The Killing of the Iron Twelve: An Account of the Largest Execution of British Soldiers on the Western Front in the First World War

Chapter 1

Occupation

Certain severities are indispensable to war; nay, more that the only true humanity lies in a ruthless application of them.

Major Rudolf von Friederich, Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege

(The War Book of the German General Staff)

The village of Iron is in the north of the Department of Aisne in France. It is one kilometre to the east of the road between Landrecies and Guise, an escape route taken by British and French troops in the last week of August 1914 when they retreated before the invading German army. Like many other rural villages in France, Iron has suffered from a long period of depopulation. The village school closed in the 1990s, the post office has long since gone, and there are no shops, not even a bakery. That staple of French village life, the bar, remained open until a few years ago before it closed its doors.

Today there are about 250 people living in Iron. An astute local historian might correctly deduce that local place-names like Jerusalem show that the Huguenots once settled in Iron. Otherwise, at first glance, the village seems entirely unremarkable. Except in one respect – it has two war memorials. Both stand on an island in the road in the centre of the village opposite the Salle de Fêtes. The oldest is the memorial to the men of the village who died in both world wars. It is made of Belgian blue stone and was one of the 36,000 monuments aux morts erected throughout France in the years after the First World War.

The second is more recent and stands to one side of the village war memorial. It is made of Wicklow granite. Surmounted by a reclining plinth edged with a Celtic scroll, it is crowned by a bronze plaque. The plaque has at its top a frieze showing a French family welcoming a group of British army soldiers into their home. Underneath is written the following inscription, in both English and French:

Between October 1914 and February 1915 the village of Iron sheltered eleven British soldiers trapped behind enemy lines during the retreat from Mons to the Marne. The soldiers and their protectors were arrested in a house which stood near this monument. All the soldiers and one villager were shot by the Germans at Guise Chateau on 25 February 1915.

The families of those who helped the soldiers were imprisoned. Their houses and businesses were burned to the ground. Some, including women and children, died as a result of their deprivations.

We remember all those Allied soldiers who refused to surrender, and the brave British and Belgian people, like those in Iron, who helped them.

The top corners of the east face of the plinth each carry a Celtic knot. Underneath them are the names of the twelve men executed: one Frenchman, five Englishmen, and six Irishmen. The south face has the regimental badges of the three British army units to which the soldiers belonged: one English regiment, the 15th (The King’s) Hussars; and two southern Irish regiments, the Connaught Rangers and the Royal Munster Fusiliers. The north face has two dates and place names: ‘26.08.1914 Le Grand Fayt’ and ‘27.08.1914 Etreux’.

The west face simply has the name ‘Iron’ above an engraving of a water mill.

The execution of these twelve men was the largest of its type ever carried out by the Germans during the First World War in the territories they occupied behind the Western Front. This is the story of the tragedy commemorated by the monument, of the men who died, and of the French families and the community who sheltered them.

The story starts with the implementation of the Schlieffen Plan, the grand German design to invade France, envelop Paris and to crush the French army before they and their allies had a chance to organise a sustained resistance. Under the Schlieffen Plan it was intended that the 1st and 2nd German armies would sweep down from Belgium and northern France, pass by the west of Paris encircling that city, and push on to crush the French armies who would be retreating from the Alsace-Lorraine and Luxemburg fronts under the weight of the attacks from the east of the other five German armies. This pincer movement would catch the French army between a Teutonic hammer and anvil. It was intended as a campaign of rapid movement – speed was of the utmost importance.

The Schlieffen Plan influenced the story in two linked ways. Its implementation saw many battles fought as part of a war of rapid movement which led to many members of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) becoming detached from their units, eleven of whom would be found in the fields near Iron. The battles were those fought at Le Grand Fayt and Etreux on successive days in late August 1914. The 2nd Battalion of the Connaught Rangers (2/CR) had landed in Boulogne on 14 August 1914. Two days later they were billeted in Mennevret, not far from Iron, where they stayed until 21 August. From 21 to 26 August they marched about 140km, in hot, trying conditions, and usually on reduced rations.¹ On 25 August they were ordered to act as the rear-guard for the 2nd Division as it withdrew. As 2/CR moved south from Tasnières to Le Grand Fayt they found their progress blocked by retreating French troops. Further, there were reports that their right flank was threatened by German troops. The response of 2/CR’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Abercrombie, was to split up his battalion on an already confused battlefield. The result was that the German troops moved in behind the dispersed units of the 2/CR and there was no coordinated response to counter them. The battalion retreated in confusion with groups of men making their own way to the rear. When a roll-call was finally taken, it was discovered that nearly 300 men were missing.²

On 27 August the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Munster Fusiliers (2/RMF) and two troops of the 15th (The King’s) Hussars (15/KH) were defending the crossings of the Sambre Canal between Catillon and Etreux, about 8km south-west of Le Grand Fayt. They were deployed along the road linking Bergues and Chapeau Rouge. That morning they came under German attack. Orders to retire from Brigadier General Maxse, GOC 1st Guards Brigade never reached them. They were left isolated as other units in the Brigade on their flanks withdrew and by early evening their line of retreat across the canal to the relative safety of Guise had been severed. Surrounded by a much superior German force, they lost their CO, Major Charrier. His successor, Lieutenant Gower, surrendered at about 21.15.³ The best available estimate of the numbers of 2/RMF missing is that a week after the battle there were between 50 and 120 men on the run.⁴

The second way in which the Schlieffen Pan influences the story of the Iron Twelve is through its failure. The plan stalled when the German armies were halted at the Marne River in September 1914. Once stopped, the armies on both sides dug in and attempted to outflank each other. The Race to the Sea had begun and, when it was over, the trench lines that would define the Western Front were in place. They ran northwards from Reims to Saint-Quentin, Arras, Armentières and Ypres before disappearing into the flooded, low-lying ground and sand dunes around Dixmuide. Southwards they meandered through Champagne, through the Meuse Valley and Alsace-Lorraine, climbing through the Vosges before ending at the Franco-Swiss border south of Mulhouse.

Victory in the west for the Germans was assumed on the absolute success of the Schlieffen Plan. It was a risky idea based on the proposition that both France and Russia could be defeated in six weeks, and it demanded complete military victory. The problem for the Germans was that they did not have sufficient resources for a long campaign in the West, whilst simultaneously fighting the Russians on the Eastern Front. The men, materiel and logistical capacity simply did not exist. Even a successfully executed Schlieffen Plan envisaged living off the land. Its failure meant that the German army had to manage an occupation for which they were not equipped, neither strategically nor operationally. It was geared up for a short, sharp war in which little resistance was expected. Faith in the assumed innate superiority of the military qualities of the German soldier, combined with contempt for the professionalism of the Allied armies and especially for the French, yielded an unquestioning belief in the inevitability of a short, successful war of annihilation.⁵ This optimistic view glossed over some serious deficiencies. One estimate is that the German armies that invaded France and Belgium were at least six army corps short of what was required.⁶

The negative effects of this failure on Germany’s long-term military fortunes cannot be overstated. For some, notably Moltke, the chief of the German army’s General Staff, the Schlieffen Plan’s partial failure meant that the game was up: the war simply could not be won. He came to this view as early as September 1914.⁷ But for other senior officers there were more immediately pressing concerns of which the most important was the resourcing of their army’s needs. When the Schlieffen Plan foundered, provisioning problems ensued. In an attempt to manage them, the German army had to drain the French and German areas they occupied of every last gramme and drop of resource. In so doing they unleashed a régime of cruelty and brutality which has few equals in the history of warfare. The Iron Twelve were caught up in this wave of oppression.

Northern France was an industrial region with a large population to be fed. The war disrupted its food supply chains: access to ports had been cut, railways destroyed, and its traditional food sources lost. Many of those left behind were either young, old, or infirm and not suited for heavy agricultural work. The occupation came at the height of the harvest. Many people had fled, the young men to the Allied armies, whilst their families took flight as refugees choking the roads. Existing food supplies and all forms of transport were requisitioned by the French army.⁸ The outbreak of the war in the summer of 1914, and the consequent disorganization meant that much of that year’s harvest was left uncollected in the fields.

In the autumn of 1914, the Germans had to find 1 million kilogrammes of fodder each day simply to feed the German 1st Army’s 84,000 horses.⁹ These needs had to be met locally. The Kriegs-Etappen-Ordnung (KEO), the German army handbook on how to manage an occupied territory, directed the army to raise the needed materials from the occupied zone.¹⁰ As well as meeting its own needs the German army found itself with the unwanted responsibility of feeding 7 million French and 2 million Belgian civilians, and managing 21,000km2 of northern France, and most of Belgium.¹¹ More demands on German resources would come from the huge number of Allied prisoners taken in the first months of the war. More than 238,000 had been captured by December 1914, including 40,000 Frenchmen trapped in Maubeuge alone. In comparison, the French and the British between them had only about 59,000 German prisoners. The Germans expected large numbers of prisoners, but do not seem to have adequately planned for them.¹²

Their strategy of occupation had six main building blocks: pacification, confiscations or requisitioning of goods, germanification, deportations, the use of forced labour; and perhaps the most sinister of them all, l’exhaustion, a word for which there is no exact English translation, but it refers to the German attempt to cripple France economically irrespective of the outcome of the war. These policies overlapped and interlocked in many mutually supporting ways. What follows is an account of what these strategies meant in Belgium and northern France in general, and in particular in the Thiérache, that part of the Picardy and Aisne that includes Iron and Guise. It was these German actions that provide the backcloth of cruelty against which the drama of the Iron Twelve was played out and help to an understanding of why the tragedy happened.

The violence seen against civilians in Belgium was repeated throughout northern France. One of the best-known events was the burning on 26 September 1914 of 1,200 houses at Orchies, a small town between Valenciennes and Lille, because the Germans thought that the town’s inhabitants had mutilated the corpses of German soldiers.¹³ Five people were killed in the ensuing conflagration.¹⁴ In nearby Quérénaing the British army had used waggons they had found to block the route of the attacking German forces. The Germans took the names of those who owned them, even though the owners had no knowledge of the uses to which their waggons had been put. Consequently eighteen men and three women died before a German firing squad.¹⁵ Cases of rape, the constant wartime travelling companion of murder, were reported in Sailly-sur-Lys and Laventie.¹⁶ Pillage was commonplace and applied to all categories of dwellings from cottages to châteaux and museums.¹⁷ Once the front line had been established the number of executions may have diminished, but they still occurred, usually for sheltering Allied soldiers. Four Frenchmen were executed at Laon on 3 August 1916 for harbouring French soldiers.¹⁸

Of the six main occupation activities, pacification was the most important in the early months of the war for the simple reason that the other five depended on a life under German control. Pacification inevitably involved a rupture with normal peacetime life. There were numerous restrictions introduced on work and family life, imposed by fines, imprisonment, or death. Offences included keeping arms (including fakes), possessing bikes or cars, and requiring communities to pay for any material damage inflicted on the German army. Hostages were taken against the good conduct of the commune.¹⁹ Owning any means of communicating with unoccupied France such as pigeons, telescopes, and telegraphic equipment was forbidden. The first posters threatening the death penalty for those sheltering Allied troops appeared in Lille on 15 October 1914.²⁰ These were quickly followed in the next month by three such warnings in the Nord and Aisne.²¹

The Germans wasted no time in putting these threats into effect in the Thiérache. In late November 1914 they executed five French people for not surrendering their pigeons. What is remarkable about this incident was not just the severity of the sentence for an offence for which the death sentence was not compulsory – there was no evidence that the accused had ever used the pigeons for military purposes – it was also the extreme cruelty shown by the Germans to two of their prisoners, an elderly married couple, M and Mme Gosse from Catillon. On 23 November 1914, three German police arrived in the town looking for pigeons. The Gosses had four pigeons hidden and it may have been that the Germans had been tipped off. The pigeons were found and Mme Gosse was arrested. The officer in charge of the Germans told Mme Gosse that she would be taken to Le Cateau and at first he told her that she would have to walk the 8km. The officer, described as ‘a teutonic brute’, first tied her to the saddle of his horse, but later relented and a horse-drawn waggon was eventually found for her. He husband was not there when the arrest was made; an order was left that on his return he was to surrender himself to the Kommandantur (the local headquarters of German occupying forces) at Le Cateau and this he duly did.

The couple were interrogated and then placed under confinement. The window of the cell which they occupied was broken and Mme Gosse was able to talk to her sister-in-law. She said the Germans were very angry and ‘did not understand’, presumably a reference to the strong bonds which can exist between the fancy and their pigeons. It is not clear whether they were formally tried, but they were shot on the afternoon of the next day. They knew nothing of their fate until informed of it by Canon Méresse, the Dean of Le Cateau, who had been authorized to offer the couple spiritual support in their last moments.

What was hideously cruel was that the Gosses were forced to walk 800m to the site of their execution, flanked by the men who were detailed to bury them. These men carried the pick-axes and spades they would need for that job. Before they were shot the Germans took care to ensure that the couple could see the burial party begin their work. Later that week their bodies were exhumed and re-buried in Le Cateau cemetery next to three local men who had been shot on 27 November for the same offence of pigeon-keeping.²²

There were other executions of Allied soldiers in the Thiérache. On 15 December 1914 three French soldiers were shot in Avesnes.²³ In April 1915 another British soldier was caught and executed. He was a Royal Berkshire Regiment soldier, George Lay of 1/RBR whose unit had been caught up in the fighting around Maroilles at the end of August 1914. According to Pabert (born Albert Denisse), a brewer who was living in Etreux, he was sheltered in Hannapes, a village about 3km from Iron. There he had been sheltered for a long time by a ‘Madame P’. In a revealing aside, Pabert says that Lay was the last of the Englishmen in Hannapes, implying that there had been others hiding there. In his diary entry for 19 April Pabert notes that his arrest had been anticipated. Lay seems to have been carrying on an affair with both Madame P and a woman called Pauline who had become jealous of Madame P and because of that Pauline had been expected to denounce both Lay and Madame P to the Germans. As it happened, Lay had been stopped in a routine check by a German patrol when he was returning to Hannapes from a nearby village called Lesquielles-Saint-Germain. Why they stopped him is not clear, but by this time the Germans could recognize the unique gait of the British soldier, stamped into them by years spent on army parade grounds.

At Lay’s trial Madame P said that she had not sheltered Lay for long. That begged the question as to who else had been looking after him. At this point Lay implicated another lady in Lesquielles-Saint-Germain with whom, as Pabert delicately put it, Lay lodged with occasionally. It is possible he was returning from her home to that of Madame P when he was arrested. The reason why Lay broadened the scope of the Germans’ enquiries was to muddy the waters. He was well aware of what had happened at Iron and thought his best chance of avoiding a firing squad was to implicate as many people as possible. If that was his intention then it failed. Lay was executed on the morning of 28 April. Pabert says Lay was ‘shot in the balls’ but this is almost certainly wishful thinking on his part.²⁴ Later that morning seven people – four women, two men, and a youth – were put on a train at Etreux to be taken to Germany to start prison sentences of between one and two years.²⁵ The large number of prisoners possibly indicates Lay’s willingness to denounce those who had helped him.

Another part of the strategy of pacification was forcing the peoples of the occupied territories to formally acknowledge German superiority in their everyday encounters with them. One of the rituals favoured by the Germans to demonstrate their ascendancy was the Grusserlass, the obligation of any French or Belgian person on meeting a German officer to step aside and tip his hat as a sign of deference.²⁶ This was enforced in Etreux with fines and beatings for those civilians who disregarded the order. Children who ignored the requirement were whipped. The Germans were quick to stamp on impudence in neighbouring Iron. One Iron citizen was fined 500 marks for making monkey gestures behind the backs of German officers.²⁷ An Etreux man who was especially targeted by the Germans for a display of Grusserlass was a M Noé who always failed to show the required deference. He did not observe the Grusserlass because he was blind.²⁸

Hostages were taken as part of the pacification strategy. The practice was widespread and began very early in the occupation. Victims would be local worthies such as the mayor or his assistants, landowners or other people of importance. They were held locally in the Kommandantur, in German POW camps, or in other parts of the occupied territories as sureties for the good behaviour of the people in their communes. Some were taken as far away as Lithuania.²⁹ Hostage-taking was part of a larger practice of using local people as military resources, as means by which the war could be conducted. As a deterrent to sabotage or attack, hostages were forced to ride on trains conveying German troops or their equipment. Civilians were compelled to act as guides and threatened with death if they gave false information.³⁰ In Amiens at the end of August 1914, hostages were ransomed not only for the good behaviour of the citizens, but also to ensure that communities came up with the food and material the German army demanded. If the captives were kept in the Kommandantur, then their conditions were not too onerous. For other captives kept elsewhere, and especially for those who were deported, then their lives were much harsher with poor food, no proper bedding, vermin, and forced labour, sometimes in freezing conditions. One hostage taken to Vilnius was made to work as a lumberjack in temperatures of -25 °C. Unsurprisingly there were many deaths due to starvation and illness.³¹

With respect to hostage-taking, Etreux escaped lightly. Whilst towns such as Albert, Peronne, and Guise were required to give up between two and four permanent hostages, Etreux was only required to provide one. The reason for this German leniency was that the Germans did not see Etreux as a security problem. M Cuvelier, the Mayor, always ensured that the town cooperated fully with the German administration; for example, the town unfailingly met German demands for confiscations. Etreux had a Kommandantur and its presence helped the Germans keep a close eye on the town.³²

Other pacification measures were those on movement: riding or owning a bike or a car was forbidden, identity cards were required and passes were needed to move outside the resident’s commune.³³ These restrictions on movement were strictly enforced: even funeral cortèges were forbidden to go to cemeteries beyond the commune border. Passes were usually only available from the Kommandantur twice weekly and the purposes for which they were granted were limited, such as helping the Germans, collecting medicines or fuel. Visits to the sick or relatives living outside the commune were forbidden.³⁴ These restrictive measures were not just part of a pacification strategy, they were important planks in the strategy of germanification since they suppressed any spirit of independence and initiative amongst the French.³⁵

The aim of the second strategy, requisitions (or confiscations), was to take all the resources of the rear area (food, clothing, furniture) that the German army might need, including accommodation for its troops.³⁶ Confiscations began immediately after the German invasion of northern France. The expropriation of French resources was planned before the war and arose out of the deficiencies of the logistics of the Schlieffen Plan and the attendant problems of supplying a large, rapidly moving army. The Germans had expected that they would have to live on what they could find in the occupied territories and requisitions were the solution. Their importance intensified once it became clear that the Schlieffen Plan had failed and the stagnant attrition of the war of trenches began.

The Germans started off with a narrow list of demands and then rapidly broadened their search. They were very good at finding and taking what they needed. The first confiscations in northern France occurred in September 1914. Typically bread and meat were each rationed at 150g a day and the Germans took what remained. By the end of 1914 many towns and villages in northern France were reporting the presence of the two handmaidens of the confiscations – hunger and inflation. In Douai, by the end of 1914, the prices of butter, milk, eggs, and meat were beyond what could be afforded even by the middle classes. At Valenciennes, flour rations were cut to a daily allowance of 108g for an adult and 68g for a child. A little further south in the villages of Le Nouvion, La Capelle, and Avesnes, all neighbours of Iron, the locals were reduced to collecting acorns to be ground up and added to their meagre flour allowances. Fuel was quickly added to the German shopping list.

These deprivations lead to a steady decline in the standard of health of the local population, with cases of scurvy and beri-beri being reported amongst old people in Lille.³⁷ Poor diet marked by an overdependence on starch was blamed. Of particular concern was the health of children. The number of cases of typhoid and tuberculosis grew throughout 1915. The Germans were not always sympathetic to French efforts to alleviate the problems. When, in 1915, the French proposed to send 100 children from Lille to the south of France via Switzerland, the Germans refused to allow a doctor to accompany them causing the children with the poorest health to be left behind. Villages and communes were presented with lists of the required materials, with fines and imprisonment for public officials and hostages if the necessary goods were not forthcoming. There were severe fines for any commune who could not deliver the amounts demanded. Homes, factories, warehouses and farms were raided as part of this process. As the war progressed, and the Allied naval blockade tightened its grip around the throat of the German homeland, this brief was extended to include materials and equipment including entire factories that were required for the German war effort.

The Germans considered that everything in France that was under their control could be seized. International law allowed them to do this under two conditions. The first was that they should only take what was needed for the occupation forces; the second was that they should pay for what they took in cash or negotiable paper currency, usually in the form of credit notes called bons. There were several different types of bon, but the most common was the bon de réquisition. These were receipts issued by the Germans to the householder when they confiscated the goods. In theory they were to be taken to the Kommandantur, where they would be exchanged for a bon which could be used as currency such as bons régionaux.³⁸ In practice the Germans did not worry about either of these conditions. From the start they took whatever they wanted without regard to the needs of their forces. If any French person had the temerity to point out that the goods being confiscated were not required to support the German war effort, as international law required, they would be told that the goods in question were not being taken, they were merely being ‘borrowed’.³⁹ Often the Germans did not pay, or paid with joke money endorsed with ironic slogans such as ‘bon payable par Poincaré ’ or ‘bon pour mille baisers’.⁴⁰ The French had to accept whatever price the Germans would pay. A further complication was that goods would be taken from communes by freebooting German units who were not under local command. In these cases, their French victims had little hope of finding the culprits.⁴¹

At first the Germans focused their confiscations on food, but later they broadened their remit to include furniture, clothing and equipment. Strict rationing was enforced and this defined what the French could use. Anything surplus was expropriated by the German army to feed its troops. Exploitation companies were formed to micro-manage the harvests, with French farmers receiving detailed instructions as to what to grow, when to produce it, and processing instructions, including on how to make butter. Few German army officers were farmers, and they refused to accept local knowledge about which crops grew best, or how to manage livestock. The Germans settled their bills in bons de réquisition but these were subject to heavy deductions for materials supplied such as twine and oil, the costs of collection, even the cost of bringing confiscated horses up to scratch. These deductions could account for half of the value of the invoice. From 1917 the Germans took over the management of farm production; the French farmers became their labourers, and the Germans did not pay them for anything.⁴² Despite the high levels of waste, the policy was very successful.

Confiscations started early in Etreux and the surrounding area, almost immediately after the invasion. According to Pabert, whilst the confiscations were highly formalized, organized, and official they amounted to little more than institutionalized theft and methodical pillage. The German occupiers took what they wanted – and that was everything, including grain, coal, wine, horseshoes, cameras, taps, barrels, cattle, mattresses, and animal hides. There were levies organized by the Commanding Officer (Kommandant) of the Etreux Kommandantur, presenting lists of demands to the Mayor. In the case of Etreux, these orders were met because the Mayor did not want any problems with the Germans. From March 1915 there was an additional tool of sequestration: the requisition squad. These were groups of German soldiers who would turn up unannounced at a house or a farm and take away whatever they required. Their methods were brutal and they terrified everyone, including the German soldiers billeted with French families. One Etreux local died as a result of their brutality.⁴³ One aspect of confiscations that the farmers of Etreux found particularly painful was the confiscation of their horses. As with pigeons and their keepers, there were strong emotional attachments between the horses and their owners: they were not merely a necessary means of production at a time when farming was not mechanized. The French regarded the seizure of horses as a tragedy which they tried to delay as long as possible. All fit horses aged between 4 and 12 years selected by the Germans would be given a red brand and returned to the fields. The horses would be collected at a central spot, inspected and valued, and then taken away. That would be the last time their French owners would see them. The Germans would often dispense with the formalities of inspections, valuations and the issuance of bons – they would simply go direct to the fields where the horses were being kept and lead them away.⁴⁴

It is clear from Pabert’s account that whilst the confiscations and rationings bore heavily on all parts of the Etreux population, farmers and smallholders did enjoy a little slack that they fully exploited. For example, the milk production from Etreux’s 300 cows could not be precisely calculated, despite the best efforts of the Germans to do so. In Etreux a soldier was employed to calculate the capacity of each cow’s udder. Cows required grass that the Germans confiscated, but only in the form of hay. The farmers of Etreux adjusted the height of the cut of the grass to ensure that there was some left over for their cows. The Germans confiscated between 2 and 4l of milk each day, but a good cow could produce more than that. Surplus milk could be hidden, and converted into butter and more easily transported. In this form it could be smuggled from those communes where there was a surplus to those where there was a shortage.

Poultry were a much more difficult proposition. The Germans requisitioned eggs from poultry-keepers pro-rata to the number of chickens they kept. The economics of poultry management were uncertain. Unlike cows, poultry needed grain that was expensive and hard to find – but underfed chickens did not lay eggs. It was not safe to let chickens out in the fields and farmyards to fend for themselves because the hungry locals would steal them, or they would fall prey to equally avaricious rodents. A further complication was that the Germans strictly regulated the poultry business with heavy fines for those who transgressed. They preferred to levy fines rather than imprison, as indeed did their French victims. Sentences could be negotiated with a fine substituted for a prison sentence. An opportunistic German Kommandant could milk the fines for their own benefit. Nevertheless, for many French throughout the occupation poultry remained the only relatively accessible meat. Pabert kept chickens but eventually tired of trying to manage all of these uncertainties and he ate all of his hens.⁴⁵

In these conditions of shortages and near starvation for many the presence of a vigorous black market came as no surprise. The Germans in Etreux paid 5 francs for a kilo of butter; the price on the black market was 16 francs. Milk was compensated at the rate of 8 centimes per litre but was sold at 30 centimes. Both the German and French authorities were complicit in the operation of the black market. In fact, there were two black markets, one operated by the Germans and the other by the French. The Germans commandeered luxury items such as chocolate, coffee, wine, and cigars, and later skimmed the supplies organized by the Committee for the Relief of Belgium (CRB), a US-led organization whose aim was to send foodstuffs to Belgium and northern France to alleviate the suffering caused to the locals by the German occupation. These the Germans sold back to those who could afford them, with soldiers acting as go-betweens with them and the German CO. Some of the black-market goods found their way to Germany. In either case the Germans made a great deal of money.⁴⁶ The French profited too. In Etreux, the Germans paid the Mayor between 8 and 15 centimes a litre for milk, but the Mayor never paid the milk producers more than 8 centimes a litre.⁴⁷

Given that the Germans were requisitioning anything of value to them, including most food supplies, the question arose of how the French were to be resupplied with the necessities of life. Rationing was introduced, food essentials were expropriated, and inferior substitutes were imported into the communes. For the French, including those in Etreux, a preoccupation was with bread, a food that occupied a symbolic place in French life, and whose cultural importance dwarfed its nutritional value. The Germans requisitioned good quality French grain and substituted poor quality black German flour, cut with non-cereal ingredients whose precise identity remains unclear, but certainly included potato flour. Other possible ingredients included ox blood and sawdust. It made