For some, little seemed to have changed. Achille Poétte returned, even thinner than before from his forced toil in Germany. The postman got a new bicycle, and once again his familiar, gaunt shape could be seen toiling up the slope between Hargicourt and Villeret. Parfait Marié restarted his charcoal business, but in spite of himself he hankered for the duties of municipal office. Parfait ran for the position of municipal counsellor, and won. In 1923, he travelled to Bohain, to appear before the War Damages Commission, and returned with 69,337 francs and 30 centimes in reparations for the village. His father, old Emile Marié who had coaxed Digby out of the woods to his death, started to rebuild his house in Villeret, but then abandoned the task, moved to Hargicourt, and became a stranger to the town of his birth.
Richard Sauvage found his wife, Marie, with a two-year-old daughter who everyone said was the child of a German soldier. Without a word he left and never came back. Claire’s father, Hélène’s grandfather, Jules Dessenne, also survived the war, though ‘Le Boeuf’ was no longer the merry, bovine glutton, but a tired hulk, eyes permanently weepy from mustard gas, who declined to discuss his war, or anyone else’s.
Jules was more philosophical about Hélène’s arrival than his wife, Eugénie, had ever been: ? am happy, for I would rather find one more person in the house than one less,’ he said. Hélène made her first communion in a makeshift church, erected in the middle of the cemetery.
Claire Dessenne seldom talked about Robert Digby, except to her growing daughter. She kept his letters and a grainy photograph, as well as the phrasebook British soldiers had been issued to help them communicate with the natives of France. On weekends, when she had time off from the cloth factory, Claire walked to Le Câtelet and laid flowers on the grave in the corner of the cemetery. His Britannic Majesty’s Government, having heard of ‘the valued service which she had rendered in the course of the Great War’, expressed its ‘deep sense of gratitude for the self-sacrificing efforts’ she had made in the form of a bronze medal and a long letter Claire could not understand and never translated. The medal went in a drawer, and was then lost.
Claire did, however, send on to an address in Hampshire the letter Robert Digby had addressed to his mother, asking that she support his French lover and child. Ellen Digby never replied.
Gradually, the gored and butchered countryside healed over; trenches were filled and ploughed back into the fields, but the new landscape was emptier, bleaker, shorn of trees and landmarks, a familiar face indelibly marked by shell shock. The Chinese labour gangs had toiled mightily, but the ground was still riddled with grenades, poison gas canisters and shells, and some made a living out of collecting the metal scraps of war. Some years later Robert Dessenne, the son Marie-Thérèse had named after Digby, was ploughing in the fields when he struck an unexploded shell, and was blown to pieces.
There is a song which the villagers of Villeret sang in 1917 as they were driven into exile and their houses were dynamited. Over the months and years the words were altered and more verses were added, and the song was passed on from the refugees of Villeret to other exiles from the north. These, in turn, brought it back to their own towns and villages after the war, and it slowly settled into the landscape of collective history until, like the craters in the fields, it seemed that it had always been there. The tune was jaunty, and the young men sang it when, a generation later, they marched off to the fresh slaughter of another war. Some called the song ‘Le Bébé Rose’, ‘The Pink Baby’, while others knew it as ‘Quatre Petits Anglais’, ‘Four Young Englishmen’. The old people of the Somme and the Aisne still sing it:
In the village of Villeret
There once were four young Englishmen
Who from the beginning of the war
Were so well hidden
That one of them, he fell in love
With a young and beautiful maid of France
And from their union was born
A pretty little baby.
Oh, what a lovely picture for France and England
For two allies to be so united in love
But sadly this was wartime
And the picture could not last.
A woman who loved a square-headed Hun,
A thing which freezes the blood with horror and loathing,
Decided she now wanted for herself
The handsome young Englishman with the baby.
But he immediately pushed her away,
And that is why this German-lover,
So jealous and so wicked,
Decided to alert the enemy
To the hiding place of the Englishmen.
The war erased everything in Villeret, except memory, for the song continues:
The Germans dragged our allies
Into the village of Le Câtelet
To bring them to judgement.
This the Germans swiftly did
And decided they must die.
The Kommandant called for volunteers
To execute these innocent men.
He asked for only 14 killers
But 20 Germans stepped forward.
The Englishmen were made to dig their graves
And our suffering comrades cried out ‘Vive la France,’
Up with the King and our beloved land,
And down with the cursed Hun.
Dessenne, Lelong, Poëtte, Marié, Dubuis, Boitelle are still the people of Villeret, and they have not forgotten.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Villeret, 1930
In the summer of 1930, fourteen-year-old Hélène Dessenne, the Englishman’s daughter with the startling cornflower blue eyes, was helping to bring in the beet harvest when a car drew up at the edge of the field on the east side of Villeret. Motor vehicles were still a rare enough sight in the region for the workers to stop and stare. The first person to emerge from the car was its driver, Henri Godé, still mayor of Le Câtelet, his long whiskers greying, spectacles perched on his nose, leaning on a cane. Godé had aged more than the dozen years since he had handed over his hidden letters to the English officer, but he made an incongruous and impressive figure standing in the roadside dust, wearing his best cravat. Behind the mayor emerged a tall stranger wearing a hat. The man was in his forties, with a kind, lined face. He carried a rolled umbrella, although the sky was cloudless.
The mayor spoke to Léon Recolet, supervisor of the harvest, who pointed towards the young girl standing alone in the field. The mayor waved and beckoned. ‘Suddenly everyone was shouting my name “Hélène! Hélène!” and I wondered what could be going on.’ She dropped her hoe and ran over. ‘As I came closer, I saw this big man with his arms open wide, who was saying softly, “Ma petite fille.” He had tears on his face. I don’t know why, but I threw myself into his arms and hugged him.’
Sitting in the back of the mayor’s Renault as they bumped along the track into Villeret, the man in the hat tried to explain, in broken French, who he was and why he had come.
Thomas Digby’s had been a grim and gruelling war. After the news of Robert’s disappearance, he had never quite given up hope that his brother might be alive. The strain had helped to drive his father mad and then into the grave, while his mother retreated ever further into herself. It was not until after the Armistice that she finally received a letter stating that Robert Digby had been shot by the enemy, with a brief note of thanks and commiseration: ‘Private 9368, killed in action, France and Flanders, 30th May 1916.’
Ellen Digby never openly showed her grief for her favourite child, but she kept her younger son and daughter, Florence, at a distance and secretly she began to drink heavily. The few who dared to call on the sharp-tongued widow would be made to read the letter passed on by Major Ashmead-Bartlett and his note commending the ‘brave and noble’ actions of her son. She never mentioned that her son had also fathered a French child.
Thomas, back in civilian clothes and perhaps suffering the guilt of the survivor, mourned his brother deeply, and seemed to find some release
in writing poetry. He spent months working on a poem dedicated to Robert. The shy and admiring younger brother had it printed on black-bordered cards and sent to everyone he could think of. He meant every painfully wrought word.
In Memory of
ROBERT DIGBY
Aged 31 who was shot by the Germans, May 30th, 1916
Friend of my youth, whose early joy,
And recollections as a boy,
Spread o’er my memory sweet.
The bliss which winged those rosy hours,
Among the leafy sunny bowers,
Is ne’er our lot to meet.
Yet we did yield those happy days
From truth’s secure, unerring ways
To flow in different channels.
A soldier’s life your footsteps trod,
To roam the Empire’s foreign sod,
And shine in honour’s annals.
Your country called, you went to war,
To fight a foe we all abhor,
Repine not at thy lot.
I prayed for you each darkest hour
To God, who gives us strength and power,
Your danger ne’er forgot.
Alas! I never heard from thee
Each year, a seeming age to me,
And yet I still had hope.
But now I know that you are dead,
Your farewell letter I have read,
And each brave word you spoke.
O brother! in thy pangs of death,
What sighs re-echoed to thy breath,
Before your spirit fled.
Could tears have stayed the tyrant’s course,
Could tears avert his brutal force,
Those tears I would have shed.
Well! thou art happy, and I feel,
For still my heart regards your weal,
I must be happy too.
Before I share the gloomy cell,
Whose ever-slumbering inmates dwell
My duty I must do.
Why weep? Your matchless spirit soars,
Among the weeping angels bowers
Beyond the starry skies.
The all of thine that cannot die
Will live through all eternity,
Before God’s throne thou lies.
Farewell! brave brother; all is past,
The bugle blows thy Post ‘The Last,’
Each volley rents the air.
The Gates of Heaven are open wide
For those like thee, who bravely died,
Go! rest forever there.
After the war, Thomas had gone into gentleman’s service, working as a valet for a wealthy family on the Isle of Wight. Discreet and careful, Thomas made a good manservant. In 1923, he returned to the north to marry a Northwich woman, Florence Leyland, his first cousin, the daughter of Ellen Digby’s brother. It proved a childless marriage, but perfectly happy, for Florence shared her husband’s gentle approach to life.
Ellen Digby died in Southampton in 1929, and it was not until he was sorting through her effects that Thomas came across another, very different letter from the one referred to in his poem: written by a man preparing for death, it asked that his lover and daughter be formally recognised and cared for by his family. Ellen Digby had never shown the letter to anyone and had hidden it, for shame. But she had not been able to destroy it. Thomas Digby was astonished, then angry, and finally resolute. Defying his mother for probably the first time in his life, he bought a second-class ticket for the steamer crossing to France.
On arrival in Le Câtelet, Thomas asked a group of boys to show him where the Englishmen had been shot. Georges Mercier, the child-witness now grown into a burly teenager, led him to the exact spot and stuck his fingers into the bullet holes in the chalky ramparts of the castle. Thomas Digby took a photograph of Georges standing there, and then gave him a silver franc.
Henri Godé immediately put himself and his car at the disposal of this soft-speaking, well-dressed foreigner with the courteous manners. After Hélène, they collected two more generations of Dessenne women from the fields around Villeret: Claire and her mother Eugénie. The teenager babbled away excitedly in the back seat, but Claire Dessenne was too shocked at the sudden apparition of her dead lover’s brother to speak a word. Eugénie sat with her lips pursed, uncertain whether to approve. The strange little party drove to the Villeret mayor’s office, where a document remains, handwritten in studied municipal copperplate, stating: ‘Thomas Digby, born in Bengal, resident of number 2, Randolph Mews, Maida Vale, W9, hereby formally recognises as his own daughter, a child born in Villeret on the 14th November nineteen hundred and fifteen and known by the name of Hélène Claire Dessenne.’ On her birth certificate, the name ‘Dessenne’ was scored out, and ‘Digby’ was written in its place.
EPILOGUE
Villeret, 1999
To save your world you asked this man to die:
Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
W.H. Auden, ‘Epitaph for an Unknown Soldier’
Like the battlefield enthusiasts who still come to sift through fields and ditches in search of wartime relics, I scoured the history around Villeret, gathering the fragments of Robert Digby’s story. So many hours were spent in dark, overheated kitchens with the descendants of Lelongs, Mariés and Dessennes, that the generations merged, as I searched for traces of an ancient love story among the farms and villages of Picardy.
In common with most British families, mine has its own First World War memories, and casualties. One great uncle, Donald Macintyre of the Black Watch, lies – I discovered with a jolt – in Vadancourt military cemetery, not five miles from Villeret. My mother’s uncle, Tim Massy-Beresford, returned from the Western Front full of holes and stories. Uncle Tim was a nineteen-year-old machine gunner in the trenches at Saint-Eloi in 1915 when a sniper shot him through the chest. As Tim collapsed, with a pierced lung, the officer kneeling behind him dropped dead. ‘The bullet, having passed through me with bad enough results, had continued straight into his head, killing him instantly,’ my great uncle wrote. Tim had recovered from his wound sufficiently to rejoin his unit at the front in 1918, and that September he led an attack down a slope towards the German lines near Cambrai, about fourteen miles north of Le Câtelet. He was shot first through the right thigh, then in the left leg, and finally across the ribs under his heart. His matter-of-fact tone is reminiscent of Robert Digby: ‘As I wasn’t dead, the only thing to do was to crawl back up the hill.’
Uncle Tim’s life had been saved by a small, inch-thick pocket diary which he had tucked into a breast pocket. The diary was on pemianent display in a glass case in his drawing room: ‘There is a neat hole in the middle of one side, but as one turns the pages one can see that the thickness slowed up the bullet and gradually deflected it so that it emerged at right angles on the last page.’ Tim spent twelve months at the front, was wounded four times, received the Military Cross and, as he ruefully observed many years later, ‘never actually saw a live Gemían soldier’.
That was the sort of Great War I had known about before I came to Villeret. A war of futile gallantry, an inconceivable death toll and a powerful but diffuse sense of loss. To understand how much had been destroyed, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘you had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancee, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie and going to the Derby and your grandfather’s whiskers.’
Like other Britons of my generation, I knew the war remotely, from symbol and song: the annual paper poppies on Armistice Day, the chirpy ditties from the school performance of ‘Oh, What a Lovely War’, Uncle Tim’s diary with the bullet hole, and the architectural emptiness of memorials to the Unknown Soldier.
But in Villeret I had chanced upon a different aspect of this war, more intimate and much more recent. The soldier, for me, was no longer unknown; only his betrayer r
emained faceless and elusive. Robert Digby was a nonconformist and a romantic. His love affair had imperilled an entire community, but when his moment of choice arrived, I believe he had taken the right route. I had come to like him, and to admire him. I felt I owed it to Robert Digby to find the person who had betrayed him and his comrades.
My days and nights were filled with images of Robert, Claire, Florency, Marie Coulette, and the others of Villeret. As the months went by I began to see the faces of the long-dead in the living. Perhaps they felt the same way about me: an unlikely Englishman appearing from nowhere, thrusting himself into their homes and lives, eating their food, undermining their defences, asking questions. I showed them photographs of my three children. They laughed and clapped my shoulder and called me ‘Papa’. Some spoke with warmth and intimacy of characters they had never met, of a time known only through the stories of grandparents but permanently inscribed in the collective memory. They talked of the executions as if through personal recollection, of the love affair between Claire and Digby in the present tense, and his death as if it had taken place last week. But there was an invisible barricade, a point where my inquiries were always stopped and turned back. When I asked who had betrayed Robert Digby, eyes were swiftly averted, shoulders shrugged, the subject was discreetly changed, refreshment offered. Suddenly memories would cloud and clutter, and they would break into impenetrable patois among themselves. At first I took this to be a natural aversion to a delicate subject, but over the weeks and months I convinced myself that they knew the answer (or believed they did) but would not (or dared not) reveal it.
Their forebears, those who left some permanent record behind of the Guerre Quatorze, were scarcely more forthcoming, but they all agreed on one aspect of the drama: Digby had been sent to his death by a woman. Writing his account in 1920, Léon Lege, the Le Câtelet notary, declined to name names, but recorded that the British soldiers had been ‘discovered as the result of some feminine indiscretions’, something closer to accident than design. Joseph Cabaret, the schoolmaster, placed the blame with discreet vagueness on the neighbouring village. ‘The poor soldiers were betrayed by a woman from Hargicourt’ he stated flatly, and without elaboration. Alice Delabranche, the daughter of the pharmacist, carefully copied out her entire diary after the war ‘to avoid any indiscretions’, removing the ‘names of certain people who acted more or less delicately with the Germans’. She then destroyed the incriminating original version. The words of ‘Le Bébé Rose’ explicitly pointed to a woman ‘who loved a square-headed Hun’, and then set her sights on Robert Digby.
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