The men were lounging and talking in groups in the quiet cornfield; the sun was growing warm when the mess cart finally rumbled up. On top of the wagon perched the regimental mascot, a small white fox terrier, clad in a patriotic Union Jack coat, that had been adopted before leaving Southampton. ‘New life came to the men’, who leapt to their feet, mess tins at the ready.
At that moment the German Maxim guns opened up. Colonel Dykes was killed in the first burst, shot daintily through the eye, his groom making ‘a valiant attempt to hold his horse until it also was killed’. ‘Some tried to reach the valley behind,’ but the older and cannier soldiers lay flat on their faces and hugged the earth, as the bullets flicked the tops of the cut corn stalks. ‘Of those who got up, most were hit.’ After two minutes of uninterrupted firing, the German gunners paused to reload and the survivors scrambled for cover below the crest of the hill. For the next five hours, what remained of the regiment was pounded with shells. Through field glasses, the future Field Marshal Montgomery observed the ‘terrible sight’ and then followed orders to try to help the trapped Lancasters. ‘There was no reconnaissance, no plan, no covering fire. We rushed up the hill.’ With predictable results. This was ‘terrible work as we had to advance through a hail of bullets from rifles and machine guns and through a perfect storm of shrapnel fire. Our men … were knocked down like ninepins.’
Many of the wounded were too badly injured to be moved, and by late afternoon, when the order came to fall back, the King’s Own Lancasters had been torn apart. Haucourt church was packed with bleeding and dying men, while dazed pockets of survivors, separated in the panic, wandered in search of their commanding officers and orders. A day that had started in perfect calm ended in utter confusion, as what was left of the King’s Own joined the great retreat. ‘There was nothing to do for it but to leave the wounded and hope that any stragglers would rejoin,’ one officer said. When the battalion was finally able to draw breath, the losses seemed barely believable: fourteen officers and 431 other ranks killed, wounded or missing, along with the mess cart, commanding officer, two machine guns and the fox terrier. (The distraught driver of the mess wagon was found to be carrying the dead dog under his shirt the next day, and was sharply ordered to bury it.) In three hours of battle, the King’s Own Lancaster Regiment had lost half its strength and much of its morale. It had also lost Private William Thorpe.
David Martin, Thomas Donohoe and the Royal Irish Fusiliers had arrived in France in typically jovial fashion, ‘singing and cheering and chanting the regiment’s motto, Faugh-a-Ballagh, “Clear the Way”.’ The local French civilians found the Irishmen intriguingly odd, and the curiosity was mutual. During a reconnoitre to the east, one officer from the Irish regiment was taken prisoner by an over-enthusiastic French commander who evidently suspected that he had come across a German spy posing as an Allied soldier. He also seems to have had some peculiar notions about the distinguishing anatomical features of a British officer, for he told his astonished captive: ‘Although I am sure you are what you say you are, still these are unusual times and perhaps you would not mind undressing, and giving me some proof that you are English.’ The officer huffily refused to demonstrate his nationality thus, and sadly we will never know what the Frenchman hoped to find that would have convinced him.
Like the King’s Own Lancasters and the Hampshire Regiment, the Irish Fusiliers were positioned close to Haucourt, just south of the village. By mid-morning on 27 August, the regiment was locked in a ferocious artillery duel. ‘Outnumbered and outranged,’ the Irish troops fell back shortly before nightfall and by the early hours of the next day the battalion, one of the last regiments to vacate the position, was in headlong retreat, but still displaying a jollity that astonished the regimental interpreter: ‘I do not understand you Irish,’ he said. ‘We Frenchmen are glad when we go forward but sad when we come back; you Irish are always the same, you always laugh and all you want is bully beef.’
The laughter swiftly subsided as the withdrawal turned into a continuous forced march, often under attack from the rear. The day grew hot and humid, but there was no pause. Slogging along grimly ‘as if in a trance’, the men stripped off their packs and threw them by the roadside. As the twenty-fourth hour of non-stop marching approached, some were left ‘with only the remains of boots’. Others collapsed, ‘physically unable to march further without rest’, but there was no time to wait for them to recover, nor was there the means to move them. The brigade commander pressed on, noting that ‘to our rear the lurid glare of burning farms and haystacks shed a fitful light on the scene’. On the evening of 28 August the exhausted Irish troops crossed the Somme River, just before the bridge was blown up, and were able to rejoin the British rearguard. When the muster roll was called, 136 men and officers were found to be missing, including Privates Thomas Donohoe and David Martin.
South of the cornfield battlefields lay Villeret, a small village of simple brick houses with roofs of slate, tile and thatch, tucked into the folds of the Picardy countryside. A wayfarer stumbling upon Villeret by chance in 1914 – and few strangers ever came through save by accident, since Villeret was not on the way to anywhere – might have paused to take in the picturesque view from the hill above the village, for as one traveller observed, ‘nature is beautiful around Villeret, and the poet or painter might stop here to depict the scene, one in the harmonious language of verse, the other by fixing the scene on his canvas’. The wanderer might also have stopped for a restorative drink, perhaps a glass of genièvre, the ferocious local gin, in the café on the corner: an establishment called ‘Aux Deux Entêtés’, the two hard-heads, with a sign showing two asses pulling stubbornly in opposite directions. Or he might have halted to observe the modest tombs in the undistinguished church, or to admire the well-kept rose garden in front of the girls’ school, the pride of the young schoolmistress, Antoinette Foulon. He might have inquired what great personage lived in the ornate, still-new château on the hill. But since he would most likely have been lost, he would have tarried just long enough to obtain directions before hurrying on to the larger settlement of Hargicourt, just across the valley, or to the ruined fortress at Le Câtelet, the most important town in the canton, five miles to the north on the road between Cambrai and Saint-Quentin.
Villeret moved to a rhythm and pattern as immutable and familiar as the motifs in the cloth woven down the centuries by its villagers. Here Léon Lelong baked his bread to a recipe bequeathed by the ancients; women in wooden clogs drew water from a pump in the cobbled square; and looms rattled in every cellar, reaching a crescendo at dusk and then slowly fading into the night, the steady clanking heartbeat of a Picardy village.
That August Villeret appeared, at least on its homely surface, to be following its regular ambling course, as contented as the pig lounging in the shade of butcher Cardon’s house. But a glance inside the door of the mairie, a grand two-storey structure with the unmistakable pomposity of French municipal architecture, might have offered a rather different impression. For in the summer of 1914 Villeret was on a war footing, its elders in a state of unprecedented anxiety. Of the approaching German army, and the carnage it had wrought, Villeret knew almost nothing. But the war had already jolted village life out of kilter, and Camille ‘Parfait’ Marié, the acting mayor of Villeret, was having to put his mind to a problem not encountered by the village since the Prussians had marched into northern France forty-four years previously: with so many men already summoned into uniform, there would be barely enough hands to bring in the harvest, which was late this year as it was. (At the same time, across the Channel, the conflict in Europe was impinging on normal existence in a similarly upsetting fashion. On 4 August, the Catford Journal reported: ‘What with the war and the rain, last Saturday was a most depressing day for the Catford Cricket Club.’)
War had officially begun in Villeret at exactly five o’clock on the afternoon of 1 August, when
