Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  The fighting petered out for now. Spring had arrived and George was tortured by the sight of the Dniester sparkling in front of their trench so invitingly. ‘I am all for challenging the enemy to a game of water-polo – stakes five prisoners, or a machine gun, or something.’ They were now guarding the Dniester from Zalishchky east to the corner of Galicia. Officers returning from leave were full of optimism. ‘We should take the Dardanelles in a month and Austria should breathe her last by June,’ George claimed emphatically. There was talk now of getting him a commission, almost unheard of for a foreigner. Nobody in the regiment objected at all having seen his conduct and in fact he was essentially living as an officer already, dining and sleeping with them, and walking in and out of their quarters at will.

  At the beginning of May, after many attempts to distract and deceive the Russians, the Central Powers launched an assault. They rolled over the Tsar’s force, sending them cascading back towards their own borders. Entire Russian corps to the north were evaporating and the Austrians were sweeping through the Carpathians. Insufficient defensive preparations had been made and ragamuffin remnants of regiments and nearby men scraped together were all that existed to stem the tide.

  To the south, George’s sector had not yet reached such a parlous state. By mid May they had in fact claimed much of Bukovyna as the Central Powers attempted to push them over the Dniester and failed. Indeed by the end of the month the Artirsky Hussars had got as far as the Prut, 30 miles south of Czernowitz by way of a strong advance steering well clear of Kolomea, which was still occupied. Czernowitz itself had been cleared, but as it lay in a valley it would have been dangerous to occupy it when the enemy could have begun shelling them. By night they watched the river and by day they slept out in the open. George was in his element despite a shortage of food. ‘I’m brown as a chestnut and very fit and cheerful.’

  Sadly for George and the Artirsky Hussars, their gains were largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. The enemy advance further along the front was relentless and Russia was in trouble. On 4 June the Germans took back Przemysl. The Tsar’s forces had no reserves, no shells; their only option was a large-scale retirement. George and the entire 8th Army began heading east. They had reached the environs of a small hamlet named Halych when at lunchtime on 7 June, as they were fighting their way back, he was hit in the stomach by a rifle bullet.

  As darkness fell on the battlefield a hospital train screeched to a halt at Halych. As they unloaded the wounded a sister was called to where George lay on a stretcher. Too much time had passed and his wound appeared to show signs of infection. There was no hope of saving him and moving him would have caused him immense pain. A Sister Rymaschevsky sat down beside him so that he would not be alone. George groaned with pain. He wanted to know if he was going to die. ‘I knew it was absolutely impossible to save him,’ she wrote to his mother, ‘but ceaselessly made efforts to calm him, saying that naturally he would pull through.’ As his condition worsened she called for a doctor who gave him an injection of morphia.

  The retreat was still in full swing and that night it became necessary to load George and the entire clearing station on to a new train bound for Ternopil. A sister was designated to travel with him and as the train rumbled along he passed away quietly before they reached their destination. George Schack-Sommer was buried in his Russian uniform in a common grave at Ternopil three days later with six comrades. He had passed his 25th birthday just one month before. The sister sent his medals to his mother and the contents of his pockets to a young OE friend of his acting as an attaché in Petrograd. ‘Your son died far from you,’ she was determined to tell his mother, ‘but … during the last moments of his life he was never alone. Around him were people, who were deeply concerned for him and wanted to help him with every power they possessed. Everything possible was done to save his life. Our sisters remember him very well … he died in our ranks as he would have died in his own.’ Any notion that George Schack-Sommer had had that people might disapprove of his choice to serve in a foreign army bore no witness at Eton. ‘We are all so proud of him,’ wrote Hugh MacNaghten as he lead the tributes.

  The same would not be said of Bruno von Schröder, for there are no contemproary references at Eton to his war service. Whilst the southern end of the Eastern Front was largely propped up by struggling Austro-Hungarian forces, the northern sector was a fully German affair. The Parchim Dragoons had arrived some 60 miles north of Warsaw in mid November. At the onset of the war the Russian armies had planned to advance either side of the Masurian Lakes in Russian Poland, some 100 miles south-east of Kaliningrad and the Baltic Coast. It was done haphazardly by two armies whose commanders cared for each other not in the slightest, but they managed to bulldoze their way well into East Prussia. This was a terrifying prospect for the Germans as, beyond the western borders of East Prussia, lay Berlin. However the disorganisation of the forces helped them to bludgeon the Russians at Tannenburg before August 1914 had drawn to a close and the Kaiser’s men managed to force them back over the Polish border and out of Germany. The Russians resolved to try to push into German Silesia but their consistently shoddy intelligence served up their plans for the Germans on a plate and the Kaiser’s men were able to strike first, pinning the Russians at Lodz. Bruno spent the weeks surrounding Christmas scrapping around Warsaw whilst the Germans dug in west of the Vistula.

  By spring the 18th Dragoner-Regiment had relocated north-east. In the middle of April Germany resolved to try and get Russian reserves away from Galicia where they planned to strike.They did this by launching attacks in the Baltic region, pushing further north-east towards Riga. There had been no serious fighting in the area thus far. The two combatants sat 10 miles apart in a string of posts as opposed to proper lines. The Germans could not afford to send men there and the Russians were relying on the fortress of Kowno to watch over the area, so the region remained underdeveloped as far as the Eastern Front was concerned.

  The situation was ideal for cavalry to perform in a traditional role and Bruno had been skirmishing right on the coast 100 miles north-east of Kaliningrad. At the beginning of his offensive, Ludendorff launched a strong cavalry force forward including the Parchim Dragoons. The Russians were barely interested in this mostly mounted advance but it would prove to be their undoing in the area. Suddenly it looked like Riga might be under threat and there were even horror stories about the Germans landing on the Baltic Coast and making for Petrograd.

  Conforming to the general advance, Bruno and the Parchim Dragoons had been moving north-east, skirmishing all the way. In June they reached the wooded area around the fortress at Kowno just as Russian reinforcements finally arrived. Three large-scale attacks were being planned for the following month up and down the Eastern Front, including one in the Baltic. In August Kowno itself came under siege and when it fell just over a fortnight later it took the Russian commander Grand Duke Nicholas with it and resulted in the Tsar assuming ultimate command of his own army.

  In early September the Germans set out again, this time for Vilnius. It fell on 18 September but it was to be their last major achievement during the offensive. Bruno and his regiment crossed into Belarus, but a German attempt to take Maladzyechna 50 miles north-west of Minsk failed. The Parchim Dragoons had pushed out beyond this target to the area around Dauhinava another 50 miles north-east where they reached the limits of their advance.

  Late on 24 September the regiment arrived at a small collection of villages and hamlets bordered by a stream named the Wilija to the east. The Dragoons immediately began setting out posts in the area to secure their position and at dawn they sent out patrols. Each village in the area had been secured by cavalry and a single machine gun, but the road running east across the stream from Pahost, where Bruno was situated, ran right into woodland that was occupied by unknown numbers of Russian troops.

  Everything remained ominously quiet throughout the morning of 25 September but at lunchtime the inhabitants began packing up an
d running away. At 2 p.m. Russian artillery began pounding the entire area and patrols emerged from the trees. Bruno’s squadron, No.2, was one of two allocated to hold the road running back to Pahost but quickly they found themselves pushed back towards the Wilija. Pushed back again, Bruno took up the defence of the southern half of Pahost itself. In front of them another squadron held the bridge over the Wilija.

  At dusk a prolonged scrap began over the crossing. The German defenders fell back as the Russians sent in more and more reinforcements. It was not until midnight that the cracking of rifle fire halted and an ominous silence descended on the isolated German cavalry.

  It was only to last a few hours. At dawn the Russian guns boomed back into life. The Parchim Dragoons began spreading out and the horses were led away to the rear. As the Russians emerged towards the Wilija with their artillery support, Bruno’s regiment steadied itself to put up a fierce defence. Suddenly they realised that the enemy was already across the stream to the south. The German cavalry was rapidly becoming surrounded. Pahost and it’s surroundings were catching alight. The fighting became more and more violent and the burning buildings blocked the path west. With great difficulty men were attempting to get the horses away, chased down by Russian cavalry that emerged from behind their advancing troops.

  In front of Bruno the Russians had been held on the eastern side of the Wilija, where, in the face of heavy casualties, they began digging in. The entire village was now ablaze and runners could not get back to headquarters at Dauhinava. In Pahost itself, in command, with no instructions, and seeing the situation deteriorate around him, Rittmeister von Massow gathered the dwindling squadrons and headed for the high ground behind the village. One squadron had suffered heavy casualties in the northern part of the village and had just got to their horses to try to effect this controlled retirement when Russian horsemen came barrelling towards them from the south. They caught the squadron completely by surprise, broke their ranks and completely overwhelmed them. Massow could not see a thing through the rising smoke from the village and he continued to wait for his men to arrive.

  The Russians were now advancing on Pahost from both sides, so high ground or not his position was futile. He gathered up all the men that had managed to join him and began heading west to Dauhinava with anyone else who had managed to survive. The numbers were low. It was apparent that the Parchim Dragoons had been badly hit. Leutnant von Bulow, commanding Bruno’s squadron, had been taken prisoner along with scores of men.

  Rudolph Bruno von Schröder never made it to Dauhinava. No account of him being a prisoner of war came to light and his body was never recovered. The 20-year-old was never seen or heard from again4. Up and down their part of the front, the German cavalry was being repeatedly checked. In fact, the entire Eastern Front front was stabilising. The following day Ludendorff ordered the construction of permanent trenches. As it had on the Western Front, static warfare had kicked in in the east. It had come less than twenty-four hours too late to save the only Old Etonian to fall whilst serving with the German Army in the Great War.

  Notes

  1 For ease of understanding, place names on the Eastern Front, with the exception of Petrograd, have been given their modern names.

  2 In 1914 Russia still operated on the Julian calendar, so 3 December was actually only 20 November as far as George was concerned. All dates in this chapter are given in the Gregorian calendar used in Western Europe so that the reader can connect events with those on the Western Front more easily.

  3 Bruno von Schröder is commemorated on the regimental memorial for Dragoner-Regiment 18 in Parchim.

  4 Charles Le Blanc-Smith was killed in November 1915. He was buried at Essex Farm Cemetery.

  Progress (left to right) on the Eastern Front, 1915.

  10

  ‘Pitifully Humorous in its Imbecility’

  By the autumn of 1915 the pool of combatants that had been educated at Eton had widened once again. As well as regulars, territorials and men who had volunteered at the onset, it now included boys who had been too young to run off to war in 1914. Teenagers who had left the school early in 1915, desperate to play their part, now began arriving at the front.

  John ‘Robin’ Blacker and his elder brother, Carlos or ‘Pip’, were the sons of an American mother and a part Spanish–Peruvian father who moved in literary circles. Pip had been born in 1895 and Robin in 1897. The elder of the two made his way to Eton but it was originally intended that Robin, the shorter, stockier of the brothers, should enter the navy and therefore he was to go to Osborne and then on to Dartmouth. After being ‘acutely miserable’ at the former he settled down and did well; but as he reached his mid teens it transpired that he was developing problems with his eyesight that were not debilitating in an every day sense but which would make life as a naval officer impossible. By this time Robin had passed the usual threshold for admittance to Eton and lacked the grounding he would need for a classical education, but Hugh de Havilland, his brother’s housemaster, took pity on him. Having been put through a Latin bootcamp of sorts at Vane Tower, the beautiful family home overlooking Torquay harbour, Robin passed the necessary entrance exams and ‘stretching things to the utmost’ joined Pip at Eton in 1914. It was a rare occurrence for boys to share rooms, but an exception was made for the brothers in order to squeeze him in at de Havilland’s, in a room at the top of the house. They bickered and fought until another boy suggested Pip fight it out with his sibling. One punch in the face later, Robin looked a little the worse for wear but their differences were behind them and they became the best of friends.

  The Blackers had spent many happy childhood days in Germany where their aunt had settled and where their cousin was an officer in the German Army. This caused an unusual rift in the family on the outbreak of war, their father being unable to bring himself to join their mother in her conventionally anti-German views. Both brothers were at Mytchett Farm when war began. ‘For someone who had been to a public school,’ Pip said, ‘the moral pressure was well nigh irresistible.’ Robin was immediately desperate to get to the front but Pip hardly felt the same. Although he went straight to try to join the Devonshire Regiment, he spent much time inwardly debating whether it was braver to go to war or to say to hell with it and refuse to play a part.

  The Devonshire Regiment would not take Pip; he had far worse eyesight than Robin and they rejected him three times based on the medical examination. In the end it was an Eton housemaster, Mr Churchill, who suggested a courier position shuttling between London and Belgium for one of the British voluntary hospital units. Robin, 17 and two months, reluctantly returned to school.

  Yvo Alan Charteris was the third son of the Earl of Wemyss. Tall, fair haired, with broad shoulders, a slender waist and a tendency to look rather solemn he had arrived in College in 1910. He was a gifted public speaker, with a distinctive deep voice and possessed diverse passions, from modern English poetry to medieval alchemy.

  Slightly older than Robin but still not 18, Yvo Charteris did the same. He was fed up before he even got back to Eton. He had waved his eldest brother, Hugo, Lord Elcho, off to war in August and half of the staff at Stanway, his family home, had gone by the end of the month. Even the women in his life were fully involved. Two of his own sisters were nursing, as were John Manners’ and Monica Grenfell, both of whom he was well acquainted with. When one of his sisters admitted to going down with ‘khaki-fever’ – crushes on soldiers – his flippancy could not mask his foul mood. ‘As everyone is in khaki it seems hopelessly indiscriminate and rather banal.’

  Yvo sat shivering through early school on a dreary morning before breakfast, rueing the fact that all of the best people, including Peter Llewelyn Davies, had left for the war. Yvo felt ‘crushed with ennui’. Not even the OTC could satisfy his military appetite because it no longer offered the opportunity for buffoonery that it used to. It was all horribly efficient. Eton seemed pointless, people left almost daily to take up commissions, so that reading classics a
nd playing games just felt horribly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

  He returned home for leave at the beginning of November but no amount of grovelling could make his parents back down. They had agreed to let him leave at Easter, but no sooner. Yvo returned to school after Christmas and was miserable half a day later. His desire to join the army, and he was not alone, was becoming an obsession. ‘I have been extremely happy here and it is a pity to leave with a nasty taste in one’s mouth.’ Anyone with any ‘gumption’ as he put it had already gone and he was beside himself. He had already decided on joining Peter Llewelyn Davies in the King’s Royal Rifles and ordered a uniform. In February his parents relented and he left in the middle of the half. As the cab pulled away from the school Eton receded into the fog and Yvo felt that he was leaving perhaps the happiest years of his life behind, but he was content. He had done the right thing.

  Across the road at de Havilland’s house Robin Blacker was similarly being driven mad by the routine of school life whilst it seemed that all those around him left for the war. The thought of joining the army was all consuming, as was the desperation to accomplish this feat as swiftly as possible. During his last year at Eton Robin had specialised in history and become close to Foss Prior. Acting as an unofficial recruiting agent of sorts for the 8th Rifle Brigade, Foss arranged for Robin to join him, and shortly after Yvo he too departed Eton College for good. He was not yet 18 years old.

  Thus far 1915 had yielded nothing but misery for the allies. Neuve-Chapelle in March had been the first solo effort of British troops against the German lines. That and Aubers Ridge in May, again aiming to make a decisive breakthrough in front of Lille, had failed and resulted in long lists of casualties being telegraphed through to the War Office. The Russians had been trounced on the Eastern Front and Gallipoli had been a catastrophic waste of time and resources.