A Foreign Field Read online

  Robert Digby was not the only fugitive in the woods around Villeret that night. Over in the forest below the Château de Grand Priel, where François Theillier was wont to carry out his daily depredations on the local wildlife, Arthur-Daniel Bastien, a young maréchal des logis, or sergeant in the French cavalry, perched glumly on a log, still wearing his magnificent crested helmet with horsehair plume, cuirasse and spurs, ruminating on why he had been ordered into a twentieth-century battle with equipment and tactics designed for the Napoleonic era. Bastien had been trained, as he put it, in ‘hand-to-hand combat with a sabre handled at full gallop, a long lance for charging the enemy, a carbine with three cartridges and, for non-commissioned officers, a revolver’. He believed he had been ‘sent to war with methods practically the same as those employed under the Second Empire’, and, like every French cavalryman ‘schooled in the arts of war on horseback’, he had considered it his patriotic duty to charge the German army with drawn sabre at the first opportunity and drive it out of France and Belgium. Only the first part of Bastien’s plan had come to pass. Unlike the French, German cavalry units were usually accompanied by infantry with machine guns, and though the breastplate looked wonderful on parade, it was visible from miles away and it was not bullet-proof.

  On 27 August, Bastien’s regiment, the 9th Dragoons, part of General Sordet’s cavalry corps, found itself at Péronne, about ten miles due west of Villeret on what would soon be the line of the Western Front, attempting to protect the left flank of the British force against the advancing Germans, but becoming utterly disorientated in the process. ‘With the Germans on our heels, and constant contact between our patrols and those of the enemy, to physical exhaustion was added the permanent nervous tension of knowing the enemy was right behind us,’ Bastien recalled. Reaching the crest of a hill east of Péronne, Bastien and his troop realised that they had strayed into the very midst of the enemy: the infantry division directly ahead was composed not of retreating British soldiers, as they had blithely assumed, but of advancing Germans. Years of training obscured any vestige of common sense, and the commanding officer, one Captain de la Baume, did not hesitate. The cavalry troop must fight its way back to the rest of the French army, he ordered, and ‘charge, without hesitation, anyone who got in the way’.

  ‘The dragoons made a beautiful sight as we advanced across the plain, helmets on, plumes blowing in the breeze, blue-black jackets and red trousers, arms glinting in the sun.’ The German machine gunners had plenty of time to line up their sights. ‘The lieutenant ordered the charge. Lances were lowered, the riders leaned forward and spurred into full gallop.’ Bastien’s troop broke through eight successive lines of German infantry, pausing before each fresh charge.

  Here was heroism, but here, too, was mounted suicide in full dress costume. ‘The infantry scattered before us every time, but their fire decimated the squadron and the bullets whistled around my ears,’ wrote Bastien, who was positioned at the extreme right of the rapidly thinning line of horsemen. Suddenly, Bastien found himself galloping down a steep incline which brought him on to a road. No more than twenty feet away was a stationary German convoy. Bastien lowered his lance and charged once again. ‘The convoy of soldiers was kneeling and firing, and I could hear the bullets wailing around me. Thanks to God and the speed of my mount, neither I nor my horse was hit. No German cavalryman dared to confront me, and the last bullets came from behind me. The countryside ahead was empty, but the rest of the squadron had gone.’

  Arthur-Daniel Bastien was one of the few survivors of one of the last great cavalry charges in history. In less than an hour, the Ist Squadron of the 9th Dragoons had been almost obliterated.

  Still looking for someone to skewer, Bastien galloped on for a mile, his ‘nerves at full stretch’. Then, when the adrenaline had subsided, the Frenchman hid in a small wood, which happened to belong to François Theillier, and wondered what to do next. ‘Having thanked Providence, I tied up my sweat-soaked mount and checked I was not being followed. The wood seemed to be empty of people, with a château on one side, and on the other a forester’s cottage which appeared to be unoccupied.’ Bastien broke in through a window, took what food he could find, and left an apologetic note to the owner for this ‘forced loan’.

  ‘As night fell, I stretched out in the ferns, beside my horse. My sleep was agitated, the night was cold, and I woke up time and again, my teeth chattering. The next morning I tried to analyse the situation calmly.’ Bastien concluded that his best option was to head south and try to catch up with the retreating French or British armies. ‘The Germans don’t take isolated prisoners,’ he reflected, wrongly. ‘They execute, on the spot, any straggling soldiers they catch … I decided to keep my weapons and fight to the death, if necessary.’ Returning to the forester’s house, he raided the rabbit hutches behind the building and dined on ‘raw rabbit for the first time’, declaring it to be ‘quite acceptable for a starving man’. As Bastien chewed his lapin tartare, he spotted ‘three new occupants coming into the wood, who turned out to be three British infantrymen, utterly disorientated’.

  Willie Thorpe of the King’s Own Lancaster Regiment had by now linked up with Donohoe and Martin of the Royal Irish Fusiliers, and all three were mortally scared, and famished. As befits a French cavalry officer, Bastien, who spoke a little English, did not forget his manners and courteously offered to share his unappetising meal: ‘I gave them a gift of the remains of the rabbit, and pointed out the general direction of the Allied troops.’ The Frenchman then bade farewell to the British soldiers: ‘I remounted, lance in hand and revolver in pocket, my sabre lying alongside my saddle, and set out in a south-westerly direction.’

  Four months later, Bastien rejoined the French army, after disguising himself as a civilian, walking over a hundred miles to his home town on the Belgian border, and finally returning to unoccupied France via Holland, Folkestone and Calais. ‘I will never forget those months in 1914, the last great days of the French cavalry,’ he wrote in his memoirs. Fifty years later, Arthur-Daniel Bastien still wondered about the fate of the soldiers he had met in the woods of Château de Grand Priel by the village of Villeret.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Born to the Smell of Gunpowder

  Villeret sits on a small plateau at the edge of the European flatlands where English, French, Austrian, Spanish, Prussian and Russian armies have marched and fought for centuries. Memories of warfare run through the land as deeply as its rivers and thick chalk seams. To the north of the village flows the River Cologne, to the south is the Omignon, and to the east the Saint-Quentin Canal, fed by the River Escaut, all tributaries of the great Somme. Long before that name became a synonym for slaughter, war was part of the region’s very soil. The young of the village were weaned on tales of the brutal Russian soldiers, the dreaded Tartars and Kalmucks, who marched in after the Battle of Waterloo, and the older folk remembered well the Prussian siege and occupation of Saint-Quentin in 1870; the painter Henri Matisse, who grew up in the nearby weaving town of Bohain, was fourteen months old when the occupation of his home came to an end, but at every meal his mother bitterly recalled how an invading soldiery had gorged itself on France: ‘Here’s another one the Germans won’t lay their hands on.’ In the nineteenth century the schoolchildren of the region sang the songs of war:

  Children of a frontier town,

  Born to the smell of gunpowder.

  Villeret. The very name was the legacy of a Roman invader. For this was the spot chosen as the site for his summer villa by some unnamed but ‘powerful personage’ from the Roman camp at nearby Cologna: his villa became Villaris in the tenth century, Villarel by the thirteenth and finally Villeret. Le Câtelet had once marked the northern frontier of France, and here, in 1520, François I built a great fortress, a massive, moated declaration of military muscle in brick and stone, 175 metres long and 27 metres high. The Spanish had laid ferocious siege to the citadel, and Louis XIV finally ordered the fortress abandoned, but the great ed
ifice still stood, the village clustered around its base, its chalky face pock-marked by cannon shot and studded with flint. Beneath Villeret church, a local archaeologist uncovered the burial place of even earlier warriors, Merovingian damascene plates, belt buckles of steel inlaid with bronze, left by the knights of Clovis and then Charlemagne, while a crumbling document in Saint-Quentin attests to the martial piety of Jean, seigneur de Villeret, son of Evrard of Fonsommes, who dutifully set off for Jerusalem in the year 1193 to slay the infidel in Holy Crusade.

  War, invasion and occupation forged a robustly pessimistic people ‘rude and rough, scoured by the winds from the North’, in the words of one historian. ‘The Middle Ages lived on in our midst.’ Over the years, Villeret had come to look with practised mistrust on any soldier, friend or foe. In 1576, the village even sent a letter to the King, requesting that he cease to employ foreign mercenaries to defend his realm since ‘foreigners, notably the Germans, have come through Picardy in the past, with their wagons and ravenous horses, stealing anything they can find, laying siege to the mansions and forts, raping women and girls, killing gentlemen and others in their own homes’.

  Nothing, however, could have prepared Villeret, Le Câtelet, and the surrounding villages for the military Titan that descended from the north in the summer of 1914. The curé of nearby Aubencheul gazed on the massed ranks of German soldiery with a mixture of terror and admiration:

  What an unforgettable spectacle! The artillery filed through: light guns, heavy cannon shining and clean, pulled by superb horses bursting with vigour, as fresh as if they had just come from the stables. On and on they came. Infantry buoyed up by their first victory, immune to fatigue. These men were like giants, their dominating stares seemed to penetrate everywhere. They sang, and cried out ‘Nach Paris! Paris dans trois jours!’ Oh, such beautiful men, robust, drunk with pride. We shall never see their like again.

  But fear also coursed through the land. The villagers watched the invaders come, and later told tales of horror. In Vendhuile, to the north, Oscar Dupuis stood by as a group of German infantrymen pillaged his home and then fetched his revolver, wounding two of the looters before being shot dead. At Bellicourt, a young British soldier had been discovered hiding in a cellar by rampaging Germans in search of drink; he was tortured, it was said, by being doused in boiling water, then shot, and thrown in the canal. The people of Gouy stared as the columns of German infantry marched through the town, chanting and singing, while at Beaurevoir they shouted