The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery

by Bailey, Catherine

  A strict pecking order, based on rank and class, governed all aspects of life behind the front line. Officers and other ranks were segregated; they lived and ate their meals separately; they used separate bathhouses and latrines; they were treated in separate hospitals. Under army regulations, they were not even allowed to use the same brothels: a blue light denoted those for officers, a red light, those for the troops under their command. Class distinctions also applied if a soldier was killed in action or died of his wounds: in some cemeteries, there were burial plots for officers, and separate plots for NCOs and other ranks.

  At the top of the pecking order came the generals and their staff. Twenty-one divisions were stationed on the Western Front in the spring of 1915. Including those in command at corps and division level, some two hundred generals were responsible for running the British Army. Each had a large personal staff, predominantly recruited from the ranks of the upper classes. The troops referred to them as ‘Red Tabs’ – a contemptuous term derived from the red insignia the staff officers wore on the lapels of their uniforms.

  The divisions rotated through the trenches: they were not in the line all the time. While other ranks were billeted in vast tented camps, or in farm buildings and labourers’ cottages, the staff officers invariably commandeered the best accommodation for themselves. Beautiful châteaux, surrounded by grounds still immaculately laid with rose gardens and topiary, were converted into staff headquarters, where the officers lived and worked. Inside, the interiors were as their owners had left them. Paintings, objets d’art and fine pieces of furniture adorned the rooms. When the officers dined, they used the china and crystal belonging to the house. Unlike the bulk of the British Army, the officers slept in proper beds and had servants and batmen to look after them.

  In the two weeks that John had been out at the Front, he had moved from château to château. As aide-de-camp, his job was to accompany General Stuart Wortley to other headquarters along the Front. They had dined with General Smith-Dorrien, the commander of the Second Army, in the sumptuous surroundings of his château at Hazebrouck; at Bailleul, with General Pulteney, the commander of III Corps; and at Château de Nieppe, with General Wilson, the commander of 4th Division. They had also ‘paid their respects’ to General Foch at his palatial HQ at Cassel, and visited General Plumer – who was in charge of V Corps – ‘for tea’ at his base, a fine seventeenth-century mansion at Poperinghe.

  The châteaux John slept in at night were not on the scale of those he visited during the day; but with the exception of the Château du Jardin in Cassel – ‘a bloody place, unlived in, damp and frightfully cold’, he noted – they were ‘comfortable’. His empathy with the living conditions other ranks had to ‘put up with’ did not prevent him from stocking up with the luxuries he was accustomed to in civilian life.

  ‘You might get Fortnum & Mason to send me a box of provisions once a fortnight – including potted meat, chocolate, pates, etc,’ he wrote to his father the week after he arrived on the Front: ‘You might also ask the Cook to send me out once a week a good pie.’ A few days later, he had asked Charlie to arrange a weekly order of ‘square chocolate from Charbonnel and Walker’.

  Such luxuries were commonplace at staff headquarters. Fortnum & Mason, the store’s records reveal, was doing a roaring trade with well-heeled officers. From the autumn of 1914, they were able to order provisions from a special catalogue. Fortnum’s offered a range of hampers. ‘Parcels Post Box No. 7’ – at £2 10sh – included ‘25 Partagás Coronas Cigars, 100 Grand Format Cigarettes, 1 F & M Plum Pudding, 1 Tin F & M Pressed Caviare, 1 Tin F & M Galantine Game (truffled), and 1 Air Cushion.’ Officers could order more or less anything they wanted – from crystallized and glacé fruits, tins of sardines, best Dorset butter, potted meats (various), Oxford sausages and pâté de foie gras to Tunis dates, Elvas plums, and muscatels and dessert almonds.

  The contents of the hampers were a far cry from the rations issued to the troops. Army regulations stipulated a soldier’s daily allowance down to the last ounce. While monotonous, for many the diet was healthier – and the food in more generous supply – than the meals they were used to at home:

  1¼ pounds fresh meat (or 1 pound preserved meat)

  1¼ pounds bread

  4 ounces bacon

  3 ounces cheese

  ½ pound fresh veg (or 2 ounces dried)

  ¼ oz coffee

  2 ozs sugar

  4 ozs jam

  ½ oz salt

  5/16 oz tea

  1/6 lb butter

  1/8 part tin of milk

  In the trenches, fresh meat was seldom available and was substituted with bully beef or maconochie, a tinned meat and vegetable stew named after its manufacturer. Bread was also difficult to get hold of and was replaced with pearl biscuits – likened to dog biscuits by the troops.

  ‘I am very comfortable,’ John wrote to Marjorie after lunching with General Pulteney at his château at Bailleul, ‘but it is a quiet life. Dull and most boring.’ He was also finding it frustrating. He hated the ‘rulebook mentality’ of the generals he met on his trips to Corps HQ, and at the headquarters of other divisions. ‘Oh how I wish I could express all my feelings about this life,’ he wrote to Charlie: ‘The pomposity, unnecessary rudeness, red tape, and the universal habit of believing that “youth is a crime” is increased tenfold. They [the generals] no doubt know their jobs fairly well, but they all behave like prehistoric men clothed in khaki. They laugh and joke and dance when the smallest, most trivial thing goes right – but lose completely all self-control when anything goes wrong. ‘There certainly will have to be a large publicly supported asylum for the millions of old decrepit and deformed generals after the War. I should also suggest for the future that all the military should go through a class of commonsense for their benefit. They sorely need it.’

  The outing to Sharpenburg to watch the attack at St Eloi came as a welcome distraction from the round of château visits, but even there John found the behaviour of his fellow officers offensive. To his disgust, after an hour or so, the others unloaded picnic hampers from their car. Seated on a rug, they continued watching the attack while eating, and drinking claret. ‘They might as well have been at the bloody races!’ he wrote to his sister afterwards. ‘Rothesay and I told them we didn’t want anything. We moved further up the ridge and watched the battle on our own.’

  Beneath the strobing sky ahead, almost a thousand British soldiers were being killed and wounded. John could not know the scale of the losses; if he had, his response to the other officers might have been stronger. Nor could he know that the attack he was watching had a direct bearing on him.

  Twenty miles away, George Moore was at General Headquarters. He had spent the day with Sir John French.

  49

  Moore was on a flying visit to the Front. The previous evening – when he arrived at St Omer – Sir John, who was still at his Advance Headquarters at Hazebrouck, was too tired, and too depressed to see him. He had just received the casualty figures for the Battle of Neuve Chapelle. ‘I am very sad tonight for our losses are terrible,’ he wrote to Winifred: ‘However there are many thousands of dead Germans lying on our front, and I believe their losses in this 3 day battle to have been nearer 20,000 than anything else. On both sides some 150,000 have been engaged in 3 days – the losses are 30,000 between them! Equal to 20%! Such is war of today! The casualty lists always make me sad. There is comfort in the fact that the Doctors report many more slight wounds than usual. We will now “go easy” for 2 or 3 days and then have another go. The German prisoners say “This isn’t War but Carnage.” I agree with them!’

  The next morning, Moore drove up to Hazebrouck to see the commander-in-chief. The purpose of his visit was to discuss their ‘plan’ for John. After spending ‘two quiet hours’ together, they drove back to St Omer; on their way, they made a detour to Helfaut, a small village, some four miles due south of the town.

  There, they saw Major Charles Foulkes.<
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  Foulkes was integral to their plan. Some months earlier, Sir John had charged Moore with setting up a weapons research station at Helfaut. Its remit was to experiment with new devices: rocket bombs, mortars, gas, and flame projectiles. The project, which was top secret, was still in its infancy, but in the years to come, ‘Special Brigade’, as it was to be called, would spearhead the development of chemical weaponry, enabling the British to wrest the initiative from the Germans.

  Foulkes, a charismatic, highly decorated officer in the Royal Engineers, was the man they had chosen to command the brigade. In the run-up to establishing it, chemists, meteorologists and other scientific and engineering experts were being sought – both in the BEF and at universities in England.

  Moore wanted John to join the brigade; the fact that he had no knowledge of chemistry, or weaponry, was immaterial: what mattered was that it was based a safe twenty-five miles from the front line.

  In mid-February, Moore persuaded the commander-in-chief to agree to his idea: this was the ‘good plan’ French referred to in his letter to the Duchess. But as the brigade was not due to become fully operational until June, they decided to wait before arranging John’s transfer.

  That morning, Moore had persuaded French to bring forward their ‘plan’. After the failure of the offensive at Neuve Chapelle, the situation on the Front was looking more precarious. Prior to the battle, the intention was to use the troops of the General Reserve – which included the North Midlands – to sweep up after a successful breakthrough. Now, the position had altered. What if the Germans were to counter-attack? After the high casualties incurred at Neuve Chapelle – and until reinforcements arrived – those of the General Reserve were the only fresh troops available. Under such circumstances, Moore argued, they could not guarantee John’s safety. There was one other factor. In England, French had his detractors: his handling of the war was the subject of constant criticism in the press. He depended on powerful friends at home to shore up his position, and the Duke and Duchess of Rutland were undoubtedly influential. In a few weeks’ time, Moore told him, they were due to host a lunch for the prime minister.

  These were the arguments that convinced French to make the detour to Helfaut. There, he told Foulkes that John would be joining the brigade.

  The last thing he expected, however, was that he would have to spring him from the front line within hours.

  In his diary, French gave a short account of the events of that afternoon:

  I went in to St Omer to take GM back there and had a talk with him (about casualties and reinforcements), and to Foulkes (about rocket bombs and Granby). On my way back here, I heard a fierce and unceasing cannonade coming from the direction of Ypres.

  The commander-in-chief was not prone to underlining; it was evidence of his anxiety. He was writing his diary in the early hours of the following morning after a sleepless night. The Germans, he feared, were about to break through the British lines.

  It was the attack at St Eloi that he’d heard as he was driving back to Hazebrouck. Following the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, he was expecting to ‘ “go easy” for 2 or 3 days’; the counter-attack caught him completely by surprise.

  He’d said little in his diary for that day, but in a letter to Winifred, written the next afternoon, he described what happened after he dropped Moore back at GHQ:

  I motored GM back to my headquarters at St Omer and left him. On my return, I heard a most violent and prolonged cannonade suddenly break out in the northern part of the line just south of Ypres. That is where the 2nd Army are. I’ve seldom heard a hotter fire during the war. A little later, I got a message saying that 27th Division of the 5 Corps had been drawn out of their trenches and that the enemy had captured St Eloi. You may imagine that I didn’t have a v tranquil evening or night. However, a strong counter-attack was arranged by 2 o’clock this morning, and after severe fighting the enemy was drawn out and the positions retaken by one o’clock today. This was absolutely unexpected for the Germans had reduced their troops on that front to reinforce their lines opposite to us on the 10th and 11th [the Battle of Neuve Chapelle]. This has cost us a good many more men I fear, and it shows how suddenly the situation changes – all in a moment.

  So shaken was French by the attack that the minute he was told that his troops had retaken St Eloi, he ordered his ADC, Lieutenant-Colonel Fitzgerald Watt, to deliver a letter to the North Midlands headquarters at Sailly-sur-la-Lys.

  Uppermost in his mind at this critical time was ‘Granby’. At the point he ordered Watt to drive the eight miles to Sailly, he had no way of knowing whether the situation at St Eloi was stable. Yet, extraordinarily, he was releasing his close aide, a senior officer, to honour his promise to the Duchess.

  On roads that were clogged with lines of troops and military transport, it was a round trip of several hours.

  50

  At Sailly, John and General Stuart Wortley were packed up, ready to go. It was clear some confusion reigned at General Headquarters. The division had been under orders ‘to move at 2 hours’ notice’ since 7.30 on the thirteenth. For two days they waited for confirmation to proceed to their new headquarters, until, at 09.30 hours, GHQ wired instructions ‘to stand fast in the present area’. Now that order had been countermanded, and the North Midlands were about to march to Merris, a small village some ten miles to the east.

  A number of the battalions had already started out. It was a relief to be leaving Sailly. For seventy-two tense hours, dressed in full battle kit and camped in the freezing cold in a field on the edge of the village, they had waited for the order to go into action at Neuve Chapelle. They were three miles from the battlefield; the shells, fired from the Royal Horse Artillery’s howitzers on the hill behind them, had screeched over their heads. After the battle ended, the scenes in the village, where numerous hospitals were located, had been depressing. Fleets of ambulance wagons had ferried in the casualties; open at the back, the wounded soldiers, their uniforms caked in blood and mud, were all too visible.

  Outside the North Midlands headquarters the walking wounded still crowded the narrow cobbled street. John and General Stuart Wortley were waiting at the entrance to the building. It was mid-afternoon and they had been kicking their heels for several hours. Having completed the final arrangements for the move to Merris, yet another message had come through from General Headquarters. Colonel Watt was on his way; he had an important letter for General Stuart Wortley which the commander-in-chief had instructed him to deliver personally. The general was not to leave until Watt arrived.

  It was shortly after four o’clock when the staff car carrying Watt drove through the wrought-iron gates and pulled up on the gravel forecourt. Stepping briskly out of the car, he saluted the general and handed him the commander-in-chief’s letter. His instructions were to wait, he explained. The commander-in-chief was expecting a reply by return.

  Stuart Wortley read the letter and passed it to John. ‘He wants you to go to GHQ,’ he said, looking at him quizzically: ‘He tells me you’re a famous inventor and that you know all about bomb-making. What do you want to do?’

  An awkward silence followed while John read the letter. As Watt knew – and Stuart Wortley suspected – this was shady business. It was made the more uncomfortable by the backdrop against which it was taking place. The three men, immaculately turned out in their staff officer uniforms, were standing on the steps of the North Midlands headquarters. Through the railings that framed the forecourt, they could see the wounded going past. These were men who had fought bravely for King and country. Watt, the commander-in-chief’s trusted confidant, had been privy to his ‘plan’ from the beginning. He knew it was the location of the Inventions Department* rather than John’s ‘inventiveness’ that lay behind his offer: the reference to ‘bomb-making’ was no more than a sop to mask his intention of removing the young marquis from the firing line.

  John had barely skimmed the contents of the letter before he answered the general’s question.
‘The commander-in-chief must have confused me with someone else,’ he replied: ‘I’m not an inventor and I don’t know anything about bombs.’

  Relieved to hear that he was not about to lose his ADC to General Headquarters, Stuart Wortley went in search of a piece of paper to write a note to Sir John.

  A few minutes later, he returned and handed the note to Colonel Watt to take back to St Omer.

  As Watt left, he saluted the general. Then he shook John’s hand and wished him luck.

  While John had no idea that his mother was behind the commander-in-chief’s offer, his reply to General Stuart Wortley was disingenuous. It was not the first he’d heard of the job at GHQ.

  ‘After tea, Lt-Col. Watt came over with a letter from the C-in-C for our General. I knew what it was about,’ he noted in his diary later that evening.

  A month or so earlier – before he left England – Moore had invited him to one of the ‘Dances of Death’.

  The commander-in-chief was not at Lancaster Gate that evening; he was in France, finalizing the preparations for the Battle of Neuve Chapelle. Following the customary dinner of exotic delicacies, Moore had sidled up to John and told him about the secret weapons project he was setting up at St Omer. He asked if John would be interested in joining the brigade.

  John shared his father’s opinion of ‘Little Big Head’. He thought him a swaggering, oleaginous figure, and his intimacy with the commander-in-chief – and the inside knowledge it conferred – grated. He was too polite to cut his host; as they chatted at the edge of the dance floor, he feigned interest in what Moore had to say. But he had no intention of following up the offer, or – were it to come to anything, which he doubted – of accepting it. Knowing the American’s infatuation with his sister, he assumed he was bragging because he wanted to ingratiate himself.