A Foreign Field

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 entered 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.

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 edifice 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 𠆉Où sont les Anglais?’ and ‘looted every house, drinking wine straight from the bottles and then smashing them in the street’.

The body of Pierre Doumoutier, Villeret’s carpenter, was brought back to the village the same night, and buried alongside that of john Sligo. Doumoutier had been guarding a bridge at Joncourt as the first enemy patrols came into view. He had rapidly, and sensibly, concluded that his ancient shotgun was no match for the advancing Germans and attempted to make his way back to Villeret. But he and two other villagers stumbled into a German patrol which immediately opened fire. Doumoutier was killed, but the ‘other two managed to escape’. Some said the carpenter had been a fool to offer resistance in the first place.

In the German military mentality, the francs-tireurs of the Franco-Prussian war, irregular partisans waiting to put a bullet in German backs, still lurked behind every tree and building. Any hint of armed defiance was to be met with extreme, salutary violence.

Le Câtelet, a key strategic point on the route south to Saint-Quentin and Paris, bore the main brunt of the invasion and, when it attempted resistance, felt the full metallic lash of Schrccklicheit.

On the evening of 27 August, the last significant body of British troops had moved out of the town, leaving behind a small rearguard of seven men to try to hold up the German advance. These were, by coincidence, men of the King’s Own Lancasters, William Thorpe’s regiment, who had been sitting ‘playing cards in the estaminet, with great sang-froid’, and who then ranged themselves across the main street as the enemy cavalry came into view. A small troop of hussars advanced gingerly. ‘Only two cavalrymen continued to come forward right to the bridge, where they dismounted, about 100 metres from the six or seven Englishmen who just watched them, without moving, impassable.’

The tense stand-off might have continued indefinitely had not a troop of German dragoons burst into view at a canter from the direction of Villeret, unaware that Le Câtelet was still effectively held by the enemy. ‘The English opened fire and the German officer – an Alsatian aristocrat, we later learned, who was headed for a brilliant career – was shot dead along with his horse directly in front of the presbytery.’ The other riders dashed for cover, but noticed as they fled that gunfire was coming from another direction.

In an upper-floor window stood a man in civilian clothes, an abandoned British army cap jammed on his head, firing as fast as he could at the fleeing Germans. This was Guy Lourdel, the tax official and town clerk, who had been unable to resist joining the fray. The English soldiers, along with a handful of walking wounded who had been treated by the curé Ledieu, now scattered into the surrounding fields, leaving behind some forty men too badly injured to move. Half an hour later, the German hussars returned, accompanied in force by the 66th Infantry Regiment, to flush out the murderous franc-tireur and teach Le Câtelet a lesson. ‘Hundreds of soldiers, unleashed like wild beasts by their officers, ran everywhere, brandishing revolvers, shouting, beating down doors that did not open fast enough with their rifle butts, ransacking the church and the bell tower in search of English and French soldiers who they claimed were being hidden by the inhabitants.’

Joseph Cabaret, the distinguished old schoolteacher, was dragged into the street by his white goatee and told to identify which perfidious Frenchman had killed the hussar, whose dead horse still lay in the street, abuzz with flies. ‘Hand over the guilty man or it is death for you and the village goes up in flames.’ The curé Ledieu was struck in the face by an Uhlan, a German cavalryman. Delabranche, the elderly pharmacist, was taken away, tied to a tree, beaten up, and then locked in the town cells with his hands ‘so tightly bound, they bled’. Henri Godé, the mild and diminutive deputy mayor of Le Câtelet, was also ‘arrested’ and hog-tied, along with the town notary, Léon Lege.

A bullet retrieved from the body of the cavalry officer thought to have been killed by Guy Lourdel, was found to be of English manufacture, but the German officer in command continued to insist that even if a Frenchman had not fired the fatal shot this was a measure of incompetence rather than innocence. ‘Bring us the sniper or else at 7.00 a.m. you will be shot and this place will be burned to the ground,’ he warned.