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Prologue

Rain spilled from an ashen sky as the famously glutinous mud of Picardy caked on my shoe-soles like mortar, and damp seeped into my socks. In a patch of cow-trodden pasture beside the little town of Le Câtelet, we stared out from beneath a canopy of umbrellas at a pitted chalk rampart, the ivy-strangled remnant of a vast medieval castle, to which a small plaque had been nailed: "Ici ont été fusilés quatre soldats Britanniques" (Four British soldiers were executed by firing squad on this spot). The band from the local mental institution played "God Save the Queen," excruciatingly, and then someone clicked on a boom-box and out crackled a reedy tape-recording of French schoolchildren reciting Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth."

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

An honour guard of three old men, dressed in ragged replica First World War uniforms — one English, one Scottish, one French — clutched their toy rifles and looked stern, as the rain dripped off their moustaches. A pair of passing cattle stopped on their way to milking and stared at us.

The day before, I had received a call from the local schoolmaster at the Times office in Paris: "It would mean a great deal to the village to have a representative of your newspaper present when we unveil the plaque," he said. I had hesitated, fumbling for the polite French excuse, but the voice was pressing. "You must come, you will find it interesting."

Reluctantly I had set off from Paris, driving up the Autoroute du Nord past signposts — Amiens, Albert, Arras — recalling the Great War, the war to end all wars, and the very worst war, until the one that came after. Following the teacher's precise directions, I had turned off towards Saint-Quentin, across the line of the Western Front, over the River Somme, through land that had once been no-man's, and headed east along a bullet-straight Roman road into the battlefields of the war's grand finale. No place on earth has been so indelibly brutalised by conflict. The war is still gouged into the landscape, its path traced by the ugly brick houses and uniform churches thrown together with cheap cement and Chinese labour in 1919. It is written in the shape of unexploded shells unearthed with every fresh ploughing and tossed onto the roadside, and in the cemeteries, battalions of dead marching across the fields of northern France in perfect regimental order.

Early for my rendezvous, I stopped beside the British graveyard at Vadancourt and wandered among the neat Commonwealth War Graves headstones with their stock, understated laments for the multitudinous dead: some known, some unknown, and the briskly facile "Known unto God" one of the many official formulations for engraved grief worked up by Rudyard Kipling. The cemetery is a small one, just a few hundred headstones, a fraction of the 720,000 British soldiers slain, who in turn made up barely one-tenth of the carnage of that barbaric war, fought by highly civilised nations for no pressing ideological reason.

The schoolteacher, solemn of manner and strongly redolent of lunchtime garlic, was waiting for me by the Croix d'Or restaurant in Le Câtelet, where a group of about thirty people huddled under the eaves, like damp pigeons. I was introduced as "Monsieur, le rédacteur du Times," an exaggeration of my position that made me suspect he had forgotten my name. My general greeting to the assembled was met with unsmiling curiosity, and again I wondered why I had come to a ceremony for four entirely obscure soldiers, a droplet in the wave of war-blood, Known unto Nobody.

The band, drawn up in the field behind the restaurant, now broke into a hearty, rhythm-defying rendition of something French and appropriately martial. The three amateur soldiers came to attention, of sorts, as two cars pulled up. Out of the first emerged the mayor of Le Câtelet, the préfet of the region, and his wife; from the second an elderly white-haired woman was extracted, placed in a wheelchair, and trundled across the field to the rampart wall.

After a round of formal French handshaking, the ceremony began. The previous year I had reported on the eightieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, a huge, poppy-packed performance with big bands and bigwigs to celebrate the very few, very old survivors. The Le Câtelet ceremony felt somehow more apt: ill-fitting uniforms on civilians, children reciting English words they did not understand, a handful of people remembering to remember, in the pouring rain. I began to feel moved, in spite of myself. The préfet launched into a lofty speech about valour, honour, and death. "See the holes in the wall?" the teacher whispered, with a gust of garlic, in my ear. "Those are from the execution." As the oration rumbled on, I surveyed the assembled crowd, few under seventy and some plainly as old as the event we were here to remember. Lined peasant faces listened hard to the official version of what the war had meant.

Suddenly I had the sensation of being watched myself. The old woman in the wheelchair, placed alongside the préfet, had also stopped listening and was staring at me. Disconcerted, I forced a smile, and tried to feign absorption in the speech, but when I sneaked a sideways glance, I found her eyes were still fixed on me. Finally, the préfet wound down, and the village priest offered a hasty orison, again in English: "Our Father who art in Heaven . . ." The rain stopped, the band struck up, and the military trio shouldered plastic and marched briskly off down the street towards the town hall, where a vin d'honneur was on offer.

As the crowd drifted away, I looked around for the old woman, and then realised she was beside me, looking up. Before I could volunteer my name, she spoke, in a high, faint voice and a thick Picardy accent that I could barely understand. "You are the Englishman," she said. It was not a question. The eyes that had caught my attention through the drizzle were now exploring my face. They were the most intensely blue eyes I have ever seen. Unnerved again, I offered a banal observation about the improvement in the weather, but she barely allowed me to finish before piping up once more.

"Our village, Villeret" — she gestured vaguely to the west with a mottled white hand — "was over there, near the front line, on the German side. When the British were retreating, in quatorze, some soldiers were left behind and could not get back to their army across the trenches. They came to us for protection. We bandaged their wounds, we fed them, and we hid them from the Germans. We concealed them in our village."

Her voice was rhythmical, as if reciting a story rehearsed by heart and scored in memory. "There were seven of them, brave British soldiers, and my family and the other villagers, we kept them safe. Then, one day, the Germans came to their hiding place." The voice trailed away, and for the first time I became aware that another person was listening: I turned to find an elderly man standing behind my shoulder, an expression of undisguised alarm on his face. She pressed on, her eyes now turned to the plaque.

"Three of the British soldiers managed to escape from Villeret, and returned to England. Four did not. We were betrayed. The Germans captured them. They shot them against that wall, and we buried them beside the church." She turned back to me and smiled gravely. "That was in 1916. I was six months old."

She continued, as if the events she spoke of were the moments of yesterday, the tragedy as fresh as the rain. "Those seven British soldiers were our soldiers." She paused again, and then murmured, the faintest whisper: "One of them was my father."

Copyright © 2001 Ben Macintyre