Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  Whilst Ralph was furious, everyone else was unanimous in their approval. Having declared that ‘of course the whole ADC system was one long period of snobbery and intrigue and petticoats’, Henry now did a complete U-turn when it meant his friend being removed from danger. Logie agreed. ‘I can’t say what a relief it is for me to know that he is out of harm’s way for the present.’ In fact, he wished they would just send him home for the duration.

  Although the Battle of Arras was over, the resumption of serious hostilities appeared to be creeping ever nearer. The Guards began their move north by way of a stop at Wardrecques near St Omer. On arrival they bivouacked in a pretty little field, but more importantly it was flat. Logie could almost see the wicket in place. Even more happily, it transpired that he was now within reach of his Aunt Muriel.

  Muriel Thompson was quite a lady. With her brothers she shared some of the credit for founding the automobile racing club at Brooklands before the war and won the first women’s race there in 1908 in her car ‘Pobble’. She wanted to follow one of Logie’s uncles to war as an ambulance driver but as a woman she was unwelcome, so she had joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. After driving for the French and Belgians, in 1916 she became one of the first women to drive for the British Army, as women were finally permitted to participate in this aspect of the war effort. By 1917 she had risen to second in command of the Calais Convoy and was now conveniently placed to spend time with her beloved nephew when he could get away.

  Of course, with a formation so heavily weighted towards Eton, 4 June could not pass unnoticed. Logie’s thoughts were entirely with the school on this hallowed day. It was a warm sunny day. ‘Oh but it ought to be spent on Upper Club under the trees,’ he lamented. ‘Can’t you hear the pigeons in school yard; lunch at m’tutor’s: mayonnaise, cutlets … wonderfully creamy pudding; more cricket, tea, absences, procession of boats … fireworks … Will it ever come again?’ He could almost reach out and touch it, but France was a far cry from the banks of the Thames. ‘You know the longing … which hurts?’ he wrote. ‘I sometimes feel it when I sit and think of the days when I could write KS after my name.’

  General John’s odd request for a catalogue of Etonians fell into place when a large contingent of OEs converged on St Omer on that breezy evening for a dinner to mark the special date. These 4 June dinners had become frequent the length and breadth of all fronts since 1915, with gatherings of Etonians getting together however they could, toasting the occasion and sending back a telegram to school; but this was by far the largest and most memorable meal during the war.

  The band of the Coldstream Guards had set up at one end of the dining hall, which was dominated by a large chandelier decorated with ribbons of light Eton blue. Such exalted personages as Gough, the army commander, and the Earl of Cavan, commanding the corps beneath him that contained the Guards, sat at the top table. After the food there was a sing-song with typed prompts in Latin as well as a rousing rendition of ‘God Save the King’. Cavan shushed everyone down after the ‘National Anthem’ and called Absence as if they were at school. No less than 206 Etonians answered their names, with 116 of them members of the Guards Division.

  The singing took up again and the congregation gave a rousing rendition of the ‘Eton Boating Song’, by which time some of those assembled had taken to standing on tables at the back. They were beginning to creak and groan. Cavan was determined to try to make a speech but naturally could not be heard by anyone that wasn’t standing right under his nose. ‘This, however, did not prevent everyone from howling with applause whenever he seemed to get to the end of a sentence.’

  At some point, someone, ‘probably an ex-Tug’, wrote out the obligatory telegram to be sent back to the headmaster at Eton. He did it in Latin. One of the battalion commanders was called up to construe in front of the crowd. He failed dismally and was given a yellow ticket made out especially for the occasion. Gough, no less, was then called up and proved just as incapable and, as this was considered a far worse transgression, he was issued with a white slip7.

  The official proceedings were wrapped up by a rendition of ‘The Vale’8, at which point the first table collapsed. ‘Pandemonium reigned.’ Cavan tried to opt for a swift exit and sent a polite enquiry to Hubert Gough asking him if he was ready to take his leave. Gough sent an indignant reply back to say that he was busy. At that point the army commander was at the bottom of a scrum on the floor. ‘Whenever a group of people were seen a ram9 was spontaneously formed by others, and then at once became a vortex of legs and arms.’ Logie watched Gough being hoisted around the room by a seething mass of brigadiers and junior ensigns. ‘Not very bad,’ he remarked. One attendee said that the most vivid memory he had was of what he thought was a brigadier holding another man down by the throat and squeezing an orange into his victim’s eye.

  Henry managed to contain himself, sitting next to Ralph and opposite Logie. He wasn’t one for drinking to excess anyway. They had bumped into a few contemporaries from other units but nobody that he was particularly desperate to see so he stuck to the usual crowd. He was disappointed with the lack of reverence shown for the occasion by some, the idea that Eton was nothing more than an excuse for an annual orgy, but he got over it. ‘Why shouldn’t one enjoy oneself as one likes.’ Gough and Cavan ran away soon after the mayhem began. General John and most of the brigadiers were hoisted before they too managed to scramble out, after which a mock battle began, the strongpoint being where the band had been until they too scarpered.

  Pip Blacker had arrived late and sitting amongst strangers he enjoyed it less than the others. By midnight the room looked more like Ginchy than a dining room and the party began to wind down. He never could figure out whether or not the authorities were apathetic about the rowdy nature of the officers present or whether they looked at it and sympathised with 200 young men ‘most of whom had seen hell in the last twelve months’ and let them get on with it.

  The Daily Dump reported that Captain Smith of the Coldstream Guards had arrived at Wardrecques in a motor car on 8 June. ‘His appearance was the signal for all Old Etonians to retire to their dugouts as it was confidently expected that the Captain was on his way round to collect a large sum of money for the damages incurred.’ Happily though it transpired that he was merely there to report that there was a huge amount in the event’s kitty that more than covered a complete renovation of the dining room. There was even a significant sum left over and this was to be sent to the Eton Memorial Fund. General John relaxed, promptly invited him to tea ‘and the room was still filled with a merry and enthusiastic party’.

  Three days after the 4 June dinner at St Omer the summer, militarily speaking, started with a bang. The Germans had been holding on to Messines and the surrounding high ground ever since the 9th Lancers had been forced out of it in 1914. Now an Etonian general was leading the charge to take it back. Herbert Plumer was a practical man, popular amongst his men. He had planned for his army to make a limited, concentrated attack to capture the front of the Messines Ridge, but Haig had characteristically doubled his intentions by adding the back side of the ridge and a further advance that took them 3,000 yards from their starting point.

  At 3.10 a.m. on 7 June the earth heaved and nineteen mines fulfilled their task, ripping the Belgian countryside apart in the largest man-made explosion yet seen. At the same time the artillery barrage roared into action. The infantry burst forward towards the traumatised Germans. The first objectives fell, including Messines itself. The enemy were in no frame of mind to repel Plumer’s men. Just after 3 p.m. the British launched an assault on what had been deemed the final objectives of the day and by nightfall this had been seized from the Germans too. By 14 June they had cleaned up and completed their task in its entirety.

  Plumer’s assault on Messines was well planned and well executed but more importantly it was a testament to what could be achieved with a limited set of objectives, as opposed to flinging men at the enemy and trying to smash throu
gh the Germans. The Guards had remained at Wardrecques, lest they be required to help exploit the situation at Messines, but when it transpired that this would not be the case they began entraining for the Salient in mid June. The news was not received with any joy, for the Guards knew as well as any other regiment the miseries that that awful spot had to offer.

  Their new home revolved around what had become the poisonous little village of Boesinghe where the whole area was low-lying and in part dissected by the Yser canal. Aside from the village, one of the other preferred targets of the German gunners was the chateau at Elverdinghe and its grounds. It just so happened that Henry and the rest of the brigade staff were about to follow numerous British units before them and make the building their home. The chateau looked sturdy enough from a distance, but in fact it had been much knocked about by shellfire. Sandbags were stacked up at the doors. Rain dripped through shell holes in the roof and the windows had been shattered. From the empty frames Henry and Oliver could see Pilckem Ridge in the distance, when torn-up sacks did not hang as shields to the elements. They took a bedroom on the first floor to share but almost immediately had to move downstairs where it was safer in the brigade office. Heavy artillery was wheeled amid the splintered trees behind the gardens, where men were ensconced under the walls and in makeshift dugouts, and it started firing from under their noses. The Germans paid them back with such ferocity that Oliver Lyttelton claimed that their teeth rattled in their heads.

  On their right the Guards Division met Marc Noble’s Welsh Division across the railway. Marc had been resident at Elverdinghe himself in the previous months but he and his outfit were now concentrating down into a smaller space to accommodate troops arriving for the summer offensive.

  After the harrowing effect of Mametz Wood on the Somme, Marc’s artillery brigade had been pulled out of the lines with the devastated Welsh infantry whom they supported so that they might all restore themselves before they were required to go back into action. It was a long process and they took part in no major offensives, aside from Marc and his guns providing support at Messines. The intervening twelve months had had a significant effect on him though, and although he had just turned 20, emotionally Marc had aged considerably.

  He returned home twice on leave before the summer of 1917 and his sister Marjorie noticed that he’d changed. He ordinarily wouldn’t speak about ‘the unpleasant part’ of the war but she could tell by his manner that it had taken its toll. Marc was still there, but he was solemn. Every now and again he would refer to isolated incidents or scenes. A German aeroplane crashing to the ground, the pilot tumbling down in flames whilst Tommies on the ground cheered. At a ruined farm near his guns Marc wandered through a sprinkling of officers’ graves, dotted about the weed strewn and unkempt fields. ‘It somehow looked so indescribably lonely. Out here one is always as gay as possible, but I think this made me feel quite sad.’ Marc spoke to her of removing an identity disc from a man who had been dead and unburied for a long time. ‘But you soon have to readjust your point of view,’ he reasoned. ‘And you simply have to give up associating death with everything beautiful and reverent like you do at home.’ As he walked about at night on his own Marc, passionate about poetry, was haunted by the words of Coleridge:

  Like one that on a lonesome road

  Doth walk in fear and dread,

  And having once turned round walks on,

  And turns no more his head;

  Because he knows, a frightful fiend

  Doth close behind him tread.

  The garden in which Marc’s guns were parked reminded him of a post-apocalyptic version of his family home in Norfolk. The field guns sat in rose beds where the flowers still grew out of ‘a wilderness of weeds’; the shattered greenhouse was covered in straggling vines. There was no glass left in the frames and the metal was twisted and bent into fantastic shapes by shellfire.

  Over 3,000 guns were being assembled in Flanders. Gradually their rate of fire increased as they worked towards a horrific preliminary bombardment, bigger than that on the Somme. On 1 July Marc’s entire neighbourhood had been under sustained heavy fire when frantic news arrived at about 8 p.m. that a howitzer battery further along had suffered a direct hit from the Germans countering their fire. The battery’s commander was a fellow OE and a friend of Marc’s, Jack Bligh, and Marc was determined to go to see if he could help them. Running off with a South African doctor who was attached to the artillery, Marc grabbed a Red Cross car from the nearby field ambulance and drove off to see if they could find any survivors in the mangled dugout. They drove up as far as they could over the pock-marked ground and then got out to walk the rest of the way. They were less than 100 yards off Marc’s haunting rose garden when a high-explosive shell came whizzing in and exploded almost on top of them, wounding both men seriously.

  At 9 p.m. the car returned, carrying Marc and his South African companion, driven by two men of the Hampshire Regiment who had found them and were returning Marc and Dr Cohen to the field ambulance. The doctor had been struck in the head and across his body, but was conscious and able to tell them what had happened. He was severely wounded but the medical attendant thought that he had a fighting chance and so he was sent down the line10. As for Marc, he was deemed a lost cause. He was unconscious from the shock of his injuries and he barely had a pulse. His right foot had been blown off and as well as substantial injuries to his other foot he had a nasty wound to his arm and significant burns. He had lost a vast amount of blood.

  By chance one of the medical personnel present knew him. A Corporal Daldry had been a clerk in the estate office at Marc’s home prior to the war. He helped to dress the young Etonian’s wound and put his arm in a sling. Then there was nothing to do but make him comfortable. They covered him in hot-water bottles and gave him a little brandy, at which point he began to regain consciousness. Marc was largely coherent, clear enough to give his name and other personal details. They were surprised to find out that he was adjutant of his brigade at only 20. When they asked him his religion though, he became upset. ‘Why do you ask that? Am I going to die?’ Daldry lied to him and told him it was purely for administrative purposes.

  Marc was in a substantial amount of pain. At 10 p.m. they gave him a large dose of morphia. He spoke a little, on and off about his guns, his battery, signals. He passed away just before midnight, still lying on a stretcher propped up on trestles with a screen around him and a single acetylene lamp burning by his head. Sewn up in an army blanket under the watchful eye of Daldry he was buried, still wearing his uniform and his arm still in a sling, in the grave near the fellow OE he had been hoping to help. Jack Bligh, 24, and Marc Noble, 20, lie two graves apart in Ferme Olivier Cemetery. The latter had been killed by the very instrument of warfare that his father and grandfather had devoted their lives to developing. Death, the ‘frightful fiend’ stalking Marc down lonely Flanders roads, had caught up with him on the eve of the next great offensive in Flanders.

  Notes

  1 Francis St Leger Greer was killed on 1 February 1917 and buried at Heilly Station Cemetery.

  2 Every year in November the Oppidans take on the Collegers at the Wall Game. In 1912, with Logie at the helm, College scored an emphatic victory.

  3 An Etonian term for Captain.

  4 A spot on the Thames at Eton used for rowing.

  5 A reference to cricket colours.

  6 Mr Broadbent.

  7 These tickets were a form of punishment at Eton at the time. The white slip entailed a trip to the headmaster and was considerably worse.

  8 A traditional Eton song sung at the end of the summer when boys leave the school.

  9 A formation from the Field Game, another form of Etonian football played at the time.

  10 Dr Benjamin Cohen subsequently died of his injuries on 3 July and was buried at Mendinghem Military Cemetery.

  18

  Setting the Tone

  For most of the time that Marc Noble had known the area around Elverding
he it had been a quiet sector. But it was now obvious to the Germans perched on the Pilckem Ridge watching Allied activity that events were pending. They upped their game accordingly.

  Brigade by brigade the Guards travelled to the rear, to the town of Herzeele, to undergo intensive training in ten-day stints. General Feilding, commanding the division, sought to verse his men fully in attack methods. Near the village trenches had been dug in an open stretch of ground and the Guards practised assaulting them. Much emphasis was put on working with aeroplanes, signal communications and the medical arrangements. Close to divisional headquarters a sand model had been erected projecting the whole of Lord Cavan’s corps sector. Evelyn Fryer and his NCOs studied and studied it to learn all the features of the landscape that they were about to assault. On 6 July even the king himself was present with the Prince of Wales to watch rehearsals with Hubert Gough. When they were not physically practising their attack there was no respite for the Guardsmen. There were conferences, map and aeroplane studies.

  In the weeks running up to the move Logie Leggatt had been on all manner of courses on topics such as bombing and bayonet fighting. Pip Blacker had been on the latter course. It was made clear to the pupils that they were not fighting by Queensberry Rules. In addition to sticking your opponent with the bayonet the men were told to smash him in the face with their rifle butt, as well as attempting to knee him or kick him in his crotch. They were told to kick, stamp, claw, gouge and bite whenever they got the chance.

  When work was completed for the day the ‘Eton Ramblers’1 atmosphere prevailed. Henry Dundas was the star of the mess. He would intersperse his singing of a vast repertoire of Harry Lauder and Gilbert and Sullivan songs with the mock Scotch sermons that he had been perfecting since he was five. ‘The most elaborate and ridiculous perorations came rolling off his tongue enriched by absurd parables, painted by the most characteristic quotations, and driven home with the unctuous insistence and bucolic pedantries of the original.’ Henry’s buoyant attitude benefited those around him. Oliver Lyttleton claimed that, at least outwardly, he didn’t care two straws for the daily and nightly doses of shellfire. ‘His nonchalance was remarkable.’