Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  Bertrand Stewart’s trial by the Supreme Court of Germany opened at Leipzig on 31 January 1912. Throughout he continuously proclaimed his innocence amidst a media storm; claiming that he barely spoke enough German to order meals and to talk to natives at train stations and hotels. The charges against him mainly related to naval defences that he had apparently never seen. The only specific evidence, it was claimed, was that of a penniless ex-criminal in the employment of the prosecutors. After a trial lasting four days, Captain Stewart was nonetheless found guilty, which for all of his bluster he was, and he was sentenced to detention for three and a half years.

  Before leaving the court Captain Stewart proudly declared to his captors that if their distinguished nation was ever at war with Britain, he hoped he would be fighting against them. As he was dragged away to serve his sentence at the fortress of Glatz, Europe was less than three years away from a monstrous industrialised war the likes of which the world had never seen. Bertrand, Gareth Hamilton-Fletcher and nearly 6,000 fellow Old Etonians, whether they wanted to or not, would get just such an opportunity to participate. Over 1,200 of them would not return.

  2

  ‘The Faces of Souls in Hell’

  ‘The sky was just beginning to light up: a pale yellow streak had appeared in the east. The clouds were tinged with pink. In a few moments the horizon was ablaze, yellow, gold, orange and blood.’ It was 5 August 1914, the end of a Bank Holiday weekend at Ramsgate. The day before had been bright, sunny, ‘glorious’ with a clear blue sky. Scores of families had flocked to the seaside but there were unsettled tones running underneath their careless frivolity. For three or four days there had been one strange word whispered by everyone … War. ‘It sounded terrible enough, and yet, to the uninitiated, it was a word of excitement, it almost sounded romantic.’

  The young man watching the sun rise had had a troubled night’s sleep after news arrived that Britain had declared war on Germany. That morning he looked down on the crowds from the pier. ‘It did not seem to make much difference whether there was war or not.’ On the sand was ‘a seething mass of humanity, happy bright faces, huddled together in a great jumble. The children jumped over one another, burying their heads in the sand and laughing. Below, in the calm sea there were little groups of yelling persons, bobbing up and down, knee deep in warm water.’ As he watched them he was already uneasily settling on the prospect of offering his services to his country for the duration of the conflict. This restless Old Etonian was 21 years old. He would not see 24.

  In August 1914 enthusiasm for war ripped through the ranks of Old Etonians and they prepared to fight in their hundreds. Anti-war sentiment was not generally found amongst old boys who were getting ready to depart for France with the British Expeditionary Force. One OE from a military family had a way with words and he encapsulated the sentiment that many displayed when they scribbled their last letters home. He declared that if Britain failed to intervene ‘we are as chicken-hearted a lot as ever existed … Nobody will ever help us or trust us again.’

  Born in April 1880, another, Aubrey Herbert, was an unlikely volunteer who would be amongst the first Old Etonians to depart for war. A Member of Parliament, he had seen his fellow politicians in London as they had stumbled towards oblivion. Ashen, they had ‘the faces of souls in hell’. A son of the 4th Earl of Carnarvon, it would be Aubrey’s elder half-brother who would open Tutankhamen’s tomb with Howard Carter in 1922. Aubrey was the eldest son of the earl’s second marriage and his father doted on him. Lord Carnarvon died when his son was 10 and Aubrey was still being privately educated at 13 when his aunt began advocating a public school education. He arrived at Benson’s house at Eton in 1893 with no experience of school life and crippled by awful eyesight.

  Aubrey was practically blind. His mother had to employ the services of a tutor to go through Eton in his company, reading aloud to him throughout his time at school, though he was already showing a remarkable aptitude for languages, speaking fluent Italian and French, and good German. Owing to his disability though, his performance at school was moderate. He also found it hard to adjust to life in the house and found solace in spending his pocket money too quickly and adopting any pet he could find, be it jackdaws, squirrels or mice. On one occasion he discovered some larks in the town being kept in a ‘dreadfully’ small cage and conspired with two schoolmates to buy them and set them free.

  In 1897 Aubrey went to Germany to undergo radical eye surgery and it had a massive impact on his life. The operation was carried out cautiously on one eye and he found that he could read for himself, distinguish people from across the room, even shoot. He went up to Oxford the following year to read history but was famed more than anything else for his climbing. One acquaintance remembered Aubrey, ‘finger holds alone’ and 40ft off the ground swinging from ledge to ledge along the tall houses on King Edward Street. It was not unusual for him to tap on the outside of a window and wave to the people inside three floors up. He once managed to get from Christ Church to Balliol by nothing but rooftops, gutters, window sills and pipes. T.E. Lawrence, a near contemporary and future acquaintance in Egypt, reminded Aubrey during the war of how he had been traversing rooftops and singing Italian love songs when he fell into a bank and was held up at gunpoint as a robber.

  After Oxford Aubrey began a career in diplomacy, firstly in Tokyo and then in Constantinople. He travelled greatly in the years before the outbreak of war, taking in the United States, Canada, the Balkans, Africa, the Far East, Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey as well as the far reaches of the Sultan’s empire. His career as a diplomat lasted until 1905 when at the age of 25 Aubrey left Constantinople. He soon decided to resurrect his travelling and toured extensively through the Mediterranean, Arabia, Palestine, the Caucasus, Mesopotamia and India. Compelled by an agreement with his mother that he would settle down to life in politics he returned glumly to England.

  By 1912 Aubrey had married and been elected as MP for Yeovil. He proved enthusiastic in his political endeavours; but within a year he was off again, this time to the Balkans, travelling from Vienna to Sarajevo and then on to Albania. He would fall wholeheartedly in love with this last country. At the conclusion of the First Balkan War, Aubrey assisted an Albanian delegation visiting London for a peace conference. This rendered him a national hero to the extent that he would twice be offered the throne. He toured the country in 1913 triumphantly, but politely declined the opportunity to become King of Albania.

  With his eyesight, Aubrey never would have been passed fit for military service. He was, however, determined to take care of unfinished business, having missed out on the Boer War. Having volunteered to go to Africa, concerns about what the dry climate might do to his eyes compelled him not to go and he had long felt it a stain upon his honour. In August 1914 he resorted to buying a khaki uniform and attaching himself to the 1st Irish Guards as they marched out of barracks and headed for France. The battalion’s commander was complicit and his presence was only revealed after their transport had sailed, but by then it was too late. With his fluency in multiple languages he was to act as an interpreter.

  Another of the first OEs to report for embarkation with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) but again not one of the most likely, was Walter George Fletcher. As war was declared he was with a contingent of over 500 Etonian boys and masters at Mytchett Farm near Aldershot with the Eton College Officer Training Corps. Every year, in addition to field days and parades the OTC, which provided the boys with basic military training, would congregate under the supervision of regulars with contingents from other public schools and universities for a two-week camp. In 1914 the camp rapidly broke up as it became apparent that war was imminent and as the regulars were mobilised the boys were turned out and sent back to school early.

  George Fletcher should have been in the Navy. That was his parents’ plan when they decked their middle son out in a little sailor suit as a child. He duly made such an awful mess of it that his father Charles saw it as a b
ad omen and began having second thoughts. When his brother piped up and said that actually he wouldn’t mind going to sea instead, the plan changed. George had always had an interest in soldiering, having been at Oxford a member of the cavalry section of the University OTC and an extremely keen territorial; or ‘Terrier’.

  The middle child in a family of three sons, George’s father was a noted historian and all three boys, Alexander ‘Leslie’, George and the youngest, Reginald William, or ‘Regie’, were born and raised in Oxford and sent to the Dragon School as day boys. Nicknamed ‘Dormouse’ within the family, George had been educated at Eton as a King’s Scholar like his father before him; rowed with the VIII and had gone up to Balliol College, Oxford in 1906 on the fringes of a set of great minds that included the likes of Raymond Asquith and Monsignor Ronald Knox.

  Now 26, George was stocky, ‘slightly ungainly’ but memorable for his ‘gorgeous laugh’. Bubbly, witty, always with a good story to tell, he was passionate about climbing, travelling and Italy in particular. George had spent two recent years teaching English in Schleswig and in addition to German he also spoke French and Italian. In 1911 he returned home and took up a post at Shrewsbury School. Unable to continue rowing due to a weak heart, he endeared himself to the boys by coaching them on the river and threw himself fully into school life.

  He found a happy home at Shrewsbury. Another OE, Evelyn Southwell, remembered one particular night at the end of a winter term. They had sat up most of the night drinking tea and marking exam papers. George left them at 3 a.m. and started off across the river on his way home shouting Die Meistersinger. They all lived together in his last term at New House, a rowdy establishment full of unmarried masters where every month the lift sank to the basement and shattered the unwashed crockery. The garden was a jungle that belonged to their pet cat and dinner was so loud and argumentative that one of them was forced to make himself heard by chalking on the wall ‘you owe me £2 2s 6d’ to another. His demand remained there until they all moved out. George had left Shrewsbury in 1913 when the headmaster of Eton, Edward Lyttelton, came calling. George couldn’t resist returning to his old school and he had just concluded his first summer back on the river and was thoroughly enjoying life at his old school when war came.

  Although George was not versed in nearly as many foreign tongues as Aubrey Herbert, he was hopeful that the Army might make use of him too. While he was making his intentions to go to war known a summons arrived at Eton via telegram asking for he and two other young masters with linguistic skills and he didn’t hesitate. After a late-night meeting at the War Office he returned to Eton to say a hasty goodbye to his father, who came over from Oxford with supplies, and began getting ready to leave.

  Once in London George and his colleagues were sent to Kensington Gardens, one of several sites where commandeered commercial vehicles were being deposited. Here they were issued with a motorbike each, or a ‘smell’ as George would always call it. Quite devastated that he would not be riding off to war on horseback, he found himself instead riding – ‘smelling’ – through Piccadilly Circus, along Oxford Street and up to Holborn where the manufacturers attempted to give them a crash course in maintenance. A mere four days after war had been declared, these three young masters congregated outside the War Office shortly after dawn. They jumped on their smells and rode off on an elbow-jarring adventure; a miniature convoy of post-Edwardian hell’s angels in khaki awkwardly rattling their way to Southampton. They arrived ahead of most of the regular soldiers, drenched with rain and with raging headaches after being shaken all the way from London to the coast. They were now part of the ‘Intelligence Corps’, which they would soon find was as vague in composition and organisation as it was in name.

  George’s whirlwind dispatch to the south coast was the exception, rather than the rule. His ad-hoc recruitment and vague job description was nothing like the regimented, precise and well-rehearsed mobilisation that got hundreds of other OEs to the front. Excitement was building. A great number of Etonians populated the Guards regiments. The 2nd Battalion of the Grenadier Guards was at Wellington Barracks on the doorstep of Buckingham Palace when war was declared. Having been mobilised they were out on a route march in London the day before their departure when they passed the gates of the palace on their way home. Quite by chance, the king and queen wandered down to watch them pass by. Leading his platoon was ‘Jack’ Pickersgill-Cunliffe. The only son of a gentleman from Huntingdonshire he was less than a year out of Sandhurst and only two out of Eton. Not yet 20, bright and with a permanent smile on his face, he saluted proudly and was captured by a photographer as the battalion marched past His Majesty in fours and found their salutes returned by their king and Commander-in-Chief.

  Many of the Etonians who had left the school for a career in the army before the war had joined the cavalry. There were fifteen mounted regiments mobilised at the outbreak of war, almost ten thousand men on horseback. The 9th Lancers were at Tidworth near Salisbury and before they left for war a photograph of its officers was taken that literally overflowed with Etonians, including three sets of brothers. Eleven pictured would die, a great many of them before 1914 drew to a close, and of those nine had been educated at Eton College.

  Francis and Riversdale, or ‘Rivy’, Grenfell were identical twins in their mid 30s. They came from an enormous family that had seen six of their brothers go up to Eton before them and the family knew what impact war could have on a household. Three boys had already fallen violently in the service of their country, including one murdered during the Matabele rising and another participating in the charge of the 12th Lancers at Omdurman. The twins were devoted to each other. Both were ‘simple’ in their countenance, not stupid, but measured and quite calm; there was little fussiness about them. Neither liked to blow his own trumpet and both thought a great deal more of others than they did of their own glory. Being awarded a gallantry medal was all but mortifying for Francis, whilst Rivy, despite the fact that the twins were suffering a great deal of financial misfortune themselves, spent his spare time on a charity he had set up for impoverished children. Their closeness as brothers had not restricted them to the same career. Rivy was in business whilst Francis had begun army life in the infantry. He never had any disdain for it but his heart was with the cavalry and it was only financial constraints that prevented him from pursuing his dream. Happily, circumstances changed and he joined the 9th Lancers in 1905. Mounted warfare became his passion and he filled endless notebooks with tactics and observations gleaned from studying at home and abroad, and observing French and German manoeuvres.

  Although a civilian, Rivy shot out to Wiltshire at the mention of war. Officially a member of the Buckinghamshire Yeomanry, he was a mounted territorial and not committed to Foreign Service. He talked his way into the 9th Lancers as a reserve officer at lightning speed; determined to go to war with his twin who was to command one of the regiment’s three squadrons.

  Douglas Harvey was required to do less fast talking than Rivy, for although he was still at Cambridge he was already a reserve officer in the 9th Lancers and he too would be going to war with his brother. Douglas and Francis; or ‘Lennie’ as he was known, were considerably younger than the Grenfells. Both in their early twenties, the Harveys had grown up in an architecturally eccentric manor house in deepest Sussex, gone through Mr Byrne’s house at Eton together, and then Trinity College like their father before. Lennie, the elder of the two, was apparently one of the nicest boys his house master had ever had, with a gentle voice and a firm countenance.

  Lennie had joined the Lancers straight after Cambridge and although it is unclear what Douglas’ aspirations were had the war not come, he was now donning a uniform and pledging his allegiance to the Ninth once it had been declared. It is fair to say that neither of the Harveys were shrinking violets. Both were Captain of their House at Eton and commanded authority. In debates Lennie could argue the most ridiculous of points quite proudly whilst Douglas would beat the table with hi
s pencil to illustrate what he was driving at, whether his schoolmates wished to hear it or not. Both were members of the ‘Pop’, both were accomplishedftballers and Lennie was a decent cricketer and runner too. Neither fell short academically either. Douglas especially was quite the intellectual, with a gift for sarcasm and a cracking sense of humour.

  Although they came from a thoroughly unmilitary background, the Harveys now found themselves together in ‘A’ Squadron under the command of yet another Old Etonian, Douglas Lucas-Tooth. ‘Lucas’ had been in Walter Durnford’s house with the Grenfell twins in the late 1890s. His temperament made him incredibly popular and reassuring as an officer. A veteran of the relief of Kimberley, he was Australian born and, receiving a Colonial Cadetship, had served in the New South Wales Mounted Infantry in South Africa before being commissioned into the Ninth at 20. A captain eight years later in 1908, he brought an air of serenity into battle with him. Francis Grenfell thought he resembled Stonewall Jackson. ‘He said very little, but in any emergency he was the one man to do a great deal. He … had some magnetic influence which filled others with confidence and admiration.’

  There was to be no haphazard road trip like George Fletcher’s for these cavalrymen. Two days before they entrained their colonel had them parade dismounted to listen to a speech that would have rivalled a modern-day Hollywood scriptwriter. He impressed on them the importance of their role in the coming war and reminded them of all the regiment had achieved in the past. He told them stories of twelve Victoria Crosses during the Indian Mutiny; of marching into Kabul with the praise of Lord Roberts during the Second Afghan War. This was what they had to live up to. ‘You are going forth to war with the greatest traditions to uphold,’ he declared, and the regiment was duly inspired.