The Lelongs had each been sentenced to eight years’ hard labour by the German court, but as Fleury casually noted in his looping hand, on the very day that Thorpe, Donohoe and Martin were executed, the couple had been released, their fine reduced from 5,000 to 3,000 francs. Elise Lelong had then obtained an official pass to travel to Saint-Quentin, at a time when it was virtually impossible to get even as far as the next village. Once there, she arranged a meeting with a local politician, Charles Desjardins, who brought her to see Elie Fleury. Ostensibly, Elise had come to Saint-Quentin to try to raise money to pay the fine, but in reality it appears that she was also intent on making certain that her version of history entered the unofficial record, which would later become the official one. Her account of those events painted her and her husband in the best possible light, as heroic resisters who had fought to the last to save the Englishmen. ‘The attitude of the Lelongs was perfect,’ Fleury dutifully noted, relating a number of heroic speeches supposedly uttered by Elise that sound distinctly fake: ‘Yes, we have fed and cared for our allies, and we’d do it again if we could,’ she was quoted as telling Judge Grumme. ‘What would you think of your women if they turned over your soldiers to the enemy?’ It was Elise who quoted Willie O’Sullivan’s unlikely speech extolling her kindness, ‘you who have been so good to us’. Even more unbelievably, she claimed that she and her husband had been unaware that Digby, Thorpe, Donohoe and Martin had returned to the village after their last, failed attempt to get away. ‘We would have gone to warn them that the patrol was coming, if we had known they were back,’ she said. This does not ring true. Since their son Lucien had acted as a guide to the men throughout this abortive escape attempt, the Lelongs knew the men were back before anyone else.
‘It was clear that one of the Englishmen had decided to spill the beans,’ the journalist recorded. ‘For he accused Monsieur Lelong of making the forged identity papers.’ The Lelongs’ sentence had been reduced and they were spared deportation and imprisonment because Digby had ‘confessed’ that the forgeries were his work. But is it likely that a condemned man would single out one of his erstwhile protectors for betrayal, when virtually the entire village had taken part in the conspiracy to protect them? Is it not more likely, instead, that the soldiers were trying to implicate the Lelongs to gain revenge on those they thought had betrayed them?
The Lelongs had sheltered the men as long as any family in Villeret, but unlike the Dessennes and Suzanne Boitelle, they had been let off with a simple fine. Wealthy by local standards, the baker and his wife had been able to pay the money to the German authorities ‘without difficulty’, according to Fleury. By contrast, Elise’s half-sister, Suzanne Boitelle, had seen her sentence increased because she would not and could not pay up. Why had the Lelongs not stepped in to help Suzanne pay off her fine and escape a longer jail sentence?
Every other contemporary account refers to a ‘betrayal’ by someone in the village; but on this subject Elise Lelong, and her conduit Fleury, remained resoundingly silent. She did reveal, perhaps unwittingly, how desperate she and her husband had been to get the Englishmen out of the village by May 1916. To Fleury, Madame Lelong insisted that she had bravely stood by the Englishmen, but as I knew from her son she was actually furious over the damage and danger they had brought on the family, and remained so for the rest of her life.
In his handwritten account, Elise Fleury had noted down the names of others in the village who had aided the Englishmen but then, perhaps at Madame Lelong’s suggestion, he had scored them out again. One name with a pencil line through it was ‘Foulon’. In the final published version the other names were omitted, and the Lelongs were left alone, as the central heroes of the drama.
Suddenly something Florency Dessenne’s daughter had told me clicked into place. ‘One day, about ten years after the war, my father came into the house and said: ‘I’ve just read an article about the history of the Englishmen in Villeret, and there’s not much truth in it. It’s as if we didn’t do anything at all, and most of it is a downright lie.’ Fleury’s flawed account, giving all credit to the Lelongs and none to anyone else, was serialised in the Bulletin de L’Aisne in 1926.
The mystery of what happened in 1916 is so bent with age, so overgrown with eighty intervening years of village gossip, that it will never be possible to untangle it completely, but a possible explanation finally seemed to be emerging from the dust of the archives, and the fog of memory. The weight of motive, proof of malice aforethought, the burden of documentary evidence and strong hints of a cover-up all seemed to point in the same direction.
No guilty verdict can ever be passed in the strange case of Robert Digby, but perhaps the story went something like this. The Lelongs stoutly defended the English soldiers until something turned them against the fugitives. Maybe it was their realisation that there was a spy network operating out of the village, possibly involving Digby and the other soldiers. More likely, given the broad evidence suggesting a spurned woman lay at the heart of the affair, their daughter Clothilde (or Charlotte) had been rejected by Digby in favour of Claire Dessenne, giving the Dessenne – Lelong family rivalry a more sinister turn. Léon and Elise then tried to persuade the men to leave; only half did so. When it became clear that the rest were staying put, the Lelongs may have quietly alerted the Germans, perhaps hoping the soldiers would be tipped off before the Germans arrived and escape into the woods, as Digby did. ‘They had all the time in the world to escape,’ Elise Lelong complained to Fleury. ‘But they allowed themselves to be captured easily.’ After a few days in jail, averting suspicion, the Lelongs were released by Major Evers, and their sentence was reduced to a payable sum. Just days after Madame Lelong had been arrested and convicted of harbouring an enemy spy, Evers issued her with a pass, and she hurried to Saint-Quentin to gather the cash to pay him, but also to provide the town’s history-maker with a carefully constructed and, with hindsight, highly questionable rendition of events. Did she also, having removed the name Foulon from the list of Villeret’s wartime heroes, put it about that Antoinette Foulon, the schoolteacher, was the traitor – a rumour that persists to this day?
In 1913, Carl Jung had a vision that a ‘monstrous flood’ of blood would inundate Europe, wrecking civilisation and spreading as far as the mountains of his native Switzerland. Fifteen years later, the great psychologist dreamed he was driving away from the Western Front with a French peasant, on a horse-drawn wagon, when shells began to explode all around them. Jung woke up, and concluded: ‘The happenings in the dream suggested that the war, which in the outer world had taken place some years before, was not yet over, but was continually to be fought within the psyche.’
I never told Hélène that I suspected her father had rebuffed the advances of another Villeret girl and had then been betrayed by her parents, the baker and his wife. One afternoon in late June, I went to see her for the last time. A handful of neighbours, her son and his wife, had been invited to bid me goodbye. We sat rather formally in her parlour, sipping fizzy pink wine. I had been welcomed heartily, and now felt – as another stray Englishman must once have done – that I had stayed long enough. As the marching song went: ‘Oh we don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go.’ While Hélène’s guests interrogated me gently with small talk, she sat quietly in the corner in her rocking chair, her eyes bright, swaying gently back and forth. When I rose to say farewell, she took both my hands in hers and kissed me once on the cheek.
The dusk chorus of birdsong was already underway when I climbed the overgrown ramparts of the ancient fortress at Le Câtelet. Robert Digby and his comrades had been executed at the foot of this crumbling hillock, manmade for war; on its summit there stands a German Blockhaus, as squat as the day it was built for a war fought at the furthest tip of living memory. Beside the bunker is an ancient oak tree. It must already have been mature and tall during that war for it was used as a lookout point, the tallest tree on the highest point in the landscape, from which the sentries
could see across the valley as far as Villeret. The German soldiers hammered iron spikes into the trunk, as steps to climb up. Over the decades, the tree has grown and gnarled around the metal, clutching the alien rungs and dragging them into its body. Such are the memories of war, grown into the landscape. The scars weep rust and sap down the bole. One day, if the tree lives long enough, the bark may cover them up completely. But they will still be there.
Acknowledgements
I am hugely indebted to those who helped me to research this book: Thomas Weber in Germany, Tony Blair in Britain and, above all, Sylvie Déroche in France, whose dedication to this project was truly heroic. Jean-Luc Gibot and Evelyne Dubuis first alerted me to the story; Monique Severin of the Société Académique de Saint-Quentin was a fund of information and encouragement; Monique Godé provided regular spiritual and gastronomic sustenance. The following historians gave me invaluable advice at various junctures: Niall Ferguson, Helen McPhail, Julian Putkowski, Annette Becker, K.W. Mitchinson, Nicolas Offenstadt and Gerd Krumeich. Others who have helped along the way include Tim Livesy and Andrew Gadsby of the Foreign Office; Harry Hunt of County Cavan; Joanna Macintyre; Tony Millett; Michael and Trish Massy-Beresford; Paul Cooper; Susan Bell; Françoise Braud; Patrick Beresford of the King’s Royal Hampshire Museum; Peter Donnelly, archivist of the King’s Own Lancaster Regiment; John Darroch, archivist of the Royal Hampshire Regiment; Major Hume Grogan, administrator of the British Legion.
Hélène Cornaille Digby was unfailingly generous with her time and her memory, as were so many others: Jean Barras; Raymond Beresse; Bernard Bétermin; Robert Boitelle; Georges Cornaille; Hubert Cornaille; Philippe Delacourt; Lucie Delacourt; Etienne Dessenne; Jean Dessenne; Jean-Marc Dubuis; Marie Fourny; Giselle Godé; Henriette Legé; Michel Lelong; Jean Lelong; Barry Leyland; Thomas Leyland; Léon Locquet; Monsieur Martin; Georges Mercier; Marcel Moreau; Jean-Paul Plume; Robert Poëtte; Jean-Marie Simon; Marcelle Sarrazin; Edgar Vannasche; Louise Vannasche. My gratitude also goes to some who have asked not to be named, out of modesty or discretion.
My agent, Ed Victor, and my publishers, Michael Fishwick and John Glusman, have been encouraging, generous and patient far beyond the call of duty. Kate Johnson and Aodaoin O’Floinn made the editing process a pleasure. My love and thanks, finally and always, to Kate Muir for her endless supply of support, tolerance and fine judgement.
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McPhail, Helen, The Long Silence: Civilian Life Under the German Occupation of Northern France, 1914 – 1918 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999).
Mitchinson, K.W., Epehy, Battleground Europe Series (London: Pen and Sword Books, 1998).
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PUBLIC AND INSTITUTIONAL RECORDS
FRANCE
1. Archives de la Société Académique de Saint-Quentin
Annuaire admin
istratif de l’Aisne (1913).
Cabaret, Jean, ‘Principaux événements qui se passèrent au Câtelet pendant la guerre.’
Delabranche, Alice, ‘Souvenirs de la guerre de ’14, remis à la Société par Charles Journel’ (July 1928).
Dessailly, Oscar, maire de Vendhuile, Extrait d’une lettre adressée à Charles Journel (8 August 1932).
Fleury, Elie, ‘Le témoignage de Mme Elise Lelong au sujetdes anglais de Villeret’ (May 1916).
Fournier d’Alembert, Extrait d’une lettre adressée à Elie Fleury (17 March 1919).
Legé, Léon, ‘Journal de notaire au Câtelet.’ Lelong, Henri, ‘Notes sur l’Histoire de la Commune de Villeret pendant la guerre de 1914 – 1918’ (1928). Peingnez, Monsieur, Journal de maire de Beaurevoir.
2. Archives départementales de l’Aisne, Laon
Dommages de Guerre, commune de Villeret. Dossier No. 15
R 1041: Dossier 280, Dessenne-Boitelle; 356: Foulon-Margerin; 361: Mlle Lecart; 375: Mazoyer-Birnbaum; 411: Morelle-Dessenne; 424: commune de Villeret; 404: Lelong-Dholent Fernand fils; 494: Gravet-Thuet; 505: Morel-Saby; 543: Société Secours Mutuels; 568: Prévot-Cardon.
Fonds Piette, No. 808, dossier sur la commune de Villeret:
Huit Anglais à Hargival, puis à Villeret, (Anonyme). L’abbé P. Gourmain, article sans titre, date du 13 juin 1858, racontant l’inauguration de l’église de Villeret.
Registres paroissiaux et de l’état civil de Villeret:
1E1023/12 (1891–1896); 1E1023/11 (1883–1890); IE1023/10 (1875–1882); 1E1023/9 (1869–1874)
3. Archives municipales de Villeret
Liste des prisonniers politiques.
Liste des travailleurs civils contraints de travailler en colonne pendant plus de 3 mois sans interruption. Dossier 4H2, télégrammes d’août 1914; Dossier 4H6,
sépultures militaires.
4. Bibliothèque municipale de Saint-Quentin
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