by Jean Findlay
Many letters from the Great War are about carnage and stinking trenches and lice and disease, but, although he experienced all of these, Charles wrote chiefly about friendships and flowers, and about the beauty of the French countryside and the idiosyncrasies of the French and Flemish people, especially at places where he was billeted. He had been protected by his passion for poetry. Beauty was his rescue from horror; but it also distanced him. Now out of a dark hole, as well as beauty, came peace. His faith, first dormant now flourishing, lifted him above the mundane and gave him insights into, and a bond with, other people. He was protected from cynicsm by the sacraments; he became patient and appreciative of seemingly mundane people and actions. This time they were billeted in a small farm within a village. The old owner was ‘reported to be very fierce’ but Charles spoke to him and heard his story: his son was married and settled in the village, and his wife was dead. They could do as they wished in the house, he told Charles. Charles granted himself a small bedroom and his next lieutenant, Machin, slept in the dining room, where there was room for eight at table, lots of chairs and some good old furniture. After discovering that the soldiers were careful with his belongings, the old man brought them eggs, which were very scarce, and milk and lettuce and told them stories. One evening, seeing Charles out on the steps, he brought out a chair for him and then more as the circle of soldiers grew. Cordially Charles asked him to join them but he said he was too old and solitary. The farmer preferred the company of the regimental servants who were billeted in his rooms and spoke to him in Scots, ‘which seemed to comfort him’. He had fought at Bapaume in the Franco-Prussian war and knew about soldiers pillaging, and his grandson was fighting in this war. Living alone, he had, Charles thought, rather loosed his hold on life. It was hard to understand him, especially after the broad French of the border, but Charles thought he would get used to it, ‘like Glasgow Scots after Dundee’. Yet as soon as he had learnt the dialect, they were moved on. Such was the transient nature of all these connections, but it did not make them meaningless, each was a part of the tapestry.
In Bray-sur-Somme, the officers of the French Army entertained Charles and his colleagues to lunch: ‘The officers, of whom the French have fewer than we, have very fine dugouts with beds, stools, tables, etc. We sat down to lunch; a party of eight and were given tinned lobster, herring roe, hare, cheese, tinned apricots, red wine, coffee, and rum, and a deal of conversation and instruction. They took our photograph afterwards…’27 In the photograph Charles is given place of honour, sitting in the middle with his moustache curled at the ends, his legs elegantly crossed and his cane across his knees. He looks as though he is enjoying the brief sophistication of a French lunch, but he realises it is a standard that cannot be upheld, ‘The French have a wonderful system of cooking behind the trenches, but it will be hard to break our men of the habit of boiling tea and frying bacon at all hours, day and night…’28
A French officer stayed with them for twenty-four hours to act as a liaison, which was tiring for Charles who was the only person who could speak both languages. The French soldiers had a custom of making rings out of aluminium fuses from German shells, using files and penknives, and his French officers gave him one of the best. In return he gave them some of his scraps of stained glass from Ypres Cathedral to have set in other rings. Meanwhile Charles occupied himself with reconstructing old dugouts for surplus officers, and with making a little chapel for the soldiers. He now fully understood the importance of faith in the lives of his men. A road from Battalion Headquarters ran through the village, and on towards the Germans. Just above his dugout was a barricade, and above that in the ruined village, he fixed the figure from a big iron crucifix on logs of wood and he and the men worked at squaring-off and clearing-up the ground in front. The idea was that the men could go there and be alone, if they wanted to say their prayers.
At Mass in the village, he was called upon to serve, ‘which frightened me rather, as I could not quite remember or find out from my book when to ring the bell, but I made up for that by the purity of my Latin.’29 Later that day he took his company down to bathe in the Somme, and found it very cold. He was thinner than he’d ever been. That last week in August he was given leave and went home to Lanark for a brief stay with his family. After his mother was called upon to say goodbye she wrote in her diary that he, ‘packed up his few things in his satchel and his father saw him off at the station where a number of his brother officers were waiting to give him a good send-off. He is very popular among them – so bright and handsome and full of humour.’30 He left behind a special list entitled ‘Useful Things for Parcels’ which ran: ‘4 oz Three Nuns Tobacco, tin of matches, hankies, shortbread, sweets, chocolate, gingerbread, envelopes, writing pads, currant loaf, books and Blackwoods Magazine.’31
Returning to France, Charles was in time to celebrate his twenty-sixth birthday in September with the men of his company. He began the day by riding up the trenches on a ‘strange horse of great strength’ who galloped all the way and got him there far too early. ‘We pottered about looking at German positions with a view to occupying them.’ Then he and Aleck Herries came back in ‘the heaviest rain I have seen for a long time, a thundering gallop downhill. Most exciting.’32
That night they had a dinner party mostly of hors d’oeuvres and vegetables as they had very little meat – although they eked it out by chopping it into mince and adding hardboiled eggs. Charles managed to get two bottles of Moët et Chandon at the local brasserie. Two of his subalterns rigged up a sort of candelabrum, and made a table-centre out of a disinfected shirt, on a turkey-red table cloth which belonged to the house they were billeted in. The Catholic chaplain Father Evans sat on Charles’s right, then Lieutanant Lionel Rooke, an undergraduate from Oxford, a slim figure always immaculately turned out, known for his optimism. Even though badly wounded in the legs later in the war, he went on to win the Irish Grand National in 1919. Next to him sat 2nd Lieutenant J. Grant, the transport officer, then 2nd Lieutenant E. Giles at the foot of the table; Aleck Herries was on Giles’s right in a pyjama jacket belonging to Charles as his clothes were still wet, then Captain Lionel Machin, who survived to become a lieutenant-colonel, then Lieutenant J. M. Challoner, who was asked at the last moment because the piper was in his company. They found a pretty aluminium cup to use in the evening as a quaigh (Scottish drinking cup) to toast the piper, which Herries then paid for, as he wanted to give Charles a present, and during dinner he engraved it neatly with CKSM and the date. The piper played their regimental march, ‘All the Blue Bonnets are over the Border’. It was often the last tune his fellow Borderers heard.
Charles did not know that on the same day at the Battle of Loos a piper in the 7th Battalion of KOSB was making history. The regimental historian Stair Gillon wrote that the push forward would probably have been lost if the anxious new recruits had not heard a sound that ‘pointed the path and steeled the will. It was the skirl of the pipes of Daniel Laidlaw, who with complete sang froid, strutted about on the parapet playing the “Blue Bonnets”.’33 He kept on playing till he was wounded and won the first VC awarded to a KOSB in the war. The Piper of Loos became the subject of a picture in The War Illustrated, a patriotic war magazine.
* * *
When they practised a battle formation on the downs behind Bray-sur-Somme, Charles was impressed to see three regiments, many thousands of men, rise out of the ground in a long single line and move forwards: it was a rehearsal for the structure of the Battle of the Somme the following year. As the autumn progressed they were moved to chalk dugouts which, although carved and decorated by stationed soldiers, were very cold. Officers kept falling ill and Charles was asked to command the whole battalion, but then became very ill himself. He turned yellow and was sent to the French Riviera to recover. Though still not named, this was the recurring trench fever.
‘Cimiez which as its name suggests is on a hill above Nice’ Charles began his next letter from the Red Cross Convalescent Home
for British Officers. As a respite from the trenches, the light and air on the hill were delightful. ‘My room is on the second floor with a view of palms and the sea.’34 Charles, however, only wanted to get back to his men; it took so long to build a team that worked well together. He cared less for the officers as they changed so often.
Years later, after Charles’s death, one of his men wrote of him,
Captain Scott Moncrieff was adored and respected by every man, not only in his own Company but in the Battalion and it is curious indeed when I learn that he only possessed the MC when, if ever a man earned the VC, Captain Scott Moncrieff earned it over and over again … I can’t help glorifying my own Company Commander, whose behaviour in the face of death helped us to keep our reason. His presence in the front line, under a severe strafe, imbued us with a strong feeling of safety and security.35
Lance-corporal William Buchanan said of him at the same time:
I can see him strolling about No Man’s Land as cool as if he were on the parade ground, seeking information and the position of the enemy … On one occasion he brought back, as a souvenir, a German sandbag … When we took over from the French it was he who reconnoitred and discovered the various enemy positions on our immediate front. Dangerous work was evidently his strong suit, not because he wanted military kudos but he felt it his duty to his men. Those who had the honour to soldier in his Company looked to him as a child would to its father.36
It was no wonder that he missed his men and wanted so much to get back to them, but he lay yellow and weak in bed and it was ten days before he was even able to get up and walk about.
Charles spent the whole of December recovering, being fed salt bean curds and told to fatten up. He even had a short holiday, motoring under a blanket to Les Antibes with old friends he encountered by chance. He said that the French Daily Mail, ‘an even viler rag than the English’, had reported that Cardinal Hartmann had arrived in Rome ‘for the meditation of the Pope in favour of peace – a particularly happy misprint.’37
He was determined to get up and rehearse for the officers’ Christmas concert. On Christmas Eve, he went to Midnight Mass at the cathedral in Nice where there was such an enormous crowd that he had to stand in the corner. He said that he had never seen so many communicants. Holy Communion went on for a full hour and when he got back at 2.30 a.m., he couldn’t sleep much, nervous over his performance the next evening. For the concert he shaved off his moustache and gave himself a middle parting, trying to look as young and handsome as in the 1913 photo, but he was, he knew, thinned and aged by war.
It was the first Christmas he had ever spent away from his family, who were all together with the grandchildren. In November his brother Colin had become rector of Little Stanmore (or Whitchurch) in Middlesex. Charles was sad that the family had to leave Scotland and that the children wouldn’t be brought up as Scots, but it was hard to find a patron who supported Colin’s liberal, theosophical views. Muriel, Countess de la Warr, feminist and socialist, was one such and she provided the living at Whitchurch. The rectory was large enough for Colin’s growing family and the garden ideal; they had found a home at last. The church itself was unusual, decorated by Italian artists in 1715, it contained the organ that Handel played upon when organist to the Duke of Chandos. When Meg arrived from Lanark that Christmas she decided that they would sell Edgemoor and move closer to the grandchildren. John, now an army vet, was married to Anna and living in Cyprus with a baby boy named David.
However much he may have wanted it, Charles was not well enough to rejoin his men, and at the very end of the year he was sent home. On the train from Nice to Paris he met his brother’s new patron Muriel de la Warr who did not impress him, but epitomised the gulf of understanding that lay between soldiers and families back home in Britain. Stopping in Paris for the night, Charles dashed off a letter to his mother: ‘Lady W. seemed deaf and stupid about the trenches, having first maintained that I had been on holiday since May, and then said, “Do tell me about the trenches, are they quite comfortable – do they feed you well?” (Who?) I said we feed ourselves. She said, “Haw! But I thought they did it with motors so wonderfully.”’38 This seemed to reinforce what he had remarked in a letter home a month earlier, ‘The truth is that the English people haven’t yet begun to dream of taking the war seriously.’39
CHAPTER 8
Critic at War
Without poets a nation cannot be great in war.
CKSM, The New Witness, 17 May 1917
Waiting on the steps of the Rectory at Whitchurch in the cold, sharp air were four little children: Colin, George, Sita and Dorothy. It was 19 January and they had already waited all day the day before and been told to come in and be patient. Finally, the watching paid off; there, through the gate and up the path, came brave Uncle Charlie in his war uniform, two days late. He was carrying his kit and a present of a heavy box. They opened it once they were inside the house – a great sculpture in chocolate from Rouen of a snail shell, its head being old Franz Josef of Austria with the Kaiser on the top of the shell driving him along, and the Sultan of Turkey pushing from behind. The snail was carefully broken, starting with the Kaiser, and a little was eaten, then the children showed their uncle around the new house and the garden in the dark.
Charles stayed for one night and then went north with his mother, who had decided at the last moment to go with him to spend the precious hours of the journey together, talking all the way. He went straight to Edinburgh that night to see his dentist the next morning. The trenches had taken a toll on his teeth: ‘8 badly decayed teeth require to be removed and artificial cases made.’1 It would take three weeks, which he would spend at home.
He returned to Edgemoor to be with his father, smoking in the study in civilian clothes, browsing among the books and catching up. With Meg he went over his old letters from Winchester days and came across a poem anticipating death,
I pray that death may be,
No thing of pain to me,
No weary memory of long buried sin.
But may the low sound of thine angels’ wings
And may the message each angel brings
Soothe all my fear.2
Charles attended both Catholic Mass and his father’s Protestant services. He returned from Mass relaying a sermon on the war which had declared that the ‘meaning of suffering was as inexplicable to us now as a surgical operation would seem to the observer quite ignorant of its purposes’.3 Like everyone else, Charles was questioning the scale of brutality and loss. His mother wrote in her diary with steely calm, ‘War is the most painful act of submission to the divine law that can be required of the human will. Soldiers are single-hearted: they do not argue, they act.’4
During his stay at Edgemoor, Gladys Dalyell came to stay for a night and she and Charles spent all day together walking. Then in the evening by the drawing room fire, Charles read a story of Saki’s, and a story and a ballad of his own. No doubt Gladys was another possible match hoped for by his parents. They would not have been discouraged by the six-verse ballad Charles read that evening called ‘The Willow Tree Bough’ which included the lines:
He’s got moustaches, a good natured rifleman,
Curl’d at each end like the fiery young moon.
Yes and he marches so deft and delightfully,
All the old streets here still echo the tune.
Now that he’s given himself up for a soldier,
All over the world his brave body to show,
How can you wonder that I in my anxiousness
Weep with my eyes on the willow tree bough?5
Like the rifleman’s, Charles’s ginger moustache was curled at the ends. The ballad may have seemed romantic, except for the odd fact that it was written from the female point of view in admiration of the male rifleman, in appreciation of his bravery. It goes on to describe the infantry ‘Fighting like seals in a lickerish estuary’, and the speaker talks of her ‘Children yet to be born to me’. The ballad was later set
to flowery, baroque music by the musicologist Edward Dent.
After the reading that evening Charles travelled to London on the night train and was at 40 Half Moon Street for breakfast with Robert Ross on the morning of 20 January. There he discussed the recently published Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, a poetic exploration of a village community which Ross had recommended. Charles added it to his pile of books, with Dante (of which he had decided to read a canto daily before breakfast ‘like a proper Papist’6), Browning and Hugh Walpole’s new novel, The Dark Forest, about his experience on the Russian Front (Charles described it as full of ‘lurking patriphobia’7). The successful and prolific novelist Hugh Walpole couldn’t join up because of poor eyesight but worked heroically for the Red Cross on the Russian Front and saw the war from a totally different angle. Walpole was picking up the bodies, without the adrenaline of the fight; while Charles had not questioned his own patriotism.
He met Charles Bonar Law, his Scottish friend from school, now in the 2nd KOSB, and took him to lunch at the Reform Club and to the theatre to see Jean Cadell, the Scottish actress with flaming red hair, in The Man Who Stayed at Home, a patriotic war melodrama. They went on to Edwardes Square in Kensington to dine with Charles Bonar Law’s father, Andrew, the Colonial Secretary in cabinet. He had been leader of the Conservative Party in opposition following Arthur Balfour from 1911 to 1915. At this point in 1916, however, as part of the Coalition Government, he was Secretary of State for the Colonies dealing with manpower for the war.