Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  Geoffrey was forced to sail his launch alongside in full view of the enemy. Lit up by searchlights, machine-gun bullets raked ML254, two lodging in his duffel coat. Men were throwing themselves on to his motor launch, scrambling down ladders whilst being sprayed by machine-gun fire and peppered with shells. Some of them broke their ankles as they jumped down on to the packed deck of the little vessel.

  ML254 began to back away with thirty-eight of Vindictive’s volunteers cowering on her deck. Still hanging on to the wheel despite his wounds, Geoffrey headed out to sea towards Admiral Keyes and HMS Warwick. His launch was badly damaged and he flashed out SOS signals on his electric torch. They went dead slow to try to keep her afloat as every wave lapped over the forecastle. Their wardroom was ablaze, perilously close to their petrol supply. Crutchley, who was proving to be ‘a tower of strength’ in organising men to bail out the drowning launch, now frantically tried to apply a tourniquet on Geoffrey’s numb leg as he huddled by the wheel. His trousers and shoes were saturated with blood and it had seeped out on to the deck all around him.

  Bleeding heavily and clinging on to consciousness, Geoffrey pulled up alongside HMS Warwick. ML254 was so waterlogged that she was almost unsteerable. Once all the occupants were safely off a charge was set to destroy her. At the last minute one of his engineers seized the ensign and they shredded it and distributed the pieces between the survivors.

  Geoffrey, who would almost lose his left leg, might have considered himself lucky to be aboard Warwick. But his ordeal was not over yet. He was sitting in the wardroom semi-conscious in an armchair when it suddenly collapsed underneath him. Light bulbs fell all around him as the ship struck a German mine off Ostend. Another officer dragged him up by his shattered arm, which shook Geoffrey to his senses and urged him forward. ‘I staggered after him dropping one leg down the ammunition hatch which woke me further and crawled up the ladder on deck.’ A destroyer was lashed alongside and they made for Dover.

  The raid could hardly be considered a success. HMS Vindictive had only partially blocked the approach to Bruges. Nonetheless naval personnel had performed bravely and three Victoria Crosses were handed out, one of them to Geoffrey Drummond and another to Victor Crutchley.

  The injuries that Geoffrey Drummond suffered at Ostend did nothing for his existing health problems after the war. However in 1939 he was determined to play his part. Not considered fit for the RNVR, Geoffrey eventually ended up in the Royal Naval Patrol Service as an able seaman. In April 1941 he was carrying a heavy sack of coal aboard HMS Pembroke when he took a fall, hitting his head on the deck housing. Lieutenant-Commander Geoffrey Heneage Drummond VC died on 21 April in hospital at the age of 55, a worthy example of the service rendered to their country by the tiny fraction of Old Etonians who chose to make their contribution at sea.

  Notes

  1 Three more OEs were killed when their troop transports sank. These were Captain David Salomons, Royal Engineers (HMS Hythe, 29 October 1915), Lord Kesteven, Lincolnshire Yeomanry, aged 24 (SS Mercian, 5 November 1915) and Lt Geoffrey Ashmore, Royal Engineers, aged 42 (SS Transylvania, 4 May 1917).

  2 This figure does not include the boys who joined the Royal Naval Air Service. When the Eton war list was compiled in the early 1920s E.L. Vaughan included them with the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force.

  22

  ‘The Light that Failed’

  Despite the failure of the German Army to barge its way to victory on the Western Front in the spring of 1918, the end of the war seemed anything but a foregone conclusion to the exhausted troops now trying to regroup after their ordeal. ‘The possibility that the moral and material resources of the Germans had fallen so low,’ wrote Pip Blacker, ‘that the war might be won in the autumn did not seriously occur to us till later.’ Whilst everything moved north in April the Guards waited, now part of Byng’s Third Army, south of Arras.

  The weather was miserable at the end of April. It did not look like the Germans were at all interested in an advance, in fact it looked more like they might begin retreating as patrols of Grenadiers found abandoned forward trenches south of Ayette. Some captured Germans seemed to give the impression that rather than contemplating an attack, they were afraid of being overrun themselves. The idea of the Guards advancing slightly to assume a ridge around the village of Moyenville began to take shape, but aside from some desultory artillery fire and the odd enemy raid, it felt as if they were in a lull as far as fighting a war was concerned.

  There really was a sense that the British Army was drawing on the last manpower available to it. Ralph Gamble had found himself in command of one of his old masters from Eton, which was a bizarre feeling. Geoffrey Headlam was nearing 40 but had requested a transfer from the OTC, which he had joined on the outset of war. In the 1st Scots Guards, Henry was bemused by the arrival of Hugh Marsham-Townshend. A 40-year-old former militia man whose younger brother Ferdinand had already been killed with the regiment back in 1915, he had a son, John, who had just arrived at Mr Goodhart’s house at Eton. Now Henry found him serving as his subordinate. ‘He calls me Sir!’ he exclaimed.

  For Henry though, one person at the front had gained an importance far above any of their fellow officers. He and Ralph Gamble had become utterly inseparable. Hardly more than acquaintances at Eton, they had moved in different social circles and had differing interests. At the front though they shared a loathing of the war along with an intense passion for their old school. The memories of Eton were all, as young men who had gone straight from Eton into the army, that they had to fall back on to try to escape the horror around them. They spent all their spare time together and whenever an invite was extended to one, it was unthinkable that the other should be excluded. Once away from their battalions they took immense pleasure reliving school days, talking about friends and acquaintances, which they called ‘Eton Shop.’

  One by one Ralph and Henry had seen their friends falling around them, whether dead or sent home wounded, and it had created an unbreakable bond between two young men who found empty spaces nearly everywhere else at the front. Oliver Lyttelton pointed out the extent to which Henry Dundas valued companionship and friends at the front. ‘I remember him many times in the winter of 1916–1917 walking five miles along the Somme roads in the rain and five miles back again for the pleasure of exchanging a quip with the brigadier.’ Of Ralph and Henry he said that ‘their intimacy was so close that it barely escaped sentimentality. [Henry] had more friends than most men and yet besides this one friend all others were as nothing. He would have given anything that he possessed to him, he would have followed him anywhere’.

  Jeffrey John Archer Amherst, Viscount Holmesdale, had been a contemporary of both young men at Eton. An officer in Ralph’s battalion, he was a fan of both Ralph, with his ‘unmistakable quality of innocence’, and Henry, with his ‘dazzling smile and scintillating sense of humour’. He described their friendship as ‘a David and Jonathon relationship without a trace of anything unhappy, difficult or questionable’.

  Henry articulated his own views on friendship. He had been reading Kipling’s The Light That Failed, which championed the close relationship between two young men:

  What a wonderful thing friendship is, and how easily misconstrued … intellectually speaking – into gross homosexuality. It is considered a dreadful thing to say ‘I love so and so’, yet ‘love’ is the only word which describes one’s feelings to really great friends, and it is only the people who realise this who succeed in the sphere of friendship.

  By the end of spring 1918 Henry was back in command of Left Flank Company, living with a French family comprising an elderly couple, two teenage girls who appreciated his gramophone and a small boy whose favourite pastime was swinging a cockroach attached to a piece of string around his head. He had by now proven himself a more than competent commander. McAulay VC had told him that having him in command of them was a source of pride. ‘I almost embraced him,’ wrote Henry in response. He had himself already
been awarded the Military Cross in the Cambrai area in late 1917 for a brave, pitch-dark attack and consolidation and in May 1918 he received this gallantry award a second time.

  A patrol of Guardsmen had been sent out under another officer to try to identify the enemy troops opposite and the moon emerged, lighting them up in full view of the enemy. They were caught under heavy fire. Only two men returned unscathed and four men had vanished, including the officer. Henry seized an NCO and off they went in search of their missing friends. Coming under the same fire, Henry was shot in the elbow but his companion, who had a bullet pass through his helmet and miss his skull, managed to help him home. Henry’s wound continued to bleed profusely and his servant McIntosh tried to insist that he go with him to an aid post. But Henry would not hear of it. It would have left one single officer with the company and so he swallowed the pain and remained, making out his reports and waiting for his men to stand down the next morning before he would let his servant drag him off to seek treatment. Along the way Henry’s only preoccupation was getting food for his companion. ‘Can you give my friend … some food,’ he asked, ‘as he has not had anything to eat since last night?’ ‘I have often thought since,’ wrote McIntosh, ‘[how many] officers would have referred to their servant as their friend?’

  It was not the first time that Henry had shown an utter disregard for his own personal safety, despite General John’s warnings about his role as a company commander and how precious he was. On one occasion, when his men were laying a wooden track at Pilckem Ridge, they came under heavy fire. ‘The Captain just kept walking up and down the slip of road as if nothing was happening,’ wrote one Guardsman. ‘When the men saw the example that [he] was showing … they very soon all returned and resumed work.’ One of the men noticed a hole in the Henry’s burberry, made by debris from one of the shells. He did not shout at his men for running away, he simply smiled when he saw them coming back to join him.

  On another occasion, in front of Langemarck, Henry crawled 300 yards in broad daylight with an orderly to begin marking an alternative route out for his men in miserable weather to save them from a mile of drudgery and a shower of German shells. The area was void of landmarks and ‘a sea of mud’. All he had to mark their route was remnants of tape he had scraped together stuck end to end.

  On such missions his sense of humour did not fail him. Henry’s reconnaissance reports were a source of entertainment for the brigade staff. ‘When his report was presented it was written as likely as not on the back of a private envelope and among a mass of useful information gathered … and by taking quite unjustifiable risks, there would be one or two deductions intended to be merely farcical.’

  Despite his record Henry felt guilty about his elbow wound as it meant he would be sent home for a month. ‘I’m afraid I feel rather a scrimshank getting hit just now when things are so uncertain.’ It had not escaped him though, that it would be a period of respite for his parents. ‘I am awfully pleased for your sakes, you poor darlings. It means a good long spell of freedom from anxiety and we shall have enormous fun.’

  He utilised his time at home fully. His sister Anne was pulled away from school and with their mother they spent a few days in London including a day down at Eton, where Henry had spent much of his time. His father was with him to see the Eton and Harrow match. It was a low-key affair played at school rather than the usual grand Lord’s affair. Mr Dundas watched proudly as Henry, Ivan Cobbold and another friend went on a recruitment drive trying to talk boys into the idea of joining the Scots Guards when the time came for them to stake a regimental allegiance.

  The reality of the war, though, was never far from his mind. Towards the end of June word arrived that a non-OE officer named Holmes, affectionately known as ‘Sherlock’ by his fellow officers, had been sitting on Henry’s bunk in their dugout when he had been killed by a German artillery shell. Shocked, Henry’s first inclination was to get back to the front as quickly as possible. By the end of July he had returned to his company and the daily grind had resumed. ‘Everyone seems to be very confident that the Germans are very low, and the line seems to be very quiet and comfortable.’

  While Henry was away the Guards had undergone a month of training and recuperation. There was a real sense amongst them ‘that Hindenburg and Ludendorff had done their worst … that their bolt was shot’ and that when they went back on the offensive the Allies would have the upper hand. They were being thoroughly versed in open warfare for the next phase of the war, incorporating and developing lessons learned during the grand German spring attacks. Different national contingents were pooling their ideas. The New Zealanders sent NCOs along to the Guards to be trained and the Canadians supplied others to give a demonstration in patrolling and raiding in daylight. Feilding was trying very hard to give the men some time for rest and relaxation too. There was a gymkhana organised by one brigade, a horse show by another and the Grenadiers played the Welsh Guards in a ‘mass football match’, twenty-five men on each side with four balls in what turned out to be a ‘Homeric struggle’.

  The Guards were also busy instructing American newcomers to the Western Front, ready for their induction into the war proper. Their visitors were from the 80th Division. All of the men appeared to be from a Pennsylvania mining district and ‘American’ was only a loose description of these troops, who had been born all over the world and communicated in ‘a babel of tongues’. Henry found them ‘amusing, interesting and rather arduous’. They were ‘very apt, very keen and very ignorant’. Britain had had four years to adapt to the industrialised warfare of the Western Front; now their new allies would have to catch up quickly.

  Henry could hear his servant McIntosh chatting away to their NCOs in the next room of their dugout and his company sergeant major, Mitchell, was enjoying himself immensely bossing them around. Henry found the Americans’ effervescent enthusiasm amusing, ‘so full of ardour to get over to the Germans and do them in’. Their commanding officer was remarkably energetic and eager to oblige. He went constantly around the lines, which Henry found wryly amusing. ‘Four years hence?’ After a period of instruction there were then stints in the line in the company of the Guards. Henry was to act as a consultant of sorts. ‘I shall give excellent advice, but avoid exercise as much as possible. The hot weather makes one very lazy and disinclined for active participation in the war.’

  On 8 August a British assault was led by General Rawlinson and his Fourth Army that the Germans would refer to as the ‘Black Day’. Aimed at pushing the enemy away from Amiens, to which they remained perilously close after Operation Michael in March, in five days the British managed to drive the Germans up to 12 miles back in some places. Although the British were outnumbered significantly they took thousands of prisoners and captured hundreds of guns. The French attacked too and forced the enemy to hurriedly evacuate a large swathe of territory to the south.

  As of 13 August though, German resistance began to harden, even if they were still on the defensive. Haig decided at this point to change things. Rather than push an ailing attack forward he switched the focus to another sector. Byng’s Third Army now came into play, attempting to surprise the enemy with a strike near Bapaume.

  By mid August the Germans had begun pulling back in front of the Guards. They remained in Moyenville and Hamelincourt, but were in no mood for a fight. The Division flung nearly 700 gas drums at them in the former village, which they had now been looking at since April, and the enemy barely reacted. Byng’s attack was to take place on 23 August in conjunction with some of the Fourth Army north of the Somme. It was decided though, that two days prior to this it was necessary for some of his men, including the Guards, to launch a limited attack north of the Ancre to take care of a line of fierce German resistance. The 2nd Guards Brigade, including Ralph Gamble’s 1st Coldstream Guards and Henry Dundas’ 1st Scots Guards, were selected for the job.

  The relevant units were pulled from the line and sent back to Saulty on 16 August for training. They
were not told what was afoot but Evelyn Fryer, with the last of the brigade’s three battalions, the 3rd Grenadier Guards, was suspicious. ‘There was much conjecture as to what this meant, the official explanation being given out that the enemy was massing opposite us and a new attack was imminent and therefore it had been decided that each division should have a complete brigade in reserve for counter-attacking purposes.’ They swallowed this tale at first, but once the Guardsmen began to practice counter-attacking and their research focus fell on positions such as Moyenville in front of their positions he surmised that they would be going forward themselves.

  Ralph had missed almost all the final preparations, even though he would be commanding one of the Coldstream companies in battle. He arrived back at the front from leave on 19 August and dined with Henry at Corps HQ; ‘very pleasant, with a band playing Pinafore’. Twenty-four hours later Ralph was loading his men into lorries for the journey to their assembly positions. Loaded down with ammunition, sandbags and shovels, they were issued with rations, including lemons, chocolate, tea, rum and cigarettes as they waited for zero hour. Henry would be acting as his battalion’s second-in-command and thus not leading his company into battle. That job would fall to Marsham-Townshend. Henry spent a strenuous night with a roll of tape, marking out assembly positions before heading back to battalion headquarters to help oversee the attack.

  The attack on 21 August was to take place along a 9-mile stretch from Miraumont to Moyenville to try to turn the line of the old Somme defences from the north. On their front, the 2nd Guards Brigade were to push south-east. In charge of the brigade since the departure of General John was Bertram Sergison-Brooke. Youthful, just as precious to Henry as his predecessor and more commonly known as ‘Boy’ Brooke, he planned to have Ralph’s battalion on the left moving on Moyenville itself and Henry’s on the right, with Evelyn Fryer’s waiting in a sunken road at Boiry to come up an hour and a half later to push through towards a railway line which comprised his brigade’s final objective.