Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  George Fletcher was on the fringes of this bright set all through Eton and Oxford but his background was very different. Patrick was at the very centre. Alongside him was Julian Grenfell, eldest son of Lord Desborough ‘with his intellectual contempt of intellect’ and wild high spirits that would be followed by bouts of depression. There was Edward Horner too, ‘most generous of hosts and most enthusiastic of companions … despite all protests from his friends an unabashed Whig’. His sisters, one of whom had married Raymond Asquith whilst Edward was still at Balliol, nicknamed him ‘the popinjay’ because he was so preoccupied with his state of dress. Born five weeks after Julian Grenfell he grew up in Somerset before being sent to Summer Fields Preparatory School in Oxford, where he became friends with both Ronald Knox and Julian. Edward was not ecstatically happy at Mr Impey’s house at Eton and struggled. His mother wrote to him in a disappointed vein which almost caused him to break down completely and he referred to one half as ‘long, stormy, troublesome and unsatisfactory’. He wrote once to his sister that ‘I never seem to have succeeded at a single thing since I came to this beastly place … and I’ve disappointed Mother and Daddy ever since I came here.’

  And then there was the Hon. Charles Alfred Lister. The eldest surviving son of Lord Ribbesdale, his brother Thomas had been killed during the Somaliland Expedition in 1904. Charles was equipped with ‘generous enthusiasm … reckless fun … nervous breeziness of manner and [an] embarrassing conviction that every second person he met was a “good chap”.’ He was relentlessly cheerful even when the authorities at Oxford sent him down for a term. He went off and worked at a mission in East London. ‘Self-critical, self-conscious but brilliant’, his wit was sharp and getting into an intellectual dogfight with him was not advisable.

  Not even his parents could quite fix why, but Charles had found his way into the Labour Party. He was leaning towards socialism at Eton, coinciding with civil unrest in Russia and his sympathy with her people in 1905. He even took up a collection for the Russo–Jewish fund and managed to extract £60 from his schoolfellows. His views were never militant, nor did he force them on others or take them out on the landed gentry that were his own, but he favoured options such as nationalisation of industry. His mother was somewhat troubled by Charles’ political affiliations, although former prime minsiter Arthur Balfour sought to comfort her with the reasoning that ‘Charles would get all sorts of experience and some sort of special knowledge which might be of more use to him than if he … ran an actress’. By the outbreak of war, however, he had left the party. Disappointed by ‘recent methods’, he still believed in the cause but had ‘lost faith in most of the remedies’ that he used to believe in.

  Whilst at school this set, Charles, Patrick, Julian, Edward, Ronnie Knox and two other contemporaries, set up their own newspaper at Eton titled The Outsider. It ran for six issues, to both positive and negative reviews before they all began departing for Balliol in the summer of 1906.

  On leaving Balliol Charles embarked upon a career with the Foreign Office, firstly at the embassy in Rome and then in Constantinople where he still resided when Britain declared war on Germany. Charles began making a dash for home but his conscience got the better of him and he returned to his post. His determination to get into the firing line did not subside though and he began applying for leave from his job to join the army.

  ‘The Turks are very cross with us now,’ he reported in August 1914, ‘and we may all have to come home if the Germans manage to rush them into war with Russia. That is now the game … You can’t imagine what a state of suspension we are in here.’ By mid September things still hung in the air and Charles was completely unaware of what was happening as far as his own family was concerned. Unbeknown to him his sister, married to another OE (a grandson of the Duke of Westminster named Percy Wyndham) was already a widow. Wyndham was already in his grave when Charles wrote, ‘Percy must have already done a lot; I hope he will get a VC or something.’ He wouldn’t find out the fate of his brother-in-law or of his younger acquaintance John Manners until he reached England at the end of the month. He was urged to stay on in a diplomatic role but Charles was firm about leaving Turkey. ‘The date of my birth determines that I should [take] active service,’ he declared as he left for home.

  After Oxford, Patrick Shaw-Stewart embarked on a career in finance and characteristically excelled. Still in his mid 20s in 1914 he was already a director of Baring Brothers. The powers that be in the organisation thought that given his age it might be prudent to broaden his life experience. At the beginning of the year he was sent travelling in North America, which was a culture shock for him. ‘Someone wrote to me as “Dear Patrick”,’ he exclaimed. ‘I have only seen her once!’ Wide eyed and dismayed by over familiarity and uncouth language he went from Washington to Arizona and then, via the Grand Canyon, to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oregon, Seattle, Vancouver and Calgary before travelling back east through the Rockies, via Iowa, Illinois and Kansas; by which time he had somewhat fallen for ‘this bustling, simple-minded, gaseous, rather incompetent, hospitable nation.’

  Patrick returned to England in the summer and when war broke out he was back at Bishopsgate. That August his ‘warlike soul’ prompted him to enquire about joining the Inns of Court OTC and the following month he obtained leave to join the war effort. With a familiar, fierce determination he aimed at getting to the front as soon as possible. ‘Baring Brothers have been perfect angels,’ he wrote. He spent a week cramming languages and after twenty-three days freezing in various passages in the War Office trying to attract someone’s attention he was finally employed. Now an official interpreter he would find himself thrown in at the front in a matter of days, sent with the new Royal Naval Division to try to save Antwerp.

  At the outbreak of war Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, found that with the Fleet Reserve, the Royal Naval Reserve and the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, he had far more sailors than he needed. A number of battalions of land forces were formed from this excess of manpower, named after prominent figures in naval history and combined with the regular battalions of Royal Marines to form this new division. With extremely limited infantry experience they did not expect to be sent away for some months but as desperation rose over the situation in Belgium they were despatched before the war was more than a few weeks old. Royal Marines aside, ramshackle did not even begin to describe them. ‘Most’ of the men had a rifle before they left although at least one OE was practically a novice at firing his and the press was erroneously reporting that their bayonets were tied on with string.

  Patrick remained at Dunkirk throughout September and October, no closer to the front than when he first stepped off the transport. The cheering crowds and adulation from the native population, who were convinced that they were a precedent for a huge British Army ‘which was to drive the hated Germans from the country’, wasn’t enough to cheer him up. ‘My sword, revolver and wire cutters are honourably rusting … I use my silk pyjamas,’ he quipped. Returning to England the haphazardly formed Royal Naval Division went to Crystal Palace for proper training where Patrick was told that he marched like a Chelsea pensioner and where he was shunted into the Hood Battalion with ‘Oc’ Asquith, the prime minister’s son and the poet Rupert Brooke.

  The men themselves came from marine depots, the various reserves, the Merchant Navy and numerous shipping hotspots such as Glasgow, Newcastle, the north of Scotland, London or Bristol. ‘I have got the queerest command … a platoon of old stokers!’ Patrick reported. This rugged band came equipped with ‘extremely fruity language’ and ‘cunning almost inexhaustible’. They had character though. He thought he could get used to them even though he suspected that they had ‘a sort of standing grievance in the back of their evil old minds that they wanted to be in their steel walled pen yelping delight and rolling in the waist, instead of forming fours under the orders of an insolent young landlubber.’

  By February 1915 the men of the Hood had been ser
ved pith helmets and rumours flew as to where they might be going. ‘Egypt, East Africa, South West Africa, Cameroons, Persian Gulf all freely mentioned’ and Patrick was quietly impressed as he was of the opinion that if he was going to see any of the world at his country’s expense he would much rather it was somewhere like Egypt than the squalor of Flanders. Rumours heightened again when their commanding officer had them solemnly practice forming squares. ‘It may be only to puzzle the poor stokers,’ thought Patrick, but it seemed to him to smack of ‘fuzzy wuzzies and other crude foes.’

  In the third week of February the Hood had confirmation. ‘It is the Dardanelles,’ Patrick reported excitedly. ‘All the glory of a European campaign … without the wet, mud, misery and certain death of Flanders.’ He was resolved to take his copy of Herodotus’ Histories with him as a guidebook. The connotations, with his classical education, were not lost on him at all. ‘Think of fighting in the Chersonese, like Miltiades’ or, alternatively, ‘if it is the Asiatic side they want us on, on the plains of Troy itself!’

  Turkey had procrastinated over entry into the war but nailed its colours to the wall at the end of October 1914, a month after Charles Lister left for home. Winston Churchill had already had the Royal Navy strike at the Turkish forts at the entrance to the Dardanelles, the straits forming a barrier between Europe and the East. They came under bombardment at the beginning of November but the dire state of events around Ypres on the other side of the continent ensured that nothing else transpired as the focus was on the Western Front.

  On New Year’s Day 1915 Russia requested that Britain make some sort of aggressive move against the Turks. Given the strain on all aspects of the British war effort at the time it was a big ask, but nonetheless the idea of an effort that did not involve large bodies of troops was suggested by Kitchener and wholeheartedly pushed by Churchill. The latter’s plan was to force the straits open using naval forces exclusively. This was a failure though and following this lack of success, despite the strain on British resources, in March 1915 land operations to try to conquer the Dardanelles were approved. General Sir Ian Hamilton was put in charge of what was to be dubbed the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force.

  The Turks had established their defences at key areas on the Gallipoli Peninsula and if the Allies had a mind to land on the Asiatic side of the straits, further men were stationed at Kum Kale near the site of Troy. In the north-west, near the neck of the peninsula, more troops were stationed near the Gulf of Saros. The peninsula itself was hardly hospitable to an occupying army either. It was dry, sparsely populated, and mountainous in places with barely any shelter. Given the position of the Turks and the previous attempts to force a way through there was also no element of surprise either. The enemy was fully aware of Allied intentions.

  The British contingent decided against trying to land on the Asiatic side. The ground was a lot more open which would leave them extremely vulnerable if the Turks decided to come at them in large numbers. Gaba Tepe or ‘Z Beach’, midway up the western side was picked as one landing point; an easier alternative for an invasion and not as securely defended as other potential sites. It was also decided that there would be a number of landings all around Cape Helles, the southern tip of the peninsula, on the premise that any Turkish troops lurking on the beach would be hammered by naval guns prior to the assault on three sides.

  So, rather than picking one good plan, it appeared that the Allies would try everything at once and hope for the best. The Australians and New Zealanders would be landing at Z Beach, whilst the Cape Helles landings would be attempted by British troops on V, W, S, X and Y beaches. Whilst they were at it, the French were to create a diversion by landing at Kum Kale on the Asiatic side and the Royal Naval Division, including the Hood, was to feign another landing in the Gulf of Saros to confuse the enemy. The aim of this over-complicated lunacy by the British was to take Krithia, a village at theft of a large, flat hill named Achi Baba on day one. On day two the British would link up with the Anzac troops to the north and storm the higher ground and on day three the Royal Navy would weigh in, steam up the narrows and barge their way through the straits. Ambitious was an understatement.

  Whilst Patrick was bored in Dunkirk, on his return to England Charles Lister had joined the 1st City of London (Middlesex) Yeomanry under the command of his brother-in-law to act as an interpreter, as it seemed entirely likely that they would be embarking for France imminently. Charles’ dreams of active service, however, were well and truly scuppered. The regiment was sent to take up a coastal defence role in distant Norfolk. There they dug sorry-looking trenches into the sand cliffs and practiced with a machine gun. ‘A certain amount of spy-hunting gave spice to the early days … but later, when this flagged, the tedium grew intolerable.’ The only highlights occurred when the men spied supposed lights being flashed out at sea by potential spies.

  Charles was fully aware of the concentration of Eton friends and other acquaintances; the likes of Shaw-Stewart and Rupert Brooke massing in the Royal Naval Division, ‘The New Argonauts’ heading for the Dardanelles. In February Charles shot to London to talk his way onto their staff and sailed aboard the Cunard Line’s Franconia when they departed for the east. ‘I shan’t regret this stunt, whatever happens,’ he wrote gleefully. ‘It is the most exhilarating feeling to be again on the sea of the ancient civilisations … I feel like a pinchbell Odysseus – longing for the same things, but with the limits and valour of some little city clerk.’

  When Charles reached Malta on 10 March he found that the SS Grantilly Castle, carrying the Hood Battalion, was already there and he met his friends for dinners, the opera and ‘generally razzled’. Charles had seen enough of the ship, with its happy mess, full of familiar faces and complete with piano, to know that he quite fancied being a part of it himself. It would beat hands down the role he had been given with the staff, where he was ‘neither fish, flesh nor fowl, being viewed with suspicion as a Headquarters man and yet not sharing in the glories of the red hat and lapel tabs.’

  The Royal Naval Division was sent to Egypt to prepare for the campaign. When they docked at Port Said they found Aubrey Herbert. Passed fit following his gunshot wound at Villers-Cotterêts it became apparent that the same basic ruse of sneaking into a regiment was not going to work again as far as active service was concerned. Owing to his linguistic skills and his experience of the east he took up a post at the Arab Bureau with T.E. Lawrence, but was not enamoured of either the work or their superior officer. Whilst Patrick was full of enthusiasm it was a completely different story for the intelligence officers in Cairo. Amongst themselves they talked about it freely. ‘There was, as far as I saw,’ Aubrey recalled, ‘unanimity between military, naval and political officers … who deplored (not to use a stronger word) the idea of attempting to land on the Dardanelles; which the Turks had been happily fortifying and they preferred, on the whole, the idea of Alexandretta far, far to the South.’

  In the spring Aubrey sought a permanent change from his unpleasant environment and joined the New Zealand contingent of the Australian and New Zealand Division. Acting as an interpreter/intelligence officer he began preparing for departure to the Gallipoli peninsula to fight the Turks he knew so well. When the Hood arrived Aubrey was happy to find old friends amongst the officers. The razzling continued and they gathered for dinners, lunches and a tour of the pyramids by moonlight. Charles and Patrick had combined to learn precisely one phrase in Turkish: ‘Do not kill me, I am a friend of Herbert Effendi.’

  By 2 April Charles Lister had managed, ‘employing the most subterranean methods’ to get himself into the battalion with his friends. Shaw-Stewart claimed that his friend had pulled as many strings to get off the staff as other people pulled to get on it, but his deviousness worked. Within three days Charles had command of a platoon and found himself in the same company as Patrick and Rupert Brooke, both of whom were presently laid up ‘weak as kittens’ with dysentery. Sadly for Patrick, it meant that he missed the wonder
ful spectacle of his friend elegantly attempting to command his men through drill in his special parade voice. Now experiencing camp life for the first time, Charles felt rather ‘a sort of baby’ amongst his band of hardened naval reservists, many of whom were advancing towards forty. The orders he attempted to bellow out he only understood ‘through a glass darkly’. He had a mind to try to impress those around him and attempted to learn signalling; ‘a useless accomplishment, I fancy, but I must above all give the impression of zeal, as I always feel my position is risky and my accomplishments far behind those of my brother officers.’ Their best officer was an ex-cavalryman and a veteran of Queen Victoria’s wars in Africa. Charles, by his own admission, had seen service on a hillside in Norfolk.

  On 10 April, Patrick hauled himself back aboard the Grantilly Castle to find his Eton friend firmly ensconced in the Hood with no intention of leaving. Their dinner table in the mess included Oc Asquith, Brooke, Charles, Patrick and another slightly older OE named ‘Cleg’ Kelly; an Australian-born talented musician who kept them entertained en route.

  Everyone referred to them as ‘The Latin Club’ and they remained up after everybody else had gone to bed every night, drinking wine and chatting away. Their conversation flowed from Byzantine emperors to music, to Turkish prisoners. Every destination, every island glimpsed along the way brought to the fore ancient connotations for Patrick and Charles. Lemnos, where Philoctetes was left behind during the Trojan War, Samothrace where Poseidon sat to watch the fighting. Unlike Aubrey, they were firm in their conviction that the campaign would be over swiftly and successfully, the Royal Naval Division at the fore. The dangers of modern war seemed alien. ‘I don’t think this is going to be at all a dangerous campaign,’ Patrick scoffed. ‘We shall only have to sit on the Turkish forts after the fleet has shelled the unfortunate occupants out of them.’