Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  One Etonian who was going to find himself at the forefront of new technology as far as weaponry designed with trenches in mind was concerned was ‘Jack’ Haldane. Born in November 1892, John Burdon Sanderson Haldane came from a family of highly individual academics. His father John, a brother of the War Minister who instigated Britain’s pre-war army reform with a European conflict in mind, was a scientist and intensely interested in the nature of gases.

  Precocious was an understatement as far as Jack was concerned. At 3, the same year that his father began using him as a guinea pig for his experiments, he cut his head open and asked if the blood dribbling down his forehead was oxyhaemoglobin or carboxyhaemoglobin. At 4, he was with his father in London as the latter hung out of windows on the Underground. Jack remembered the grime and the smoke breathed in as his father tested the atmosphere by collecting it in glass bottles. By the age of 8, Jack was fully engaged in helping his father analyse gas during his experiments and soon moved on to making simple mixtures for Haldane Sr to use.

  It was always going to be a struggle for Eton to further the education of this prodigious talent. Arriving in 1905 he was that good a mathematician that it was rumoured that he taught the masters as opposed to the other way around. The headmaster was frequently frustrated with him; threatening him with the notion of becoming ‘a mere smatterer’ instead of being exceptionally good in one field if he continued to jump about between different specialities. Some of the masters just couldn’t comprehend him. ‘He is a baffling boy,’ one wrote in a school report, ‘and I shall be glad to be rid of him.’

  When he went up to Oxford, Jack continued to help his father, who strove to expand his son’s scientific knowledge in a continuously unique way. Down a mine in Staffordshire he taught Jack the effects of breathing methane. He had him stand and recite Mark Anthony’s speech from Julius Caesar. ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen …’ He soon became short of breath and ‘somewhere about “the noble Brutus”’ Jack’s legs went from under him and he collapsed onto the floor, where of course the air was clear. ‘In this way,’ he explained pragmatically, ‘I learnt that [methane] is lighter than air …’

  After fiddling with his degree and characteristically changing from maths and biology (he claimed that nobody could study mathematics for five hours a day and remain sane) to arts he came out of New College with a First to absolutely no raptures at all because the date was 4 August 1914. Like its Eton counterpart, the OUOTC was in camp. Jack had joined the Signallers with the express intention of grasping wireless telegraphy and was busily engaged with it when ‘the angel of death on a motorbike’ arrived with news of war. Jack volunteered immediately and asked for a commission in the Black Watch. The War Office duly obliged. After four months of training he crossed to France and joined the 1st Battalion as their bombing officer in February 1915.

  Jack Haldane was fully aware that he might be killed at the front, and that ‘a huge waste of human values was going on there’ but it did not anger him. He rather enjoyed the whole thing, which he knew singled him out from most of his contemporaries. Neither did he appear to be afraid. In fact, he lacked any sense of fear to the point of recklessness. This endeared him to the men at least, who gave him nicknames like ‘Bombo’ and ‘Rajah of the Bomb’. He would crawl out alone into no-man’s-land at night to watch and listen to the enemy scuttling about their trenches. One night he had been gone for some time when a loud bang went off at the German lines, ‘succeeded by a tangle of very lights’ and the sound of rifles and machine guns. Silence fell and they waited ‘with some apprehension’ to see what would happen. In time a torchlight appeared and a filthy Jack climbed over the parapet. ‘The Boche was saying unpleasant things about us,’ he drawled. ‘So I just tossed a bomb over to them.’ On another occasion, to prove a point, Jack seized a bicycle and cruised across an exposed gap in full view of the Germans; stating that they would be too shocked at his brashness to take a shot at him. He was right.

  His eccentricity, sometimes bordering on insanity, made him immensely popular, but his duties with a new weapon had the reverse effect. Other officers loathed the sight of Jack after he was appointed Trench Mortar Officer for the 1st (Guards) Brigade. Men would be sitting quietly in a portion of trench and along he would come with his team and their mortar. Unceremoniously they would plonk it down and begin firing its shells at a high trajectory with the intention of having them drop into the German lines just in front, attracting unwanted attention from the enemy. George Fletcher described them: a large bang, then ‘a slight swish in the air, and then an almighty roar’. Whenever they were ‘biffing’ in his sector the Germans threw a powerful searchlight on them looking for the offender or showered them with machine-gun fire. By the time this retaliation had started, Jack and his men would have packed up and moved along the line, leaving a distinctly nasty taste in the mouth of those who remained. Retribution occasionally found him. One day Jack was pulled up for not wearing his Glengarry and had to admit that it had been ruined when a neighbouring battalion had taken offence to his visit and pushed him into a ditch.

  Haldane’s bomb squad, so to speak, was a funny little outfit. He had an NCO from the brigade’s Coldstream Battalion and a small team of hand-picked men that constituted his own little army. They were largely left to their own devices and spent their days playing with explosives. They were exempt from certain duties and didn’t turn out for guard duty, being focused on thirteen muzzle-loading mortars. Jack was in his element when Douglas Haig came across him and labelled him ‘the bravest and dirtiest officer in my army’.

  As well as trench mortars, hand-held bombs were becoming a mainstay on the Western Front. Jack thought that they were fantastic. ‘The best people at it seem to be the reckless kind. The average man does not seem to like it.’ Ian Henderson had been on a training course on how to use them and seemed to fall into the latter of Haldane’s two categories as he returned to start imparting this new knowledge to the men. ‘They are beastly things,’ he complained. ‘Likely to go off at any moment. I live in deadly fear of them.’

  Of all the weapons unleashed on the Western Front in the spring of 1915, the one that instilled the most fear and caused the most horrific damage was yet to come. In April and May the Germans used poisonous gas for the first time on French and then British troops. Peculiar yellowish-green clouds formed and began to drift towards the Allied lines. Chemical warfare had been outlawed at the Hague but every major combatant in the Great War at this juncture had been guilty of experimenting with it. In the opening days of May gas attacks were relentless. A battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers ceased to exist as a military entity with not fifty men available because of it. Thousands of British casualties were accumulating in medical posts where the baffled staff stared at them in dismay.

  The British hierarchy immediately assumed that they were dealing with chlorine. The effects of this gas were horrific, to say the least, stripping the bronchial tubes. As the victims subsequently began gasping it proceeded to fully infiltrate the lungs. Tissue turned to mucus and the lungs filled with fluid. Throwing themselves to the ground did nothing for those that had been exposed as the gas sank. Men grasped at their throats and died with their fists clenched in agony. Casualty clearing stations were flooded with men who were quite literally blue, the result of their blood being starved of oxygen. The worst off died coughing, spitting and gagging as they drowned on dry land. British troops were promptly instructed to soak field dressings in bicarbonate of soda and use it as a respirator. Soaking it in some kind of alkaline solution was also thought to be effective; the most readily available source was latrine buckets full of urine.

  As soon as he heard what had had happened Kitchener consulted Jack Haldane’s uncle who telegraphed his brother in Oxford. Within twenty-four hours Haldane Sr, with all of his specialist knowledge of gases, was on his way to France.

  In the first week of May, Jack Haldane was promptly ripped from his unit and ordered to join his father at a large
school in St Omer with a selection of other volunteers. In one classroom a miniature greenhouse had been constructed and they took to sitting in it and pumping it full of chlorine gas. Jack assisted as they compared the effects on themselves in various quantities; with respirators, without them; ‘it stung the eyes and produced a tendency to gasp and cough when breathed’. Having inflicted this horror on themselves, Jack and his colleagues sat in the greenhouse trying to crank a hand turned wheel as their respiratory system began to break down, they then burst outside and began doing 50-yard sprints in the grounds with respirators on to see what the effects of the gas were. When they had had enough they traded out and the next man rolled up for punishment.

  ‘None of us [were] … in any real danger,’ Jack claimed as they ultimately came up with a stop-gap form of protection for soldiers in the trenches. But a few men had to ‘go to bed for a few days’. Jack found himself short of breath and incapable of running for a full month or so after their experiments. Unfortunately for the young scientist, however, in a matter of days he was advancing across no-man’s-land in pursuit of the enemy.

  On 8 May Jack Haldane was despatched back to Black Watch for ‘special duties’ in connection with the gas menace; there was even a suggestion that he might be named as some sort of advisor on the subject to Douglas Haig, but the point became moot. When he arrived back at his regiment, he found that his men were about to go into action and he was absolutely determined to go with them, at the head of his own platoon if at all possible. This push, known as Aubers Ridge, was a disaster. In the spring of 1915 the British had resolved to push towards Lille and this offensive followed a failure at Neuve Chapelle. Still suffering from the effects of the gas, Jack set off ‘with all the urgency of an old gentleman with chronic bronchitis’.

  Years later he still had a distorted version in his mind of what happened. He mustered the reserves of Black Watch and was advancing through an orchard under heavy fire when he was hit by debris and fell to the ground. Dragging himself up, Jack resumed command of his depleted platoon and raced for the parapet. In no-man’s-land he went down again under the shock of another shell blast. He remembered, or so he thought, staggering back through reserve trenches towards a dressing station, caked in mud and blood, with his right arm and his left side bleeding.

  Wandering through the ranks of wounded and dying men another Black Watch officer caught hold of him and flagged down a car to ask the driver to take Jack on to another dressing station. ‘Oh it’s you,’ the driver remarked casually when he saw Jack. They had met in 1913 at Oxford and, bleary eyed, Jack recognised that his chauffeur was the Prince of Wales. He was so far gone that in the days after the battle he ‘remembered’ reading about his own death in The Times. In 1961 he told Robert Graves that he thought it quite plausible that he had died that day in pursuit of Aubers Ridge and that the succeeding forty-six years had been a vivid dream.

  In the early evening of 14 March 1915 a terrific bombardment opened. The German target was a small, loosely defended village on a crossroads named St Eloi, sitting midway up a gentle hill some 2 miles east of Ypres. The Germans had begun their attack by setting off a mine in the vicinity and news shot up the line that the enemy had managed to blow up several sections of the British front and rush men into their trenches. Approaching midnight a significant part of the British defences had fallen and the village too.

  At St Eloi itself, George Davies’ battalion of the Rifle Brigade and the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry were ordered to support a counter-attack that was being planned. The counter-attack failed and at 3 a.m. on 15 March George and his fellow officers received orders to make the main attack in an attempt to retrieve the situation. Billy Congreve’s insanely brave schoolfriend, Reggie Hargreaves, was their sniping and bombing officer. By the end of their failed attempt to drive the Germans back out of the village and the British lines Reggie would be lying in the ruins of St Eloi, shot in the chest and the leg, with a broken arm and his left foot and right hand mangled by shrapnel. During the retreat he was left behind but four of his snipers ignored orders the following night and went looking for him. Reggie was barely breathing when they began dragging him on to a stretcher in full view of the enemy.

  It was the middle of the night when George Davies’ youngest brother, 10-year-old Nico, was woken by the sound of the doorbell frantically ringing in the aftermath of St Eloi. He sat up in bed and listened to muffled voices drifting up the stairs. ‘Then I heard uncle Jim’s voice, an eerie banshee wail and an outburst: “They’ll all go Mary,” he cried to the boys’ nurse. “Jack, Peter, Michael, even little Nico – this dreadful war will get them all in the end.’ A little while later the door opened to Nico’s bedroom and Barrie silently entered and sat on the end of his bed. ‘I don’t think he spoke,’ Nico recalled, ‘but I knew George was dead.’

  As George Llewelyn Davies’ battalion was advancing to drive the Germans out of St Eloi, he was not with them. He had marched up towards the fray with another OE, none other than Alfred Aubrey Tennyson, explaining a morbid premonition that he had had about being killed. On the way their colonel had sat them down in the early hours of the morning to explain the advance. Resting on a bank, George had not realised that he was sitting in an exposed position. A sniper’s bullet was the result. His colleagues took him back along the main road to Voormezeele, a sad, battered little village and buried him, covering his grave in purple flowers; his favourite colour.

  A few days later, in amongst a bundle of black-edged condolences, a little envelope arrived on James Barrie’s doorstep. George had written one last letter just hours before he was killed. To the end he tried to console his guardian. He was not afraid, he claimed, nor taking any unnecessary risks. ‘And if I am going to stop a bullet, why should it be with a vital place? … Keep your heart up Uncle Jim and remember how good an experience like this is for a chap who’s been very idle before.’

  It was five days later when another sniper struck a further blow at Eton. George Fletcher popped up to take a quick look over the inadequate parapet at Bois Grenier and was hit in the head. He died almost instantly. One of his men, Frank Richards, claimed that in the whole of the war, which he himself survived in its entirety, he never saw the battalion so cut up about an officer’s death. When another OE took over later in the year he found he was still living in George’s shadow. Charles Fletcher, who had lost two of his three sons in under five months, indirectly blamed the French flag for the attention it had drawn to the Fusiliers’ section of the line. At home, the den became a shrine to his two lost boys but George’s flag, the offending object, hangs today in the ante chapel at Eton.

  But aside from this memento, George’s death was still to have a far more poignant legacy. Devastated, Charles Fletcher sent word of his middle son’s death on to Shrewsbury School. Evelyn Southwell, an OE himself, was mortified. To George’s former colleagues he was still part of their household, their extended family. Evelyn could not walk into their shared house without thinking of him. When he broke the news to his form, the boys responded with a loud burst of applause for George. ‘What else would you have?’ It was the cruellest blow that the war had yet sent him. ‘His personality lies stamped on all the little institutions of our life, and his name is mentioned almost every time we sit down together. He was, and is our d’Artagnan.’

  With no interest in military matters and no practical experience, the next letter Evelyn wrote was to his own father: ‘You will have heard the news of Fletcher’s death. I think you will agree with me that the matter is now closed. I must go and take his place.’ To George’s father he closed with a final sentiment for the road. ‘I hope I may catch some of his spirit and show one hundredth part of his courage.’

  Notes

  1 Lieutenant Gilbert Mitchell-Innes died aged 20 and lies in Vlamertinghe Military Cemetery in Belgium.

  2 ‘Tug’ was another term normally used by Oppidans to describe a King’s Scholar.

  3 Geoffrey Valenti
ne Francis Monckton is commemorated on the Le Touret Memorial. His brother, Francis Algernon Monckton, is remembered on the Menin Gate. The third Etonian to fall in Gareth Hamilton-Fletcher’s company was Harold Sterndale Entwistle Bury, 26. He too is commemorated on the Le Touret Memorial.

  7

  ‘The New Argonauts’

  Patrick Houston Shaw-Stewart passed through Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, at the turn of the twentieth century as part of an exceptional group of young men. The losses amongst them during the war would spur many a conversation about the waste of the Great War. Patrick himself was never at a boarding school until he went to Eton in 1901. The son of a general, he found, to his disappointment, that he was far from the only genuinely gifted King’s scholar. He would spend years tussling for prominence with another Colleger named Foss Prior, who had returned as a master by the outbreak of war, eventually suffering defeat in the competitive environment amongst the scholarship boys. Never gifted at games, Patrick however found sporting employment as a cox of the house four, but described it as ‘a thankless office from every point of view’ for it associated him with ‘a ridiculous set of scugs and scamps’.

  Patrick longed for status and fretted frequently over it, at one point so much so that his hair began falling out. A hammer blow was when the mechanics of school life ensured that Foss and not he would one day be Captain of the School. This to Patrick had seemed his ‘only chance of cutting a figure’. He did get his recognition though in 1904 when he beat both his rival and the famed Ronald Knox1 to the Newcastle Prize, the premier academic contest at Eton. ‘This was … fame indeed,’ he concluded. ‘I was greatly petted and applauded, and tremendously happy.’