Blood and Thunder (10 page)

Notes

  
1
  Bertrand Stewart was laid to rest in Braine Communal Cemetery.

  
2
  Hubert Crichton's body was relocated to Montreuil-aux-Lions British Cemetery in the 1930s.

5

‘God Won't Let Those Devils Win'

Along with the rest of the BEF, George Fletcher had travelled some 200 miles in three weeks during the retreat, wrestling with his smell and hoping to exchange the ‘infernal instrument' for transport of the four-legged variety. He had considered simply abandoning it on more than one occasion, but a last-minute pang of conscience about what the king would think of him if he simply abandoned His Majesty's motorcycle to the Germans inspired him to continue tinkering with it until it jumped back into life. Having been so desperate to get to war, George admitted freely in his letters that he was living a ‘pig-like life', destitute as his baggage had been unceremoniously tossed from the lorries to lighten the load. ‘A column of sleepless and foodless men staggering along mile after mile is a mighty different thing from a route march at home: and as far as the sight of a horse camp after being surprised by artillery fire, or the road to the firing line in the rear after a big fight, it is a thing not sung of by Homer … or anyone else' he told his father.

‘You may imagine me,' George wrote, ‘sleeping in a wet trench with bombs bursting all around and the next man grovelling with a bullet through his spleen.' In reality, he admitted, he was curled up in an armchair in front of a fire with a cat purring away on the hearth. The Aisne was a quiet affair for George. The misty mornings reminded him of Eton, ‘of early days in the autumn half … and sweaty wall games'. From little igloos made out of brushwood, filled with straw and blankets, George listened to the booming of the guns whilst they sat in reserve. ‘During this time our Brigade goes off on manoeuvres in the field like the ECOTC till lunch, after which it reads the papers till tea-time, when it does a little close-order drill and goes to bed.
C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas guerre.
'

His period of inaction on the Aisne gave George plenty of time to contemplate how much he missed Eton. His father had moved into his old flat on the High Street and was one of a number of academics volunteering to fill in for younger masters departing for Kitchener's army. George was desperate to hear how he was getting on. ‘It is so funny to think of him teaching small boys Latin grammar and I want especially to hear all about my dear stupid pupils.' He could imagine ‘thirty ridiculous puppies' gawping in front of his father. ‘How they will make you grind your teeth at times, and how you will like them at others.'

One member of the Fletcher family who was languishing even further away from the action was George's younger brother Regie. Five years his junior, Regie too had been a King's Scholar at Eton before going on to Oxford. The fact that he was twenty-two did not stop their father from proudly referring to him as his ‘baby'. The brothers didn't look at all alike. George was stocky, whilst Regie was tall and graceful in his movements with reddish gold hair. Where George leaned towards languages and cherished the idea of a pet kitten in his dugout, Regie loved poetry, literature and above all his dog Muncles. Like his elder brother though, Regie was an accomplished oar. Having developed late, he did not feature much at Eton but at Oxford, where he followed George in 1910, he rowed stroke in the Balliol boat for four years, in the Leander Four at Henley and in the University Boat Race in 1914.

Regie's other great pastime was the Oxford University OTC. Much more elaborate than its cohort at Eton, it featured an artillery section and during his four years as part of it Regie rose to second in command. He loved his guns and had already decided on a military career when the Great War came. One of the first of the University men to be called up, Regie was on holiday in Ireland and ended up on a train with ‘about 25 carriages carrying a howling drunken mob' to report as reservists to a base. Within a few days a ‘rabble' of forty men had turned up and been shoved in his direction. ‘I am trying to provide for them; but I should think they will starve fairly soon, as I haven't the faintest idea what to do,' he joked.

Regie had a unique charm. He had a temper; and absolutely no issue with letting anyone, be he a gunner or a general, know exactly what he thought of them. Thanks to his years on the river, which required a certain amount of unique motivational speaking, he had learned to do so in the most innovative and colourful manner. Before he had even landed at Havre in the last week of August, he had established a mutual vendetta with a captain of a Scottish regiment. Once in France it was two native soldiers who made his life difficult that felt the wrath of his sharp tongue by way of ‘an assortment of French oaths interspersed with a few sound English damns, to great amusement of admiring crowd of Tommies'. He varied his repertoire when necessary and could do subtlety. Havre was abandoned during the retreat and the base relocated to St Nazaire. Put on a ship and stuffed into a cabin where three other officers, a collection of what he termed ‘bores and mangy dug-out Captains', chose to ignore his obvious preparations for bed and continued ‘drinking whiskey and talking rubbish' he simply stripped off the shirt he hadn't removed for nearly a month. ‘
Exeunt omnes
.'
1

Whatever his capacity for ‘abuse' when the situation vexed him, Regie was also noted for his affectionate nature. The first thing he did on landing in France was to go and buy a stock of footballs so that his men might have something to do. Once they arrived at their new base in St Nazaire he was thoroughly disgusted to find that no provision had been made to give the men shelter from the rain. Their constant discomfort angered him to the point that Regie led a raid on the Remount Depot to liberate some tents that they had in stores. ‘Owing to stupidity of sentry' he very nearly got away with it. They made off with twelve tents and two poles but were caught. As the only officer present Regie stood and took the earbashing on behalf of all and even put up a fight before he had to yield to a higher-ranked officer and give them back. ‘My reputation is quite gone,' he remarked, but the men were grateful for the effort. His worst stream of vitriol though, even more so than those aimed at the Germans, was Regie's reaction to the curators of a park at home. They had been setting out traps and threatening Muncles the dog, whose picture would go everywhere with his master at the front to keep the bullets away. He gave his aunt explicit instructions. ‘If my dog gets killed in a trap … I will come back when this war is over with an 18-pounder gun, line them all up in the middle … of the cricket field and then bring my gun into action … “Target, curators of the park, range 100 yards, fuse zero. One round gunfire.”' Please give them this message with my compliments.'

For someone as eager as Regie, sitting at a camp in complete ignorance of how the war was progressing and playing no active part in it was not only ‘damnable', ‘intolerable', but frightening. The camps were rife with unsettling rumours during the retreat. Almost as soon as Regie arrived it began. ‘Amiens evacuated? What is going to happen? Suspense awful.' It didn't matter how outlandish the stories were. On this occasion the Germans were supposed to be bearing down on Havre in motor cars laden with Maxim guns. By 11 p.m. this was apparently fact. Packed up and ready to run, Regie and his unarmed men were told in no uncertain terms that if they heard rifles, they were to flee to the docks. ‘Where are we going to? They say not England … Is George alive? What has happened to the fleet?' Tales of the annihilation of 20,000 men arrived, along with bloody rifles that were piled in the stores. Ten days later Regie spotted a piece of artillery; ‘sight broken, shield splintered … also the limber wheels are broken. There are bloody pieces of meat stuck to the gun.' He was in no doubt that if the Germans broke through to the coast they would be done for. ‘There will be some sort of massacre … I have a baby pistol and a toothpick. Probably shall chuck latter away and use fist.'

The rumours turned out to be false. ‘I am sitting here in a rage like a poisoned rat in a hole,' Regie fumed. ‘If only I had joined some damned line regiment, at least I should be fighting now instead of running away without firing a shot.' For Regie and those sharing his plight, they alternated between bouts of semi-optimism (‘The war will probably last long enough to kill me and Kitchener's army as well') and all out despondency (‘Every bit of news makes us more miserable and restless'). To make it worse, new arrivals were being sent up to the front immediately. ‘Miserable little squirts … vile … little unweaned rats … boys who six months ago were fags at their public schools.' It was beyond all things conceivable. ‘Our language would make mother's hair turn white.'

In the event, the subalterns at the camp resorted to squabbling with each other. It was every man for himself and one senior officer had marked Regie as an Oxford Blue and deemed it sufficient qualification for a speedy posting to the front. When he informed his brother subalterns that he was off, the reaction was typical. One officer flew into paroxysms of rage, hurling blasphemies and every swear word under the sun at Regie until he had completely exhausted his vocabulary. He used more abusive language to Regie's face than the latter had used in the entire duration of his rowing career. Another officer didn't have it in him to swear, but said he'd be damned if Regie would go if he could help it. ‘Polite and cheery, aren't they?'

Regie honestly didn't care. On 21 September he and fifty men were sent off to entrain for the Aisne to join an artillery outfit that had suffered heavy casualties. Regie was delighted and sat in the door of the train with his legs dangling out of the window. ‘I really am now going to the firing line to take an active part in the Great War,' he gloated. On his way he learned from fellow officers that had seen it for themselves that it was deadlocked, an artillery duel; the Germans heavy guns on one side, British artillery on the other. His brother George, bored at the front, was in agreement. ‘The … kind of fighting our infantry has done, besides waiting in a trench, has been lying down waiting for our guns to silence the enemy's guns … I'm sure Regie has the real job of the War … for at present the artillery is the great thing.'

The Royal Field Artillery Brigade that Regie was to join at Paissy consisted of eighteen guns, split into three numbered batteries with six guns each – 116, 117 and 118 – and contained approximately 800 men at full strength. Together they had lost eight of eighteen officers on the Aisne. For much of it, they hadn't been able to get near the guns to fire them, such was the accuracy of their German counterparts. The Scottish rugby international that Regie was to replace was accounted for with a direct hit. Regie detrained and was taken through the woods to a turnip field just by Moulins where Douglas Lucas-Tooth had been buried. There he found the guns surrounded by enormous mounds of earth and concealed by brushwood and large branches. That afternoon they had been discovered by the Germans and shells had been dropping within 10 yards of their precious eighteen pounders, smashing holes in the ground.

Life in the ECOTC had taught Regie the basics in military terms and its counterpart at Oxford had taught him how a gun was fired, but once he got to the Aisne he found that he had much to learn in terms of war. There was the sight of the dead and wounded littered on the ridge, birds circling overhead, and the hardships of life at the front. Some were harder to accept, such as attacks of dysentery and dwindling supplies of tobacco. ‘In a couple of days I shall be worse than starving … when my pouch is empty, God help anyone who annoys me.' For the most part Regie bore the rest in good humour. He had had all of his hair shorn off and joked that he would be ugly when he was old and bald. Boredom was abated by frequent rides on one of the two horses he had with him; especially ‘The Playboy,' which he had named after a literary character. He rejoiced in getting a rare proper wash. He would sit on a heap of straw with his boots and socks off and wiggle his toes about ‘like a baby, in sheer delight at the sight of them.'

Nothing, though, prepared him to being lulled to sleep by the sound of howitzer shells. ‘I'm afraid,' he wrote. ‘The noise makes one think one is a dead man already.' He panicked at the perpetual banging of the guns and couldn't tell if he was actually under fire. ‘It must wear men down to a shadow.' Quickly, Regie learned the absolute necessity of digging. He took up a shovel and fashioned himself a square pit with additional cubby holes at two corners for extra protection. ‘The noise is appalling; with your own guns blazing away, a battery … just behind you and the bursting of shrapnel all round.' Within a few days though he had adjusted sufficiently to be pacified by smoking his pipe under fire and was even writing letters whilst the shells rained down.

Their favoured objective was a German battery some 100 yards behind the enemy trenches on the opposite side of the river. All day long they fired at each other while the infantry sat still. Sometimes they were required to jump out of bed and fire at night too and during busy periods they would sleep by the guns. The German gunners were indiscriminate. ‘I had not a stitch on my body when she first came … I don't mind when I am fully clothed, but when splinters come whistling round one's bare legs it ceases to be a joke,' Regie commented wryly.

He learned that, to a gunner, aeroplanes were evil; circling about till they spotted a line of guns and then directing German fire on to them. When one buzzed into sight a shout went up and the officers and men scattered into hiding or did their best impressions of a tree. But the most frightening introduction was to the enemy's high explosive shells, ‘Black Maria'. She whistled as she came through the air, singing. George had seen it in action. ‘One, two, three tornadoes of earth coming nearer and nearer … the crash was awful.' As she exploded she sent splinters: ‘great jagged, hot bits of iron' in all directions. Regie was subjected to it constantly and found that some dealt with the threat of it better than others: