I am very glad for your sake (not for my own, except as a matter of Punch-family pride) that you have got a commission. I hope the Muse may recover under canvas. Let me know your address and books shall be sent to you … If you don’t get sent to the Front we may meet somewhere in an anti-raiders ditch! … Good luck.
Seaman also gave Eddie to understand that he himself was a marked man; the German Intelligence had special orders to keep him under observation, because of some dispute in a hotel in Baden-Baden.
The proprietors had feared that Punch must close down, but were glad to be proved wrong; humour proved to be a necessity, even though an agonizing division soon appeared between the jokes at the front and the jokes at home. After the first battle of Ypres in November 1914 the British armies, at the cost of 32,000 casualties, held on to the Channel ports, and both sides dug into positions which were never altered by more than about thirty miles during the next few years. After this the main task of an infantry regiment was to be shot at or shelled.
Eddie had joined the Lincolns, instead of the Artists’ Rifles, because it made him feel closer to Christina. Her elder brother, Edwin, had returned from Rangoon to join the regiment; her younger brother, Ned, had already done so. The 4th Battalion had its headquarters in the Drill Hall in Lincoln, and Christina, with baby Rawle and a stout nursemaid of fifteen, was to spend the time of separation in what Eddie hoped would be the tranquillity of her father’s home.
However, as soon as war was declared, Bishop Hicks (whose comment had been “England does not want this war and I hate it”) turned over the episcopal palace to anyone who needed shelter. The first-comers were the Belgian refugees, who began to arrive in October.
They fled from Antwerp to Ostend [the Bishop wrote to Christina], then in Ostend they had to hurry away in a steamer for fear of the Germans, leaving all their goods behind them in les malles in the station. So beyond a little bag, they had nothing but what they stood up in. This was a real sorrow to them, for it made them, they thought, look contemptible: dear souls! They like, at present, to live in ‘Tina’s room’ and the rooms adjoining, upstairs. There they have their meals, after the continental manner.
All over England the refugee problem followed a familiar pattern, early generous welcome giving way to friction. Ronnie, waiting at the station in his long soutane, was asked doubtfully by a lady, “Êtes vous Belgique?” and did not like to answer “Non, je suis Angleterre.” At Lincoln every cooking pot and pan was soon ruined; but to the Bishop his guests were always “dear souls”.
Ned, removed, at least for the time being, from the dangerous influence of Ronnie Knox, was sent to Gallipoli. Eddie was lucky enough to miss this. The 2/4th Lincolns began their duties in Ireland, in County Kerry, which was supposed to be dangerously Republican; but they found themselves peacekeeping in a peaceable area. Eddie unfortunately had time enough to draw caricatures, an art he gave up altogether in later life, and one of his drawings caused him to fall foul of the Adjutant. He was also very nearly killed in the regimental horse races. Being light and agile, he was put up on the favourite, but had to wear two cartridge belts to bring his weight up to the handicap; the belts came loose and almost battered him to death. Afterwards he was asked why he had not pulled up, but this had simply not occurred to him.
For Eddie, horses were one of the redeeming features of the opening months of the war. He loved to watch them, particularly if they were cantering freely in the open, moving, as they always do, in a half-circle. He had an idea that it is because we always require them to move in a straight line that we have never quite tamed them.
By 1916 the battalion began to be impatient to be “out there”. It was the year of Verdun, where the French casualties were so heavy that for the time being the fighting on the Western Front had to be largely left to the British Army. Haig had tried a mass breakthrough on the Somme, with losses of about 65,000 men, and it was said that the Higher Command were disappointed with the new drafts from the Midlands and East Anglia, because they were too stupid to do anything more than advance straight forward towards the enemy in daylight, and be killed. Disenchantment had set in, conscription was introduced for the first time, and still the Lincolns wanted to join their other battalions in Flanders.
In December, Christina gave birth to her second child in somewhat cramped conditions in the Bishop’s Palace. Eddie did not get compassionate leave, perhaps because of his difference of opinion with the Adjutant. The 2/4th had been brought back to England to bring up their equipment to scale, preparatory to embarkation for France.
Winnie had never seen Wilfred so distressed as on the day when his beloved Territorials were recruited into a general service battalion. There was not much chance, after his ordination, of his joining them as a chaplain. The Chaplains’ Department of the War Office was firmly opposed to Anglo-Catholicism; they felt, for example, that it was not the business of a priest of the Church of England to administer the last sacraments to the dying on the battlefield. In that case, Wilfred asked, could he be a stretcher bearer, or train as a medical orderly? The Bishop of London told Wilfred—who was still only a deacon—that he could not.
Ronnie was inclined to agree with this decision. He had returned, in the Michaelmas term of 1914, to an almost empty University. “Oxford is quite indescribable,” he wrote to his father. “A cloud of depression hangs over it which it would take several Zeppelin bombs to pierce.” None of his friends had been able to come to the house party at More Hall; his advice to them to stay and take their degrees, instead of rushing into uniform, fell on deaf ears. They would not listen to reason, or even to affection disguised as reason. His influence seemed suddenly to count for nothing.
In truth, his friends were in another world of experience. Julian Grenfell, a natural soldier, had already joined the army. Harold Macmillan and Charles Lister, among so many others, were training for commissions. Guy Lawrence was at Belton Camp with the 7th Battalion of the South Staffordshire Regiment. “Yes, I think Gi is happy,” Ronnie wrote to Dick Rawstorne. “With fifty people to run errands for him he’s happy, and they’re happy, so what’s the odds? But oh, my dear, the thought of his going to the front.”
Finding the deserted colleges intolerable, he went to teach classics, without pay, at Shrewsbury. Here he thankfully re-entered for a time the world of childhood, devising ingenious games for the boys, or challenging them to translate “motor-car” (= “a smoking vehicle”) and “Zeppelin” into Latin. In the casualty lists he began to read the names of his friends, the first ones to be killed in action. Others were standing by to go out, and “the nearer it gets to the time,” Ronnie wrote, “the gloomier life is. I can’t think, you know, how women stand it at all.” Then, in the spring of 1915, the foundations of his belief in the Church, which had been so secure, without loose stones, began to tremble.
Both Guy and Harold Macmillan expected to be sent overseas before long. They turned to him for spiritual direction. Having reached a point of extreme Anglo-Catholicism, could they be content with it? If they had to die, they wanted to die in absolute certainty. Should they “pope” now? The fashionable word revealed the depths of embarrassment and trouble. And Ronnie, as a priest, found that he did not know what to say. If they came back alive in a year’s time, he was not sure that he would still be an Anglican himself. What kind of an answer was that?
His first unmistakable intimation, Ronnie tells us in A Spiritual Aeneid, was in May 1915, when Wilfred, now an ordained priest, said his first mass at St Mary’s, Graham Street. Ronnie travelled up from Shrewsbury to be there:
We had been brought up together, known one another at Oxford as brothers seldom do. It should have been an occasion of the most complete happiness to see him now … in the same church, at the same altar, where I had stood three years before in his presence. And then, suddenly, I saw the other side of the picture.
If this doubt, the shadow of a scruple which had grown in my mind, were justifiable—only suppose it were justif
iable, then neither he nor I was a priest … the accessories to the service—the bright vestments, the fresh flowers, the mysterious candlelight—were all settings to a sham jewel; we had been trapped, deceived, betrayed, into thinking it was all worth while.
Ronnie said nothing as yet to anyone about his doubts. Wilfred wrote to his father to tell him that there were fifty-five communicants in the church and the collection taken up was one pound and one shilling, but both of them knew, neither of them needed to say, what it meant to Bishop Knox to have a second son ordained, even though once again he did not feel able to attend an Anglo-Catholic mass. Wilfred began life as an assistant curate, with his vicar, J. C. Howell, as his confessor and friend. He got permission to go on living at the Trinity Mission—in what Ronnie called “almost habitable lodgings” in Caroline Street; St Mary’s was in a smartish district where Wilfred felt somewhat out of place, except in the rows of slum cottages which were then still standing behind Ebury Street. “He is still remembered in the parish,” writes the present vicar, John Gilling. “People in the cottages used to darn his socks for him while he waited barefoot.”
Ronnie was in a state of shock. The chapter of A Spiritual Aeneid which described this period is called “Seeing a Ghost”. Two days after Wilfred’s first mass, Guy Lawrence wrote that he had been received into the Catholic Church by the Jesuits at Farm Street. “My mind was made up for me,” he wrote. “God made it clear to me, and I went straight to Farm Street … I know I am happy and I only long for you to be happy with me. Come and be happy. Harold will, I think, follow very soon … You’ve been and are my best friend, Ron; there is no shadow between you and me.”
In the event, Macmillan put off his decision until after the war, “if I’m still alive.” If so, he meant to get away from home, from Ronnie, from every outside influence, and relearn his belief for himself. Neither he nor Guy loved Ronnie any the less, but they did not need him as they once had done.
At present [Ronnie wrote to Rawstorne], I’m like a top that’s got outside its grooves and is spinning about all over the place, and you can’t tell whether it’ll get side-tracked into the groove again or go clean off the board. But I’m afraid I shall never be broad-minded, Dick—unless I pope, perhaps: I think I might turn into rather a broad-minded Roman Catholic … But oh, Dick, I do hate it all, and I do hope you’ll hate it less than I do. Do for heaven’s sake not get a fever, there’s dangers enough without that. God bless you, my dear, you’ve been very good to me.
Dick Rawstorne was due to sail for Gallipoli. The Dardanelles landings began in February 1915. Charles Lister went out with the Naval Division, was wounded three times, and died in August. Guy’s battalion had relieved the Naval Division, and Guy himself came through unhurt, but the losses were terrible; as he put it, “an almost full parade of the regiment is now in paradise.” His nerves were wearing thin. He was invalided home, and “I think Gi isn’t quite so well,” Ronnie wrote to Dick, “because I was to have gone there for the weekend, but he’s put me off.” The shadow had fallen. Then Dick himself was taken prisoner by the Turks.
While the slaughter continued on every front, Ronnie fought his own battle with himself. He made a list of reasons—not the most important ones, but still important—for and against his conversion to Rome.
You’ll be more popular in
the long run. But you’ll first lose all the popularity you’ve got.
You’ll get rid of the prayer-book. You’ll miss the Authorised Version.
You’ll be able to get an altar when you want it, even abroad. But you won’t say mass in old
Parish churches, like All Saints,
York.
Your fellow priests won’t be married. But they’ll be much more vulgar.
It will distress Guy and Harold if you don’t. It will distress your father if you do, and many who have been kind to you.
It will be seen that nobody could be more cruelly hard on Ronnie than he was on himself. He began to consider the idea of entering a monastery, and devoting his life to the memory of his dead friends. To outside observers his will power seemed to be “slipping away like a piece of soap down the drain”. “Don’t break all our hearts,” said Howell, at St Mary’s. He spoke for Wilfred, who could not bring himself to say anything.
In August 1916 Ronnie went to Hickleton to consult Lord Halifax, the great supporter of Anglo-Catholicism and Church reunion. At the house party he met a most singular person, the Jesuit priest Father Martindale. Martindale, in the nursery language of the Knoxes, was Ronnie’s “haunt”. Their lives crossed at many points, Martindale, quite without intention, acting as something between a warning and a reproach.
Charlie Martindale—he was christened Charlie—was nine years older than Ronnie. His biographer, Father Caraman, tells us that he was sickly from birth—“I cried; I didn’t like the world; nor do I.” Like Ronnie he had been brought up by elderly relatives, promised brilliantly and won every conceivable academic prize, but his reaction against middle-class life was early and violent. Before his reception into the Church he had gone to work as a hospital porter; after ordination he became a Jesuit, because he had heard that the Oratorians and Benedictines “were all gentlemen”; he was expected, because of his wretched health, to confine himself to a life of scholarship (he did, in fact, write nearly five hundred books, and was asked by the Vatican to collate their manuscript of Ausonius) but he broke away, appeared in unexpected places, conducted missions to seamen, dockers and incurables, all of whom loved him. He never stayed long in the houses of the great, and was only at Hickleton to collect some details for a biography of Hugh Benson. Ronnie, who was eagerly looking forward to consulting Martindale, felt that this would make a bond between them; he did not know that Martindale, who had had to struggle with his own temptations to homosexuality and undue sentiment, disliked Benson’s work and hated the idea of writing the Life, which he had undertaken only after pressure from the Benson family.
Ronnie described the meeting more than once, always telling the story against himself. In a conference at Oxford in 1936 he recalled how he must have looked, in his smart buckled shoes and consciously “Roman” cassock, while Martindale hurried in, thin and shabby, “with a face like an extremely animated skull, not dressed in a cassock at all, but in a rather seedy frock-coat which didn’t fit him too well and I think I knew in that moment that this was the real thing … Anyway, I went and talked to him that evening while he was packing up to go somewhere else. Father Martindale was always packing to go somewhere else.” As the priest flung his shoes into a suitcase, Ronnie told him, in agony of mind, that he was coming to believe the Church of England “hadn’t got a leg to stand on”. Ought he not to take the plunge and become a Catholic at once? The answer was completely unexpected: “Of course you couldn’t be received like that!” Ronnie felt the sensation, familiar since childhood, of being hit suddenly in the wind.
Father Martindale had not intended a rebuff, simply a call to positive thinking. The effect on Ronnie was decisive, but for a while he drifted without moorings. His only certain conviction was that he must leave Shrewsbury. His last address in the chapel of the school which he had loved so much had none of his usual humour. He took Newman’s subject, “The Parting of Friends”, and the boys, he thought, had a suppressed air of wanting their money back.
Wilfred bore as best he could with these apparently endless hesitations. The idea of a separation was terrible to him, but he tried to concentrate only on Ronnie’s unhappiness. The best thing for his brother, he thought, might be a hard spell of work in a parish.
In spite of everything, there were moments when they could laugh together. Sometimes they laughed so much that, as in former days, they felt like rolling about the pavement. This was the case when they were walking up Whitehall and saw Erm coming out of the Admiralty, all dressed up, as Wilfred put it, like Lord Nelson. Both were too overcome to ask him what he had done with his telescope. They exaggerated a little. Dilly was in t
he uniform of a sub-lieutenant, R.N.V.R.
Bloomsbury and Cambridge attitudes to the war varied. Of those closest to Dilly, Henry Lamb, who had medical training, served with the R.A.M.C., Frank Birch joined the Navy as an ordinary seaman and amazed the lower-deck concert parties with impersonations of Wedd, Nixon and Monty James; Maynard Keynes was needed at the Treasury. Of the cast of Dilly’s play, The Limit, four were to die at Gallipoli.
Dilly, determined that his motor-bicycle should be of use, made strenuous attempts to enlist as a military dispatch rider. “It seems it’s mostly night-riding,” Ronnie had anxiously written home, “so there’s not much chance of Erm, with his sight, being accepted.” Dilly’s contention was that in the darkness there was no difference between good and bad sight, but a demonstration of his riding led the selection board to reject him decisively. His future, however, had been decided for him elsewhere.
At the beginning of 1915 he was asked to join I.D.25, the department of Naval Intelligence which became better known as Room 40. He was to become a cryptographer, that is, an expert in the art of reading secret writing, a system which in wartime ranged from the crucial signals of Higher Command down to a junior officer in the trenches, struggling by candlelight with his muddy codebook. “Who would appreciate an obituary such as: He died like a hero, his last words being XB.35.06.7K2?” asked Punch in 1917. The answer might well have been: the regulars of Room 40.
By the time Dilly joined Room 40 it had come a long way from its amateurish beginnings. When war was declared the Admiralty had no cryptographic room at all. Alfred Ewing, who had been a professor of mechanics, had been asked to see what he could do about getting up a department. He found himself, as he says in his own account of those years, “in the thick of special work quite outside my ordinary lines,” and reduced to looking through the dusty codes at Lloyd’s and the Post Office to learn even the rudiments of the business. He was a good organizer, however, and he had three pieces of luck; he got on well with the terrifying Admiral Fisher; he was given the current cipher and signal book of the German Navy, picked up by the Russians from the body of a drowned seaman; and he knew that the Germans could not send messages by their underwater cables—the British Navy had cut these on the first day of the war. All German signals, then, must pass either through Allied or neutral cables, or by radio. Calls from their shore stations or between their ships at sea could all be intercepted by our directional radio stations, which rapidly learned to identify the sources and the call signals. Our operators covered positions across the vast face of the waters extending from the Arctic Circle down to the Cape Verde Islands.
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