A Foreign Field

by Ben MacIntyre

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Wasteland

  Villeret was blasted off the map, its rubble further pummelled into a chaos of dugouts and muddy craters overgrown with rank brambles of barbed wire, while British troops inched forward and the Germans fought on with the immense fortifications of the Hindenburg Line, the final defence, at their backs. A new front line tore through the heart of the village. The sweet-tasting streams that had once watered the fields around Villeret ran rancid and dead, their last remaining fish poisoned by gas and lead.

  A French soldier from Hargicourt obtained a pass to survey what had become of his former home and reported ‘a land criss-crossed with trenches, strewn with ruins, as flat as a carpet. Nothing remains.’ The old world had vanished, save for some shards of building and remnants of François Theillier’s once-abundant game, which continued to breed among the holes and stumps. Villeret was formally taken by the British on 15 April 1917. At the end of that month, one Captain Oates, son of the commanding officer of the Sherwood Foresters, popped up from a trench that ran through what had once been Foulon’s field, ‘sniped an unsuspecting partridge through the head, collected it from no-man’s land during cover of darkness and presented it to his father for supper’.

  Villeret was now no more than a military reference point, but the war-makers considered it an important one and when summer came the British surged forward in a heated rush towards the ridge above the village on which stood the ruins of Cologne Farm, an objective ‘about one mile to the west of the Hindenburg line itself [which], if taken, would allow observation over sections of the line’. The attack succeeded, capturing ‘a few, very significant yards of front’, but the killing was dreadful.

  The pattern was repeated again and again in the shadow of the Hindenburg Line: a series of small movements back or forth; with each attack and counter-attack, the ancient contours and meanings of the rolling fields and familiar landmarks were dissolved and reformed. The dense woods where Robert Digby had sheltered were shattered into scorched stumps and stagnant holes. From the British lines the soldiers could ‘count the number of rather despondent looking trees’ in what had once been Les Peupliers de la Haute-Bruyère, and the German-held copse took on a fantastical and menacing aura. The men said the few poplars still standing were ‘made of tempered steel and capable of hiding a battalion of evil-intentioned snipers’. In festive mood, on 25 December 1917, a German wit in the opposing trench raised a sign reading ‘Merry Christmas’: ‘A Lewis gun was immediately turned on the sign and shot it down.’

  The woods, the quarry, the mill, the ruined outlying farms and hills were now coordinates on trench maps with new military names: ‘Ruby Wood’, ‘The Egg’, ‘Sheep Post’, ‘Frog Post’. The sweeping vista from Theillier’s château contained ‘Priel Crater’; the lanes where Claire and Digby had courted were ‘Zulu Boulevard’ and ‘Maxim Road’. A large dugout in the middle of the beet fields was considered luxurious and christened ‘The Leicester Lounge’; here behind-the-lines entertainment was provided by a battalion band boasting ‘Riflemen Breedon, Fawcett and Pollock, late of the Drury Lane Theatre, the Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Trocadero Hotel.’

  In the ferocious dialogue of the guns, the smell of mortality grew overpowering; the corpses piled up until more people died around Villeret in a few vicious months than had ever lived there.

  In January 1918, Sergeant Edouard Severin, the mayor of Villeret currently serving in the French army, crept forward with the former mayor of Hargicourt to inspect what was left of their villages in the région dévastée:

  The brutes, the depraved brutes! In this vision of destruction, there is not a wall left high enough to shelter a dog. The village is a spectacle of death. Ruins! Ruins! Ruins! They have wrecked everything, the stables, the farms, the church and even the arbours in the gardens. Villeret is a place of desolation. We could see only the smashed houses, land ripped up by the trenches and bomb craters.

  The pair pushed on through Villeret where iron bedsteads twisted by the heat poked up through the debris, and on down a shredded incline towards Hargival, the hill where Digby and Sligo had once tried to outrun the Uhlans. ‘The Boche guns could be heard, bombarding the batteries at Hargicourt. The rain of iron became heavier around us. “Dangerouss!”, the Tommies cried as we passed. And we left, thinking it would be foolish to take additional risks with that storm breaking overhead.’

  On 21 March, a ‘breathless cook’ ran through the Villeret trenches, screaming that the Germans had attacked in force: ‘German grenades were bouncing down dugout steps before [the British] knew the battle had begun’. From behind the pile of brick that had been the mairie, the machine-gunners of the Manchester Regiment fired until it grew dark, and then escaped before the village was overrun once more. Having discreetly shifted forces from the Eastern to the Western Front, the German army selected the pulverised Somme for its counterattack, advancing with stunning power along forty miles of front. In six days the British suffered 300,000 casualties. But the German advance was stopped and then, in August, rolled back by an Allied counterattack. Slowly, the German army began to fall apart.

  Hargicourt and Villeret were not finally ‘cleared’ until the end of September. That month, the New Yorker ‘doughboys’ of the 107th Infantry Regiment battled furiously over Gillemont Farm and the Magniez pastures, with the Germans resisting every step: ‘Few surrendered. In the ruins, in hedges and in every copse were concealed Boche machine guns, and as the men charged up the slope they received this murderous fire full in their faces. It was rifles, bayonets and bombs against machine guns,’ wrote G.F. Jacobson of the 107th. The British reached the mighty Hindenburg Line on 26 September.

  At Bellenglise, where the line had seemed strongest, British infantry units crossed the canal under a thick fog and crashed through the unbreakable line. ‘The enemy’s defence in the last and strongest of his prepared positions had been shattered,’ reported Douglas Haig. So many had been killed that this was now, in large measure, an army of children: as the end of war dawned, more than half of the British infantrymen were under the age of nineteen.

  Some of the troops around Villeret had broken at the same moment as the Hindenburg Line. On 21 September the Australian soldiers crouched on the Hargicourt road were ordered to move up to the front line for another assault. One hundred and nineteen of them, ‘desperately under strength and in need of rest’, convinced that the colonial troops were being forced into the slaughter while British units were held in reserve, had refused to budge. All except one were found guilty of desertion; the war ended before they could be punished.

  Suzanne Boitelle was in the Revin refugee camp in the Ardennes with the other Villeret exiles, when the weary peace finally arrived. She had been released and reunited with her son Guy in February 1918. The villagers were delighted to see her. Emile Marié, who had continued as acting mayor while his son Parfait still languished in a German work camp, was particularly solicitous, and after her months of deprivation, Suzanne was earnestly grateful: ‘He was most welcoming. He gave me everything I needed.’ Exile had been brutal, and some had not survived the ordeal. The people sensed peace before it was declared.

  ‘A few days before the Armistice, the French cavalry appeared a few miles off, the cannon sounded all night, and the Germans fled,’ Suzanne Boitelle would recall. The next morning, the people of Villeret saw their first French troops in more than four years.

  But the war raged around their homes until the very end. In Le Câtelet, on 29 September, Thomas O’Shea, a New Yorker and a corporal with the US infantry, became separated from his platoon ‘well within enemy lines’ and found himself hiding in a shell hole, alongside the ruined medieval castle, with two other American soldiers. It was recorded that ‘upon hearing a call for help from an American tank, which had been disabled thirty yards from them, the three soldiers left shelter and started towards the tank, under heavy fire from German machine guns and trench mortars’. They rescued three
injured soldiers from the tank and then, ‘in the face of violent fire, dismounted a Hotchkiss gun, and took it back to where the wounded men were, keeping off the enemy all day by effective use of the gun and later bringing it, with the wounded men, back to our lines under cover of darkness’. O’Shea died of his wounds on a stretcher, not far from where Robert Digby lay in Le Câtelet graveyard.

  On 9 October, a ‘thin, grey-haired man in ragged civilian clothes’ suddenly detached himself from a pair of South African infantrymen who were escorting him down the Roman road about ten miles from Villeret, and ran towards a passing horseman. Dancing up and down in front of Major Francis Drake of the 11th Hussars, who had happened to be passing, the wizened little man kept shouting: ‘That’s my troop officer.’ After four years of concealment, most of it in an oak cupboard the size of a coffin, Patrick Fowler had finally been liberated, only to be arrested by his own side. Half an hour earlier, a frail apparition, ‘gesticulating wildly’ and telling an unbelievable tale of survival, had rushed towards the South African troops entering Bertry. ‘They had immediately placed him under arrest as a spy, and were marching him back under escort.’ Drake was ‘one of the very few men left in France who could have recognised him’, and had it not been for their chance encounter on the Roman road, Fowler might have shared the same fate as Digby.

  The hussars were stationed just a few miles away, and the regiment’s commanding officer immediately rode over to Bertry to thank Fowler’s saviours: he found Louis Basquin dying of consumption. ‘Monsieur, you have nothing to thank me for, I was too ill to fight for my country and wished to do my duty. I could do no less.’ Fowler was reunited with his regiment, but declined to take the leave he was offered. ‘He was too weak for active work, and saw the war to an end in the officers’ mess.’ Even though the fighting was nearly over, he refused to go home. This may have been a reflection of Fowler’s innate heroism, or perhaps the mark of a man who had spent far too long cooped up in a cupboard.

  The German grip had to be prised from the land as from a dead man. At Le Câteau, where Digby’s war had started and officially ended, one German machine-gun company battled on until the eleventh hour. At 11.00 a.m. on 11 November, the crew fired a final, thousand-round burst, ‘before standing up and taking off their forage caps to the English, and walking away without looking back’.

  Karl Evers beat a rather hastier retreat. Having helped to burn the files held in Antwerp, he joined the other staff officers in a swift rush back to Germany. By the end of November, Major Evers, one-time Etappen-Kommandant 8/X of the 2nd Etappen-Inspektion, the former King of Le Câtelet, was back in his hometown of Celle, and out of uniform.

  The day before the Armistice, Henri Godé, Le Câtelet’s mayor, spotted an advance guard of British troops, the 12th Battalion of the London Regiment, entering the little town of Neufmaison, where he had been exiled along with the rest of the town’s population. Godé accosted the commanding officer, Major Ashmead-Bartlett, and handed over to him the letters written by Privates Digby, Thorpe, Martin and Donohoe on the eve of their deaths, which he had ‘kept hidden for a year and a half. Bartlett was deeply moved by the simplicity of these ‘voices rising from the grave to accuse the Germans’.

  Suzanne Boitelle realised the war was at its end when she saw Germans retreating into the woods shooting at French soldiers; the French did not fire back, since they ‘had not received orders to open fire’. The heroine of Villeret was standing near a group of French gunners at eleven that morning. ‘They cried out that the Armistice was signed, and everyone went mad, everyone was happy. The soldiers danced around their guns, shouting and singing.’

  It had taken just two days for the Germans to transport Suzanne Boitelle and the other villagers from Villeret to the refugee station, but it took months for them to get back across the devastated land. In the words of one resident: ‘The valley had become the valley of Johoshaphat, covered by a mantle of war consisting of abandoned arms and ammunition, guns, machine-gun belts, countless shells, grenades, cannons, tanks, tank bridges, bayonets, helmets by the thousand, pitfalls, spades, pickaxes, tin cans, knapsacks, great coats and all sorts of other debris crushed into soil itself, to say nothing of the corpses emerging from the ground and rotting horses.’ The wealthy and the official were the first to come home, to find ‘not only no more houses, but no trees lining the roads, no woods, no agriculture. It was as if the entire countryside had been flattened.’

  Some believed a place so utterly devastated should not be repaired, but merely abandoned as a permanent monument to the horror. Mademoiselle Fournier d’Alincourt gazed on the wreckage of her château, where Robert Digby had been sentenced to death, and despaired: ‘My heart is torn apart by the sight of my poor destroyed home … I will never see it as it was before.’ Jeanne Magniez, reunited with Georges, returned to find her home similarly ruined. The mansion was a pile of bricks, the courtyard a maze of shell holes and barbed wire. With typical vim, she set about rebuilding Hargival: the house would be smaller, but the stables larger and the ruined Pêcherie would be preserved in its state of devastation as a memento mori. François Theillier never rebuilt the Château de Grand Priel, and he could never bring himself to hunt again in its grounds.

  Much of the original population did not come back to this wilderness, this strip of Armageddon thirty miles wide that had consumed more than a thousand different settlements and half a million homes. By mid-January, the local newspaper reported that the canton of Le Câtelet was undergoing a ‘repopulation’, with three of its pre-war inhabitants back in their homes. ‘The land was no longer their land,’ observed a local writer. ‘They no longer recognised the changed faces of their villages, denuded of old trees, ancient churches, venerable châteaux and farms, which gave them their particular character.’

  When the once-plump Marie-Thérèse Dessenne was finally released from German prison, she weighed a pitiful six stone. Neither she nor Florency set foot in Villeret, but settled instead in Saint-Quentin, where Florency immediately took up smuggling tobacco again.

  Léon and Elise Lelong, the baker and his wife, accompanied by Lucien and Clothilde, came back and inspected the remains of what had been their home, but departed almost immediately, never to return. Elise Lelong told her family that they had been ‘ruined by the war, and by their involvement in the episode with the English soldiers, which had cost them dear’.

  Marie Coulette, predictably, stood her ground. With her daughter Eugénie, her granddaughter Claire and her great-granddaughter Hélène, the head of the Dessenne family set to work rebuilding their home with whatever could be scraped together in the way of government compensation. As the reconstruction got underway, they lived in temporary corrugated iron shelters, flimsy shacks, or underground in the few cellars that had not been mined.

  Gangs of Chinese labourers were brought in to clear away the barbed wire, rubble and live explosive. Exile and exposure to Englishmen, Irishmen, Germans and Russians had done little to broaden the cultural horizons of some in Villeret, who saw the Chinese as ‘yellow devils … with their slit eyes, their sordid and multicoloured accoutrements, their savage expressions, their gesticulations, their confinement like wild animals behind wire and the total impossibility of understanding a word they said.’ When the Chinese labourers were spotted clearing out what remained of Cologne Farm, ‘one inhabitant of Villeret opened fire at these exotic rogues’.

  The rebuilders of Villeret finally erected a large and ugly mairie and a church that was even larger and uglier in the middle of the village. It was assumed, officially and wrongly, that Villeret would eventually return to its former size, but barely half of its inhabitants came back. Some, like the Lelongs, stayed away out of choice, while others were merely listed on the ‘Monument aux Morts’ in front of the new church: four Lelongs, three Mariés, two Boitelles. Of the sixty Villeret men mobilised in those first heady days of war, thirty-three died in battle, of whom only two were identified and buried in the village cemete
ry. Some who had survived the war did not long survive the peace: Victor Marié, the slippery former spy, returned to Villeret with his DCM in 1919 and died just three years later at the age of forty-three. The cause of death was rumoured to be poisoning.

  In 1920, Villeret was awarded the Croix de Guerre. ‘This small village suffered greatly,’ wrote Mayor Henri Lelong. ‘Even the last sleep of its dead was not respected, for many of the tombs in its cemetery were destroyed by explosives, the bones inside scattered to the wind. But its children did their duty valiantly, as was demonstrated in the business with the British soldiers and the spying affair, as well as by those who left in 1914 and fell on the field of honour.’

  Paul Boitelle had left Villeret to fight in 1914, leaving behind his radiant young wife with two healthy sons. He returned to find his home destroyed, just one surviving son, Guy, and Suzanne prematurely aged from imprisonment and semi-starvation. But the Boitelles considered themselves lucky, and Suzanne struggled on: ‘We women collected all the bricks we could find, and with these we put up temporary shelters. We received war compensation, but it couldn’t replace everything we had lost.’ She bore little resentment towards the Germans, considering them a different race from the Nazi fanatics who would follow. ‘The soldiers of 1914 were more humane than those of 1940. They were older, understood more, and they were kind to the children, giving them sweets.’