Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  Goodbye darling – I love you till all is blue.22

  For his family, Yvo’s death was the point of no return. Whatever happened in the war, they could never go back to the lives they had lived before. For Cincie, it destroyed the familiar platitudes of glamour: ‘I am haunted by the feeling that [Yvo] is disappointed. It hurts me physically,’ she wrote in her diary.23 ‘Not little Yvo,’ Ettie Desborough wrote to Balfour.24 The following months felt to Mary as though ‘all the universe was rocking round one’.25 She bore the return of Yvo’s kit, his empty clothes ‘the most poignantly pathetic of all the heartbreaking angles & sharp turnings one has wearily to take’, she told Wilfrid Blunt.26 ‘Mary has a lion-heart, it will make her able to triumph even over this, & prove herself indestructible,’ Ettie had written, but Yvo’s death had eviscerated Mary,27 had ‘taken … all that I ever had of high worldly hopes & aspirations’, as she put it to Blunt.28

  Mary refused to dissemble. ‘No one can maintain that it is not tragedy,’ she told Arthur from Stanway as the family faced its first Christmas without Yvo:

  – pure and unadulterated, that it is draped in all the glamour of romance … does not mean the price is less to pay … and although the houses are not ruined or the harvests burnt here in England, still the long cruel tentacles of this deadly war has stretched its icy claw and reached each house and hearth … if you hold yr breath you hear the sound of widows weeping, sisters sobbing and the ceaseless falling falling of the mothers’ tears, the whole air is stifled, surcharged with sadness, which eats into the soul … I will not believe that sadness is not sadness – or say it is God’s will and all is for the best!29

  In the autumn of 1915, in her mid-forties, Pamela fell pregnant. She rejoiced in this late, unexpected pregnancy. It gave her ‘new courage & joy & hope – & bridged one over an Autumn & winter of [illegible] anxiety about Bim & Xtopher’, she told Mary.30 In her poem ‘Hester’, describing this time, she is Demeter-like, fecund, as the land around her during:

  nine months’ joy of happy life,

  Of quiet dreams and blessed days,

  Of peace that even calmed the Strife,

  And steeped her in a golden haze …31

  Pamela was no longer frozen while the world moved around her. Now she was blooming while the world held its breath. Strings had been pulled and for the duration of Pamela’s pregnancy, Bim was given a staff position under Brigadier John Ponsonby (commanding the 2nd Guards Brigade), away from action.32 The decision was justified by concerns about Pamela’s health. Nonetheless, Bim took the position reluctantly. ‘My duties are to copy out recommendations for medals into books, and to check figures … Also I inspect the billets and rifles and gas-helmets of the Orderlies, telephone clerks and cyclists. Quite a large portion of my work is telling the General the date,’ he told his mother.33 He whiled away his time performing in shows for the troops: two-hour rowdy affairs each evening involving ‘Pierrot business’, ‘Sketches’ and songs. He procured a motorcycle and ‘tiff-tiff-ed’ his way across the countryside; read the large packages of books Pamela sent him; and prepared his own poems for publication – Worple Flit, a slight, forty-page volume, published by Pamela’s publishers Blackwell later that year. Pamela’s son was safe, her child was about to be born. But the moment was to prove as fleeting as she might have feared. Hester was born on 24 May 1916, and died a few hours later.

  ‘It has been dreadful – so overwhelming a sense of loss – at times I can hardly stand up against it,’ Pamela confessed to Mary.34 She had Hester photographed by H. C. Messer’s studio in Castle Street, Salisbury – the waxen child, eyes shut, nestled among broderie anglaise – and sent the image to all her family and friends. Photographing the dead was not in itself uncommon: Percy Wyndham was photographed in his bed after death, surrounded by his favourite books and pictures.35 Pamela’s widespread dissemination of the image at a time of mass grieving was.

  Pamela had always established a monopoly on loss. During the Harry Cust episode, she never spoke, nor apparently thought, once of Nina. When Drummy died, she acted as though she alone could have saved him, almost entirely ignoring the fact that he had been engaged to another woman. But her behaviour on Hester’s death, as her own family’s sons died around her, tries the empathy of the biographer most. Pamela had suffered a terrible loss. She reacted as though she were the only person to have suffered loss in the world. She bombarded grieving families with pictures of her own dead child, and everyone who would listen, including Bim, in France, with pages about her grief. Perhaps the most difficult element is that Pamela paid lip-service to self-awareness. ‘I try to dwell on how much all the World is suffering now – & how deep the sorrows of others,’ she said to Mary, but she employed these thoughts as consolation, not as perspective.36 It is doubtless this behaviour that gave rise to another myth surrounding Oliver Hope’s origins – disseminated, among others, by Susan Lowndes – that having buried Hester at Queen Anne’s Gate Pamela made her way to Salisbury Infirmary, saying to the Matron: ‘I’ve lost my baby, have you any orphans?’37 The Lowndes family had a strange fascination with laying claim to and denigrating Pamela’s memory. This, as is evident from Pamela’s earlier references to Oliver, is no more than a florid romance. But such was her behaviour that the story of a high-handed aristocrat mad with grief could almost be true. Pamela was not the monster of myth. She had simply been so long spoiled that she could not see anyone else as more than a circling planet and herself the sun. But as she dwelt at length on her grief and pain in her letter to Mary she did rouse herself enough to recognize her sister’s ‘anxiety – & dear Letty’s’ and add, ‘I long for you both to get good news.’38

  Some six weeks previously, Mary had spent Easter at Stanway with a large group of family and friends. They had good weather, and games of tennis. But the ‘parliaments’ in Mary’s boudoir focused almost exclusively on the war; and a flippant discussion at lunch on the necessity of post-war polygamy now that all the young men of their acquaintance were being wiped out left thirteen-year-old Bibs, recorded Cincie, ‘seriously distressed’. A further blow was struck at both sisters’ hearts that afternoon on receipt of letters from Connor the agent enclosing the sum of ninety-seven pounds: their shares ‘of Ickey’s [Yvo’s] little fortune’. In the gloaming, Cincie walked with a desolate Bibs up to the Pyramid. Stanway, as always, was magical in the dusk. But ‘Mamma is miserable – it’s really like a broken heart. What can one do?’ said Cincie.39

  That night Mary had a ‘dream-vision’: ‘The atmosphere of the room seemed to quiver with excitement – I felt the stress and strain and saw as if thrown on a magic-lantern sheet, a confused mass of black smoke splashed with crimson flame … like a child’s picture of a battle or an explosion.’ Among these ‘flames and smoke’ she ‘saw Ego standing, straight and tall’. His profiled face was set and stern, his eyebrows and moustache dark against his pale face. It seemed as though ‘he was exercising his forces with all his might and main’. A brilliant golden banner swathed his chest in spiral folds, and ‘seemed to protect him’. ‘I felt that something had happened,’ Mary said later, ‘but I knew not what, it was below the level of consciousness.’40 She spent the rest of the weekend in a reverie.

  Mary’s dream was on the night of Saturday 22 April 1916. Three days later The Times reported a small battle at Katia, in the Sinai, after a surprise attack by hostile forces at 5 a.m. on Easter Sunday. The day after that, Mary received a cable from Letty: the Gloucesters had been involved, Ego slightly wounded, and both he and Tom Strickland captured. ‘I can’t bear it for Mamma,’ said a dismayed Cincie, knowing that Ego himself would be ‘miserable’ at having been ‘captured at his very first engagement’ – ‘so like his pathetic luck’.41

  But, despite best efforts, the details that trickled through over the next few days did not add up to any coherent story. The Times reported a ‘Stiff Fight’ by British cavalry against enemy forces of up to 3,000 – Germans, and Turks on camelback, in conditions of
mist and fog.42 But the war correspondents’ conjecture could not be confirmed because, as Mary said, ‘all’ at Katia that day ‘were killed & taken’,43 their fates obscured as much as the battleground that day. The trickle of news guttered out, to be replaced by ‘lots of confusing Egyptian rumours’, prismed through the Chinese whispers of the well-meaning and those for whom Lord Elcho’s fate was simply bavardage. At a dinner party in London Mary overheard Mrs Keppel say that a syce (an Arab servant) had sworn that after the battle he had watched by Lord Elcho’s body for hours.44

  Mary later said of her ‘dream-vision’ that ‘it helped me to wait and kept me outwardly calm’.45 But inwardly she was ‘terribly worried, over-tired and nervy’.46 She pressed Balfour for ‘the private account of what happened to the Yeomanry (Glos. Worcs. and Warwicks.) on Easter Sunday … it’s so maddening not knowing’.47 Almost a month after the battle the Elchos were ‘inexpressibly relieved’ to receive confirmation through the American Embassy that Tom Strickland was a prisoner in Jerusalem and being taken to Damascus. But the cable was silent about Ego. The next day, in early May, Mary went to Truro to stay in Miss Jourdain’s Anglican convent ‘for a rest’, taking with her a crucifix as an offering (the former governess had become a nun).48

  The uncertainty continued. A list procured by Hugo of prisoners at Constantinople did not bear Ego’s name. More frustratingly still, Tom Strickland’s letters to his wife Mary, delivered by the Red Cross, made no mention of Ego. On 10 June the Red Cross telephoned with the message ‘Lord Elcho at Damascus. No details’, which rendered the family ‘wild with joy’.49 Two weeks later the message was countermanded: the Red Cross had sent the wrong name.50

  The final news came on 1 July. The French Red Cross confirmed Lord Elcho’s death at Katia. He had been twice wounded, had had the wounds dressed and, despite his batman’s entreaties, had gone back into battle. A shell had blown out his chest, killing him instantly. ‘Oh God – Oh God, my beautiful brother that I have loved so since I was a baby – so beautiful through and through! Can it be true that he’ll never come back?’ asked Cincie.51 Mary was at Clouds.52 Hugo wired through, asking Guy Wyndham to break the news to his wife. For Mary it was confirmation of a still, small feeling in her deepest heart: ‘Ego told me – when he died … for I saw him in my dream,’ she told her mother. ‘I never really felt that he’d come home – from the War – but of course I didn’t know.’53 But so cataclysmic was the final confirmation of Ego’s death that, ever afterwards, Mary could not remember whether it came on the 1st or the 2nd of July.54

  Instances of people sensing a loved one’s death from many miles away are not uncommon. It can be felt as a shift of energy, a tickertape of images running through the mind, an inexplicable sense of discombobulation and loss. There is no rational explanation; many will think it simply imagination. But Mary thought that the vision – which seems to have coincided exactly with the time of battle – was the product of ‘a strenuous love’. Ego had reached her at his time of greatest ‘mental stress and strain’. She clung to that, determined ‘not to fail’ Ego and to create for his sons the life that he now could not.55 ‘I’m not going to be wonderful! I’m sick of the word,’ she told Arthur.56 ‘[B]ut there is no other word for it,’ Cynthia said.57

  After Ego’s death, Mary struggled – though she would never say it – with the fact that he had died in such a small battle, with no medals or mentions in dispatches to prove his valour. In a further wrench, General Sir Archibald Murray’s official report of the battle, published in The Times in September 1916,58 did not even mention Ego’s name. The baldest account of Ego’s death gave Mary the most comfort: a wire received from Hyatt, Ego’s sergeant, now a prisoner of war, several months after Ego’s death: ‘Lord Elcho twice wounded – then shell carried away chest. Acted magnificently.’ ‘Acted magnificently’ Mary underlined, immediately sending to Ettie and Evelyn this last shred of news. Such words, from a ‘simple, unsuperlative sergeant’, must mean something.59

  The day confirmation of Ego’s death was received was – although this must have been reduced to the periphery of the family’s thought – the first day of the battle of the Somme. It is strangely apposite: both such monumental tragedies, the difference only one of scale. Mary had heard the rumours of a new campaign back in January. ‘I suppose you know (I’m not asking you!) that there’ll be heavy fighting in March or April,’ she wrote to Balfour at the time.60 Intended for spring, the campaign, a concerted Anglo-French offensive, devised, in the wake of Gallipoli and the British attack on the Eastern Front, to end the war on the Western Front once and for all, was delayed until July by the German offensive at Verdun. For a week beforehand the Allied forces had bombarded the German trenches with artillery. The sound was so loud that Asquith heard it in Downing Street. So confident were the generals that, as Raymond Asquith wryly wrote to his wife Katharine shortly before, ‘An order has just come to say that there is to be no cheering in the trenches when peace is declared. No-one can say that our Generals don’t look ahead.’61

  At 7.30 a.m. on 1 July 1916 the first troops went over the top. They were assured by their generals that they could make their way across no man’s land ‘with a walking stick’, that not even a rat could have survived the bombardment of the German trenches.62 At Angelina’s, Angela fried 800 eggs in three hours.63 A short distance away, wave after wave of soldiers, weighed down by 60-pound packs, walked steadily into a line of German fire, mown down, toppled like ninepins, entangled and shredded by barbed wire, pulped under the feet of the men who came up behind them only to fall themselves. A total of 19,249 British soldiers, including 993 officers, died that day; almost 40,000 more were wounded. The battle, which the generals had so confidently expected to be a rout, lasted in total 140 days. Nothing illustrates the generals’ failure of intelligence and apparent disregard for human life more than the catastrophic Somme.

  Bim turned nineteen on that first day of the Somme. His battalion was posted nearby, and in combat, on and off, that summer. But his letters home dwelt on ‘do you remembers’, literary discussions and his anxiety about Worple Flit’s publication (Bim knew that his work was not ‘fashionable’ and feared the critical response: ‘I daresay if I wore black shirts … and wrote verse that was quite incomprehensible, the reviewers would take it for genuine “poesie”’).64 He wrote to Pamela, leaning on one elbow while lying on a blanket in a field surrounded by poplars, telling her about a nice new company commander who ‘laughs at my jokes’, and alluding to a brief love affair with a young, ‘very pretty and very well-dressed’ French woman called Ninette, promising to send his mother a photograph of her.65

  Bim’s letters that summer were love letters, reassuring Pamela of her youth and beauty, mourning with her Hester’s loss, marvelling at her courage and strength. There are only brief hints at a darker truth, a pointedly casual reference to a corporal in his battalion who had received a ‘Blighty’ wound only that morning (‘He was hit in the ankle and fore-arm, and was simply jubilant. The other chaps envied him a good deal, and so did I’);66 a passing reference to the difficulty of sending mail (‘We are moving around a lot’); a capitulation at the end of a long letter (‘I would give the last ten years of my life for six months’ rest now’);67 and, in August, a plea (‘I do wish you would tell me what the High Brows think? The P.M. and sic-like …’).68

  The war drove a rift between the generation that fought and those who sent them there, nowhere more so than among the elite. The mechanistic chain of command and incomprehensible orders gave the upper classes serving a glimpse for the first time of the impotence felt on a daily basis by most of Britain’s populace. Suddenly there was a ‘They’: generals and politicians who made decisions with no regard to what the men – even officers – thought.69 Those fighting were part of an anonymized mass, aristocrat and common man alike, buried where they fell. Many of those officers felt angered at the betrayal of their generation by their parents, and for the children of the Souls this was
in many cases a literal statement – none more so than Raymond Asquith. The Coterie’s acknowledged leader wrote to Diana Manners, savagely tearing apart the Souls who continued to chatter and talk:

  Their minds are almshouses … We do not hunt the carted hares of 30 years ago. We do not ask ourselves and one another and every poor devil we meet ‘How do you define Imagination?’ or ‘What is the difference between talent and genius?’, and score an easy triumph by anticipating the answer with some text-book formula, originally misconceived by George Wyndham in the early eighties at Glen, and almost certainly misquoted by Margot at the borrowed house of a Frankfort baronet, not because it was either true or witty or even understood, but because it was a sacred obligation to respect whatever struck the late Sir Charles Tennant as a cut above what he had heard in the night school at Paisley where they taught him double-entry …70

  Raymond’s cousin Bim could not say this – he could not yet comprehend this. But he was no longer the child who had gone to war and who wrote to his mother, ‘I think I shot a German the other day; if I did, God rest his soul.’71 In the dog-eared Oxford Book of English Verse that he carried always with him, the poems underlined all dwell on farewell and longing. In June, while at Poperinghe, he wrote ‘The Mad Soldier’. Written in the vernacular, it is the voice of a dead soldier, decaying beneath a heap of bodies in the trenches where ‘rats eat Body-meat!’