Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  The German artillery continued to pick away at Henry’s company, in particular the officers. ‘We are frightfully short … now,’ he reported. ‘We want about twelve junior officers at once, but, I don’t suppose we shall get any … the companies aren’t much above 90 rifles in the line.’ At times he was struggling to concentrate on the job at hand. Henry Dundas’ father had noticed a marked change in his boy. Something of the inherent vivacity that everybody so loved about him, had gone. ‘Four weeks ago today,’ he wrote, ‘and just about now, 6 o’clock in the evening:’

  Whatever way my days decline,

  I felt and feel, tho’ left alone,

  His being working in mine own,

  The footsteps of his life in mine.

  On 20 September he spent some more time sitting by Ralph’s grave. ‘It is a wonderful thing that In Memoriam. I just sat there and read it, with its almost uncanny power of being applied to one’s own particular case.’ On the way back Henry managed to stop at a clearing station to see Christopher Barclay, another of Ralph’s fellow officers in the 1st Coldstream. He had been shot in the stomach and had to have the bullet extracted through his back. The journey took Henry via the Arras–Bapaume road which he hadn’t seen since he had passed along it with Ralph. ‘What a golden memory.’

  Plans for 27 September had now been finalised. Broadly speaking the First and Third armies were to attack on a 13-mile front opposite Gouzeaucourt with the Guards Division on the left of the line. Once again the 2nd Guards Brigade was to carry out the attack. They were to cross the canal, take the Hindenburg Line’s support system, and then advance along a spur of high ground running north and east of Flesquières. Once the brigade had taken the first objectives, the 1st Guards Brigade would pass through them and advance towards the final point, an imaginary line going from Marcoing down to Cantaing, where they would push out tentative patrols towards the Scheldt river and wait for another division to come through them in turn. It was going to be a crucially important day. If these objectives could be secured and the Hindenburg Line conquered, it could signal the beginning of the end for the German Army.

  Henry was to lead his own company this time. They began taking up their positions at 6.30 p.m. on 26 September. Steady rain soaked them but failed to hamper their progress much and everybody got into position across the slippery ground. Then, at 4.30 a.m. on 27 September the preparation of the entire brigade was hit by a hostile bombardment that caused a fair number of casualties amongst the Scots Guards. Luckily it was only short and it wasn’t followed by an infantry attack. Zero hour came and the battalion punctually went off at 5.20 a.m.

  The 1st Scots Guards moved forward under a particularly effective artillery barrage. Henry and his men had little difficulty crossing the canal, having been supplied with light ladders crafted by the Royal Engineers. Getting across might have proved easier than they expected, but the Germans put up stout resistance in the trenches on the other side, in particular with machine guns. They were assaulting an intricate network of trenches but the attack continued and the battalion had reached its objective by 7 a.m. Shortly afterwards the 1st Guards Brigade passed through them and continued the advance.

  Until mid afternoon, by which time the British attack from the north had begun to make some headway, the Scots Guards were exposed to a galling machine-gun fire from the direction of Graincourt as they attempted to consolidate their new positions. As they went about their work a particular machine gun nearby continued to exact casualties from the still-advancing troops. Henry climbed out of the trench to reconnoitre where it was for himself. He had only gone a few yards when he was hit, probably by a waiting sniper.

  Men who tried to rush to his aid were hit too. Then two of his company dropped their rifles and tried again. They were not fired on, presumably because the Germans thought that they were stretcher-bearers, and they managed to carry him to safety. He lived for a few minutes and did not speak. As Henry’s chest ceased to rise and fall, another of Eton’s lights burned out on the Western Front. All that was left was the hope that in his final moments, he was comforted by the anticipation of setting out on the journey he had come to believe in so profoundly: to find his way back to Ralph, and the rest of his fellow Etonians that he mourned so deeply.

  The Guards Division was relieved that night. When the Scots Guards crossed back over the canal and retired to Boursies they carried Henry’s body with them. McIntosh, devoted to him, escorted him the 6 miles as Henry was carried by German prisoners. He rounded up Henry’s precious blackthorn walking stick, given to him by the daughter of an Edinburgh judge, and his book of poetry so that they might be sent home to Redhall. The following day Henry was laid to rest at Boursies. The whole of his company was present with a vast array of his friends. The pipers played ‘The Flowers of the Forest’ for him one last time.

  At home his parents received hundreds of letters of condolence. Boy Brooke said that Henry’s death and that of Ralph Gamble ‘were the two greatest losses the Brigade had had’. It was high praise from the brigadier who had made Henry glow with pride every time he referred to him by his first name. His colonel was similarly upset. ‘Henry was the life and soul of the battalion, and was loved by us all. As a soldier he was magnificent, so wonderfully capable, gallant and cheerful. He was adored by his company who would have followed him anywhere.’

  Perhaps the most heartfelt notes though came from his men. ‘I can hardly yet realise that he is gone from amongst us,’ mourned McIntosh, ‘and that we shall never hear his cheery voice again.’ His company sergeant major wrote on behalf of the whole company:

  I cannot tell you how much he is missed by us all as we had been in many tight corners together and we always knew when we had your son leading us we would get through if there was a way through at all … I am sure we shall never get another like him … Captain Dundas led his men to the very last and was the same as he always was – a hero.

  There was a sense amongst those that had known him that in Henry the world had lost a young man of real promise. ‘Guido’ Salisbury-Jones, leading a company of Ralph’s battalion, described his friend as ‘‘an outstanding personality’ and credited him with an ability to lift those around him. ‘There was so much that I owed to Henry’s invigorating influence. He had a capacity to bring out any latent talent that I possessed. I had never regarded myself as a wit, but in his company I found myself capable of repartee which astonished me. It was Henry who at Eton one day decided to substitute “Guido” for my real name “Guy”. That was thirty-five years ago. The Italian version has remained to this day as a heritage from that immortal friend of my youth … Poor Henry,’ he mused. ‘[Gifted above average] he might have been a future Prime Minister.’ J.M. Barrie knew him and had noticed his potential too. ‘I thought so much of your boy that though you don’t know me you will perhaps allow me to say how deeply I sympathise with you … He seemed to me … to be marked for notable things.’

  Henry had survived Ralph Gamble by five short weeks and together they had almost reached the end of the war, only to fall in its final weeks. ‘To see them together was to see youth at its best,’ wrote Oliver Lyttelton, ‘and the charm of their presence, the freshness and gaiety in their companionship are beyond my powers of description. The memory of them is the most poignant left to me of all the tragedies of the war.’ Of 21-year-old Henry Dundas he wrote: ‘Age, disillusion, decay, never touched him. Like a bright flame he burnt and is suddenly extinguished. To his friends the world is darker.’

  23

  ‘Folded in the Dark Cloud of Death’

  As October dawned and the Allies continued in pursuit of the Germans, the realisation dawned that the war might be won. In the preceeding weeks the idea that the Allies were advancing towards victory had taken hold. Pip Blacker had first begun to feel it in late August, but now the feeling had gained momentum:

  In an initial darkness, this hope first flickered intermittently like a will o’ the wisp, and then steadied, first to
an uncertain glow, and then to a continuous illumination which quickly intensified and culminated in a victory so total that at first it did not seem real.

  Ludendorff had reached the end of his endurance and offered his resignation at the end of October. Bulgaria had already capitulated on 30 September, a month later Turkey followed and then, on 3 November, Austria–Hungary surrendered on the Italian Front.

  The final Allied offensives on the Western Front began the following day in wet, miserable weather. The Germans had been pushed back on part of their front to Mons. In just over four years, the Great War had come full circle. Shortly before dawn on 11 November 1918, in Foch’s personal train in the forest of Compiègne, a desperate German delegation signed the armistice. Oliver Lyttelton was by now brigade-major for the 2nd Guards Brigade. In the early hours he was awoken by a memo telling him that the war was to end at 11 a.m. that morning. He fell asleep again. When he joined Boy Brooke at breakfast it wasn’t until the brigadier asked if there was any news that Oliver remembered the order and said, ‘Yes, sir, this: the war is over.’

  Pip Blacker was in the Bavay area, a place of scattered border towns where the 9th Lancers had taken refuge after their ridiculous charge long ago in 1914. ‘News about the armistice ran round like fire … Faces radiating joy emerged from blankets and everyone struggled to their feet. Pandemonium!’

  That night, he and another officer walked to the eastern edge of town and stood looking out on the countryside. For four years the eastern horizon had been intermittently lit up by gun flashes and flares. Now it lay silent.

  Back at Eton, as the bell in the courtyard struck 11 o’clock on 11 November 1918, the boys went barrelling out of their classrooms, shouting, cheering and celebrating the end of the war in scenes of unparalleled joy. A small group of slightly more reserved Collegers walked into Eton and spied Charles Fletcher across the High Street. Excitedly they ran over to him to celebrate the news with the elderly man. None of them knew what to do. Tears stained the old man’s cheeks. After more than four years of a seemingly interminable war that had robbed him of two sons, a stream of acquaintances and countless pupils, it was finally over. The boys watched uncomfortably as the old man broke down in front of them and sobbed at the side of the road.

  After the initial jubilation that greeted the news at the front, perhaps surprisingly an air of gloom set in. ‘I ought, I realised,’ wrote Pip Blacker, ‘to be feeling exultant. But I did not … I wondered what my father and mother were doing at that precise moment.’ He was overwhelmed by misgivings about what was going to happen to the world now that it was all over. More importantly, the war might be over, but Robin was still dead.

  Oliver Lyttelton and Boy Brooke rode about the troops:

  Everywhere the reaction was the same, flat, dullness and depression … we had some scores to pay off, and now they would never be paid. We began to wonder what England would be like, whether we should have enough to live on … what our account at Cox’s might be. This readjustment to peace-time anxieties is depressing, and we all felt flat and dispirited.

  Counting the cost of the Great War was harrowing. There were some ten million dead, perhaps more than double that figure wounded. Patrick Shaw-Stewart had been truly heartbroken when he wrote of the continual loss as early as 1915. ‘The fact is that this generation of mine is suffering in their twenties what most men get in their seventies, the gradual thinning out of their contemporaries … Nowadays we who are alive have the sense of being old, old, survivors.’

  This book has told of 128 Old Etonians who fell during the Great War but this represents only 10 per cent of the school’s casualty list. The Western Front had seen the bulk of the school’s losses, but Etonians who died during the Great War are buried in nearly thirty different countries, including two who fell in Northern Russia after the armistice was signed, thirty-one who fell after the engagement at Qatiya in April 1916 on the march toward Jerusalem that followed and six who were killed in East Africa, half of them serving in the ranks as the Germans attempted to divert Allied resources from the Western Front.

  Eton’s losses ranged from those, such as Robin Blacker who had barely passed their eighteenth birthday, to Field Marshal Lord Roberts, who died at the age of 82 at St Omer after inspecting Indian Troops in November 1914.

  Each and every loss was mourned but some had a wider impact on the world. A talented scientist, Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley was a contemporary of Einstein and his research altered scientific understanding of atomic structure, allowed the proper placement of elements in the periodic table, enabled identification of solid samples without destroying them and pinpointed three missing elements. It was widely believed that he was on course to a Nobel Prize.

  When he was killed serving as a lieutenant with the Royal Engineers at Gallipoli, the German scientific community mourned him as much as the British, who flogged the War Office with the consequences of not having heeded their requests to remove Harry Moseley from danger. Now the most promising British physicist of his generation was dead. Paperwork had gone forward to facilitate his extraction from the front, but not in time. Ernest Rutherford was livid. He declared that ‘to use such a man as a subaltern [was] economically equivalent to using the Lusitania to carry a pound of butter from Ramsgate to Margate’.

  The press carried headlines like ‘Death of a Genius’ and ‘Too Valuable to Die’. There could be very little doubt that Moseley’s death helped Rutherford and the scientific community to convince the public that certain brains, ‘being a national and even a military asset’, should be protected during the war. It had, however, mattered little to Moseley himself. Henry had not only displayed a relentless determination to become a subaltern and put himself in harm’s way, but had already refused numerous job offers connected with the war effort that did not require getting shot at.

  In addition to the 1,168 known to have died, of the five and half thousand OEs who served some 1,500 more were wounded and 130 taken prisoner. In the course of their service, Old Etonians amassed almost 2,000 honours and awards, including thirteen Victoria Crosses and 548 Distinguished Service Orders, forty-four of them with a bar and four with two bars. There were some 750 Military Crosses, including thirty-seven men who were awarded the medal twice, like Henry Dundas, and four who received three citations. Neither did this figure include almost 600 more decorations awarded by foreign armies, such as the Légion d’Honeur conferred upon Ian Napier for his work as a liaison officer with the French during the summer of 1917.

  The survivors had to try to build a life in the aftermath of a conflict that had entirely reshaped their consciousness and in many cases brought an abrupt end to a sheltered childhood. Victor Cazalet was one of a multitude of young men who now matriculated late at Oxford and Cambridge. It was a muted atmosphere, but they were all in it together. The nature of university life seemed trivial, juvenile and irrelevant given all that they had seen.

  The feeling of uncertainty remained unsettling for those who had to return to work. The whole life experience for many young Etonians returning home was waging war. Oliver Lyttelton wanted to marry the daughter of a duke. ‘I had a few hundred a year and my pay and nothing else. I looked likely to revert to being in second-in-command of a company.’ Promotion looked distant. ‘You could hardly get into the Guards’ Club for officers.’ He would embark on a political career and with Harold MacMillan would serve in Winston Churchill’s cabinet during the Second World War. In 1957 the latter would become prime minister himself.

  Aubrey Herbert ended the war operating as a liaison with the Italian army in Albania. He lost his sight completely not long after the conflict ended and was advised that having all his teeth extracted would help to cure his blindness. The operation resulted in blood poisoning and he died in 1923. He left a widow and four children. He was 43 years old.

  When the war ended Ian Napier had flown some 200 hours, shot down one enemy aircraft in flames, put seven more on the ground, forced two to land on his side of the
lines and shot down three out of control. He returned home and joined the family business in the first of many business ventures. He was twice married and fathered three sons. He died an old man, two months short of his eighty-second birthday in 1977.

  Aside from those who fell at the front many Old Etonians had been maimed. Night flying in particular caused a constant stream of deaths but it was essential for the air defence of London from German raids. Philip Babington and Eustace Ralli were exact contemporaries at Eton and in May 1918 were practicing flying by night with the aid of a searchlight. The pair were involved in a tragic smash. Babington suffered ‘serious injuries’ but, in the passenger seat, Ralli’s back was broken. He spent over a year in hospital before he ultimately succumbed to his injuries at the RAF Hospital in October 1919. He was 21 years old.

  Perhaps one of the saddest victims of all was David Stuart Barclay. Barclay served in Henry Dundas’ battalion, arriving in 1916. A quiet boy, he was five days younger than Henry. His life was shattered on 15 September 1916 when he was struck in the face by a bullet as this final stage of the Battle of the Somme raged. His injuries were horrific. ‘Poor David Barclay is wounded very badly,’ Henry told his parents. ‘Shot in the face somewhere he is blind in both eyes and his hand is very badly shattered … what a wicked thing this damned war is.’ David survived, blinded and mutilated, for seven months before he finally weakened and slipped away at his home in Norfolk in April 1917. He was 20 years old.