Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  It soon became apparent when they reached it that the area was still rife with isolated Germans, who subjected them to a hail of bullets from a trench and from their open flanks as soon as they began to move forward. They managed, however, to drive back the Germans and rushed the Green Line. When they got there, instead of finding the missing Coldstream Guards, De Crespigny found Germans, lots of Germans shooting at them from all directions. Thinking that they were about to come across their own men they had been in the wrong formation and took heavy casualties. Pushing on though they came into contact with Oliver Lyttelton’s battalion and managed to strengthen the right flank of the Guards Division.

  Elsewhere, Oliver had noticed that some Coldstream Guards were trying to come up on his side. They appeared to be pinned back by machine guns and so he decided to try to help. He grabbed two sergeants and a few stray men with four light machine guns, Lewis guns. Together they all crawled out of their new line and tried to lay down a covering fire. It proved a thankless task. Never again would he trust a Lewis gun because he could see them having no effect at all. Leaving his little band with plenty of ammunition Oliver crawled back to try to find someone with a proper machine gun.

  Pip Blacker meanwhile had made it into no-man’s-land and begun work on his track. On their way he and his men found a wounded officer of Henry Dundas’ battalion and two quivering, unhurt Germans whose nerves had gone. They appeared to have done all they could to help the Scots Guards officer and so Pip and his orderly stopped to share some ration biscuits with them ‘which they ate like starving animals’.

  They moved off and a short time later had begun marking out their track with the help of another Old Etonian, Dormer Treffry, a 39-year-old Cornish subaltern. Together they were putting out pickets when the German artillery began potting at them. The first shells hit at a harmless distance some 100 yards away, the second lot screamed over their heads and burst at less than half that distance. The next flurry was right on target.

  Pip had been standing some 20 yards from Treffry and as he threw himself on to the floor he looked up just in time to see a shell burst right under the elder man’s feet. Treffry was flipped into the air ‘like a shot rabbit’ and Pip watched his legs spin as if he were doing a cartwheel. Before he had properly registered in his own mind what had happened he was on his feet and running towards him. He had a sick feeling in his stomach and all that he could think was, ‘What am I going to see in the next ten seconds?’

  Poor Treffry was lying on his back. One of his legs had been almost severed, his femur protruding into the air, and the other was bent back at an awkward angle. Worst of all, his abdomen had been torn open and his intestines had spilled out. Pip saw immediately that there was no hope, but his fellow officer was still conscious. In his head a plan was forming: pick him up, get him over the ridge to help. But then another thought occurred to him. Would it not be kinder to just put him out of his misery?

  As they tried to lift him Treffry was trying to speak to them. Pip leaned over and ‘in an almost inaudible voice’ Treffry croaked, ‘Get them out of it. Get out of it yourself. Leave me here.’ More shells exploded around them, one just a few feet over their heads. The corporal kneeling beside Pip told him later that if he hadn’t been leaning down to hear his fellow OE’s words then it would have taken his head from his shoulders.

  Together the two of them managed to get the mortally wounded Treffry on to a stretcher and they began to carry him. Pip took the head end because it meant he could face away and he wouldn’t have to look at his mutilated body. He had completely forgotten about the artillery bombardment until they began walking. One shell hit a few yards away, plunging into the soil before it detonated and sending up a column of earth high above them. Mud rained down on them and on Treffry. They lowered him for a few moments and Pip sincerely hoped that the wounded man had lost consciousness, but as the last bit of earth splattered on to him Pip saw Treffry shift his head and heard him muttering.

  Oliver Lyttelton was still in search of that machine gun when he wandered along a trench and into another OE, Lieutenant Colonel Guy Baring, commanding the 1st Coldstream Guards and looking forlornly for his battalion. ‘I’ve just been trying to give them some covering fire,’ Oliver told him. Baring was adamant that he was going to go to join them and began trying to climb out of the trench. ‘Not that way, sir,’ Oliver pleaded. ‘Go round a little, you will get hit there.’ He continued to plead but to no avail. Baring clambered up on to the parapet where Oliver heard a bullet strike him and he caught his body as Baring fell back dead in his arms.

  Immediately afterwards Oliver, still in his quest for an elusive machine gun, came across a Brigadier John Campbell sitting in another shell hole. This modest abode was the site of his headquarters and there he sat, still with his hunting horn, blowing on it intermittently to Oliver’s astonishment. He was overflowing with enthusiasm. He beckoned Oliver over to him and at once they commenced arguing about where they were. Campbell was sure that they had reached the third objective and now occupied the Blue Line on their maps. Oliver was certain they still hadn’t progressed past the first, the Green. It was not surprising that the officers were baffled. The maps they carried had been issued a day or so before the battle and they were hugely. inaccurate Eventually Oliver managed to convince Campbell that he was right and that the brigadier was nowhere near as far forward as he had anticipated. Campbell was defiant and recognised that to stop here meant imminent failure. ‘Those bastards in that redoubt are holding us up,’ he barked. Then came his orders. ‘Go and get a few men and bomb them out.’

  Having bound up his wounded leg, Harold MacMillan had now acquired a Lewis gun and was on his way to find a use for it when he felt a bullet pierce his left thigh. He threw himself into a shell hole, shouted to an NCO to take over, and that was that. He lay there for the rest of the morning, ‘doggo’ in the summer weather. Another bullet had drained his water bottle and so, with a dry throat, he read a copy of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Unbound in Greek that he’d stuffed in his pocket. Doubtless the lead character, a champion of humanity and civilisation, would have been appalled at the man-made carnage going on around Harold. The battle continued to rage and men ran backwards and forwards past him. He played dead whenever Germans appeared. By lunchtime his hole had been blown in twice by shells a few yards off and the pain in his leg had become much more severe. He took half a grain of morphia and there on the battlefield he took a two-hour nap until some fellow Grenadiers came by and helped him to safety.

  Oliver Lyttelton was no idiot. The task assigned to him by Brigadier General Campbell was suicidal. ‘But needs must when you get an order’ and so off he went to collect a dozen or so men with a supply of bombs and they commenced chucking them down the trench in question to try to flush out the enemy. They progressed some 40 yards before he heard a mass of footsteps stampeding towards him. He shouted an order to mount their Lewis gun. The first German to rush round the corner was shot down at point-blank range despite throwing his arms in the air. Suddenly eighty or ninety more arrived, all with their hands up, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they outnumbered Oliver and his men more than seven to one. In less than an hour Oliver, despite his impossible task, had reported back to Campbell in his shell hole. ‘The redoubt is cleared, sir, and I have captured about a hundred prisoners.’ ‘By God!’ Campbell exclaimed, ‘that’s the best thing I’ve seen done in this war. Damn me if I don’t get you a VC for that!’ Oliver informed him that the Germans had all had their hands up already. ‘My VC vanished.’ Nonetheless, the Guards had in part reached the Brown Line, their second objective, and now they began to consolidate their position.

  Looking about for something further to do, Oliver decided to try to attack the next objective with the hundred men that he had originally put together. Despite the fact that the timed British barrage had long since crept out of contact, there seemed to be great confusion amongst the Germans and Oliver thought he might be able to ‘pick somethi
ng up cheap’. He discovered a communication trench leading away from the line to the east and took his men along it. Chancing on a practically undefended position they had made it to within sight of the enigmatic Red Line; the last of the four objectives for the day. Les Boeufs lay ahead, within reach, but with only one hundred men and no support on either side he began fashioning a defensive position and sent a message back for help. Relinquishing command to a major who arrived on the scene, Oliver hoped that with a battalion they might take the village.

  An hour passed whilst the sun beat down on them. Oliver was distraught. It seemed to him that they had the chance to take the initiative. He watched through a telescope as the German gunners calmly packed up and left. He watched bodies of infantry retiring. ‘I was sure that if we had even a brigade handy, we could go for a mile or two without a casualty.’ Another hour passed. Then another and another. Unknown to Oliver, a further attack was ‘out of the question’. All the Guards battalions active that day had been heavily engaged. Three quarters of their officers were down and two thirds of the men. Finally the Germans re-took the initiative and several hundred of them rushed his mixed body of Guardsmen and jumped into the trench.

  Oliver fired all the ammunition from his revolver straight at them. It was utter confusion. One German knelt down and levelled a rifle at him from 5 yards away. Oliver pathetically threw his revolver at the man’s head. Luckily the man thought it was a bomb, dropped his rifle and covered his head with his arms. The situation was now hopeless as far as proceeding with the attack was concerned. All hopes of glory and the Red Line were gone. His men being ‘hopelessly outnumbered’, Oliver scrambled out of the back of the trench and began blowing his whistle to signal a retreat.

  For all Oliver’s best efforts, little progress had been made on the flanks and he and the other surviving officers were ordered to stand fast and put their lines into a good state of defence. He was sent back to find John Ponsonby to report on what he had seen. Oliver found the brigadier at his headquarters; an old trench with some camouflage thrown over it. He made his report and downed a glass of port whilst Ponsonby joked about a bullet in the seat of Oliver’s trousers. He himself had not even noticed it. ‘He asked me which way I was facing when I got it.’ Joking aside, Ponsonby told him to take a nap for a couple of hours under the table in his dugout. Oliver fell asleep instantly.

  The men of the Guards Division, according to Henry Dundas, were ‘simply gun fodder’. He would not forget Guillemont, Ginchy in a hurry. He claimed bitterly that ‘the dear ones at home in England’, preoccupied by Zeppelins over Hertfordshire,3 would forget those names in a heartbeat. There were bodies absolutely everywhere, ‘awful, grinning, greenish black faces with their staring sightless eyes and yellow teeth … [with the] awful mottled wax-like pallor of the newly fallen corpse’. Harold MacMillan was similarly disgusted. The act of death on a battlefield might, he thought, be a noble and glorious one ‘but the actual symptoms are, in these terrible circumstances, revolting only and horrid’.

  That night Pip Blacker could not sleep. They had managed to get Treffry to a young medical officer who took one look at him and said it was hopeless. There was nothing to do but put him to sleep and wait for the end. ‘I begged him to pump in all the morphia that he could spare.’ But Treffry had a tough constitution and did not die till nightfall. Pip heard that as the Cornishman had marched out of Bernafray Wood on 15 September he had told a sergeant that he was convinced that he would die. Pip tossed and turned throughout the night following that awful September morning. ‘I could not banish the persistent images … there he was … happy, then his broken body.’ It was as if he were looking at a photograph album of him. The middle-aged volunteer who had ‘lost his sparkle’ at Ypres and his life on the Somme wouldn’t leave Pip alone.

  Henry erroneously believed that the Guards Division was ready for their curtain call as far as the Somme was concerned. ‘The Great Biff is over,’ he wrote home. His battalion of the Scots Guards had gone in about 750 strong and came out with just 142 men. ‘To intensify the general jolliness of the situation’, the weather then turned on them completely.

  Harold MacMillan was carried by fellow Grenadiers to a doctor who sent him off for further treatment with another officer. The route was being shelled so they dispensed with the stretcher bearers so as not to put them at risk and decided to try to walk. They got separated and Harold found his way out of danger. ‘Then I was safe, but alone and absolutely terrified because there was no need to show off anymore, no need to pretend … then I was very frightened … I do remember the sudden feeling – you went through a whole battle for two days … suddenly there was nobody there … you could cry if you wanted to.’ He collapsed into a ditch and lay there until some Seaforth Highlanders found him and moved him on again.

  ‘Having all one’s friends killed makes one rather bitter’, Henry raged in the aftermath of his introduction to war. ‘And then one sees 180,000 are employed in the air defences of Great Britain. Stout fellows. One Zeppelin [taken down] in two years … Jolly good … and the filthy press and the damned people go on as if it were the biggest thing in the whole war.’ Henry had seen whole swathes of his friends and fellow OEs fall in a single day. In fact, 15 September 1916 was the costliest day of the war for Eton College, with twenty-one former pupils wiped out in less than twenty-four hours. It was ‘perfectly heart-rending.’ ‘I should like to have it pointed out to me where all the honour and glory lies,’ Henry raged. ‘It is curiously elusive.’

  In the 2nd Coldstream Guards only two officers were unhit and it was the same in the 3rd Battalion. In the 2nd Irish Guards ten officers were out of action and in Oliver Lyttelton’s battalion, the figure was even higher. Seventeen officers were killed, wounded or missing. The high concentration of Etonians amongst the Guards battalions meant that Henry could reel off whole lists of those he knew. He had counted amongst his friends at Eton Robin Blacker and now Willie Edmonstone, another of their friends and the boy who had suggested that Robin transfer to the Guards, was also dead. Very tall, shy and reserved, ‘young as he was when war broke out, he wanted to go at once.’ He was killed leading his company when a shell burst in between him and one of his sergeants. He was still 19.

  The worst reminder of the loss befell the likes of Henry and his fellow survivors when they were sent out on to the battlefield to lay to rest those bloated, grinning corpses, their friends. He helped miserably to bury the body of the 2nd Coldstream Guards’ adjutant and eight men who lay strewn nearby. ‘Not very jolly.’ Evelyn Fryer was sent out for a day to inter as many as he could find in front of Ginchy. The weather had been hot and the bodies were almost jet black. They buried some 200 men, the Germans outnumbering their own fallen friends. Henry stood and watched in the pouring rain as the body of Guy Baring was buried at Fricourt, ‘a melancholy spectacle’.4 They had also found the body of one of their own, a Scots Guards OE, and had set about making a cross for him. ‘Poor old Tim and Willie and Bunny Pease and Lionel Neame and a hundred others.’

  Etonian sorrow was not limited to the Guards Division by any means. During the 8th Rifle Brigade’s advance Foss Prior had fallen wounded. He was in the process of being patched up when he was hit again, this time fatally. Although he had had to assume command of the battalion, Arthur Sheepshanks was utterly determined that his fellow Eton master would not lie exposed on the battlefield or end up in an unmarked grave. He rounded up some volunteers and he and these men scoured the area under fire until they found him. Foss was saved from anonymity and thanks to his brave friend and Eton colleague, one of the last of the original officers of the 8th Rifle Brigade lies in Bernafray Wood Cemetery.

  ‘Every successive minute’ of his war had been an increasing burden on this young man who never believed that he belonged in uniform. Nonetheless he had volunteered to fight alongside his fellow Eton masters. They realised just how much of a sacrifice his participation demanded of him when he took a commission in 1914. Another reluctant
schoolmaster and OE had gone with him, Shrewsbury’s Evelyn Southwell. Both had followed George Fletcher’s example in going to war, no matter how unsuited they thought they were, and in a little over a year both had shared his fate.

  Over 160 Etonians now lay dead on the Somme; thirty-eight of them without a grave and destined to be commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial. Seventeen OEs had been buried in Guards Cemetery, Les Boeufs alone. That is to say nothing of the likes of Guy Cholmeley, who had been shipped maimed to England with the threat of death still hanging over them. Attempts to force the German Army into submission on the Western Front in 1916 had now absolutely failed. Winter was about to intervene. Attacks continued until mid November when large-scale assaults were shelved. As had been apparent to Henry Dundas from the moment he arrived in Flanders and to those at the front with him, this was no place for blind optimism. The war was not over. They had not yet even suffered the worst that it could throw at them. The whole sorry mess was now set to continue at least into 1917, pulling more and more of his young schoolmates into action with him.

  Notes

  1 William Herbert Gladstone was killed with the Coldstream Guards in 1918 at 20 years old. He was buried at Sanders Keep Military cemetery near Havrincourt.

  2 The name of one of the playing fields at Eton.

  3 The newspapers at home were much preoccupied with the downing of a Zeppelin at Cuffley, Hertfordshire, on 2 September.

  4 Lieutenant Colonel the Hon. Guy Victor Baring is buried at Citadel New Military Cemetery, Fricourt.