Many of Villeret’s inhabitants had multiple businesses: weaving, seasonal farming, occasional manual labour, perhaps a little tobacco-dealing or a café on the side. Alphonse Morelle, for example, called himself a weaver by trade, but explained: ‘Before the war I had a café and sold some tobacco, but in between times, at home, I did some weaving, and in the summer I hoed the beets and helped with the harvest.’
Some of the Villeret men worked in the Templeux-le-Guérard phosphate mine beyond Hargicourt, and although this brought in extra money, it coincidentally tended to compound the village reputation for anti-social behaviour. Inhaled phosphate dust had left many mine workers with damaged lungs, which were often treated only with copious quantities of blanche, a white liqueur similar to absinthe. The drink dulled the pain but, like absinthe, it also destroyed the mind, and there were at least forty people in Villeret with brain damage resulting from addiction to this poisonous brew. In 1914 the village contained no fewer than thirty ‘cafés’. Some of these were little more than cellars with a single barrel, while others were almost luxurious. The ‘Aux Deux Entêtés’ offered a billiards table, wind-up gramophone with a choice of sixty records, and an archery gallery, as well as a multitude of different drinks, from fine champagne to the throat-roasting genièvre.
Outsiders, particularly those with claims to cultural sophistication, were inclined to see the village as a rustic throwback. A new schoolteacher, Monsieur Duchange, had arrived in 1907 to find what he called a ‘thoroughly mediocre intellectual and moral standard’, a community populated by thieves and drunks, riven by internal bickering and run by a mayor who was corrupt, oppressive, and violent. Duchange left after three years, declaring he ‘would not want to stay a moment longer in such a place’. What the scandalised schoolteacher failed to appreciate was the other side of the Villeret character: a streak of hardy independence that could easily be taken for ignorant belligerence, unless it was on your side. Villeret was an easy place to miss, an easy place to disdain, but as the Kaiser was about to discover, it was not an easy place to subdue.
With the war approaching, the first wisps of fear, gossip, information and disinformation began to blow through the region, even reaching the isolated enclave of Villeret. Rumour insisted that German spies were in the area posing as Swiss mechanics repairing the looms. Two optimistic volunteers with a single gun and two cartridges set up a guard post on the road into Le Câtelet, and hung a chain across the road to hold back the German army. Some of the better-informed inhabitants made preparations to leave.
On 16 August, four days after the first troops of the British Expeditionary Force crossed the Channel, the locals had their first glimpse of an Englishman in uniform, in the form of an affable fellow on a motorcycle. With the schoolmistress of Le Câtelet translating, he managed to explain that he had been following an air squadron and was trying to get to Brussels. The villagers pointed to the north and before heading off the motorcyclist turned to survey the rolling fields as if he were a carefree tourist. His words were carefully recorded: ‘Oh, France, beautifully.’
German troops marched into Brussels four days later, but a week went by before another English soldier appeared in Villeret, this time demanding the whereabouts of the largest village shop. He was duly directed to the establishment of Alexis Morel, who was a part-time grocer, haberdasher, café-proprietor, liquor salesman, and sometime chairman of Villeret’s archery club. He also sold bread. The soldier instructed Morel to supply every loaf he had in stock to feed the advancing British army, and to prepare another batch for the following day. Morel complied without demur, but assiduously noted the cost of the requisitioned bread: ‘295 francs’.
It would be more than six years before Morel saw any reimbursement, and it swiftly became apparent that the British army, fuelled on his bread, was no longer advancing, but retreating. The first sign of the calamity was the sight of Belgian refugees, initially a trickle, but soon a torrent, moving south through Le Câtelet. ‘They had the unspeakable in their eyes; they carried their belongings and their gestures were despairing.’ The guns were now clearly audible.
Achille Poétte, the cadaverous, indefatigable postman of Villeret and chief local gossip, suddenly found himself unemployed when the postal service was abruptly terminated. That evening an exhausted squadron of French cavalrymen passed through Le Câtelet, their stumbling mounts, drawn faces, and evident lack of élan offering the first clear sign that victory had not materialised. The officer gamely insisted the retreat was merely strategic, a prelude to the flanking movement that would drive the Germans back. The people chose to believe him and when a passing refugee claimed that Walincourt, ten miles north, was already occupied, he was threatened with jail for spreading alarming news. But then came incontrovertible proof: long lines of horse-drawn ambulances carrying British wounded, and behind them columns of soldiers, their faces pallid from fatigue and fear. Ninety-five injured soldiers were treated at the makeshift hospital set up in Mademoiselle Founder d’Alincourt’s château at Le Câtelet, while the bakers’ ovens churned out extra loaves for the retreating men.
In her diary, 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,