From Ice Floes to Battlefields

by Anne Strathie

  12. The Looker-On, 14 February 1914.

  13. Ibid., 31 January 1914.

  14. The Times, 13 May 1914.

  15. The Looker-On, 30 May, 6 June 1914.

  16. The Looker-On, 30 May 1914

  17. This and other details of the Duke of Edinburgh’s activities are taken from the ship’s log (www.naval-history.net).

  18. Pennell to Captain Ramsay, 26 April 1914, ref. 2012/437, Waitaki District Libraries and Archive, Oamaru, New Zealand.

  19. Information on the wedding (in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster) is from public records, New Zealand newspaper reports and Ponting, The Great White South, pp. 129–30.

  20. Pennell to Wright, 7 May 1914 (auctioned on 20 September 2011 by Charles Leski Auctions, lot 69).

  21. Pennell is alluding to the Franco-British Entente Cordiale (1904).

  22. Strange and Bashford, Griffith Taylor, pp. 72–6; Sanderson, Griffith Taylor, pp. 87–92.

  23. The Times, 18 November 1913.

  24. Speak, Deb – Geographer, Scientist, Antarctic Explorer, p. 11.

  25. Washington Post, 14 March 1914, p. 14.

  26. Our Mutual Girl, IMDb website; the denial was reported in several newspapers, including in Australia and New Zealand.

  27. Newspaper reports, church website and details on Christie’s website of Scott’s Antwerp medal (www.christies.com).

  28. Wheeler, Cherry, chapter 8.

  29. Rodin sought refuge in Britain in autumn 1914, when Paris appeared under threat from German invasion. He initially (at the suggestion of close friends from Paris) based himself in Cheltenham, arriving in October 1914, three months after the unveiling of the statue of Wilson. Rodin would have passed the statue by his erstwhile pupil every morning on his way from his lodgings to the Town Hall, where war news was posted up. Whilst in Cheltenham Rodin wept when he read about the destruction of Rheims Cathedral and other beautiful medieval buildings in France. Rodin’s Kiss was shown in Cheltenham’s Art Gallery and Museum (The Wilson) in the 1930s (for several years) and again in 2014 (the centenary of his visit).

  30. Young, A Great Task of Happiness, chapters 11–18.

  31. Newspaper reports including Daily Mail and The Times; Cruden Bay website, www.crudenbay.org.uk.

  32. Caird was also well connected in literary and artistic circles through his wife, Sophie Gray, the sister of Effie Gray, who had been married both to John Ruskin (an artist much admired by Edward Wilson) and John Everett Millais.

  33. Shackleton, The Heart of the Antarctic and South (2007, Wordswoth Editions Ltd version), Preface.

  34. Haddelsey, chapter 7.

  7

  From Arctic to Antwerp

  On 4 August 1914, Victor Campbell sailed the Willem Barents into Grønfjorden, the main Norwegian settlement on Spitsbergen. When he disembarked he found British, Norwegian, Swedish and Russian mariners and prospectors huddled around the settlement radio or discussing the news that Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia.1 Campbell was coming to the end of his second visit to Spitsbergen on behalf of the Northern Exploration Company, for whom he had been carrying out work since returning to England in early 1913. Campbell and his wife had, over the years, become accustomed to long separations and short periods together with their young son.2

  For this voyage, Campbell had recruited his long-standing friend Michael Barne (a Discovery veteran) and Terra Nova helmsman Mortimer McCarthy; Wilfred Bruce had accompanied him on his first voyage, but had since married.3 The Willem Barents had been refitted in Tromsø and, apart from some difficulties in persuading NEC’s London office to send money to pay for the repairs, things had gone well. Late pack-ice had sometimes hampered their progress but by the end of July they had delivered food supplies to encampments, loaded coal to take back for analysis, built a new settlement and checked that NEC’s land claim signs had not been removed.

  After digesting the latest news about the situation in the Balkans, Campbell set out to visit NEC’s marble quarry and the last few sites he had yet to visit. On 7 August the Willem Barents arrived at Krossfjorden, where the Germans had built a meteorological station which, Campbell knew, had a two-way radio. The station leader told him that France and Germany were also now at war. When the Willem Barents arrived at Grønfjorden the following day, Campbell found out that Britain had declared war on Germany.

  Campbell immediately set sail for Aberdeen, but when, two days out from Spitsbergen, a propeller blade broke, he changed course for Tromsø. He, Barne and McCarthy put the Willem Barents in dock, signed themselves off from their duties with NEC and went to find a ship which would take them back to Britain. They arrived back in England on 28 August; by mid-September Campbell had been appointed as No. 2 in Drake Battalion, part of the 1st Brigade of the newly formed Royal Naval Division.

  The RND had been formed, largely at the instigation of Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, soon after the outbreak of war. It had three brigades. Its 1st and 2nd (Naval) Brigades were largely made up of naval reservists, serving men currently not attached to a ship and volunteers from all backgrounds. Each brigade had four battalions, named for famous admirals: 1st Brigade was made up of Drake, Benbow, Hawke and Collingwood battalions; 2nd Brigade of Nelson, Howe, Hood and Anson. The 3rd (Marine) Brigade was drawn from shore-based mariners from Chatham, Portsmouth, Plymouth and Deal (for which its battalions were named).

  As the RND would need to fight alongside army units, some senior army officers had been drafted into the Division. Under this hybrid command structure, Campbell’s brigade commander, Commodore Henderson, reported to Major-General Paris, the Division’s commanding officer.

  Within a few weeks of joining, Campbell was appointed commander of Drake Battalion. After four years of working with small groups of skilled men, he was now in charge of 1,000 men, including about thirty full-time naval officers, several hundred below-decks seamen, reservists and raw recruits.4 But Campbell’s time on the Terra Nova expedition had taught him to expect and deal with the unexpected.

  The week before Campbell arrived back in Britain the Germans had attacked and occupied Brussels. The Belgian government, royal family and army senior command retreated to Antwerp. The fortified port was, in effect, the last bastion between the German army and the Channel ports.

  In Britain, newspapers were full of reports based on official government announcements, army dispatches and cables sent from the front by newspaper correspondents who were following British and Allied troops as they moved round Europe. One byline which appeared regularly above first-hand accounts was that of Central New Agency’s ‘B.J.’ Hodson. Since leaving Akaroa in 1912, Hodson had spent most of his time in Eastern Europe, reporting on the Balkan Wars. As an ex-soldier, he was accustomed to being on the front line and had, when based at a gun emplacement near Constantinople, lyrically described ‘missiles singing across the valley, raising clouds of earth as they plunged into the hill around the battery’.

  By September 1914 Hodson was in Antwerp, where he travelled to the city’s outer ring of fortifications to report on a visit by the King of Belgium to his troops. He was greeted as a comrade by Belgian soldiers, who had been fighting since early August and were already exhausted:5

  My lieutenant was a Brussels man. He married on 8 July, and his wife was still at Brussels, only 12 miles distant. This he told me while now and then rifle fire rattled viciously behind us. Four black-frocked priests dug a large hole, where, just as the sun set, they placed four bodies of brave Belgian soldiers, and read a brief burial service … The eager question was asked, ‘Are any British troops coming?’

  When Hodson went to see the German defences around Brussels and Louvain he found them ‘characterised by German thoroughness [and] … well furnished with machine guns, field pieces and howitzers of considerable calibre’. Any frontal attack on them would, he decided, be ‘a very serious proposition’. He was equally impressed at the resilience of Belgian troops who tried to hold Termonde, south-west of Antwerp,
against the Germans:

  ... one company was cut off … others hid in the ruins of the burned streets until the Germans retreated … The Germans burned the fine old Town Hall … The scene presents itself to the imagination as one rivalling Dante’s ‘Inferno’. Overhead shells screamed … in the outer darkness stood the silent charred skeletons of twelve hundred once happy homesteads.

  When he arrived in Antwerp on 26 September, Hodson was somewhat surprised to find locals going about their business ‘in placid Belgian style’. American reporters began to leave town in search of ‘war atmosphere’ for their dispatches. Hodson headed for a village south of Antwerp where he found that houses had been gutted and the streets were littered with shattered glass:

  My chauffeur pulls up close to an arch, which is barricaded by railway trucks … I produce my papers and am informed that the Germans are in a coppice some 300 metres further on, and that I had better have the car turned round. This done, I mount the railway embankment cautiously … the scene before me is … a far, smiling prospect of flat meadows broken up by woodland – mustard and cress beds broken up by broad beans.

  He learned that only recently the apparent calm had been broken by the ‘harsh clack-clack-clack of a German machine gun’, which had resulted in the deaths of two locals and the wounding of two of their companions.

  On 28 September Hodson reported from the fortified settlements south of Antwerp:

  Shells followed a survey of the town by a German aeroplane. The first fell into a cemetery where a company of soldiers were burying a popular comrade … The second projectile struck the Barracks and the third the Red Cross Hospital … All around the horizon there were clouds of smoke from burning villages.

  Hodson noticed some large craters near the town’s waterworks; he was told they had been caused by German 11-inch shells, but:

  [a] few seconds’ delay would have saved us the trouble of inquiry, for, singing overhead, there came another, which likewise exploded in the field, about 200 metres away … [I] awaited events with a London photographer, who was desirous of obtaining ‘front seat’ pictures of shells bursting … The fourteenth projectile … whined, as it seemed, up into our very faces, and dropped into the garden of a cottage nearby … This satisfied the photographer, and was quite enough for me.

  As the bombardment continued, Zeppelins and aircraft from both sides regularly flew above the city. On 1 October crowds gathered to watch an aerial battle between a Belgian biplane and a German Taube monoplane:

  The Taube had chased the biplane …, the Belgian pilot not being averse to persuading the Taube to come within the range of the forts. The Taube’s armament included a mitrailleuse and the Belgian pilot, armed only with an automatic pistol, found himself unable to cope effectively with his foe … the Belgian pilot began to descend, and the Taube, greatly daring, followed him down until he found himself ringed around with bursting shrapnel. Promptly he rose again and flew away to the south-east … The thrilling encounter was witnessed by practically the whole population, who crowded the streets and house-roofs when they heard the sound of the guns.

  That night, another Taube dropped leaflets suggesting that the Belgians should consider surrendering to the Germans rather than fight in the interests of Britain and Russia.

  On 3 October Churchill arrived in Antwerp, where he tried to persuade the Belgian king and army commanders to stay and defend the city rather than retreat to Ostend. To encourage them he offered to send reinforcements in the form of the 1st and 2nd Naval Brigades of the Royal Naval Division.

  On 4 October, Campbell and his fellow officers were told that they would be crossing the Channel and joining Belgian and other troops in Antwerp, in an effort to hold the city.6 Training exercises were halted, firearms and ammunition issued from naval stockpiles and naval sweaters and trousers handed out to volunteers; necessities such as water-bottles, food-containers, haversacks, winter-weight outer garments and first aid supplies were procured from wherever they could be found.

  Campbell and his men marched to Dover, where ships were waiting to carry them across the Channel in convoy. The vessels were so crowded that few managed to sleep during the crossing. It was still dark when they reached Ostend, where they unloaded their kit and gulped down some food. Some men scribbled letters home to go back with the ship. Campbell and his men piled into the trains and requisitioned London buses which were waiting to take them to Antwerp. The men were ordered to stay awake in case the Germans attacked the trains or convoys of buses, but few managed to do so.

  In the small hours of 6 October 8,000 exhausted RND officers and men arrived in Antwerp. As they marched through the city they were greeted by flag-waving, cheering crowds who proffered beer and coffee. But they continued to the outer ring of fortifications, where Belgian troops were waiting to be relieved after days of being pounded by German ‘Big Bertha’ howitzers and heavy artillery.

  Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, considered the situation at Antwerp to be so serious that he sent Colonel John Seely, one of his senior staff officers (a personal friend of Churchill and a former Secretary of State for War), to assess the situation. If Seely reported back that there was a chance the city could be held for a few days more 20,000 men of the BEF’s 7th Division would come to Antwerp; if not, French would deploy the 7th Division elsewhere.

  On 7 October Campbell and other RND battalion commanders were ordered to retire from the outer ring of fortifications to Antwerp’s inner ring of forts. Once there, Campbell and his men began sinking additional trenches between forts 4 and 5, which defended the roads and railway lines running south to Brussels. With Brussels already in German hands the only main means of escape from Antwerp was to the west, where the railway line to Ghent and the coast was still open. But to reach the railway line Campbell and his men would need to cross the River Scheldt on a pontoon bridge. The bridge and the roads leading down to it were already packed with Antwerp residents who were fleeing their homes, rather than risk being killed in the bombardment or taken prisoner by German soldiers. That night the Germans stepped up their bombardment.

  By dawn on 8 October much of Antwerp was ablaze or in ruins. During the day rumours began circulating that some forts had already been taken by the Germans and, as darkness began to fall, Seely and another staff officer came to Campbell and told him to retire his men as the RND was about to withdraw from Antwerp.

  Campbell, reluctant to accept orders from a staff officer, told Seely he needed to confirm the order with Commodore Henderson. Seely assured Campbell that everyone was retiring, heading for nearby stations, where trains were waiting to take them to Ostend and British ships. He gave Campbell a map and explained where he would find the trains and, in all probability, the other RND battalions.

  Campbell sent a runner to the neighbouring forts to double-check for other RND men who might still be there, but was assured that there were none in sight. He led his men out of the trenches and, following 2nd Brigade, entered the city, keeping his machine-gunners at the back of the column to act as rear-guard and disguise the retreat. Seely, who was by now driving around in a car, came up to Campbell twice to make sure he knew where he was going.

  Campbell led his men through the crowded streets of a city none of them had seen in daylight. Smoke and dust from burning and collapsing buildings swirled around them and, as they headed downhill towards the river and the pontoon bridge, fumes and smoke from blazing petrol tankers on the river bank made it hard to breathe. Moving with the crowds, they eventually made it across the bridge and, in company of Plymouth Marine Battalion, tried to find a station and a train heading towards Ostend.

  Campbell kept hoping to meet up with the other three 1st Naval Brigade battalions but there was still no sign of them. He asked several brigade and divisional senior officers, but they had not seen them either. All Campbell could do was to try to get his own men away and safely to Ostend. He eventually managed to get all of his men, some of whom were wo
unded or on the point of collapse, onto one of the trains heading towards the coast. When it stopped about 10 miles short of Ostend, at Blankenberge, an officer from Chatham Marine Battalion managed, against the odds, to find a billet for Campbell and his men. In the morning one of the light trams which usually carried holiday-makers along the sea-front brought them to Ostend.

  On 10 October the Military Governor of Antwerp surrendered his city to the Germans.

  When Campbell returned to England he discovered his battalion was the only one from 1st Brigade to have escaped from Antwerp and that almost 2,000 men from Benbow, Hawke and Collingwood were missing. It seemed that they had not, as Seely had suggested, left their positions ahead of Campbell’s battalion but that, due to a misunderstanding, had received their orders to retire too late. Over the coming days and weeks it became clear that most of the men in Campbell’s brigade had either been taken prisoner by the Germans or fled into neutral Holland, where, in accordance with the rules of war, they had been interned.

  B.J. Hodson had stayed to the bitter end; he had sent a cable describing the fall of Antwerp, but, thanks to the censor, readers only saw a truncated version:

  We hear our guns crashing out loud defiance to the enemy in a persistent roar. We hear the enemy’s reply almost as distinctly. (The message here breaks off, the remaining portion having been stopped by the censor.) (Signed) B.J. Hodson (Central News).

  Some people suggested that the RND men at Antwerp had not been sufficiently well trained and equipped for their task. When a letter from one of them, Mr F.B. Hulke, was published in The Times of 16 October and in regional newspapers, Bertie Hodson felt he should let people know what he had seen at Antwerp: