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.
Lourdel was a wildly eccentric man with a patriotism verging on mania and a commitment to his government and country that was excessive even for a tax inspector. At the age of thirteen, he had joined a band of partisans in the Franco-Prussian War, and on the first day of mobilisation in 1914 he had dispatched his three sons to war. He attempted to join up himself but, at fifty-seven, he had been rejected as too old.
At dawn, Lourdel presented himself to the German officers now lodged in Mademoiselle d’Alincourt’s château, proudly acknowledging that he had opened fire on the German troops, but also pretending to be even more mad than he was. ‘He knew he had to take whatever was coming to him, for the sake of the village which was in such deadly peril on account of his bravura, but also for the sake of his self-respect,’ a neighbour later wrote. ‘He put on a good performance as a bloodthirsty killer, and standing amid the Germans, as if blind to their presence, he kept shouting: “Kill the lot of them!”.’ Lourdel’s captors became convinced they were in the presence of a genuine lunatic, and locked him up instead of killing him.
Terrified, several villagers had hidden in the undergrowth of the moat surrounding the medieval castle. That night a jumpy German sentry heard a rustling in the bushes around the moat and opened fire, shooting one Madame Lemaire-Liénard through the throat. She had taken refuge there with her husband and daughter. ‘With the death of the woman the German officers began to calm down. They had wanted innocent blood, and they got it.’
After twenty-four hours, the invaders finally released their hostages and the main body of troops moved on. A handful of guards remained behind to keep order and in the wake of their first, traumatic experience of German occupation the people of Le Câtelet ‘cleaned out and disinfected their homes’. The body of the horse, ‘which had been covered in religious ornaments by the passing German troops, was dragged away’. So too was the tax inspector Lourdel; he was taken under guard, still raving for German blood, to Reims. The city, and Lourdel, were duly liberated a few weeks later in the Allied counterattack, and Le Câtelet’s eccentric patriot finally succeeded in persuading the French army to allow him to join the ranks. He survived the battles of Verdun and the Somme, was wounded twice, and lived on to a great age boasting of how he had resisted the German army single-handed.
Although Lourdel’s actions had ultimately released him from life in German-occupied France, the more cautious folk of the region drew quite another moral from the tale: Lourdel is still referred to as ‘that imbecile who shot at the German hussar and nearly had the lot of us killed’. There were other ways to defy the Germans than by shooting at them, they said. The German occupation was only a few hours old, but already some had concluded that accommodation rather than confrontation was the best approach.
The most immediate manifestation of that moral dilemma, which would trouble the occupied people of northern France for the next four years, was how to react to the scores of British soldiers left behind in the retreat. At Vendhuile, just hours before the Germans arrived, the mayor spotted a group of British soldiers drinking in a bar and could not suppress the suspicion that ‘they wanted to be caught’. In Hargicourt the deputy mayor reported an English soldier who had hidden in woods by the road into the village who ‘had the audacity to open fire, as a despairing gesture’, when the enemy columns arrived, and then ran to hide in the nearest barn. When German troops began bayoneting the straw, he emerged and surrendered.
Suddenly deprived of orders and a clear line of command, the lost soldiers reacted in different ways. Since the British military command had not anticipated any such eventuality, the rules governing what a soldier should do if trapped behind the lines were vague. Some gave themselves up. Others wandered blindly around the countryside, avoiding every human being and hoping for miraculous deliverance. Some literally went to ground, like Private Patrick Fowler of No 1 troop, A Squadron, of the 11th Hussars,