Moved to the military hospital at Valenciennes, the German writer encountered numerous wounded enemy soldiers and noted that, ‘as elsewhere, when we met Englishmen, we had the joyful feeling of bold manliness’. Jünger won the Iron Cross for his part in the battle, and was wounded twice more, by shrapnel in the left leg and a revolver bullet across his scalp. Reflecting on the Somme carnage, Jünger wrote of how man might be ‘crushed but not conquered; in such moments the human spirit triumphs’. In one way, he might have been describing the more valiant side of Villeret’s recent history.
Just a few miles away at the front on 4 July, the American poet Alan Seeger was martyred – just as he had prophesied, when he and his fellow legionnaires tried to storm a disputed barricade across the battle-bog at Belloy-en-Santerre, by the Roman road just west of Péronne.
The Battle of the Somme brought such horror to Villeret that few, other than Claire Dessenne, had much time to dwell on the fate of Robert Digby and the other men. But when the German military police reappeared and arrested Henri and Joséphine Marié, the unanswered and suppressed questions suddenly resurfaced. The Réseau Victor, Villeret’s highly effective spy network, had been betrayed, reminding any villagers in doubt that a traitor was still among them. ‘The activities of these two had been uncovered by the enemy,’ the mayor reported, but ‘everyone believed that whoever had denounced the Englishmen had done the same to the Mariés.’
German penetration of Victor Marie’s espionage network was ‘a sickening body blow’ to British Intelligence. For months the system had worked without a hitch: on prearranged dates, when Victor hung out washing on a particular clothes line, homing pigeons would be air-dropped, to be released back across the lines by Marié and his agents with whatever information had been gathered. ‘Everything appeared to be in first-class order … Victor Marié was on the spot, his system was growing, and the pigeons were returning with valuable information about the location and movement of German reserves.’ From time to time, Victor returned to the British army’s General Headquarters, via the Netherlands, to brief his spy-masters. During one of these visits it was noticed that the French spy was showing ‘clear signs of strain’, so it was decided to boost his morale by decorating him. On 9 July 1916, with the battle raging, Field Marshal Haig personally presented Victor Marié with the Distinguished Conduct Medal, commending him as a ‘really bold and plucky fellow’. But General Sir Walter Kirke, Marie’s handler and the officer in charge of Secret Service operations and counter-espionage, remained deeply anxious. ‘I have misgivings and much fear that we may lose Marié, when the whole service will go phut,’ he confided to his diary, with gloomy prescience.
Victor Marie’s network, woven over the previous two years with all the intricate skill of a maître-tisseur, was unpicked in a matter of hours. Two days after Christmas, eight of his agents were arrested and promptly executed by firing squad in Saint-Quentin; seven more were sentenced to long prison terms; three died in captivity. Delacourt, the mayor of Vendelles, along with another network agent, was seized and died in his cell the day before his scheduled execution. The acting mayor of Hargicourt was arrested merely for having been seen in Villeret on the same day as the Marié brothers. The sixty-eight-year-old mother of the principal conspirators, herself a key figure in the network, defied the Germans with typical Villeret gumption: ‘The widow Marié-Leroy denied everything and furiously resisted all attempts at interrogation, disconcerting the members of the War Council by refusing to speak anything but patois.’ Baffled and uncertain what to do with this incomprehensible peasant woman, the court simply ordered her to be removed to another occupied village, Preux-au-Bois. Scores of others were rounded up, but no one can be sure how many perished. Henri Marié was condemned as a spy and ‘deported in captivity to Germany; deprived of food and exhausted, he contracted tuberculosis which killed him a few years later’, Villeret’s mayor wrote. The gravestone of his thirty-three-year-old sister, Joséphine, one of the key operatives of the Villeret network, tells of a still more ghastly fate. Already a widow after the death in combat of her husband Paul, Victor’s brother, ‘she was imprisoned in Saint-Quentin and tortured by the Germans, who wanted to wring a confession out of her. Driven to insanity by her suffering, she committed suicide in her prison cell on 18 September 1918’, less than two months before the war ended.
The Marié brothers themselves proved harder to pin down. Marius simply vanished. Early in August Victor had set off from GHQ to fly back across the lines, and crash-landed in heavy mist. For three months there was a ‘deafening and worrying silence’. The British pilot of the plane duly reappeared in the Netherlands, but Victor himself was captured and imprisoned in Aix-la-Chapelle. According to the official French history, he was sentenced to death, but managed to escape the day before he was due to be shot, ‘thanks to the help of a Belgian friend’, a shadowy Monsieur Dervaux.
In mid-November the Battle of the Somme staggered to a halt, having claimed over a million casualties for an advance of just a few meaningless miles of mud. When the wind was blowing from the west and the weather warm, the smell of putrefaction reached as far as Villeret.
The British marked Christmas Day by lobbing over a fresh volley of shells at points where festive Germans might be assembling. The Somme fiasco had somehow embittered the war; this could no longer be disguised to anyone as a jolly game of football. As the poet Edmund Blunden wrote: ‘Both sides had seen, in a sad scrawl of broken earth and murdered men, the answer to the question. No road. No thoroughfare. Neither race had won, nor could win, the war. The war had won, and would go on winning.’
In the wake of the slaughter came another army: Russian prisoners began arriving in their thousands behind the German lines, herded by guards and pitiful to behold. The villagers watched the Russians arrive, columns of filthy and miserable men, ‘horribly treated, dying of hunger, pulling up roots as they passed and eating them raw’, and then lodged in ‘camps of famine and brutality, reminiscent of the English convict hulks’. Le Câtelet’s notary recorded their arrival: ‘The sight of these poor creatures, ill-dressed, badly-shod, dragging themselves along with difficulty, chilled us to the marrow. Most died of hunger, misery and ill-treatment. Some, according to eyewitnesses, were buried alive.’ An official order of 29 October 1916 strictly forbade ‘the display of any sympathy for the prisoners, no matter what nation they are from, talking to them, or giving them food’. The old quarry north of Villeret was transformed into a vast Russian prison camp, where these ‘wretched men, practically naked and dying of hunger’, were fenced in behind barbed wire. Once again, the instinctive generosity of the villagers emerged, and ‘the inhabitants, despite their own deprivation, managed to smuggle food to these poor people to alleviate their sad fate. Some, caught red-handed in these acts of charity, were beaten with the rifle butts of the camp guards’. At the end of 1916, 400 British prisoners arrived at Vendhuile, where they were imprisoned in a camp behind the defunct brewery. During the harsh winter of 1917, many died of cold.
In Germany, the villagers condemned for helping the British soldiers fared little better. Marie-Thérèse Dessenne supplemented the pitiful prison diet by knitting socks in exchange for a little sugar and fresh water, and when she did not work hard enough, the women gaolers beat her, sometimes so severely that she was unable to stand. Her husband, Florency, never the most robust character, found imprisonment even worse. Consigned to a salt mine and spending every hour he was not labouring hunting for wild and barely digestible roots in the soil of the prison compound, he grew spectrally thin. In Siegburg prison, Suzanne Boitelle survived principally on ‘cooked potatoes, sometimes with a little jam, if there was any’. At Easter 1917, she and the other women prisoners buoyed their flagging spirits by dreaming of the banquet they could make themselves if they were free women: ‘Pâté de foie gras sur canapé, Saumon président, Haricots Raymond, Pain Perdu’ to be followed by ‘music, gramophone records and singing’. When she wrote this fantasy menu,
Suzanne still had eight months of her sentence to serve before she could be allowed home. But by then, she had no home.
The Russian prisoners had been sent to Villeret to build the stage-set for the next and last great scene of the war, the withdrawal to the Siegfriedstellung, the Siegfried Line named after the Teutonic and Wagnerian hero, or the Hindenburg line as the British then knew it. Having fought with such ferocity to defend this part of the line in the battle of the Somme, the Germans now prepared to slip away.
The strategic withdrawal was a military masterstroke, the strongest network of defences man had ever created, and one of the most reprehensible acts of vandalism in the twentieth century. The German army would take cover behind the vast system of fortifications, incorporating the subterranean Riqueval canal and great rolling fields of thick German barbed wire, constructed in such a configuration that the enemy might be funnelled into positions where they could be more easily massacred by machine-gun fire. The new Hindenburg line was ninety miles long, and surgically excised twenty-five miles of front, freeing up a dozen German infantry divisions. Everything between the new concrete and metal barrier and the old front line was to be destroyed. Villeret, and other towns like it, would be rendered not just uninhabitable, but as hard as possible to traverse. Orchards were to be cut down to deny food to the advancing enemy, larger trees felled to a height of one metre to offer retreating riflemen a convenient ledge from which to fire, fields flooded, bridges smashed, castles and houses burned, the country methodically and utterly ruined, and what remained sewn with booby-traps of grotesque ingenuity: trinkets wired to bombs, the body of a British soldier invisibly attached to the pin of a hand grenade, time-fuses inside ‘graves’ to ‘an unknown soldier’. As the historian of Le Câtelet observed, the scientific destruction ‘left no place for the population: all that remained was to sweep them from the land, and tear them from the homes they had vainly tried to defend by their presence’.
The planned withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in November 1916 would also sweep away Major Karl Evers and his hated administration. Evers wanted to leave anyway. The strutting major had always considered himself a cut above the common herd, and after complaining of ‘social isolation’, he applied for and was given a new post as a staff officer in the imperial German government in Antwerp, with the highly prestigious title of geheimer Justizrat, similar to a privy councillor, and not much to do. Evers’s new job did provide plenty of opportunities to mix with the top brass, and whenever a senior VIP passed through Antwerp, such as Archduke Friedrich of Austria, he somehow always contrived to be in the photograph, standing next to the eminent personage.
The major’s parting blow came in another verbose proclamation: ‘A group of inhabitants of the average middle class of the population will be taken to Germany as prisoners in reprisal’ for the arrest of German Alsatians by the French government. Several hundred ‘notables’ from the region were rounded up and sent to a prison camp in Holzminden, including the lawyer Léon Lege, who had been unwilling host to Evers for the last two years. The next day, the Evers regime was over. ‘One beautiful day, Evers and his entourage, after building their pyramid of paperwork, were sent away,’ taking with them all records of their administration and ‘the Herculean administrative infrastructure that had spawned so many questionnaires and notes, so much harassment of the population, driving the mayors to distraction, sending guards and inspectors trotting from door to door’. The new Kommandant of Le Câtelet noted, with surprise and irritation, that ‘his predecessor had left him no information at all, not even a list of lodgings’.
In the chill early spring of 1917, the Germans began their withdrawal, codenamed, appropriately, Albench, after the malevolent dwarf in Wagner’s Ring. The destruction began with the woods and the smaller buildings. Jeanne Magniez watched in desolation as her beloved Hargival was crushed into dust and splinters. ‘The letters from my beloved Jeanne have arrived,’ wrote Georges Magniez.
The Pêcherie has been razed to the ground, and she has had to watch the trees she loved so much being chopped down. The thought of her unhappiness obsesses me, and I can barely face it. I dream of the Pêcherie all night, I was walking there with her and we surveyed this devastation. Six months from now, our paradise will be utterly destroyed. Oh, that the Blessed Virgin might spare her from such suffering.
On 25 February 1917, the people of Villeret and surrounding villages were ordered to assemble in the village square. Mobilisation, evacuation, deprivation, deportation, imprisonment and the other rigours of war had radically thinned out the village population, but what remained was here: the trustworthy and the doubtful, the kind and cruel, Claire Dessenne and Marie Sauvage with their daughters, each now over a year old. The stalwart Marie Coulette herded Florency and Marie-Thérèse’s children, whose care she had taken over from the day their parents were deported to Germany, and the rest of the Dessenne clan. The remainder of the Lelong family, with Suzanne Boitelle’s son Guy in tow, Antoinette Foulon and her father Emile: all waited in the square for instructions from Emile Marié, ‘The Fat One’, acting mayor in the absence of his son, Parfait Emile, who ensured that the ‘principal archives, including the lists of births, deaths and marriages, were safely packed away’. Hélène’s birth certificate would survive the war, and so would the requisition orders filled out by the Orstkommandant of Villeret, Lieutenant Scholl, the final acts of petty pilfering. Emile Foulon looked on wryly as Scholl helped himself to what little remained of his once-extensive possessions: thirty-six porcelain plates, the last remaining milk cow, and his brass chandelier.
‘The inhabitants each took with them a bag containing only essential items. The Germans allowed much of the baggage to be loaded on to their carts, but a quantity of this was lost, or opened and pillaged.’ The refugees, joined by the handful of staff from Theillier’s château on the hill, formed a column and walked slowly out of Villeret and into exile in the Ardennes, ‘through swirling mists, along muddy and rutted roads, the younger ones on foot, the others on carts loaded with bags’. The village was deserted, save for the German soldiers and a ‘handful of men to look after the animals, who were lodged in the Lescroart Farm’.
Marie Coulette led her little band away; Claire walked with Hélène in her arms. Louise Dessenne, Claire’s six-year-old cousin, would recall: ‘Our possessions were piled into a small cart, with the smallest children on top. Me, I had to walk to the station, where we were loaded on to cattle cars.’ Two days later, the family trudged into the refugee camp at Revin, in the Ardennes, but the widow Dessenne wrapped herself in fraying dignity. ‘She was wearing a shawl over her head, and some people mistook her for a beggar and gave her bread.’ It was politely but firmly returned: ‘If these people only knew Marie Coulette of Villeret, they would know that I don’t need their bread,’ she remarked.
The scenes of exodus were repeated at Hargicourt, Vendhuile, Gouy, Le Câtelet, and Hargival. Jeanne Magniez bade farewell to her home, but was permitted to load up a cart with her photograph albums, letters, and a quantity of other luggage. As he led the refugees from his town, Henri Godé, the acting mayor of Le Câtelet, kept the last letters written by Digby, Thorpe, Donohoe and Martin ‘secreted on his person, which would probably have led to his being shot, had they been discovered’. Alice Delabranche, the daughter of the town chemist, was one of the last to leave, with the ‘rain falling in torrents; we were soaked to the skin, our bags and baskets wet through’. As she stumbled away from the village where she had been born, Alice looked back only once: ‘All you could see of the horizon was flames and smoke.’
Ernst Jünger described what followed, as the German forces set about carefully creating a new and vast no-man’s land. ‘They found with demolishing acuity the main girders of houses, attached ropes and pulled with rhythmic cries of great effort until the whole thing collapsed. Others swung mighty hammers, smashing whatever came in their way, from flower pots on window ledges to the artful glasswork of greenhouses. As far as the
Siegfried Line every town was a pile of ruins. Every tree was felled, every road mined, every well polluted, every waterway dammed, every cellar exploded or made deadly with bombs.’
Before leaving the ruins of Péronne, a German soldier with an eye to history inserted a placard above the shattered colonnade, which read, in curled and mocking script, correct to the last umlaut: ‘Nicht ärgern, nur wundern! ’‘Be not angry, Only admire.’
In the Château de Grand Priel, stripped of its lavish furniture, where François Theillier had grown fat on the land, high explosive was placed in the cellars that had furnished German officers with his finest wines. The blast left a crater fifty yards across, filled with crushed brick, fragments of carved stone, shattered marble pillars and the glass from ninety-nine windows. Jeanne Magniez’s mansion was torn apart, as her Pêcherie had already suffered, and in Le Câtelet every house in turn was reduced to rubble. ‘The only way to tell one building from another was by the pattern of tiles on the floor.’ The mountainous walls of the great medieval citadel where Robert Digby had been shot stood immune to the devastation, but the wooden cross on his grave was flattened in the blast that also destroyed the old church.
By day, the destruction billowed blackly across the land, and its red glow lit up the night. ‘The Boche is certainly burning something behind his lines,’ wrote a British officer. ‘Dense clouds of smoke can be seen any day at various points, and flames at night. Is he burning villages in the rear? If so, he is certainly about to retire.’
In Villeret, the handful of men left behind ‘watched the preparations being made for its destruction: holes for mines in the cellars, and in the wells; the placement of charges everywhere’. The simple village church was packed with strings of explosives, along with the mairie, and the homes of Lelong, Marié, Boitelle, Foulon and Marie Coulette’s homestead. Florency Dessenne had hidden his few remaining pieces of gold in a metal box in the garden, in the vain hope that they might be retrievable after the war, but they, too, disappeared into dust, along with Marie Coulette’s cooking pots, the church bells, Emile Foulon’s stuffed fox and his daughter’s rose beds. ‘When they finally withdrew, Villeret flared up like a torch with repeated explosions that blew up every house and public building. The village was completely levelled, not a wall was left standing.’
A Foreign Field Page 18
