Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  On 10 August an appeal was published for 2,000 junior officers to join the army until the conclusion of the war. This appeal was liable to appeal to many an Old Etonian as it sought to find men between the age of seventeen and thirty who were cadets or ex-cadets in university OTCs, and other highly educated young men. Kitchener got more than he asked for but these volunteers could not instantly be turned into competent officers. It became a constant trade-off between keeping them at home to train them as much as possible and using this precious stock to replace the fallen at the front. Foss Prior was one master who would actively try and direct boys he had taught at Eton to join his own battalion as officers when they had determined to go to war but it was a frustrating situation. The enthusiasm of some men who were potential officer stock to get to war meant that they had enlisted in the ranks. One Scottish regiment had whole swathes of men from Glasgow University in the ranks. Worst of all was the huge shortage of experienced men to command brigades and divisions, numbering thousands of men, in the field.

  Dick was hoping that the shortage of sound company commanders would earn him his own company as the prospect of life as a second lieutenant did not excite him. His experience in the Eton OTC meant that he was used to ordering people around and the thought of going backwards was concerning, as was the idea that the War Office would summon him back and send him off to where he ought to be in the first place, as the lowest of subalterns. ‘Then I shall have to make a fuss.’

  Part of Patrick Shaw-Stewart’s set, the Hon. Julian Henry Francis Grenfell, as born in March 1888. His father, Lord Desborough, was an Old Harrovian, but he would send all of his sons to Eton. Going up in 1901 Julian was, along with his friends, an editor of The Outsider. ‘No one was fuller of the rather misdirected but not wholly deplorable spirit of levity and mischief which animated that paper than Julian.’

  When his younger brother was born, Julian had demanded that they name him Billy, and although their parents declined and christened him Gerald William, ‘Billy’ he remained for life. Julian was just as forceful about his own nickname. When endeavours were made to affectionately call him ‘Max’, he retorted, ‘Call me Julian Grenfell, Taplow Court, Buckinghamshire.’

  The Grenfells were closely associated with the Manners family, who termed the brothers ‘the curly heads’. Billy went up to Eton in 1903 and was one of the rare Oppidans to win the Newcastle in 1909 as well as being editor of the Eton College Chronicle for two years. He was a big, solid young man standing 6ft 4in, a boxer when he went up to Oxford; but his build contradicted his shy, gentle nature.

  Julian, a shade shorter than his brother, was a regular in the cavalry, although his regiment of Dragoons was in South Africa when the war commenced so he was not among the first to depart for the front. Billy waved John Manners off to war on 7 August 1914 and promptly delivered himself to the War Office. Six days after finding out about John’s heart-breaking disappearance at Villers-Cotterêts he received a commission of his own and became one of the OEs joining Foss Prior and Sheepshanks in the 8th Rifle Brigade.

  Despite the urgency and enthusiasm with which the lines of he and Dick Durnford delivered themselves into Kitchener’s hands, there was then a long period of training and inaction. In fact, to begin with it was not certain that they would be needed at the front at all. Billy was busy trying to turn ‘unlicked ruffians’ into soldiers with furious sham fights by both day and night. Dick was still waiting patiently to be given his own company. His biggest trial was adjusting to a military diet (‘You may imagine my pampered stomach’s disgust’). He also enlisted his mother to produce 250 pairs of khaki-coloured mittens for his men. The 9th King’s Royal Rifles had been moved to Petworth where he was as heartily sick of Sussex as the Sussex locals appeared to be of them. The battalion was to be inspected by Kitchener who was bringing politicians to see some of his New Army. It had become necessary, Billy thought, as the politicians were said to believe that it was mythical.

  The misinformation and rumour circulating as to when these volunteer soldiers might see action at the front was overwhelming. Dick’s advice to his mother was not to believe a word of anything, from anyone. Put quite simply, an army such as theirs was ‘comparatively valueless minus rifles’ and so, as they lacked them, whatever she had heard they were not ready to go anywhere yet. Billy Grenfell was far more laid-back about when they might be leaving for France. ‘Some say March; some say next Thursday.’ He thought perhaps April but he was not at all disappointed to be kicking his heels in England at first. ‘We shall have plenty of time to exhaust the pleasures of war,’ his remarked. ‘The men are a trifle impatient, which is a good sign: but they are not really slim enough to face the German machinations at present.’

  Lord Shuttleworth’s son, the Hon. Edward James Kay-Shuttleworth, was referred to as ‘Ted’ by his friends. He had followed his elder brother Lawrence through Mr Bowlby’s house at Eton and then gone up to Oxford full of the joys of life but with a serious, religious edge to his outlook. He too had found his way into a New Army battalion of one of the rifle regiments. Whilst the 7th Rifle Brigade prepared to go to war he married his sweetheart Sibell. His new wife stood with a friend at Aldershot in May 1915 and watched a cloud of dust coming towards them; their men on the way to war. Ted brought up the rear as they filed past, giving her a big smile and waving goodbye. Surely now, she thought, with the Kitchener’s men taking to the field the war would come to an end soon.

  Dick Durnford and his men crossed with a ship full of Sikhs and Gurkhas, landing at Havre in the dark and stumbling into camp having not eaten properly since England, laden with heavy packs. They could hear the artillery far away at the front and whilst the men practised getting their new respirators on and off lest they be gassed, he planned to climb to the top of the nearest steeple and watch the flashes of the guns to the east.

  Billy Grenfell too was getting ready to depart with the 8th Rifle Brigade and Lord and Lady Desborough planned to leave for France at the same time. His sister Monica was working at a hospital in Wimereux on the coast and they had gained permission to look it over and see what she was up to. Just before their planned departure though, a cable was received from their daughter to say that she was in Boulogne with their eldest son Julian, who had picked up a minor head wound and was awaiting a berth on a hospital ship back to England. A blood-stained letter arrived from him, cheerfully boasting that he had (partially) stopped a German shell with his head. ‘We are practically wiped out,’ he said of his regiment ‘but we charged and took the Hun trenches.’

  Despite his good spirits, Julian’s condition deteriorated swiftly and it was suggested that his parents might want to advance their plans for their French crossing. They left Taplow Court seven minutes after receiving permission and found scruffy but gratefully appreciated passage on an ammunition boat. It transpired that a shrapnel splinter had penetrated Julian’s brain by an 1½in. An operation was carried out and he awoke with every hope of making a full recovery. They spent much of their time comforting the Marquess of Lincolnshire and his wife who had journeyed out in a similar manner to be with their son, another OE, Viscount Wendover, ‘Bob’. He had gone into the Royal Horse Guards in August 1914, an only son after five daughters, always smiling. His hip had been smashed up along with his arm and he passed away at the age of 20 at Boulogne1.

  Meanwhile Billy was making his way to France with his battalion. When the ship docked and the men sat down to rest he rushed off to the hospital. He was ‘terribly overwhelmed’ by his brother’s decline but his appearance cheered Julian. ‘I am glad there was no gap,’ he said. He meant that as he fell out of the line, his brother was to walk into it.

  Coincidentally, Edward Horner was languishing in the same hospital, horribly wounded. After some indecision he had joined the North Somerset Yeomanry but had coveted a move to a regular cavalry regiment. He had the watchful eye of Sir John French on him at the front, who apparently couldn’t sleep for worry when Edward was in the trenches.
This did not save him from a severe abdominal wound caused by shrapnel. It was not considered fatal but it had damaged a kidney. Like the Desboroughs, his parents managed to get permission to go to France and took a surgeon with them. They found him ‘drunk to serenity on morphia’. When he saw them he raised his head pathetically and said, ‘O’ darlings, the fun of it.’

  Edward’s condition was to improve and he was soon bound for London and a lengthy convalescence but Julian was not so lucky. He held his mother’s hand to his face and passed away a few days after Billy arrived in France at the age of 27. He was buried in what would become a vast military cemetery full of British graves in Boulonge, with a letter from their youngest sister Imogen and flowers that she had sent him from her little garden at home. John Manners’ sister too was nursing and she wrote a brief letter to Julian and Billy’s mother that tried to make sense of their mutual loss. ‘I try to feel that we have been lucky and blessed in having these glorious beings, and being loved by them … but my heart is aching for you, because I just do know what it is; nothing can be the same.’ In Gallipoli Patrick Shaw-Stewart was grief stricken ny his friend’s loss. They had been so different. Julian was ‘all for letting things happen to him’ whilst Patrick planned everything to the last detail. They quarrelled frequently, but when Patrick threw himself into the Royal Naval Division it was Julian who had come to him in London to show him how to put on a Sam Browne belt. Charles Lister was similarly distraught over Julian when he received the news on his sick bed in Malta. ‘It is the bitterest blow I have had since the war and am likely to have,’ he wrote to Lady Desborough. ‘I can’t write what I feel about poor Julian; the void is so terrible for me and the thought of it quite unmans me … He stood for something so precious to me, for an England of my dreams made of honest, brave and tender men.’

  Before she departed for England, his mother went for a walk and sat down to try and write Billy a letter. She glanced up to find him standing in front of her. He had received their telegrams and borrowed a car to get back to Boulogne. He stayed with her for three hours and when the time came for him to leave and return to his battalion she almost couldn’t let him go. Having buried one son, Lady Desborough might have done well to cling on, because she would never see Billy again.

  Dick Durnford had found his church steeple and had been watching star shells and gun flashes at the front, acclimatising himself to the constant noise. With his feet back on the ground he sadly pondered the growing casualty lists in The Times. He was now one of the wide-eyed newcomers that his friend George Fletcher had spoken of, gaping with surprise at the state of the men he saw coming back from the lines. They were ‘fearfully untidy’ in their battered uniforms with their straggly beards.

  As Dick’s bewilderment highlighted, some sort of training in trench warfare was required for this army of volunteers before they went into action. Accordingly, at the end of May, the 9th King’s Royal Rifles were informed that they would be introduced into the lines in stages; the first of which was a lot of digging. Within a fortnight they had progressed from daytime excursions into the reserve lines to forty-eight-hour stints. These rotations were supposed to be in what were considered ‘healthy sections of the line’, but nonetheless Dick’s battalion did not emerge unscathed. The officer who was second in command had lasted precisely ten minutes before a bullet grazed his head and he had to be taken away again.

  Dick’s first impression of trench warfare was that it was noisy, with ‘monstrous’ shooting going on day and night. He was, he felt, handicapped by a ‘constitutional ineptitude of all mechanical devices’. He loathed the ‘unsportsmanlike’ nature of bombs, howitzers and mines. There was no peace from these menaces though, even in the reserve lines, for all the shells that overshot the front line or fell short of the artillery batteries landed on them. At night they served the front trenches and carried them ‘anything from barbed wire to a biscuit, stumbling about in shell holes … and being shot at’. Once they had delivered the goods and were thoroughly worn out, inevitably some threat became apparent that required them to stand to rather then sleep, or the battalion in front would complain about something that was missing and off they would have to go again. He reported at the end of June that such menial work had cost them 140 men in three weeks. ‘This shows you the wastage,’ he wrote home, ‘and it is rather sad.’

  Billy too was becoming used to ‘every form of frightfulness’. The smell of manure behind the lines was a godsend after living ‘in a cage’ with a host of German corpses in different stages of decomposition. In July a trench mortar scored a direct hit on the 8th Rifle Brigade and a young Etonian officer named Arthur Ronald Backus was buried alive with two sergeants by the blast. Born in Peru and a member of the VIII in 1913, he had gone up to Cambridge before departing to join the army. Some fifteen Germans clad in greatcoats had come sidling towards them with bombs in hand and while Billy and his men caught them with rifle fire as they turned and ran, ‘Ronnie’ Backus dug himself out of his grave with his hands.

  Billy was growing used to the dirty tunnellers, walking about the trenches ahirtless with their picks. He was not impressed by the visiting generals though. He had a good way to get rid of them: ‘Excuse me, sir, two men were shot dead by snipers just there; for God’s sake, sir, keep your head down and move along at the double’. Off the senior officer would go ‘lathering with fear, never to reappear’. One such officer had offered Lord Desborough’s son a supernumerary role as an aide to remove him from danger, but Billy was disgusted. These roles were, to his mind, reserved for ‘all the tufts and toadies’ and the scorn that he saw heaped on these ‘extra’ aide-de-camp’s was not unjust. His battalion was already five officers down; he was not about to leave the rest and his ‘glorious’ men to kick his heels in a job of no real use.

  As part of a carrying party Dick got his first glimpse of Ypres. At the beginning of July he saw first-hand the destruction that had befallen the medieval cloth hall and the cathedral. The ghostly ruins were shrouded in gas that hurt the men’s eyes. Billy, quietly going about his business amongst this terrifying spectacle and bearing the ‘grievous shock’ of Julian’s death bravely, painted a picture with words of his own: a town of rubble and broken bottles. ‘Darling Julian is so constantly beside me,’ he wrote, ‘and laughs so debonairly of my qualms and hesitations. I pray for one tenth of his courage.’

  Despite the fact that no major offensive was immediately pending as far as British plans went, intensity was rising around Ypres as the summer approached. Another OE who found himself moved into the area was Francis Grenfell. He had returned to the 9th Lancers following his wounds at Messines on 21 April to find the regiment at a reduced strength. He was moved up towards Ypres immediately. In the middle of May, the dismounted Lancers were subjected to the fiercest fighting they had yet seen and his squadron was moved into the lines at Hooge.

  Empire Day, 24 May, was to dawn clear and sunny, with not a cloud in the sky. The Ninth were hustled into a stretch of trenches straddling the Menin Road, bolstered by the remnants of some infantry battalions placed under their officers’ command. With his men Francis occupied the road itself. A light breeze was blowing when at 3.a.m. the cavalry saw four red flares shoot up and then a 30ft-high thick, yellow haze rising in front of them. It rolled down the ridge towards the British lines. With no experience of gas and having been issued with new masks only two weeks before, the cavalrymen flailed as the pungent smell overcame them. The masks became saturated and were rendered useless as men began dropping to the ground, gasping for air, stumbling blind through the trenches and clutching at their throats.

  Then the German guns opened fire and troops poured towards them. The line broke on either side of the Ninth but they tried desperately to hold on although pounded by shells and trench mortars. Under the intensity of the German attack they fell back, abandoning the trenches. Casualties were continuous and heavy, the Germans poured past them, overrunning the British lines and pushing the survivors back
towards Ypres.

  In the early hours of 25 May, following their ‘greatest day of glory and sorrow of the whole war’, forty-odd men came stumbling down the Menin Road from Hooge with a yellow tint to their faces, wearing ragged uniforms, caked in mud. They carried Francis Grenfell’s body with them. They were all that was left. The 9th Lancers as he and his twin Rivy had known it, as Lennie and Douglas Harvey had known it, had ceased to exist.

  Nearby Hooge, by the side of the Menin Road south-east of Ypres, was dominated by the ruins of a chateau that had been blown up by shellfire during the fierce fighting on 31 October 1914. This poisonous area was to become fiercely contended as the summer progressed. British tunnellers had managed to dig underneath a farm and carve out a gallery below what they hoped was a significant tangle of German trenches; stuffing it full of ammonal. On 18 July an OE nearby was awaiting what ought to be a decent-sized explosion that would rupture the German lines and enable elements of the Middlesex Regiment to flood in and take the void that was left, strengthening the British position.

  The following day the mine went up with some force. But by the time the Rifle battalions arrived a few days after the explosion, it had still proved impossible to build a trench into the crater as planned. It now formed an unsightly gap in the British line, garrisoned at each side by men laden with bombs ready to lob their ammunition at anyone who might try to overrun the area. Wet weather was turning Hooge into a liquid mass of mud and slime and preventing any further extensions to trenches and other fortifications being dug properly.

  Dick Durnford began hearing rumours of a German offensive; indeed they were not exactly concealing their efforts in front of him. He had been subjected to a full week of perpetual shelling and was extremely frustrated by the notion of having to sit still whilst the Germans took potshots at him. To make things worse, the trench on their right was not fully joined up so that they lived under constant threat of the enemy exploiting the gap. Dick had even neglected to eat, which he admitted was a very significant thing for him. As he was relieved from the line, exhausted, on 26 July there was little going on, ‘but you never know your luck,’ he said cautiously. The situation at Hooge was indeed about to take a dramatic turn for the worse.