by Wade Davis
THE WAR CHANGED everything. In the winter of 1910 Duncan Grant, Adrian and Virginia Stephen, and several other friends had disguised themselves as Abyssinian princes and, with Adrian playing the interpreter, managed to board a dreadnought battleship. They’d demanded and received full military honors, having deceived the officers in command into believing they were an official delegation, headed by a Prince Makalin. Adrian spoke to his cloaked and bejeweled friends in Latin, reciting long passages of Virgil’s Aeneid, which he had memorized as a boy. His princes grunted in return. The flag commander, W. W. Fisher, who happened to be Adrian’s cousin, was completely fooled. He apologized for not having an Abyssinian flag on board, ordered the ship’s band to play the national anthem of Zanzibar, the only vaguely proximate score at hand, and then offered an eighteen-gun salute, which the delegation declined, citing a tight diplomatic schedule. In fact, the cast of characters was on the edge of panic. It had begun to rain, threatening their makeup, and Duncan Grant’s mustache had begun to peel away. The caper was off. On their return to the train station by private carriage, the entourage, still in disguise, insisted that the waiters don white gloves before serving them food. When the hoax came to light, Duncan and Adrian were asked only to apologize as gentlemen to the First Lord of the Admiralty.
By the end of October 1914, with tens of thousands of young men dead and the nation mobilized for a war beyond all wars, such a stunt would have been inconceivable. The war obliterated sensibilities, laid waste the precious conceits of this small constellation of friends who had with such confidence graced the social scenes of London and Cambridge. Within days many of Mallory’s friends had signed up, his younger brother, Trafford, his former student Robert Graves, Cottie Sanders’s brother Jack, the climbers Siegfried Herford and Hugh Wilson. “We have,” wrote Rupert Brooke, “come into our heritage.” Within a fortnight Geoffrey Young was at the front, first as a journalist and later as a medical transport officer. Geoffrey Keynes, Mallory’s closest friend, was soon performing surgeries in the shimmering light of kerosene lamps in the cellars of bomb-blasted ruins. As a schoolmaster Mallory was exempt, and, though fully committed to the defeat of Germany, he remained apart, reduced to giving lectures at Charterhouse on the causes of the conflict.
The heart of Bloomsbury wanted nothing to do with the war. “I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal,” confessed Maynard Keynes in a letter to Duncan Grant. But work he did, twenty hours a day throughout the war, bringing his financial wizardry to the highest levels of government. Others clung to principle or retreated into passivity. Bertrand Russell went to prison. E. M. Forster signed on with the Red Cross in Egypt. Duncan Grant was allowed to perform alternative service and spent the war on a farm growing turnips, as did Adrian Stephen. Clive Bell wrote that he was opposed to the war, not because of the tragic loss of life but because it promised to leave the world poorer in the pleasures of life. Asked why he was not fighting for civilization, Lytton Strachey, then thirty-four, replied, “I am the civilization for which you are fighting.” Appearing before a military tribunal as a conscientious objector, Strachey was asked what he would do if he saw a German soldier violating his sister. “I would try,” he responded with an air of virtue, “to get between them.” As the casualties mounted, such wit fell flat.
Through the dark first autumn of the war, as the British regular army was destroyed as a fighting force, Mallory often slipped away from school to visit the wounded, convalescing in a nearby hospital in Godalming, where Ruth worked as a volunteer. His only contacts with the front were the jingoistic newspapers and his correspondence with Geoffrey Young, which always rang true. “It becomes increasingly impossible to remain a comfortable schoolmaster,” he wrote to Young in late November. “I read this morning the dismal tale of wet and cold, which made my fireside an intolerable reproach … Naturally I want to avoid the army for Ruth’s sake—but can’t I do some job of your sort?”
With each passing day his dilemma deepened. He feared for his wife, who in December would be pregnant with their first child, but he was haunted by the wounded. Every week brought news of the death of another friend or a former student of the school; twenty-one Charterhouse graduates alone were killed in the first three months of the war. Every afternoon, he saw boys being prepped for war as cadets of the Officer Training Corps. Each month the army required 10,000 new officers of the lower ranks simply to replace the rosters of the dead. These recruits in the first years of the war came almost exclusively from the universities and public schools; entire graduating classes went directly to France as newly commissioned second lieutenants. In 1915 Winchester sent not a single student on to Oxford. That same year Charterhouse graduated 411 upperclassmen, all of whom proceeded directly to the trenches.
The chances of emerging unscathed were slim. Indeed, in 1914, the chances of any British boy aged thirteen through twenty-four surviving the war were one in three. Schools, on average, lost five years’ worth of students. The student body of Eton numbered 1,100; in the war, 1,157 Old Etonians would perish. Wellington, a school of only 500, would sacrifice 699. Uppingham would lose 447, Winchester 500, Harrow 600, Marlborough 733, and Charterhouse 686. The Public Schools Club in London lost over 800 members, forcing it to close for lack of numbers. Of the thousands of public school boys who entered the war, one in five would perish. The lucky ones served on staff positions behind the line. Of those young officers who fought in the trenches, half would die.
In the early spring of 1915, with the help of Eddie Marsh, Mallory made inquiries at the Admiralty. Fletcher would have nothing of it. Mallory, he claimed, was too valuable an asset at the school, and government policy left the decision strictly in his hands as headmaster. Other Charterhouse masters, however, he allowed to enlist. Harold Thompson signed up in January 1915 and was killed at the Somme. Harry Kemble joined the London Regiment and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel before being killed in action in 1917. William Gabain was attached to the Intelligence Corps, serving in France until invalided back to England in November 1916. Lancelot Allen served as a chaplain at the Somme. Bernard Willet was stationed in the artillery with a siege battery. Philip Fletcher entered the Signal Corps in the first weeks of the war.
With so many colleagues gone, often replaced by old men or crippled veterans, Mallory felt increasingly isolated on a campus where with each passing week more and more of the boys sported black armbands, indicating the loss of a father, an uncle, or a brother to the war. Then, in April, came word that his good friend Jack Sanders, Cottie’s brother, had been killed by gas at Ypres on the very day Rupert Brooke had died of blood poisoning on a small island in the Mediterranean. Brooke had joined the navy, witnessed the siege of Antwerp, and then upon his return to England, while staying at Walmer Castle with Violet Asquith, daughter of the prime minister, had written “The Soldier,” a sonnet that became the most famous poem of the war:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer earth concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
“The Soldier,” along with four of his other sonnets, was published in 1914 and Other Poems, a slim volume that in five years would go through twenty-eight printings. Brooke did not live to see its success. En route to Gallipoli from Egypt, his ship stopped off at the island of Skyros on Saturday, April 17, where, feverish, he wandered for several hours through olive groves scented with thyme and sage. A letter reached him from Eddie Marsh, with a clipping from the Times, which had printed “The Soldier.” On Easter Sunday the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral had read the poem from the pulpit before a congregation of several hundred widows, parents, and orphans. A solitary young
man had leapt to his feet, disrupting the reading with a harangue against the war. By Thursday morning, April 22, Brooke was comatose, his temperature rising by late afternoon to 106 degrees. The following day he was dead of sepsis, brought on by an infected mosquito bite. He was buried in a “corner of a foreign field” on the isle of Skyros.
Mallory was stunned. “It is true, I’m afraid,” he wrote to Arthur Benson on April 25, “that I’ve been too lucky; there’s something indecent, when so many friends have been enduring such horrors, in just going on with one’s job, quite happy and prosperous. I hear this morning that Rupert Brooke is dead of blood poisoning. I expect my friends to be killed in action, but not that way. It seems so wanton.”
Rendering the loss even more painful was the exploitation of Rupert’s death by those desperate to find a hero in a war that had made a mockery of the notion. Eddie Marsh wrote the obituary for the Times, which was signed by Winston Churchill. Tributes and proud eulogies appeared everywhere. Brooke, who never experienced the trenches, never wrote of the war as would Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. But he had seen enough to know that it held no mythic glory. “It’s a bloody thing,” he wrote on November 5, three months into the carnage. “Half the youth of Europe blown through pain to nothingness, in the incessant mechanical slaughter of these modern battles. I can only marvel at human endurance.”
In May came more bad news: Mallory’s brother, Trafford, initially so keen on the war, wrote home of piles of dead bodies, the overwhelming stench of the trenches, a fellow officer’s skull blasted by a bullet. Within a fortnight he had been badly wounded in the leg. Fortunately, he survived. Another good friend, Harry Garrett, died in Gallipoli, shot through the head by the Turks. Under the naive impression that the life of a pilot might be safer than that of a soldier, Mallory wrote to Eddie Marsh, seeking a connection that might land him a commission in the Royal Flying Corps, but nothing came of it. That spring at Charterhouse, Mallory had twenty students in his Under VI Modern History class. All but one graduated to war, and four were killed in action. Mallory sat out the summer of 1915 at Pen y Pass, while in France the British Army readied itself for the slaughter at Loos.
In September, Ruth gave birth to a girl, Clare, even as word arrived that Mallory’s friend and climbing companion Hugh Wilson had been killed at Hébuterne. Robert Graves was at Loos with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. In eight months, he wrote, his battalion had lost its full fighting strength five times over. The best way to survive the war was to get wounded. The best wounds, he advised, came on quiet nights in the open, when the chances of a bullet hitting an arm or a leg were highest and the calm on the line implied that the casualty clearing stations would not be too busy. Night patrols between the lines were the ticket, though that could mean crawling through corpses and watching rats tussle for the possession of a severed hand or head.
In the late fall of 1915, Charterhouse’s headmaster finally relented and granted Mallory leave to join up. Mallory wisely sought a commission in the Royal Garrison Artillery and after a three-month training course he was posted to an artillery unit that, he assured Ruth, would be positioned safely behind the lines. On the eve of heading to the front, he had dinner with a young officer just out of the trenches, returning home on leave for the first time in eight months. “To think what those men endure,” George wrote somberly to Ruth, “life seems to mean nothing if war has a place in it.”
There was, in fact, nowhere at the front that was secure. On his first night near the line, a bullet passed between him and a soldier walking three feet ahead. “We settled long ago,” he later reflected, “that there’s no reckoning with death.”
Mallory’s orders directed him to a unit of four six-inch howitzers operating north of Armentières, eight miles south of the Ypres Salient. Commanding the battery was Captain J. Lithgow, a kindly and effusive Scotsman. Mallory, a second lieutenant, shared a billet with Lieutenant D. A. Bell, who was in charge of No. 4 gun. Mallory first came under fire on the night of May 14, 1916. Ten days later a German shell destroyed the back of their cottage but spared his room. “I’m not in the least bit nervy yet,” he assured Ruth on May 27. “We haven’t been badly shelled. One constantly hears the long crescendo whistle and bang or the quick whiz-bang; the ear becomes unconsciously trained in almost no time to note the changes of tone and observe the approximate distance of bursts.”
Two days later, in the middle of a black rain, his unit was ordered south by night to occupy a new position in Picardy near Albert, the staging ground for the Somme. “Evidently we have come to a hot part of the line,” George wrote to Ruth. “Be brave dearest. I came out here to fight.”
“I shall never forget the night we left Armentières en route for Vimy,” recalled G. Ramsay, Captain Lithgow’s batman, who was with Mallory on the march south. Teams of horses strained in their harnesses, hauling guns and caissons of shells. Trucks and lorries inched forward. Troops bent into the rain, trudging facedown along the muddy tracks.
“After a few days bombardment at Vimy,” wrote Ramsay, “we made our way to the Somme where we again joined up with the other half of the battery to take up our position at Pioneer Road, near Albert … This position was well remembered for hard work and no play, with continuous unloading and fusing shells, gun barrels almost red hot with excessive firing, shell dumps and artillery everywhere, with 8″ and 12″ howitzers on our left, 4.5s and 18 pounders behind us, French 75s in front, all raining shells on the German positions. While we were in this position our sister battery 41 lost all officers in one night while they were in their mess at dinner. Two of our junior officers were sent as replacements and the same thing occurred the following night.”
Mallory made no specific mention of the loss of these men, but in a June 16 letter to Ruth he alluded to the danger of being strafed from the air. The more immediate horror, he wrote, was the prevalence of dead bodies and the difficulty of digging in soil certain to yield corpses. He lived now in a dugout, carved into the chalk terrain. Below ground was the scent of decay and the stink of rats, above the smell of cordite and sweat. His unit, the 40th Siege Battery, was attached to the 30th Heavy Artillery Group, which, in turn, was a part of 2nd Corps Heavy Artillery. For the assault at the Somme, the British had in place a howitzer or mortar for every seventeen yards of the German line. In seven days, beginning on June 24, they blasted the German trenches with more shells than had been fired in the entire first year of the war. Mallory and Bell and their crews worked around the clock in four-hour shifts. Every morning broke with a withering barrage that lasted eighty minutes, with guns firing along the entire front. The remainder of the day saw a continuous bombardment, with perhaps a thousand shells fired by each gun. At night half the artillery rested, as the rear of the German lines was swept by heavy machine guns, with the intent of slicing down the enemy’s efforts to replenish their lines.
The Germans returned the fire, and the ground around Mallory’s emplacement trembled and groaned with the concussion of shells, field batteries, and giant sixty-pounders that blew out the lamps and shook the timbers in the deepest of dugouts. On the eve of the assault on July 1, Mallory wrote Ruth a long letter, “a spasm of thought,” as he called it, on the nature of religion and his hopes for the spiritual education of their daughter, noting, “The conception of God must be formed very gradually out of the child’s own spiritual experiences.”
Three days later, a thunderstorm broke and the weather turned cold. The battery fired night and day, the barrels of the guns glowing red in the darkness. A field gunner visited with horrific tales from the trenches. Mallory sought solace in Shakespeare, poring over a pocket edition of four plays, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. To his father he wrote of the dead and the dying, of reports of entire regiments “being cut up by machine guns.” On July 11, just before the second phase of the battle began, he was sent to the trenches, where for three days he occupied an advance observation post, a “bed of rabbit wire in a wet clay hole.” His
task was to register artillery fire on a distant redoubt, a windmill at 8,500 yards. The landscape was torn, the remnants of trees tattered and forlorn, the trenches awash in the “rotting bodies of the enemy and manifold horrors.” He witnessed for the first time flamethrowers incinerating soldiers, “liquid fire exploding with great flashes.”
On July 25, he finished Henry James’s novel The Wings of the Dove and wrote to Ruth of purity and truth, qualities he cherished in their love. But his reality was gruesome. “My nerves are quite unaffected by the horrible—not so my nose; but oh the pity of it I very often exclaim when I see the dead lying about. And anger I feel too sometimes when I see corpses quite inexcusably not buried.”
On July 29, Mallory came close to breaking. He had been leading a work detail away from the trenches when the party came under artillery attack. Lagging behind him were two of his men, young soldiers burdened by a heavy load, a spool of barbed wire. As shells burst on all sides, Mallory and those with him leapt into an adjacent communication trench, where they huddled for several minutes, waiting out the storm of fire. As the last of the 5.9s exploded, he climbed out and saw the spool of wire on the road, and the two lads, facedown in the mud, bundles of blood and bone. He had been with them all day. Both were Scots from Port Glasgow, on the Clyde. Alexander Craig was nineteen, John Forrest just twenty-two. Mallory insisted that they be carried to an aid station, though it was obvious they were dead; their heads were half severed from their bodies.
His letters through the long summer of the Somme record a descent toward despair. On August 2, from the mud hole crawling with rats where he slept, he wrote, “The surroundings are indescribably desolate and dotted with little crosses … The fighting here is very stiff … It’s a slow business; I’m not such a hero as to refrain from putting often enough to myself the question: How much longer?” A fortnight later, on August 15, he confessed in a letter to Ruth, “I don’t object to corpses so long as they are fresh. I soon found that I could reason thus with them. Between you and me is all the difference between life and death. But this is an accepted fact that men are killed and I have no more to learn about that from you, and the difference is no greater than that because your jaw hangs and your flesh changes colour and blood oozes from your wounds. With the wounded it is different. It always distresses me to see them.”