Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  I got almost directly below the Hun … Austin, my observer, was able to fire continually while the Hun never got a shot at us. We fired 300 rounds of which far more than half hit his machine and yet he lived. In the end we were some ten miles from our lines so I turned for home … we all came home very pleased with life in time for lunch.

  A senior officer turned up on Boxing Day, however, and Eric dubbed him the ‘President of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Huns’. He was told that he would be sent home in disgrace if he did it again, which seemed rather ridiculous.

  The beginning of the year was frustrating. Activity was quite low, but as the weather improved suddenly 45 Squadron was overwhelmed. Eric was their most experienced aviator and had become something of an expert on aerial photography. At home his mother was frantic. In her diary she noted that on 6 March 1917 the newspaper reported ‘36 Aeroplanes Down!’ That evening Eric had taken his flight out. On their way home they were approached by what he assumed to be three Nieuport scouts. They turned out to be German machines, which promptly started shooting at them. Two of the 45 Squadron machines were downed quickly and the Germans set upon Eric and the other; diving on them from above and behind. He eventually managed to put down near the aerodrome with a spluttering engine, but it had been a close call.

  Two days later Eric’s mother noted another headline: ‘56 machines down in two days.’ She hadn’t heard from him for nearly a week and he was due home on leave. On 11 March she scribbled off a letter, ‘When are you coming home … I love you my own so very, very much.’ It was returned.

  That day, 11 March, was an extremely busy day as far as German aircraft were concerned, with nearly one hundred of them being sighted through the day. The retreat to the Hindenburg Line had commenced and up and down the entire Western Front the Allies were just as active, observing 102 separate targets. Three of 45 Squadron’s machines set off on a photographic mission in the morning, including Eric’s. One dropped out with mechanical failure but Eric continued on with his remaining companion. Shortly after 11 a.m. they were attacked by two Albatros scouts in full sight of the British trenches. Eric’s two-seater machine was no match for this foe and both he and the other British aeroplane were shot down and fell just behind the British lines. All four men were killed, Eric’s observer, Thompson, reportedly falling out of the plane on the way down.

  Eric had first pondered the possibility of his own death when he got up from his smash with Robert Loraine with a face full of dirt. He was adamant that it did not scare him, whatever it turned out to entail. His mother had his attempt to console her in the form of a letter he had left behind. ‘At its very worst it is … absolute blank and therefore why fear it?’ It would be, he told her, ‘just like going to sleep and dreaming nothing’. He also penned a note to his younger brother, Maurice. ‘Help mum and look after her. Do not let her grieve too much, try and keep her interested. I hope you will never see this letter.’ Within a month it would be unheard of for 45 Squadron to let any less than half-a-dozen machines fly together for additional protection when crossing the lines. It was a lesson learned too late to save 23-year-old Eric Lubbock, the young Etonian who had looked out on the bank holiday crowds at Ramsgate the day after war was declared.4

  Notes

  1 BK gave up his appointment with the RFC because he thought it his duty to go back to the 2nd Grenadier Guards. He was killed in May 1915 at the age of 30 and laid to rest at Le Touret Military Cemetery. His younger brother Victor travelled in the opposite direction, joining the RFC from the Grenadiers. He was killed (accidentally) nine months after Basil at the age of 28. Their youngest brother, Aubrey, educated at Radley rather than Eton, had already been killed in September 1914 at the age of 24 with the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry.

  2 Deighton’s younger brother John also took to the air, serving as an ensign with the United States Navy’s flying services.

  3 The incident occurred on 21 February 1915. Major Arundell Neave, 39, Captain Edward Radcliffe Nash, 26, and Lieutenants Nathaniel Walter Ryder King, 27, and Rowland Auriol James Beech, 26, are buried in a row at Ypres Town Cemetery.

  4 Captain Eric Fox Pitt Lubbock was buried at Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery. A year later Thomas Hughes joined him. The cemetery now contains fourteen Old Etonians, four of whom served with the RFC. The other two are Arthur Victor Newton and Alwyne Travers Loyd.

  17

  ‘Am I Going to Die?’

  The air war was becoming completely unrecognisable to the pre-war pilots who had survived long enough to see it into its latter stages. Arthur Rhys Davids KS was still at Eton, and captain of the school, in the summer of 1916. He epitomised those boys, now young men, that had witnessed first-hand the birth of the aeroplane and since 1914 there had been much coverage of airborne conflict in the national press. The thought of becoming a pilot, one of these chivalrous knights of the air, waging war above the battlefields, was tantalising for ambitious young Etonians just leaving school. When, at 19, Arthur got his wings and was sent to join his squadron with famed pilots such as Albert Ball he declared that he was in ‘the land of the Gods’ before his feet had even left the ground.

  As well as cavalrymen Douglas and Lennie Harvey, Mr Byrne’s house was to produce two notable pilots. Both had been in the house during Douglas Harvey’s tenure as captain. ‘Jack’ Hay Caldwell was from Invernesshire, the wild countryside bordering Loch Morar, and arrived first in 1907. The second of the boys, Ian Patrick Robert Napier arrived some two years later but he and Jack were similar in age and became great friends, not only at Eton but at home in Scotland during the holidays. Ian was the younger son of Henry Melvill Napier, a Clyde shipbuilder and one half of Messrs Napier & Miller at Old Kilpatrick. Born near Dumbarton in 1895, Ian went up to Eton in 1909 and was a successful rower. A member of the VIII for three consecutive years as well as captain of the boats he rowed alongside the likes of Ronnie Backus until departing school just before the outbreak of war.

  Whilst his father’s firm began turning out minesweepers and assembling aircraft for the war effort, Ian joined a new army battalion of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders almost immediately and served as a personal aide-de-camp in the summer of 1915. Ian was stationed at Ripon with a reserve battalion and went in April 1916 to see a cousin of his mother who was commanding a wing of the RFC. Ian managed to get him to sponsor an application. Orders eventually came through for him to report to No. 1 School of Military Aeronautics at Reading and his training was swift. ‘After 1hr 20mins dual with Capt. O’Malley – I flew by myself!!’

  Nicknamed ‘Naps’ or ‘Old Naps’ by his fellow officers, Ian was rather understated and loathed showing off, but he could not resist one stunt that resulted in a small measure of fame before he left for the Front. It served to advertise the dash and exciting appeal of a life in the air when he glided to a halt on one of the playing fields at Eton and was surrounded by excited observers in the summer of 1916.

  Ian arrived on the Western Front in March 1917, a fortnight before Rhys Davids. Both young men had been singled out as having promise and were selected to join scout squadrons. The Great War was witnessing the birth of the fighter pilot. If the BE2cs and other reconnaissance and observation machines couldn’t protect themselves whilst going about their work then action needed to be taken. Rather than allocating one superior aircraft to a squadron they were now bunched together in units of their own. Populated by bright young pilots they went out in formation without photographs to take or guns to range. Their mission was to escort the slower two-seaters or fighting as a group to expel the enemy from the sky before the Germans could attempt to bring the working machines down.

  Number 40 Squadron, for which Ian was destined, had formed at the beginning of 1916 at Gosport in Hampshire. Robert Loraine, Eric Lubbock’s former pilot, had initially been put in charge of the fledgling outfit and eventually they flew off to France in FE8 ‘pushers’, so called because the engine sat behind the pilot and ‘pushed’
them along. By the time Ian arrived the squadron was under the command of another OE, Leonard Tilney, another of Mr Brinton’s boys. He had left the cavalry and qualified to fly as early as March 1915 and was himself barely 21 years old, having left school as recently as 1914. They had moved into single-seat Nieuport scouts, which, although they were second hand in this case, were some of the best-designed aircraft available to the Allies.

  Ian’s new squadron had been patrolling from Armentières down to Arras some 30 miles south-east of the aerodrome. They had suffered as badly as Eric Lubbock’s squadron in the opening days of March 1917. On 9 March more than half a dozen of their machines were set upon by a group of German scouts from the unit of Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron. The flight lasted half an hour during which they dropped out alarmingly. Four machines were shot down and the other four were badly shot about. Number 29 Squadron came rushing to their aid and got one man shot down by von Richthofen, Germany’s most prolific pilot during the Great War, for its trouble.

  Ian flew his first sorties at the end of the month. No. 40 Squadron were part of a huge effort preparing for the Battle of Arras. With the German retreat, plans had been thrown into disarray, and it became even more crucial to watch what the enemy was up to. Photography and artillery observation were therefore imperative in the run up to the battle and Ian and his fellow pilots were busily engaged in escorting two-seater squadrons over the lines.

  Men continued to arrive to replenish those lost as the squadron struggled to retain its full strength. One of them was an older pilot who arrived at the beginning of April. Edward ‘Mick’ Mannock was suspected of being a bit of a coward when he first appeared. He was 29 years old and had nearly died in captivity at the beginning of the war when he was interred as a civilian whilst working in Turkey. He had since been repatriated in appalling health but had recovered sufficiently to join the Royal Engineers and subsequently transfer to the Royal Flying Corps.

  The Battle of Arras began on Easter Monday, 9 April, when the British and Canadians launched attacks eastward. The first morning was successful. The Hindenburg Line was broken and nearly 6,000 German prisoners taken. Almost the entire front-line system was overrun in under an hour and the second within two. By the end of the day some of the third line had been breached and the Canadians had seized Vimy Ridge under the control of an Etonian general.

  Five days later, as British troops on the ground pushed on, Ian shared his first aerial victory on an afternoon patrol when he and a fellow officer accounted for a German Albatros. He was having much more luck than Mannock, who just couldn’t get going. His flight commander described him as ‘like a highly strung pedigree horse at the starting post’. It wasn’t for want of enthusiasm. Mannock hated the Germans, said a fellow pilot. There was ‘absolutely no chivalry about him; the only good Hun was a dead one’. Mick came from a working-class background and in the evenings he cut a solitary figure in the mess, smoking his pipe and reading. Youthful gossip aggravated him and a ‘Hamlet like gloom’ hung over him. ‘It’s all very well for you fellows,’ he once snapped. ‘You were born with a silver spoon. I had an iron shovel.’

  On 29 April the Red Baron accounted for another member of 40 Squadron. A week later every single Nieuport involved in one of 40 Squadron’s patrols came back damaged and a Captain Nixon, trying to protect his pilots, was shot down by von Richthofen’s younger brother. It had been a trying induction to aerial warfare for Ian Napier.

  The offensive persisted for six bloody weeks. On 23 April it was renewed again. Nivelle had failed spectacularly on the Aisne, triggering mutiny among the French, and the British were attempting to relieve the pressure on them. Casualties were horrific. Allenby asked Haig to stop but he persisted. Allenby supposedly warned Haig that the troops being sent in barely knew how to fire their rifles. They were lost all over the battlefield. However, the Germans had been pushed back 2–5 miles along a 20-mile front . These were the biggest advances since static warfare had kicked in at the end of 1914.

  The Guards did not play a leading role in the Battle of Arras. Henry Dundas had by now turned 20, and he was not happy about it. ‘The kudos out here of being “only 19” is not inconsiderable,’ he said and it was sad to think that soon he was no longer able to ‘bask in its genial rays’.

  More and more young Etonians were arriving to compensate for those lost during the back end of 1916. With the arrival of increasing numbers of school contemporaries, Henry’s social circle at the front had begun expanding greatly in the lull since the Somme. Sometimes new friends came from unexpected directions too and he had struck up friendships with some older OEs. On the way back from leave at the end of 1916, Henry met another Old Etonian who had been out with the Irish Guards since 1914. The eldest son of an Irish army officer and nobleman, Eric Beresford Greer, a talented athlete, had been at Mr Impey’s house until 1910 when he had gone to Sandhurst. Eric had left for France immediately with the BEF and had survived Villers-Cotterêts, the Aisne and Ypres by the end of 1914. Wounded early in 1915, he spent a considerable amount of time recovering and found time to fall in love and marry Pamela Fitzgerald, the daughter of another Irish aristocrat, before rejoining the 2nd Irish Guards in time for the Somme. That battle had put paid to any optimism that he might have had for struggling towards victory. Eric was becoming more and more cynical as the war progressed. Henry had taken just a fraction of the time to form the same opinions: that the General Staff and politicians were clueless idiots, hell bent on flinging the youth of Britain bodily against the Germans until there was nobody left. Sitting in their train carriage, he and Eric hit it off right away. They shared an artistic bent and soon began an enterprise in that vein. Henry would pen satirical poems about the war and Eric would illustrate them with amusing pen-and-ink sketches. It started off as a ‘sort of book’ but the latter had a mind to direct their work towards publication in one of the national pictorials.

  At the beginning of 1917, Eric’s younger brother and fellow OE, 23-year-old Frank was killed.1 He had been acting as the brigade bombing instructor when a charge went off accidentally. Someone was needed to replace him and Henry, with his bombing experience, was summoned. Life at brigade headquarters was to prove quite jovial for him, all things considered. As well as Oliver Lyttelton, four years his senior, Henry was spoilt by the company of yet another OE. Sir John Swinnerton-Dyer, like Eric Greer, was a regular officer, having joined the Scots Guards in 1910. John and Henry hit it off over dinner one night when they began an in-depth conversation about religion, priests and their role in the war. He immediately became another of Henry’s cronies and he duly raved about his sense of humour (‘this in spite of being a regular soldier’) and his good-natured manner.

  Henry was in awe of their commanding officer. To say that Brigadier General John Ponsonby was a character was an understatement. This was the same Ponsonby that had rolled about on the Aisne back in 1914 trying to avoid the intense German shellfire and the same man who had attempted to get the attack at Loos that killed Robin Blacker postponed. Henry was not the only one of his subordinates who adored him. He suffered with a cleft palate, but once officers had learned to understand his style of speech they found him ‘wildly individualistic and charming’. He benefitted from complete devotion not only because of his obvious competence, but because he was affectionate and treated his men like human beings.

  ‘General John’ was a proud OE. He kept a typed list of all of the Etonian officers in his brigade with their years at school, their houses and details of colours and awards.‘Never,’ wrote Henry, ‘have I met a better raconteur. His stories of Eton 1880–1885 are perfect. Yet the same period in the hands of another might be a nightmare of tedium.’ Ponsonby was famous for his pipe, which nobody ever saw lit, and for his horses. Any man that criticised them, despite the fact that they never once stood still even on the most solemn of occasions, was ordered to stand on a chair in the naughty corner. This punishment served as a frequent one for all sorts of indiscreti
ons. Oliver had had his hands rapped lightly on many an occasion for pointing out that the brigadier had signed forms in the wrong places. ‘Any papers which want signing must be brought to me by 2.30 p.m.’, were General John’s instructions. Anyone bringing any after that allotted time would be forced to stand on a chair in the corner for ten minutes after tea.

  The list of transgressions for which one could end up being ordered to stand on the chair was many and varied. No one suffered quite so much as the hapless brigade signalling officer. He had a narrow escape when General John asked him to find a barber to give him a haircut. He had returned with a soldier servant who had never cut a man’s hair in his life, but had much experience in clipping horses. He was let off then because the results turned out to be not so bad, but he had a unique aptitude for blurting out precisely the wrong thing in front of General John at the wrong moment. On one occasion the brigadier had been out scouring Poperinghe for an alarm clock. Smugly he had returned with his prize and given it pride of place on the mantlepiece. The signalling officer had been napping on the sofa and he promptly woke up, scowled at it and exclaimed, ‘What on earth made you buy that shoddy thing?’ He was immediately sentenced to the chair ‘for casting aspersions on the Brigadier’s taste in hardware’. One morning General John was feeling a little under the weather and although he was up and about decided he was not fit to visit the trenches that day. ‘Quite, sir, quite,’ the signalling officer agreed. ‘You’re just like the man who used to say “I eats all right, I drinks all night, I sleeps all right, but when I seek a job of work … I comes all of a tremble”.’ Up he went on the chair again for his indiscretion.

  Of the Etonians, poor John Dyer spent much time hovering upon the brigadier’s chair. Before dinner one night in Ypres he jointly announced with another man that they were the ‘working members’ of the brigade staff, ‘thereby lacking in respect due to the Brigadier’ and implying that he was idle. One lunchtime at the end of June he was asked by the brigade major how he intended to get back over to brigade HQ and he impertinently scoffed ‘ride of course, how do you suppose?’ He began to explain that he was not one of those officers whose bodily comfort required the service of a luxuriously appointed motor car to convey their velvet limbs to the trenches. Unfortunately he appeared to have forgotten that General John and the brigade major were about to get in a car and travel up to the lines, so his punishment was considered most just. He even managed to exact upon himself a special stint as far as the chair was concerned. John once called up the commanding officer of the Scots Guards, who had finally got to sleep after days of hard work, only to blankly look at the receiver and admit, ‘For the life of me I can’t remember what I wanted to say, sir.’ For this display of ‘gross inefficiency and callous carelessness’ General John ordered him to go down to the battalion in person and stand on a chair in their own dugout.