Thomas Leyland chuckled at the scandal of another era and slurped his tea. I wearily prepared myself to ask the question I had voiced a hundred times in French, certain I would learn nothing new: ‘Do you know how the Germans found out where Robert Digby was hiding?’
‘Oh, aye,’ he answered brightly. ‘The postman gave him away. ‘
The old man continued, oblivious to my astonishment: ‘Seems this postman might have fancied the unmarried daughter and he was jealous, on account he didn’t want our Robert to have her. So he told the Germans where to look. All the village said it was the postman.’
Achille Poètte, the lanky postman, had certainly carried a torch for Claire. After the war he had always been particularly solicitous of Hélène, calling out to her whenever he passed by the Dessenne household. But Achille had spent eighteen months in a forced labour camp for his part in the plot to conceal the Englishmen, whereas a traitor would surely have been granted clemency. Achille’s son Robert, born four years after the war, was defensive on the subject: ‘The Englishmen were betrayed by someone. I don’t know who. This is always a delicate subject, you understand.’
My conversation with Thomas Leyland had opened a whole new avenue of possibility. Breeding carrier pigeons is a beloved hobby in northern England, just as it is in northern France, but Digby was more than merely a gifted amateur when it came to pigeon handling. He was, in Thomas Leyland’s words, ‘a real pro’.
Major Evers had been rightly convinced that messages were being sent across the front by carrier pigeon. Villeret had been at the heart of the French spy network, gathering vital intelligence on German troop movements to be passed on to the British army’s GHQ. Could Robert Digby have been acting as a messenger for the Réseau Victor?
There was always something about Robert Digby that seemed too large for his uniform as a shilling-a-day private soldier: his command of languages, his superior level of education, the ease with which he had established links with the local people, and his concealment and survival skills. It seemed highly unlikely that he had intentionally stayed behind the lines – his wound was proof enough that little planning was involved – but it seems just possible, having found himself in that position, he had remained out of choice rather than necessity, becoming a part of the local espionage network. We know the Marié brothers were reporting to British army intelligence, and through them Digby could easily have established contact with the Intelligence Corps at GHQ. His accidental cover, as a French peasant with a girlfriend and a baby in tow, was a good one; and if caught, he could always maintain that, like his comrades, he was just another fugitive soldier. On the other hand, if Digby had been involved in the espionage network, why did he take the risk of staying in Villeret, where there were so many other British fugitives and no safety in numbers? Perhaps the answer is that he had fallen in love.
There was no way to find out for certain whether Digby had been, or had become, a spy behind the lines. Victor Marié died in 1922, his brother Marius in 1952 and their mother in 1931 – the family tomb in Villeret graveyard pays elaborate tribute to their wartime espionage, exalting ‘those who sacrifice themselves for their country’, and even inflating Victor’s medal to a Victoria Cross.
The British remember Victor Marié rather differently, for his former spymasters were of the firm belief that the person who betrayed the Réseau Victor to the Germans, blowing one of the Allies’ most important spy networks, was the man who had created it. ‘True to character, Victor Marié defected to the German Secret Service, with the result that GHQ’s Beverloo system was destroyed.’ This would explain the ease with which he had ‘escaped’ from the prison at Aix-la-Chapelle. The British believed Victor had turned traitor after he was captured in December 1916, but it seems likely that he had begun working for the Germans many months earlier. Indeed, when Haig pinned a medal to Victor Marie’s chest and commended his bravery in July 1916, the turncoat had probably already started to pass information to the other side. No wonder he had seemed anxious.
The discovery of Victor Marie’s treachery raised yet another disquieting possibility: if Digby had indeed worked with Victor as part of the Réseau Victor, he may also have been one of the dozens of spies subsequently betrayed by the smuggler and double-agent. Most documents relating to the Réseau Victor were burned on the eve of Nazi occupation by French municipal officials, well aware that reprisals were likely against those who had resisted in the first war. Only a handful of references have survived in the French intelligence archives, none alluding to a British agent on the ground in 1914 – 16. The British intelligence files, if such exist, remain under seal.
In 1933 the Scottish writer John Buchan wrote a First World War novel entitled A Prince of the Captivity. My father had read it to me as a child, and I now read it again with eerie recognition.
Buchan had served as a second lieutenant with the Intelligence Corps, attached to the British GHQ in France, with responsibility for censorship, publicity and propaganda. He may not have been directly involved in spying, although he liked to hint that he had ‘performed fantastic duties which a romancer would have rejected as beyond probability’, but he was privy to some of the most secret workings of the British military machine.
The novel tells of a British army officer, Adam Melfort, who is disgraced and stripped of his rank after being condemned for a cheque forgery committed by his wife. As a gentleman, he cannot bring himself to reveal the real culprit, but to salvage his reputation after his release, Melfort embarks on a secret mission behind enemy lines. He is flown into occupied northern France in January 1915, and for months, disguised as Jules, the local village idiot, and with the complicity of a handful of local conspirators, he begins collecting vital military information, ‘notes of German troops and concentrations, and now and then things which no-one knew outside the High Command, such as the outline for the Ypres attack in the spring of 1915 and the projected Flanders offensive which was to follow the grand assault on Verdun’. Melfort passes the information back to British Intelligence by various ‘devious ways’.
‘Sometimes the neighbourhood was black with troops moving westward, and then would come a drain to the south and only a few Landsturm companies were left in the cantonments. There was such a drain during the summer of 1916 when the guns were loud on the Somme …’
Melfort adapts himself entirely to the life of a rural farm worker, ‘but there would come times when he listened to the far-off, grumbling guns in the west with a drawn face. His friends were there, fighting cleanly in the sunlight, while he was ingloriously labouring in the shadows.’
The local Kommandant, a man ‘with an eye like an angry bird, and no bowels of compassion for simple folk’ begins to suspect the ‘shaggy young peasant’ is more than he seems. The espionage network is exposed by a traitor and unravelled, and Adam Melfort is forced to flee for his life. ‘There were wild rumours in the village. Jules the simpleton had, it appeared, been a spy, an Englishman, and a confederate had betrayed him.’ (Melfort escapes, carries out a number of other heroic exploits and finally regains his reputation and rank.)
At GHQ during the war, John Buchan had made the acquaintance of one Major Cecil Cameron, an officer in the Special Intelligence Section. Cameron had himself been jailed before the war for covering up for a crime committed by his wife, but at the time Buchan met him, he was responsible for coordinating spy networks in the occupied territories, such as the Réseau Victor, and infiltrating agents behind the German lines. If Digby was a spy then Cameron, who killed himself in 1924, could have been his spymaster.
The name chosen by Buchan for his fictional French village, where a British agent hides for half the war before betrayal unravels his spy network, was Villers.
Robert Digby may not have been a spy, but it became clear that many in Villeret, including some of his most staunch allies in the village, had believed that he was.
In 1919 the Bulletin de l’Aisne published a list of prisoners of war that included an a
ccount provided by Marie-Thérèse Dessenne, the wife of Florency, describing how she had been condemned to ten years’ imprisonment in Germany. ‘Madame Dessenne left behind four little children, the youngest only a few months old, when she was arrested … she had taken in an entire squad of English spies without having a clue what she was getting mixed up in.’
I had hitherto assumed that whoever turned Digby in, had done so for reasons of personal jealousy – a crime passionnel linked to his love affair with Claire Dessenne. The possibility that the villagers had discovered Digby was a spy, and perhaps learned of the existence of the Réseau Victor at the same time, added another dimension.
The village elders – Parfait Marié, his father Emile, Léon Lelong, the baker – clearly had most to lose by the discovery of a spy network in their midst. Emile’s behaviour was certainly open to question. It was he, after all, who had persuaded Digby to give himself up. His intervention might explain why his son had been imprisoned rather than executed, and also why, after the war, he had chosen to exile himself to Hargicourt. Had Emile Marié revealed the soldiers’ whereabouts as an act of self-defence, to protect the village and his son, or were they all in it together?
Emile’s name had a galvanising effect on Georges Cornaille, the elderly member of one of Villeret’s oldest families. Monsieur Cornaille, sharp of memory but hard of hearing, had nodded politely but vaguely as I ran through the facts of the betrayal and my list of suspects. When I came to the name Emile Marié, however, he sat up as if someone had prodded him with a fork, and snapped: ‘Claire wanted him dead, it was Emile who sold Digby to the Germans.’ Then he seemed to fall asleep.
The one person whose life was most directly affected by the treachery displayed no animosity, and little curiosity, as I rifled through the past trying to find her father’s killer. Hélène was always hospitable when I would appear at her door with a fresh batch of inquiries. We spent hours over orange juice and photographs, as her husband Hubert fussed in the kitchen. She could no longer move around without her walking frame, and although her eyes remained bright, their brilliance was fading. When we talked about the father she had never known, she seemed almost childlike, entranced. ‘They said we were as alike as two drops of water. He spoke five languages, you know. He was a champion rugby player, and so handsome. He was an officer, like his father. He was so in love with my mother.’ Sometimes she cried. ‘My father was so proud of me, it was he who looked after me all the time. He would promenade through the village dressed in civilian clothes, holding me in his arms.’
As the Englishman’s daughter, Hélène had enjoyed a special childhood status: ‘In the village, after the war, I was known to everyone as La Tiote Anglaise, the little English girl. People opened their doors to me, I was welcomed everywhere. That made the other children jealous.’
We pored over photograph albums: Hélène as a pretty child and a handsome young woman, reunions over the years in France and Britain with gentle and generous Thomas Digby; formal posed pictures of her wedding to Hubert, her home and her son. She kept the French phrase-book issued to Robert Digby and the other soldiers of the BEF, but of her father only one image survived, clipped from a photograph of the battalion rugby team, folded and copied so many times it has become an indistinct blur, a myth with a moustache.
When I asked Hélène if she thought her father had been a spy, she merely smiled and shrugged, as if only too happy to see another layer of honour settle over the paternal legend. When I uncovered and passed on details of her father’s life she had never known before, she would clap her hands and exclaim in pleasure.
The lives of Hélène and Claire Dessenne had not been easy or lucky ones. After the war, Claire had refused to look at another man, turning down all offers, and there had been many. It was not until Hélène herself married Hubert Cornaille, from the neighbouring village of Le Verguier, at the age of eighteen, that Claire had allowed herself to be courted again. But Robert Digby never strayed far from her memory. She finally married the foreman of the local textile mill, an arrangement of friendship more than passion. Often mother and daughter would walk over to Le Câtelet to stand at the grave of lover and father, where the rustic wooden cross was eventually replaced by a symmetrical hewn headstone, donated and engraved by a British government commission: ‘Remembered in honour.’ Hélène recalled that her mother ‘always took a beautiful blue hydrangea to put on the grave, but she didn’t cry in the cemetery. She only wept at home.’
Hélène had experienced her own anguish in the next war, when Hubert had gone off to fight the Nazis, only to be captured, imprisoned and forced to labour for another German regime, building civilian bunkers. ‘We went five years without seeing one another. Our best years,’ Hélène said. ‘When Hubert left for the war I was about to have our son. He saw the child only once, when he was a baby, and the next time he saw him the boy was six years old.’
Despite her suffering, Hélène showed little desire for revenge. She confirmed that her mother ‘had it in for Emile Marié’ after the war, but when I spoke of the betrayal she would smile in an almost mystical way, for a God cannot be brought down by a mortal. ‘Why do you want to know?’ she once asked me softly, but did not wait for a reply. ‘I don’t mind if you find out. But you understand, this was wartime, and we were in an occupied land. What happened, happened.’ There was something of her father in that stoical understatement.
The evidence was still no more than circumstantial, but enough to cast doubt on the actions of about a dozen individuals: Eugénie Dessenne, the resentful grandmother; Léon Recolet, the foolish uncle; courageous but complicated Jeanne Magniez; Achille Poëtte, the over-talkative postman; the schoolmistress Antoinette Foulon; Emile Marié, onetime acting mayor, and even Victor Marié, the spy and quisling. A case could be made against each of them.
Yet my strongest suspicions kept returning to where they had started, with the baker and his wife, Léon and Elise Lelong. Charlotte Lelong, the half-remembered name given to me by Jean-Marc Dubuis, was very close to Clothilde Lelong, and it was common practice in Villeret to be christened with one name and known by another.
The baker’s daughter was much the same age as Claire. I discovered that she had left the village and married a soldier from the south immediately after the war, with what seemed, to my increasingly suspicious mind, like great haste. Léon Lelong had personally begged the soldiers to leave in 1916, with more than a hint of desperation, and even provided his own son to act as a guide on their last, abortive attempt to get out of the village. But, perhaps most compellingly, of all the people affected by the events in Villeret, the Lelongs were the only ones to hold a grudge against Robert Digby.
‘My grandmother told me that the affair with the Englishmen had cost her dear,’ recalls Michel Lelong, Lucien’s son, now himself aged seventy-four. ‘Before the war, my grandparents were well off, but they were practically ruined by this business, which left them so strapped for cash they ended up living with my father. They seldom talked about it, but my father said that helping the Englishmen had caused them great problems. He always said that “we were betrayed”, but I don’t know who by.’
If the Lelongs had alerted the Germans to the presence of Digby and the others, why had the baker and his wife been so severely punished, condemned to eight years’ hard labour each and a 5,000 mark fine? As Michel pointed out: ‘They were prisoners of war, deported to Germany.’ The harsh sentence meted out by Judge Grumme to the poor Lelongs was surely enough to prove their innocence.
Except that it was never carried out.
Emile Marié had taken pains to preserve the municipal archives when Villeret was evacuated in 1917. After a long and dusty search, Jean Dessenne found them for me, still tied together with string, in a box in the town hall cellar. Much of the material was missing, and there was no reference anywhere to the English soldiers, save for a single sheet of paper headed ‘Political Prisoners’, on which appeared the names of all those who had been convicted ‘
for espionage, protecting and assisting allied prisoners’. Here were listed Parfait Marié, Suzanne Boitelle and even Henri Marié, arrested for his role in the Réseau Victor, again suggesting a direct link between the British soldiers and the spy ring in Villeret. But of Léon and Elise Lelong, there was not a mention.
Suspicion rising, I next ordered up the British medal lists of French and Belgian civilians decorated for their roles in the First World War. ‘My grandmother always said that the British had been very grateful, and thanked her profoundly for what they had done,’ Michel Lelong had said. Here, once again, were the names of all those who had been convicted by the German military court in Le Câtelet – each had been awarded a bronze medal by the King, ‘as a testimony of Britain’s thanks for the timely help which you gave to our distressed comrades, and as a token of gratitude for such assistance to his subjects’. The Lelongs were not on the list.
Clearly, the Lelongs’ account of their wartime sufferings, accepted as historical fact by their descendants, was open to question, but I needed more solid evidence. In the archives of the Société Académique de Saint-Quentin, I found it.
Elie Fleury, a Saint-Quentin journalist and local historian, had spent the entire war making copious notes of everything he had witnessed, or had been told by others, during the occupation. From these he compiled a book, entitled Sous la botte (Under the Boot), in which he gave a brief account of ‘The Englishmen of Villeret’. But he also left behind a sheaf of handwritten notes describing a meeting he had had with Elise Lelong, the baker’s wife. The date at the top leapt off the tattered page: 1 June 1916, two days after Digby’s execution.
A Foreign Field Page 22
