The Brilliant Outsider
Page 10
George had installed his new bride in a small house at Southsea, not far from the Portsmouth barracks, and waited impatiently. He had expected to be in France by March but it would be late November, sixteen months into the conflict, before he got his orders and embarked, not for Europe, but the Middle East. By the time George left England there were already signs of strain in his relationship with Betty. She was used to the attention of men and found it hard to give up what she called ‘the feeling of euphoria and living in the moment, the gaiety before the international storm’. Her husband was simply not interested in what she called her ‘social swing’, meaning her circle of friends and their frivolity.
There had been tension even on their brief honeymoon during which George accused his bride of ‘flirting rather heavily with other men’, something he did not tell his father. Betty couldn’t deny it – after all, it was her habit – instead spitting back angrily with taunts that she had married him for his money and position. Distraught and realising that he had made a mistake, George had spent the next few months trying to engender in Betty what he would later call ‘something akin to loyalty’. She made promises, but even as he left for the Front, perhaps never to return, George remained unconvinced of his wife’s constancy and feared the worst.
The one saving grace, he thought, was that Phyllis, the wife of his friend Major Fred Powys Sketchley, would be moving into the house with her two children while her own husband was away, fighting at Gallipoli. Betty would have the company of a woman she liked and might be forced to behave herself. After all, Phyllis and her sister Molly Campbell had been witnesses at their wedding six months earlier.
Instead, he had inadvertently let a fox into the hen house, or at least someone to open the front door for the fox. Six weeks later, in early January 1916, Phyllis had a visitor – her younger brother, Wentworth Campbell. Campbell was variously called ‘Jock’ or ‘Bertie’, depending on the company and the situation. He was a career soldier in a family whose military legacy stretched back to the eighteenth century; he had been educated at Sandhurst and then joined the Black Watch, the famed Scottish infantry regiment. In January 1914 he had transferred his commission to the Poona Horse and when war was declared was stationed in India. But men were needed in Europe and after extended leave he would be joining others in France, at the Somme.
Jock had spent a few weeks in London and was making a fleeting visit to Portsmouth to see his sisters, Phyllis and Molly, then heading back to the city for some last-minute fun before shipping out to the Front. Instead he stayed in Portsmouth for ten days, seduced by a wanton Betty Finch who had already forgotten her promises to George, as she reflected more than fifty years later: ‘Jock was a darling and I fell madly in love with him, but he was far too kind and gentle with me. I treated him very badly but for a time we were very happy. I needed a stronger, less kind man. George was certainly that, but my marriage to George was a terrible mistake. We were just temperamentally unsuited.’
George Finch would be in for several surprises when he arrived in Alexandria in December 1915. The first was meeting up with Guy Forster, who had been serving in France and was now bound for the trenches of Gallipoli. George was expecting to follow him as a gunner in the Royal Garrison Artillery, so the two friends spent a few days together near the seaside at Sidi Bishr, relishing what might be the last days of their lives and filling the void of fear with discussion about post-war strategies.
It was as if the apocalypse they were about to face had torn a ragged hole in their suits of youthful invincibility. Before the war they had set out to climb higher and harder than anyone else, refusing to yield even to the forces of Mother Nature. Their post-war pact was the opposite, flushed with the fears of mortality. If they survived, George and Forster would climb only for fun, never climb more than two days in a row and would withdraw to ‘lesser mountains’ if the weather worsened.
They parted after a week, when Forster sailed for the Dardanelles with the Royal Engineers, but George would not follow. Instead, he was transferred to the Royal Army Ordnance Corps as a support expert and sent to a new frontline in the Balkans. About the time that Jock Campbell was bedding his wife back in Portsmouth, George was acclimatising to the heat and dust of Macedonia.
A joint French and British campaign had begun there the previous year, supposedly to help Serbia stave off aggressive manoeuvres from a combined German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian army. But by the time the French and British arrived the Serbian troops had already crumbled and retreated to the ancient city of Salonika. Despite this, the decision was taken for the new troops to remain and protect what was regarded as a strategic position.
George Finch would make his name here, not so much as a warrior but as a man of science. He had been promoted to captain and drafted to join the Ordnance Division where his skills as a chemist were needed, both to be innovative and build new explosive devices but also, more importantly, to maintain, repair and test the army’s stock of shells and bombs. A history of the Division penned after the war showed that he had made a significant contribution: ‘The Ordnance was fortunate to possess such a distinguished man of science.’
George revelled in the environment, as harsh as it was with soaring temperatures during the day and the cold of a desert at night. The mountains were not snow-capped but brown and hard, the winds screamed and the marshes in the flatlands were full of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. But George Finch was in his element in the open air with all its challenges, and he was keen to make an impression. The opportunity soon presented itself when his superiors came to him with a problem.
It was the summer of 1916 when it was discovered that thousands of shells, most of which had been stacked inside camouflaged bunkers carved into the rocky hillsides to hide them from enemy aircraft raids, had leaked in the extreme heat. The oozing amatol, a highly explosive mixture of TNT and ammonium nitrate inside the shells had soaked the fuses, which meant that almost all of the army’s stock was unusable and would leave the frontline exposed to an increasingly aggressive enemy.
There seemed little chance of getting new supplies shipped across the Mediterranean from Egypt, so George was given the job of trying to salvage the ammunition. It was a dangerous task, working with unstable explosives, and made worse because most of the positions were strung out across rugged mountain passes between Albania and the mouth of the River Struma in Greece. Access roads, at times, were impassable by vehicle.
Over the next few months, Finch and his team were able to clean 60,000 shells of the leaked material and fill the cavities with a molten paraffin mixture before replacing the fuses. He did not escape unharmed, though; one eye was injured in an explosion and he would use a monocle in later years. In the opinion of his commanders, George Finch was a war hero.
In December 1916, a year after leaving Portsmouth, word reached George that his wife was seriously ill. There had been infrequent correspondence between them since he’d left, but now George was spurred into action. After his heroics in rescuing the armaments stock, compassionate leave was assured and he was back in London by the end of January 1917.
There was a shock waiting for him when he got down to Portsmouth; not only was Betty in fine health, contrary to what he had been told, but she was nursing a four-month-old baby. The message had been a ruse to hide controversial news. He had not even known that she was pregnant. Frederick George Peter Ingle Finch had been born on September 28, 1916, more than nine months after George had left for Egypt. Surely he could not be the father. So who was?
Betty crumbled and revealed her affair with Jock Campbell, insisting that the relationship had now ended. Initially fraught, George gradually came to terms with the situation and even agreed to let the boy share his name, registering his birth a few days later and naming himself as the father: ‘She implored my forgiveness,’ he later wrote to a friend. ‘I still loved her after a fashion. My feelings towards Peter were none other than those of intense pity. For his innocent sake, for the sake of m
y own people and name I forgave my wife. I gave Peter my name as if he were my son.’
But George hid the truth from his family, writing to his mother: ‘My son was born on the 28th of September last. His name is Peter. He is a splendid boy and you will be awfully proud of him.’ He also wrote a letter to the young boy, which was addressed ‘To my son’ and explained his feelings for him. Sadly, Peter was never made aware of its existence.
But George also wanted retribution. Instead of staying in Portsmouth with his wife for the rest of his leave, he set out for France to track down and confront Jock Campbell. Just how he managed this and where he found Campbell is uncertain but he would write about the confrontation a year later: ‘I had a further ten days leave in France, which I employed looking for Campbell. I found him, thrashed him into unconsciousness but unfortunately (so I thought then and for a long time afterwards) did not kill him. I narrowly avoided having to face a court martial.’
George did not return to Salonika immediately. In his private records there is a map of France with his scribbled handwriting on the front cover: Finch 1917. Inside he had drawn an arrow to the town of Breteuil and in red ink vigorously circled the area west of another town, Crèvecoeur-le-Grand, labelling the whole area with a capital ‘F’, which might refer to the battlefront.
The only other clue to his war-time travels was a conversation he would have more than half a century later during which he reminisced with a young relative about the happy experience of mingling with Australian and Canadian soldiers in France in 1917 around the time of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, part of a major Allied offensive in April 1917, soon after the United States formally entered the war.
The memory was clearly quite powerful, although he did not go into detail other than noting a confrontation with a senior officer who chided him for having mud on his uniform. He reckoned the officer wouldn’t have known ‘where the hell’ he’d been, but he didn’t make it clear if he’d risked a charge of insubordination by voicing the opinion, or whether it was merely a mental response.
Soon afterwards George headed back to Salonika and, for a time, felt he had been able to salvage his marriage. Betty wrote regularly for the next few months, raising his hopes that they had a future together and might eventually have more children. It was a hope to cling to as the war continued into its fourth year but the letters eventually trailed off and George feared the worst. He asked a friend back in Portsmouth to check on Betty and he quickly confirmed that Jock Campbell had reappeared and the two had begun seeing one another again. Despite the beating he had received at the hands of George Finch, Campbell was staying in his house and in his bed. It was the end of the marriage as far as George was concerned although he would have to establish proof of the affair before he could begin divorce proceedings.
12.
PLEASURE AND PAIN
A young German fighter pilot named Rudolf von Eschwege was cutting a swathe through the British Royal Flying Corps along the Macedonian Front through late 1916 and most of 1917. The ‘Richthofen of the Balkans’, as the 22-year-old was known because of his Red Baron-like success, had shot down more than twenty British planes, and won a dogfight with the English ace Gilbert WM Green, whose wingman was shot down.
The dominance of the German, played out above the disputed Front and in plain sight of both armies, was having an impact on troop morale. He had to be stopped, particularly when he began seeking new targets and turned his attention to manned observation balloons. The sausage-shaped inflatables were sent aloft on cables well behind Allied lines, beyond the range of enemy gunfire and protected by their own anti-aircraft guns, to gather information about the battlefield ahead.
The Eagle of the Aegean Sea (another of von Eschwege’s nicknames) was so skilful and elusive that he would simply fly across the Front, keeping the sun behind him so that he was difficult to spot, then dive unseen from the heavens in surprise attacks that forced observers to leap from their baskets and parachute to safety as their hydrogen-filled balloons erupted in flames and fluttered to the ground like dead leaves. Such was his aerial dominance that on one occasion von Eschwege even shot down a British Sopwith Camel sent to protect a balloon. Something had to be done and it was George Finch who came up with the solution.
Direct confrontation had failed so George laid a trap for the increasingly confident pilot, hoping to use his own arrogance against him. On November 21, 1917, the Allies sent an observation balloon aloft near the inland city of Orljak. It was floated to 3200 feet, higher than usual, so it could be easily seen from the German side of the battlefront. In the basket beneath the balloon was a dummy soldier as well as 550 pounds (250 kilograms) of explosives and a detonator connected to a concealed wire taped to one of the ropes that anchored the balloon to the ground where George had rigged a trigger switch.
The bait had been set, and was quickly taken. A German scout plane soon spotted the balloon and not long afterwards Rudi appeared in his powerful twin-gunned Albatros fighter. The young German made a beeline for the balloon, firing specially made incendiary bullets as he closed in. On the ground below, George watched and waited patiently until the pilot, still firing, came close to the balloon. He then triggered the explosives.
A group of Bulgarian soldiers manning a German observation post some miles away had gathered to watch their champion through binoculars. Their translated report gave a colourful description of the attack as it unfolded:
Now appeared the German … he rushed like an eagle on its prey. He shot well. Had his incendiary ammunition fired? Now he was within a few yards of the balloon – now the aircraft lifted its head again – now it flew just over the balloon – and now the envelope was in flames. Hurrah! But it was different than usual: the balloon blazed into a powerful pillar of fire. Slowly the burning scraps of shell tumbled to the ground. The soldiers roared and cheered. But an officer felt a foreboding that made his heart tremble. ‘Where was Eschwege?’ Yes – thank heavens! – he had come through safely. His plane came out of the smoke – then, oh, woe! – it bent over its left wing – now it slipped off to the side – and then it turned over, the heavy motor dragging it down, and crashed down to earth. Horrible! It was not possible that Eschwege should be no more! The cheers gave way to a wailing grief. ‘Eschwege dead! Our Eschwege dead!’ We cannot believe it!
George Finch, man of science, was once again a hero.
In a conflict that would become known as the Doctors’ War because twice as many men were casualties of illness as of fighting, it seemed inevitable that after three years in Macedonia George Finch would be among those who would succumb. Not long after his triumph against von Eschwege, George became one of the 160,000 men in the Balkans who would fall to malaria, a disease fed by the swamps that lined much of the Front and passed on by the clouds of mosquitoes that swarmed above the mud.
The illness would not only have a profound effect on George’s health for the rest of his life but would also stand in the way of some of his most important mountaineering opportunities. He lay for weeks on a camp bed in an overcrowded makeshift tent hospital where hygiene was almost impossible to maintain and the only known treatment was doses of quinine, which saved many lives but caused side effects such as bleeding under the skin, the loss of sight and hearing, chest pain and blackwater fever. It was there as he convalesced for several months that George met a young woman who would take his mind off the disloyalty of Betty Fisher.
Her name was Gladys May. Her father, Robert, was a shipping merchant, and the family – Robert, his wife, Maud, Maud’s mother, Gladys and her much younger brother – lived in a sizeable house in a prosperous suburb and employed two servants. In her teenage years Gladys attended boarding school.
When war broke out Gladys joined the Volunteer Aid Detachment of the Red Cross where she trained as a nurse before being sent to Cairo as the disasters of Gallipoli began to unfold. In 1916 she was transferred to Salonika and, as the war entered its fourth year, she found the love that she hoped would last
beyond the fighting.
George hoped so too. Gladys was the antithesis of Betty Fisher; a strong and practical woman with a quiet personality in contrast to his wife’s flittering ways. They were qualities he admired under normal circumstances but with the backdrop of war and illness she must have seemed an angel. He began to call her Eve – his temptress and saviour – as the relationship developed beyond that of nurse and patient into a close friendship. Soon they were lovers. George told Gladys about his wife and her infidelity, but he avoided any mention of Peter.
In September 1918 he was back in England after being invalided out of Salonika, convalescing in the town of Lewes and reading all six volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Perhaps inspired by his reading he wrote to Gladys in October, confessing his ‘misery’. He wanted them to marry without secrets: ‘Listen, you shall know all that matters now. I could tell you nothing of this before, simply because I did not feel sure of you. Darling, for years I have hidden my misery from you and all the world with the most cheerful lies I could sum up. But now when I feel you love me as I love you, you are going to be told everything.’
The letter then detailed the sequence of events leading up to his return to London to discover that his wife had borne a son with another man, and his decision to give Peter his name and try to save the marriage before discovering that Betty and Jock had resumed their illicit affair.