Blood and Thunder
Page 50
But in many, the wounds were not visible: a generation of young men emotionally scarred and tormented by the horror that they had witnessed. Some Old Etonians would never come to terms with what the conflict had done to them. Reginald Mendel was just 18 when he left Eton in 1915 for the Royal Field Artillery. His family situation was complicated as far as the war was concerned. His father was a director of Harrods but of part-German descent. His mother was visibly distressed by the stigma of this Germanic connection. ‘Rex’ as he was known, was at the front when his father died at the beginning of 1917. On 3 May he was wounded whilst walking through Arras when a shell burst nearby and threw up some paving stones. Rex was thrown to the ground, dazed and his lower abdomen and the top of his legs suffered crush injuries. He suffered in silence for a week before he delivered himself up as sick and during his recovery was working at the War Office. One morning at home, he got out his revolver, put it to his head and pulled the trigger.
His heartbroken mother wrote a frantic letter to the War Office, lest they think her boy was a coward. ‘Fear, through ill health of not getting back on active service preyed on his mind, with results as per certificate.’ Rex’s colonel seemed of a mind to try and ease her distress. ‘No one was keener to fight for his country than he was, and he did splendidly during the nine months he was out with me here – With such a brilliant career before him – I mourn his loss more deeply than I can possibly tell you in words, and feel as if I had lost a very dear and brave son.’ The truth was though, that 20-year-old Rex could not bear the thought of going back to war.
One of his contemporaries in College, Charlie Pittar, had survived the last rush of the Guards towards Germany following Moyenville, including being gassed, and witnessed the armistice after his exploits of August 1918. Following his demobilisation he gained a nomination to follow his father into the Indian Civil Service and for two years he worked as a probationer at Queen’s College, Oxford, whilst helping to teach classics and mark papers locally at the Dragon School, his old prep school. He was preparing to go off to India to begin his career but the war had robbed him of his ability to take part in sport, whether it be the effects of being gassed or the emotional strain brought on by shell shock and the loss of his friends, which manifested itself with persistent headaches, insomnia, dark moods and fits of depression.
One Sunday night in August 1921 Charlie bid his parents goodnight and went off to his room after supper. His mother popped up to see him. He was working and she asked him if he was busy. He waved her away. ‘Yes, I’m very busy.’ Shortly before 8 a.m. the following morning his father went to his study. On the desk was a note from Charlie warning his father to be careful of gas upstairs. Rushing to his son’s room he found that it was full of fumes. His 23-year-old son was dead in his bed, with a tube attached to a gas stove and the supply switched on. His body was cold.
‘I cannot ask you to forgive me for what I am going to do,’ he had written in a note to his mother. ‘And I don’t think you will ever realise my general state of mind. There seems to be a sort of cloud which oppresses me. Today I’ve been throughout in a most extraordinary state – a mixture between deep depression and wild excitement, and always this cloud.’
Eric Greer and Billy Congreve were just two newlywed OEs who died leaving pregnant widows. Both gave birth to baby girls. In 1919 Billy’s best man, William Fraser, committed himself to helping to raise his friend’s daughter and married Billy’s widow. Eric Greer’s daughter, Erica, was born at the beginning of 1918. In another tragic twist his young widow, Pam, would not live to see the end of the war. A victim of the influenza epidemic that ravaged Europe in 1918, it fell to Eric’s parents to raise their little girl.
Parents who had lost their sons found a myriad of ways to come to terms with the void created by their deaths. Ralph Gamble’s heartbroken father gave up his post in the Indian Civil Service, shattered by the loss of his only son. A workaholic, William Garstin, was to commemorate his boy Charlie in the best way that he knew how. He went to work. In 1917, with all of his knowledge of the East and his experience of public works, he was made a founding member of the Imperial War Graves Commission, and with it not only assumed responsibility for honouring Charlie’s sacrifice but in part for that of every one of His Majesty’s subjects who fell during the war.
At the beginning of 1918 Pip Blacker had spent a good deal of time with the father of one of his best friends at Eton. E.W. Hornung, author of the Raffles books about a gentleman thief, had lost his only son, Oscar, in 1915 and, as Pip put it, ‘reacted in rather a peculiar way’.1 He felt an overwhelming need to put himself as close to the front as possible, to share his son’s experience. He had begun work for the YMCA which provided canteens for soldiers behind the lines.
E.W. based himself in Arras, but instead of establishing his canteen in as safe and comfortable place as he could find, as was the norm, he opened his ‘tea-totallers bar’ close to the front line. This humble little abode was in fact a hole dug out of the side of a sunken road, with corrugated iron walls and a makeshift roof. There he dispensed hot, sweet tea in half a dozen battered enamel mugs with biscuits to passing soldiers. Word got around that he was a celebrity and, dressed in basic khaki, as the kettle steamed away he chatted with his beloved ‘customers’ about their homes.
E.W. was a portly gentleman and he suffered greatly from asthma in the damp, cold conditions. However he appeared to revel in his ordeal. ‘The worse the hardship, the more he was pleased; the nearer he felt to Oscar, whose experience he was sharing.’ Whenever his path crossed with his friend’s father, Pip thought that E.W. appreciated greatly the chance to talk about his son and another of their friends, Bartle Frere, who had been killed in 1916.2
E.W. spent a night with them in January 1918 and Pip put him up on the bed of a fellow officer who had gone on leave. ‘Before going to sleep we talked about Oscar. Any new thing I could tell him, he said, was like a priceless jewel.’ They talked about what they might do if they survived the war but Pip was unconvinced. ‘He supposed, he said, that he would go on writing, but I could see that he had misgivings. He had lost zest and seemed to have little to live for.’
For his part, the elder man revelled in every moment spent in their dugout and in the opportunity to talk for a prolonged time with someone who had known his Oscar so well. ‘He was now out here in his grave; but which of them was not?’ Pip was the last one left and his safety caused E.W. no small amount of anxiety. ‘I lay awake listening to his even breathing, and prayed that he at least might survive the holocaust yet to come.’ Pip believed that there was something stoic and heroic about the actions of this one grieving father:
The hardship to which he was subjecting himself during the long hours in his sunken road derived from his bereavment. He was honouring the memory of his son by giving the humblest service to those whose experiences came close to Oscar’s.
Henry Dundas’ family faced an uphill struggle to come to terms with the death of their precious boy. By the early 1920s his father and his eldest sister, Anne, had journeyed the length and breadth of the Western Front, visiting his grave at Boursies and looking out over the Canal du Nord. When his remains were transferred to Hermies Hill British Cemetery 2 miles away in 1925 his parents visited him every year until the outbreak of the Second World War. The inscription on his headstone matched that upon Ralph Gamble’s 30 miles away: ‘I thank my God for every remembrance of you’. Seeing the front for himself brought his father some measure of comfort given that his child lay so far away from home. ‘I have seen myself hundreds of cemeteries,’ he told the assembled crowd at the opening of the Slateford War Memorial. ‘From Ypres to Armentières and down to the Vimy Ridge: from Arras all round by Bapaume to Havrincourt and Cambrai: along the Hindenburg Line to St-Quentin, all round the region of the Somme and south as far as the forest of Villers-Cotterêts … where our men fell in the early days of the war. All these cemeteries are well cared for, and, though still uncompleted for the
most part … they lie, officers and men side by side, symbolising the comradeship that was theirs.’
Henry’s mother never recovered from the loss of her only son and the rest of her life was tinged with a bitterness that she would take to her grave. Her relationship with her daughters was coloured by the admission that, given the choice, she would have elected to keep him with her instead. Her hatred for the Germans never subsided. Every Sunday she attended St Martin’s church in between Slateford and the Haymarket in Edinburgh. ‘She would frown and cough with disapproval should the rector ever be reckless enough to murmur from the pulpit some pious sentiments about forgiving our enemies.’ She trained him to refer to the Germans as ‘the Boche’ or ‘Huns’ in his sermons and even claimed to have hit former Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin over the head with her umbrella in the mid 1930s over his failure to rearm.
When she passed away, some three decades after the battle on the banks of the Canal du Nord, Henry’s mother left instructions that in her coffin should be placed a small flag he had made for Left Flank Company HQ on his final leave. Henry had hand-stitched one for each of his battalion’s companies, believing that they would be a source of pride for the men.
His sisters idolised him for the rest of their lives. Anne carried in her handbag well into old age her brother’s final letter, urging her to behave herself at her seventh boarding school after being expelled or having run away from all the others. She ensured that the annual commemoration for her brother appeared in The Times well into the 1990s when she herself died, making it the longest running of all such notices. Her greatest fear as an old lady was that when she passed away, so much time would have elapsed that she would not recognise Henry when she got to heaven.
In the spring of 1919 Eton’s hierarchy invited thirty-one OE generals of the rank of major-general and above to visit the school so that they might show their appreciation. ‘Nowhere are [your] services more highly honoured and valued than at Eton, to which you are … and which is proud to number you amongst its sons.’ A staggering 165 OEs reached the rank of brigadier-general and could not be accommodated, but eighteen exalted military figures were available and they arrived in late May to cluster together outside the chapel to have their photograph taken and to address their audience.
It fell to General Plumer, as the senior officer present, to give a speech worthy of the occasion. ‘We all of us realise that we are not here today as individuals,’ he began. ‘We are here as representatives of the great army of Etonians who have, during the last four-and-a-half years upheld the honour of their school in the service of their country.’
The thought of Eton had kept many of them going during times of hardship:
As you know, we never lost an opportunity during those four-and-a-half years of assembling on 4 June, or St Andrew’s Day … assembling together to discuss Eton topics and reviving Eton memories. I can assure you that these gatherings were a great tonic to us. The old forgot that they were old and became young – at any rate they behaved as such. All of us forgot that we were tired.
The boys of Eton College, he claimed, had not failed to do their bit:
The British Empire has emerged triumphantly from the greatest ordeal with which she has ever faced, and Eton claims that in that ordeal and in that triumph she has played a part worthy of herself. She does not base that claim on the prowess of achievement of a few individuals who happened to be in a position of authority and influence at the time, but she bases her claim on the large number who gave up much, and the many who gave up all, not prompted by any expectation or even desire for self-advancement; but simply by the wish to do what they knew was their duty.
It was not he, nor the assembled generals, he said, that were responsible for victory, it was the spirit of those who had not returned, including almost 1,300 Old Etonians:
We owe a debt to them, and it is for us to try and pay it … We can pay it by upholding in our lives the honour of our school as they upheld it by their deaths.
Plumer would not have been disappointed, for those that fell have not been forgotten at Eton. Reminders of their sacrifice are around every corner. Their names border the schoolyard on memorial panels and individual plaques circumvent the cloisters with more personal tributes supplied by their families. George Fletcher’s prized French flag now hangs in the ante chapel at his father’s behest, but perhaps the most poignant salute is the legacy of one single death on the field of battle.
In 2012 the Collegers decided to amend a tradition of over a century so that they might remember one of their forebears. On special occasions they now raise their glasses and toast ‘In Piam Memoriam LCL3’. Each of them leaves school aware of who Logie Colin Leggatt was and knowing that he laid down his life in Flanders when he was a fraction older than they are. Magnify his sacrifice by well over a thousand and you have some idea of what Eton College, as just one community of many, contributed to the Great War.
Notes
1 Second Lieutenant Arthur 'Oscar' Hornung was killed on 6 July 1915 with the Essex Regiment. His body was never discovered and he is commemorated on the Menin Gate. He was 20 years old.
2 Bartlett Laurie Stuart Frere was killed with the Bedfordshire Regiment on 13 November 1916. He is buried at Knightsbridge Cemetery near Albert.
3 In Pious Memory LCL.
Sources
Personal papers belonging to the following OEs that are in private hands were either consulted or information kindly donated by:
David Barclay
Guy, Harry and Hugh Cholmeley
Bernard ‘Audley’ Mervyn Drake
Geoffrey Drummond
Henry Dundas
George and Reginald Fletcher
Eric Greer
Francis and Douglas Harvey
John Lee-Steere
Logie Leggatt
The Hon. John Manners
Reginald Mendel
Marc Noble
Ian Napier
Charles Pittar
Also: Diary belonging to Algernon Lamb (with thanks to Clive Morris, 1st The Queen’s Dragoon Guards Heritage Trust and ‘Firing Line’, The Museum of the Welsh Soldier, Cardiff Castle)
Eton College:
Eton College Chronicle 1885–1928
Eton College Registers 1841–1919
House Books 1900–16
House Debating Society Books 1909–17
Papers of John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
Papers of Richard Selby Durnford
Papers of Edward Cazalet
Miscellaneous School Periodicals
Imperial War Museum:
George Schack-Sommer
Major Valentine Fleming
Thomas McKenny Hughes
Archibald James
Royal Air Force Museum:
Papers of Captain Ian Henry David Henderson
National Army Museum:
Papers of Major-General John Ponsonby
National Archives:
WO 95
WO 339/374
AIR 1
Newspapers and Periodicals:
Illustrated War News
The Graphic
Scots Guards Magazine
The Times
Westminster Gazette
Books:
Amherst, Jeffery, Wandering Abroad (London: Secker &Warburg, 1976)
Avebury, Baroness, Eric Fox Pitt Lubbock … A Memoir By His Mother (London: A.L. Humphreys, 1918)
Bailey, O.F & Hollier, H.M., ‘The Kensingtons’ 13th London Regiment (London: Regimental Old Comrades Association, 1936)
Ball, Simon, The Guardsmen (London: Harper Perennial, 2004)
Beckett, Ian F.W., Ypres: The First Battle, 1914 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2004)
Birkin, Andrew, J.M Barrie and the Lost Boys (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979)
Blacker, John, Have You Forgotten Yet? The First World War Memoirs of C.P Blacker, MC, GM (Yorkshire: Leo Cooper, 2000)
Bladersburg, John Ross of, The Coldstream Gu
ards 1914–1918 (Oxford: Humphrey Milford, 1928)
Bruce, Anthony, The Last Crusade (London: John Murray, 2002)
Buchan, John, Francis and Riversdale Grenfell, A Memoir (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd, 1920)
Card, Tim, Eton Renewed: A History from 1860 to the Present Day (London: John Murray, 1994)
Chandos, Viscount, The Memoirs of Lord Chandos (London: Readers Union, 1964)
Clark, Ronald. J.B.S., The Life and Work of J.B.S. Haldane (Gateshead: Nothumberland Press, 1968)
Congreve, Billy, Armageddon Road, A VC’s Diary 1914–1916 (London: William Kimber, 1982)
Cooper, Duff, Old Men Forget (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953)
Craster, Micheal, Fifteen Rounds a Minute (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 1976)
Desborough, Lady, Pages from a Family Journal, 1888–1915 (Eton: Eton College, 1916)
Doyle, Peter, Loos 1915 (Stroud: Spellmount, 2012)
Dundas, R.N., Henry Dundas, Scots Guards: A Memoir (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1921)
Edmonds, Brigadier-General James, History of the Great War, Based on Official Documents (London: MacMillan, 1922 etc)
Eton College, List of Etonians Who Fought in the Great War (London: Riccardi Press, 1921)
Ewing, John, The History of the 9th Scottish Division 1914–1919 (London: John Murray, 1921)
Ewing, John, The Royal Scots, 1914–1918 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd. 1925)
Fawcett, H.W. and G.W.W. Hooper, The Fighting at Jutland (London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd,. 1921)
Fitzherbert, Margaret, The Man Who Was Greenmantle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983)