unknown, and the briskly facile ‘Known Unto God’, one of the many official formulations for engraved grief worked up by Rudyard Kipling. The cemetery is a small one, just a few hundred headstones, a fraction of the 720,000 British soldiers slain, who in turn made up barely one tenth of the carnage of that barbaric war, fought by highly civilised nations for no clear ideological reason.
The schoolteacher, solemn of manner and strongly redolent of lunchtime garlic, was waiting for me by the Croix d’Or restaurant in Le Câtelet, where a group of about thirty people huddled under the eaves, like damp pigeons. I was introduced as ‘Monsieur, le rédacteur du Times,’ an exaggeration of my position that made me suspect he had forgotten my name. My general greeting to the assembled was met with unsmiling curiosity, and again I wondered why I had come to a ceremony for four entirely obscure soldiers, a tiny droplet in the wave of war blood, Known Unto Nobody.
The asylum band, set up in the field behind the restaurant, now broke into a hearty, rhythm-defying rendition of something French and appropriately martial. The three amateur soldiers came to attention, of sorts, as two cars pulled up. Out of the first emerged the mayor of Le Câtelet, the préfet of the region, and his wife; from the second an elderly white-haired woman was extracted, placed in a wheelchair, and trundled across the field to the rampart wall.
After a round of formal French handshaking, the ceremony began. The previous year I had reported on the eightieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, a huge, poppy-packed performance with big bands and bigwigs to celebrate the very few, very old survivors. The Le Câtelet ceremony felt somehow more apt: ill-fitting uniforms on civilians, children reciting English words they did not understand, a handful of people remembering to remember in the pouring rain. I began to feel moved, in spite of myself. The préfet launched into a lofty speech about valour, honour and death. ‘See the holes in the wall?’ the teacher whispered with a gust of garlic in my ear. ‘Those are from the execution.’ As the oration rumbled on I surveyed the crowd, few under the age of seventy and some plainly as old as the event we were here to remember. Lined, peasant faces, listened hard to the official version of what the war had meant.
Suddenly I had the sensation of being watched myself. The old woman in the wheelchair, placed alongside the préfet, had also stopped listening and was staring at me. Disconcerted, I forced a smile, and tried to feign absorption in the speech, but when I sneaked a sideways glance I found her eyes were still fixed on me. Finally the préfet wound down and the village priest offered a hasty orison, again in English: ‘Our Father who art in Heaven …’ The rain stopped, the band struck up, and the military trio shouldered their plastic and marched briskly off down the street towards the town hall, where a vin d’honneur was on offer.
As the crowd drifted away, I looked around for the old woman, and then realised she was beside me, looking up. Before I could volunteer my name she spoke, in a high, faint voice and a thick Picardy accent that I could barely understand. ‘You are the Englishman,’ she said. It was not a question. The eyes that had caught my attention were now exploring my face. They were the most intensely blue eyes I had ever seen. Unnerved again, I offered a banal observation about the improvement in the weather, but she barely allowed me to finish before piping up once more.
‘Our village, Villeret,’ she gestured vaguely to the west with a mottled white hand, ‘was over there, near the front line, on the German side. When the British were retreating, in Quatorze, some soldiers were left behind and could not get back to their army across the trenches. They came to us for protection. We bandaged their wounds, fed them and we hid them from the Germans. We concealed them in our village.’
Her voice was rhythmical, as if reciting a story rehearsed by heart and scored in memory. ‘There were seven of them, brave British soldiers, and my family and the other villagers, we kept them safe. Then, one day, the Germans came to their hiding place.’ The voice trailed away, and for the first time I became aware that another person was listening: I turned to find an elderly man standing behind my shoulder, an expression of undisguised alarm on his face. She pressed on, her eyes now turned to the plaque.
‘Three of the British soldiers managed to escape from Villeret, and returned to England. Four did not. We were betrayed. The Germans captured them. They shot them against that wall, and we buried them beside the church.’ She turned back to me and smiled gravely. ‘That was in 1916. I was six months old.’
She continued, as if the events she spoke of were the moments of yesterday. ‘Those seven British soldiers were our soldiers.’ She paused again, and then murmured, the faintest whisper: ‘One of them was my father.’
On a balmy evening at the end of August in the year 1914, four young soldiers of the British army – two English and two Irish – crouched in terror under a hedgerow near the Somme River in northern France, painfully adjusting to the realisation that they were profoundly and hopelessly lost, adrift in a briefly tranquil no-man’s land somewhere between their retreating comrades and the rapidly advancing German army, the largest concentration of armed men the world had ever seen.
Privates Digby, Thorpe, Donohoe and Martin were shards from an explosion, primed for years, expected by many, desired by some and detonated just six weeks earlier when a young Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip pulled a revolver in a Sarajevo backstreet and mortally wounded Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the imperial throne of Austria-Hungary. The lamps were going out all over Europe, but in the small town of Villeret, deep in the Picardy countryside, the lamps were just being lit, watched, from under a hedge, by four pairs of hungry British eyes.
The four Tommies, of whom the oldest was only thirty-six, had barely a clue as to their whereabouts, but knew well enough that they were not supposed to be there. According to official military strategy, the men should have been at least one hundred miles north, in Belgium, winning a swift and decisive victory against the Hun. But then the war was not going according to plan: neither the Schlieffen Plan, dreamt up by a dead German aristocrat, to encircle France rapidly from the north; nor France’s Plan XVII, which called for the gallant French soldiery to attack the enemy with such élan that the Germans would immediately lose heart; nor the British plan, to defend Belgian neutrality, support the French, reinforce the might of the British Empire and then go home.
Barely a fortnight earlier, the British Expeditionary Force, or BEF (this was a war that appreciated a clipped acronym), had begun crossing the Channel in troopships. They were met with beer and flowers in the August sun. Some of the soldiers were surprised, even a little disappointed, to discover they were not going to fight the French again. They swapped cap badges for kisses and then happily headed east and north towards Belgium to teach the Kaiser a lesson: 30,000 jangling horses and 80,000 men clad splendidly in khaki and self-confidence. The poet Rupert Brooke thanked God,
Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye and sharpened
power …
To the east, the first of the 200,000 Frenchmen whose élan would be extinguished forever in a single summer month, lay rotting into the soil of Alsace and Lorraine. The German behemoth hurtled down through Belgium, sweeping aside the impregnable fortifications of Liège and Namur, to the great industrial plains where the unsuspecting British army was busily arranging itself into neat battalions. ‘The evening was still and wonderfully peaceful,’ recalled one British officer, scouting in advance of the main body of troops. ‘A dog was barking at some sheep. A girl was singing as she walked down the lane.’ He watched the darkness settle gently over the land. ‘Then, without a moment’s warning, with a suddenness that made us start and strain our eyes to see what our minds could not realise, we saw the whole horizon burst into flames. To the north, outlined against the sky, countless fires were burning … A chill of horror came over us.’