World War I Love Stories

by Gill Paul

  The War in the East

  In 1915, as Germany went over to a defensive strategy in the West, reserve forces were released for service on the Eastern Front. German reinforcements sent to Galicia to help the armies of Austria-Hungary would now form the spearhead of a major offensive into Polish Russia. In May 1915 an Austro-German force broke through enemy lines at Gorlice-Tarnów, taking the Russians completely by surprise. The Central Powers made massive gains, pushing nearly 300 miles forward into Russian territory and inflicting up to two million casualties on the Russians, most of whom were prisoners.

  To any other nation, such a defeat would have been a mortal blow. However, Russia not only survived but, with the accelerated development of its military industries, prepared for offensive operations in the following year. Accepting a Franco-British request for action—to relieve pressure on Verdun—the Russians opened their offensive in June 1916. Commanded by Russia’s most able commander, General Alexei Brusilov, four Russian armies broke through the Austrian defenses, in response to which the Germans rushed reinforcements to the Front to stem the Russian attack. Unfortunately for Brusilov, he lacked the support of other Russian generals, and the offensive ground to a halt in September.

  Russian infantry pose beside two Maxim machine guns. The Russian Army endured great hardships and suffered terrible casualties, so that by the summer of 1917 it was on the point of collapse.

  The severe winter of 1916–17 caused serious famine throughout Russia, which combined with five million military casualties produced rising unrest in Russia’s major cities. In March 1917, against a background of mass demonstrations and the breakdown of discipline within the army and police, Tsar Nicholas II was deposed and a provisional government appointed in his place. The new government continued military operations against Germany, but its authority was challenged by left-wing groups, whose demands for “peace and bread” met with a ready response from the war-weary peasants and soldiers.

  After the failure of a Russian offensive in July 1917, the army began to disintegrate, with the Germans driving deeper into Russia and meeting little opposition. In November 1917 the provisional government was overthrown by the Bolshevik faction of the leftist Social Democrats. The new government, under the leadership of V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, immediately sued for peace. On December 15, 1917—to the dismay of the Western Allies—an armistice agreement was signed at Brest-Litovsk, followed by a formal peace treaty in the new year.

  The bulk of Germany’s divisions could now be redeployed for action on the Western Front. Germany had undoubtedly achieved a great success in the east, but overall the war was not going in its favor. The blockade led by the British Royal Navy was beginning to take effect, depriving the country of essential foodstuffs and vital war materials. Germany’s two main allies, Austria-Hungary and Turkey, were also being systematically ground down by Allied material superiority. Worse still, growing numbers of US troops were starting to arrive in France, and by mid-1918 would be ready to make a serious contribution to the Allied cause. The German High Command prepared for one last great offensive in the West.

  Some of the key figures in the Russian Revolution, including the two Bolshevik leaders, Vladimir Lenin (center) and Leon Trotsky (top right).

  Defeat of the Central Powers

  The great German offensive in the West was launched on March 21, 1918, against a section of the line held by the British. Supported by the heaviest bombardment of the war—nearly 10,000 guns, howitzers, and trench mortars—the Germans spearheaded the attack with elite “storm troops” trained in trench infiltration tactics. Outnumbered, the British were unable to hold the German advance and fell back over a wide front, with some German units penetrating to maximum depth of 40 miles. But after a week the German assault began to weaken, just as Franco-British reinforcements were being rushed to the points of gravest danger.

  A map of the Western Front in 1918. The two broken dotted lines show initial German advances in March through to June; however, by August Allied troops had regained ground, as a shift of the (thicker) battle line demonstrates.

  The Germans launched two further attacks in April and May, but despite early successes they, too, failed to break the Allied will to fight. The Germans were now exhausted. In August 1918 the Allies went over to the offensive and, supported by fresh American divisions, they began to push the Germans back to their homeland. This time, the Allied advance could not be halted and by the end of September the German High Command reluctantly accepted that the war was lost.

  Germany’s plight was made worse by the knowledge that Turkey and Austria-Hungary were also on the point of collapse. The British had defeated the Turks in Mesopotamia and Palestine, and, with the fall of Bulgaria, Constantinople was now under threat. On October 30, 1918 Turkey accepted Allied armistice terms. With Austria-Hungary having sued for peace three days earlier, on November 3 fighting duly came to an end on the Italian Front in the Dolomite mountains.

  Germany was now alone, with widespread civilian unrest and mutinies breaking out in the German Navy. On November 9, having lost the support of his government and people, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and a republic was proclaimed in Germany. Armistice talks with the Allies were already ongoing, and at 11 a.m. on the eleventh day of the eleventh month the guns on the Western Front finally fell silent.

  The war had seen the destruction of the old empires of Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Ottoman Turkey, and the emergence of new nation states in Central and Eastern Europe. But the new settlement, largely imposed by the Western Allies, did not put an end to the national and ethnic antagonisms that had always bedeviled Europe. Indeed, it was the failure to achieve a proper, lasting peace in 1918–19 that, along with a series of devastating economic crises in the 1920s and 1930s, created the conditions for a second, even more destructive global conflict just twenty years later.

  THE VERSAILLES TREATY

  The peace treaty between Germany and the victorious Allies was signed at Versailles on June 28, 1919. The main terms of the treaty were confirmation of the loss of Germany’s overseas colonies, the return of Alsace and Lorraine to France, the cessation of parts of Eastern Germany to Poland, the demilitarization of the Rhineland, and severe restrictions placed on the size and type of Germany’s future armed forces. The German delegation signed the treaty under protest, particularly irked by a subsidiary clause that stated Germany must accept responsibility for starting the war. Unpopular throughout Germany, the seeming injustice of the Versailles Treaty was exploited by far-right parties and effectively repudiated by Adolf Hitler when the Nazis came to power in 1933.

  American troops are addressed by General “Jack” Pershing, commander of the US Army in France, in March 1919. Just three months later, a peace treaty between Germany and the Allies would be signed.

  Robert

  DIGBY

  &

  Claire

  DESSENNE

  A map showing the position of British, French, and German troops on August 23, 1914, as the Battle of Mons began.

  Robert R. Digby

  BRITISH

  Born: 1885

  Rank & regiment: Private in the 1st Battalion, Hampshire Regiment

  Claire Dessenne

  FRENCH

  Born: 1897

  According to this April 1916 notice posted in Villeret’s town hall, all British soldiers who surrendered before April 30 would be held as prisoners of war, but after that any found would be shot.

  “They fell for one another: boom! Just like that!” said Claire’s grandmother. There was nothing anyone could do to separate them—until they endured the ultimate betrayal.

  Villeret in northeastern France is an isolated little hamlet surrounded by dense woods and rolling fields of wheat, rye and hay, where poppies bloom in summer. In 1914 most residents lived off the land and tended livestock, although some of the men worked in a nearby phosphate mine, doing tough work they would later learn had damaged their lungs. When war came, the able
-bodied went off to fight, leaving their mothers, wives, and daughters to tend the home fires.

  One such household was run by feisty matriarch Marie Coulette Dessenne, who lived in the Rue d’en Bas with her son, Florency, her daughter-in-law, Eugénie, and her granddaughter, Claire. Her other son, Hugo, Claire’s father, had gone to fight. German troops moved in to occupy the area and Marie Coulette complied grudgingly with the new regulations requiring them to declare all their livestock and crops, and give a proportion to feed the invaders. Household items—pots, pans, cutlery—were requisitioned, and if the Germans saw any possession they desired during routine searches they simply helped themselves.

  Everyone knew everyone else in Villeret, where extended families lived side by side, but that didn’t mean they always got along.

  …Claire was a great beauty … with her grandmother’s lively character.

  Seventeen-year-old Claire was a great beauty, with long, chestnut hair and her grandmother’s lively character. She hated the way the German soldiers’ eyes followed her in the road, and resented the enforced restrictions on their movements in and out of the area because she yearned for excitement and romance. A few local boys had tried to woo her, but with no success. And then one night in September 1914, there was a knock on their door. She opened it to see a tall, blonde, blue-eyed, very handsome twenty-nine-year-old Englishman, who asked in halting French if they could spare any food. Her heart was lost in an instant.

  “Wholesale Rout and Slaughter”

  Robert Digby never wanted to join the army. His father had been a career officer, but Robert tried different jobs, working for a time as a barman in a Parisian café where he learned to speak passable French, then setting himself up as a pig farmer in his home town of Totton in Hampshire. The pig farm collapsed and in 1913 both Robert and his brother Thomas volunteered for the Royal Hampshire Regiment, then the following year were shipped across the Channel with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). On August 22, they were taken to the Franco-Belgian border near Mons, where the plan was that they should make a stand on the Mons-Condé Canal and prevent the advancing German army from encircling the Allies. The problem was that there were 80,000 of them and 160,000 Germans.

  Battle began on the morning of August 23 and at first British riflemen managed to hold back the enemy, inflicting heavy losses, but by afternoon it became clear that their position was untenable. At 3 p.m. the order was given to begin the retreat, but the Germans pursued them, forcing them to fight a hasty rearguard action. One private, Frank Pattenden, wrote that “it was nearly wholesale rout and slaughter.” The British fought bravely and managed to hold up the German 1st Army for 48 hours, but at great cost: of the 80,000 men in the BEF, 20,000 were killed, wounded, captured, or simply missing. And among the missing was Robert Digby.

  During the retreat, his unit was engaged in a skirmish in the village of Villers-Outréaux in which he was wounded in the arm. He stopped to get treatment at a field station and then returned to where his unit had been, only to find that his comrades were either dead or had retreated as the Germans had advanced, leaving him on the wrong side of the lines. He tramped cross-country through fields and woods, trying to find a safe route across to British lines, and along the way met other stragglers in the same position. Seven of them teamed up, reckoning they had a better chance together than alone. They scavenged what food they could find but were starving and gaunt when in mid-September they arrived in Villeret and Robert risked knocking on the door of the Dessenne family.

  THE ANGELS OF MONS

  The Battle of Mons was the first battle of the Great War, and although British troops were vastly outnumbered and ultimately overwhelmed, it seemed miraculous that they managed to hold back German troops for as long as they did. On September 29, 1914, Welsh author Arthur Machen wrote a short story in which shimmering ghosts of English bowmen killed at Agincourt 500 years earlier came to help the English army at Mons. The Evening News ran the story as fact rather than fiction and soon anecdotes began to circulate of men who claimed to have seen these supernatural bowmen as well as dozens of angels, helping to delay the German forces. Many soldiers were utterly convinced they had seen these apparitions, and the stories were tacitly encouraged by British military intelligence. What better morale-booster could there be for their troops than the notion that the angels were on their side?

  “The Bowmen of Mons,” an illustration of the ghostly archers printed in the London Illustrated News, 1915. The rumors of angels helping the British troops inspired countless short stories, paintings, and songs, but researchers failed to find any convincing firsthand reports.

  The Illicit Guests

  When Marie Coulette saw the state the Englishmen were in, she invited them to sleep in her hayloft, although she was risking arrest for harboring Allied soldiers. It was only a matter of time before her neighbors found out and word spread around the village. The villagers could have handed the fugitives over to the German occupiers to keep themselves out of trouble, but the Germans were hated and Robert Digby in particular was very charming, so they decided the village would harbor them. They would stay in attics and work the fields, learning the region’s patois and passing themselves off as locals until they could find a way to slip across German lines and rejoin their army. Villagers were proud to have taken a stance against the occupation and soon the seven men became known as “our Englishmen.”

  A view of the village of Villeret in 1914; by the war’s end, all its buildings, including the church, had been destroyed.

  When challenged, Claire admitted the truth to her mother—that they were very much in love.

  Robert was given false papers in the name of Robert Boitelle and lodged in the attic of local woman Susanne Boitelle. Robert had aristocratic bearing, sublime manners, and was so much liked by the local women that when Marie-Thérèse Dessenne, Claire’s aunt, gave birth to her fourth child in spring 1915, she named him Robert in honor of the English guest. But not long afterward, it was observed that Robert and young Claire were spending a suspicious amount of time alone together, slipping off for long walks or up to her family’s hayloft. When challenged, Claire admitted the truth to her mother—that they were very much in love.

  Although she liked Robert, Claire’s mother disapproved of the relationship. Who would want her daughter linked to a fugitive with an uncertain future? She asked Claire’s cousins Emile and Julie to spy on them, but Claire caught Emile spying and persuaded him to come to their side, acting as lookout to warn them when others were coming. There was nothing that could be done—especially when it became obvious to all that Claire was carrying Robert’s child.

  Food was increasingly scarce by the autumn of 1915. All livestock, milk, and eggs were requisitioned for the German army, and white bread was only ever seen on German tables. After the birth of Claire and Robert’s baby on November 14, 1915—a girl they called Hélène after his mother Ellen—villagers began to mutter about the extra mouths they had to feed. Three of the visitors had managed to escape back to British lines, but the four that remained showed no signs of leaving. Attitudes to them began to change, imperceptibly at first and then more obviously. Robert was so caught up with his baby daughter, whom he proudly paraded in his arms up and down the village streets, that he failed to pick up on the change of mood.

  In spring 1916 the Germans put up signs saying that all British soldiers who surrendered before April 30, would be held as prisoners of war; after that would they be shot and any French citizens who had helped them would be fined and imprisoned. It would only take one person in the village to betray them, and that’s exactly what happened on May 15, 1916.

  In the early hours of the 16th, the hayloft where the four men were sleeping was raided by German troops; three were captured but Robert Digby managed to leap out of a window and escape into the woods. He hid there for five days, unable to get a message back to Claire because of all the German soldiers who’d been posted on sentry duty. The village’s acting mayo
r Emile Marié guessed he must be in the woods and came to find him. He said that if Robert were to give himself up, the Germans had promised his life would be spared, but that if he stayed at large there would be dreadful reprisals against all who had helped him—including Claire and Hélène. There was no choice. A couple of days later, on May 22, Robert walked out of the woods and surrendered. He was tried by a German military court at Le Câtelet, accused of spying, and sentenced to death. Emile Marié’s promise of amnesty had been untrue.

  On May 27, 1916, the first three Englishmen—William Thorpe, Thomas Donohoe, and David Martin—were killed by a firing squad, and three days later Robert Digby suffered the same fate. He left behind a very stoical letter for his own mother, an apologetic letter for Claire’s mother asking her to look after Claire and the child, and three letters for Claire herself: “Tell the child not to weep for me, for I have brought her into a world of such unhappiness . . . Embrace my baby girl and later, when she is grown, tell her the truth about her father, who has died contented.”

  The letter Robert wrote to Claire from his prison cell in Le Câtelet hours before his death, sending her a kiss and asking her to tell his daughter about him one day.

  Hélène and Claire in 1925. Hélène, known to locals as “la tiote anglaise” (the little English girl), had her father’s stunning blue eyes.

  The child grows up

  Marie-Thérèse and Florency Dessenne were sentenced to ten years’ hard labor and fined 10,000 marks for sheltering the Englishmen. Suzanne Boitelle got 23 months in a German prison. The Lelongs, the village bakers, and Achille Poëtte, the postman, were also imprisoned and an additional fine was imposed on the village as a whole. No one knew who had betrayed the Englishman but rumors and theories abounded. Had it been Léon Lelong, whose daughter had been in love with Robert? Achille Poëtte, who had been in love with Claire? Victor Marié, a local spy? Why had Mayor Emile Marié’s son, who’d been arrested at the same time as the first three Englishmen, been released without charge after Robert’s execution? No one knew for sure but there were a lot of bitter accusations behind closed doors. Marie Coulette concentrated on looking after Marie-Thérèse and Florency’s children, and Claire looked after baby Hélène, counting themselves lucky to have avoided punishment.