Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  The time had finally come for Henry Rawlinson’s large-scale assault. Whileit commenced on 23 July, for Alick and his men zero hour would come a few hours earlier. The assault between Delville Wood and High Wood would begin first at 10 p.m. on 22 July so that there would be time to take care of ‘Wood Trench’, an inconvenient landmark that lay in their way.

  At noon on 22 July Alick and his men were told to get ready. As night approached the preliminary bombardment commenced. Alick was to go over in the second wave through a cacophony of noise and darkness, the way intermittently lit by flares and flames. His company ran headlong into heavy shell and machine-gun fire and the assault ultimately ground to a halt as the leading companies of the battalion ran into the back of some Royal Warwickshires in front who had turned on their heels after being exposed and their ranks raked by machine guns. Alick soon arrived on the scene. There were men everywhere. All they could do in the confusion of darkness was drop into a trench and cling on. It appeared that the attack was caving in. Disorganisation was rife. One battalion was not even aware that there was a trench in its way. The bombardment, for which, bear in mind, the gunners had not been given instructions until it began getting dark, had not been effective. The men simply couldn’t get forward. As dawn broke orders arrived to fall back to their original front line.

  Alick and his men, scattered as they were, for now remained forward. He managed to get a hasty report back to his commanding officer and then waited until he received a message telling him to fall back to a trench 300 yards behind which afforded better cover. Just as dawn was breaking on 23 July they got up to move. Concerned that he might not be taking all his men with him, Alick climbed cautiously out of the congested trench and began heading away from High Wood. He edged along a sunken road that ran close to the firing line, stopping every now and again to drop on to the back edge of the trench to look in and enquire if any B Company men were about. ‘It is becoming too clear to be moving about,’ he told them. ‘We must be getting back.’ He rounded up six or so men operating under a Sergeant Evans, all of whom climbed out of the trench and began following him.

  Some 120 yards on Alick leaned down again and had just turned his head to be back on his way when a shell exploded level with his waist. Alick fell forward towards the trench with his head resting on the parapet whilst Evans sprinted to him. The men in the trench had begun pulling at his arms and shoulders to get him inside and under cover but Alick was already gone. His bottom half had been blown away.

  Mortified the men lowered him into their trench and for the whole of that stifling summer day they covered him with a waterproof sheet and sat watching over his remains. As soon as dusk came they carried him for 2 miles under shellfire in the direction of Mametz. When they arrived, men of the battalion that had slipped away from their duties came out to meet the stretcher bearers. Alick was laid to rest at Dantzig Alley, a cemetery which had recently been started near Mametz, 3 miles from his best friend and fellow OE, Frank Ellicott.

  His commanding officer and men were distraught. A few days before Alick’s death another officer had remarked that he ‘looked after his subalterns like a father, even though some of them look twice his age’. The same man wrote to Alick’s father to tell him that his son’s display had been faultless, proof ‘that the metal is gold and tried in the fire’.

  The tenderness and care that he had lavished on those he was responsible for remained with them for the duration. ‘My last memory of Alick,’ wrote one colleague who had been maimed back in 1915, ‘will be a very characteristic one, of the loving care with which he bandaged me and helped me out of the trench when I was wounded.’

  By the end of the war, only one of the three generations remained, for Alick’s grandfather died in March 1918. Alick’s was just one of the lives wasted on 23 July in more badly orchestrated attacks that gained nothing. He was 24 years old, a fraction older than the age his mother had been when she died bringing him into the world.

  Notes

  1 Walter and Billy Congreve are one of only three sets of fathers and sons to have been awarded the Victoria Cross. Johnnie Gough and his father were another (his uncle also won the award, meaning that their family has won it more times than any other) and the third pair to have the distinction are Field Marshal Lord Roberts and his son Frederick. Thus four of the six men concerned are Old Etonians.

  14

  ‘The Gambler’s Throw’

  By the summer of 1916, the Guards Division in particular was overflowing with OEs who had little experience outside of school. Straight from Eton, they delivered themselves to barracks ready, but not necessarily willing, to fight. Hundreds of boys who had left Eton since 1914 were serving in or had already died in the armed services. Hugh MacNaghten was one housemaster finding this incredibly difficult to comprehend. He had seen William Gladstone, grandson of the four-time prime minister of the same name, hovering by the river on leave. He had rowed with the VIII as late as 1916 and with his baby face ‘he seemed never to have left at all’.1

  Another such boy was Henry Lancaster Nevill Dundas. He was 17 when the war began and had always stood out in a crowd. Born in Edinburgh in 1897, his passion was reserved for three aspects of his life: Eton, Scotland and, once he had joined the army, the Guards Division. ‘About these things,’ he wrote, ‘I have no sense of humour.’

  He was from the outset a vibrant personality, one of a kind. At two years old, during the Boer War, he would entertain adults by singing ‘Rule Britannia’ in full (or ‘The Absent Minded Beggar’ for light relief). Henry liked to shock. One kindly old clerk at Kirkcudbright once asked him how old he was and 4-year-old Henry piped up in the broadest Scotch accent he could muster, ‘I’m 65 and drunk every night!’ He became a well-known face in Edinburgh. Once he failed to turn up for a French lesson with a tutor and was caught instead joyriding on a milk cart about the streets and shouting instructions to two street urchins doing the driving. On another occasion he wandered away from his guardian and they found him turning the handle of a barrel organ whilst the old man who owned it collected the money. He was a fantastic mimic and his father was utterly baffled one day to pass underneath a window at the family home of Redhall and hear a deep baritone pontificating in a sing-song manner. He found his five-year-old son standing on a table in the nursery, wearing his nurse’s nightgown and ‘declaiming to an admiring congregation of the servants a sermon in the manner of a parish minister’.

  Henry was sent to Horris Hill Preparatory School in Berkshire. His father had loose family ties to Etonian scientific brains such as Jack Haldane and Henry was undoubtedly bright enough to follow them into College at Eton. Indeed he succeeded in making the list of King’s Scholars but his parents thought that an Oppidan house, without such a fierce focus on academic achievement, would give their son a broader experience of school life.

  Thus in September 1910 Henry entered Hugh Marsden’s house. His first years, not unusually, were a trying experience. The elder boys in the house gained some amusement from having Henry sing Harry Lauder songs on demand but Henry had a tendency to mask his self-consciousness by ‘forcing himself into the centre of the picture’. He could come off as tactless and on occasion full of himself. ‘Exhausting’ was a word that one boy used to describe him and several others remarked that he was perfectly likeable, in small doses. His wit and his kindness, though, balanced out his over-exuberant character. Dick Durnford was his classical tutor and a perfect fit. Good natured and patient, he recognised Henry’s immense promise beyond his hyperactive nature and lavished much time on him.

  As Henry moved through the school and matured into a young man, one school report labelled him as ‘exceedingly sharp, almost too sharp for the peace of mind of his Divisional Master (doing the writing), whom he bombards with volleys of incisive and often awkward questions!’ The mass exodus caused by the outbreak of war in 1914 pushed Henry to the forefront of the school. He was a competent enough sportsman, representing Eton’s fledgling rugby te
am, and was a member of Pop and an editor of the Eton College Chronicle. This he endeavoured to liven up with some sensationalism and sports reports mimicking the cheap press, much to the distress of the Colleger working alongside him. Not a classical scholar in the strictest sense, there was never any doubt, given the influence of his house master, that Henry would choose to specialise in history.

  As his departure loomed, Henry knew that he would go to war, although at this point it was just about still a choice rather than a compulsion. He refused to let it cast a shadow on his life at Eton and immersed himself in every facet of school life. Mondays were given over to the meetings of the Scientific Society and on Tuesdays the Shakespeare Society met, his favourite. Thursdays were the Essay Society, Fridays were for Pop debates and Saturday perhaps a lecture from a guest. He was amongst those who created their own magazine, The Jolly Roger. ‘Of this a master had to be the censor,’ scribbling out the quips that went too far with a blue pencil.

  In the summer of 1915 Henry’s happy existence at Eton was brought to a premature end as he set out for war, putting on hold a history scholarship at Christ Church. ‘Well, well, the last letter from the old boy’s club,’ he wrote at the end of July. ‘Tomorrow I tool up to London, dressed as an Old Etonian. Eton never looked more delightful than she does tonight after a week’s continuous downpour … I hope I shall never show myself forgetful of the debt I owe you, darling daddy and mummy for letting me come here … I can say no more [than] thank you, from the very bottom of my heart.’

  There was no military affiliation in Henry’s immediate family but he specifically wanted a Guards regiment, for the familiarity of Eton friends, and a Scottish affiliation, so that left one choice; the Scots Guards. It was easy to arrange from school. Since the Guards had been mauled at Loos, the average age of their subalterns had dropped dramatically. For the boys filing out of Eton, the Guards proved to be the most popular destination. It lessened the blow of being wrenched from school. Such were their numbers within the regiments that it became almost a continuation of Eton; the same familiar faces, the same social groups day in and day out. But when they finally made it into battle it was going to be a recipe for heartbreak and tragedy.

  Henry joined his regiment at Wellington Barracks in September 1915 at the age of 18½. The thought of going to war did not appal him but he was, in his words, ‘rather less enthusiastic about it than I ought to have been’. He began his training in earnest. He spent the winter, thanks to his aptitude for bombing, doing a short course as an instructor at Southfields near Wimbledon and from there he was able to spend much time not only back at Eton but indulging his passion for Gilbert and Sullivan by trawling London suburbs looking for productions and visiting theatres at Wimbledon, Kennington and Hammersmith. He turned 19 in February and was offered a choice of whether he wanted to go out to France immediately or ‘wait for warmer weather’. He chose the latter but Henry’s reprieve was brief. By Easter he could evade the front no more. It was not until this point, in spring 1916, that he actually underwent any training with the men at Corsham.

  There was ‘little buoyancy’ about his mood when he realised that he was finally ‘for it’. At the end of May Henry departed Waterloo Station with a handful of fellow OEs. The young subalterns on their way to the Guards Division were clueless as to what lay in wait for them. The division, they would discover, was extremely introverted. A young Guards officer fresh out of Eton and newly arrived on the front would have next to no contact with any non-Guardsmen. The Guards were inspired by a powerful esprit de corps that would not be diluted by the founding of numerous additional battalions as the war progressed. This would help Henry settle in, but for now, even their own formation was a mystery to him and his companions. Henry knew who was in charge of the division, and who commanded the two Scots Guards battalions, but as for brigadiers or which battalions would be operating near him, the whole thing was a ‘sealed book’.

  At the end of June 1916 the 1st Scots Guards were at Hooge, relieving elements of Canadian units that had been slaughtered in Sanctuary Wood. When the Guards began taking casualties of their own Henry was abruptly summoned to help replace them. Travelling on a night train to Abbeville he cleaned his teeth at Calais, had lunch at Hazebrouck, plodded the last leg to Poperinghe and then ‘started off along what is now probably the most famous road in the world’. Henry found Miles Barne, an older OE in temporary charge of the battalion, and joined B Company fresh out of the line.

  When Henry joined his battalion the whole Guards Division had just come back from practising for an attack north of Ypres but the stalemate on the Somme meant that everything elsewhere was shelved. Henry found his first experiences of the trenches rather thrilling; the constant shelling especially left its mark on him. ‘You are absolutely helpless, as to go into a dugout is merely to exchange burial alive for disintegration and burial dead.’ But the biggest impression left on him was the difference between the reality of life at the front and the ‘ludicrous optimism’ of people in England. This optimism was painted on to ‘our lads in the trenches’ by the press. He had seen very little of it himself. The mood was not necessarily depressed, but large swathes of men foresaw no end in sight.

  Eton remained, thanks to the presence of so many contemporaries in the immediate vicinity, at the forefront of Henry’s mind as the Guards were sent back to rest. As the the Battle of the Somme began, to the north he reported perfect blue skies. It all reminded him of summer at school. ‘Any water – even a canal – reminds me of the river and any trees – even shell-torn – of Upper Club2’. A particular friend, Christopher Barclay, had joined the Coldstream Guards and Henry found plenty of time to pop along and see him. Talking ‘Eton shop’ on long walks was their favourite pastime and at the end of the month they even had a party, courtesy of brigade headquarters, complete with a band. When they played the ‘Boating Song’ Henry nearly wept. They danced till midnight, the guns booming away to the south, ‘flares stabbing the night all around’; and yet the officers of four of the Guard’s battalions could forget everything, even the possibility of being summoned to join in the show ‘and revel as at a children’s party’.

  August saw yet more misery for Haig, Rawlinson and the men on the Somme. On 27 July Delville Wood and Longueval were finally secured thanks in part to an obscenely concentrated artillery bombardment. Rawlinson was making negligible progress. Control by seemed to have devolved completely out of his hands, resulting in a series of messy, disjointed attacks directed by his subordinates that were costing Britain dearly. Douglas Haig was determined that this had to stop, but this did not prevent him putting unrealistic expectations on his generals in terms of what he expected them to achieve whilst they pulled back on the obscene wastage of manpower.

  By September, seventy-six Old Etonians were already dead on the Somme but the bloodshed was far from over. It had been resolved that High Wood, Ginchy, just to the south-east of Delville Wood, and Guillemont, a little to the south-west of that, would all have to be taken before an all-out offensive could be made on what had originally been the German third line. Since mid August, at Haig’s behest, the Fourth Army commander had been planning the attack. Haig was still demanding a decisive breakthrough. He wanted the ridge behind Les Boeufs seized then, as soon as the gap was opened, a mass of cavalry would flood into it. Yet again, as on 1 July, Haig was pressing Rawlinson to take multiple lines in one hit. Guillemont fell at the beginning of the month and Rawlinson ordered a number of attacks on the Ginchy area to prepare for his big push.

  The Guards were transferred to Rawlinson’s army and began moving on 19 August towards Albert. The train carrying the 1st Scots Guards crawled south. ‘To give added piquancy’ they were supposed to be on a special tactical train described in Henry’s handbooks as being used for rushing troops from one part of the country to another. Their move was not a surprise. Ever since the ‘biff’ on the Somme had begun the Guards were certain that they would be destined for it at some stage. �
�The atmosphere,’ Henry wrote, ‘is rather like that in a music hall when the star turn is just coming on … some fun I should imagine.’ Evelyn Fryer, another OE serving with the Grenadier Guards after originally enlisting as a private in the Honourable Artillery Company, was sorely disappointed that thus far the Guards had played no part in the big event to the south. Enthusiasm would be too strong a word but the Guards were honestly pleased to get away from the dreaded Salient.

  The situation on the Somme at the beginning of September was vague for the troops being fed into the battle, not only as to what they would face but in terms of where they physically stood themselves. They arrived with map references for trenches to guide them but they were often futile. ‘The almost entire absence of landmarks caused them to be meaningless.’ Battalions were turning up to what they thought was the correct location, only to find that they were hundreds of yards from where they were supposed to be. The scrappy nature of the attempts to take German positions meant that nobody was ever really sure of the overall situation, which caused problems for artillery and for staff trying to manage the troops; doubly so when the troops themselves could not point to their location on a map.

  Communications were dire. Messages went awry, for it could take a runner an hour to reach brigade HQ in one sector and many became casualties in the shellfire that swept the whole area. It was not as if they could pick up a telephone either, for the cables were being continually destroyed by artillery. These difficulties and the conflicting reports received by the staff ‘were responsible for the vague and often inaccurate instructions which were given to the infantry during this difficult period’.

  Troops continued to accumulate in the area behind Ginchy in large numbers for this push. It was, as Henry put it, a last ditch attempt, ‘the gambler’s throw’ as far as the Somme campaign was concerned. Another young Guards subaltern arriving at Happy Valley was a future prime minister, Maurice ‘Harold’ MacMillan, and he thought that the most extraordinary thing about modern war was the desolation and emptiness of it all. ‘One can look for miles and miles and see no human being.’ But burrowed into the ground like rats there were hundreds of thousands of men. Harold was 21 when he first left for France. The son of a publisher he was another Colleger who had arrived at Eton from Summer Fields. Rubbish at games, he was sharp enough but struggled at school until his mother finally withdrew him in 1909 after three years. Having gone up to Oxford, Harold was suffering from appendicitis when war broke out and he had to wait until the end of 1914 to be able to gain a commission in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. His eyesight was a worry but he found a medical officer that was sufficiently lenient. Like Yvo Charteris he orchestrated a swap into the Grenadier Guards. This did embarrass him but ‘was it so very reprehensible?’ He asked years later, ‘The only privilege I and many others like me sought was that of getting ourselves killed and wounded as soon as possible’