by Mark Rowe
The Admiralty would supply details about the enemy (such as: were they waiting for him to land?). “The object in view would be fully attained if a considerable force of the enemy were attracted to the coast. You will be re-embarked as soon as this is accomplished,” his orders ran.
Aston reached his command at Chatham at 1.30am on the Wednesday, August 26. On the way the Admiralty had sent him another telegram, which already made a dangerously vague and contradictory mission worse. If, on arrival at Ostend, he found the enemy, ‘you must act according to circumstances and their strength, endeavouring to avoid bringing calamity upon the town for the sake of a minor operation’. Some of that was contradicted by yet another message on the way to Belgium; if the enemy were in Ostend, Aston was to land somewhere else, and turn them out (and never mind the townspeople?). Aston had an impossible job. As he wrote later, putting the best face on it, the hope “was that my little force would be looked upon as the advance guard of a strong British army and have some moral effect. Failing that if it drew down upon it a strong enemy force that would otherwise be launched into the decisive battle in France it might be considered to achieve a strategic effect.” Put less kindly, he was bait. If the Germans took no notice, he was wasting his time; if he succeeded, and made the Germans think he was a threat, they would smash him, and Ostend.
Aston arrived off Ostend on the Wednesday night. The admiral carrying him was against landing the Marines in a choppy sea in the dark. Aston did not have any staff, ‘not even a servant to look after my kit’. He landed at 3.30am on the Thursday, August 27, and began preparing for his 3200 men and 300 tons of stores, ‘designed mostly for the defence of Scapa Flow’. He had besides to deal with the mayor of a town of 25,000 people ‘in a state of panic’, the Belgian military, and the British embassy at Antwerp, as the Germans had marched into Brussels days before. “Then ended the longest and heaviest day I have ever spent,” Aston recalled. “But ended with men on the approaches to the town and entrenched.” For that he had to thank his ‘magnificent men’, mostly old reservists, who however were not trained to work in battalions; nor were there many officers to go around. Aston set up 3000 men on a seven-mile perimeter, thin by the standards of war, and which as he wrote would have ‘sufficed to keep off a cavalry raid’, but nothing more serious. The month ended with Aston ordered to return to England ‘at your earliest convenience’. That meant fetching all the 300 tons of stores, including many tons at a barracks a mile from the quay. “Well,” said a doubtless by now thoroughly weary Aston, “the men rose to the occasion magnificently. Men who had lain on outposts all night came in marching order also carrying WP [waterproof] sheets, blankets and boxes of ammunition. Then did fatigue work on the quay.” All 300 tons went back the way they had come, and the Marines embarked in the dark, ‘cheered by the town as they cheered the British in’, Aston noted cynically. Ostend had been a town ‘that did not want us’, because they did not want the war to hurt them or their property. So much for Britain going to war to save them.
III
Aston landed at Portsmouth and took the train to London, returning to the Admiralty one week after he left. What had he - and his hard-working men - achieved?
They had not fought any Germans, which Aston implied was as well, because his brigade of four battalions was ‘not really battalions but just herds of old reservists’, and ‘recruits who had never fired their rifles’. “The main difficulty,” Aston summed up, as if men too rusty or untrained to be any good were not difficulties enough, “is that no-one will explain to the First Lord what a battalion or a brigade is and what it requires in the way of officers, organisation and equipment to make it a mobile unit in the field.” Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, was only ever interested in being a commander, issuing commands; he had been born into an aristocratic family that had been telling other people what to do for centuries. How to make Churchill’s commands work was for lower ranks to fix; or not, as Aston found out, and as others would find out later.
IV
In London again by the end of August, Lady Gwendoline Churchill kept up twice-daily letters to her husband Jack, still asking him to write to her and console her. Not that she was doing a very good job of consoling her husband, who was the one who faced the prospect of going to war. She wrote to him on September 1 after lunch at the Admiralty, with news about him, from Kitchener, via her brother-in-law Winston; Jack’s yeomanry would train for three or four months, then go to war: “I am not happy as you may imagine as that means you will go face to face with those swines of Germans who by that time will be more savage and desperate than ever,” she wrote, tactlessly. She did however do an excellent job, passing on gossip. In another letter that day after a visit from Winston’s wife Clemmie she reported that Winston was too tired to motor to see Jack: “W had only three hours sleep last night; there was something critical, I don’t know what ...”
The next day, she called the war news ‘pretty grim’: “Do you think we will be able to hold the Germans long enough to give the Russians time to march on to Berlin, I doubt it very much.” Again, we see that faith in Russia to do the hard work, sooner or later to be disappointed. She shuddered at the long list of missing troops in the newspapers, and yet again in a self-obsessed way urged her husband to visit her and give her courage to bear it all (but wasn’t her husband the one in need of comfort?). In the afternoon she was ‘so miserable’, still haunted by list of missing men, but cheered by her biggest piece of gossip yet; from Winston and Asquith. She marked this letter ‘secret’:
The PM was at lunch and he told me that our Army is the best, better than the Germans and better than the French. The German individually are rotten, cannot face steel, cannot shoot, but their headquarter staffs is splendid, organisation and strategy.
Was Asquith unconsciously projecting his dissatisfaction with the panicky, dumb British headquarters on the Germans?!
August 1914 ended with many men where they had not started the month. Alan Brooke was in Cairo. He saw the sights, such as the well where Potiphar was supposed to have imprisoned Joseph, and (more likely genuine, and more likely to interest Brooke the artilleryman) the marks made by Napoleon’s guns on the city gate and nearby mosques more than a century before. On August 30 he took a trip to the Sphinx and then the Great Pyramid:
...and went right up to the King’s chamber in the very centre. It was desperately hot and stuffy inside and stank of bats but I would not have missed going inside for a lot. We then climbed on to the top and were well repaid by the magnificent view from the top. I felt I could have stopped all day on top looking around. On our way back we dropped into the zoo and had tea there ...
For many, in the same place as ever, life went on as ever. Frank Balfour in Sudan was ‘wrestling very inadequately’, so he told his friend Irene Lawley, ‘with one of the plagues of Egypt’: locusts. Working out of a steamer along 20 miles of both banks of the Nile, his weapons against the pests were paraffin and arsenic:
A swarm of locusts is a thing to wonder at. The eggs from which these have hatched may have been laid years ago - as soon as there are good rains and food for the young crawling locusts they hatch out. As we have them now they are bright green-yellow and an advancing swarm looks as if the ground was all on the boil. Later they will go black and shed their skins - after that they can flie - the object is to kill them all before that happens. It’s a brutal business - you drive hundreds of thousands into a clump of bushes, surround it with dry stuff - pour paraffin on top and apply the match - or else you lay poisoned grass on the ground, let them eat that.
On August 31 William Swift’s daughter-in-law Annie called on him in Churchdown. Her son Reginald, who had joined the army’s commissariat (food supply) branch in mid-August, had left the Bristol port of Avonmouth for abroad. “He has sent his photograph. He is a nice looking lad. Annie will get a dozen taken from it. He is in uniform, looks well. She took a bag of apples
back with her and brought me a bottle of jam.” The next day Swift rose early as usual, just before 6am. As a man in his 70s, he was asking a lot of himself by working five hours in the garden: “Had two or three swoons perhaps the effect of the heat and of my hurrying to get the potatoes out while the fine weather lasts.” A letter from his Aunt Sarah asked him to tell Mr Hooper, her landlord - who wanted to move into her house - that she would not leave until the proper time, April 1916. That may have seemed a way off to a man like Swift, who might have sensed he was near the end of his time, and who was anxious for the young men of his family heading for danger.
Shadowy as the first battles in Europe were, it was dawning on some that war between two of the most powerful nations ever would be on a scale not seen before. As Donald Weir, the army officer in India, wrote to his mother on August 27, having heard the first news of the BEF: “The war will no doubt last a very long time and the losses will be enormous on both sides before any final result is attained.”
Chapter 23
To the end of the world
The world has indeed never been the same again, and never will be.
Antony, A Record of Youth, by his father, the Earl of Lytton (1935)
The same amateurism that made a shambles of the Ostend expedition at the end of August 1914 had already doomed the Gallipoli campaign by the time Gerald Legge landed in July 1915. Even on the battlefield, he could not help telling his father, Lord Dartmouth, about the wildlife - ‘some topping birds’ - with a difference; he was no longer the lone hunter: “No big birds ... which surprises me as they would get lots of cheap meals here now.”
He kept his hunter’s instinct and curiosity. He wrote of ‘wandering about the front line’ for two days before he led his company of South Staffords there for the first time. “I am enjoying myself hugely at present,” he said, “it is only the smell and flies I object to.” All he left unsaid was what was making the stink and so many flies, and what vultures, if there had been any, could feed on. The locals, too, seemed to evoke his travels in Sudan the year before. “Their snipers are very accurate and very quick and I respect them. They, the Turks, are real gentlemen and fight as such. They could shell our hospitals and hospital ships for certain but never yet have they fired at either.” It did not seem to occur to Legge that the Turkish defenders were saving their guns for the men they had not hurt yet.
From a friend of a friend, Legge had heard how the attack, meant to capture the Turkish capital Constantinople and change the war, had gone wrong before it even began: “... if only the fleet had not come fooling around before the Army was ready we could have gone straight through with little trouble.” Three months on, the campaign had stalled, and what Legge called ‘this old hill Achi Baba’, a commanding point on the Gallipoli peninsula, was a long way off yet. He summed up: “Now we have many thousands of men here and can move but very slowly with thousands of lives lost. It seems like a baddish bit of self-advertisement by someone.”
A letter to a friend dated August 5, after nine days in the trenches, had much the same tone; and if you sensed any faltering in his good cheer, any wistfulness, and brooding on death, you may have been reading too much into his words, written on very small sheets of (unusually for him) plain paper.
It was most interesting and in spite of flies, heat and stinks I was completely and entirely happy there. It seems odd that there are people who can be happy with all that noise and suffering going on all round and I am rather ashamed of it in a way but still I am sure a contented and happy man in command of a company is an asset even if he is a damned bad soldier. The Turks are gentlemen and fight as such; their snipers are sportsmen and I respect them. I had an exciting bout with one, one night I went out to stalk him but he knew his job too well, which was to lie still while I had to move the result was he located me before I located him and he put two or three all round me so I gave him best and crawled back to the trench with my tail down ...
Again, despite the suffering due to the extreme climate of the Mediterranean midsummer, let alone the fighting, Legge credited the Turks as gentlemen, and likened war to sport. He went on:
... it is extraordinary how one can carry on with very little sleep for a long time and how fit one feels on it but I expect it tells after a time. I wish we could get done with this old war all the same; I long for the old life again but I suppose it can never be the same with all those good fellows away. Did you see that Woosham was killed out here. That is the greatest loss I have had in this war. After all he and I have been through together it seems hard for him to go out like that. I wish I could tell you all that I believe we are going to do today I hope it is going to have a big effect out here but I am sworn to secrecy. Write and tell me anything cheerful you can. Yours ever Gerald Legge.
Four days later he and his company left their trenches to attack machine-guns, and snipers who seemed to aim at leaders. Legge was dressed conspicuously in shorts, puttees and light boots with rubber soles. One of his men, Private Apdale, wrote later that he bandaged the wounded Legge’s arm and leg. “The most marvellous thing about all this, how I was not riddled with bullets I shall never understand if I live to be a thousand. God alone knows why I was spared ... the only reason I can give that I was not riddled with bullets is that the Turks seeing me dressing wounded may have refrained from firing at me.” He wrote clumsily, like a man not used to putting his words on paper, and trying to make sense of something as inhuman as battle. Apdale told how Legge’s servant, Private Walters, came to them, with a wounded wrist, and Legge was hit again. Legge supposedly told Apdale to find stretcher bearers. ‘Shall I take my equipment?’ Apdale claimed he asked.
No, he says, so I took my rifle and bayonet bandolier water bottle and made a dart across the open, back to find any stretcher bearers, the snipers firing at me as I ran. I ultimately found the stretcher bearers but they informed me that it was a certain death to venture up as far as the hole where Captain Legge was. Anyhow I tried several times to get someone to go back with me but they appeared to have plenty of work in looking after wounded who had managed to come out of the battle towards more safety.
Then, according to Apdale, came the order to retire. Stumbling on ungrammatically, but doing his best, Apdale went on:
Now your lordship is what most certainly happened because I saw it, the ground where Captain Legge lay and also the rest of the wounded was set in flames by the Turks and I very much regret to inform your lordship that the wounded was burned. It may console your lordship when I say that in my opinion Captain Legge was either unconscious or dead before the ground was on fire as he was wounded four times while I was there his servant Walters no doubt dead by him.
Apdale ended this account for Lord Dartmouth of the death of his son: “I hope you will excuse my rather illiterate way of explaining what happened but of course you will understand.”
Other letters reached Lord Dartmouth with different stories; one said that when all was quiet that night, Legge was buried with respect and a small cross put on his grave. Several wrote of Legge, while wounded, urging his men on, with the shout ‘get on Staffords’. But as one man admitted, men circulated stories that others knew to be untrue. Apdale may have felt a need to explain away why he left Legge dead or dying, to be burned. Surely, even if the Turks were wicked enough to burn their enemies alive, it made no sense for them to set fire to the attackers’ ground, because any smoke would hide the busted attack and aid the retreat. More likely the shooting had set things alight, one more mishap in a failed and pointless attack.
It says something about the power of an aristocrat, and something about the humanity of the surviving South Staffordshire soldiers, once miners, shop workers and labourers, that although about half their fellows were killed in those few minutes, some took the trouble to write letters to Legge’s father, in the simple, only way they knew. A Sgt Cooke wrote to his wife, who forwarded the letter to Lord Dartmou
th, that Legge ‘used to expose himself so much, didn’t know what fear was d-d it’:
He was my ideal type of an English officer and gentleman, I got on splendidly with him. We were talking together all night on the 7th, he was telling me about the travels in different parts of the world. He used to go all over the world, collecting or something of that sort. It is a pity but I somehow felt he would get knocked out. I cannot explain the feeling but there it was, he had an exaggerated idea of the Turk, he used to say the Turk was a gent and fought like one.
Photographs
Patshull House, near Wolverhampton, the home of the Earl of Dartmouth
A demonstration in Tipton by strikers, June 16, 1913; note the men in the middle carrying brass instruments
Much work in 1914 was heavy, hot and hard. Burton upon Trent was world-famous for brewing; Bass’ steam cooperage made wooden barrels for beer
A pre-1914 photo of the bridge over the River Trent at Burton, looking from the Winshill side. Clifford Gothard would have come from Bearwood Hill Road to the right to go into town
The visit of King George V and Queen Mary to Nottingham, Wednesday, June 24, 1914: the royal procession ‘on the Forest’, the park to the north of the centre
Football spectators at Hull, 1913
A ‘military Sunday’ at York before 1914 passes the Minster