Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  Robin and his men quit marching, exhausted, at 9.p.m. and he shed his pack, wrapped himself up in his trench coat, drank some tepid tea then sprawled out on his waterproof sheet and tried to sleep. At last, Yvo and his battalion turned into Vermelles, a ‘wreck of a town’. Yvo promptly got separated from the rest of his brigade. He had been heading the rear party, walking at the back and trying to rally stragglers who had fallen out, ‘an awful task’. He ended up wandering about the town with a different Guards brigade until he found his fellow officers and spent the night lying in the bottom of a soaking wet ditch drinking a mixture of rum and brandy to keep warm. All night long, the artillery hidden in amongst the ruins pounded away. Robin was despondent. ‘All this served to prove that there had been no very great advance, and things were more or less as they had been.’

  His enthusiasm to get to war no longer came hand in hand with the ‘smash the Kaiser’ philosophy. ‘On the contrary, he talked of it as if it would be never-ending.’ He had assumed a fatalistic attitude towards the war before he had even left England. In mid July the Blacker brothers were at the RAC Club when Pip picked up a newspaper and saw that his best friend from Eton had been killed three days before. He took the paper over to Robin and silently put it in front of him. His younger brother just handed it back. ‘Don’t worry about this. We are all going to get killed. You and I and everybody else.’

  By the time he had arrived in France, Robin’s nonchalance had devolved into all out bitterness; ostensibly since the decimation of his brother officers in the 8th Rifle Brigade at Hooge. He was in France, so he declared, ‘to partake in that universal lapse into barbarism and inhumanity (not to say imbecility and madness)’ that was the Great War.

  ‘There is one subject on which I try not to let my mind dwell as it irritates and disturbs me,’ he fumed. ‘That I, a human being 18 years old, the product of untold ages of evolution in humanity, should be in this place with the sole intent of putting to death other human beings … and with what object?’ Clearly, to Robin at least, removing ‘militarism and tyranny’ from the face of the earth was never going to be achieved in this manner. ‘Never!’ He had decided that the whole sorry mess was ‘pitifully humorous in its imbecility, in its hopelessness’. If he ever lived to see another war, well, he stated his intentions forcefully: ‘I will have sufficient moral courage to proclaim my sentiments and to wash my hands of a pack of idiots of which I regret to say I am at present one – unhappily.’

  After the disaster of 26 September plans for a mass push had faded, but the idea of simply abandoning the battlefield and leaving the French to it on the right was not an option and so planning for smaller advances continued. From Hill 70 on the southern end of the battlefield the enemy commanded Loos and in its environs. Opposite them there was a chalk pit and a nearby mineshaft which gave the enemy a superior view of the area. The importance of these positions was apparent and at dawn on 27 September the plan for the Guards, the only reinforcements available to Haig, was that they would take both along with Hill 70 itself. One OE was serving with the 4th Grenadier Guards and remarked that neither he, nor indeed any of the other subalterns, received the slightest bit of detailed information as to what they were supposed to be doing. Their orders were still being amended even after they had set out to attack the Germans.

  Robin’s battalion was to support an attack being made towards the chalk pit, the narrow strip of woodland next to it that had been thoughtfully dubbed ‘Chalk Pit Wood’ and a distinctive chimney by the mineshaft. Robin was ordered out of bed at 2.30 a.m. and pushed on in the dark over barbed wire and empty British trenches on the way to occupy the old German line abandoned in the preceeding days. Before the fighting had begun, there had been a large gap between the trenches. In the initial attack British troops had had to advance across this open stretch of ground under heavy fire and Robin found himself tripping over dead bodies. ‘The scene is not pleasant,’ he remarked. ‘The battlefield has not been touched … and there are many, many dead.’ He found himself sitting in a scruffy German dugout surrounded by German correspondence and it sent shivers up his spine. He couldn’t wait to leave Loos behind. It was ‘a blighted and poisonous land’ and it made him sick to look at it.

  The 2nd Irish Guards took Chalk Pit Wood as planned with the aid of a smoke screen thrown up by more Guards to the left; but when they emerged out of the other side of this shield they were easy targets for the German machine guns across the road in a little bit of woodland known as Bois Hugo. They were eventually forced back with heavy casualties. Robin’s battalion had been sitting in wait and were now sent up to help and together with the Irish Guards they took back the wood1. At 6.30 p.m. the Coldstream were ordered to advance on the Chalk Pit itself and so two companies, including Robin’s, set forth and did so without too much difficulty. Darkness found them digging in and consolidating their position.

  On the evening of 27 September, Lord Cavan did his rounds, assessing the situation and decided against a further move on Hill 70. What he did want, though, was a fierce effort to consolidate their positions. The Guards were ordered by Haig to repeat the attack on the chalk pit, however, and at 3.45 p.m. on 28 September they set off from the southern edge of Chalk Pit Wood to try to take the mineshaft. At the time Brigadier-General John Ponsonby, the Etonian commanding Robin’s brigade, was still trying to get the attack postponed, at the very least till it was dark, but zero hour came and he still had no word in reply, so he was forced to commence the advance.

  The attack had been entrusted to the 1st Coldstream Guards and again it was Robin’s company that was in the thick of it. They were to push south and all available machine guns were to be utilised to cover their advance, concentrating their fire on Bois Hugo across the road which was packed with German firepower. As soon as they set out they were showered with shells and bullets from the machine guns in Bois Hugo. Just ten men, two of them officers, managed to reach the objective. The rest were swept away. A withdrawal was ordered. When a roll call was taken at the end of the day, the Coldstream Battalion found thirteen of its twenty-three officers and over 200 men either dead, wounded or missing on the battlefield. The whole of that night was spent digging in and scouring the nearby ground for wounded men.

  On 3 October a casualty list arrived at Windsor with Robin Blacker’s name on it as ‘missing’. The same day his brother was put on notice to leave for the front. At Vane Tower the desperate wait for news had begun. Pip later heard that their father had swung from extreme pessimism to bouts of optimism, slowly convincing himself that his youngest son was certainly alive and taken prisoner. Pip himself was wandering about Windsor and Eton in a daze. It was agony. Was it better or worse that they had heard nothing? If nobody had found him then he must have surely been alive; or no, he could have been blown to pieces by a shell. Perhaps there was just a delay whilst Robin encountered all the bureaucracy of becoming a prisoner of war or was it because he was one of the cold, dead bodies littering no-man’s-land?

  Two days after the list arrived Pip crossed to France in a draft of 100 Coldstream reinforcements. It was radically different to the embarkation of just a year ago. Most of these men were returning to a front they had already experienced. There was no cheer. As soon as he arrived he began interviewing any survivors of the attack on the Chalk Pit that he could find. Robin had last been seen carrying a rifle and bayonet well ahead of his platoon. Fifty men had gone in and so far fifteen had come out, but where was he?

  Robin Blacker was found by a party of South Wales Borderers on 14 October. It was a misty morning and they took advantage of the cover to go out looking for bodies. He was lying by the side of the road just to the south of Chalk Pit Wood, his body torn apart by machine gun fire; at 18 years and three months he was among the very youngest Etonians to fall during the war. They returned for him in darkness, carrying him back to their lines and digging a grave behind their trenches. They had made a duplicate cross by accident for one of their own men who had been kille
d and so the Welshmen scrubbed out the name, wrote Robin’s on it instead, and marked his final resting place.

  Confirmation of his death reached Vane Tower on 19 October. George Bernard Shaw, a family friend, was in Torquay and hurried to Robin’s parents to find that Robbie Ross2 had coincidentally arrived the night before: ‘Just the right man at the right time’. Leaving Ross with Robin’s mother, Carlos Blacker was whisked off for a walk by his friend. Shaw listened while Blacker damned Vane Tower and said that he would shut it up with all of the memories it held of his teenage son and let it all rot. Shaw exploded and argued that anything associated with Robin should be ‘blazing with life and triumph’. When he calmed down Carlos said instead that he would kill himself if not for the pain it would cause his wife. Shaw listened, he joked, they laughed, philosophised and talked through his grief. ‘I played all my stage tricks to keep him going.’ Only when he was satisfied that the Blackers would make it through that first, awful night did he leave them; Robin’s mother with her eyes full of tears and his father agonising over a still-sealed letter from the front lest it contain some horrible description of his boy crawling, wounded through no-man’s-land and dying a long, painful death. Robbie Ross took it away.

  Four days later Pip had spent a frustrating day trying to get baths for his men organised at a colliery with a broken water supply. He was just sitting down to dinner when the post arrived. He stopped reading his mother’s letter halfway through and staggered unnoticed outside to stand in the rain. He decided to go to bed and, lying down but unable to sleep, he realised that he was an only child. Robin was no prisoner, there was no guaranteed safe return when the war ended. Pip had no choice now but to survive for his parents. That was his only thought. ‘Now their anxieties were wholly focused on me.'3

  With the offensive petering out life gradually settled down to a tedious routine, just as it had in the Ypres area the year before. Having been spared the attack on Hill 70 Yvo was becoming used to life in the trenches. The weather was dire and Vermelles had become a ‘sea of mud’, hideously ugly and squalid. Loos was disgusting, nothing but a heap of ruins and piles of corpses. ‘We have a delightful sight in our graveyard here,’ he wrote home. ‘From one of the graves the tombstone has been laid open by a shell – the coffin lid has been torn off showing the skeleton of a man – a toad is playing on his chest and little brown mice are playing on his bones. RIP says the tombstone.’

  Yvo had plenty of time to contemplate his surroundings and he still had a childish view of things. The flares and shell flashes reminded him of the annual fireworks display on 4 June at Eton. He was mesmerised by them. He favoured the flares, which were better than his favourite roman candles. They hung and then fell slowly in red, white or green. How were they ever going to repair this land once the fighting was done? He rather thought he’d like to buy up Vermelles and turn it into a theme-park type establishment that would resemble White City. He would make a maze out of the trenches, and rifle ranges with dummy Huns ‘peeping from the windows of ruined houses’. Overhead shells would burst and dispense chocolates at various intervals to amuse the guests. The biggest concern Yvo had about being wounded was that if he was sent home everybody would see his shaven head. This idea was mortifying for one blessed with such flowing blonde locks. He would have to make sure that he received a light scalp wound so that he could ‘swathe his head in an impressive bandage’ until his hair grew back.

  Every now and again the reality of the grown-up world he found himself in was visible through the cover of his jokes and light-hearted quips. The chances of him getting his conveniently distinguished wound were increasing as Yvo had been rotating in and out of trenches around the town of Hulluch. Up he went through what seemed like miles of communication trenches ‘everyone getting entangled in telephone wires’, past old German lines with deep, comfortable-looking dugouts equipped with beds. The first sight of blood at the bottom of a trench made him sick and he felt a little out of his depth. On the first evening he had had a map thrust at him and was told to take a party off to improve a communication trench. Bewildered, he picked up a revolver and his broken compass, which was about ‘as useful as Nelson’s blind eye’ and went off to give it a go with no faith in his own ability.

  He spent his nights sitting on an old gun emplacement drinking brandy and supervising (though he claimed he knew nothing about it) the digging of trenches. He spent the beginning of his nineteenth birthday picking at a can of bully beef that he had found on the floor of the trench while he waited to be relieved ‘for lack of a better occupation’. As soon as it was open he was engaged in his own personal war with an army of rodents who could smell breakfast. ‘The war seems weary of its own melodrama,’ he wrote, ‘… but it does not not know how to give up.’

  A final British attack a week later was aimed at taking the Lens–La Bassee road; a humble objective compared to the original aims of the Loos offensive. Yvo went back into the trenches on 14 October to relieve some territorials who he claimed had ‘made a mess of things’. It was a particularly unhealthy spot, an old German trench near the Hohenzollern Redoubt within 150 yards of the enemy.

  On 17 October the 1st Grenadier Guards were given orders to bomb a trench that connected the British line to a German one. Exquisitely named ‘Slag Alley,’ they were to force the enemy out of the other end. At 5.a.m. Yvo’s company commander sent a party of bombers out. The trench turned out to be shallow after the first few yards and although they made some progress the men walked into the path of two machine guns that were spraying bullets up and down the trench. A little time passed and the captain ordered Yvo up the line to see what was occurring and why the advance had ground to a halt. He succeeded in shifting them along, returned to report his success and then went back up to continue supervising work.

  As he was walking up the line the German machine guns opened fire and in one spray of bullets both Yvo and another promising young officer were killed. The company commander went running up to see what could be done but for his trouble had the top of his skull shaved off. A huge portion of the battalion’s strength was wiped out in one tiny assault that failed in its entirety; for as soon as Yvo was killed his men abandoned the fight, having no direction, and turned for home. That evening they went back to collect his body, carried him back to Guards headquarters in the town of Sailly-la-Boursem and buried him next to the churchyard.

  Yvo’s mother’s worst fears had been realised just eleven days after his nineteenth birthday. She had sat with Julian Grenfell’s father, Lord Desborough, her heart aching for him after he and his wife had returned from burying their son. ‘He looked so crushed, so seared, so patient and so brave.’ But now, following the experiences of the Grenfells and the Manners it was her turn. ‘I have felt, superstitiously, that things might have gone differently had he not changed his regiment,’ she wrote. But he had, and now she could do nothing but try and put such thoughts out of her mind to stop herself from going mad.

  At a cost of 3,500 casualties the advance on the Lens–La Bassee road typified everything that had been wrong with the autumn campaign and crowned a truly awful year for the allies. Operations officially ceased at Loos on 4 November, by which time fifty more Old Etonians had had their names read out in the school chapel and many hundreds more were irreparably scarred or lying in hospital. From here on out, the average age of the school’s casualties was to get younger, for as 1916 dawned the boys leaving Eton College no longer had a choice about whether or not they went to war.

  Notes

  1 It was on this day that Rudyard Kipling’s only son, John, vanished in the midst of battle with the Irish Guards.

  2 The long-time friend and companion of Oscar Wilde.

  3 The Blackers visited France in 1919 to find their son’s grave but after three years of subsequent fighting and artillery action in the area there was no trace of it. John Robin Blacker is commemorated on the Loos Memorial with 20,602 others lost on the battlefield, including Captain the Hon. Fer
gus Bowes-Lyon, uncle of Her Majesty The Queen.

  11

  ‘We Had Not Been Taught to Surrender’

  Just before the outbreak of war the 10th Earl of Wemyss passed away at the grand age of 95 and Yvo Charteris’ father succeeded to the title, leaving that of Lord Elcho for his eldest brother. Almost twelve years Yvo’s senior, Hugo Francis Charteris, ‘Ego’ to the family, was born prematurely on 28 December 1884 at his grandparents’ house. As a little boy his angelic long, flaxen hair, big blue eyes and long lashes belied shrewdness and a sensible manner that coloured the way he saw the world. He was at a birthday party at the age of 5 when one old lady went overboard in her appreciation of him and his looks which led him to ask his mother, ‘I’m not such a sweet as that lady says am [I]?’ Soon afterwards she was hat shopping with him in town and he was listening to the staff (‘Oh Moddom, you do look well in this’ or ‘Oh Moddom, this suits you fine’). When they stepped out on to the street all little Ego could say, with intense scorn was ‘vile flatterers’.

  The age gap between Ego and Yvo meant that the former was away at school by the time his younger brother was born and so they were not close. Ego’s confidant was the brother in between them. If Ego was pragmatic and sensible, then Guy, eighteen months younger, was a dreamer. When they were still quite young Ego was heard to remark that on Christmas morning Guy’s future children would get no presents because his brother would still be waiting for Father Christmas to show up.

  As children they were well acquainted with Julian and Billy Grenfell and they were frequent visitors to Taplow Court. Following a spell at prep school in Cheam, Ego went up to Eton in 1898 where the size of the place was a shock to him and his most exciting observation was that the organ had a funny way of going moooo like a sick cow in the middle of chapel. Ego eventually began to settle in and adjusted to the bustle of life in Mr Impey’s house where he would just about be a contemporary of Edward Horner. Guy followed him and managed to crush him somewhat. As only a brother could, he proved to be an awful ‘facetious’ nuisance. Ego had got issuing pompous commands to his fags down to a fine art. ‘You might boil these eggs,’ he instructed regally one day. ‘Boil your face,’ remarked his brother and Ego had to sit whilst everyone in the room laughed at him.