Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  Soupir Communal Cemetery was among the early sites begun specifically to hold the remains of British soldiers on the Western Front. Before that, they had largely been buried in plots in French civilian churchyards and burial grounds. Soupir contains the highest proportion of Great War Etonian graves in a cemetery anywhere in the world: 50 per cent of the dead were educated at Eton College.

  In such cases as La Coeur de Soupir the fighting had taken place in a relatively concentrated area about the farm and the British had continued to hold the ground. At nightfall on 14 September the Brigade was able to stand still and take stock, treating the wounded and dying on site and evacuating them in organised fashion over the course of a number of days and carrying out burials itself. Jack Cunliffe was laid to rest alongside his fellow Etonians.

  At Villers-Cotterêts and by the Chemin des Dames the chaos was on a far grander scale and complicated by the fact that British forces had fallen back, having to leave wounded and dying men on the battlefield. Whether or not the Etonians who fell would rest in carefully tended plots or in complete anonymity mostly came down to sheer luck. In some cases though, those that received news of a confirmed burial in a marked grave, whether it be Old Etonians, their fellow officers or the men that served with them, owed this resolution to the stubborn determination of families who displayed a complete refusal to believe that their son, brother or grandson could simply vanish on a battlefield.

  Hubert Crichton’s death was a certainty and his body had ended up at the communal cemetery at Puiseux.2 Lord and Lady Cecil’s missing teenage son, George, was not an OE, but he was a grandson of Lord Salisbury, the former Prime Minister, and when they took up the task of finding out what had happened to their boy at Villers-Cotterêts they were also keen to find out whatever they could about his fellow Grenadier, John Manners. The hardest fact to ascertain at first was whether they had actually fallen or were in a German prisoner-of-war camp.

  As in the case of Jack Cunliffe’s murder, rumours ran throughout the Brigade and beyond until they reached home shores. Lady Cecil referred to a ‘particularly cruel’ story about John doing the rounds in London. Unsubstantiated, where it began is unclear but she seemed to be referring to a whisper that also appeared in a letter home from Neville Woodroffe. He had heard that having failed to retreat owing to a lost order John found himself surrounded by Germans with just five men and had allegedly shot himself in the head rather than surrender.

  On 9 September Lady Manners received a letter from one of John’s fellow officers to say that he was missing. He had watched John go up with his platoon and hadn’t seen him since. ‘My supposition is that he was most likely taken prisoner,’ he reassured her; the same fate as officers Buddy Needham and George Cecil. So hope still existed. A few days later though, young Lord Congleton, an OE who had just arrived at the front penned a hurried letter to a friend of his and John’s. ‘I don’t know what news has reached home,’ he began, but after the devil of a fight it was apparently clear to all in the battalion that John was dead. Of the three platoons sent to assist the Irish Guards, John’s, Buddy Needham’s and George Cecil’s, only seven men had come back in. ‘They report that there are about thirty more wounded prisoners in German hands.’ Of the nineteen original subalterns Congleton reported the 2nd Grenadier Guards had three left on his arrival.

  It would transpire that John had sadly been struck down whilst directing his platoon’s fire in the woods, as had George Cecil. Now Lady Manners and Lady Cecil were consumed with trying to find out where their boys had been laid to rest. Lady Cecil arrived in Villers-Cotterêts before September had passed and found herself less than 15 miles from the front, facing a conflicting fog of misinformation and confusion. Enlisting the help of the American ambassador in Paris, who gave her a car and a military attaché, she battled her way to the necessary passes to get up to the front where the mayor of Villers-Cotterêts, a Dr Moufflers, had been instructed to provide her with assistance.

  She found the town and those nearby littered with caps and men’s pocket books. Moufflers directed her to gravesites dug by the French locals and the British prisoners where she was told that any papers identifying the men had been sent to Paris. In the forest itself were two large mass graves dug by the Germans and or prisoners depending on who was giving testimony. One was full of German soldiers and another that seemed, by the amount of khaki caps scattered on the ground, to be full of British troops. Somebody had stuck up a notice indicating that there were twenty men there but nobody knew who.

  With his parents in India, Lord and Lady Brassey were pulling every string they could in looking for their grandson, Gerry Freeman-Thomas. It was to be a particularly painful and drawn-out search. Lord Brassey had sent a man to the Aisne and, like Lady Cecil, had approached the American ambassador with no result. By December 1914, however, he and Lady Brassey had managed to accumulate a fair amount of detail about Gerry’s part in the advance on the Chemin des Dames by interviewing survivors. A corporal named William Roderick, the son of a Welsh rugby international, had seen Gerry fall whilst advancing across the plateau towards the sugar factory and ran over to him. He found him with a severe wound to his thigh, bleeding heavily. Gerry was adamant that he move on without him and so he continued his advance. His captain, another OE named Gordon Hargreaves Brown, had bound up the wound as best he could to try to stem the flow of blood and he had propped the 21 year old against a haystack where he hoped Gerry would be safe. At some point another injured Coldstream man was placed with him. They were close to enemy lines, as German troops spotted the wounded men and brought them hot coffee and food, although the family also recalled an account that had the enemy setting light to the haystack at some stage. At dusk the other man made his getaway, but Gerry’s leg was too painful and he could not follow. The following morning a search party was sent out to bring him back but the young Etonian had simply vanished.

  During the course of their investigations the family had for a time believed that Gerry was being treated at a hospital in Cassel, only to have this hope taken away. At the turn of the year, four months after the battle for the sugar factory, the family was ‘anxious but by no means hopeless’. By the summer of 1915 though, no more information had come to light regarding his fate. The matter of settling his affairs had begun. It was carried out on the assumption that Gerry had died on or since 14 September, although a reserve was put on his property should he reappear. Lady Brassey, however, had given up all hope of finding her grandson, and 21-year-old Gerry Freeman-Thomas was never seen or heard from again.

  At Villers-Cotterêts, desperate families had found the answers they were looking for, but only after resorting to extreme measures. Lady Manners had been given the names of three Grenadiers in captivity in Doberitz and their service numbers so that she could attempt to contact them at their camp. She sent them care parcels and corresponded with them. Two, a Lance Corporal Massey and a Private Bird, claimed to have buried John in a mass grave and described the tree that had been marked up with the details next to the burial site. Another knew nothing of the burial but believed what the others said. Anyone not present appeared to be quoting Massey, who claimed to have been part of the burial team.

  Following Lady Cecil’s visit, the mass grave in the forest had become the focus of attention in the search for her George, John Manners and their fellow officers. Another member of the Cecil family returned to the area. Accompanying was Lord Killanin, the brother of Colonel Morris, commanding officer of the Irish Guards, who had vanished leaving a widow and a four-week-old son. They appeared on Dr Moufflers’ doorstep in mid November 1914 looking for permits to go into the woods. The makeshift grave was located amongst the trees by the side of the forest road leading away from the town. The large plot was marked by a rudimentary cross and some wreaths left by the locals. With heavy hearts and a team of six men they began the grim task of exhuming the bodies, the sound of the guns at the front booming in the distance.

  It became apparent that
there were far more than twenty men buried in the plot. It was also clear that the burial party had taken little care. The fallen soldiers were tangled together ‘as thrown in anyhow, one after the other’. The team began extending the grave, removing identity discs and laying out the men in proper fashion for burial. ‘The faces were quite unrecognisable … often smashed. ‘These men,’ wrote Lord Killanin, ‘had been dead for two-and-a-half months. In no case was it possible to identify a body by features, hair, teeth, owing to the amount of time … and the way in which these bodies had been treated.’ He was unable to recognise his brother until they found his engraved wristwatch on his remains. George Cecil was identified by his monogrammed vest and his Grenadier buttons, some of which were removed for his mother. Another body was carefully lifted out of the pit and placed on the ground. It was evident that the clothing was that of an officer. Removing the disc from around his neck they were able to identify 26-year-old Geoffrey Lambton, an OE who was known to have been killed early on in the day on 1 September.

  No trace was found of John Manners. In desperation his mother began writing to senior officers of the regiment and one was convinced that he was in the same cemetery as George Cecil in the forest. ‘I went very carefully into the question in about the middle of September,’ he told her. ‘I am as certain as I can be that your boy was buried with George Cecil and other British soldiers in the same grave … The evidence I got was from Grenadiers who knew your boy well and I have not a doubt that they are correct.’

  Their testimony was dubious though. The officer admitted that by December, when he wrote to Lady Manners, all of the men who had provided the information were dead or gone from the regiment having been wounded; he couldn’t remember which. One who did survive and continued to speak about having been coerced into burying his fallen colleagues was a young drummer boy. He paid a visit to John’s grandmother and his sister Betty went to interview him. He was a pleasant boy and he told a beautiful story about finding John’s body; his revolver grasped in one hand and his sword heroically in the other with a clean bullet wound to the head. He retold how along with a number of other casualties, including George Cecil, John was taken to the mass burial site and that their German captors removed all personal items and rifled the men’s pockets. ‘I love to think of him dying as he lived, clasping his sword so proud and triumphant,’ wrote Betty.

  His story was a comfort, but Lady Cecil was not convinced. ‘[His] stories were so … fantastic, as you know … it really was not evidence until corroborated.’ Indeed a full two years later, as the Battle of the Somme raged, another senior officer was adamant that John had not necessarily been buried in the forest. ‘I can give you no definitive information,’ he commiserated. Certainly no identity disc of John was found when Lord Killanin’s team went through the morbid process of identifying the remains and separating the bodies of the likes of George Cecil and Geoffrey Lambton. ‘Your son’s body was not found in this grave. We have no record at all of where he is buried. I wish most sincerely that I could tell you more, but I fear it is hopeless.’ Lord and Lady Manners were still trying to seek clarification as to whether or not John had been buried with his fallen friends when the war was all but over. The waiting was indescribable but the alternative was not much better. ‘Grief does not really bring it quite home,’ Lady Cecil wrote after she had found all of her answers in the forest at Villers-Cotterêts. ‘I still feel as if I were waiting – tho’ there is nothing now to wait for.’

  John Manners’ name joined that of Gerry Freeman-Thomas on the memorial 40 miles east of Paris on the south bank of the Marne at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre. Here 3,739 men who disappeared during the retreat and subsequent advance back to the Aisne in 1914 were commemorated.

  John’s former house master was shattered by his death. Hubert Brinton would lose twenty-nine of his boys before the war was over. He and his wife were devastated by the loss of John. They hoped and prayed that the rumours of him being a prisoner were true and that he was safe. When confirmation arrived that John had been killed Brinton was beside himself. He couldn’t speak his name without tears. ‘Three months of war,’ he wrote soon after, ‘and life changed forever, for so many.’ John’s parents went to see him at Eton and he thought that he had made an absolute fool of himself because he had sat in front of them in silence. He sought to explain himself in a letter to Lady Manners. ‘I couldn’t talk about him while you and his father were sitting there in the study. It must have seemed strange to you.’

  Billy Grenfell had been at Eton and Oxford with John, but their friendship transcended that. Their families were close and they were like brothers. Billy wrote to John’s mother in agony. ‘I think so often that I owe to him and you the happiest days,’ he wrote. Their set, ‘our little band of brothers’, was falling apart ‘and it is such pain for me to think of losing him, to all of you it must be as if the sun has gone out of the heavens’.

  In all, the men at Villers-Cotterêts had removed ninety-eight bodies from the German-dug grave including four known officers. All but one man belonged to the 4th Guards Brigade. Pocket books were removed with identity discs and the names of as many as possible recorded. As a result of their determination, almost one hundred men; seventy-eight of them identified, received a fitting burial and commemoration at Guards Grave. Kipling referred to the cemetery as one of the most picturesque in France. The men were cared for diligently by Dr Moufflers until the advent of the Imperial War Graves Commission. ‘Irreparable as is the loss suffered by the loss of those officers and soldiers,’ remarked Lord Killanin, ‘and awful as the work of exhumation was, it is to me an abiding consolation … to know that their remains were rescued from an utterly unknown grave … and have been laid to rest … [with] respect and reverence and affection and honour.’

  Of the twenty unidentified men amongst the trees at Villers-Cotterêts it has never been confirmed if one of them was John Manners. At home in Hampshire, an effigy was fashioned of him laid out in his uniform. It forms the centrepiece of a memorial in a private chapel as if it were a tomb. ‘It is where he would have liked to lie,’ wrote one of his best friends, ‘on that lonely windswept hill, looking over the wide expanse of the New Forest that he loved.’

  Notes

  1 Bertrand Stewart was laid to rest in Braine Communal Cemetery.

  2 Hubert Crichton’s body was relocated to Montreuil-aux-Lions British Cemetery in the 1930s.

  5

  ‘God Won’t Let Those Devils Win’

  Along with the rest of the BEF, George Fletcher had travelled some 200 miles in three weeks during the retreat, wrestling with his smell and hoping to exchange the ‘infernal instrument’ for transport of the four-legged variety. He had considered simply abandoning it on more than one occasion, but a last-minute pang of conscience about what the king would think of him if he simply abandoned His Majesty’s motorcycle to the Germans inspired him to continue tinkering with it until it jumped back into life. Having been so desperate to get to war, George admitted freely in his letters that he was living a ‘pig-like life’, destitute as his baggage had been unceremoniously tossed from the lorries to lighten the load. ‘A column of sleepless and foodless men staggering along mile after mile is a mighty different thing from a route march at home: and as far as the sight of a horse camp after being surprised by artillery fire, or the road to the firing line in the rear after a big fight, it is a thing not sung of by Homer … or anyone else’ he told his father.

  ‘You may imagine me,’ George wrote, ‘sleeping in a wet trench with bombs bursting all around and the next man grovelling with a bullet through his spleen.’ In reality, he admitted, he was curled up in an armchair in front of a fire with a cat purring away on the hearth. The Aisne was a quiet affair for George. The misty mornings reminded him of Eton, ‘of early days in the autumn half … and sweaty wall games’. From little igloos made out of brushwood, filled with straw and blankets, George listened to the booming of the guns whilst they sat in reserve. ‘During
this time our Brigade goes off on manoeuvres in the field like the ECOTC till lunch, after which it reads the papers till tea-time, when it does a little close-order drill and goes to bed. C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas guerre.’

  His period of inaction on the Aisne gave George plenty of time to contemplate how much he missed Eton. His father had moved into his old flat on the High Street and was one of a number of academics volunteering to fill in for younger masters departing for Kitchener’s army. George was desperate to hear how he was getting on. ‘It is so funny to think of him teaching small boys Latin grammar and I want especially to hear all about my dear stupid pupils.’ He could imagine ‘thirty ridiculous puppies’ gawping in front of his father. ‘How they will make you grind your teeth at times, and how you will like them at others.’

  One member of the Fletcher family who was languishing even further away from the action was George’s younger brother Regie. Five years his junior, Regie too had been a King’s Scholar at Eton before going on to Oxford. The fact that he was twenty-two did not stop their father from proudly referring to him as his ‘baby’. The brothers didn’t look at all alike. George was stocky, whilst Regie was tall and graceful in his movements with reddish gold hair. Where George leaned towards languages and cherished the idea of a pet kitten in his dugout, Regie loved poetry, literature and above all his dog Muncles. Like his elder brother though, Regie was an accomplished oar. Having developed late, he did not feature much at Eton but at Oxford, where he followed George in 1910, he rowed stroke in the Balliol boat for four years, in the Leander Four at Henley and in the University Boat Race in 1914.