A Foreign Field

by Ben MacIntyre

  Georges Mercier, the little boy who hid in the bushes to watch the executions, is eighty-eight now, and as angry today as he was then. His voice quavering, but not from age, he recalls the scene. ‘I wanted to cry out “Bastards!”, something like that went through my head, but my cousin Eugène stopped me. He was fifteen, and supposed to be looking after me. If the Germans had seen us, they would have shot us, the sons of bitches. One man was too tall for the coffin, and I saw that whoreson commander of the firing squad break the legs with his boot heel. That chilled my bones.’

  ‘Who betrayed them to the Germans?’ I ask.

  ‘It was a woman, a neighbour, that’s what I heard,’ he says, rolling the thought around his mouth like a bad taste.

  In Saint-Quentin I found tiny Henriette Legé, the notary’s daughter who, more than eight decades before, aged ten, had watched the tumbril rolling past her occupied house, and heard the tramp of Digby’s passing boots. ‘I had the misfortune to live in that epoch,’ she says, remembering how her safe middle-class world had been destroyed. ‘My childhood was devastated.’

  A million and a half Frenchmen perished, leaving 600,000 widows. After the war there were not enough men to go around. Henriette was one of half a million young women who never found a husband.

  ‘They said it was a jealous woman. The Englishmen were getting around the village, and a jealous woman betrayed them,’ she observes, without condemnation.

  Suzanne Boitelle died in 1988, but a few years earlier her grandson recorded her memories of the First World War. I listened to them with her youngest son – born just one year after the war and named, intriguingly, Robert – a story of blunt heroism, told in simple staccato sentences, laced with patois: ‘In 1914 I lived in Villeret. I was arrested because I had sheltered a British soldier in my home. I was twenty-one years old. My husband was away at the war. I was taken before the German war court, and sentenced to a year in prison and a fine of one thousand marks. Since I wouldn’t pay the fine, I got five additional months in prison.’

  Only once did her voice rise in anger, but she remained guarded: ‘We were betrayed by someone in the village.’

  Robert Boitelle stared at his mother’s medals and citations, British and French, commending her ‘courage and dignity’, and answered the question before it had been asked. ‘I don’t know who did it, but they say it was a jealous woman.’

  The archives in Villeret produced no evidence that anyone had ever tried to bring charges against the nameless traitor, but Florency’s wife, Marie-Thérèse Dessenne, had her own suspicions, and exacted vengeance of a sort. After the war Marie-Thérèse became exceptionally pious, performing novenas – nine successive days of prayer – in the hope of having her supplications answered. It was in the midst of one such novena, at the rebuilt cathedral in Saint-Quentin, that she spotted ‘the betrayer’ in a nearby pew. ‘A woman was also praying, asking forgiveness for her sins. Marie-Thérèse hid next to her, concealed behind one of the cathedral columns. Then, in a loud voice, she shouted: “Your sins can never be forgiven, you have blood on your hands!” The woman fled in panic. She must have believed it was the voice of God speaking to her.’

  Some years later, Marie-Thérèse was shopping with her grandson Edgar in Saint-Quentin when she spotted the woman again. ‘Look, that’s the one who sent us to prison,’ she said. The woman started when she recognised Marie-Thérèse, and scuttled away. Edgar recalled the woman’s face, ‘younger than my grandmother’, and her ‘expression of shock’. But not her name.

  Frustrated, I walked up the hill outside Villeret to the copse where François Theillier’s great castle once dominated the skyline. The trees had grown through the remains of smashed brickwork and the shards of glass from exactly ninety-nine windows. Stone steps, overgrown by creepers, led down to a deep crater, once a splendid wine cellar, where German explosive had been packed among the wine racks.

  At the end of a sunken avenue, no longer lined with limes, lay a shallow concrete watering trough, made in Paris, an echo of Theillier’s hunting passion – placed close enough to the castle for the owner to get a clear shot when a luckless deer stopped to drink. Nearby, stood a row of empty and rotting concrete rabbit hutches, the clapiers from which a young French cavalry officer snatched a rabbit and shared its remains with three bewildered foreign soldiers named Thorpe, Donohoe and Martin on an August day in 1914. I pushed through tangled undergrowth and over a pink granite column lying in exact broken segments like disjointed vertebrae, to the point where Theillier’s great dining-room would have been. Something crunched wetly underfoot: snails; dozens of fat, slowly twitching escargots de Bourgogne, bred for a rich man’s table, liberated by war and now multiplying undisturbed amid the ruins.

  In Germany I found satisfaction of a sort. After the war, according to the official French account, a judicial investigation was launched into whether Major Karl Evers should be prosecuted for the deaths of the four English soldiers. Evers was still on the staff of the imperial government in Antwerp when the Armistice was declared. He had inconspicuously returned to Celle, to resume his career as a magistrate, with a clutch of medals in recognition of his wartime service – the Iron Cross (second class), the Friedrich August Cross of Oldenburg and the Order of the Red Eagle. But Evers was never quite the same, he drank heavily and the bizarre behaviour noted by the people of Le Câtelet became ever more pronounced in peacetime. In 1920, Evers spent an extended period in the sanatorium at Bad Nauheim, suffering from an unidentified ‘nervous disorder’. Soon afterwards, Evers, now the senior judge of Celle, was prosecuted for refusing to leave a pub at closing time. By January 1926, he was residing permanently in Karlsbad Sanatorium under the care of neurologist Dr Hans Willige. A month later, Evers retired, and by the end of the year, he was dead. She could not have known it, but Marie Coulette, the elderly matriarch of the Dessenne family who had defied Evers for so long, outlived her enemy by a full week.

  Of an official investigation into Evers, which might have unlocked the secret of the betrayal, there was barely a trace. In April 1919, the Prussian Ministry of Justice apparently handed over Evers’s personal file, following a request by the German Foreign Office, but many of the German First World War records were destroyed by Allied bombing in the second war and no record of any investigation can be found in either the French or British archives. There was little appetite for prosecuting German war criminals after 1918. ‘The inquiry came to nothing,’ the official historian of the region concluded in 1933, ‘because Evers was not part of the war council in Le Câtelet and the penalty had been confirmed by the war council in Saint-Quentin’. The death sentences had been imposed by a German military court, even if Evers was personally responsible for bringing espionage charges against the four. ‘We can conclude that Evers, deceived for so long and determined to have his revenge, had made his accusations as damning as possible,’ the official record states. It was somehow comforting to know that the petty tyrant had ended his days mad and drunk.

  The war also left an indelible mark on Patrick Fowler, the soldier whose war had been spent inside Marie Belmont-Gobert’s armoire. After returning to England, Fowler got a job as a valet and lived on to the age of eighty-eight, reticent about his experiences, and perhaps aptly after four years spent facing the inside of a cupboard door, slightly unhinged. The Belmont-Goberts, however, fell on hard times. But their plight was discovered by the British popular press and their heroism recounted in the papers. Madame Belmont-Gobert was awarded the OBE, the Hussars presented her with an engraved silver plate, the War Office stretched a point and decreed that she was entitled to twopence a day as Fowler’s messing allowance which came to more than 2,000 francs, and the Daily Telegraph set up a fund to help them out. Finally she and her daughter were ferried across the Channel to London ‘where a magnificent reception was accorded them by the King and Queen, the Lord Mayor and the British public generally, proving to the whole French nation that England knows how to recognise and honour heroism
and self-sacrifice’. Even the cupboard was venerated. Purchased by a grateful nation, it was placed on exhibition in the Imperial War Museum and then finally transferred to the King’s Royal Hussars Museum in Winchester, where it remains, a thing of indestructible peasant simplicity and sturdiness. The Villeret story was more complicated.

  I was starting to give up hope of ever knowing who betrayed the British soldiers, when the first direct accusation was made. One Saturday afternoon, I was finishing a bottle of wine after lunch with Jean-Marc Dubuis, bus driver of Villeret, whose grandfathers, Arthur Tordeux and Desire Dubuis, were the pair of poachers who had first found the Englishmen in Trocmé woods. I had visited the Dubuis family half a dozen times already, asking questions with no apparent effect. A cautious and reticent man, every time I managed to turn the conversation towards the betrayal he would deftly steer it away again. One shouldn’t talk about it,’ he would say. Or ‘It was a long time ago … These things are painful, the family is still in the village.’ When I asked him whether he was referring to Hélène or the family of the betrayer, he clammed up completely.

  But as he poured himself another glass of wine, Jean-Marc Dubuis broke off in the middle of a long and complicated complaint about the bus company, and the air in his kitchen held, for a moment, quite still. ‘Another woman was in love with Digby,’ he said slowly. ‘He would have nothing to do with her, because he was in love with Claire, and his baby. This woman did not mean it to go as far as it did. She did not think they would all be killed.’

  I glanced at Jean-Marc’s wife, Evelyne, who was staring at her husband, with her mouth open and eyes wide. But Jean-Marc rolled on.

  ‘She thought they would be arrested and imprisoned. She never expected them to be shot. But the village made her pay anyway. She left Villeret, and never came back.’

  A long, long pause.

  ‘Her name was Lelong, I think it was Charlotte. Charlotte Lelong.’

  At last, a name. A member of the Lelong clan, rivals of the Dessennes, the baker’s family which had quit Villeret after the war, never to return.

  As I was leaving the Dubuis home, Evelyne Dubois plucked at my jacket and drew me aside. Hitherto notably unforthcoming on the subject, she whispered: ‘That may be wrong. I heard the name of the treacherous woman was Antoinette Foulon. She was also in love with Digby. She told Claire Dessenne: “If I can’t have him, then you can’t have him either!”’ Evelyne paused, suddenly doubtful, too much said. ‘But then, the person who told me that may have been trying to shift the blame …’ She closed the door.

  Antoinette Foulon, the pretty Villeret schoolmistress who had cooked meals for the fugitives in the earliest days of their concealment, appears on the official Almanac for Villeret in 1913. But in the first census after the war she is gone, replaced by a new teacher. Had Antoinette Foulon betrayed a man who would not be her lover? Or was the traîtresse the mysterious Lelong girl?

  Jean Dessenne, the mayor of Villeret for twenty-seven years, is the last member of the clan still living in the village. Jean’s father, Emile, had acted as lookout while his cousin Claire and Robert Digby were in the hayloft, and his home, another post-war construction, is just a stone’s throw away from the site of Marie Coulette’s house. Jean Dessenne and I spent hours together in the archives and talking with his neighbours. Yet it took weeks of prompting before Jean, too, vouchsafed a name. ‘My father knew who had denounced them, but he never said exactly who it was. He did say one thing, however, which was that it was someone within the family. In my opinion he was talking about Léon, Marie Coulette’s brother. He had a big mouth that one, he just didn’t know how to shut up, and he was really stupid.’

  Could it be big, lumbering Léon Recolet who had inadvertently betrayed the men’s existence and whereabouts? But, if the culprit had indeed been a member of the Dessenne family, there was a more plausible candidate to hand.

  Eugénie Dessenne, Claire’s mother and Hélène’s grandmother, had wanted Digby out of their lives from the moment he first appeared at the back door of Florency’s house. She had tried her best to prevent her daughter’s affair with the Englishman, and made no secret of her disapproval when the child was born. With the threat of reprisals looming over the entire village, had Eugénie slipped out one night to speak to the Orstkommandant at Cardon’s house? Was she unsurprised when Major Evers’s squad of Feldgendarmerie arrived in Villeret on 16 May 1916 and made straight for Florency’s hayloft?

  If a deal had been struck, that might explain why the Dessennes, with the exception of Florency and Marie-Thérèse, escaped punishment. It might also explain the tone of Digby’s last letter to Eugénie, written from his prison cell, at once solicitous and vaguely threatening, and his observation that she had ‘not suffered the same fate’ as he. Did Digby believe that his child’s grandmother had betrayed him? The flashing blue eyes of that child, now eighty-eight years old, cloud over when her grandmother’s name is mentioned. ‘She never talked about it. Never.’

  Like Major Evers, I was beginning to see traitors everywhere. Even the halo over the heroic Jeanne Magniez was fading.

  Jeanne and Georges Magniez rebuilt Hargival after the war, but they left standing a German Blockhaus pitted by bullets off the new courtyard as a memorial to what had happened there, and a good place to keep the chickens. The ruins of the Pêcherie became overgrown, and Georges and Jeanne grew old together. There were no children, but many dogs and more horses. A photograph of Flirt, the horse she had killed rather than relinquish it to the German army, remained on Jeanne’s bedside table.

  Jeanne died in 1964 at the age of eighty-three. As I picked my way through the sheaves of papers, letters and photographs she had left behind, I was tugged by doubt. Jeanne’s relations with the German officer class had been warm. Judge Grumme, the German who had sentenced her former wards to death, came back to visit Madame Magniez at Hargival after the war, and she proudly showed him the remains of the fishing lodge where she had hidden the soldiers for so many months. They laughed about it together. Some three decades after Jeanne first met Wilhelm Richter, the once-young German aristocrat was still writing to her in a vein not usually associated with occupying enemy troops: Je vous adore de tout mon coeur,’ ‘I love you with all my heart,’ wrote Richter in 1948, thanking Jeanne for sending photographs which showed that Hargival had become ‘a veritable paradise of calm and beauty, recreating what was there before’. A year later he wrote again, after Jeanne had sent yet more photographs of the estate: ‘I see you in spirit at Hargival in your great château, or riding out, tall in the saddle, on a successor to the Son of Steel. Je vous adore, comme toujours …’

  I was uneasy, too, at the way the condemned men had chosen to bless Jeanne Magniez as they faced the execution squad. Had her friendship with a German officer spilled over into intimacy, and then complicity? Had Jeanne Magniez taken the decision that it would be safer for the English soldiers, and for her, if they were taken into captivity?

  Philippe Delacourt inherited Hargival estate from Jeanne, his aunt. Together we set off towards the spot where the Pêcherie had once stood, down a narrow, rutted track; as we walked, Philippe pointed to a dented British soldier’s helmet from the Great War hanging on a nail on the wall of the barn, and the finials missing from the top of the gate into the orchard, ‘shot off by bored German officers’. Every year the Delacourts plough up more rusting unexploded shells. ‘Sometimes they go off.’ After a heavy rain, the air smells rusty.

  A small cellar with a vaulted brick roof is all that remains of the Pêcherie, where Digby and the other men had hidden in the first days of the war as unsuspecting German officers used the building for target practice. When Philippe dug out the old building, he had found the earth thick with thousands of spent cartridges.

  ‘Who betrayed Robert Digby?’ I asked, without exactly meaning to. ‘Was it a woman?’

  Philippe scratched his ear and smiled, and instead of replying, he pointed to the green fields. ‘Do you see the
ripples and indentations in the meadow? That is the pattern left by falling bombs.’

  Like the villagers of Villeret, the land is permanently marked by a war fought a lifetime ago. Explosive remnants, the ancient secrets that explain its contours, lie buried just beneath the surface.

  Thomas Digby died leaving no children apart from the French daughter he had formally adopted. The other Digby sibling, Florence, died a spinster. Hélène Digby was the last of the line.

  But Thomas’s brother-in-law and cousin, Thomas Leyland, was still living in Northwich, the last survivor from his generation. I found the old man in a tiny, freezing house in the backstreets of the town. Drinking brick-red tea and huddled around a single-bar electric fire, we talked of two long-dead brothers, he in the rolling accents of the North.

  ‘Robert was great with pigeons. There was nowt he couldn’t train a pigeon to do. They said he was the best pigeon-handler ever seen in these parts.’ Thomas Leyland continued: ‘The father he had a breakdown, got violent, and Tommy was let out of the army on account of it. He always said he got a special letter from the King on account of his father being a colonel. It wasn’t ’til after the war we found out what happened to Robert in France. He got in with this French family, see, when they found him in the garden, with his arm all shot up. And in time he fell for the daughter, and they had a baby. Aunt Nell – that’s what we called his mother Ellen – was very wicked over it, they say. Didn’t want nowt to do with the girl. She was a hasty-tempered woman, that one.’