The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery

by Bailey, Catherine

  Among Diana’s circle, the war was already loosening social conventions. At 8 Fitzroy Square in Bloomsbury, two of her closest friends, Iris Tree and Nancy Cunard, hosted parties that were notorious for their debauchery. Convened at the last minute for officer friends home on leave from the Front, they turned into orgies. Diana always declined invitations to attend the parties. She disapproved of sexual licentiousness. The morning after one party, she went round to Fitzroy Square to help clear up. The squalor disgusted her. Everywhere, there were ‘champagne bottles broken at the neck to save the trouble of drawing the cork’, ‘pools of blood and vomit’, and ‘frowsty unmade beds’.

  Diana’s reticence about sex added to her allure. ‘She was probably the only virgin there,’ Duff Cooper commented ruefully after attending a gallery opening with her. Patrick Shaw Stewart, another of her admirers, was constantly trying to persuade her to marry him or, failing that, at least to go to bed with him. ‘You, you see, always want to keep (1) me (2) your old virginity. Whereas I always want to get (1) your heart and soul (2) your worshipful body.’

  The thought of having to ‘make nice’ to the lascivious George Moore was abhorrent to Diana. Yet, as she realized, she had no choice but to go along with her mother’s diktat: ‘My brother John was the last male issue of our noble house and the trenches were certain death,’ she remarked grimly, looking back on the episode: ‘To get my brother to GHQ was her obsessing hope. She thought that only I could coax this boon out of Moore.’

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  Diana saw Moore at every opportunity throughout that winter. To do so necessitated leading a schizophrenic existence. At her mother’s insistence, her time was split between Shad Thames and Mayfair. If Diana was assigned to a morning shift, Violet would arrange tea parties at Arlington Street so that she could see Moore for a few hours before returning to Guy’s for the evening shift. On her days off, Violet forced her to go to the theatre and to the opera with him.

  Encouraged by her apparent interest, Moore showered her with gifts. Among them, as Diana recalled, was ‘an ermine coat to the ankle (my mother chose it from Jay’s), a monstrous little monkey called Armide with a diamond waistbelt and chain, Maupassant’s works in full morocco, countless éditions de luxe, and a cream poodle called Fido cut en papillon with pom poms and bracelets of fluff and a heliotrope bow’. Twice weekly, he sent her a box, ‘the size of a coffin’, full of Madonna lilies; and he gave her jewels too: one, a gigantic sapphire, was said to have belonged to Catherine the Great. ‘All this had to be accepted,’ Diana wrote to her son many years later. ‘Not difficult to accept, you’ll say, but I really did hate him.’

  It was bad enough having to accept an embarrassment of gifts from a man who repelled her, but it was the dances that Moore held in her honour that Diana found unbearable. ‘I was very young and couldn’t cope at all,’ she remembered.

  They took place at 94 Lancaster Gate. Nicknamed the Dances of Death, because no one knew which men would be alive when the next dance was held, the parties were bacchanalian. Moore spared no expense. Interior decorators were summoned to create a theme for each occasion. One evening, Bakst’s vibrant set designs would adorn the ballroom; on another, erotic drawings by Aubrey Beardsley. At every dance, hundreds of purple orchids and pink camellias, grown in hothouses and specially shipped in, festooned the tables.

  Moore left it to Diana and her friends to choose the guests. Held behind ‘barred doors’, and limited to an exclusive fifty people, the dances quickly earned a reputation for excess. ‘Parents were excluded. We dined at any time,’ Diana recalled: ‘The long waits for the last-comers were enlivened by exciting, unusual drinks such as vodka or absinthe. The menu was composed of far-fetched American delicacies – avocados, terrapin and soft-shell crabs … The dancing, sometimes to two bands, negro and white (and once to the first Hawaiian), so that there might be no pause, started immediately after dinner. We kept whirling to the music till the orchids were swept away in favour of wild flowers.’

  During dinner, Moore insisted that Diana sit next to him. When it was over, he would become jealous if she danced with anyone else. ‘The parties were the delight of my friends but I, who could not like him because of his passion for me, found the position acutely painful,’ she remembered. Her friends steered a wide berth. While they had no qualms in accepting the American’s hospitality, they did not like him either.

  Cosseted alone with Moore, Diana was forced to keep up the pretence of flirtation for hour after hour. Mindful that her brother’s life might depend on how well she performed this charade, she had to put up with endless turns around the ballroom, letting him ‘murmur love or Chich-techicher-chich-chich hotly in my ear as we shuffled and bunny-hugged around’. Escape, unless she wanted to spoil her friends’ enjoyment, was impossible. ‘I wanted to leave at a reasonable hour, drive twice around Regent’s Park with a swain and be dropped home at an hour compatible with hospital duties the next morning.’ But the minute she left, Moore would turn down the lights and dismiss the band. ‘When you leave, the place is a morgue,’ he told her.

  Frequently, Diana went straight from the dances to morning prayers in the chapel at Guy’s. The thirty-minute service began at six thirty and was followed by a breakfast of tinned eggs and ‘stalish fish’. As she described it, an eagle-eyed sister, sitting on a rostrum, watched over the nurses while they ate. ‘My trouble was wanting not to eat. Often I would be called with several other miscreants after the meal and reproved severely. Did I know that nurses were different from other people? Their lives were dedicated to the sick, maybe dying, and they must keep up their strength by a sensible diet in order not to be found wanting.’

  At 8 a.m. came the start of her ten-hour shift. Despite the strict discipline, Diana was enjoying the job at Guy’s. After a difficult beginning, she had overcome the doubts of her superiors. Nurses were not expected to feature in the newspapers, or to have the prime minister enquire about their welfare; suspicious of her glamour and her privileged background, the senior matron had thrown her in at the deep end.

  The first weeks on Charity, a women’s surgical ward, had not been a success. No one told Diana how to perform the menial tasks allocated to her – or where the things she needed to perform them were kept. ‘I was given a very unattractive little boy of two or three as my own patient,’ she remembered: ‘He was recovering from appendicitis. I clung to him and tried to ingratiate myself. I was told to give the boy a bath and dress him cleanly. This meant a spate of agonizing questions. What bath? Where are the clean clothes? What soap? I had no idea how to wash a child (half-invalid) of two. I seemed to have done nothing practical in all my twenty years. The child yelled as though I’d put it on the rack.’

  But, to her immense pride, it was not long before Diana was accepted as a competent member of the nursing staff. Her conduct sheet was immaculate and she was popular with the patients and the other nurses. She had not fainted at her first operation and, as she recorded proudly, she was soon allowed to administer injections, cut abscesses and prepare patients for the operating theatre. In recognition of her capabilities, she was given one of the toughest nursing jobs at Guy’s. ‘I was moved after a few months from my dear Charity Ward down to Ashley Cooper Men’s Accident Ward – very different – a high, gaunt, sunless ward, busier and much sadder.’ For the most part, the patients were dockhands who had suffered horrific accidents at work – ‘paralytics and spinal cases that in minutes had lost their powers utterly’, as she described them. Every one of them had to be washed and fed. Some were so badly injured they died within a few hours of being admitted.

  The satisfaction that Diana gained from the challenges she faced at work compensated for the evenings she was forced to endure with Moore. Nonetheless, it was a period of intense unhappiness for her. ‘I had earned the hard name of a “scalp-collector”,’ she recalled. Her flirtation with the American angered her many admirers, some of whom were her closest male friends. ‘On the whole my own impression is that
her beauty is increasing and her humanity dwindling,’ Raymond Asquith wrote to Edward Horner, a friend and rival for Diana’s attentions: ‘I am training myself to admire her as a natural object – the Alpine sunset, the Pink Terrace in New Zealand – instead of the damned unnatural and extremely provocative one she really is.’ In an agony of jealousy, Horner wrote to Diana herself: ‘I can’t understand your form of loving people. I can’t constitutionally believe in your loving me, and a couple more.’ George Vernon, another of her admirers, also accused her of distributing her ‘favours to all with impartiality mixed with a curious caprice’. Diana was aware that her very public flirtation with George Moore served only to reinforce her reputation for capriciousness. It also cast her as a fortune hunter. Very obviously, money was all Moore had in his favour. As he whirled her around the dance floor, she found it intensely hurtful that she was unable to explain to her friends why she appeared to be in his thrall.

  On the rare occasions when Sir John French was in London, he attended the Dances of Death. ‘The Commander-in-Chief himself looked in on the revels,’ Diana remembered. ‘He would not stay long.’

  Whether, in the course of one of their brief meetings, Diana spoke to Sir John about her brother, or whether George Moore had interceded on her behalf, she does not record. But a cryptic note to her mother, written in the second week of January 1915, suggests the favour had already been asked: ‘No word from GM or guest,’ she told her.

  The ‘guest’ was a reference to Sir John.

  French was in London to attend meetings at the War Office. He and Sir Douglas Haig, the Commander of the First Army, were planning a spring offensive. Neither man doubted that the German Army could be beaten. ‘Given an improvement in the weather, and adequate supplies of ammunition,’ Haig told The Times that January, ‘we could walk through the German lines at several places.’

  They had been waiting for the opportunity to attack for some time. Out in France, it had rained incessantly. There had been just eleven dry days since October. In the sodden plain between Ypres and Cuinchy – the northern and southern points of the British line – the trenches had become little more than culverts. In these conditions any serious forward movement would be suicidal.

  Along whole stretches of the line, the water in the trenches was waist high. For the British troops massed there, it had meant weeks of enduring extremes of physical privation. Lieutenant Charles Tennant was with the Seaforth Highlanders outside Armentières. ‘Water is the great and pressing problem,’ he wrote: ‘The weather has been almost unprecedentedly wet and the whole countryside is soaked in mud and like a sponge. Owing to its flatness it is generally impossible to drain the trenches, and every day of rain has made them more and more unpleasant until now the chief question is how to keep the men more or less out of the water. In a summer campaign it would not matter, but when a hard frost sets in at night, and we have had several, frostbite sets in at once and the man is done for so far as his feet and legs are concerned.’

  At the War Office, and at General Headquarters, getting the men out of the water and on to higher ground was the priority. By mid-February, after weeks of discussion, the battle plans were in place. But French had to wait. He could not launch his offensive until the country had dried out.

  It was at the eleventh hour that Violet received the ‘word’ she had been waiting for. Six days before John was due to embark for the Front, a note arrived from the commander-in-chief.

  ‘My Dear,’ French addressed her:

  Please don’t worry yourself or be unhappy. Trust me to see that he is all right so far as anyone can be so in this kind of war. Of course, I needn’t say how necessary it is for you to keep our correspondence on such a subject absolutely secret. If he once knows of it nothing can be done. But I have a good plan which our mutual friend will explain to you.

  Indeed, I understand and feel most deeply for you but I hope this assurance will make you happier. I am not one of those who believe in a very long struggle – it will go on some time longer, of course, but you will probably have him back much sooner than you think.

  The ‘mutual friend’ was, of course, George Moore.

  Violet forwarded a copy of the letter to Charlie. Attached to it was a note:

  Darling,

  This I got this morning and at 3am I get up and see G Moore in Diana’s bedroom next door. Oh dear.

  Yr loving VR

  For understandable reasons, Diana never wrote about what occurred in the early hours of that morning. Whether, as a reward for securing her brother’s safety, Moore forced her to submit to his advances, she does not record. But he had evidently extracted some sort of price. For a married man to be found in a debutante’s bedroom at that hour broke every convention.

  Nor can we know Diana’s feelings towards her mother. Violet had effectively prostituted her daughter to save her son; she had forced Diana to seduce a man she loathed. Yet Diana does not write of the contempt she must have felt.

  ‘If he once knows of it nothing can be done.’ The need for secrecy prevented Sir John from committing his ‘good plan’ to paper. Moreover, he told Violet, he would not address it for a while. First, he had important business to attend to out in France.

  Unaware of his mother’s intriguing, John finally left for the Western Front on 26 February. That morning, he went to Arlington Street to say goodbye to her. Disingenuous to the last, Violet wrote to him afterwards: ‘Remember darling, never do anything foolish or foolhardy. Be clever. Charlie and I don’t know how to bear it all. 6 months of waiting makes it doubly worse. But I didn’t seem to mind a bit, did I? Were you proud of me? I was – but you wouldn’t be now!! Oh, do your best for me, I beseech. How I worship you.’

  PART VII

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  It was 9 March – the eve of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle – and Sir John French was dining with his old friend Lord Esher at 20 Rue St Bertin, an elegant eighteenth-century house behind the cathedral at St Omer. A short distance from General Headquarters, the town’s leading notary had placed the house at the commander-in-chief’s disposal.

  The two men were dining alone. A fire blazed in the grate; outside, the temperature had plummeted and it was threatening to snow.

  ‘The spider in his web,’ as one contemporary described him, Lord Esher shunned public office, but through his friendship with the royal family and Britain’s senior politicians wielded great influence. He had been instrumental in ensuring that French was given the post as Commander-in-Chief of the BEF. As early as 1903, he had reported to the King that he believed French to be the outstanding general of his generation, not only a brilliant commander in the field, but also a man who cared deeply for the troops who served under him.

  The evening was marked by a flurry of signals and telegrams as the final preparations for the battle were put into train. From time to time, there came the clatter of hooves on the cobbled street outside – a single horse ridden at an urgent trot delivering last-minute messages from GHQ. Other sounds filtered into the dining room; the ringing of distant telephones, the brisk steps of staff adjutants in the hallway – and on the stone stairs that led up to the commander-in-chief’s private office.

  French was delighted that Lord Esher could be with him on such an important occasion. His mood was euphoric; at 07.30 hours the next day he was to launch the first systematic British attack since the commencement of trench warfare. He had waited for this moment for months. ‘Winter in the trenches,’ he acknowledged, had been ‘trying and enervating’. The attack, he believed, would raise the troops’ morale.

  Nowhere had their experience been more ‘trying and enervating’ than in the sodden meadowland at the southern end of the British line. It was here, in the valley of the Lys and the Layes, some fifteen miles west of Lille, that Sir John proposed to launch his offensive.

  Earlier in the day, at General Headquarters, he had shown Lord Esher a map of the battlefield. The front along which he proposed to attack lay beneath Aubers Ridge. It wa
s not much of a ridge; approached by a gentle slope, it rose to a height of just fifty feet. Yet if the ridge could be captured, the British troops would be out of the boggy ground and in position to push on, over the plain, to Lille.

  Other considerations – besides the ridge’s strategic importance – had played a part in his calculations. Using spotter planes, and information gleaned from German prisoners of war, the Intelligence Corps had identified this sector as the weakest point in the enemy’s line. In advance of a major offensive against the Russians, the German High Command had pulled every available man, gun and shell out of France. At Aubers, they had denuded their front more extravagantly than elsewhere. Just six companies, with only twelve machine-guns between them, had been left to defend the ridge. As 1st Intelligence Corps had observed, their trench system was shoddily constructed. The firing trench – a single line of sandbag breastwork – could be easily breached; the wire in front of it was little more than two rows of chevaux-de-frise – portable trestle-like structures that two men could lift to one side.

  Against this flimsy barrier, French proposed to use his troops as a battering ram. The attack was to be narrow and deep. No fewer than forty-eight battalions were to be hurled at the enemy along a front that was just two thousand yards long.

  Everything, French explained to Lord Esher, depended on speed. If Neuve Chapelle – the village at the foot of the ridge – could be quickly captured, his troops would be on top of it before the Germans had time to bring up reinforcements. With this objective in mind, he planned to begin the offensive with the ‘biggest bombardment in the history of the world’. For a full thirty minutes, 180 British guns, configured deep behind the lines in a horseshoe opposite the village, would pound the German trenches, blowing open a path for his troops to advance.