by Jean Findlay
The First Battle of Ypres stopped the Germans from moving up to the Channel ports. It consolidated the earlier Belgian action of opening the sluices that held out the sea and flooding their own country: 22 miles were flooded between Dixmude and Niewport, stopping the enemy in their tracks. But the Germans did not give up; they decided to come through Ypres from the Menin road and were met less than a mile outside the town at a tiny village called Hooge. The Prussian Guards broke through at first but were eventually held off by the 9th Infantry Brigade.
This was 17 November and the KOSB threw themselves into the intense fighting. C company took a heavy toll of the enemy, especially ‘a group of five or six men who remained for the whole 13 days in a very wet part of the trench and declined relief in view of it being an exciting position. One of these men shot six Germans in rapid succession who had got into his trench.’29 Adrenaline was running high for some of Charles’s company, but, as their commanding officer, he could see the real toll, recording the numbers lost daily in the Unit Diary, and describing his first experience of a trench mortar – ‘a large shell of high explosive comes over like a football. It has a demoralising effect because of its slow flight and terrible violence. Men are blown into several pieces.’30
The personal commentary in his letters was always less brutal, ‘Quant à la guerre, rien à signaller, except that this wood has an evil smell, and that shells hit the pine trees and bring them down on us. I cut off the tops and fill my dugout with them to counteract the pervading smell.’31 The smell was made up of ammonium chloride, dirty bodies and reeking trench foot. They spent two weeks in trenches unwashed and unshaven, then there was the release of billets again, with food parcels and letters from home. Charles wrote ‘Billeted’ verses which vividly reflect his gaiety of spirit in the face of death with a sort of boy scout camaraderie, in rhymes intended to entertain.
…
We’re feasting on chocolate, game pie, currant bun,
To a faint German-band obligato of gun,
For I’ve noticed, wherever the regiment go,
That we always end up pretty close to the foe …
Mustn’t think we don’t mind when a chap gets laid out,
They’ve taken the best of us, never a doubt;
But with life pretty busy, and death rather near
We’ve no time for regret any more than for fear …
You may go to the Ritz or the Curzon (Mayfair)
And think they do things pretty well for you there;
When you’ve lain for six weeks on a water-logged plain
Here’s the acme of luxury – billets again.
‘Billeted’ was published in full later in 1917, with another three of Charles’s poems, in E. B. Osborn’s The Muse in Arms, an anthology of over a hundred poems by men serving in all three forces during the war. Charles was not the only soldier expressing himself in verse; there were fifty-two contributors to this volume, all men, including the poets Robert Nichols, Osbert Sitwell, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, all of whom would come into Charles’s life later on.
Billets meant the sudden luxury of warm water to wash in and Charles was relieved to shave off his beard; it had been a surprise to grow a black beard beneath an orange moustache, and the colours, he felt, did not mix well. He and five other officers lunched in a Flemish restaurant where he noticed the décor had the mark of good craftsmanship: mantelpieces, panelling, china, everything down to the cutlery was beautifully made:
Belgium was and still is a delightful country. Like Gabriel Nash, I like to go about looking at things and there are such millions of little details here that one might easily overlook, but that one does, at some time or other, notice with delight. In Belgium the aristocracy has always been an aristocracy of craftsmen.The commonest tin spoons are perfectly proportioned, nothing to worry or offend one except dirt, but we are pretty dirty ourselves …32
As he was writing, the room was suddenly invaded by weeping women, ‘which seemed to hint at a German advance’, and signalled the end of the only holiday the regiment had had since landing. The break did mean he received piles of post. One family friend wrote Charles a letter addressed ‘Charles Scott Moncrieff, the K.O.S.Borderers, Somewhere’, and miraculously the letter got to him as fast as any other. Meg sent him a second air cushion which was useful when a Gordon Highlander was brought in badly wounded, and Charles was able to give him that and his waterproof because they could get no stretcher till sunset. ‘The Belgians are far better than the French,’ he wrote. ‘The Flemish really are like us. I don’t know what it is, but the Flemish women at every house door are like the unmarried daughters one expects to find when one pays calls in the country in Scotland, and they are simple, capable, friendly folk. I love them.’33 Having read of the city of Ypres, which epitomised the Flemish craftsmanship, he was longing to see it. When he finally got the opportunity he was not allowed to enter but still felt that:
the effect of the town, with its convents indented here and there by a heavy shell, and its broad moat with slabs of ice and its torpid swans, and all the spires and gables showing beyond, against a blue sky, with shells bursting high up, like a medieval Jerusalem, was very haunting. The Halles must be a wonderful building, and the mere fact that it is unsafe to approach by daylight adds to the glamour. I thought of the line in … ‘Golden Wings’ …
The draggled swans do greedily eat the weeds that in the water float;
Within the rotten leaky boat you see a slain man’s stiffened feet.
I took no books into our pinewood except the Oxford Book of English Verse … I used to spend the dark hours trying to piece together Keats’ ‘Nightingale’, there are some lines in the middle that I can never remember, and I get the epithets all mixed, it is a drowsy pursuit. I have two colloquial novels from St Nazaire … but … one does not want to read much …34
Marching away from Ypres, they came to what he called ‘an unpleasant little manufacturing town’ near the frontier. Here his company occupied an old tile factory while Charles and six other officers were sent to ‘le chateau du patron, a curiously pretentious and humble villa opposite’. They had a confrontation with an old woman (who, he wrote, resembled Mrs Besant) who would give them a room as they had a billeting order but not let them use the kitchen. So they went to a grubby estaminet full of flies and private soldiers but no food, finally finding a café on the main square where they got steak and chips and watery beer made of straw and coffee.
Charles, however, was unwell. He was invalided out at the beginning of December with trench foot, which came from standing too long in high mud and never getting the feet dry. Numb feet turned blue or red as a result of poor circulation and had a decaying odour in the early stages of necrosis: if left untreated it led to gangrene and amputation. He had written home in late October asking for: ‘Boot insoles, size 11, cork or loofah – two or three pairs – some small tins of Vaseline for the feet’.35 But the parcel had gone astray.
He was sent first to the officers’ convalescent hospital at Osborne on the Isle of Wight, a beautiful old house. Then, miraculously, he thought, he found himself at home at Edgemoor for Christmas. Three of the grandchildren were staying: Colin and Connie’s children – Colin, George and Dorothy aged six, four and two. Instead of mud, bombs and decaying bodies, he was surrounded by firelight, a decorated tree and children with Christmas stockings. Young Colin solemnly asked his uncle Charles if, when soldiers were given swords to fight a battle, they were allowed to keep them afterwards.
CHAPTER 7
God in the Trenches
Christianity is a characteristic of our armies far more nearly universal than courage or cowardice, or drunkenness or sobriety or chastity or the love of plunder.
CKSM, The New Witness, 29 November 1917
By 6 January 1915 Charles was well again, stationed at Red Barracks, Weymouth with a written instruction to rejoin his regiment and very happy about it. However, his hopes of returning to France were dashed whe
n he developed a bad fever. He was put in the Weymouth convalescent home, writing to his mother that he had influenza. He had not heard of trench fever, caused by body lice, which plagued the trenches. ‘I probably shan’t have my clothes off before Christmas,’ he had written in a letter in late October. Trench fever took two weeks to incubate, starting with a sudden high fever, severe headache, pain on moving the eyeballs and pain in the legs. Charles suffered from bouts of trench fever for the rest of his life, and often complained to his correspondents that he had a bad flu.
He was made a captain on 2 February. Promotion among officers was fast, particularly at the beginning of the war, partly because professional competence increased quickly in such extreme conditions, also because replacements were urgently needed. One odd reason for such high casualties among officers was the fact that they were encouraged to grow moustaches to distinguish them from the men, but with enemy trenches at such short distance, the moustache also distinguished them for the Germans who were encouraged to aim for the men in jodhpurs with moustaches. Uniform changed slowly and so did the moustache ruling.
By 18 February, he was ordered back to his old stamping ground, stamping also with frustration – the Wireless Station at Portland Bill on the south coast of England. He was put in the old lighthouse again, furnished as summer quarters by an absent landlady called Mrs Melladew, with a good lamp at night and ‘everything snug’. A letter had arrived from his mother with a quotation from The Times which detailed an inscription on the Berlin Town Hall (‘inscription’ was the Edwardian term for graffiti): Peace brings Wealth. Wealth brings Pride. Pride brings War. War brings Poverty. Poverty brings Humility. Humility brings Peace, the endless circle. He remarked later in a letter, ‘There is an illogical idea that the Germans are especially wicked because they used gas before we did … and because their airmen drop bombs upon the just and the unjust.’1 In spite of this fair view of war and lack of any hatred for Germans, he realised that what meant most to him was to be with his men in France at the front line – but he had to stay at Portland, training troops, until May.
He spent his Easter leave in Winchester, describing it as looking incredibly beautiful – but feeling that it would fade away as quickly as a dream. He got the key to Gunners Hole and bathed in the chill spring water all alone, as he had done with friends as a schoolboy. He saw all the school staff, dined with the chaplain, Trant Bramston, and walked up hills with Rendall, his former housemaster and now headmaster, in Rendall’s inimitable style: very fast and loaded with a revolver and kit.
Finally on 22 May he arrived, with six brother officers, at Le Havre, excited by the prospect of real and what he called ‘honourable’ work at the front. Next day was spent at Rouen where he visited the cathedral and admired the rose window over the organ, which he compared to a Turkish carpet. He and ten colleagues camped outdoors in the heat and he set out with a few of them to find the river, needing to bathe. On the way they were confronted with a long and high asylum wall – ‘Asyle des Aliénées’ it was called on the map – where Charles got talking to an old and toothless inmate, explaining to her that the Scotch army had been with Jeanne d’Arc rather than against her. However she kept on hissing at him, ‘Vi – i – i’ like a goose, and finally told her fellow inmate that Charles had been a friend of Jeanne d’Arc – a thought he fully appreciated.
The May weather made life in the trenches a more summery, flowery experience than his last visit. Firstly the trenches themselves were superior to those from the winter before, the ground quite firm with more sandbags and planks, and dugouts in the trench wall large enough to crawl into. The time was also quieter; with four days fighting in ‘fire’ trenches, two in ‘support’ and two days in reserve in dugouts hollowed out of the canal embankment. ‘Support’ was a long street of huts, adorned with armchairs and marble consoles taken from the châteaux, of which there were six within easy distance. Seated in a gilt, upholstered chair, battered by many sitters moving it about, in the glow of the yellow dust Charles could see the towers of Ypres Cathedral and the Cloth Hall with smoke rising, and a great pink glare then a flame rolling over wafted by a slight breeze. He tried to smoke a pipe but found it hard to get going and instead set to writing a poem which encapsulated all his feelings of sadness at the desecration of such beauty, the desire to protect the buildings he loved in his own land and the call to arms that seemed to come from former Wykehamists long dead. He called it ‘Domum’.
…
Who will fight for Flanders, who will set them free,
The war-worn lowlands by the English sea?
Who my young companions, will choose the way to war
That Marlborough, Wellington, have trodden out before?
Are those mere names? Then hear a solemn sound,
The blood of our brothers is crying from the ground …
The poem continued to value the men he knew, recently killed,
…
And all the gold their futures hold in youth’s abundant store
They’d freely give to have you live in their midst once more.
What was it that you fought for; Why was it that you died?
Here is Ypres burning, and twenty towns beside.
Where is the gain in all our pain when we have loved but now
Is lying still on Sixty Hill, a bullet in his brow?2
The man ‘lying still on Sixty Hill [with] a bullet in his brow’ was Robert Gibson, who had shared his tent at St Nazaire less than a year before. On 5 May the Germans had retaken Hill 60 after a massive bombardment and gas attack. Two thousand British lay dead in an area the size of a large back garden. One of them was Gibson, the don from Oxford, loved by all his colleagues. ‘And all the gold their futures hold in youth’s abundant store/ They’d freely give to have you live in their midst once more.’ There had to be some reason behind his sacrifice: that Gibson knew he was defending his country – preventing Oxford’s dreaming spires becoming like the ruin of Ypres before him. The poem was printed in The Wykehamist. ‘Domum’, home, the title of the Winchester School anthem – was school and all it stood for. The core of the public-school ethos was self-denial (even self-effacement), duty to House, to School and by extension to country, fortitude or endurance, and physical courage. Pupils were being taught or trained as leaders: anyone making the ultimate sacrifice, therefore, would be honoured. So clearly did Rupert Brooke’s famous poem embody all that was felt in 1915, that it was read out in St Paul’s cathedral on his death:
If I should die think only this of me,
That there’s some corner of a foreign field,
That is for ever England …
Charles would have read Brooke’s poem earlier that March when it was published in the Times Literary Supplement. It was a ‘curious thing’, Charles mused in a letter home, that all the people that he had lived with in camp for a long time past seemed to have been killed, naming ten. He seemed muffled from the real pain, almost anaesthetised by shock: ‘How gentle a thing war is, that can let me stay out in front of the German army from 8.30 till 2 carrying white sandbags about, with rockets streaming overhead like Crystal Palace, and come to no harm beyond treading on my spectacles, and that only because I had taken them off.’ He went into a frenzy of work, seeming oblivious to the carnage around him: in his descriptions he never dwelt on the horror, perhaps because he was in a curious way protected from it. ‘I am very pleased to-night at having done more work than Anderson. My way lies through an ex-French trench, with ex-Frenchmen lurking in it, which are not wholly pleasant. But one gets quickly used to a lot.’3
Charles’s chief protection from the horror of the trenches was reading books and writing poetry. He read Sense and Sensibility to himself and the Oxford Book of English Verse to his friend and lieutenant, Machin. ‘We had a great excitement this afternoon. I was sitting writing verses for the Wykehamist, when I heard a loud whizzing, and found several large rockets of a civilian kind going off amid flame and smoke on the little wood on
my left.’4 His poetry was of supreme importance and, at this point, the war was secondary. He used poetry as an aid to endurance and encouraged others to do the same. He gave A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman, with its lyrical lines evoking the beauty of the English countryside and the growing-up of a young man, to an officer from New Zealand. Neil Macleod had come to study at Oxford at the outbreak of war and stayed. His widow wrote to Charles’s nephew, years after his death, saying, ‘Neil treasured the book all his days,’ and that the book had been with him in Germany as a prisoner, later in the Sudan and India, even at Dunkirk.5
When his battalion came out of trenches on 6 June, Charles was billeted in the Château Rosendael. In its small park an Anglican service was held overlooking views of the surrounding countryside, green and full of flowers. He could still see the towers of Ypres, the cathedral spire fallen on the horizon. He sat to write under trees at the company mess table on which one soldier had placed a shrapnel case as a vase and filled it with columbine and mock-orange blossom. The château garden was in full bloom: roses, pansies, budding pinks and a great clump of rhododendrons. He declared that he would like to buy the plot, build a new villa on it and grow old there, taking people for thankfully boring Sunday walks to Hill 60, and other battlefields. (All the British battlefields fought on since Christmas were within a good walk of the château.) Several of the officers thought it a great idea and he proposed they club together to buy the wrecked land, likely cheap in Belgium after the war. These were optimistic plans for the future during a war when many had no future and large numbers were dying all around.
At Rosendael, the men had a pet parrot which ‘imitated the whine of a spent bullet to the life’. Charles remarked that it was the only animal he had seen to take an interest in the war. He perceived that the little frogs were worried when they fell into a long, dry trench, so if they were dry and clean, he would pick them up and throw them over his shoulder like golf balls. The big frogs, he said, in the water, made a sound like a cable-car passing, while the songbirds were puzzled by the bullets. There was a nightingale that he passed going to and from the trenches, ‘that sings all night to the bullets, wondering why they don’t stop and join it on its bough. This spot is infested before sunset with midges, and after with bullets, which come down very gently at intervals till bedtime. They smack into the trees but none of us has yet been hit.’6