August [1914]

by Mark Rowe

  The first thing the army did with troops was to make them march. It filled the day, gave them stamina and hard feet, and weeded out the weak. In his memoir, Guy Paget made the wise and important point that only the young could stand the sheer physical fatigue, and sometimes hunger and thirst, of warfare: “However gallant the spirit may be, nature cannot be overtaxed when one is much over 40. The war proved it time after time.” Similarly, soldiers who could get away with some disability in peacetime could not in wartime. A commander was only acting for the best for all his men if, like Sir Mark Sykes of the 5th Battalion, Alexandra Princess of Wales’ Own Yorkshire Regiment, he set a higher standard than he would for his civilian workers. To take a 1909 example of a hard-working, well-meaning but deaf man called Edwards he proposed to get rid of:

  ... suppose we have to mobilise with such a man as adjutant, it means getting another just at the moment when they will be impossible to find ... If Edwards were one’s agent or employed it would be otherwise ...

  The army picked only the fit, because lives would depend on it.

  III

  Gothard had meant well. A couple of weeks later - it may have been significant that it was the day his mother went to Nottingham - Arthur Wardle and another man visited Gothard at home, and they ‘talked for a long time about enlisting’. Still, it was only talk; and these were young men, the very sort that Kitchener was asking for.

  Chapter 11

  Spectators on the Shore

  ... the mother country is now engaged in perhaps the most difficult struggle in her whole 1500 years of history.

  Sydney Morning Herald editorial, August 6, 1914

  I

  “War, war, war, per mare, per terras, in short ubique in Europe. It is a horrible shame,” wrote Denys Yonge, the vicar of the village of Boreham, near Chelmsford. As his fondness for Latin showed, Yonge was stuck in the past. He turned 78 in 1914 - ‘mother would have been 109 today’, he wrote on July 11 - and judging by his diary felt distant from, and perhaps indifferent to, events. As a vicar he still did some preaching, and held a place in local affairs. On August 4 he went to the meeting of the local board of guardians, which looked after the poor laws covering the sick, the aged and orphans, besides paupers. He had lunch with his fellow administrators: “All the people full of the war, as of course they would be.” Yonge sounded detached, as any old man would be, who only followed events through The Times.

  The clergy did what they could for their parishioners, holding ‘intercession services’ most evenings to pray for peace - presumably a peace won by Britain. Otherwise vicars, and their families, did their usual August rounds, of work and pleasure; such as mowing the grass in the churchyard, arranging the flowers in church, visits (Yonge reckoned he did 980 in 1914), music lessons and light sports. For example Dorothy Wright, the 19-year-old daughter of the vicar of Hemingborough in Yorkshire, wrote in her diary for August 4, the day war was declared, only that she, her mother, and her brother Charlie, a history student at Trinity College, Oxford, played in a tennis tournament at the club at Cliffe, the next village. (“Dad umpired.”) She first mentioned the war on August 9, when Charlie cycled to nearby Selby in the afternoon for news. On the Tuesday morning, August 11, all the Wrights cycled to Selby: “Crowds of soldiers, 7000!” she wrote. “Played tennis in aft.” Dorothy Wright did some war-related charity work; she went to ‘Red Cross practice’ later that day (and even later played croquet in the twilight and dark); wound wool for socks for soldiers and sailors; and held sewing meetings. Likewise her mother took the train to Pocklington on September 2, for a meeting of the Soldiers and Sailors’ Families Association (SSFA), “and came back tired out and had to go to bed”.

  II

  If the people of 1914 did one helpful thing, and otherwise left the war to others, they gave to charity. Reservists who left their jobs to join the army and navy, as they last did for the South African War of 1899 to 1902, might well have to leave their families out of pocket. At worst, as the Burton upon Trent branch of the SSFA found in 1899, a woman in a terraced house in the town would have been starving, but for the association’s aid. In some ways the association was generous, in others not; in all cases, it set the rules; and the ones setting the rules were the traditional leading figures in a town and county. The Staffordshire president of the SSFA was Lady Dartmouth, Gerald Legge’s mother; Lady Burton chaired the Burton meetings, as the wife of the brewer Michael Arthur Bass, first Baron of Burton. She looked into the cases of reservists’ wives near her country home; she sent regular postal orders to her committee of ladies, who then gave out the charity, in cash, or groceries if the women were judged to be ‘careless’. After the Boer War, Burton SSFA kept giving, to ‘deserving cases’. That even included the wife and child of a soldier in prison for desertion; but not men who had left the army, because national policy reckoned that the men, if supported, would then not bother to look for work.

  Such charity - whereby the ones giving the charity knew best - had ticked over for years, and began anew in August 1914. Lady Burton took the chair again. She told her committee, as was reported in the local press:

  We must deal very gently and tenderly with these poor women whose husbands have been wrenched from them and who are feeling very sore and unhappy and as a result unequal to conform their lives to their altered circumstances. We must try and make them feel the help we are enabled to give them is not charity but freely offered of their more fortunate friends ... a gift and a kindly thought to make up in a small way for their troubles and anxieties.

  That sounded generous, except that, as working folk might have said, you couldn’t spend it at the Co-op. People fallen on hard times, let alone those without a wage because the man of the house had left to serve his country, had no right to aid, only what charitable givers offered. Large employers, such as Burton’s breweries, the post office and the railway companies, said they were giving the families of their workers called up as reservists about half the man’s pay. Again, it sounded generous, but not if you only just made ends meet on your usual pay.

  Worries about money ran through the letters of the reservist and Derby railwayman Arthur Bryan. As a King’s Royal Rifleman, he found himself at Sheerness, on the mouth of the Thames in Kent, waiting to sail. In one undated letter in mid-August, he apologised for the handwriting, ‘as I have had the butt of a rifle for a desk’:

  That ninepence a day I left to you will not start till we go out to Belgium so I am sending you five shillings. It’s all I can spare as we are getting the princely sum of one and three a day and most of your food to buy out of that. There is a man in my tent that comes from Derby works at the carriage works MR [Midland Railway]; his wife tells him the company are allowing her something a week while he is away so if you hear anything about it you must go to Mary’s and tell them about your change of address. Well sweetheart, don’t worry about giving the house up as it doesn’t bother me a bit as you know.

  By that last line Bryan meant that his wife Louie and their baby daughter Doris might give up their house and move in with her mother, whether for the company or to save money. In a later letter while still in England, Bryan advised his wife on how to claim separation allowance, which with the ninepence a day from him would give his wife 14 shillings and sixpence a week, “so you will be able to manage and be sure to register your name for the relief fund as there is plenty for everyone I don’t see why you should not have a share as well as anyone else”. Like soldiers before and since, Bryan urged his wife not to worry about him; he assured her of his love and that he was well; and he longed to be home. “I should like to be chasing you up that garden walk again my love but never mind we shall laugh again shortly,” he told her. Meanwhile, they had to make the best of it.

  So too did the ‘army wives’ of officers, such as the newly wed Janey Brooke. A knock on the hotel bedroom door on the Monday night, August 3, had cut short her honeymoon, as a telegr
am from the War Office ordered Alan Brooke to be ready to leave for India from Southampton around August 11. Once at sea, Brooke wrote to his mother: “I was very surprised that they should be sending us back as I thought that they would be sure to give us a job at home.” Like any ambitious army officer, Brooke wanted a job nearer rather than further from the fighting. Any officer, and any officer’s wife, had to accept that duty came first: “We had to get up again and pack up at once so as to leave early the next morning,” Brooke wrote. The Brookes crossed from Ireland on the Saturday night, August 8, and booked into a hotel in London. On the Monday, Brooke’s last full day in England, his wife wrote her own letter to her mother-in-law. “My dearest mother,” she began, in larger handwriting than her husband’s:

  Alan says I may call you that now I am writing to you for him as he is so very busy and had to go out at once after breakfast ... Life seems so to have changed for us in the last fortnight. We heard the first distant rumours of the war scare on our wedding day but we did not think that it would affect us so nearly and so very soon ...

  Brooke was leaving, probably, for Egypt, via Gibraltar and Malta, while Janey would stay with an aunt in Buckinghamshire, then make the return crossing to Ireland. “He is very well and quite splendid about it all as of course we know he would and he is the most perfect husband I am so very happy and these changes cannot alter that. Our time at Gweedore was just a paradise and it is so lovely to be able to look back on that now.” Brooke, evidently having returned to the hotel after a day’s errands, then finished the letter: “I did not gather much more today.” As he did not know if the army would return him to India, or send him to Egypt, to guard against the (so far neutral) Turks, he did not know where to send himself money, nor whether his unit would bring any of his belongings from India. With ‘great difficulty’ at the military outfitters Cox and Co, where everyone else in the same fix as him was buying the same things, Brooke bought a uniform and such varied necessities as polo boots, haversack, water bottle, scabbard for sword, and waterproof: “But there was not a revolver or a Sam Browne belt to be got in town for love or money!”

  Brooke, like many, was finding life awkward enough, trying to equip himself and do as he was told, without wanting to worry about his wife or the unsure future. At least Janey Brooke looked on the bright side; she cherished what she’d had, rather than cursed what she hadn’t. Or as Brooke wrote to his mother, in yet another letter, while still on honeymoon, Janey was ‘such a help, never a word about herself’. She, and he, in Brooke’s words hoped ‘it will all plan itself out in the end’. Janey Brooke understood the outbreak of war was the time to put her husband first, and not to fret about what was out of your hands anyway. Not so Lady Gwendoline Churchill, ‘Goonie’ to her husband John, the younger brother of Winston. She may have had several reasons, or none, for a crass and demanding stream of letters in the first days of the war. Maybe, parted from her husband, she felt ‘dreadful blues’, as she put it on August 5; maybe she suffered from an idle, self-obsessive life; she may even have been playing a deep game of torturing her husband; or maybe she was dim. Her second letter of August 5, from a holiday cottage near Cromer, was typical:

  My darling Jack. I could think of nothing but you and what you are doing; I am dreadfully anxious to know your plans; I have the gloomiest thoughts and I cannot get out of my head the possibility of the Germans landing some soldiers while we are engaged fighting their navy on the high seas. In fact darling I am very unhappy being here and crying a lot though I do try and be brave and make myself believe that it is not all so bad and think you will be able to come here very soon. Do you think you will be able to get away after you have organised the squadron; you must let me know if I should go to Blenheim to be near you. I am torn in two about it, wanting to be near you, and not wanting to leave the children alone being here but it is of no use going on like this and I must pull myself together and be brave and sensible and not see things too black and after all if there is a war in this country you may come out of it with medals and clasps of which we will be both so proud of. Wire to me please darling often and tell me what to do.

  This was the letter of someone, as she said, ‘torn’ between responsibilities, though none of them added up to much. A nanny looked after her two sons; servants brought up children and did everything for the Churchills and their class. Winston Churchill’s wife Clemmie, with young children, had visited, Goonie reported: “I have had to pack her poor French nurse off as she was in such a state and crying and having hysterics about her people in France.” The hysterics might have been catching. Goonie might have felt she had not too many choices, but too few. She may genuinely have feared a German landing on the Norfolk coast. Writing to Clementine, Winston Churchill did admit to being ‘a little anxious’ that his wife was at Cromer: “It is 100 to one against a raid but still there is the chance and Cromer has a good landing place near.” As a Churchill, though, married into the family of one of the ministers fighting the war, Goonie and Clementine alike had to set a public example. Did that explain why Goonie privately loaded her woes on her husband - as if he had time to spare, while preparing a cavalry unit for war? Evidently Jack Churchill did answer his wife’s letters at once, because by August 7 she was writing back. “I am proud of you; but of course I am thinking of you all the time and longing to see you again.” She sounded loving; in truth she only wanted her husband to satisfy her emotional demands. She went on: “I am in such a mortal terror of those dirty German swines and you are such a coco, such a sweet and I love you such a lot; you are my life and my being; ... it is always a person like you and loved like you that gets shot at.” Did she have to remind her husband of that? Was she having a dig at him, or was she simply emotionally ignorant? She seemed to supply her own answer: “I am dreadfully silly but I am brave really and quite resigned.” Clementine Churchill had arrived the night before: “Clemmie is full of stories and anecdotes and Cabinet secrets.”

  In another letter that day - having received another letter from her husband at the Churchill family seat of Blenheim Palace, and a telegram from Oxford - Goonie hoped that Clementine would stay, “but I am afraid she might want to return to Winston which is quite natural”. Britain was in its third full day of war, and already Goonie Churchill was harping on to her absent husband! She did show signs of adapting: she and Clementine and other friends went into Cromer and told “the trades people not to put up their prices otherwise we would report them to the Board of Trade”. Having something to do, ordering the lower classes around, seemed to help; she closed her letter cheerfully: “Bless you my Jacko your Goonie who is brave and happy.” For the time being.

  A couple of days later, after going to church, she had Sunday lunch with Clementine Churchill, “and she has just told us of the battle at Muhlhausen with advantage to the French but with appalling casualties, 20,000, 17,000, it is quite horrible; when do you think it will all end? I don’t think the swines are coming out to fight our Navy; they are playing a dirty game; they have all their submarines out and are trying to sink our ships. Pray God they will not get any.” As they had long planned, the French had launched infantry attacks into eastern France, gaining little and losing many men.

  Goonie felt more settled - ‘I am no more in a panic’ - thanks to family gossip, the company of her father and others, and the sight of some defenders: “... we saw about 800 soldiers on the road and on the hill were the Light Horse; they had Essex written on their shoulders and they were Regulars; they looked like they could take on the Germans any day. It is a horrid day very windy and blustery and hot so the poor soldiers looked very hot and tired, but nevertheless it was very comforting to see them.” The next day - ‘Just received your wire from Banbury’ - Goonie told her husband more gossip, which made her one of the most informed people in the country. “Winston has just been on the telephone to Clemmie and he has told her about Muhlhausen been exaggerated also about the rumour of these swines threatenin
g to cut the archbishop’s throat at Liege unless the forts were surrendered.” That correction did not, however, change her opinion of the Germans: “What barbarians and whole swines they are. I tremble to think what they would do if they ever got over here, the horrors.”

  Letter by letter she swang between extremes, just as she had to swing between roles, none of them made by her, but all in terms of other people - as a wife, a mother, and a Churchill who could out-bully over-charging tradesmen. She was on the same page a nervous and self-centred woman only ever allowed to be a spectator of life; and a swift retailer of the country’s most important secret piece of war news, as told by Winston to Clementine Churchill to her: “... our expeditionary force had left yesterday morning and some more today. I hope our soldiers will not get killed.”

  Goonie went on with her holiday: “We sit on the beach and watch torpedo boats capture German tramps [other boats] which is most exciting and we play tennis.”

  Chapter 12