to the smell of gunpowder.
Villeret. The very name was the legacy of a Roman invader. For this was the spot chosen as the site for his summer villa by some unnamed but ‘powerful personage’ from the Roman camp at nearby Cologna: his villa became Villaris in the tenth century, Villarel by the thirteenth and finally Villeret. Le Câtelet had once marked the northern frontier of France, and here, in 1520, François I built a great fortress, a massive, moated declaration of military muscle in brick and stone, 175 metres long and 27 metres high. The Spanish had laid ferocious siege to the citadel, and Louis XIV finally ordered the fortress abandoned, but the great edifice still stood, the village clustered around its base, its chalky face pock-marked by cannon shot and studded with flint. Beneath Villeret church, a local archaeologist uncovered the burial place of even earlier warriors, Merovingian damascene plates, belt buckles of steel inlaid with bronze, left by the knights of Clovis and then Charlemagne, while a crumbling document in Saint-Quentin attests to the martial piety of Jean, seigneur de Villeret, son of Evrard of Fonsommes, who dutifully set off for Jerusalem in the year 1193 to slay the infidel in Holy Crusade.
War, invasion and occupation forged a robustly pessimistic people ‘rude and rough, scoured by the winds from the North’, in the words of one historian. ‘The Middle Ages lived on in our midst.’ Over the years, Villeret had come to look with practised mistrust on any soldier, friend or foe. In 1576, the village even sent a letter to the King, requesting that he cease to employ foreign mercenaries to defend his realm since ‘foreigners, notably the Germans, have come through Picardy in the past, with their wagons and ravenous horses, stealing anything they can find, laying siege to the mansions and forts, raping women and girls, killing gentlemen and others in their own homes’.
Nothing, however, could have prepared Villeret, Le Câtelet, and the surrounding villages for the military Titan that descended from the north in the summer of 1914. The curé of nearby Aubencheul gazed on the massed ranks of German soldiery with a mixture of terror and admiration:
What an unforgettable spectacle! The artillery filed through: light guns, heavy cannon shining and clean, pulled by superb horses bursting with vigour, as fresh as if they had just come from the stables. On and on they came. Infantry buoyed up by their first victory, immune to fatigue. These men were like giants, their dominating stares seemed to penetrate everywhere. They sang, and cried out ‘Nach Paris! Paris dans trois jours!’ Oh, such beautiful men, robust, drunk with pride. We shall never see their like again.
But fear also coursed through the land. The villagers watched the invaders come, and later told tales of horror. In Vendhuile, to the north, Oscar Dupuis stood by as a group of German infantrymen pillaged his home and then fetched his revolver, wounding two of the looters before being shot dead. At Bellicourt, a young British soldier had been 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
