Regie’s other great pastime was the Oxford University OTC. Much more elaborate than its cohort at Eton, it featured an artillery section and during his four years as part of it Regie rose to second in command. He loved his guns and had already decided on a military career when the Great War came. One of the first of the University men to be called up, Regie was on holiday in Ireland and ended up on a train with ‘about 25 carriages carrying a howling drunken mob’ to report as reservists to a base. Within a few days a ‘rabble’ of forty men had turned up and been shoved in his direction. ‘I am trying to provide for them; but I should think they will starve fairly soon, as I haven’t the faintest idea what to do,’ he joked.
Regie had a unique charm. He had a temper; and absolutely no issue with letting anyone, be he a gunner or a general, know exactly what he thought of them. Thanks to his years on the river, which required a certain amount of unique motivational speaking, he had learned to do so in the most innovative and colourful manner. Before he had even landed at Havre in the last week of August, he had established a mutual vendetta with a captain of a Scottish regiment. Once in France it was two native soldiers who made his life difficult that felt the wrath of his sharp tongue by way of ‘an assortment of French oaths interspersed with a few sound English damns, to great amusement of admiring crowd of Tommies’. He varied his repertoire when necessary and could do subtlety. Havre was abandoned during the retreat and the base relocated to St Nazaire. Put on a ship and stuffed into a cabin where three other officers, a collection of what he termed ‘bores and mangy dug-out Captains’, chose to ignore his obvious preparations for bed and continued ‘drinking whiskey and talking rubbish’ he simply stripped off the shirt he hadn’t removed for nearly a month. ‘Exeunt omnes.’1
Whatever his capacity for ‘abuse’ when the situation vexed him, Regie was also noted for his affectionate nature. The first thing he did on landing in France was to go and buy a stock of footballs so that his men might have something to do. Once they arrived at their new base in St Nazaire he was thoroughly disgusted to find that no provision had been made to give the men shelter from the rain. Their constant discomfort angered him to the point that Regie led a raid on the Remount Depot to liberate some tents that they had in stores. ‘Owing to stupidity of sentry’ he very nearly got away with it. They made off with twelve tents and two poles but were caught. As the only officer present Regie stood and took the earbashing on behalf of all and even put up a fight before he had to yield to a higher-ranked officer and give them back. ‘My reputation is quite gone,’ he remarked, but the men were grateful for the effort. His worst stream of vitriol though, even more so than those aimed at the Germans, was Regie’s reaction to the curators of a park at home. They had been setting out traps and threatening Muncles the dog, whose picture would go everywhere with his master at the front to keep the bullets away. He gave his aunt explicit instructions. ‘If my dog gets killed in a trap … I will come back when this war is over with an 18-pounder gun, line them all up in the middle … of the cricket field and then bring my gun into action … “Target, curators of the park, range 100 yards, fuse zero. One round gunfire.”’ Please give them this message with my compliments.’
For someone as eager as Regie, sitting at a camp in complete ignorance of how the war was progressing and playing no active part in it was not only ‘damnable’, ‘intolerable’, but frightening. The camps were rife with unsettling rumours during the retreat. Almost as soon as Regie arrived it began. ‘Amiens evacuated? What is going to happen? Suspense awful.’ It didn’t matter how outlandish the stories were. On this occasion the Germans were supposed to be bearing down on Havre in motor cars laden with Maxim guns. By 11 p.m. this was apparently fact. Packed up and ready to run, Regie and his unarmed men were told in no uncertain terms that if they heard rifles, they were to flee to the docks. ‘Where are we going to? They say not England … Is George alive? What has happened to the fleet?’ Tales of the annihilation of 20,000 men arrived, along with bloody rifles that were piled in the stores. Ten days later Regie spotted a piece of artillery; ‘sight broken, shield splintered … also the limber wheels are broken. There are bloody pieces of meat stuck to the gun.’ He was in no doubt that if the Germans broke through to the coast they would be done for. ‘There will be some sort of massacre … I have a baby pistol and a toothpick. Probably shall chuck latter away and use fist.’
The rumours turned out to be false. ‘I am sitting here in a rage like a poisoned rat in a hole,’ Regie fumed. ‘If only I had joined some damned line regiment, at least I should be fighting now instead of running away without firing a shot.’ For Regie and those sharing his plight, they alternated between bouts of semi-optimism (‘The war will probably last long enough to kill me and Kitchener’s army as well’) and all out despondency (‘Every bit of news makes us more miserable and restless’). To make it worse, new arrivals were being sent up to the front immediately. ‘Miserable little squirts … vile … little unweaned rats … boys who six months ago were fags at their public schools.’ It was beyond all things conceivable. ‘Our language would make mother’s hair turn white.’
In the event, the subalterns at the camp resorted to squabbling with each other. It was every man for himself and one senior officer had marked Regie as an Oxford Blue and deemed it sufficient qualification for a speedy posting to the front. When he informed his brother subalterns that he was off, the reaction was typical. One officer flew into paroxysms of rage, hurling blasphemies and every swear word under the sun at Regie until he had completely exhausted his vocabulary. He used more abusive language to Regie’s face than the latter had used in the entire duration of his rowing career. Another officer didn’t have it in him to swear, but said he’d be damned if Regie would go if he could help it. ‘Polite and cheery, aren’t they?’
Regie honestly didn’t care. On 21 September he and fifty men were sent off to entrain for the Aisne to join an artillery outfit that had suffered heavy casualties. Regie was delighted and sat in the door of the train with his legs dangling out of the window. ‘I really am now going to the firing line to take an active part in the Great War,’ he gloated. On his way he learned from fellow officers that had seen it for themselves that it was deadlocked, an artillery duel; the Germans heavy guns on one side, British artillery on the other. His brother George, bored at the front, was in agreement. ‘The … kind of fighting our infantry has done, besides waiting in a trench, has been lying down waiting for our guns to silence the enemy’s guns … I’m sure Regie has the real job of the War … for at present the artillery is the great thing.’
The Royal Field Artillery Brigade that Regie was to join at Paissy consisted of eighteen guns, split into three numbered batteries with six guns each – 116, 117 and 118 – and contained approximately 800 men at full strength. Together they had lost eight of eighteen officers on the Aisne. For much of it, they hadn’t been able to get near the guns to fire them, such was the accuracy of their German counterparts. The Scottish rugby international that Regie was to replace was accounted for with a direct hit. Regie detrained and was taken through the woods to a turnip field just by Moulins where Douglas Lucas-Tooth had been buried. There he found the guns surrounded by enormous mounds of earth and concealed by brushwood and large branches. That afternoon they had been discovered by the Germans and shells had been dropping within 10 yards of their precious eighteen pounders, smashing holes in the ground.
Life in the ECOTC had taught Regie the basics in military terms and its counterpart at Oxford had taught him how a gun was fired, but once he got to the Aisne he found that he had much to learn in terms of war. There was the sight of the dead and wounded littered on the ridge, birds circling overhead, and the hardships of life at the front. Some were harder to accept, such as attacks of dysentery and dwindling supplies of tobacco. ‘In a couple of days I shall be worse than starving … when my pouch is empty, God help anyone who annoys me.’ For the most part Regie bore the rest in good humour. He had had al
l of his hair shorn off and joked that he would be ugly when he was old and bald. Boredom was abated by frequent rides on one of the two horses he had with him; especially ‘The Playboy,’ which he had named after a literary character. He rejoiced in getting a rare proper wash. He would sit on a heap of straw with his boots and socks off and wiggle his toes about ‘like a baby, in sheer delight at the sight of them.’
Nothing, though, prepared him to being lulled to sleep by the sound of howitzer shells. ‘I’m afraid,’ he wrote. ‘The noise makes one think one is a dead man already.’ He panicked at the perpetual banging of the guns and couldn’t tell if he was actually under fire. ‘It must wear men down to a shadow.’ Quickly, Regie learned the absolute necessity of digging. He took up a shovel and fashioned himself a square pit with additional cubby holes at two corners for extra protection. ‘The noise is appalling; with your own guns blazing away, a battery … just behind you and the bursting of shrapnel all round.’ Within a few days though he had adjusted sufficiently to be pacified by smoking his pipe under fire and was even writing letters whilst the shells rained down.
Their favoured objective was a German battery some 100 yards behind the enemy trenches on the opposite side of the river. All day long they fired at each other while the infantry sat still. Sometimes they were required to jump out of bed and fire at night too and during busy periods they would sleep by the guns. The German gunners were indiscriminate. ‘I had not a stitch on my body when she first came … I don’t mind when I am fully clothed, but when splinters come whistling round one’s bare legs it ceases to be a joke,’ Regie commented wryly.
He learned that, to a gunner, aeroplanes were evil; circling about till they spotted a line of guns and then directing German fire on to them. When one buzzed into sight a shout went up and the officers and men scattered into hiding or did their best impressions of a tree. But the most frightening introduction was to the enemy’s high explosive shells, ‘Black Maria’. She whistled as she came through the air, singing. George had seen it in action. ‘One, two, three tornadoes of earth coming nearer and nearer … the crash was awful.’ As she exploded she sent splinters: ‘great jagged, hot bits of iron’ in all directions. Regie was subjected to it constantly and found that some dealt with the threat of it better than others:
The senior subaltern is married. Somehow he seems to pay little attention to Maria. Perhaps if I was married I should be given the necessary inspiration of bravery; but being just a blasphemous bachelor, whenever the old bitch comes singing through the air I duck my head and drop into my pit.
As well as dodging shrapnel, Regie was also learning that life or death at the front was a lottery. One morning he had climbed into his married friend’s shelter for tea when the Germans opened a bombardment and it began to rain shrapnel, shaking the leaves above their heads. He wished to God he could be in his larger, more efficient shelter. At a lull in the fighting he made a dash for his pit. ‘What do I find lying in the bottom of it but a great, hot, jagged splinter … about eighteen inches long.’ He was resolved to live life for the here and now. In the next hour he might receive a bullet in the head or a thousand cigarettes might arrive in the post, you just couldn’t tell.
Finally, Regie had learned that, as sharp as he thought he was, he still had a thing or two to learn from senior officers. He had sent a man to the guard room for answering back and he remained locked up until the major returned the next morning. ‘I always thought I was fairly adequate in abuse. But when this creature put up as his defence: “I didn’t think a Second Lieutenant could order me to the Guard Room,” I just stood and gasped for ten minutes while this old retired Major talked to him. I never heard such [abuse] in my life, and the old man never once repeated himself.’
Regie’s induction to life under fire on the Aisne was short; not because of flying shrapnel but because the French were about to relieve the BEF in the area. Sir John French had coveted a move north for some time. In the interests of supply lines and reinforcements it was desirable to be as close to the Channel as possible. Additionally, the German High Command had resolved to push for the Channel to gain a stronger footing in Belgium and threaten Britain itself. A mass logistical effort ferried the BEF north, in large part by rail, and when further troops arrived they would form a line from Armentières in the south all the way up to the area surrounding a little town in Belgium that was about to become engrained on British consciousness: Ypres.
Approaching Belgian shores in the first week of October was a mounted contingent that, like the 9th Lancers, contained large numbers of Old Etonians. The Household Cavalry, comprising the Royal Horse Guards (The Blues) and the 1st and 2nd Life Guards (The Royals) landed at Ostend and Zeebrugge and concentrated in Bruges in pouring rain on 9 October.
Arriving in the SS Basil was Charles Sackville Pelham, Lord Worsley. Affectionately known as ‘Otto’ to his colleagues owing to his resemblance to a famous jockey, he had been an extremely shy child with an intense love of horses when he arrived at Eton in 1899. Whilst not a brilliant academic, he approached everything he did in a painstaking and conscientious manner. He could not abide liars or fools, but had a wickedly good sense of humour. ‘He sees a joke at once,’ said his tutor. ‘Always an asset to a young man with many friends.’ Worsley’s path to Sandhurst had long since been decided on. With additional tutoring in Frankfurt and Touraine in languages he joined the Blues, his grandfather’s regiment, in 1907 and took command of the regimental machine-gun section. In 1911 he became a married man and brother-in-law to Douglas Haig.
From Bruges the Household Cavalry turned south and commenced a tortuous march. It hardly felt like war. ‘It all seems so strange,’ Worsley noted as he led a machine-gun company south. ‘One would think one was on manoeuvres.’ In no time at all though, events would take a most serious turn and the Blues and Royals would be in the very centre of the action. As they advanced towards the fray they were cold, wet and tired, but they were all in good spirits. ‘Two of my drivers are just like music-hall turns and keep us all in shrieks of laughter all the time we are halted in the road; they are priceless.’ They reached Ypres on 13 October and were sitting in the town square under the shadow of the medieval cloth hall. Less than a week later the German artillery would open fire on the thirteenth-century building and begin its systematic destruction.
On 19 October 1914, the battle for Ypres began. As part of an intended Allied offensive to push the Germans back towards their homeland the French had occupied Roulers and the Household Cavalry was ordered to protect them. They set out on a reconnaissance amidst rumours of German troops concentrating in the area. Don’t worry, the French told them; there is nothing ahead of you. Within 250 yards they were under fire. Another OE, the Blues’ adjutant, watched the brigade retreat west from a burning Roulers in the distance; covered by Worsley and his machine guns. By the end of the day the Germans had advanced up to 9 miles. The population of Roulers was streaming away toward Passchendaele. Worsley and his guns were unscathed, but he was witnessing the worst of the war. In the evenings the regiment billeted in empty houses where they found meals on the table, indicating the speed with which their inhabitants had fled. ‘One’s heart bleeds for them … leaving every mortal thing.’
Regie Fletcher was not having a merry time either. His artillery brigade had arrived at Hazebrouck where troops were stacking up and tempers were becoming frayed. A body of men, including his own, had been billeted in a farm where the owner was none too pleased about having British troops sleeping in her outbuildings. The men knew exactly which officer to call upon. A bombardier hunted Regie down and complained that the old lady had locked up the water pump and wouldn’t let them take anything with which to cook their potatoes. Regie politely asked that she might give him some water personally. No. He tried again, in the sweetest manner possible and still she refused. His temper rapidly diminishing Regie continued to reason with the ‘old shrew out of Shakespeare’ until he finally snapped. ‘I told her in good Englis
h that she was the most sour-faced cross-grained old [hag] I had ever met (and one or two other things as well).’ The old scold went off obediently and unlocked the pump.
Now the old lady had realised that Regie was in a position of authority she sought him out for all her complaints about the soldiers living on her land. On one occasion she came after him to say that the sergeants had lit a fire in their makeshift mess that would burn her house down. He went to look and ascertained that in fact this was hardly likely to be the case. ‘I tell her not to worry herself or me.’ She promptly burst into tears, to which Regie was immune. ‘Weep on madame; when the Germans come you will have something to weep for.’ ‘I would rather have the Germans than the English’ she spat. He replied, ‘Ah taisez-vous Madame; allez-vous en tout suit à coucher.’ (‘Be quiet Madame; go to bed now.’)
The day after the Household Cavalry was pushed away from Roulers, Regie and his guns crossed into Belgium. It was dull and dreary with a miserable drizzle throughout the day. The journey was arduous and Regie amused himself on their halts by making friends with tabby kittens and French soldiers; and putting giggling little Belgian children up on The Playboy and leading him around. Finally, 116th Battery rolled to a stop at Pilckem, some 5 miles to the north-east of Ypres. The country they found there was distinctly unsuited to the workings of an artillery battery. The whole of the area to the east of Ypres was flat. With no high ground to review the terrain, the Germans had taken to destroying any windmills, church spires or vantage points. The artillerymen would have to rely on conducting much of their ranging and observations by walking forward into the lines with a map and a compass in hand. The area around Pilckem already showed signs of heavy fighting on 21 October. Regie’s commanding officer had been out to have a look around and had seen French territorials who had been blown to pieces by shells, about twenty of them, mangled and in a disgusting state.
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