the schoolteacher who had helped the lone English motorcyclist watched the British in retreat: ‘They had only one desire, to go faster, ever faster, to escape the enemy who, their desperate gestures seemed to say, was snapping at their heels.’ Cavalrymen rode slumped in their saddles, and infantrymen collapsed in Le Câtelet square and slept as they fell. Now the civilian exodus had begun. From Hargicourt some 300 people headed south, on foot or in wagons, and others began to seep out of Le Câtelet. ‘It is very sad to see the poor villagers flying south as we retire,’ wrote one British officer. ‘Those who, as we came north a fortnight ago, looked on us as their deliverers, are now thinking we are broken reeds. They are crying and asking us to save them and their homes … A ghastly business. Poor creatures.’
Out-of-the-way Villeret did not witness the British retreat, but the tales of what was happening in Le Câtelet, spread graphically by Poëtte, set the exodus in motion. Cardon loaded up his horse and cart with his possessions and family, and creaked off down the road to Saint-Quentin, watched by the rest of the population, and the anxious butcher. A handful of others left in the ensuing hours, but most chose to stay. The tales of German atrocities were only rumour, after all.
From the top of his monumental château on the hill above Villeret, monumental François Theillier trained his telescope to the north and saw rumour made fact. A thick column of smoke, invisible to those in the valley, was rising from the town of Caudry, just twenty miles away to the north-east. François Theillier was the nearest thing in Villeret to a feudal lord: many of the villagers worked his land, he owned an automobile with a radio in it, and he was so much wealthier than anyone else for miles around that a man who had won at cards or sold his crop well was said to be ‘as rich as a Theillier’. The family fortune had been made from the charcoal mines of Anzin, and Francois’s father, Colonel Edouard Theillier, had naturally set about building himself a château commensurate with the family’s social standing. Completed in the 1880s in a style intended to echo that of the early seventeenth century, the Château de Grand Priel dominated the skyline, a statement of unlimited money but limited taste, boasting pink granite columns, lordly turrets and exactly ninety-nine windows, since one more would have meant a higher rate of tax. The colonel’s wife, in the great tradition of the châtelaine, dabbled in fashionable forms of agriculture, installing her prize herd of Swiss cattle in stalls adorned with ‘polished brass balls’. A semaphore relay manned by retainers was set up on the roads leading up to the château, as a sort of primitive traffic light system to ensure that when any member of the Theillier family wished to be on the road, nobody else was in the way.
Old Colonel Theillier had died in 1900, leaving one son, Pierre, to manage the estate, and the other, François, to indulge his twin passions of hunting and food. The only occupation François Theillier liked more than killing animals was eating them. Large concrete drinking troughs were imported from Paris and placed at strategic points around the château to lure deer, wild boar and other game within range of Francois’s guns. Rabbits were left to breed unmolested to produce a sufficient supply for the master’s bag, even though they chewed the Theillier fields to shreds. Bred pheasants were added to the wild partridges that furnished his groaning table, and imported snails from Burgundy were farmed in vast cages, fattened to the correct size and succulence by an estate employee whose sole task was the provision of limitless gastropods for the gastronome.
François Theillier was, inevitably, enormous. Even as a child, he had been very portly and the locals joked (in an undertone) of the measures taken to try to combat his ballooning bulk: his parents were said to dangle rattles out of his reach, just to try to make him move, and the colonel was rumoured to have locked the teenage François in the cowshed to keep him out of the pantry, whereupon he was said to have eaten the cattle fodder. By the outbreak of war Theillier had reached his full, majestic corpulence, with a weight variously estimated at somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty-seven stone. ‘He had to sit on three chairs side by side,’ it was said, and while out hunting he was pulled in a large cart with a revolving seat on top and a loader stationed behind, thus enabling François to slaughter the local fauna in droves while expending a minimal amount of energy. The landowner’s preferred method was to hunt with a rifle in each hand. ‘He waited until the birds crossed in flight, and with four cartridges he could kill eight birds.’ One day, a stranger to Villeret came across François Theillier asleep under a tree at the gates to his château. The man did not stop running until he was safely back in the village. ‘I’ve just seen God the Father,’ he reported.
For such an immense man Theillier could move quite fast. And what he now saw from the château roof that August morning sent him bounding into his car (whose doors had been widened to admit him). The chauffeur was instructed to drive to Saint-Quentin as quickly as possible. The local seigneur did not trouble to stop and warn the people of Villeret of what was so dramatically bearing down on them from the horizon.
Field Marshal Sir John French, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, had made his headquarters in Theillier’s grand house on Rue Antoine Lécuyer, where a Swiss chef was the only staff member remaining. The Field Marshal arrived there just a few hours before Theillier, having been rousted out of his bath in Nauroy Château before his dinner, to be told that the Germans were at Estrées, just over a mile away. Theillier knocked on his own door and informed the Scottish guardsman who opened it that he had important information for the field marshal, only to be told that the British commander-in-chief was packing and preparing to leave Saint-Quentin. Twenty minutes later, French and his staff had gone, heading south with the rest of the BEF. Wandering into his dining room, Theillier found a package of papers ‘bearing the inscription “Secret Service” … then, moving on to the kitchen, he noticed a large pot full of freshly-chopped leeks for the dinner of the field marshal, who once again had been forced to miss his meal. The chef had a sour expression on his face.’
The ‘secret service’ papers would eventually find their way back into the hands of British intelligence; the fate of the leeks, given Theillier’s fabled appetite, is less mysterious. Having finished a supper intended, literally, for an army, Theillier heaved himself back into his car and followed the exodus south. He would never see his château again.
The same evening Theillier motored away into comfortable exile in Paris the first squad of German cavalry, the very tip of the enemy’s advance guard, entered Hargicourt in pursuit of English stragglers. Not recognising the German uniforms and believing he was welcoming English hussars, the mayor came out to offer the horsemen champagne. But the patrol of eight German dragoons led by a lieutenant did not stop, for they had spotted two men in khaki uniforms struggling on foot up the slope to Villeret. One of these was John Sligo, a thirty-year-old Welshman from the Rhondda Valley. His regiment, the Somerset Light Infantry, had come under heavy fire at Ligny and in the retreat, like many others, Sligo had been wounded and left behind. The man with him was Private Robert Digby.
In the three days since he had become separated from the Hampshire Regiment, Digby had wandered along empty country roads, moving at night and hiding by day. At the village of Gouy, which adjoins Le Câtelet, he had sought the help of the local priest, the Abbé Morelle, who rebandaged his arm. There he found John Sligo, who had also been tended by the priest, and the two fugitives had moved on together. They rested a few hours in ‘an abandoned factory’ before setting out again. Dusk was gathering as Digby entered Villeret for the first time.
The German dragoons spurred their horses. Hearing the clatter of hooves and turning to see the German patrol less than half a mile behind them, the Englishmen ran. Through the town square, past the town hall and the butcher’s, they ducked right, out into the open again, sprinting towards a dense copse some 200 yards from the edge of the village. Seconds later the German dragoons entered Villeret at a gallop, guns drawn. Digby was younger than Sligo and a keen rugby player. The Welshman may also have been more seriously wounded, for Digby reached the woods well ahead of his companion, and plunged into the thick undergrowth, just as the leading horseman caught up with Sligo, and shot him dead.
The wood was impenetrable on horseback and night was closing in. The German dragoons paused
