A Foreign Field Page 3

  War had officially begun in Villeret at exactly five o’clock on the afternoon of 1 August, when Le Câtelet’s garde champêtre, or municipal policeman, marched portentously up rue d’En-Bas, clanging his bell to announce mobilisation. Some of the boys had been so anxious to get into battle they had dropped their tools in the fields. Within a few hours of hasty farewells the village population of roughly 600 had shrunk by more than a third. Even the mayor, Edouard Severin, rushed off to war, leaving his deputy in charge. Thrust into a position of uninvited responsibility, Marié, a charcoal-maker with drooping moustaches, thick spectacles, and a permanently unhappy mien, quickly found the weight of office burdensome. The acting mayor was universally known as ‘Parfait’, which happened to be his middle name, but which also aptly reflected his cast of mind: he was a perfectionist, albeit a constantly frustrated one, and missives from the préfecture at Saint-Quentin had begun arriving on his desk in swift and baffling succession.

  On 5 August the sous-préfet demanded: ‘How many workers are needed to bring in the harvest? Please reply as soon as possible and before midday tomorrow.’ Then someone calling himself the ‘President of the Food Commission’ wanted to know exactly how much wheat, dry and ground, was immediately available. Next, with powerful oddness, it was decreed that all street advertising for Bouillon Kub, a variety of powdered broth, should be torn down. German spies were suspected of leaving a trail of messages on such hoardings for the use of advancing troops, but since Marié could not possibly have known this, the request must have seemed, to say the least, eccentric.

  A little over a week later another impossible order landed on Marie’s desk – ‘Extend help to all needy English, Belgian, Russian or Serb families.’

  There were no such families in Villeret, for even by the standards of rural northern France the community was an isolated and self-contained one. Even the inhabitants of Hargicourt, just a quarter of a mile away, were considered ‘foreigners’ by the Villeret folk, and regarded with abiding distrust. In turn, the people of Villeret were often dismissed by neighbouring communities as a collection of ‘gypsies’, backward peasants who kept to themselves. There was a local saying: ‘The rich folk of Hargicourt, the clever folk of Nauroy and the savages of Villeret.’ Like that of many villages in Picardy, the social structure of Villeret was founded on an interrelated network of clans, families linked by blood, marriage and feuds. For as long as anyone could remember, Villeret had been home to the Mariés, the Cornailles, the Morelles, the Dessennes, the Foulons and the Lelongs – united by a common distrust of the world beyond the village boundary. Few Villeret villagers spent much time in Hargicourt or Le Câtelet, and only rarely would they travel the eight miles to the market town of Saint-Quentin, for the rest of France was a fickle place, important as a market for beet, wheat and brightly coloured cloth, but otherwise to be avoided. Villeret was not unique in this philosophy. One of the region’s historians described his fellow Picards as ‘frank and united, rarely keen to leave their land, living on little, sincere, loyal, free, brusque, attached to their opinions, firm in their resolution’. An old Picardy saying aptly captures the Villeret attitude, lying somewhere between selfishness and self-reliance: ‘Chacun s’n pen, chacun s’n erin’ (Chacun à son pain, chacun à son hareng), each has his own bread, each his own herring. In other words, mind your own business.

  Many of Villeret’s inhabitants had multiple businesses: weaving, seasonal farming, occasional manual labour, perhaps a little tobacco-dealing or a café on the side. Alphonse Morelle, for example, called himself a weaver by trade, but explained: ‘Before the war I had a café and sold some tobacco, but in between times, at home, I did some weaving, and in the summer I hoed the beets and helped with the harvest.’

  Some of the Villeret men worked in the Templeux-le-Guérard phosphate mine beyond Hargicourt, and although this brought in extra money, it coincidentally tended to compound the village reputation for anti-social behaviour. Inhaled phosphate dust had left many mine workers with damaged lungs, which were often treated only with copious quantities of blanche, a white liqueur similar to absinthe. The drink dulled the pain but, like absinthe, it also destroyed the mind, and there were at least forty people in Villeret with brain damage resulting from addiction to this poisonous brew. In 1914 the village contained no fewer than thirty ‘cafés’. Some of these were little more than cellars with a single barrel, while others were almost luxurious. The ‘Aux Deux Entêtés’ offered a billiards table, wind-up gramophone with a choice of sixty records, and an archery gallery, as well as a multitude of different drinks, from fine champagne to the throat-roasting genièvre.

  Outsiders, particularly those with claims to cultural sophistication, were inclined to see the village as a rustic throwback. A new schoolteacher, Monsieur Duchange, had arrived in 1907 to find what he called a ‘thoroughly mediocre intellectual and moral standard’, a community populated by thieves and drunks, riven by internal bickering and run by a mayor who was corrupt, oppressive, and violent. Duchange left after three years, declaring he ‘would not want to stay a moment longer in such a place’. What the scandalised schoolteacher failed to appreciate was the other side of the Villeret character: a streak of hardy independence that could easily be taken for ignorant belligerence, unless it was on your side. Villeret was an easy place to miss, an easy place to disdain, but as the Kaiser was about to discover, it was not an easy place to subdue.

  With the war approaching, the first wisps of fear, gossip, information and disinformation began to blow through the region, even reaching the isolated enclave of Villeret. Rumour insisted that German spies were in the area posing as Swiss mechanics repairing the looms. Two optimistic volunteers with a single gun and two cartridges set up a guard post on the road into Le Câtelet, and hung a chain across the road to hold back the German army. Some of the better-informed inhabitants made preparations to leave.

  On 16 August, four days after the first troops of the British Expeditionary Force crossed the Channel, the locals had their first glimpse of an Englishman in uniform, in the form of an affable fellow on a motorcycle. With the schoolmistress of Le Câtelet translating, he managed to explain that he had been following an air squadron and was trying to get to Brussels. The villagers pointed to the north and before heading off the motorcyclist turned to survey the rolling fields as if he were a carefree tourist. His words were carefully recorded: ‘Oh, France, beautifully.’

  German troops marched into Brussels four days later, but a week went by before another English soldier appeared in Villeret, this time demanding the whereabouts of the largest village shop. He was duly directed to the establishment of Alexis Morel, who was a part-time grocer, haberdasher, café-proprietor, liquor salesman, and sometime chairman of Villeret’s archery club. He also sold bread. The soldier instructed Morel to supply every loaf he had in stock to feed the advancing British army, and to prepare another batch for the following day. Morel complied without demur, but assiduously noted the cost of the requisitioned bread: ‘295 francs’.

  It would be more than six years before Morel saw any reimbursement, and it swiftly became apparent that the British army, fuelled on his bread, was no longer advancing, but retreating. The first sign of the calamity was the sight of Belgian refugees, initially a trickle, but soon a torrent, moving south through Le Câtelet. ‘They had the unspeakable in their eyes; they carried their belongings and their gestures were despairing.’ The guns were now clearly audible.

  Achille Poétte, the cadaverous, indefatigable postman of Villeret and chief local gossip, suddenly found himself unemployed when the postal service was abruptly terminated. That evening an exhausted squadron of French cavalrymen passed through Le Câtelet, their stumbling mounts, drawn faces, and evident lack of élan offering the first clear sign that victory had not materialised. The officer gamely insisted the retreat was merely strategic, a prelude to the flanking movement that would drive the Germans back. The people chose to believe him and when a passing refugee
claimed that Walincourt, ten miles north, was already occupied, he was threatened with jail for spreading alarming news. But then came incontrovertible proof: long lines of horse-drawn ambulances carrying British wounded, and behind them columns of soldiers, their faces pallid from fatigue and fear. Ninety-five injured soldiers were treated at the makeshift hospital set up in Mademoiselle Founder d’Alincourt’s château at Le Câtelet, while the bakers’ ovens churned out extra loaves for the retreating men.

  In her diary, the schoolteacher who had helped the lone English motorcyclist watched the British in retreat: ‘They had only one desire, to go faster, ever faster, to escape the enemy who, their desperate gestures seemed to say, was snapping at their heels.’ Cavalrymen rode slumped in their saddles, and infantrymen collapsed in Le Câtelet square and slept as they fell. Now the civilian exodus had begun. From Hargicourt some 300 people headed south, on foot or in wagons, and others began to seep out of Le Câtelet. ‘It is very sad to see the poor villagers flying south as we retire,’ wrote one British officer. ‘Those who, as we came north a fortnight ago, looked on us as their deliverers, are now thinking we are broken reeds. They are crying and asking us to save them and their homes … A ghastly business. Poor creatures.’

  Out-of-the-way Villeret did not witness the British retreat, but the tales of what was happening in Le Câtelet, spread graphically by Poëtte, set the exodus in motion. Cardon loaded up his horse and cart with his possessions and family, and creaked off down the road to Saint-Quentin, watched by the rest of the population, and the anxious butcher. A handful of others left in the ensuing hours, but most chose to stay. The tales of German atrocities were only rumour, after all.

  From the top of his monumental château on the hill above Villeret, monumental François Theillier trained his telescope to the north and saw rumour made fact. A thick column of smoke, invisible to those in the valley, was rising from the town of Caudry, just twenty miles away to the north-east. François Theillier was the nearest thing in Villeret to a feudal lord: many of the villagers worked his land, he owned an automobile with a radio in it, and he was so much wealthier than anyone else for miles around that a man who had won at cards or sold his crop well was said to be ‘as rich as a Theillier’. The family fortune had been made from the charcoal mines of Anzin, and Francois’s father, Colonel Edouard Theillier, had naturally set about building himself a château commensurate with the family’s social standing. Completed in the 1880s in a style intended to echo that of the early seventeenth century, the Château de Grand Priel dominated the skyline, a statement of unlimited money but limited taste, boasting pink granite columns, lordly turrets and exactly ninety-nine windows, since one more would have meant a higher rate of tax. The colonel’s wife, in the great tradition of the châtelaine, dabbled in fashionable forms of agriculture, installing her prize herd of Swiss cattle in stalls adorned with ‘polished brass balls’. A semaphore relay manned by retainers was set up on the roads leading up to the château, as a sort of primitive traffic light system to ensure that when any member of the Theillier family wished to be on the road, nobody else was in the way.

  Old Colonel Theillier had died in 1900, leaving one son, Pierre, to manage the estate, and the other, François, to indulge his twin passions of hunting and food. The only occupation François Theillier liked more than killing animals was eating them. Large concrete drinking troughs were imported from Paris and placed at strategic points around the château to lure deer, wild boar and other game within range of Francois’s guns. Rabbits were left to breed unmolested to produce a sufficient supply for the master’s bag, even though they chewed the Theillier fields to shreds. Bred pheasants were added to the wild partridges that furnished his groaning table, and imported snails from Burgundy were farmed in vast cages, fattened to the correct size and succulence by an estate employee whose sole task was the provision of limitless gastropods for the gastronome.

  François Theillier was, inevitably, enormous. Even as a child, he had been very portly and the locals joked (in an undertone) of the measures taken to try to combat his ballooning bulk: his parents were said to dangle rattles out of his reach, just to try to make him move, and the colonel was rumoured to have locked the teenage François in the cowshed to keep him out of the pantry, whereupon he was said to have eaten the cattle fodder. By the outbreak of war Theillier had reached his full, majestic corpulence, with a weight variously estimated at somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty-seven stone. ‘He had to sit on three chairs side by side,’ it was said, and while out hunting he was pulled in a large cart with a revolving seat on top and a loader stationed behind, thus enabling François to slaughter the local fauna in droves while expending a minimal amount of energy. The landowner’s preferred method was to hunt with a rifle in each hand. ‘He waited until the birds crossed in flight, and with four cartridges he could kill eight birds.’ One day, a stranger to Villeret came across François Theillier asleep under a tree at the gates to his château. The man did not stop running until he was safely back in the village. ‘I’ve just seen God the Father,’ he reported.

  For such an immense man Theillier could move quite fast. And what he now saw from the château roof that August morning sent him bounding into his car (whose doors had been widened to admit him). The chauffeur was instructed to drive to Saint-Quentin as quickly as possible. The local seigneur did not trouble to stop and warn the people of Villeret of what was so dramatically bearing down on them from the horizon.

  Field Marshal Sir John French, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, had made his headquarters in Theillier’s grand house on Rue Antoine Lécuyer, where a Swiss chef was the only staff member remaining. The Field Marshal arrived there just a few hours before Theillier, having been rousted out of his bath in Nauroy Château before his dinner, to be told that the Germans were at Estrées, just over a mile away. Theillier knocked on his own door and informed the Scottish guardsman who opened it that he had important information for the field marshal, only to be told that the British commander-in-chief was packing and preparing to leave Saint-Quentin. Twenty minutes later, French and his staff had gone, heading south with the rest of the BEF. Wandering into his dining room, Theillier found a package of papers ‘bearing the inscription “Secret Service” … then, moving on to the kitchen, he noticed a large pot full of freshly-chopped leeks for the dinner of the field marshal, who once again had been forced to miss his meal. The chef had a sour expression on his face.’

  The ‘secret service’ papers would eventually find their way back into the hands of British intelligence; the fate of the leeks, given Theillier’s fabled appetite, is less mysterious. Having finished a supper intended, literally, for an army, Theillier heaved himself back into his car and followed the exodus south. He would never see his château again.

  The same evening Theillier motored away into comfortable exile in Paris the first squad of German cavalry, the very tip of the enemy’s advance guard, entered Hargicourt in pursuit of English stragglers. Not recognising the German uniforms and believing he was welcoming English hussars, the mayor came out to offer the horsemen champagne. But the patrol of eight German dragoons led by a lieutenant did not stop, for they had spotted two men in khaki uniforms struggling on foot up the slope to Villeret. One of these was John Sligo, a thirty-year-old Welshman from the Rhondda Valley. His regiment, the Somerset Light Infantry, had come under heavy fire at Ligny and in the retreat, like many others, Sligo had been wounded and left behind. The man with him was Private Robert Digby.

  In the three days since he had become separated from the Hampshire Regiment, Digby had wandered along empty country roads, moving at night and hiding by day. At the village of Gouy, which adjoins Le Câtelet, he had sought the help of the local priest, the Abbé Morelle, who rebandaged his arm. There he found John Sligo, who had also been tended by the priest, and the two fugitives had moved on together. They rested a few hours in ‘an abandoned factory’ before setting out again. Dusk was gathering as Digby ent
ered Villeret for the first time.

  The German dragoons spurred their horses. Hearing the clatter of hooves and turning to see the German patrol less than half a mile behind them, the Englishmen ran. Through the town square, past the town hall and the butcher’s, they ducked right, out into the open again, sprinting towards a dense copse some 200 yards from the edge of the village. Seconds later the German dragoons entered Villeret at a gallop, guns drawn. Digby was younger than Sligo and a keen rugby player. The Welshman may also have been more seriously wounded, for Digby reached the woods well ahead of his companion, and plunged into the thick undergrowth, just as the leading horseman caught up with Sligo, and shot him dead.

  The wood was impenetrable on horseback and night was closing in. The German dragoons paused briefly at the edge of the copse to peer into the vegetation before they ‘swung around in the direction they had come’, and trotted away. As one villager later remarked: ‘It was the last pointed helmet we would see for some time.’ When it was quite dark, a handful of village men warily emerged from their homes and retrieved the body of the dead soldier from beside the place they called Les Peupliers de la Haute-Bruyère, the poplars on the high heath. Parfait Marié filled out his first death certificate, copying the Welshman’s strange-sounding name from his identity tags in immaculate curling script. That night, John Archibald Sligo was buried in an unmarked grave, the first foreign resident of Villeret’s tiny graveyard.