by Jean Findlay
Charles noticed that the Bonar Laws did without servants; the eldest daughter kept house. Charles felt at home in this Scottish Presbyterian household, made slightly austere since Mrs Law had died seven years previously and her husband had thrown all his energy into his work. ‘They were all very simple and pleasant. I was rather frightened of him before dinner in his sanctum with his scarlet dispatch box at his feet and Charlie saying silly things from the arm of a chair … I think they show great promise of our future Government after the stale lees of this Asquith regime are poured down the sink of Time.’8
Later in 1916, after the resignation of the Prime Minister and Liberal Party leader, Asquith, Andrew Bonar Law was invited by King George V to form a government, but, being a wise and humble man, he deferred to Lloyd George, Secretary of State for War and former Minister of Munitions, whom he believed was better placed to lead a coalition. He did, however, serve in Lloyd George’s War Cabinet, first as Chancellor of the Exchequer and then as leader of the House of Commons. Law briefly became Prime Minister from Nov 1922 to May 1923. But his leadership was short-lived: he resigned, unable to speak, with terminal throat cancer.
Charles felt at ease with the Bonar Laws and what he called their ‘healthily decent family life’, while disapproving of the dissipation of the privileged Asquiths. He had been at school with the children of both leaders, and Charles Bonar Law with his hard-working Scottish background had become a friend while Cyril Asquith had not. While Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith was generally criticised as being weak and vacillating concerning the war, partly, it was later revealed, because so much of his time was spent writing love letters to the beautiful young socialite Venetia Stanley. By 1915 Asquith was writing three times a day, often during Cabinet meetings, and would even ask her advice on strategy. He was accused of muddle and delay that led to considerable loss of life.
From the Bonar Laws’ house Charles went back to Half Moon Street. He was leading a double life and thinking double thoughts. His letters home extolled the ideal of family life, while in London he was drawn as by a magnet to the Ross establishment, the antithesis of family life. However, a change was happening in him, as the war changed everyone. The gulf between his professed beliefs and his actions was beginning to show: he felt the battle of good and ill, the confusion, within himself; he did not know where he stood, and he was tired and sore. This questioning was sensed by Robert Ross who wrote to Millard that Charles was becoming ‘tiresome’ and ‘an amiable bore of some accomplishment’.9
Leaving Piccadilly that night, Charles arrived at the coast at midnight and boarded a boat bound for France; settling down to sleep in the malodorous dining room with many other officers, he finally felt at home. The men slept on deck and after his brief leave he was glad to be back in their company, but it was February and the weather bitterly cold. He chose to be billeted for the week with the priest of the village, with whom he could talk about why he felt at home in the chaos and uncertainty of war, and yet uncomfortable in the ‘civilisation’ of London. He was confident and happy as a soldier, yet how could anyone enjoy such a war? The priest suggested Aristotle’s simple formula for happiness: ‘Happiness is Virtue plus Action.’ Courage and industry were the virtues that kept Charles happy. The priest’s sister washed all his clothes, for which he offered her a five-franc note; she would only take 25 sous, so he suggested giving the rest for l'oeuvre de l'église, ‘which loosed the tides of eloquence. They were very sweet and humble and gracious.’10
That freezing February he marched his company fifteen miles through biting wind, snow and hail to Doullens, twenty miles from the front. He had to send half of them back again to help push the transport up the hills. Horses were lighter than some of the heavy vehicles used to move food and medical supplies, but they too slid in the deep mud and the wagons got stuck. Men were needed to heave the wagons from behind and to carry extra loads. On arriving at the town they had to shovel snow off the roads as there was ‘a great uproar of French motor transports going down, possibly to lend a hand at Verdun’ and trying to get through the drifts. ‘It is a great thing to get reasonable food in a hotel after a continuous diet of tinned salmon rissoles.’11
By March Charles had marched with his men to Arras, where secret tunnelling on a massive scale was going on beneath the seemingly quiet place. As an ancient town with Roman origins Arras had tunnels and sewers – known as boves – running beneath the streets, and the countryside between the British and German positions was full of underground caves, from where chalk had been quarried during the Middle Ages, some of which were cathedral-sized caverns. The Allied Command decided that if they could link these various subterranean holes in secret, an entire army would be able to move safely from the front to the rear of the German positions, and attack from behind.
Until then, tunnelling had merely been used by both sides to detonate explosives under enemy lines: here it would take on a different purpose. It was a hugely ambitious plan, and 500 men of the New Zealand Tunnelling Company – all professional miners – set to work with a battalion of ‘Bantams’, short Yorkshire miners below the Army’s minimum height of 5 foot 3 inches. In a matter of months, they had created two interconnected labyrinths, 12 miles long, capable of hiding 25,000 troops, with electric lighting provided by its own small powerhouse, as well as kitchens, latrines, and a medical centre with a fully equipped operating theatre. It was here in the fledgling underground kingdom that Charles and his men made a brief stay. However, it was a full year before the Battle of Arras, when the cellars came to be used for their surprise attack. Charles wrote a poem called ‘Summer Thunder’, which was published much later, kindled by the underground city.
… he was come into the King’s Palace,
And timidly walked through corridors, down flights
Of echoing iron stairs that never ended;
And moved, pressed hurrying on, through days and nights.
And sometimes paused at spider-haunted windows
To catch the blinding flare of beacon lights,
And heard artillery grumble in the distance,
For he knew that they warred against that Palace, when
He saw the gnomes come chattering from their chambers,
Well-armed for battle; little, dusky men
Complaining, shrill, in the old early language,
Conscious that Fate was falling upon them then,
Suddenly, in the midst of the field of battle,
He stood bewildered, with a roar in his ears
As the two armies frantically crashed together.
Men running forward and falling. Groans and cheers,
And the sobbing breath of quiet men keenly fighting …12
Again he was transported to other wars, this time ancient ones from the Anglo-Saxon world, ‘in the old early language’, and was tapping the thread of soldiery through the ages. Thankful to be briefly free from these vivid sounds of struggle and death, and seeing it was quiet on 3 March 1916, Charles rose early from the cellars which, though deep and gloomy, were kitted out with beds and some carpets, except that the carpets were hung on the walls to keep them from getting dirty. With a guidebook he went around the city. Not all the citizens had fled and he estimated there were about 800 left out of a population of 26,000; some shopkeepers stayed in business furtively behind closed doors, replenishing their stocks from unnamed sources. ‘Then there are all the oddities of shattered houses; in one place an iron spiral staircase, rising some 15 feet with all the masonry round it fallen. In others complete rooms with photographs on the mantelpiece, but the whole front wall unhinged as in a dolls house or a theatre, storeys with no stairs to them.’ Most of the fine buildings described in his guidebook – the cathedral, palace, town hall and belfry – were now flattened or gutted, although the Grand Place with its gabled houses was intact. He and two colleagues drank coffee after lunch in a clean and smart little patisserie in the main street that ran down to the German lines. ‘A determined-looking wom
an sold me a cake, or tart which she had baked that morning, very delicately and well.’13
As soon as he reached his dugout, Charles requested a table of his own on which to put his papers: copious correspondence, books and company reports as well as poems. There was no light and he ‘consumed a disquieting number of candles’.
His aunt Kate sent him a new anthology of prose and poetry, ancient and modern, by Robert Bridges, chosen to strengthen and console both soldiers and civilians in wartime. Bridges, the Poet Laureate, wrote in his preface, ‘man is above all a spiritual being and the proper work of his mind is to interpret the world according to his higher nature’,14 a sentiment that Charles agreed with, but Bridges was not at the front, and consistently trying to live through the higher nature while savagely killing with the lower nature was nervously exhausting and for many destabilising. The poems yet to be written by greater war poets would bear witness to this. Charles was critical of the volume, thinking it more a revelation of the author’s tastes than a representative collection: Bridges had omitted Browning altogether, and quoted Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell and Lascelles Abercrombie, but not Walter de la Mare.
Meanwhile Charles’s war letters were still entertaining; in fact there was a gaiety about his particular dance with death. On 22 March he described a new bomb to a friend:
The chief amusement of our particular enemy there was daily at teatime, to launch aerial torpedoes on to my Company headquarters. They are things like turnips with their leaves clipped into wings, which are fired out of some kind of trap, like clay pigeons. You hear the click as they start, and then gaze out over the fields to see where exactly it came from, and then yell downstairs to someone at the telephone to get the guns going, and then one’s voice is drowned by the torpedo arriving somewhere near the lobe of one’s right ear, and so on till the box of torpedoes is emptied, and we and the Germans both stop for tea and in the middle a British shell comes sauntering overhead, hotly followed by a polite R.A. subaltern who asks (down the companionway) ‘Was that all right, sir?’15
An able raconteur and good mimic, Charles also kept his fellow soldiers amused and the atmosphere optimistic. Charles Lunn, a cousin also at war, wrote home about him that March:
Capt D. declared that Charles was the bravest officer he had ever seen, ‘offensively brave’ he added. Charles would light a pipe and stroll along a sap to see if there were any Bosches at the far end. In D.’s opinion Charles would be killed or court-martialled or else win the V.C. before the end of the war. He added that Charles ran the Company very well and seemed a very capable business man.16
Although the creative effort of reading and writing was an effective tool to distract him from the horror emotionally, it could not fend off the physical results of life in the trenches and by 29 March Charles was in hospital with trench fever again. This time the hospital was a rough-and-tumble place where his own servant seemed to do most of the work, and the other officers on the ward were ‘Kitcheners’, the all-volunteer army named after the then Secretary of State for War, Horatio Kitchener17. He appreciated the Scottish Territorial nurses, ‘with gentle voices, and a habit of lingering for an indefinite while by one’s bedside, making a very little conversation’.18 Charles was homesick for his own company or at least his own 13th Field Ambulance where he would have had the chaplain Father Evans to talk to. The Kitchener’s army men annoyed him with their genuine keenness to be away from the regiments in the field.
However, he could not get back to his men; he was sent home before Easter on sick leave. He remained in London until he was passed by the Medical Board for one month’s light duty, to be followed by two months’ home duty with the 3rd Battalion of his regiment at Duddingston Camp, near Edinburgh. This brought him near enough to Lanark for the occasional weekend with his parents who thought he looked older, grave and thin. In July he was ill again and was sent to Buxton for treatment.
The summer of 1916 was a time of significant events in the war, but Charles was out of action and could only read of them in disjointed reports back home. There was the inspiring victory of the Battle of Jutland, which ensured British control of the North Sea, allowing the continuing naval blockade of the German ports and stopping their food imports. The only naval routes for the Germans to the Atlantic were the Straits of Dover or the North Sea minefield which the British had laid between Orkney and Norway. On 31 May 1916, the Germans made for the latter but the British Grand Fleet, based in Orkney and Cromarty, intercepted a coded message and met them just off Jutland in Norway. It was a huge battle with 250 ships on both sides and ended in a German retreat to their blockaded harbours. Lack of food played a major part in the eventual German defeat.
Then there was the most infinitely depressing battle of all, on land: the Battle of the Somme. The KOSB, though not Charles’s battalion, were present and were lined up along with General Haig’s twenty-seven divisions, an astonishing 750,000 men, against 16 divisions of Germans. The idea was to break through the German lines by sheer power of bombardment. However, the trenches were impenetrable. The Germans had spent two years digging several lines of deep trenches, with bombproof shelters and connecting tunnels. In front were two belts of wire ‘forty yards broad, built of iron stakes, interlaced with barbed wire often almost as thick as a man’s finger’.19 Haig sent over wave after wave of infantry, not moving fast and dodging and ducking as they were used to, but standing and marching relentlessly. This was supposed to overpower the enemy, but they were just machine-gunned down, the generals having refused to change their tactics. At the end of the first day, 1 July 1916, there were 58,000 casualties, making it the worst day in the history of the British Army. Yet the same tactics were employed for nearly five months, until 21 November when snow forced them to stop fighting. By then the British troops had captured twelve kilometres of ground and lost 420,000 men.
Charles, yellow and feverish with trench foot and trench fever, in and out of hospitals, lay in Britain reading of the battles his comrades were fighting, and having medical after medical in frustrated attempts to get back out there. On the last day of July, he heard to his dismay of the death of Aleck Herries, killed in action on 22 July on the Somme. Herries had been with him since the First Battle of Ypres, in the trenches in Flanders and France, and his spirited company had kept Charles buoyant; he was a great loss to his friends and the regiment. For the first time Charles wrote a poem about the horror, later published in the Wykehamist and the anthology The Muse in Arms:
The Field of Honour
Mud-stained and rain-sodden, a sport for flies and lice,
Out of this vilest life into vile death he goes;
His grave will soon be ready, where the grey rat knows
There is fresh meat slain for her; – our mortal bodies rise,
In those foul scampering bellies, quick – and yet, those eyes
That stare on life still out of death, and will not close,
Seeing in a flash the Crown of Honour, and the Rose
Of Glory wreathed about the Cross of Sacrifice,
Died radiant. May some English traveller to-day
Leaving his city cares behind him, journeying West
To the brief solace of a sporting holiday
Quicken again with boyish ardour, as he sees,
For a moment, Windsor castle towering on the crest
And Eton still enshrined among remembered trees.
Charles’s faith in life after death was powerful and orthodox. Death through sacrifice for one’s friends meant Glory, and Glory was an experience of God’s presence. Charles never lost his belief that they were fighting and dying to protect the England evoked in the last verse of his poem (Aleck Herries was an Etonian). If he had no wife or child to protect, the protection of architecture and tradition was itself a passionate cause; but perhaps not enough to salve the loss of such a splendid friend, and make him forget that his body was a ‘sport for flies and lice’.
While recuperating Charles turned his mind t
o his journalism and started writing for a new periodical. The New Witness, formerly The Eye-Witness, was a weekly magazine set up and edited by Cecil Chesterton in 1912; it was polemical and political with roots in Distributism. A split from Fabian Socialism, Distributism was a third-way economic theory which criticised both socialism (state ownership) and capitalism (ownership by the wealthy few) and said property should be owned by the general populace through the use of cooperatives and small family businesses. It argued that economic activity should be subordinate to human activity as a whole; our spiritual, intellectual and family life should come first. When the editor became fatally ill at the front in 1916, his famous brother G. K. Chesterton took over, and immediately brought in Charles as a contributor. Charles’s brother Colin, the vicar, known for his unorthodox religious views, knew Chesterton well enough for an introduction. Chesterton himself was forty-two in 1916 and was described by Bernard Shaw as a ‘man of colossal genius’. He was six-foot-four and weighed twenty-one stone, wore a cape with a squashed hat and carried a swordstick. Starting adult life as an artist, he was now famous as a poet, writer of fiction, essayist and journalist, and a larger-than-life public figure seen by many as a latter-day Dr Johnson.20 His autobiographical Orthodoxy published in 1908 was a description of his own journey towards Christian belief, and his ultimate conviction that the world is good and meaningful and something to be grateful for. His humorous and optimistic attitude permeated his writing and he held no grudges, maintaining, ‘The Bible tells us to love our neighbours and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.’ This humanity permeated the magazine, which became more balanced, but still supported Distributism. Another Chesterton epithet was, ‘Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions’, which ensured the magazine was not bland. Other contributors to The New Witness included E. Nesbit, Arthur Ransome, Conal O’Riordan, Desmond Macarthy, Maurice Baring, and, later, the young Eric Blair (George Orwell). One of Charles’s close friends was the pioneering lawyer E. S. P. Haynes, who used the magazine as a continual battleground forum for his liberal reform of divorce law. Cecil Chesterton was against law reform to make divorce easier and the dispute was fierce, but Haynes was a seasoned lawyer and won every spat, conceding, ‘I dislike divorce as heartily as I dislike surgery. But I am intellectually convinced that divorce on proper lines is as essential to social hygiene as I am that surgery on proper lines is essential to medical hygiene.’21 He never had cause to divorce his wife, Oriana, although later she had reason to divorce him. She was to become one of Charles’s closest friends.