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  Everyone who worked with Pierre Darquier in the army during these war years gave a good report of him—“sweet tempered, highly intelligent” was a typical comment—and in September he was appointed chief medical officer to the Garde Républicaine, the elite corps of defenders of the president of the republic and the French state.8 Louise did not regret leaving Tours for Paris and a rented apartment in the avenue de Clichy. “There are not even any victories to speak of,” she wrote from Tours. She was “reading books about Byzantium…making myself two muffs with some old fur.”

  The mutinies continued. The fears of the French high command, including Pétain, of Bolshevik anarchy were exacerbated by the revolution in Russia of November 1917. Pétain restored order by improving conditions in the trenches for his poilus, but some soldiers were arrested and tried, a few were sent to Devil's Island, and fewer were shot. Louis made his escape. He applied for transfer to the artillery in October, and by the time he turned twenty on 19 December 1917, his commanding officer had sent him off for training with the following assessment: “excellent background, good military mind, excellent behaviour, intelligent and well educated. Should be highly suitable for a position of command although still shows signs of a slightly weak character for his young age.”9

  When Will Jones' hospital ship arrived in England in November 1916 he was diagnosed as suffering from “debility,” a word to be used over and again about him, sometimes interspersed with “sick in field”—the latter often caused by the stench and sight of unburied, mutilated or decomposing corpses, bones and human parts. During the Great War “debility” was “often the result of repeated acute states of exhaustion,” which sometimes led to D.A.H. (disordered action of the heart), effort syndrome, stress, panic attacks caused by fear—“soldier's heart.”10 For the next eight months Will was treated in hospitals, convalescent homes and Australian retraining centres. He managed to add mumps to his debility, but by June 1917 he had been set sufficiently upright to be sent back to the front.

  This time he fought in Belgium, in the sea of mud which was the third battle of Ypres, or Passchendaele. While Louis was kicking horses behind the lines, Will was transferred to the 2nd Division Signal Company as a sapper. From September to October his division fought through the battle of the Menin Road, at Broodseinde Ridge and Passchendaele. As the pelting October rains came down, in these hopeless encounters, fought up to the waist in the deep swamp of the flooded landscape, small victories brought vast losses: there were thirty-eight thousand casualties in the Australian divisions alone, many of them drowned in submerged shellholes.

  Will was arrested for drunkenness: he spent seven days in the clink, and on the day he was released he was gassed again, and again the day after. A fellow soldier recorded: “The poor creatures were blind… suffering great pain in their throats and stomach,” as “helpless as babies.”11 On 31 October, as his division was withdrawn for rest, Will was invalided once more to England. Again he spent nearly eight months there being reconstructed for the front.12

  Louis Darquier was luckier. Until 1918 he had spent most of his time in training or behind the lines. In his month of preparation for the artillery at Fontainebleau, just outside Paris, Louis did well. He was appointed corporal, then sergeant: “calm and thoughtful,” the reports said, “energetic and full of drive,” and he came twenty-ninth out of 159 young cadets. Now he was to fight as Will Jones had, in the thick of it. In February 1918 he was posted as an officer to the 49ème Régiment d'Artillerie de Campagne, the 49th Field Artillery Regiment, and the following month he reached the front at last. By this time artillery was more accurate, of better quality, in better supply. The German army was almost exhausted, and now it faced a unified enemy.

  General Ferdinand Foch was appointed commander-in-chief of all Allied forces in April 1918. The Allies were helped by improved resources, technological advances in communications and weaponry, tanks and aeroplanes, and, at long last, troops from the United States. Pétain was not happy with the idea of a unified command. He resented Foch's appointment and wanted to retain American troops under his control. Vain and pessimistic, he saw U.S. Commander-in-Chief General John J. Pershing as inexperienced, and himself as “a great man.”13

  In Paris, Louise stood at the windows of her apartment, watched the first air bombardments and agonised. Both her sons were at the front. Louis joined his unit, the 6th Battery of the 49th, at Toul near Nancy on 10 March, and two days later General Pétain arrived to review the regiment, to present the men with souvenirs of his visit, and formally to promise its officers the honorary insignia of the Fourragère after the war.14

  Louis' regiment fought in the second battle of the Somme throughout April 1918, at Moreuil to the east of Hangard Wood, alongside Will's division, part of the Australian corps which halted the German advance at Villers-Bretonneux. Will, meanwhile, was convalescing in Weymouth. This was a combined French and British attack; French posts next to British, Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders, fighting close to the enemy. The second Somme battle was no longer only stalemate trench warfare, but also hand-to-hand fighting under continuous heavy fire and shelling, in copses, woods and gullies, using bayonets, revolvers and bombs.

  There were heavy losses and hideous shrapnel wounds, and “the whole countryside was literally drenched with gas.”15 It was mustard gas now, and Louis was in the mêlée of death and mutilation, fighting among the first German and British confrontations by tank attack. He was mentioned in despatches for his bravery in combat at Hangard-en-Santerre on 9 April, although the wrist wound he later added to his career details was too slight to be mentioned in his regiment's daily journal.16

  Louis had performed well, and in July was promoted to second lieutenant. A month earlier his regiment had moved on to take part in the second battle of the Marne, around the Montagne de Rheims where the last German offensive was to begin. Fighting in support of Allied troops along the Somme, Louis reached the Rheims sector, where Corporal Adolf Hitler's regiment was part of the massive German assault. Will Jones rejoined his unit on the Somme in July, as it prepared to take part in the battle of Amiens.

  Louis fought on until the end of August, when his unit was pulled from the front, and in September he went on leave to stay with his parents in Paris. In her letters written to Cahors throughout the war, though she is always concerned about Jean, a medical auxiliary now—often at the front line, often under fire, often ill—it is Louis, “my second lieutenant,” about whom Louise frets the most. She loved all her boys, but “Louis made himself noticed and felt more than the other two.” Still, for her, “all that matters is that my children survive!”17

  After two days at home in Paris Louis wrote to the War Office requesting release from the army. He was still a boy: the handwriting of the letter is childish and hesitant. He sent it off on 4 September 1918, and five stamps, many addresses and over a year later it arrived at the War Office on 12 September 1919. “I have been engaged as a volunteer for the duration of the war since 5 July 1915 …I beg to request a transfer to the reserve,” Louis wrote to the Minister of War.18 He had been at the front for six months, and had written his letter knowing that on his return from leave he was to be reassigned to the 8th Battery and his artillery regiment was to be placed with the 2nd French Colonial Corps, under the command of the U.S. Army and General Pershing.

  This first solo attack by the American forces, part of the huge Champagne offensive, began on 12 September 1918 at St.-Mihiel, southwest of Verdun. Here Louis fought in soaking rain and deep muddy trenches. The American onslaught was only one of the Allied offensives orchestrated by General Foch. Another was the battle of Amiens, which had begun on 8 August. This time Will was lucky. His division's successful attack on Mont St.-Quentin in August, followed by the last Australian attack of the war at Montbrehein in early October, was the end of his war. Peace was declared on 11 November 1918; he had survived.

  While his request for release from the army winged its way from military
office to office, Louis had to fight on in the quagmire of the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Where he fought—at Souain-Perthes-les-Hurlus—is today a necropolis for many thousands of the dead—French, American and German. By the end of October 1918 Louis' Colonel Cambuzat commended him again: “Perfect behaviour. Remarkable drive, good conduct under fire. Good sense of command. Will make an excellent battery officer.”19

  As Louis' regiment was preparing for the last great offensive in November, the armistice was declared; a few days later the 49th Artillery made a triumphal entry through small French villages in the Moselle. Nearby, Louis' hero Pétain led the triumphal march into Metz, and Louis and his regiment attended when the president of the republic, Raymond Poincaré, arrived to decorate Pétain with his marshal's baton. General Pétain, now an exalted Maréchal de France, immediately fulfilled his promise and honoured the 49th Regiment with the Fourragère.

  For the next twelve months, as other soldiers were gradually demobilised, Louis was based at or near Metz in barracks. The year was passed in recovering ammunition and taking part in reviews and parades. Louis might have distinguished himself at hand-to-hand combat, but acting under orders remained impossible. In May 1919 he was cited for “unshakeable bravery” and “superb disregard for danger” under enemy attack at Hangard-en-Santerre on 9 April 1918, but his new squadron leader reported of him: “better in combat than during rest and instruction periods,” lacking “sufficient understanding of the role of the officer during the post-armistice period.”20

  Will Jones, meanwhile, was on his way back to Tasmania. After the armistice and three weeks' leave in Paris he set sail in the troopship SS Ypiranga in March 1919, heading for Cape Town, then Australia. He was just coming up to his twenty-fourth birthday. On 7 June, with two other diggers, he went into Cape Town to have several drinks at the Grand Hotel. At another hotel, the Fountain, they did likewise, went back to the Grand and had a few more, then went upstairs to dinner where they each had another couple of double whiskies. Dead drunk, the Australians were put out on the hotel balcony. Will fell to the pavement below and fractured the base of his skull. He was heaved into a taxi and taken to hospital, where he died an hour later. He left a kit bag and a wallet with £28.10s, souvenirs of battle in the shape of two German watches, seven pence, a German belt and a French calendar.

  At the Court of Enquiry proceedings in Cape Town, the finding was that the deceased “met his death by falling from a balcony of the Grand Hotel, Strand Street, Cape Town, on the evening of the seventh June 1919, about 9:45 p.m.: that there is no evidence showing any reasons for the deceased climbing or falling over the balcony fence—which stands some three feet six inches high…in the opinion of the court the deceased soldier was intoxicated at the time of the accident.”21

  Two-thirds of the Australian soldiers who served overseas became casualties of the Great War; over forty thousand of them are buried in the towns and fields of northern France, in known and unknown graves. Will Jones was given a military funeral.

  On 12 September 1919 the Ministry of War replied to Darquier's request of a year earlier and he was appointed to the reserve. He was demobilised on 1 October in Metz, and sent off from the 49th Artillery Regiment with this final report:

  In peacetime has not lived up to the hopes founded on his wartime behaviour. Has carried out no noteworthy service. Took advantage of his achievements as a group commander to make no further effort. Poorly carried out subsequent missions he was entrusted with. Ended his career with an act of indiscipline which entailed a punishment of 15 days' arrest.

  Judging himself to be demobilised, [Darquier] discharged himself from the regiment in the morning of 1 October, without waiting for the arrival of ministerial orders concerning his demobilisation—orders received in the evening of 1 October.22

  And so, in 1919 Louis Darquier left the army in disgrace.

  Pierre Darquier remained nominally mayor of Cahors until 1919— thirteen years of service which earned him the decoration of chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1913. Towards the end of 1918 the old family home in Cahors was rented out and he and Louise moved to an apartment in Neuilly, the leafy and elegant Parisian suburb near the Bois de Boulogne. The wide avenues and substantial private houses of Neuilly exude careful affluence, and Louise's choice was large enough for all the family, for Pierre's surgery and for the one or two domestics they always retained.

  Unlike the men of so many French families, the three Darquiers who served throughout the war survived, and by 1920 Pierre and Louise had their sons with them in Neuilly. While Jean ended up as a medical captain and was awarded the Croix de Guerre for heroism at Verdun, Louis' departure from the army was ignominious, although he had fought well. His army citation entitled him to a minor decoration—a Bronze Palm on his Croix de Guerre, but as, most unusually for him, he never mentioned this in his voluminous curricula vitae, it may well be that it was removed from him at this time. He spent the following decade loathing France.

  Later Louis transformed his hatred for France and his ignominious departure from the army into vehement patriotism. He remembered only the glorious victory of la patrie and his relish for battle, and bewailed the fate of French soldiers such as he, who had shed their blood for France while Jews and financiers had remained at home, making personal fortunes out of the war.

  Before the Great War, pacifism had little appeal in France to generations brought up in the shadow of the German enemy. After it, 1,400,000 had died, and more than a million disabled French soldiers returned home—the crippled, the disfigured, the gassed, the traumatised. There were the 600,000 widows, and many more thousands of fatherless children. Pacifism was to permeate an entire generation, as was its shadow, fascism.

  The rise of Hitler and the Nazis is always linked to the First World War and the humiliation inflicted upon Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, signed in June 1919. As firmly linked to the aftermath of that war is the rise of nationalism and fascism in France, which pounced upon the old divisive issues and weakened the republic, already enfeebled by the nation's terrible losses, both human and economic. To veterans who shared Louis Darquier's convictions, their hatred of the parliamentary government of the republic was based on their belief that it was now in the hands of parasites who used the sacrifice of the French soldier for their own ends.

  Action française had a good war, its jingoistic support for the royalist and nationalist cause expressed in witch-hunts against Germans, traitors, spies and foreigners. Omnipresent in hospitals, barracks and at the front, the newspaper loved to mythologise the immortal glory of the military heroes of France, one of whom was General Pétain, the supreme commander of the French army and the “Victor of Verdun.”23

  Many men prominent on the Catholic right and in Action Française after the war had been leaders during it: Pétain himself, General Maxime Weygand24—Foch's chief of staff—and the Catholic General édouard de Castelnau,25 who went on to found the Féderation Nationale Catholique, the fraternal partner of Action Française within the right wing of the Catholic laity. These were only a few of the vast army of shaky survivors who, like Adolf Hitler in Germany, extracted a poisoned sense of destiny from the Great War. By 1939, nothing could make the people of France, who had paid the highest price in the First World War, feel enthusiastic about repeating one month of it.

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  COCK

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  Scandal and Caprice

  EvERY TIME WILL was wounded, or invalided out of France, the Jones family received a telegram. When they received the telegram announcing his death in Cape Town, the Premier of Tasmania helped them find out almost immediately the true reason for it. Thereafter alcohol was never mentioned: Will was a casualty of the Great War, or had been “killed in an accident.” His kit bag and wallet were restored to his family, and his medals followed. In the same year, 1919, the old wooden homestead at Armidale burnt down. Harry moved his family into a comfortable house in Launcesto
n.

  He was still a wealthy man, but seems to have become less so with each passing year, as the family homes became increasingly modest. In 1921 they moved into the last of these, “Glenholme” at 3 Cypress Street, Launceston, a small and typically Australian suburban house, prettily gabled but unassuming, its kitchen mantelpiece decorated with the painted words: “Jesus is Lord.” Cypress Street is as gloomy as its name. In family accounts of those years in Launceston, Will is never forgotten, Myrtle never mentioned. By 1915 two of her brothers were teaching and studying, in Queensland and New South Wales. Myrtle may have followed them; there is no way of knowing for certain where she was until her marriage in Sydney in 1923.

  Louis in the meantime, after two weeks under military arrest, returned to Neuilly in October 1919. The war had devastated the population of the Lot, and like many of his fellow Lotois Pierre Darquier did not return to Cahors after the war. As he had done before, he made way for Anatole de Monzie, who added to his portfolio of political activities by taking over as mayor of Cahors. Pierre took a position as a doctor for an insurance company in Paris, La Préservatrice. He continued to have a surgery at home, but something had happened to his spirit during the war. He had seen too much. His eldest son Jean had been gassed, and returned home in 1919 to succumb to the worldwide influenza epidemic. He survived to follow his father into that field of medicine in which Pierre had become interested as a medical student, neurology. René, who was now eighteen, was studying law, which to Louise's delight he “passed with flying colours.”1