by Gill Paul
A photographer takes shots of a Nieuport 28: The French no longer used them because of their fragility, but they were at least easy to maneuver.
FLYING ACES
French newspapers first used the term “ace” in 1915 about pilot Adolphe Pégoud after he downed his fifth German plane; five came to be the generally accepted number you needed to shoot down to be considered a “flying ace.” It was not always easy to confirm hits, but it was universally accepted that German pilot Manfred von Richthofen, otherwise known as the Red Baron, was responsible for shooting down 80 planes before he was himself brought down near the Somme in April 1918. René Fonck was the most famous French air ace with 75 “kills,” and he also managed to survive the war. Billy Bishop of Canada brought down 72 planes, and Edward Mannock was the UK’s highest scorer with 61, while Eddie Rickenbacker was America’s most successful with 26.
Manfred von Richthofen, the infamous Red Baron.
All the same, Quentin began to put pressure on his superior officers to let him fly in combat. Knowing his life would be on the line, he asked if it were possible for Flora to come over to France and marry him. She could live in the Paris house with his sister-in-law Eleanor, and he’d be able to see her during his time off duty. Flora began to explore this possibility only to discover a law prohibiting the sisters of servicemen from leaving the country during wartime. Theodore was furious. He thought she should have been allowed to go, “then, even if [Quentin] were killed, she and he would have known their white hours,” he wrote. He put pressure on the War Department over that summer but to no avail.
Irene Givenwilson was still stationed at Issoudun, and Quentin liked being able to talk to her about Flora. When he got letters from his fiancée, Irene recalled, he would burst in “like an avalanche . . . and dance round the room waving them aloft.” Irene told Flora she was “enshrined in Quentin’s heart,” his “guiding star.” One evening they had a serious conversation in which Quentin told Irene about his wishes in the event that he were “bumped off:” “Fouf [Flora] has so much spunk, and she knows just how I would want her to act,” he told her. “She must live on. Life is glorious.”
Airborne at Last
In mid-June 1917, Quentin at last got his orders for combat flying. He was extremely popular in Issoudun and all the mechanics lined up to say goodbye, adding, “Let us know if you are captured and we will come and get you.” There had never been any airs and graces about him. Rickenbacker described him as “Gay, hearty and absolutely square in everything he said or did . . . one of the most popular fellows in the group.” Privately, some had concerns that he might be too much of a daredevil and wouldn’t take sufficient care of himself in the air, but any such thoughts weren’t voiced at the time.
Quentin was sent to the airfield at Orly, near Paris, where he joined the 95th Aero Squadron. After his first flight, he wrote to Flora “It is really exciting at first when you see the stuff bursting in great black puffs around you.” And to his mother he wrote, “You get so excited that you forget about everything except getting the other fellow and trying to dodge the traces.” On July 11, he downed his first German plane after a dogfight in which he evaded two others. But on the 14th his luck changed when a group of Nieuports in which he was flying encountered a larger group of Fokkers, commanded by Hermann Göring. Quentin was at the back in what was known as “tail-end Charlie” position, and he broke off from the formation in order to confront the pursuers. After a brave duel with a Fokker he took two machine-gun bullets in the back of the head and his plane hurtled to the ground near Chaméry, west of Reims.
Rumors of his death circulated straightaway, but it was July 20 before official news was received at Sagamore Hill, where Flora was staying with the Roosevelts. “Little Flora is broken-hearted,” Theodore wrote to Archie. “I bitterly regret that he was not married and does not leave his own children behind him.” Letters of condolence flooded in, including messages from King George V and from Allied leaders including Clemenceau, Balfour, and Lloyd George. Flora also received hundreds of letters, including one from Irene Givenwilson that read, “He used to dream of going home next year & marrying you . . . Flora dear, you will never realize how deeply he loved you.” The last letters Quentin sent before his death arrived, among them a cheerful birthday greeting for the family’s maid, Mary Sweeney.
Photographs of Quentin’s body lying alongside the wreck of his plane were sent to the Roosevelts. So proud were they of their brave son that they had prints made to give to relatives.
“Flora dear, you will never realize how deeply he loved you.”
The Germans realized who Quentin was and buried him with full military honors. Moreover, controversy was soon stirred up because the son of an ex-American president had been killed in battle yet the German Kaiser kept his six sons protected behind the lines. It was one more reason why German soldiers became disillusioned with the war that summer, and by the end of August 1918 they were beginning to desert in their thousands. After a German retreat that autumn, Quentin’s grave was on the Allied side of the front line, and so many soldiers came to pay their respects that a protective barrier had to be erected around it.
Soldiers paying their respects at Quentin’s grave in a field near Chamery.
Life Goes On . . . Eventually
Flora was inconsolable in her loss, but selflessly spent time with the Roosevelts, trying as best she could to comfort Quentin’s mother. She was there when someone sent a photograph of Quentin’s body alongside his mangled plane, but far from being upset by it Theodore pinned it on his wall to show how proud he was of his son. Later, they also displayed the crumpled axle of his plane recovered from the crash site.
For a long time, Flora did not socialize at all, but in 1920 she entered into a hasty marriage with one of Quentin’s old comrades from Issoudun, a man called Roderick Tower. “Poor child,” Ethel wrote. “I think she has just done it in desperation; she was so unhappy.” It does seem as though Flora was looking for a replacement for Quentin, and although the couple had two children together, the marriage failed and the divorce in 1925 cited both Tower’s drinking and his infidelities. Two years later Flora was married again, this time happily, to an architect called George Macculloch “Cully” Miller. Then in 1941 she became president of the Whitney Museum of American Art, which her mother had founded ten years earlier.
As Quentin had wished, she lived her life to the full, but there must have been days when she looked back on her first love, the witty, tender-hearted man who stole her heart at the age of nineteen. No doubt she daydreamed about what might have been if she had been able to enjoy her “white hours” with the president’s son.
Flora, c. 1919. It took her many years to get over the loss of her dashing fiancé.
J R.R. & Edith
TOLKIEN
Married: March 22, 1916
A Webley revolver, standard issue for soldiers.
A first edition of The Hobbit, published on September 21, 1937. Tolkien said that while staring at a blank sheet of paper one day, the first line came into his head: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
BRITISH
Born: January 3, 1892
Rank & regiment: Lieutenant, Lancashire Fusiliers then BEF 11th Battalion
Edith Mary Bratt
BRITISH
Born: January 21, 1889
Edith and J.R.R. in 1961: Their relationship had survived many separations and vicissitudes, but they always had great affection for each other.
According to Tolkien, he and Edith rescued each other from “the dreadful sufferings of our childhoods,” and that created a bond so strong that it would see them through the separations and “darknesses” of their lives.
Edith Bratt was illegitimate. Her father’s name was known to the Bratt family, but was not recorded on Edith’s birth certificate and they never revealed the secret to outsiders. She grew up in Handsworth, Birmingham, with her mother, Fran
ces, and a cousin, Jennie Grove. From an early age she proved to be a talented piano player. The family hoped she might one day become a concert pianist, but her world fell apart after her mother died suddenly when Edith was just nine years old. Her guardian, the family solicitor, sent the grieving young girl to boarding school, where she was desperately lonely. After she left school, he found a room for her in a boarding house where the landlady, Mrs. Faulkner, encouraged her to play the piano to entertain other guests, but complained if she tried to practice during the day. It seemed as if her dreams of being a professional musician were destined to come to nothing.
A map of Birmingham at the beginning of the century. More than half its men (150,000) served in the war; 13,000 of them were killed and 35,000 wounded.
… during the summer of 1909 both admitted they had fallen in love.
Edith was nineteen years old when two new lodgers arrived in the house—Ronald and Hilary Tolkien, sixteen and fourteen respectively. They had been born in South Africa, but moved back with their mother, Mabel, to live in England after their father died in 1895. Mabel encouraged her boys in a love of literature and language, and she also brought them up in the Roman Catholic faith after she herself converted in 1900, an act which caused her Baptist family to disown her. When Mabel died in 1905, Father Francis Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory was named as the boys’ guardian and he was the one who oversaw their schooling and care. At first they lived with a childless aunt, Beatrice, but were unhappy there, so in 1908 Father Francis arranged for them to move into the lodging house where Edith lived.
Edith and Ronald took to each other straightaway, despite the fact that she was three years older. They formed an alliance against the strict landlady, whom they called “The Old Lady,” and persuaded the maid to smuggle them extra food from the kitchen. They sat in Birmingham tea shops giggling as they threw sugar lumps at passers-by and, during the summer of 1909, both admitted they had fallen in love. Tolkien wrote to her in later life recalling “your first kiss to me (which was almost accidental)—and our goodnights when sometimes you were in your little white nightgown, and our absurd long window talks.” He was supposed to be studying for his Oxford entrance exam that summer, but took time off to spend with Edith instead. After they went on a day-long bicycle ride in the autumn of 1909, word of the budding romance reached Father Francis, who reacted with fury, banning them from seeing each other and moving Ronald and Hilary to new lodgings.
The Barrow’s cafe in Birmingham: Tolkien and his friends used to meet here as a group calling themselves The Tea Club or The Barrovian Society, which they later reduced to the acronym T.C.B.S. Only two of them would survive the war.
Upset by the enforced breakup, Edith accepted an invitation to go and live with friends in Cheltenham, and Father Francis forbade Ronald from even so much as writing to her, saying that he could do as he wished when he turned twenty-one, but that until then he must do as he was told. That was still three years hence, a desperately long separation for an ardent young lover, but he felt he had no choice but to obey.
Ronald, aged nineteen, while a student at Oxford during his enforced three-year separation from Edith.
True Love Wins the Day
As Tolkien later wrote about the ban, “Probably nothing else would have hardened the will enough to give such an affair (however genuine a case of true love) permanence.” He obeyed Father Francis, going to Oxford to study Classics and then switching to English Language and Literature, but on January 2, 1913, on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, he wrote to Edith telling her he still loved her and asking when they might be reunited. A devastating reply came by return. She said that she’d believed Ronald had forgotten all about her and had therefore become engaged to a man called George Field. Edith had made a new life for herself in Cheltenham, playing piano at the Baptist Church and forming a number of close friendships, among them one with this man George, the brother of a school friend.
Tolkien would not take “no” for an answer. On January 8, he caught a train to Cheltenham where he and Edith spent the day walking in the countryside and talking about their situation. He must have been persuasive because by the end of the day she had agreed to break off her engagement to George Field and marry Ronald instead.
They decided not to announce their engagement right away. Tolkien wanted to complete his education and establish a way to earn enough of a living to support Edith. One other matter stood in the way, and that was religion. He asked her to convert to Catholicism so they could be married in the Catholic Church and, reluctantly, she agreed. On January 8, 1914, she was accepted into the Catholic Church but at a price: the friends with whom she had been living asked her to leave their house, and she also had to give up her piano playing at the Baptist Church and attend the rather more dour Catholic ceremonies instead. She and Ronald quarreled about it, though they never fell out for long. He had begun writing stories and poems, including some written especially for her: “we have become/as one, deep-rooted in the soil/of Life, and tangled in sweet growth.”
CONSCRIPTION IN WORLD WAR ONE
Most German states had introduced compulsory military service back in the early 19th century, so when war began in 1914 they had a well-trained army of 3.5 million regulars, conscripts, and reservists. France had only 1.1 million, but they raised more after 1912 by extending the length of military service to three years and drafting 84 percent of all eligible men. The draft was not introduced in Britain during the first half of the war because public opinion was set against it. During the six months after war was declared, a million men volunteered to fight, but many more were required as the casualty rate was so much higher than expected. The famous British Lord Kitchener posters reading, “Your Country Needs You” were widely distributed and popular songs encouraged enlistment. Still the number of volunteers was not sufficient and in January 1916 the British government was forced to introduce conscription, targeting single men first and then married ones. In America only 73,000 volunteered in the first six weeks after they entered the war, so in June 1917 Woodrow Wilson introduced the draft for those aged 21 to 31 (a range later broadened to 18 to 45).
Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, was a commanding presence on British recruitment posters.
Tolkien decided not to volunteer when the war began, opting to finish his degree instead, but after graduating in June 1915 with first class honors, he took up a commission in the Lancashire Fusiliers and began his training. Edith was now living in Warwick with her cousin Jennie, and Ronald bought a motorcycle so he could ride down to visit her during his periods of leave. He became the battalion’s signaling officer and had to learn Morse code, flag signaling, how to handle carrier pigeons, and how to use a field telephone. They knew it wouldn’t be long before he was sent to France, so on March 22, 1916, he and Edith were married at the Catholic Church in Warwick. When it was time to sign the register, she had a problem as it asked for the name, rank, and profession of her father, and she had never told Ronald of her illegitimacy. Flustered, she scribbled down the name of an uncle, but later when she told Ronald the truth, he replied, “I think I love you even more tenderly because of all that.”
They honeymooned for a week in Somerset, but this was marred somewhat by press speculation about an imminent “Big Push” by the British army. Both knew that Ronald would be a part of it.
Trench Fever
Tolkien arrived in France on June 6, 1916, and found on arrival that all his gear had been stolen, which seemed an inauspicious start. He was transferred to the 11th Battalion and hung around for three weeks until they set off for the Somme, marching through torrential downpours past villages where the buildings were mere piles of rubble. On July 1, the first British troops went “over the top” in what became known as the Battle of the Somme, but Tolkien’s battalion was held in reserve. This was lucky for him, because 20,000 Allied troops were killed that first day alone. It wasn’t until July 14 that his unit was sent forward to the Front. First they t
ried unsuccessfully to capture the little village of Ovillers from the Germans, with Tolkien frustrated at the poor state of the communications systems, few of which were functioning efficiently. Next they stormed the German stronghold of Schwaben Redoubt where several prisoners were taken. Many of his unit were killed, but he survived unscathed.
Soldiers going “over the top” on July 1, 1916, during the Battle of the Somme. A bell rang to signal when it was time to climb out of the trenches and into the line of enemy fire.
The Duchess of Westminster, Constance Lewes, sponsored the creation of the military hospital in Le Touquet, where Tolkien was treated. The building had previously been a casino.
Back home Edith was frantic with worry. She received regular letters from him, written in a prearranged code they knew she could decipher so as to work out where he was along the Western Front. But then she read the news reports and realized that he was in one of the most dangerous spots in the entire theater of war. Between July 1 and November 18, more than a million men would die at the Somme, making it one of the bloodiest battles ever fought. Every knock on the door might mean a telegram announcing her husband’s death.