hip, but made the two young women into the closest of friends. They became a familiar sight of the locality, trotting down the wooded lanes around Hargival, hacking across the plateau above Villeret, or watering their horses at the village trough in Le Câtelet.
Jeanne Delacourt was twenty-eight when she married Georges Magniez in 1909, a match of love but also of dynastic logic, for the Delacourts of Gouy and the Magniez family of Hargival were joint pillars of the rural gentry, hardly as rich as François Theillier with his industrial money and flashy tastes, but in an indefinable way grander. After five years of marriage, there was still no sign of any children in the Magniez household, but if Jeanne minded, she was so busy with her dogs, home, husband and horses that nobody noticed. Local gossips thought that Jeanne was a ‘racy’ type; she smoked cigarettes, drove an automobile without gloves on, and treated everybody with exactly the same direct, penetrating and faintly lofty manner, usually from the saddle. She was tall and striking, whereas her husband was small and shy, with a diffident manner that belied a passionately romantic soul. There were many, in fact, who said that Jeanne was the real squire of Hargival.
Georges Magniez had enlisted as an officer in the 41st Artillery Regiment on the eve of war, and left Hargival for the front within hours of mobilisation. Georges pledged to write and Jeanne promised to exercise Flirt, his magnificent thoroughbred, whom they had nicknamed ‘Son of Steel’. As the names of their favourite animals suggest, Jeanne and her husband were enthusiastic Anglophiles. Jeanne had heard the first gunfire over at Le Câtelet as the German troops arrived; she had watched the refugees fleeing south, and the weary columns of retreating British infantry and the wagons loaded with wounded men. From Vendhuile, the nearest village to the Hargival estate, her servants brought horrific tales of German brutality: the shooting of Oscar Dupuis and Madame Lemaire-Liénard and the way the ‘notables’ of Le Câtelet had been taken hostage, beaten and mistreated. The equinomaniac Jeanne was particularly outraged to learn that horses requisitioned by the French government at the outbreak of war and gathered at Le Câtelet, including several from the stables of Hargival, had since been appropriated by the enemy. Capricious and undefined, the war seemed to seep into every corner, and yet it was nowhere.
On 17 September, on the road adjacent to the Hargival estate, a German staff car was ambushed by a squad of French cavalrymen, led by one Lieutenant Bourbon-Chalus, and four Germans were killed. On the plateau where the Magniez sheep grazed above Hargival, German machine-gunners exchanged fire with a patrol of French chasseurs on the valley side. But even as the war raged, a semblance of normal life continued. A woman from Vendhuile trudged up the hill with drinks for the French soldiers, as if at a sporting event. Nearby, a lone farm worker, ‘taking advantage of the fine weather’, continued his rhythmic scything to the echo of heavy gunfire: ‘The battle and the harvest carried on side by side.’
Anyone on horseback ran the risk of being mistaken for a soldier and shot by one side or the other, and the more cautious inhabitants stayed indoors. Jeanne Magniez, undaunted, was out on her daily ride on Flirt when she discovered the British soldiers huddled miserably in the woods on her property. ‘It couldn’t really be called a hiding place, for the quarry was virtually open to the sky,’ she later recorded. She cantered back to the mansion and returned within an hour, bringing blankets and food. Not for the last time, the men hailed Jeanne as their ‘guardian angel’.
‘For several days I brought them provisions, since they had not a scrap to eat, as I tried to work out how to get them to Péronne. I searched in vain for a way through,’ she wrote. On 23 September Péronne was finally retaken by German troops and ‘the door was slammed shut’.
That night 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
