Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  Back at the camp Dick was fretting over their fate. All he received were ‘wild rumours’. He feared the worst for his friends and heard that the battalion had been badly cut up, but he was hoping that reports had been exaggerated. ‘Naturally we are all anxious and fidgety,’ he wrote. As wounded men and prisoners streamed down he seized them, desperately searching for information. The camp itself was now under fire from German artillery as Dick frantically waited for the 1st King’s Royal Rifles to be relieved from the lines.

  Two days later he had managed to get to the survivors. They had been dribbling in all night and all day in a bedraggled state, wading through the mud as the thaw continued. ‘You would hardly know they were human beings.’ Worst of all, news came that Derrick had been killed and it threw him into a state of shock. They had been at Eton together, joined the battalion at almost the same time and Dick had seen him but forty-eight hours ago, setting off cheerfully on his way to battle; he had waved him off. The thought that struck with him was that Derrick, like him, was an only son. Dick’s platoon sergeant had been killed as well, while leading the platoon in Dick’s absence. The guilt was harrowing2.

  The 2nd Division, to which Dick’s battalion belonged, had lost a staggering forty-nine officers, roughly two battalions worth, and almost a thousand men in one day. The depletion facilitated Dick’s return. Word was that the battalion would be sent back to rest and revive itself, but hopes were in vain. The 1st King’s Royal Rifles were to be sent back into action almost immediately.

  Dick re-joined his platoon in a nearby rest camp where they were squashed into cold huts. Having shed most of his possessions he was sorry now to have relinquished his stationary job. His servant Farndon was furious with him, primarily because he had been out since August 1914 and had no inclination to do any more fighting. Dick felt hugely guilty and asked his parents to fashion a box of treats for him as he’d been ‘just like an elder brother’. Perhaps they could send him some cocoa, biscuits, socks or anything they could spare. ‘He would appreciate them and I know he deserves them.’

  Any plans for rest and recuperation had been shot to pieces shortly after the engagement at Miraumont. Suddenly Dick and his battalion were ordered to stand to because the Germans began retreating from the battlefield. Operation Alberich, as it was known to those carrying it out, began on a small scale in late February. As baffled as the British were, there was method, rather than madness or capitulation, in the enemy’s actions. Ever since September 1916, the German Army (and prisoners of) had been constructing a brand new, brutal system of defence behind the lines that they had been fiercely clinging to. Known as the ‘Siegfriedstellung’ or the ‘Hindenburg Line’ to the Allies, the Royal Flying Corps had observed this activity as far back as October the previous year. This new defensive system stretched from in front of the Third Army near Arras, all the way along the front of the Fifth, which included Dick, down past Rawlinson’s Fourth Army into the French sector where Nivelle was planning his assault on the Aisne. After the horrific losses on the Somme, withdrawing to this strong position would give the Germans a shorter line to man against any forthcoming Allied offensives.

  Instead of filling the trenches in the Hindenburg Line so that they overflowed with defenders they were loosely held and behind them efforts were put into strategic strongpoints. Concrete block-houses had sprung up; known as pill-boxes. Filled with machine guns which covered the spaces in between they were halfway impervious to artillery. Further back still was another complex collection of pill-boxes, surrounded by earth, and some were even mocked up to look like houses with pretend chimneys. Surrounded by copious amounts of barbed wire, the system relied on letting the British advance and then launching fierce counter-attacks. There were machine-gun nests and troops ready to pounce on any invaders who flooded unknowingly over the foremost part of their lines.

  On 4 February orders were sent out to get ready for the staged withdrawal. It would take several weeks and on 22 February, in front of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps in the Ancre Valley, the preliminary stages began. Dick heard a horrid rumour that they were to shoot forward after the Germans and move under canvas, but Gough was adamant that his army were not going to barrel after the enemy at undue risk. Caution and diligence was key. ‘Great news of the Boche retiring,’ Dick gloated, although the overriding feeling amongst Etonians watching events transpire was one of suspicious confusion.

  By 1 March Dick reported that he had moved forwards. Despite setbacks such as Miraumont, Gough’s army was approaching his intended destination: Loupart Wood. A final push was required to seize his favoured position and the 1st King’s Royal Rifles were about to become extremely well acquainted with a nearby objective called Grevillers Trench around a village named Irles. Their objective would be to push towards the edge of a ravine known as ‘the Lady’s Leg’.

  The artillery began to bombard the area and it was blown to pieces, leaving ‘tumbled and shapeless masses of earth’. Nerves were frayed as the Germans retaliated and one of Dick’s fellow officers flipped completely. In the middle of the night he spied seven Germans in no-man’s-land attempting to mend the wire cut by the British artillery. ‘This was too much for him,’ Dick wrote. ‘He rushed around telling everyone an attack was coming and we all stood to. At this moment our people put a terrific barrage over … Fritz got the wind up, thinking an attack was coming and puts all his artillery on us … Terrific din ensues.’

  At the same time someone let off a whole host of multi-coloured very lights. The poor officer who had started it all was by now out of the trench and ended up flat on his belly when the Germans turned a machine gun on him. Dick’s reaction was typical of his youthful reaction to imminent danger. ‘It was quite like a show at the Crystal Palace,’ he joked. Miraculously nobody came to any harm and as usual he ended up in fits of hysterical laughter at the thought of the elder man hopping frantically around.

  On 9 March they rested up as a blizzard blew into their sector but at midnight it was time to leave. Efforts had been made to make Dick look as much like a private soldier as possible. He carried a rifle with a fixed bayonet, sandbags were tied over his knee high boots so that German snipers would leave him alone. ‘Boche snipers are very fond of picking off our officers,’ his servant claimed. Shivering in their assembly trenches together they were issued soup and then there was nothing to do but wait.

  At 5.15 a.m. it began. The artillery barrage blazed to life. Howitzers pummelled the Lady’s Leg and Dick jumped on to the parapet, urging his men to follow him. It was still dark and a mist hung in the air. The artillery had done its job; the wire was cut to pieces. As for the German machine guns, one sharp sergeant with a steady hand took out the main offenders with his rifle. They were so eager to get at the Germans that Dick and his men almost outran their own artillery barrage. They lay down in front of the enemy’s wire and waited for the shells to subside, Dick checking to see that Farndon was fit and well.

  As soon as the British barrage lifted they jumped forwards. The whole of Grevillers Trench was taken and outposts were flung up in one strike. Farndon, though was stuck on the shattered wire. Frantically trying to unhook himself under fire he lost sight of his ‘Mr Richard’ as Dick ran on. The mist confused him. The men had bunched in areas so try as he might, once everybody started jumping into the trench he couldn’t get his bearings or find his officer.

  Ordered to dig in, Farndon began frantically helping to consolidate their position. As he burrowed frantically he kept checking about him, convinced that Dick would show up at any moment. The Germans had increased the ferocity of their fire on the trench. Farndon was clearing the entrance to a mineshaft when his company commander came along. There was a rumour going about that Dick had been killed. Had he seen it for himself? He hadn’t. A rapidly panicking Farndon requested permission to go and see for himself, but it was refused. He was just planning to do it anyway with a sergeant major when a corporal came running along and said that he had seen an officer who l
ooked exactly like Dick being helped back to safety. Relief washed over Farndon. Finally his captain gave him permission to go off and establish facts for himself. He went running off to the dressing station to find Dick.

  The action, it was claimed by the battalion’s commander, was ‘a notable example of the methods then recently adopted for an attack of limited scope, in which the artillery left the least possible burden on the infantry’s shoulders’. It was important that, in this instance, the infantry kept as close to their own artillery barrage as possible, ‘even at the risk of a few casualties’. He pronounced the casualty rate of the battalion as ‘very light’. They had only lost one officer, which was to be admired. He wrote a very different letter to Dick’s parents, as that one officer was their 19-year-old only son, and he had been killed by a British shell.

  Farndon found the teenager’s body in between the German wire and Grevillers Trench. Dick had been killed by a shard of shell that had struck him in the head. His men picked up his body and carried it to safety. At Albert the Pioneers made him a coffin and he was laid to rest in an extension to the town cemetery.

  ‘It will be a lifelong sore to me that I was not actually by his side when he fell,’ wrote Farndon. ‘His eagerness, the misty weather and bad luck were the cause.’ This veteran of the entire war who had been in it since the beginning was finally broken. ‘His loss has given me … one of the hardest knocks of this terrible war.’ Dick’s parents received a stream of letters from people that had been acquainted with their son that painted a picture of a thoughtful, sweet-natured boy. The maid at his house at Eton even wrote to tell them that she had never forgotten that he would never light his fire on a Saturday, just to try and save her a bit of work. Perhaps the most heart-breaking letter that they received was in their son’s own hand. Back in 1916 he had hidden it where they might find it if he were killed:

  I am writing this in case I don’t come back. I know how much you will feel it if I go under … Thanks to you both my life has been an extraordinarily happy one … I particularly want everything at [home] to go on as if I was coming back one day. You know how fond of the place I was and I should hate to think that [it] was suffering … So please do everything as if I was away for a time only, and in every way keep the family traditions going. That is the saddest thing of this war, the way so many traditions have lapsed. I don’t want mourning or anything … Your loss of an only son … is very great but carry on and God Bless You, my dearest parents.

  Their teenage boy had survived less than three months at the front.

  Notes

  1 Just as he passed out in summer 1916 news arrived that his cousin 2nd Lieutenant Jacinth Wilmot-Sitwell was one of them. Serving with the Coldstream Guards, on 9 July he was wounded by a trench-mortar shell and died shortly afterwards at the age of 21. He is buried at Essex Farm Cemetery.

  2 2nd Lieutenant William Arthur Derrick Eley was buried at Regina Trench Cemetery, Grandcourt. He had only left Eton in April 1916 and was 19 years old when he was killed.

  16

  ‘I Long to Fly’

  The Great War was the first major conflict where all combatants fully embraced flight as a means to contribute to victory. What had been an expensive hobby for gentlemen became an essential part of warfare and an exciting prospect for scores of Old Etonians preparing to join the war effort.

  The Honourable Eric Fox Pitt Lubbock was born in May 1893. In the words of his mother, Lady Avebury, he was ‘merry, abounding in vitality and high spirits from the earliest days’. He was always an adventurer. ‘He has to my knowledge,’ claimed one friend of the family dramatically in talking about his resilience when he was a child, ‘had seven nasty accidents this week, which would have killed most children but from all of which he has got through with nothing but smiles.’ Eric went to Eton at the age of 11, for his parents were determined that he should begin whilst his brother was still at Mr Goodhart’s house with him.

  Perhaps because of his young age he suffered acutely from homesickness and it was coupled with a dislike for his schoolwork. ‘I Eric Lubbock,’ he wrote, ‘am interested in most branches of natural history, and can [take] no pleasure at all from Latin and Greek … What on earth can be the good of stuffing one’s head with languages long ceased to be spoken and all books of which are translated?’ Eric was of a generation of schoolboys who watched the birth of the aeroplane. He saw one fly over the school in 1910. ‘Today I saw the sight of my life,’ he wrote home. ‘It was an aeroplane. It looked like a huge bird gliding softly along in the air … I long to fly … all I could think was I long to fly.’

  The Royal Flying Corps was formed in the spring of 1912 whilst Eric was at Oxford. The first squadron to be fully up and running at Larkhill was No.3 and a number of Etonians were connected with it. The adjutant was Major Basil Barrington-Kennett, or ‘BK’, and he vowed that the new RFC should combine the smartness of a Guards regiment such as his own with the efficiency of the Royal Engineers from which they had been born1. Another OE was present from the beginning and instrumental in the development of this embryonic outfit. The creative spirit of the Royal Engineers was imperative in fostering this exciting new technology but it was a former Rifle Brigade man who could argue that few in the RFC had done more than he to develop the military potential of the aeroplane.

  Reginald Cholmondeley was the son of an army man from Oxfordshire. He had left Eton in 1907 to go into the army, transferred into the Royal Flying Corps as soon as he could, and got his pilot’s license in August 1912. He became the first RFC pilot to attempt a night flight the following year. Early in 1914, 3 Squadron was engaged in such diverse pursuits as perfecting forced landings, communications between air and ground, firing guns from aeroplanes, range finding using signalling lamps and using flares to relay artillery observations. Reginald took off on 10 March 1914 again on a night flight. At the time, with no proper lighting in the cockpit and none on the ground to guide him home, it was a perilous mission. Helped along by a full moon at 2,000ft he could see the lights of Andover and Salisbury but he had lost sight of home and had he not been fully aware of his surroundings then he would have found it very difficult to find his way back.

  By midnight on 5 August 1914 Reginald’s squadron had been mobilised with its twelve war-worthy machines and a week later they departed to the front. Once in France they painted Union Jacks on the underside of the wings. This early in the war they were fired at indiscriminately by overexcited men on the ground, whether friend or foe. The Fletcher brothers saw their machines differently. As an artillery officer, Regie had reason to hate them, and he passed time on the Aisne trying to exact revenge for the hostile shells that the German machines directed on to him. ‘Spent rather a pleasant afternoon sniping stray aeroplanes with a rifle,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Blazed about 40 rounds at one, but with no visible effect.’ He was finally stopped by an order from the major who insisted that he give up. In the trenches George was simply enchanted by them. ‘They come out just like butterflies on a fine day, and the air is full of the humming of their engines.’

  In the early war of movement, the RFC’s objective was reconnaissance, acting like airborne cavalry. No. 3 Squadron spied large numbers of German troops converging on Mons before the retreat put an incredible strain on the Royal Flying Corps. They were forced to pack up and move several times. The aeroplanes suffered from being left out in the open. Transports sped away numerous times, leaving the machines with overworked mechanics who had insufficient tools and equipment to look after them properly. At night they would have to guard the aeroplanes, sleeping under the wings in deteriorating weather as the Germans approached.

  It stood to reason that the German Army would not want the Allied machines to fulfil their reconnaissance objectives and vice versa. Both sides began to look at arming their machines. Early attempts were comical. Pilots stuffed revolvers in their pockets; they took grenades up with them with the intention of dropping them over the sides. In October 1914 came one o
f the first instances of aerial combat. Then on 12 October Reginald Cholmondeley took off from St Omer in a Sopwith Scout, one of the best machines available, and took on an enemy machine. He had had a rifle fitted to one side of his cockpit so that he could try to fly and shoot at the same time, and a carbine on the other, both pointing upwards to avoid his propeller. Not surprisingly he failed to put his opponent out of the sky.

  Experimenting with armaments would prove to be Reginald’s downfall. On March 12 1915 he was bombing railways during the battle of Neuve Chapelle. Reginald was sitting in his machine whilst it was being loaded with six volatile, converted French shells. One of the bombs exploded, setting off another, and the aeroplane went up in flames. Reginald Cholmondeley never stood a chance of getting out alive. The 25-year-old was buried at Chocques Military Cemetery with the other victims of the accident.

  Eric Lubbock had never expressed an interest in anything military, but the instant that war was declared he was eager to play his part. He had been interested in motoring since 1910 and on 6 August 1914 he delivered himself to the Royal Automobile Club in London to volunteer for foreign service. His sister’s husband, an officer in the Black Watch, urged him not to enlist. England, he said, would be crying out for young officers soon enough and he was concerned about the experience Eric might have of serving in the ranks. Eric went up to Oxford but as he was not a member of the OTC they could not help him at that stage. Frustrated, he joined a long queue of men waiting to enlist. He was not at all impressed with the doctor who saw him. ‘He looked stupid, threw a tape measure around my collar bone and said I was unfit.’ Eric was furious. ‘Nonsense, said I. I rowed in Trial Eights, surely I’m fit enough.’ His chest was apparently too small by 1in.