by John Pearson
Another source of real frustration was his feeling that at this crisis in his nation’s history he, Richard Bellamy, M.P., ought to be doing something. He wasn’t all too certain what. That in itself was one of his problems. At fifty-seven he was too old to fight, but he applied to his old crony, Admiral Hall, to see if he could be of any use to Naval Intelligence. They lunched together at the admiral’s club, and although the pink-faced little man with the great eyebrows was now one of the busiest and certainly the most important men in Whitehall, he hadn’t lost his quirky sense of humour.
“Work for me, Richard? Oh, that’s a good one! Very good indeed.”
“But why not, Adam? I’m quite serious.”
The sharp little sailor screwed up his eyes and nodded. “Just ask yourself, Richard, what could you do?”
“Well, anything you asked me to. I’m not exactly ignorant of naval matters.”
“No, you’re not. But you’re a politician, Richard my friend. The sort of chaps I need are specialists—coding experts, navigation men, gunnery officers.”
“I could learn.”
The admiral shook his cropped grey head. “We haven’t time to teach you, I’m afraid.” Then, seeing how crestfallen Richard looked, he added kindly, “Richard, my dear old thing, you must be realistic. War is a job for young men and for specialists. Your specialty’s politics. That’s where you belong and nowhere else. Just stick to that.”
Easier said than done. With war, the game of politics had ceased. Churchill, like some old-style buccaneer, was running the war at sea now from the Admiralty, whilst the great Kitchener, moustache and all, was the invulnerable war lord with direct responsibility to Asquith for the campaign in France. Opposition M.P.s—even when as well informed as Richard Bellamy—were not required.
But, as we know, it is the nature of political animals to long for power. Richard was no exception. He disliked Asquith, mistrusted what he called “that gang of mediocrities around him,” and as the war began in earnest, Richard, along with several of his front-bench opposition colleagues in the House, began to plan in earnest to dislodge him.
Like every soldier, James had had secret nightmares over how he would behave in the thick of battle. Would he disgrace his comrades? Would his nerve fail him at some crucial time? He need not have worried. From that first moment when he heard the gunfire crackling across the morning air of Mons, he recognised that he was in his rightful element at last. He was a soldier. This was something he had trained for, and it was just as well he had, for Mons was a terrifying baptism of fire for anyone.
At first James’s squadron was in reserve, so that during the first days fighting rumbled on in front of them with nothing but the gunfire and the smoke of battle and the long lines of wounded to give much hint of what was happening. At this stage, everybody’s optimism was such that the main feeling in the squadron was fear that the fighting would be over before they had their chance for what their commander called “a good hard crack at Fritz.”
James felt this more than anyone, but his colonel, a slow-spoken giant of a man who had ridden at Omdurman in ’98, counselled patience.
“Jerry’ll be out there for quite some time yet. Your chance will come soon enough, young Bellamy.”
“But surely, sir, our cavalry will soon be breaking through and we will simply have to follow up and guard the prisoners. This is the offensive General French has planned for.”
“You think so?” said the colonel drily, stroking his thin moustache. “I’ve an idea that our general’s been a shade too hopeful this time, Bellamy.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
The colonel shrugged his massive shoulders. “From the sound of things, I’d say the opposition’s far stronger than he’d reckoned. It doesn’t sound to me as if we’ve made our precious breakthrough. More like it someone’s breaking us.”
And so it proved. All afternoon the sound of firing steadily increased. Far away on the right the town was burning and a thick pall of smoke was drifting back towards the British lines. To start with all the firing seemed to come from rifles and machine-guns, but just before dusk artillery joined in—German artillery.
James and his squadron moved up soon after midnight. Morale was high, for there was still the firm belief that this was the start of the offensive that would bring them home by Christmas. But in their orders there was no mention of an advance, only of digging in and holding their section of the line. When dawn came James saw a scene of carnage—the shattered and abandoned town, dead British soldiers lying where they had fallen the day before, and out ahead of them the enemy.
Before the sun was up the enemy artillery had started again. The shells were falling half a mile ahead of them, and James and his men were waiting for the promised British field artillery to answer back. It never did. But just before eight o’clock the first grey wave of German infantry appeared, and hell broke loose. This was the chance the well-trained British infantry had waited for. Each marksman worked like an automaton—indeed, the British rate of rifle-fire was such that the Germans thought that they were up against machine-guns—and by eight-twenty the first enemy attack had failed. But throughout that morning the attacks renewed—again and yet again—and with each attack the British lines were thinned and fresh men scurried in to take the dead men’s places.
“Still no news of James?” asked Geoffrey Dillon.
Richard shook his head.
“Ah well,” said Dillon, making his best attempt at human sympathy, “no news is good news, I suppose.”
Richard nodded. “I suppose so,” he said wretchedly. “Of course one reads those ghastly casualty reports each day. Over twelve hundred dead already and the retreat still going on. Just tell me, Geoffrey, what does our blithering British high command think it’s up to? Throwing away our finest troops like this—not even knowing that von Kluck was there—and all to no earthly purpose!”
“Extraordinarily heroic, though, Richard. Six regiments holding up a German army corps for three whole days and giving our gallant allies time to scuttle back in safety to the Marne.”
“Exactly, Geoffrey. The usual British story, sheer incompetence at the top and heroism from the men who do the fighting. You know, if any harm has come to James, I’ll not rest until Sir John French has been court-martialled for wantonly hazarding the lives of the troops in his command. As for Asquith …”
“Yes, Richard. What about Asquith?”
“The sooner he’s out and we’ve a government that really knows how to fight this wretched war, the better.”
“Absolutely, Richard. On that I think that we’re agreed.”
But James was safe. In mid-September Hazel heard from him. After Mons he and his regiment had fought their way back south towards the Allied lines. It was a heroic retreat but one thing it destroyed forever was the British dream of “Home for Christmas.” As autumn turned to winter British troops were starting to dig in for what looked like being a long, hard-fought war. Mile on mile of barbed wire was going up through northern France, and James and his company advanced into Flanders and dug in before the little town of Ypres. Throughout October and November James somehow managed to survive the six weeks’ slaughter that was later known as the First Battle of Ypres. Tired, battle-stained, and half frozen, he spent that Christmas in the trenches. Instead of Mrs. Bridges’ cooking and his father’s best champagne, he dined off bully beef washed down with army tea and capped with a special Christmas tot of army rum. That was the one day when the barrage ceased, and on Christmas night he heard the British and the German troops singing their Christmas carols back and forth across the silent wastes of no man’s land.
It would have pleased him had he known that at that moment, in far-off Belgravia, as his wife, his father, Georgina, Prudence Fairfax, and the Dillons settled to their Christmas dinner, he was foremost in their thoughts.
“And what’s the latest news of James?” Prudence asked before her lips had even touched her turkey.
“Oh, he seems wonderful,” Hazel replied. “I heard from him for Christmas and he seemed in the very best of spirits.”
She didn’t add that she was worried by the recent change in his letters. They were no longer full of all the optimistic chat of the first few weeks of war. Instead they now all seemed much the same; he was missing her, he loved her, he was “managing all right,” his men were “the finest bunch of warriors a man could wish to serve with.”
“Pity he didn’t land a spot of Christmas leave,” said Dillon tactlessly.
“Oh, but he did,” said Hazel quickly. “He turned it down, though, because he said his duty was to stay with his men. One of the other officers with a family came instead.”
“How very wonderful your husband is, my dear,” said Lady Dillon. “You must be so very proud of him.”
A big, fat, gushing woman with a heart of gold, Lady Dillon was as different from her husband as one human being can be from another. Hazel and Georgina liked her, which was as well, since the Dillons had been increasingly making their presence felt at Eaton Place and a strange friendship seemed to have developed between the two archenemies, Richard and Sir Geoffrey. This was the first time that the Dillons had shared such a family affair; and with dinner over, as the two men sipped their port before they joined the ladies, they had quite clearly reached a state of mutual understanding.
“Come now, Geoffrey,” Richard was saying. “You know more about the inner workings of the Party than any man alive. What’s going on?”
Dillon smiled with bland self-satisfaction. “Richard, you flatter me,” he said.
“Not flattery at all. You know it’s true. But that’s not the point. The time has obviously come to act. We can’t allow this muddle and this slaughter to go on. We’re paying for Asquith and Kitchener and the whole gang of them in young men’s lives. Perhaps I feel all this as strongly as I do because of James, but the time has clearly come to get a coalition of the best brains in the country to run this war. There’s no other way.”
Dillon drained his port appreciatively. “I quite agree, and so do a lot of others. But as you realise there are difficulties.”
“You mean because Bonar Law, our gallant leader of the opposition, is too spineless to speak out.”
Dillon smiled and peered over his spectacles at Richard. “Bonar’s a wise old owl. He knows how easy it would be for opinion to turn against us, so he bides his time.”
“Meanwhile thousands of men are getting slaughtered every day because of conceited generals and drunken politicians.”
“Strong words, Richard.”
“I mean every one of them.”
There was a brief silence, broken only by the sound of Geoffrey Dillon snipping the end off his cigar. “If you are really serious, there is one thing you could do,” he said slowly.
“Anything, Geoffrey, if it would sink this government.”
“Write for Northcliffe.”
“You must be mad.”
“I’m utterly in earnest. How else can we get the facts across? You’ll never get the chance to tell the truth in Parliament, but Northcliffe’s the sworn enemy of Asquith. Just state your case, and you could get that coalition quicker than you think.”
“Geoffrey,” said Richard cannily, “I think you know a good deal more than you’re letting on.”
“I generally do,” said Dillon. “But there’s one thing that I’m quite sure of. You are the one man who could do this properly. You’re not a cheap journalist from the gutter press. You’re an ex-minister who’s specialised in matters of defence. You know the facts and feel powerfully about them. Think it over, Richard. This could be the most important thing you’ve ever done.”
Richard pondered. “I’ll think about it,” he said finally. “But from the start, there’s one absolute condition I must insist on. My name must not appear. For James’s sake, if for none other.”
Dillon nodded. “Pity, Richard, but I understand. Now shall we join the ladies?”
That spring saw two offensives. In France, the British General Staff began to pour its new reserves of men into the two-mile-wide death trap that formed the gruesome setting for the so-called Second Battle of Ypres. And in London, Alfred Harmsworth, Baron Northcliffe, proprietor of the Times and the Daily Mail and probably the most influential newspaperman in history, began his offensive against the Asquith government. Both battles raged with great ferocity.
At Ypres, James Bellamy, still a mere captain, but because of losses now in command of a squadron, fought with desperate gallantry. In the abortive storming of the ridge, his was the one original squadron which reached and held its full objective. They stayed there two days and nights against the full power of the German army. When they were ordered to retreat before a German poison gas attack, James led back the remains of his squadron. There were nine of them. In divisional despatches James was recommended for the Victoria Cross.
In London, Richard Bellamy had launched his attack upon the government in the Daily Mail, but his timing was a good deal better than the British General Staff’s. He had prepared his articles with skill and his facts were virtually unanswerable. He exposed the muddles in the High Command, the shortages of ammunition, and the defects in the Allied strategy just at the moment when the scandal of the lack of shells at Ypres was breaking. The evident authority with which he wrote undoubtedly increased the popular demand for a new coalition government to pursue the war with skill and vigour. Not unnaturally, Richard hoped that he would find his place within it.
It was the end of April when James came home on leave. He was exhausted, very much on edge, and still suffering from the effects of German poison gas. But no one at Eaton Place really appreciated this. They saw a moody, sullen, bitter man in place of the high-spirited young officer who had gone off to war just eight months earlier, and they wondered miserably what had happened.
Hazel inevitably bore the brunt and there was little she could do for him. Suddenly he seemed to have no hope, no aim in life, and no desire for anything—not even love. His one obsession now was with the Front and with his comrades who were in the fighting. His second night at home he awoke shouting that the Boches were coming. She did her best to calm him.
“Darling, you’re back in London. You’re away from it,” she said. But he would not be comforted.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “There’s no escape. When you have seen what I have it’s with you night and day.”
Then he began to shake. She held him until he slipped off into troubled sleep.
Richard never discovered how his name got out as the author of the Northcliffe articles. He always suspected Geoffrey Dillon; there was no proof, but it would have been in character. At any rate, by the time the damage had been done it scarcely mattered.
Certainly the rumours were around Westminster by the time James came home on leave, and as a result the name Bellamy was not the best loved among the senior officials in the War Office. It was one of these, an elderly, officious man, who noticed that a Captain Bellamy was being recommended for a V.C. He stopped it just in time.
“Thank God I spotted it,” he said to another senior official. “The Minister would never have forgiven us if we’d gone and made a hero of that Bellamy fellow’s son.”
The other senior official nodded. “Good for you,” he said. “But what are we going to do with him?”
“Young Bellamy? Oh, shove him somewhere on the staff where we can keep an eye on him. One must be careful.”
And so it was that just a few days later, still in the middle of his leave, a very puzzled James was summoned to appear before his colonel commandant at Knightsbridge Barracks, to receive the most scathing lecture of his life. Word had got round, the colonel said, that whilst on leave James had been spreading rumours prejudicial to the interests of the service. He had been making criticisms of his senior officers and of the supply of ammunition at the front. There was a possibility that these remarks had been picked up by the yellow press.
Angrily James attempted to ask who was accusing him and what the charges were, but the colonel brushed aside his interjections.
“No one’s accusing you of anything, Captain Bellamy. It’s just that, as you should be aware, there are some things that officers in this regiment do and some things that—er—they don’t. I feel you have disgraced your comrades and yourself. You are no longer one of us, and I have recommended your secondment to the staff.”
There was no argument or chance of an appeal, nothing for James to do except salute, turn on his heel, and march off in the cold wind, an outcast from the regiment he loved.
When he had gone, the colonel commandment looked over at his adjutant.
“Dashed hard on a fellow having a politician for a father,” he said wearily.
But things weren’t all that promising for Richard either. The changes he had campaigned for all came to pass within a month—a coalition government, a Ministry of Munitions under Lloyd George, Bonar Law and Balfour both back in the government. But what about himself? He had been hoping for the Admiralty or the Secretaryship of State for War. He had the knowledge and ability and he had done more than most to bring the coalition into being. But once again he learned the saddest lesson: there is no gratitude in politics. When he was finally fobbed off with one of the most modest offices of state the government could offer, he accepted with bad grace—but he accepted. Better to be First Civil Lord at the Admiralty than a mere backbencher: better almost anything than that. Years later, in an unguarded moment, Balfour told him what went wrong.
“You know what ruined your career,” the great man said. “Writing those wretched articles for Northcliffe. When Bonar Law found out he said he simply couldn’t trust you any more.”
Almost inevitably the long middle months of war became a time of discontent at 165. Now for the first time food was getting scarce. Edward joined the infantry, Rose became a “Clippie” on the buses, and even Hudson felt that loyalty to King and Country outweighed his duty to the Bellamys. Luckily the recruiting board rejected him when he tried to volunteer to join the army, but he was finally enrolled as a special constable. As he explained to Richard, “Humble although it is, it does permit me to make my contribution to the waging of this war.”