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 Thomas the follower in every game, and the roles were never reversed. Robert was 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
