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.
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 original 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