A Foreign Field Read online

  That night Villeret, east of the solidifying line, saw its first massive influx of German soldiery in the formidable shape of the 8th Hussars Cavalry Regiment and a squad of Imperial Guards. The soldiers stayed only one night before marching on to the west, but it must have seemed as if another hoard had descended. On Emile Foulon’s property alone, seven officers moved into the tidy, well-appointed bedrooms, while 280 soldiers stretched out in his barns and sixty horses were turned loose in his fields. Before leaving the Germans inspected every cellar, ostensibly in search of enemy soldiers, but in reality to pilfer anything available. The 8th Hussars had a long history of fighting the French, having done so with enthusiasm in both 1815 and 1870, so they knew the rules: three carts were piled high with Villeret cloth and rumbled away to the east, towards Germany. ‘Pillage took precedence over everything else,’ the villagers observed grimly.

  As the war turned to stalemate and the contours of a more permanent front took shape, units on both sides spread out from the main arteries and began to mass in ever greater numbers in the smaller villages. Le Câtelet found itself firmly under the boot once again. Hostages were crammed into the village prison at gunpoint, and the inhabitants were told to stay in their houses ‘on pain of death’.

  The German troops that now set about digging in across the region were not the proud Teutons of a few weeks earlier, but angry, and in some cases disillusioned, men who had tasted defeat. Henriette Lege, daughter of the town notary, crouched in her father’s cellar, listening in terror as the German army occupied Le Câtelet for the second time in three weeks. ‘We heard a loud hammering on the door and my father opened it. There stood a tall German officer with a long moustache. “The Barbarians have arrived,” he said, and then he laughed.’

  The ever-practical Jeanne Magniez, faced with the reality that her home was now in enemy-occupied territory and likely to remain so for some time, set about finding more comfortable long-term accommodation for the nine British soldiers she now considered her guests. In the woods west of Hargival, less than half a mile to the west of the mansion, down a narrow track, stood a small thatched building known as the Pêcherie, or Fishing Lodge. Here monks had once fished the River Escaut to provide Friday fare for the abbey, and here Jeanne Delacourt and Georges Magniez had courted in the saddle, and out of it. ‘I decided to move them to this isolated building which, to all appearances, was empty and boarded-up,’ she wrote. ‘With the aid of Mademoiselle de Becquevort and a young servant aged sixteen, I managed to provide the fugitives with everything they needed to survive.’

  The Pêcherie must have seemed the height of luxury to men who had now spent a month living rough, but Digby was deputed to ask their redoubtable saviour for another service. With only civilian clothes, they were afraid that if they were caught by the enemy out of uniform, they would be shot as spies.’ Jeanne immediately had a message sent to the mayor of Walincourt, asking him to find the uniforms hidden by the farm hand and have them sent over to Hargival. ‘The mayor of this commune was very worried about the possible consequences’ of aiding the fugitives, wrote Jeanne, with disdain. So, typically, and ‘despite the mayor’s protestations’, she did the job herself, riding over to the town, ignoring the German sentries, and retrieving the uniforms. ‘The men were delighted.’

  At night the soldiers would occasionally steal out from their hiding place to walk in the woods, but by day they remained behind its barred shutters, sealed off from the war outside. In the early part of this strange captivity only the arrival of Anne de Becquevort, Jeanne, or her servant interrupted the monotony. ‘They lived a quiet life, if a little cramped,’ Jeanne remarked with finely tuned irony. Over the next month, as the war became entrenched and hopes of escape dwindled, to their fear was added boredom. The men had little to do but talk about themselves, their families, and their previous lives, knowing well that they might be outlining their own epitaphs.

  They were an odd assortment, this tiny lost army behind enemy lines. Willie Thorpe, a short, stocky Liverpudlian with a kindly disposition and a garrulous streak, was the eldest at thirty-six. Like many professional soldiers he was nostalgic by inclination, given to singing sentimental songs, drinking too much whenever possible, and reminiscing about home. Thorpe had three children back in Liverpool, and they were his pride and obsession. He carried a family photograph in his wallet which he would pull out, unbidden, to discuss the virtues of his offspring at length with anyone who would listen. He had come to soldiering comparatively late in life, having joined up in 1910, on pay of fivepence a day. A year later, he had obtained his third class certificate of education, but there is no evidence he had any ambition to rise through the ranks. Willie Thorpe had wanted to earn a bit of money for the family he doted on, and spend as much time with them as he could. Before August 1914 he had never set foot outside his native land. When he joined the King’s Own Lancaster Regiment the last thing on his mind, one suspects, was the possibility that he might some day have to go to war.

  The three Irishmen in the group, Thomas Donohoe, David Martin and William O’Sullivan, were a study in contrasts. Martin was a Protestant from the streets of East Belfast, Donohoe a Catholic from the little village of Killybandrick in County Cavan, and O’Sullivan was a Cork man, from the village of Barrackton. Donohoe, thirty-two and a farmer’s son, had joined up in Glasgow in 1905, and later wed Maggie ‘Bridie’ Young from Drumliff. When the time was right he planned to leave soldiering, return to Killybandrick, and take over the family farm. Thomas and Bridie had been married four years, and were looking to start a family when his unit was posted to France. Burly and ruddy, with huge hands, Donohoe might have looked like a bruiser, but he was a gentle and sensitive character. David Martin was born in County Down and brought up in the Castlereagh area of Belfast. Some four years younger than Donohoe, and fully a head taller than any of the other soldiers, Martin was also a married man who had worked as a cook before deciding to join the army. Both the men of the Royal Irish Fusiliers were steady professionals with little taste for danger, but O’Sullivan, the third and youngest of the Irish trio, was made of more boisterous stuff. One of eight siblings, with three brothers also in the army, O’Sullivan was a wild youth, much given to horseplay, drinking and practical jokes. At least one of his enforced companions had marked him down as a liability from the outset.

  Harry May and John Edwards were quiet, cautious men who kept largely to themselves, while the two youngest members of the band remain almost entirely shadowy figures. Jack Hardy is known only by a signed photograph he later gave to Jeanne Magniez; it shows a handsome youngster with a jutting chin and neatly combed hair.

  In this group of regulars Private Robert Digby seemed oddly out of place. He had joined the army in 1913, enlisting in Winchester, and completed his training just nine months before the outbreak of war at the age of twenty-eight. Digby’s father, also named Robert, was a crusty former colonel in the Indian army whose career in various imperial outposts was brought to a premature end when he was shot in the head and seriously injured during a hunting accident. Surgeons had tried, and failed, to remove the bullet from Colonel Digby’s skull. Robert had been born on home leave, in Northwich, Cheshire. A second son, Thomas, was born two years later while Colonel Digby was serving in Roorkee, Bengal, and a sister, Florence, appeared three years after that. Ellen Digby, his mother, was the daughter of a fishmonger from Northwich, but marriage to Colonel Robert Digby (‘soldier’ and son of a ‘gentleman’, on their marriage certificate) and the years she spent lording it over servants in the colonies had thoroughly imbued her with a certain sense of superiority. The family was comfortably off and Robert and Thomas had both received a good education, complete with Latin and Greek, at Bedford Grammar School. Robert in particular had proved an able student with a gift for languages and sport, but he was also a rebel. His contemporaries remember the elder Digby boy as ‘clever, but wild as hell’.

  The two brothers were quite different but very close. Whereas Rob
ert was extrovert and liable to get into trouble, his younger brother was careful, meek and deeply serious. Tall, athletic and charming, with fair hair and a cavalier’s moustache, Robert Digby had a powerful effect on women, and eight decades after the war his good looks have gone down in village folk memory, recalled with something close to awe. Thomas, on the other hand, found women rather terrifying.

  As a child Robert often argued with his father, an irascible martinet whose naturally bad temper was worsened by his injury. When the boys were growing up, it was often noted that Robert was the leader and Thomas the follower in every game, and the roles were never reversed. Robert was protective of his younger brother; Thomas looked on his older brother ‘as a God’. Their mother openly doted on Robert and made no secret of her favouritism.

  Robert Digby was a strange mixture of parts: a little spoiled, sometimes deliberately wayward, he possessed an instinctive resistance to regulations that enraged his father and baffled his officers. It was not insubordination exactly, more the impression he gave of fulfilling orders without engaging in them, as if his mind were fixed on a distant place. Years later, his distinctive manner was recalled in ‘an odd sort of smile, like he was laughing at a joke he didn’t want to share’. But he was also deeply conventional, trotting out the accepted patriotic formulae about King and Country embedded in every classical Victorian English education. Weaned on Kipling and tales of British valour, he liked to drill his younger siblings in the back garden, barking orders and marching them up and down until they were exhausted. From his parents, he had inherited a formal, ingrained notion of duty, which sat uneasily alongside a natural exuberance and a broad streak of devilry. ‘He was a gallus one,’ recalled a relative, using a northern slang word meaning outgoing or bold. At the age of fourteen Robert had led his brother on an illicit underage expedition to the local pub in Northwich. The older boy swaggered up to the bar and demanded a beer; Thomas quailed at the last moment, and ordered tea. Robert mocked him: ‘If you want tea, why don’t you go and see Mother?’

  As with his father, anger came quickly to Robert Digby – his temper had swept him into more than one fight in schoolyard and army barracks – but it was equally swift to vanish. ‘He was quite highly strung, energetic and very talkative,’ recalled a relative. When he became excited, he would gesticulate emphatically. But there was also a ‘natural gentleness’ about him which emerged most particularly in his dealings with children, people his mother considered her social inferiors, and animals. Ellen Digby’s family in the north of England bred racing pigeons, and Robert had discovered a natural affinity for the birds. ‘He was never happier than when he was inside a coop, stroking and cooing to the pigeons.’ But Ellen Digby considered the hobby to be ‘very common’, which doubtless only stoked Robert’s enthusiasm.

  In 1908 Colonel Digby, his mind deteriorating rapidly, was invalided out of the army and the family settled in the Hampshire village of Totton. Robert was restless in the Home Counties. He tried a series of jobs – including a brief stint as a horse trainer and another teaching in a preparatory school – but could not settle. One summer he took the steamer to Boulogne, and then the train to Paris, where he spent several months improving his French, working as a barman in a café and wandering along the Seine. On returning to Hampshire he announced that he was going to move to Paris, a notion that was swiftly and definitively crushed by an appalled Ellen Digby, who by all accounts held a low opinion of foreigners in general, and of the French in particular.

  By 1911, Robert had returned to the north of England again, devising what his family later referred to as ‘The Chicken Plan’. With considerable difficulty he convinced his younger brother that the future, and their fortunes, lay in poultry farming, organised on modern European production principles. Robert and Thomas Digby went into partnership with money borrowed from their parents. The Digby chicken farm, just outside Northwich, struggled along for a few years, and then the business collapsed. Thomas privately blamed the failure on his brother who he believed had no head for business and much preferred racing pigeons to breeding chickens. In 1913, when Robert announced that he was joining the army and signed up with the Hampshire Regiment, Thomas once again followed in his footsteps.

  Thus it was that while Robert Digby was lying low in the Pêcherie on the Hargival estate, Thomas Digby was on the other side of the front line with his comrades helping to grind the German army to a standstill. Thomas had received word that his brother had been wounded in the first days of the fighting, and had then vanished, but he clung to the hope that Robert was still alive.

  Of the two boys, it was Robert who seemed destined for a military career more distinguished than that of a mere private. With a senior-ranking soldier as a father, a socially aspirant mother, a good education and a top-notch talent with a rugby ball, Robert Digby was natural officer material, and yet he had joined up at the lowest rank, initially earning a meagre seven pence a day.

  There are a few possible explanations for Robert’s apparent lack of ambition. Digby may have had ‘girl-trouble’; joining the army was a well-known route for wayward middle-class men to escape the wrath of an angry father with a pregnant daughter. Another explanation may have been the financial problems after the failure of the poultry farm; the army was equally good at hiding bad debtors and unmarried fathers. He may possibly have joined up as a humble private to prove something to his father. Their relationship, always fraught, had deteriorated rapidly after the stuffing came out of the chicken business. Even members of his family, years later, conceded that there was something surprising in Digby’s decision to remain in the ranks, rather than take the officer’s commission to which his education and social standing seemed to entitle him.

  Despite his lowly rank, in Walincourt woods Digby had emerged as the leader of the group of fugitives. The nine were all still part of, although thoroughly disengaged from, the British army, which theoretically made Corporal John Edwards the officer in command. But as the weeks dragged on, the authority of rank slowly eroded. The rest of the British army might have been only a few miles away, but it grew more impossibly distant day by day, as an entire German administrative structure, along with hundreds of thousands of troops, set about occupying the region behind the lines. The fishing lodge became a prison, and soon a new hierarchy emerged within the group, with Robert Digby – failed chicken farmer, over-qualified private soldier and enigma – at the top.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Behind the Trenches

  From the heights above the River Aisne, where the Germans had entrenched, the battle line spooled east to the Swiss border, west in stalemate and then north, as the armies sought to outflank one another in the overlapping battles known as ‘The Race to the Sea’ that more resembled a bloody game of leapfrog through Picardy and Artois. At Flanders, in October, the race came to an end, and another sort of war began. The battle line scored swiftly and arbitrarily across the landscape gradually dug in to a deep gash of trenches hedged with barbed wire and punctuated by machine-gun nests, running 480 miles from Switzerland to the North Sea. On opposite sides of the muddying gulch, the forces massed. Le Câtelet saw eighty-nine artillery pieces pass through in a single day, accompanied by column after column of German troops heading towards the front. From the air, it seemed as if two vast teams of uniformed navvies were labouring to build some enormous and pointless ditch across Northern France. From Nieuport in Belgium it ran south past Ypres, Arras, Albert, before turning east above the Aisne. In the crook of that wheeling line lay Villeret, less than ten miles from the front line just west of Péronne. In time, the point where the River Ancre crossed the front, west of Péronne, would mark the division between the French and British armies: for ninety miles, to the north, the trenches were manned by the British; to the south, the line was held by the French.

  The British force simultaneously expanded and shrank. At the end of October, Kitchener would call for 300,000 volunteers, but these were smaller men. The soldiers of the orig
inal BEF had all been over the regulation height of five feet eight inches. Henceforth anyone over five feet three was deemed an acceptable warrior. The war of movement staggered into stasis and, for the people of Picardy, what had been an invasion, now became a vast, minutely organised and intimately repressive occupation, the methodical pillage of a strip of industrial and agricultural land containing about 2.5 million people.

  The villagers listened and wondered, while ‘the cannons grumbled away to the west, and the occupation covered everything, like a cloak of lead’. The war seemed impossibly, terrifyingly near. Ernst Rosenhainer, the young German infantry officer who had recoiled from the cruelty of the initial invasion, was struck by the way the landscape suddenly changed from bucolic idyll to pitted wasteland, as he marched with his regiment to the trenches south-west of Villeret, between Péronne and Noyon. ‘We came through the lovely valley of the Oise River,’ he wrote. ‘At times through the most beautiful beech forests.’ But just a few miles further on ‘a veritable labyrinth of trenches is opening up before us … there is nothing but death and devastation, and now a solemn silence under the autumn sun’.

  In the village of Aubencheul, a friendly French-speaking German army captain from Alsace paused to chat with the curé and told him: ‘A mighty blow is being prepared. If it succeeds, the war is over. If it fails, the struggle may continue for five years, perhaps seven, for the English are tenacious and their resources are immense. They are our real enemies, an infernal race. Oh, if only we could overcome them.’

  Through the rest of October and for most of November, the remains of the BEF and units of the Indian Army battled it out with the Germans across a strip of Belgian Flanders: 75,000 died, before the First Battle of Ypres ground to an inconclusive halt by winter. Further south, the German occupiers settled in for a battle of attrition, and the region behind the front lines east of the River Somme, including the villages of Villeret, Hargicourt, Hargival, Vendhuile and Bellenglise now became a single administrative unit. Under the new German military government, the Etappe, or rear zone, was ruled by the Etappen-Kommandant headquartered in Le Câtelet, who in turn came under the command of an Etappen-Inspekteurat at the German military headquarters now established in Saint-Quentin. To the north and east, the German occupation was more fluid, allowing rural and industrial life to continue much as before, but here, immediately behind the front line, the German yoke was at its most oppressive. Every inhabitant, from well-to-do Jeanne Magniez in her mansion at Hargival to the Dessennes in their tiny home in Villeret, was now a part of the German war machine, to be kept in order, carefully controlled and gradually bled of any available resources and luxuries that might contribute to the effectiveness or enjoyment of the German forces.