To marshal unwanted visitors, the ministry employed a brigade of boy scouts. ‘They helped to keep such people at bay,’ Sir Charles Callwell recalled: ‘They took lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate* for their motto, and adopted the method of herding the intruders into an unattractive apartment on the ground floor, as tube attendants herd subterranean travellers into the lifts, and of keeping the intruders there until they verged on a condition of mutiny. They then enlarged them in big parties, each of which was taken control of by a scout, who led his charges round and round and in and out along the corridors, and up and down between floors, carefully avoiding the elevators, until the victims were in a state of physical and mental collapse. If one of the party quitted the ranks while on the trek, to read the name marked up on some door that he was passing, the scout called a halt – it would never have done to permit that sort of thing because the visitor might conceivably have noticed the name of the very official whom he had come to see.’
Violet had not been kept ‘at bay’ by the scouts. The word ‘Duchess’, printed on her calling card, ensured that she did not have to wait long to see Basil Hood. No sooner had she handed it to a scout than he escorted her up to his office on the first floor.
Hood, a bachelor in his mid-fifties, was Private Secretary to General Edward Bethune, the Director of Territorial Forces. At the general’s invitation, he had joined the ministry a few days after war was declared. He did not fit the mould of a War Office official: a former captain in the Green Howards, he had retired from the army to become a librettist and lyricist. Best known for his long-running hit show, Gentleman Joe, he wrote musical comedies and Savoy Operas. He had also collaborated with the composer Arthur Sullivan, famous for his work with Sir William Gilbert, to adapt continental operettas – notably The Merry Widow and The Dollar Princess.
It was General Bethune’s love of musical comedy and opera that led him to employ Hood as his private secretary. They had met in the 1890s when they were serving in India and had remained friends ever since. Born in 1865, Bethune – the second son of a Scottish laird – joined the Gordon Highlanders when he was twenty. A hugely popular officer, famous, as a contemporary noted, for his ‘fondness of theatricals and all other forms of social amusement’, he achieved notoriety following the accident that resulted in the loss of his right hand. ‘During a performance of The Sorcerer, in which he was playing a leading part,’ The Times reported, ‘he placed too large a quantity of explosive in the magic teapot, which thereupon blew up, inflicting such injuries on his right hand that it was amputated at the wrist.’ To the amazement and admiration of his contemporaries, he continued ‘to ride uncommonly well’, commanding a troop of mounted infantry – known as Bethune’s Horse – in the Boer War. In 1901, his bravery in action was rewarded with the command of a cavalry brigade. Thereafter, he rose rapidly to the rank of Lieutenant-General, largely thanks to his close friendship with Sir Ian Hamilton, then Chief of Staff to Lord Kitchener.
Hood’s office was in an anteroom next to Bethune’s. The moment Violet arrived – and to her surprise – he ushered her in to see the general.
The chance meeting gave her the breakthrough she had been waiting for. As soon as it was over she wrote to Charlie in a state of breathless excitement:
I went straight to see Hood’s brother on receipt of your telegram and he made me see General Bethune – a divine man. Divine! (Ought to have got to him at the start. You and I would have been happier.) For he is going to take the matter in his own hands. He understands!
I mentioned you as a professional soldier who could see no way out, and that you and you only had my confidence. I told him John could neither wield a sword or shoot anything (but partridges or grouse)! Nor ride well enough and had had no teaching whatever like real soldiers have, as he had never been one – and had only been out 1 month all told with the Territorials, so he was utterly ignorant of warfare. But was a good chauffeur – and practical – otherwise no soldier!!
He heard my case and is going to ‘see to it’!! ‘Trust me,’ he said. It would be in the sense of John not being a soldier! And having no experience. ‘We shall do a lot of weeding. Leave it to me!’
Oh, Charlie, I nearly died. Thank God for Hood and for his brother, and thank God that I got your telegram when I did. Bethune considers ESW* a ‘blustering empty ass’.
Your wire came through just as I was starting for the train. I now go by the 6.30.
Yr loving VR
The following day – a damp, grey Sunday throughout the entirety of which the low cloud shrouding the castle failed to lift above its turrets and towers – Violet did not emerge from her bedroom until after lunch.
The elation she had felt after seeing General Bethune had faded. On waking, she had a splitting headache, and when Tritton, her maid, brought in her breakfast tray, the news from the servants’ quarters was upsetting. Few of the castle’s indoor and outdoor servants had clocked in for work that morning. They had stayed at home to spend the last precious hours with soldiers from the North Midlands who had been given leave to return to their villages to say goodbye to their families.
A telegram from Lord Kitchener, with whom she sought every opportunity to ingratiate herself, had also irritated her. A guest of Lord Brownlow’s at the nearby Belton House, he had declined her invitation to tea: ‘Kitchener lunching at Belton today – no time to come here,’ she wrote crossly to Charlie.
Uppermost in her mind, though, was John. In the cold light of day – and with just a fortnight to go before the North Midlands’ departure for the Front – she doubted whether Bethune would be able to do anything. Lying fretting in bed, she confided her thoughts to her brother: ‘Of course all my high hopes for things to get better for me seem to dwindle in face of “thinking it out”,’ she told him: ‘Bethune said something about untrained men (which he calls John) – “I shall do a lot of weeding.” But what can he do? I have sent him by train a long letter putting the details of John’s case before him – so that he knows details of how and when and where. Now I must be silent to everyone but you. He comforted me amazingly in the moment. But a fortnight is short, my dear, and can John be considered as untrained!!? I feel lots of hope at times and cold sweat at others. I wish I could see you. Write a lot. Nothing can make me worse than I am.’
42
That same day – 18 October – a hundred miles away, General Bethune was at his desk at the War Office in Whitehall. He had been there since dawn.
Though it was a Sunday, lights blazed throughout the building. Out on the Western Front, a major offensive was in progress. Everywhere, everyone was in a high state of alert; along the corridors, military aides and attachés hurried to and fro delivering memoranda between departments; in the principal rooms overlooking Horse Guards Parade, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the Permanent Under-Secretary, the Adjutant-General, and their senior advisers stood scrutinizing maps of the battleground, which hung on the walls suspended from giant rollers. Two floors below, in the most closely guarded section of the building, armies of specially trained cipher clerks were working at full stretch to decrypt the reams of coded communiqués coming in from General Headquarters at St Omer.
Thirty miles to the east of GHQ, along a 25-mile line that stretched from La Bassée in the south to Ypres in the north, the British Expeditionary Force was poised to attack. Massed on either side of it were the French and Belgian armies.
The offensive, planned by Marshal Foch, Assistant Commander-in-Chief of the French Army, and Field Marshal Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, was designed to win the war. For five weeks now, in the southern sector of the line, the Germans had failed to gain ground. After halting their advance on the Marne, the Allied armies had pushed them back to the Aisne. The chance had come at last to outflank the Kaiser’s army. If the attack, centred on Ypres, succeeded, they could liberate Belgium and force the Germans out of France. The stakes, however, were high; if the attack failed, a
nd the French and British armies were overrun, there was nothing to stop the Germans from reaching the Channel ports, where they could launch a strike against England.
So confident was Sir John in the success of the offensive, he was willing to risk his entire army. At the battles that had preceded it – Mons, Le Cateau, the Marne and the Aisne – British losses had been unexpectedly heavy: 31,709 men had been killed or wounded – far in excess of the figure that actuaries at the War Office had estimated at the outset of the fighting. To bring the BEF back to strength, four new divisions – a force of upwards of fifty thousand men – had been rushed to the Front from England, as had every last available reservist. Until the territorial divisions arrived – of which the North Midland was to be the first – Sir John had no other reserves to fall back on.
Two days earlier, General Smith-Dorrien, the Commander of II Corps, had questioned the field marshal’s strategy. ‘He was sad and depressed at the condition of his two divisions,’ Sir John noted in his diary: ‘He says they have never got over the shock of Le Cateau – that the officers he has been sent to replace his tremendous losses are untrained and ignorant and that there is no great fighting spirit throughout the Corps.’
It was true of half the British Army. Of the 154,000 soldiers massed along the 25-mile Front, 50,000 had been fighting almost continuously since the third week in August. Still reeling from their experiences, the men were exhausted and demoralized and their stocks of supplies and ammunition were low.
Prior to the offensive, Smith-Dorrien’s was the only voice of dissent. At the War Office in London, Britain’s senior military commanders shared Sir John’s conviction that with one more push the war could be won. Yet that Sunday morning, as they stood gathered in front of maps of the battleground, no sooner had the offensive begun than their carefully drawn plans began to go awry.
At 7.10 the previous evening, General Rawlinson, the commanding officer of IV Corps, had been given what the chiefs at the War Office considered to be a relatively simple task: at first light, he was to attack Menin, a small, strategically important town to the east of Ypres. No opposition was expected; the few German units defending the town were isolated outposts, lightly manned.
By noon it was evident from the communiqués flying between GHQ and IV Corps HQ at the Front that Rawlinson had failed to carry out the order. Initially, after a liaison officer was dispatched to IV Corps HQ to investigate the reason for the delay, a mix-up over the wording of the order was blamed, and at 13.45 hours new orders were telephoned through to him. But still, Rawlinson held back. He had received intelligence to suggest that large numbers of German units were concentrated at Courtrai, twelve miles to the east of Menin. Until he could verify the report, he was not prepared to risk his troops in the attack.
The report was one of a number that had trickled through that week. They had come from spies in the occupied zone who, besides telling of German troops concentrated at Courtrai, had reported a large force congregating from the north. Yet the heavy cloud that had shrouded the Flanders plain throughout the week had made it impossible for the Royal Flying Corps to send up their spotter planes to verify the reports.
The following morning, the cloud lifted, proving that Rawlinson was right to be cautious. At 10.30 a.m., when the grounded reconnaissance planes were at last able to take to the skies, the pilots spotted a vast army on the move. Flying high above the designated battleground, they could see German soldiers converging in their thousands. The long lines of guns and troops were coming up fast on the roads across the plain. And they were making for the British lines in front of Ypres.
They were the troops of the Fourth Army. Unbeknown to Sir John French and the High Command at the War Office, in the break since the fighting on the Aisne, the Germans had also been planning an offensive. Their intention was to encircle the BEF. Stealthily, under cover of darkness, they had moved their soldiers into position. Commanded by Albrecht, Duke of Württemberg, the Fourth Army had 130 infantry and rifle battalions and 20 cavalry squadrons. Standing facing the BEF, separated by a distance of just a few hundred yards in places, they outnumbered the British by two to one.
Extraordinarily, though the evidence of a large concentration of enemy troops was incontrovertible, when confronted with it, Sir John French refused to believe it. ‘How the devil do you expect me to conduct my business, when you keep bringing up these new corps?’ he thundered at Colonel George MacDonogh, his chief of intelligence. When MacDonogh, knowing the truth of the reports, threatened to resign, French still refused to believe him. Dismissing his intelligence out of hand, he accused MacDonogh of conjuring ‘celestial’ divisions and ordered his corps commanders – and particularly the recalcitrant Rawlinson – to press ahead with the attack.
His decision would cost him what remained of the original British Expeditionary Force. Numbering 84,000 in August 1914, at the close of the battle* the BEF had sustained losses of 82,060. The greater part of this loss fell on the infantry battalions that had landed in France in August. By mid-November, on average, only one officer and thirty-one other ranks remained in these battalions – a casualty rate of 97 per cent.
But this was to come.
On that fateful Sunday, around the time that Sir John French sent his adjutant to IV Corps HQ to investigate why Rawlinson had failed to attack, Violet’s letter arrived at the War Office.
Addressed to General Bethune, it contained the ‘details of John’s case’ – the ‘how and when and where’, as she had cryptically mentioned to Charlie.
The letter has not survived; the general probably destroyed it as soon as he had read it. But at some point later that afternoon, he set aside his war work to compose a reply to her.
‘My Dear Duchess,’ he wrote:
I received your letter this afternoon. No one shall ever know that I have been in communication with you over this matter.
I have started on one project – which may or may not succeed. If it does not then I must try something else. One thing and one only will be an insuperable block, and that will only occur if your son insists on going with the Division. We could do nothing against that, but I must try and devise some means of getting round that.
Even as a professional soldier I cannot see that there is any good reason for his going on the continent untrained.
I will do all I can to help and no one shall trace your influence in the matter.
Believe me,
Yours very sincerely,
Edward Bethune
The ‘project’ he had ‘started on’ had necessitated writing another letter. It was to General Edward Stuart Wortley, the commanding officer of the North Midland Division. Acting on information that Violet had given him, he told the general that John was concealing a serious heart condition. Until he could supply the War Office with a certificate of good health, he was not to embark for France with the division.
While there was a grain of truth in the story Violet span to General Bethune, she had lied to him. She knew there was nothing seriously wrong with John’s heart. Some years before, it was Dr Hood who had first detected that his heartbeat was arrhythmic. But, as he had assured Violet, it did not point to a serious condition. John smoked upwards of sixty cigarettes a day: Hood’s view was that the action of his heart was being overstimulated by excessive amounts of nicotine.
Six weeks before the meeting with General Bethune, Violet had forced John to seek a second opinion. In the hope that he did in fact have a more serious condition – one that would keep him out of the war – she had sent him to see Dr Colman, a leading heart specialist. He had concurred with Dr Hood:
My Dear Duchess,
I am glad to say there is nothing more serious than cigarettes.
His heart is perfectly sound. There is a little irritability due entirely to tobacco. I gave him something to quiet his cough, but have told him knocking off cigarettes for three weeks is the only thing that will be of use. I do not think, in any case, you need be especially anxious abou
t him.
Events moved quickly after General Stuart Wortley received General Bethune’s letter.
At four o’clock on the afternoon of 19 October, a telegram boy appeared over the brow of the hill at the top of the drive leading up to the castle. Hot and breathless after the long cycle from the post office in Woolsthorpe, he propped his bicycle against the battlements and crossed the terrace to the small priest’s door that was set into the corner of the portico. There, he handed the telegram to the hall porter.
The telegram – addressed to Her Grace the Duchess of Rutland – was from Henry, who was at Boodles, his club in London. He had just had lunch with General Stuart Wortley:
Have seen ESW. He takes Division abroad. He has had letter from War Office which utterly perplexes me. Am writing to you but fear you must come London tomorrow as position is very difficult and unpleasant and I cannot explain by wire. Rutland.
Straightaway, Violet forwarded the telegram on to Charlie. Knowing there was nothing wrong with John’s heart, and dreading the ‘interview’ with her husband, she scrawled a note on the back of it: ‘This means Bethune has done something!! Oh I am frightened!! If I come up tomorrow, I must see you before Henry.’
The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery Page 27