by Jean Findlay
Not finding a publisher, Charles was prompted by the experience to apply for the Patterson Bursary in Anglo-Saxon from Edinburgh University. He sat an exam on the grammar and literary history of Anglo Saxon and translated both verse and prose.
That evening he travelled overnight to London where his old friend Richard Ball, now living near King’s Cross, gave him breakfast in his rooms and then accompanied him to Winchester for a few days with friends. They had dinner with Rendall, now headmaster, and were entertained afterwards by singing from a former schoolfriend, the choirboy James Steuart Wilson, with whom Charles had once been in love. He wrote restrainedly to his mother, ‘His voice is very much improved in quality, while it has lost none of its character.’30 Wilson went on to a successful music-hall career. A few days after his visit an article in The Wykehamist explained the difficulty of the Patterson Bursary examination and its distinction, and announced Charles as recipient. Suddenly the Dons at Winchester looked on him with more respect – as no longer an undistinguished scholar.
Back in Edinburgh, meanwhile, he was also seen as a useful family member. Aunt Kate, Meg’s youngest sister, whom she had funded through university, was very engaged in the burgeoning women’s suffrage movement. She invited her sisters and nephews and nieces in Edinburgh to suffragette meetings to hear speakers from London and Glasgow – as well as to hear Kate herself. (Meg noted proudly that Kate spoke effectively to well-attended meetings.) At the seaside at Elie in 1912, they had held a family debate proposing the motion ‘Do women need further liberation?’31 which concluded that the Scott Moncrieff family was overwhelmingly run by its women; they took all the major decisions, and the men were only necessary to provide the money. From his personal experience, women were quite powerful enough. In 1913, Kate, delighted that Charles was living nearby, enlisted her nephew’s help with her fundraising. He wrote home, ‘I helped at the Suffragette Jumble Sale in Nicolson Street – it was horrible.’32
If politics were a chore, there was one activity at university that he enjoyed enormously: acting. He took part in a production of The Merchant of Venice and here met Henry R. Pyatt and his wife Fanny who became lifelong friends. Pyatt was a master at Fettes School; he was an amiable optimist who played the cello, wrote light verse and was a genial host. Fanny, the only daughter of the bishop of Edinburgh, was a woman of exquisite taste in clothes, furniture and friendship. Charles spent many evenings with them and they corresponded thoughout his life. Pyatt later wrote of Charles during this period, ‘He gave me the impression of being aristocratic by nature in the sense of loving and doing and emulating the best things.’ At this point in his life Charles was at his most handsome: heads would turn as he entered a room. He was manly, strong and physically active, with a distinction about his bearing; dark blue eyes, pale skin and a serious expression. His voice was also arresting – soft, clear and deep and he delivered his own witty epigrams using excited, eccentric gestures. There was something tantalisingly elusive about him, remembered Henry Pyatt.
Impishness is not the word, for that suggests a want of dignity which was never observable in him. I saw him once in his student days at a fancy dress ball attired as a faun, with a leopard skin flapping round bronzed limbs and vine leaves in his hair and said to myself, ‘Faun-like, that is it.’ … Scott Moncrieff was undoubtedly satirical. This attitude was due in fact to his extreme sensitiveness, which tempted him instinctively to whirl a rapier of glittering wit around him to prevent others from getting under his guard, and penetrating to his secret, a thing that few succeeded in doing.33
If Pyatt meant by Charles’s ‘secret’, his homosexuality, then it was safe; few save his closest friends discovered it, though others may have suspected. University had been a mixed time, very different from the continuation of school that Oxford would have provided. He came away with two degrees, one in law and one with distinction and a prize in English literature, as well as the experience of having excelled at his cadet training and been chosen to help to lead the group in Canada. The law degree would set him up as an army officer, while the First Class Honours in English would foster his future career in literature. He was aware that he was at his zenith and had a photograph of his profile taken, keeping copies that he gave to friends later in life. All this lent him a certain amount of self-assurance, which could be mistaken for arrogance by some but perhaps was rather an instinct that his life and looks would never be better.
CHAPTER 6
Lightness in War
There is something rather stimulating in being under fire.
CKSM to his mother, 27 October 1914
The urge to glory was too simple a sentiment to describe the impulse that thrust Charles to war, but it was certainly part. The public school ethos glamorised warfare: studying the classics meant engaging in poetry and prose about Greek and Roman warriors, and the team spirit nurtured by sport on the playing fields enhanced partisan feeling. War was the ultimate team game, with the highest stakes. Charles had also been a cadet since leaving school and had spent some of his summer holidays for the last four years training as a lieutenant in the 1st (Highland) Cadet Battalion of the Royal Scots Regiment, under Colonel Holden Mackenzie. In March 1913 he was appointed 2nd Lieutenant in the General Reserve of officers.
The industry for creating soldiers was flourishing all over Europe. With a population of forty million, France had decided in 1913 to match Germany’s number of soldiers, though the Germans had a population of sixty million to choose from. All of Europe was well aware of the jostling for military power. The Germans were competing with the size of Britain’s navy, egged on by their jealousy of Britain’s rule of the waves and the vast British Empire, and Britain, concerned, chose to outbuild their rival in modern battleships. Germany had plans for war and General Schlieffen had begun working on them as far back as 1905. However it was a less organised country that provided the prompt. Not all Serbs lived in Serbia, some boiled resentfully under Habsburg rule in Bosnia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Franz Ferdinand, nephew to Emperor Franz Josef, was inspecting the Habsburg army’s summer manoeuvres and drove into Sarajevo with his wife Sophie on 28 June 1914. A Bosnian Serb assassination team was planned and in place. They first threw a bomb which killed an officer in the car behind the Archduke who, undeterred, asked to be driven to visit the casualty in hospital. His car took a wrong turning, and out of the crowd stepped Gavrilo Princip who shot both the Archduke and his wife. Then followed a month’s silence.
* * *
That summer Charles went on the annual camp with his company of Royal Scots cadets, training on Lanark Moor. On 24 July he decided to keep a diary as ‘relief from the monotony of half remembered things’.1 It was a personal record, rather than a run-down of political events in Europe. At camp Douglas Christie was his adjutant, the eldest of the four Christie brothers from the Fife estate of Durie, second cousins with whom Charles had spent many holidays. The Christie boys were unusual characters and regaled Charles with stories of their prep school where they called their lugubrious headmaster ‘The Shadow of Death’, and his equally sinister manservant, ‘The Valet of the Shadow of Death’. Once, as schoolboys at Fettes, they were told they would be beaten by the head boy for a misdemeanour. Their liberal mother, however, who held the advanced view that physical beatings were not the best punishments for small boys at boarding schools, wrote saying that if they were beaten she would remove them. They were beaten and she removed them, taking them with her to Monte Carlo where they lived in a rambling mansion by the coast and were taught, mornings-only, by a personal tutor, while Mrs Christie enjoyed a stylish bohemian life and gambled in the casinos.
On Lanark Moor Douglas and Charles pitched camp in the wind and rain behind the Scottish Rifles mess huts, as there were other regiments there too, and the huts provided some shelter. Charles had brought his typewriter and he and Douglas rigged up rotas on it before walking into Lanark to visit the picturehouse that his father had opened a year before. Then the fled
gling officers sat round a fire and drank halfpenny mugs of cocoa out of a Dixie can in the chill evening on the damp moor. Next morning all seventy of the company paraded to Lanark Station to meet the Officer in Command. They had four ‘admirable’ sergeants. Of one of them Charles wrote: ‘The renowned J. M. Davie, such a man as Philip Bainbrigge would say – and such a modest and quiet boy too, for all his authocracy, that one can hardly talk to him.’2 ‘Authocracy’ was a rare quality which both he and his friend Bainbrigge found very attractive; a mixture of authority and aristocracy that marked a man as a natural leader.
In the evening the Commanding Officer gave a lecture ‘about buttons and duty and the bravery of boys’3 and asked Charles to organise the drum service for Sunday. Charles stopped the local Minister, whom he knew well, in Lanark High Street and borrowed thirty hymn books, then collected some more from his mother plus a chess board for cousin Douglas and a tin bath for himself, ‘in which I bathe every morning at 6.30 outside my tent, as an example to the others’.4 On the way back to camp he met the CO’s adjutant, McHardy, and they passed two nuns from a local convent: ‘McHardy and I met two sisters from Smythum and worked up a religious argument. His views are 1843 – mine are 1348, so we don’t exactly see eye to eye about it.’5 McHardy was of the strictly evangelical Free Church which had seceded from the Church of Scotland. Charles had by now a reaction to Protestantism which he saw as unforgiving and puritanical as exemplified by the church he attended with his father and the attitude of some of his masters at Winchester. He was searching for a warmer, less condemnatory approach to faith and in his poetry he harked back idealistically to pre-Reformation times. Perhaps sensing this, one of the nuns from the Smythum Convent kept in contact with him throughout the war.
On Sunday 26 July, inspired by his reaction to McHardy, Charles organised the entire service around his own attitudes to his faith. They had Anglican prayers, including, noted Charles in his diary with an exclamation mark, the absolution – High Anglican prayers, verging on the Catholic. The two lessons were chosen and read by himself. The first was the last two chapters of the Ecclesiastes, which included, ‘Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth; walk in the ways of your heart, and the sight of your eyes.’ The second reading was 1 Corinthians 13, the reading about love, concluding, ‘So faith, hope and love abide, these three, but the most important of these is love.’ They were inspiring texts for any romantically inclined young man. McHardy did not approve of the service nor the hymns, calling it ‘Sabbath day entertaining’6, and he organised a counter service of Psalm singing in the evening without music, beating time with his tobacco pipe on the table. Yet to McHardy’s great dismay and Charles’s secret triumph, the choir revolted and opted for hymns.
The following day Charles caught the express train to Edinburgh for a break, bought the newspapers and read of a disturbing incident in Dublin where his local regiment, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, (KOSB), was stationed keeping an eye on the ferment for Home Rule. A shipment of arms, including 900 German guns, had arrived at Howth for the Irish Volunteers and the KOSB were ordered to seize the weapons. They were met by an angry crowd throwing stones, and spat on and jeered by the Irish crowd. The KOSB were ordered to fire on the crowd and killed three civilians without managing to capture the arms.
Charles also read with feelings of ‘awe and foreboding’7 of the Austrian Ultimatum to Serbia, Austria’s reaction to the Sarajevo shooting. The demands were extreme and even threatened Serbia’s existence as a separate nation; the Serbians were given only forty-eight hours to comply. Whilst Great Britain and Russia sympathised with many of the demands, both agreed the timescale was impossibly short. Diplomatic attempts at peace, all too frantic and last-minute, could not stop the mobilisation of troops all over Europe; by now Serbia, Austria, Russia, Germany and France had armies ready to fight.
Charles wrote to the War Office, informing them of a change of address from Lanark to Edinburgh and expressing a hope that he might serve with the 3rd Royal Scots (based at Glencorse in Edinburgh), because he had been to Canada with them. However the regimental system, based on locality, was entrenched, using local officers to command the men. In 1914 a Scottish Border accent would be incomprehensible to someone unused to hearing it. Charles had absorbed Scots; he understood and could also speak it fluently. It was likely he would be called into the King’s Own Scottish Borderers – which, as a Lowland Regiment, did not wear the kilt. Charles would have preferred a kilted regiment, like the 3rd Royal Scots – he thought men looked their best in kilts and enjoyed wearing one himself.
When camp was ended on 31 July, Charles and his cousin Douglas returned to Edinburgh. By chance, Philip Bainbrigge reached Edinburgh late that night from Shrewsbury School, amazed to see Charles arriving at the station at the same time. The following day they all went to bathe at the Drumsheugh bath club and then Douglas returned to Durie, his large family home in Fife. Charles, having an obligation to his guest, wrote, ‘I stayed and played with Philip.’ The friendship was at that point ambivalent as the entry is immediately followed the next day by ‘Sat 2nd August – I fled over to Durie also, and spent a very pleasant and quiet weekend, tinged with the excitement of war.’8 Charles and his cousins awaited their orders. On Monday, Charles travelled to Elie, not far from Durie, where his mother and the extended Scott Moncrieff family were all staying. He posed with them in a photograph in the back garden of Elie Castle, looking handsome, mercurial and mischievous. He was nearly twenty-six and physically and mentally in very good shape. His brothers are both in the picture, John, and Colin with Connie and three children, with numerous cousins, aunts and uncles, while in the centre sit the greying Meg and George Scott Moncrieff, matriarch and patriarch, organisers of the yearly family gathering.
The older faces look more sombre and worried than those of the younger members. Germany had declared war on Russia and France and had announced they would march through Belgium, breaching the Treaty of London of 1839. Britain, expecting invasion from the north French coast and hearing on 4 August that the treaty ensuring Belgian neutrality had been breached, now declared war on Germany.
Cut off in the tiny seaside town of Elie there was nothing to do but wait and discuss and look at the awe and foreboding on the older family members’ faces. The banks were shut for three days and the stock exchange closed too. Charles received a friendly letter from one of the cadets’ fathers thanking him for allowing his son to fall ill and rest during the training on the moor – but no orders. Charles walked around Elie all day, waiting in frustrated excitement. The orders arrived at his address in Edinburgh where Philip Bainbrigge was staying, and were forwarded to Elie, arriving on Thursday morning in the form of a telegram requesting him to join the King’s Own Scottish Borderers at Dumfries.
Charles caught the next train to Edinburgh and rushed about getting his uniform; officers were responsible for buying their own. Andersons, the outfitters, was in a state of siege, but he managed to get a fitting and, best of all, a good second-hand khaki tunic and breeches, which were delivered about 5.30 p.m. to his Edinburgh rooms. Sending Philip over to Elie to stay with his parents for the weekend in his absence, Charles changed and packed in record time and caught the last train to Dumfries at 6 p.m. He fell in with the KOSB on their way from Moffat and had two excited officers in his compartment for the rest of the journey.
Friday was spent meeting other officers, and, after spending that night at the Station Hotel listening to the shunting of endless trains, Charles woke at 6.30 a.m. to start soldiering on the very wet Saturday 8 August – organising the medical inspection for his militia who arrived in twos and threes, then tracking down a Jewish tailor who agreed to buy their cast-off civilian clothing. By 1 a.m. they were ready. They paraded down the muddy and stony streets of Dumfries, lined with ‘dimly seen’ faces.
The people turned out marvellously, bless them, to see us off – babies held up to the windows – and crow
ds all along the way – and then a great overpowering cheer from the bridge over the station as we passed out underneath it. Colonel Dudgeon, Lord Lieutenant of the Stewartry, turned out in cocked hat and feathers to see us off.9
The party of King’s Own Scottish Borderers left Scotland in the small hours of the following morning, to join the 3rd (Reserve) Battalion at Portland, near Weymouth on the south coast of England, where men were trained up in readiness to be sent to join the 2nd KOSB Battalion in France. They were also positioned for defence against invasion from the sea if necessary. Charles was given command of a battery of 9.2-inch guns perched on the cliff overlooking the west battery and 305 feet above it. He had ninety men: 65 gunners and 25 Borderers. The gunners lived in shelters and the infantry in tents outside. For the first night he slept in the store, on crates of biscuit boxes, in his coat, shirt, breeches and puttees. At 4 a.m. the gunners did their daily parade to uncork and prepare the guns, so he got up and was able to borrow someone else’s rug and a coat to sleep under.
Eventually Charles’s full kit arrived: his Glengarry bonnet in dark blue wool, with black tails and a band of red, white and dark green dicing, with a red toorie on top. The silver cap badge, set on a black rosette, identified the regiment. The badge bore the Cross of St Andrew, inscribed ‘King’s Own Scottish Borderers’, and an image of Edinburgh Castle with three turrets, each with flag flying. Above and below, were the mottoes In Veritate Religionis Confido (‘I put my trust in the truth of religion’) and Nisi Dominus Frustra (‘Without the Lord, everything is in vain’) – the motto of the City of Edinburgh. Surrounding the picture was a wreath of thistles. The Regiment was authorised to wear trews of Leslie tartan, the family tartan of the Earl of Leven. Only the pipers wore kilts, of Royal Stewart tartan.