by Robert Fisk
I discovered that Bill’s memory could be defective. In the 4th Battalion records is the following: “DUISONS 11 June 1919. 2 companies quelled trouble at Chinese Compound Arras . . . 1 officer and platoon remained as guard.” I suspect that this is the official, censored version of the shooting at the Chinese compound, that the “officer” is my father. Only the date is 1919, not 1918. Bill had got the year wrong.
But he had remembered Louvencourt with great vividness. And one freezing winter’s day, the countryside etched by snow banks and the fields of white military cemeteries, I travelled the little road I had taken with my parents more than forty years earlier, back to Louvencourt on the Somme. I had my mother’s snapshot from the family scrapbook with me, which showed the house where Bill was billeted. Again, I’m not sure what I expected to find there. Someone who remembered him? Unlikely. He had left Louvencourt sixty years earlier. Some clue as to how the young, free-spirited man in the 1918 photograph could have turned into the man I remember in old age, threatening to strike Peggy even when she began to suffer the first effects of Parkinson’s disease, who had grieved her so much that she contentedly watched him go into a nursing home, never visited him there and refused to attend his funeral?
I found the house in Louvencourt, the roof still bent but the wall prettified with new windows and shutters. Unlike Bill in 1956, I knocked on the door. An old French lady answered. She was born in 1920—the same year as Peggy—and could not have known Bill. But she could just remember her very elderly grandmother— my father’s “old biddy”—who lived in the house. There was an old, patterned tile floor in the living-room and it must have been there for a hundred years. Bill Fisk in his hobnailed boots and puttees would have walked through here. At the end of the cold street, past the church, I found the château, half in ruins behind a yellow and red brick wall, and I met the oldest man in the village—he had three front teeth left—who did remember the English soldiers here. Yes, the officers had lived in the château.69 His home had been the infirmary for the battalion. He was six at the time. The English soldiers used to give him chocolates. Maybe, I thought, that’s why he lost his teeth.
I walked back up the road. Opposite the house where my father had spent those cold nights I found another very small British war cemetery. And two of the graves in it were those of men who were shot at dawn by firing squad. Private Harry MacDonald of the 12th West Yorks—the father of three children—was executed here for desertion on 4 November 1916. Rifleman F. M. Barratt of the 7th King’s Royal Rifle Corps was shot for desertion on 10 July 1917. Their graves are scarcely 20 metres from the window of the room in which 2nd Lieutenant Bill Fisk lived. Did he know who they were? Had their graves, so near to him, spoken to his conscience when he was asked to command a firing party and kill an Australian soldier?
From Paris, I called up the Australian archivist in charge of war records in Canberra. No soldiers from Australian regiments were executed in the First World War, he said. The Australians, it seemed, didn’t want Haig’s men shooting their boys at dawn. But when the war ended, two Australians were under sentence of death, one for apparently killing a French civilian. The archivist doubted if this was the man Bill spoke of, but could not be sure. And—it would have pleased my father, I thought—the condemned man was spared. Alas, the truth was far more cruel.
Yet another Independent reader wrote to me, referring to the case of an Australian soldier, an artilleryman serving in the British army, who had indeed been sentenced to death for murder—for killing a British military policeman in Paris, not a French gendarme. His name was Frank Wills and his file was now open at the National Archives in London. Back I went to what was once called the Public Record Office, where the computer bleeper had been replaced by a screen; but when I read that file number WO71/682 was waiting for me, I knew that these papers would contain a part of Bill’s life. If he did not read them, he must have been familiar with their contents. He must have known the story of Gunner Wills.
The story was simple enough, and the trial of No. 253617 Gunner Frank Wills of “X” Trench Mortar Battalion of 50 Division, Royal Field Artillery, was summed up in two typed pages. He had deserted from the British army on 28 November 1918—more than two weeks after the Armistice—and was captured in Paris on 12 March 1919. He and a colleague had been stopped in the Rue Faubourg du Temple in the 11th arrondissement by two British military policemen, Lance Corporals Webster and Coxon. It was the old familiar tale of every deserter. Papers, please. Wills told the British military policemen that his papers were at his hotel at 66 Rue de Malte. All four went to the Hôtel de la Poste so that Wills could retrieve his documents.
According to the prosecution:
the accused and L/Cpl Webster went upstairs. Shortly afterwards two shots were fired upstairs . . . the accused came down and ran out with a revolver in his hand, he was followed by L/Cpl Coxon and fired three shots at him. One of the shots wounded L/Cpl Coxon in the arm slightly. The accused made off . . . but was chased by gendarmes and civilians and arrested. The revolver was taken from him and found to contain five expended cartridges. L/Cpl Webster was found at the top of the stairs, wounded in the chest, abdomen and finger; he was removed to hospital and died three days later . . .
The Australian soldier, the dead policeman, the involvement of French gendarmes, Paris. This must have been the same man whom Bill was ordered to execute. Gunner Wills had joined the Australian army in 1915 at the age of sixteen—he was Bill’s age—and was sent to Egypt, to the Sinai desert and to the Dardanelles. Like Private Dickens, Gunner Wills took part in Churchill’s doomed expedition to Gallipoli. He too fought the Ottoman Turks. But in 1916 he had been sent to hospital suffering from “Egyptian fever”—which left him with mental problems and lapses of memory. The prosecution at his court martial did not dispute this. Frank Wills was discharged from the Australian army in 1917, then travelled to England and—a grim reflection, this, on the desperation of the British army at this stage of the war—was allowed to enlist in the Royal Artillery in April 1918. He arrived in France before Bill Fisk. Unlike Bill, however, nineteen-year-old Frank Wills was already a veteran.
Wills, according to his own defence, had been drinking. “He came to Paris for a spree . . . Had no breakfast on 12th March, 1919 . . . He was not drunk, but getting on that way. Does not remember whether he fired at L/Cpl. Coxon or not. He knew the revolver was loaded, and had been loaded since November 1918.” A sad, eight-page handwritten testimony signed with an almost decorative “F Wills” explained how the two British military policemen asked him if he was carrying a pass to be in Paris and how, when he arrived with them at his hotel,
I rushed up the stairs to my room. I found the door of the room locked. Within a few seconds I heard someone coming upstairs. I had my great coat over my arm at the time. In a pocket of the great coat I had a revolver with six rounds. The revolver was issued to me by my unit . . . I took the revolver out of my pocket in order to hide it under the carpet on the landing. I did not want to be arrested with a revolver in my possession as I had a large amount of money on me and I had been playing crown and anchor. I thought a more serious charge would be brought against me in consequence. Scarcely had I taken my revolver out of my pocket when someone came up the stairs . . . This person rushed at me and I then saw it was Cpl Webster. No conversation passed. Cpl Webster had me by the right wrist. I was frightened and excited and in wrenching my wrist the revolver went off twice. Cpl Webster then let go my wrist and gave me a blow on the head and knocked me down the stairs. I was stunned by the blow on the head . . . I found the revolver lying on the stairs in front of me. I picked up the revolver. I was under the impression that Cpl Webster was following me down the stairs. I was bewildered and greatly excited. When I reached the street I heard one shot go off as I reached the pavement. I do not remember what happened after that until I was arrested.
Wills’s testimony was that of a very young and immature man. “When I left my unit,” he wrote, “I
had no intention of remaining away. I met some of my friends and they persuaded me to come away for a spree. I eventually got to Paris. I intended to go back to my unit after seeing Paris: there was very little work being done at the time and things were rather slow. I got mixed up with bad company and had been gambling and drinking heavily . . .” Wills was to repeat this admission of his drinking problems in his last testimony. He claimed he still suffered from memory lapses. He had no pass to be in Paris and had returned to his hotel room to get his belongings. The two shots had been fired because Corporal Webster had “wrenched” his wrist. After his arrest, he wrote, French police had driven him away in a taxi and only after one of the policemen had hit him with a bayonet had his memory returned. “I was not drunk but was getting on that way. The deficiency in memory is brought on by drink . . .” It was not difficult to picture the young man, drunk, desperate, slowly realising the terrible fate that might await him. And again, I wanted to see this place, if it still existed, the hotel, the stairs, the second floor where Wills had fatally wounded the British military policeman, the street where Wills was arrested by the gendarme.
I fly back to France yet again. The Rue de Malte remains, a narrow one-way street cut in two by a boulevard, still home to a clutch of small, cheap hotels. And incredibly, No. 66 is still a hotel, no longer the Hôtel de la Poste, now the Hôtel Hibiscus. What on earth can I find here? The receptionist is Algerian and I ask for a second-floor room, nearest the stairs, the room in which Wills stayed. The hotel has been many times modernised, its walls flock-papered; there is a television in the lobby that is tuned to a football match with a commentary in Arabic. But the staircase is original, along with its ornate banisters and big iron knuckles, the kind installed in so many French houses in the late nineteenth century.
I tell the Algerian why I have come here and he suddenly bombards me with questions. Why did Wills come to Paris? Why did he shoot the military policeman? His name is Safian and he tells me that for his university degree in Algiers he studied the effect on children of a massacre at a village called Bentalha. Bentalha. I know that name. I have been there. I have seen the blood of a baby splashed over a balcony in Bentalha, a baby whose throat had been slit by young men who killed hundreds of civilians in the village in 1997. The Algerian government blamed Islamists for the slaughter. But I had always suspected that the Algerian army was involved. I repeat this to Safian. “I have heard this,” he replies. “There is much to clear up about this massacre. I had a friend, he said the military were there and they advanced and they stayed just short of where the massacre was taking place. They did nothing. Why? I cannot say too much. Remember, I am an Algerian.” I remember. I remember the villagers who survived. They said the same thing to me, that the Algerian army refused to come to their rescue.
Like the sudden meeting with the young Lebanese man in Douai, the Middle East reaches out again. The fear of an Algerian—of his country, of his government—is present in this cheap hotel lobby in Paris. The killing of a soldier here more than eighty years ago is a safer subject. I translate Wills’s testimony for Safian. He cannot understand why Wills shot Corporal Webster when he would have received a lesser charge for desertion. I climb the stairs twice. It only takes fifteen seconds to reach the second floor. When I run up the staircase, I reach it in five seconds—the length of time it must have taken Corporal Webster. Wills would have had no time to conceal his gun—if he intended to. The second floor is only 5 metres square. Here Frank Wills struggled with Webster and left him lying in his blood on the floor. I walk into Room 22, nearest the stairs, Wills’s room, the last place he slept in freedom before his death. Here he kept his great coat and his service revolver. He had been drinking on the morning of 12 March 1919, probably in this room. Punch, cognac and “American grog,” he had told the court. There had been an American soldier staying in the hotel who fled after the shooting. No one ever found out his identity. Was there an army mafia at work here? Who was running the gambling dens, providing the drinks? Who gave Wills the money he was found to be carrying—6,640 French francs in notes and ten gold Louis coins?
I sit on my bed in Wills’s room and read again through his testimony, this young man whom my father was ordered to kill, his last words written to spare his life.
I am 20 years of age. I joined the Australian Army in 1915 when I was 16 years of age. I went to Egypt and the Dardanelles. I have been in a considerable number of engagements there, & in France. I joined the British Army in April 1918 and came to France in June 1918. I was discharged from the Australian Army on account of fever which affected my head contracted in Egypt. I was persuaded to leave my unit by my friends and got into bad company. I began to drink and gamble heavily. I had no intention whatever of committing the offences for which I am now before the Court . . . I ask the Court to take into consideration my youth and to give me a chance of leading an upright and straightforward life in the future.
I could see how this must have affected Bill Fisk. Wills was not only the same age—he had been sent to France only two months before Bill arrived on the Somme. Wills had not deserted in time of war. But he had killed a British military policeman. I remember how Bill believed in the law, justice, courts, magistrates, policemen.
I walk out of the Paris hotel into the soft summer night. To the left is the street in which the two military policemen asked Wills and his colleague for their papers. A little further is the street called “Rue Albert” in the British documents—it is the Rue Albert Thomas—in which Wills was grabbed by the French gendarme and pushed into a taxi and—according to Wills—struck by a bayonet. By then, he had forfeited his life.
The Court Martial summary states that Wills was “sentenced to suffer death”; he was taken to the British base at Le Havre on the French coast on 24 May. Bill was based there in May 1919—he took two snapshots of the camp, one of them with a church-tower in the background—and was present when Wills arrived. In the British archives, I had turned to the final record of his execution with something approaching fear. Bill had spoken of his refusal to command the firing party. I believed him then. But the journalist in me, the dark archivist that dwells in the soul of every investigative reporter, needed to check. I think that Bill’s son needed to know that his father did not kill Frank Wills, to be sure, to be absolutely certain that this one great act was real.
And there was the single scrap of paper recording Wills’s death. Shot by firing squad. “Sentence carried out 0414 hours 27th May,” it read. The signature of the officer commanding was not in my father’s handwriting. The initials were “CRW.” A note added that “the execution was carried out in a proper and humane manner. Death was instantaneous.” Was it so? Is death really instantaneous? And what of Wills in those last minutes, in the seconds that ticked by between four o’clock and 4:14 a.m., how did a man of only twenty feel in those last moments, in the dark in northern France, perhaps with a breeze off the sea? Did Bill hear the shots that killed him? At least his conscience was clear.
Bill Fisk was born 106 years ago but still remains an enigma for me. Was the French woman with whom he picnicked a girl who might have made his life happy, who might have prevented him returning on the Boulogne boat to Liverpool eighty-six years ago, to his life of drudgery in the treasurer’s office and his first, loveless marriage? Was she perhaps the real reason why he volunteered to stay on in France after the war?
The Great War destroyed the lives of the survivors as well as the dead. By chance, in the same Louvencourt cemetery close to Bill’s old billet lies the grave of Roland Leighton, the young soldier whose grief-stricken fiancée, Vera Brittain, was to write Testament of Youth, that literary monument to human loss. Perhaps the war gave my father the opportunity to exercise his freedom in a way he never experienced again, an independence that society cruelly betrayed. His medals, when I inherited them, included a Defence medal for 1940, an MBE and an OBE for postwar National Savings work, and two medals from the Great War. On one of them are the dates
1914–1919, marking not the Armistice of November 1918, but the 1919 Versailles Treaty which formally ended the conflict and then spread its bloody effect across the Middle East. This is the medal that bears the legend “The Great War for Civilisation.”
In Peggy’s last hours in 1998, one of her nurses told me that squirrels had got into the loft of her home and destroyed some family photographs. I climbed into the roof to find that, although a few old pictures were missing, the tin box containing my father’s Great War snapshots was safe. But as I turned to leave, I caught my head a tremendous blow on a roof-beam. Blood poured down my face and I remember thinking that it was Bill’s fault. I remember cursing his name. I had scarcely cleaned the wound when, two hours later, my mother died. And in the weeks that followed, a strange thing happened; a scar and a small dent formed on my forehead—identical to the scar my father bore from the Chinese man’s knife.
From the afterlife, Bill had tried to make amends. Amid the coldness I still feel towards him, I cannot bring myself to ignore the letter he left for me, to be read after his death. “My dear Fellah,” he wrote:
I just want to say two things to you old boy. First—thank you for bringing such love, joy and pride to Mum and me. We are, indeed, most fortunate parents. Second—I know you will take the greatest possible care of Mum, who is the kindest and best woman in the world, as you know, and who has given me the happiest period of my life with her continuous and never failing love. With a father’s affection—King Billy.
CHAPTER TEN
The First Holocaust
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
