty of troops on the eve of the struggle, but within hours of the bombardment they began to arrive: heart-shocked men carried in on field ambulances with terrible wounds, bodies torn up by shrapnel and explosive, and after them the troops, struggling up from the assault out of deep chasms of exhaustion and fear. The Allied attack on the Somme failed, but it took its toll. The villagers had witnessed battle-weary soldiers for two years, but never on this scale. Foulon’s stables and barns were packed with hundreds of troops, and all vestiges of normal life evaporated: ‘The mairie, the classrooms, the teachers’ homes, and the church were all transformed into field hospitals.’ The oak trestle on which Alexis Morel had once kneaded bread for the épicerie was dragged off for the surgeons to use as an operating table. Just one month after Digby’s execution, death arrived in cataracts.
‘Day and night the wounded from the Somme poured into Villeret,’ wrote the mayor, including a handful of British and French who had got further in the advance, dotted among the countless Germans. Villeret, now one vast hospital-mortuary for the Somme, stank of sweat and mortality. ‘One hundred and thirty German soldiers died from the
ir wounds and were buried in the community graveyard,’ beside John Sligo, the sole Englishman. Years later, the children of the village would find neatly severed arm and leg bones in the field beside the lazarets, where German doctors had flung amputated limbs from their abominable surgery. Even François Theillier’s elegant château, along with its stables and outhouses, was transformed into a vast and rococo barracks for wounded and dying men. With wounds came disease, and the farm where Theillier’s mother had once kept beautiful cows in pens with brass trimmings, became a ‘hospital for the contagious’, echoing to the groans of slow gangrenous and tubercular death.
One of those who found themselves in Villeret’s makeshift hospitals was the officer Ernst Jünger. The twenty-one-year-old had already distinguished himself as a soldier of almost impossible courage, who would later earn fame for his lyrical depiction of war and less honourable distinction as an extreme right-winger. He had been patrolling a part of the front line known as ‘Nameless Wood’, when ‘suddenly a shot from an unseen sniper got me in both legs’. He bound his wounds with a pocket handkerchief and ‘limped over the shell-shot ground to the dressing station’ … The same evening I was moved to the Villeret field hospital.’ Jünger described the scene of mephitic ghastliness inside a field hospital, where ‘the whole misery of war was concentrated’: ‘The surgeons carried on their sanguinary trade at operating tables. Here a limb was amputated, there a skull chiselled away, or a grown-in bandage cut out. Moans and cries of pain sounded throughout the room, while nurses in white hastened busily from one table to another with instruments and dressings.’
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