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 Robert 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