A Foreign Field Read online

  A FOREIGN FIELD

  A True Story

  of Love and Betrayal

  in the Great War

  BEN MACINTYRE

  In memory of Angus Macintyre

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Note on Sources

  Prologue

  Chapter One - The Angels of Mons

  Chapter Two - Villeret, 1914

  Chapter Three - Born to the Smell of Gunpowder

  Chapter Four - Fugitives

  Chapter Five - Behind the Trenches

  Chapter Six - Battle Lines

  Chapter Seven - Rendezvous

  Chapter Eight - Aren’t Those Things Flowers?

  Chapter Nine - Sparks of Life

  Chapter Ten - The Englishman’s Daughter

  Chapter Eleven - Brave British Soldier

  Chapter Twelve - Remember Me

  Chapter Thirteen - The Somme

  Chapter Fourteen - The Wasteland

  Chapter Fifteen - Villeret, 1930

  EPILOGUE - Villert, 1999

  Acknowledgements

  Select Bibliography

  Notes

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Note on Sources

  This is a true story. It is based on official documents, letters, diaries, newspaper articles and contemporary writings by the participants. It would have been impossible to tell without the admirable, and peculiarly French, habit of bureaucratic history-hoarding, which prompted local officials to amass quantities of first-hand evidence from ordinary people, describing their experiences in the region behind the lines between 1914 and 1918. This information, collected immediately after the war, was carefully stored in municipal, departmental and academic archives and then almost entirely forgotten.

  The story has also emerged from hundreds of hours of conversation with scores of people who were directly touched by the events described, or who learned of them from their parents, grandparents and neighbours. Their accounts are inevitably partial, in every sense, but also surprisingly consistent. Recollections of a remote time can never be perfectly accurate, but they were offered with simple honesty and I have tried to record them faithfully. What follows, then, is partly an excavation from a distant war, but also a collective memoir of a community, an attempt to reconstruct a forgotten fragment of the past through reminiscence and oral history.

  Prologue

  The glutinous mud of Picardy caked on my shoe-soles like mortar, and damp seeped into my socks as the rain spilled from an ashen sky. In a patch of cow-trodden pasture beside the little town of Le Câtelet we stared out from beneath a canopy of umbrellas at a pitted chalk rampart, the ivystrangled remnant of a vast medieval castle, to which a small plaque had been nailed: ‘Ici ont été fusillés quatre soldats Britanniques.’ Four British soldiers were executed by firing squad on this spot. The band from the local mental institution played ‘God Save the Queen’, excruciatingly, and then someone clicked on a boom box and out crackled a reedy tape-recording of French schoolchildren reciting Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’.

  What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

  Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

  Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle

  Can patter out their hasty orisons.

  An honour guard of three old men, dressed in ragged replica First World War uniforms – one English, one Scottish, one French – clutched their toy rifles and looked stern, as the drizzle dripped off their moustaches. A pair of passing cattle stopped on their way to milking and stared at us.

  The day before, I had received a call from the local schoolmaster at The Times’s offices in Paris: ‘It would mean a great deal to the village to have a representative of your newspaper present when we unveil the plaque,’ he said. I had hesitated, fumbling for the polite French excuse, but the voice was pressing. ‘You must come, you will find it interesting.’

  Reluctantly I set off from Paris, driving up the Autoroute du Nord past signposts – Amiens, Albert, Arras – recalling the First World War, the war to end all wars, and the very worst war, until the one that came after. Following the teacher’s precise directions, I turned off towards Saint-Quentin, across the line of the Western Front, over the River Somme, through land that had once been no-man’s and headed east along a bullet-straight Roman road into the battlefields of the war’s grand finale. No place on earth has been so indelibly brutalised by conflict. The war is still gouged into the landscape, its path traced by the ugly brick houses and uniform churches thrown together with cheap cement and Chinese labour in 1919. It is written in the shape of unexploded shells unearthed with every fresh ploughing and tossed on to the roadside, and in the cemeteries, battalions of dead marching across the fields of northern France in perfect regimental order.

  Early for my meeting with the schoolteacher, I stopped beside the British graveyard at Vadancourt and wandered among the neat Commonwealth War Graves headstones with their stock, understated laments for the multitudinous dead: some known, some unknown, and the briskly facile ‘Known Unto God’, one of the many official formulations for engraved grief worked up by Rudyard Kipling. The cemetery is a small one, just a few hundred headstones, a fraction of the 720,000 British soldiers slain, who in turn made up barely one tenth of the carnage of that barbaric war, fought by highly civilised nations for no clear ideological reason.

  The schoolteacher, solemn of manner and strongly redolent of lunchtime garlic, was waiting for me by the Croix d’Or restaurant in Le Câtelet, where a group of about thirty people huddled under the eaves, like damp pigeons. I was introduced as ‘Monsieur, le rédacteur du Times,’ an exaggeration of my position that made me suspect he had forgotten my name. My general greeting to the assembled was met with unsmiling curiosity, and again I wondered why I had come to a ceremony for four entirely obscure soldiers, a tiny droplet in the wave of war blood, Known Unto Nobody.

  The asylum band, set up in the field behind the restaurant, now broke into a hearty, rhythm-defying rendition of something French and appropriately martial. The three amateur soldiers came to attention, of sorts, as two cars pulled up. Out of the first emerged the mayor of Le Câtelet, the préfet of the region, and his wife; from the second an elderly white-haired woman was extracted, placed in a wheelchair, and trundled across the field to the rampart wall.

  After a round of formal French handshaking, the ceremony began. The previous year I had reported on the eightieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, a huge, poppy-packed performance with big bands and bigwigs to celebrate the very few, very old survivors. The Le Câtelet ceremony felt somehow more apt: ill-fitting uniforms on civilians, children reciting English words they did not understand, a handful of people remembering to remember in the pouring rain. I began to feel moved, in spite of myself. The préfet launched into a lofty speech about valour, honour and death. ‘See the holes in the wall?’ the teacher whispered with a gust of garlic in my ear. ‘Those are from the execution.’ As the oration rumbled on I surveyed the crowd, few under the age of seventy and some plainly as old as the event we were here to remember. Lined, peasant faces, listened hard to the official version of what the war had meant.

  Suddenly I had the sensation of being watched myself. The old woman in the wheelchair, placed alongside the préfet, had also stopped listening and was staring at me. Disconcerted, I forced a smile, and tried to feign absorption in the speech, but when I sneaked a sideways glance I found her eyes were still fixed on me. Finally the préfet wound down and the village priest offered a hasty orison, again in English: ‘Our Father who art in Heaven …’ The rain stopped, the band struck up, a
nd the military trio shouldered their plastic and marched briskly off down the street towards the town hall, where a vin d’honneur was on offer.

  As the crowd drifted away, I looked around for the old woman, and then realised she was beside me, looking up. Before I could volunteer my name she spoke, in a high, faint voice and a thick Picardy accent that I could barely understand. ‘You are the Englishman,’ she said. It was not a question. The eyes that had caught my attention were now exploring my face. They were the most intensely blue eyes I had ever seen. Unnerved again, I offered a banal observation about the improvement in the weather, but she barely allowed me to finish before piping up once more.

  ‘Our village, Villeret,’ she gestured vaguely to the west with a mottled white hand, ‘was over there, near the front line, on the German side. When the British were retreating, in Quatorze, some soldiers were left behind and could not get back to their army across the trenches. They came to us for protection. We bandaged their wounds, fed them and we hid them from the Germans. We concealed them in our village.’

  Her voice was rhythmical, as if reciting a story rehearsed by heart and scored in memory. ‘There were seven of them, brave British soldiers, and my family and the other villagers, we kept them safe. Then, one day, the Germans came to their hiding place.’ The voice trailed away, and for the first time I became aware that another person was listening: I turned to find an elderly man standing behind my shoulder, an expression of undisguised alarm on his face. She pressed on, her eyes now turned to the plaque.

  ‘Three of the British soldiers managed to escape from Villeret, and returned to England. Four did not. We were betrayed. The Germans captured them. They shot them against that wall, and we buried them beside the church.’ She turned back to me and smiled gravely. ‘That was in 1916. I was six months old.’

  She continued, as if the events she spoke of were the moments of yesterday. ‘Those seven British soldiers were our soldiers.’ She paused again, and then murmured, the faintest whisper: ‘One of them was my father.’

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Angels of Mons

  On a balmy evening at the end of August in the year 1914, four young soldiers of the British army – two English and two Irish – crouched in terror under a hedgerow near the Somme River in northern France, painfully adjusting to the realisation that they were profoundly and hopelessly lost, adrift in a briefly tranquil no-man’s land somewhere between their retreating comrades and the rapidly advancing German army, the largest concentration of armed men the world had ever seen.

  Privates Digby, Thorpe, Donohoe and Martin were shards from an explosion, primed for years, expected by many, desired by some and detonated just six weeks earlier when a young Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip pulled a revolver in a Sarajevo backstreet and mortally wounded Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the imperial throne of Austria-Hungary. The lamps were going out all over Europe, but in the small town of Villeret, deep in the Picardy countryside, the lamps were just being lit, watched, from under a hedge, by four pairs of hungry British eyes.

  The four Tommies, of whom the oldest was only thirty-six, had barely a clue as to their whereabouts, but knew well enough that they were not supposed to be there. According to official military strategy, the men should have been at least one hundred miles north, in Belgium, winning a swift and decisive victory against the Hun. But then the war was not going according to plan: neither the Schlieffen Plan, dreamt up by a dead German aristocrat, to encircle France rapidly from the north; nor France’s Plan XVII, which called for the gallant French soldiery to attack the enemy with such élan that the Germans would immediately lose heart; nor the British plan, to defend Belgian neutrality, support the French, reinforce the might of the British Empire and then go home.

  Barely a fortnight earlier, the British Expeditionary Force, or BEF (this was a war that appreciated a clipped acronym), had begun crossing the Channel in troopships. They were met with beer and flowers in the August sun. Some of the soldiers were surprised, even a little disappointed, to discover they were not going to fight the French again. They swapped cap badges for kisses and then happily headed east and north towards Belgium to teach the Kaiser a lesson: 30,000 jangling horses and 80,000 men clad splendidly in khaki and self-confidence. The poet Rupert Brooke thanked God,

  Who has matched us with His hour,

  And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,

  With hand made sure, clear eye and sharpened

  power …

  To the east, the first of the 200,000 Frenchmen whose élan would be extinguished forever in a single summer month, lay rotting into the soil of Alsace and Lorraine. The German behemoth hurtled down through Belgium, sweeping aside the impregnable fortifications of Liège and Namur, to the great industrial plains where the unsuspecting British army was busily arranging itself into neat battalions. ‘The evening was still and wonderfully peaceful,’ recalled one British officer, scouting in advance of the main body of troops. ‘A dog was barking at some sheep. A girl was singing as she walked down the lane.’ He watched the darkness settle gently over the land. ‘Then, without a moment’s warning, with a suddenness that made us start and strain our eyes to see what our minds could not realise, we saw the whole horizon burst into flames. To the north, outlined against the sky, countless fires were burning … A chill of horror came over us.’

  At Mons, above the Belgian border, on 23 August, the British were suddenly faced by a field-grey wave of three-quarters of a million Germans, crashing down from the north. At first the outnumbered British fought with calm efficiency, then determination, then desperation. For some, the fear was worse than the blood-letting. Retreating inside France, the British turned and fought again at Le Câteau three days later, leaving more dead on the battlefield than Wellington had lost at Waterloo. The retreat resumed. Sure hands now trembled, clear eyes clouded; the depleted army scrambled south in a desperate withdrawal that would last two weeks and take them to the edge of Paris.

  An old Frenchwoman stood on her cottage doorstep and watched the ragged British soldiery stumbling through her village. As the mounted officer passed, she spat a livid stream of sarcasm at him: ‘You make a mistake,’ she hissed. (The young Captain would never forget the sting of it.) ‘The enemy is behind you. Are you not riding in the wrong direction?’

  For 200 miles the German army pursued, looting, burning and wielding the weapons of summary massacre and collective retribution, for this was the policy of Schrecklichkeit – organised terror designed to inflict such horrific repression on the civilian population that it would never dare to resist. Hostages were shot and bayoneted, priests were executed, homes and towns were destroyed. At Louvain, in a signal act of desecration, the great library of more than 200,000 books was put to the torch. Some German soldiers were appalled at their own might. Ernst Rosenhainer, an educated and sensitive young infantry officer, was torn between exultation and repulsion as he watched civilians fleeing from their homes: ‘It was heart-rending to hear a woman beg a high-ranking officer, “Monsieur, protégez-nous!”,’ he wrote.

  The local people watched in disbelief as refugees, Belgian and then French, streamed through the villages of the Somme and the Aisne, a ‘broken torrent of dusty misery’, dragging over-laden donkey and dog carts and recounting lurid tales of German brutality. Behind followed the BEF: horse-drawn ambulances with mangled wounded and long lines of exhausted and hungry soldiers, ‘an unthought-of confusion of men, guns, horses and wagons. All dead-beat, many wounded, all foot sore.’ At their backs, plumes of smoke marked the steady German advance in a spectacular frenzy of arson. An English officer turned around from a small incline to see ‘the whole valley and plain burning for miles’.

  ‘We must allow the enemy no rest,’ declared a German battalion commander. The British rearguard was forced to fight as it fled. Nerves frayed, bellies empty, minds warping from lack of sleep, some retreating soldiers dozed on the march while others began to see ghosts and castles along the
way. Flight forged its own legends. The Angels of Mons’ were said to have been seen hovering over the retreat, the shimmering spectres of English bowmen killed at Agincourt five hundred years earlier, now resurrected to protect their fleeing countrymen.

  The Times correspondent wrote: Amongst all the straggling units that I have seen, flotsam and jetsam in the fiercest fight in history, I saw fear in no man’s face. It was a retreating and broken army, but it was not an army of hunted men … Our losses are very great. I have seen the broken bits of many regiments.’ The lines stretched and snapped; authority dimmed, the stragglers multiplied, and the treasured distinctions of regiment and division blurred as units fragmented, re-formed, or broke away. Whatever the British reading public might have been told, most soldiers were terrified. When the horses were allowed to rest, their legs folded. Unable to march further, some men threw away their equipment and lay down to die or await the enemy. Officers who would have shot any man who acted thus a day or two earlier, did not now look back. ‘That pained look in the troubled eyes of those who fell by the way will not easily be forgotten by those who saw it. That look imposed by circumstances on spent men seemed to demand all forgiveness from officers and comrades alike, as it conveyed a helpless and dumb farewell to arms.’ The neat martial logic of the army as it had disembarked on the coast of France became hazy in retreat. Most men marched unquestioningly on. Some deserted. Some looted. Some hid. Others died of exhaustion. An officer of the Royal Fusiliers recalled a private from Hackney, ‘a most extraordinarily ugly little man in my company who could not march one bit … On the second day of the Retreat he collapsed at the side of the road and died in my arms. I have no record of his name, but as a feat of endurance and courage I cannot name his equal.’