Blood and Thunder (16 page)

Now all George wanted was a real tabby kitten to sit in front of his brazier. He intended to feed it on tinned sardines and stash it in a gumboot when they advanced, but he feared that the censor wouldn't pass it. But George's prayers were answered. In January he got out of the trench one day to stretch his legs to the rear and was wandering past Stinking Horse Farm when he heard a little mew behind him. George invited the cat up on to his shoulder and took it for a walk. It ran up and down his arm, wandered off numerous times but came padding back again to climb on to his shoulder and rub his face against his stubbly beard. It ran off knowingly as he re-approached the trenches. ‘I will not forget you, o' cat – visitor of comfortless mortals,' he sighed.

One bit of work that George seized upon to break the spell of inactivity was night patrols. They at least made life more interesting. George was renowned for his ‘brave and brainy deeds' and went out frequently. Usually with one other man to keep it simple, he went to ‘see what the Germans were up to'. He would pull on a Burberry, remove his underwear from under hia trousers (the less clothing that was soiled the better), put a pistol in an accessible pocket, wire cutters in another and finish off his outfit with a knitted cap and gumboots.

Gathering information was the intention. On one occasion some men up the line were convinced that they had heard noises coming from underground. Fulfilling the colonel's request for information, George set off with ten men. He didn't like taking out large groups and it disappointed him immensely when the men he took out didn't share his enthusiasm. The ones that had a tendency to ‘lie doggo' and wait for him to baby step them through the adventure ruined his fun, although if they lay petrified he knew they were ‘in a worse funk' than he was, which was marginally satisfying.

When a patrol went out, word went up and down the lines and no shots were fired until they returned; unless it was a flare telling them to return. Off George would go, ‘bellying and elbowing along like a worm', scraping through his own barbed-wire defences. It was a filthy, slow job and the first thing he would do was look for cover. One night he found a good ditch ‘not exactly a commodious lying place', for it was full of water: ‘however we stopped and lay for a few minutes every ten yards. Elbows soaked, knees and legs immersed.'

Avoiding searchlights was a priority that George considered ‘great fun'. The most powerful searchlight one of his men saw in the entire war was in front of them. Every time it was switched on as they were carrying up to the trench they stopped dead in their tracks, ‘sinking our heads on our chests so that we would resemble stumps of trees, or posts'. Once it shone within inches of George, who rolled under some cabbages and hoped to God they wouldn't move the beam over him.

If all went well he would get close enough to hear the Germans snore and the guards whispering. On these instances the noise of wire cutting was too risky so they lay listening to their conversations. The Germans, of course, were playing the same game. They would send out twenty–thirty men, spread out like a fan, and it was easy to get caught in the middle of a patrol coming the other way. Communications sometimes went awry and George could be in danger from his own men. One night he found a lovely looking bucket which he claimed eagerly to take home only to find that it was a British trap that rattled. When he lifted it men of his own battalion began shooting at him.

Of all the surprises that one might come across on a patrol, bloated, decaying corpses were the worst; a stark reminder of what could happen if you didn't make it home safely. One night, George had made it about a 100 yards along a particular ditch when he came upon a German who had evidently tried the same things days before. George retrieved his helmet for the den at home. Bobbing about in the North Sea, his brother was desperate to have one. ‘Leslie will be disappointed, but the den is the real depot for all the common gear of “the boys”. He shall have the next.'

On another occasion George encountered a far more grizzly sight. He was crawling along when he saw against the skyline an ominous bayonet and the tip of a German
pickelhaube
helmet. ‘My revolver came out and I silently worked up to the helmet till I touched it with the barrel.' The man wasn't asleep, he was dead. Crawling along the rim of the trench, which ran back to the enemy lines George was greeted with a horrific sight. Much of the ditch had been roofed over but it had now collapsed. ‘Everywhere there were [bodies], German rifles, equipment, spades and other tools.'

The trench continued for some 30 yards, sometimes disappearing underground. It was impossible to count the dead. George found some sitting, some leaning, some lying down. He couldn't imagine what had happened to them or why nobody had come to claim them. It was far too grim to think of pinching a helmet for Leslie and instead he focused his attentions on climbing along without disturbing the remains. It reminded him of climbing, like the holiday on Skye he had taken with Regie the previous summer: ‘working from point to point and saying so far, so safe, and now for the next part.'

Gareth Hamilton-Fletcher, who had had such bold ideas about Britain's pre-war relations with Germany and another member of the Eton XI at Lord's in 1912, arrived at the front in January 1915 with the Grenadier Guards. Sometimes, rather than keeping their distance, patrols turned into raids and unlike George Fletcher's outings the onus was very much on making contact with the men opposite. Attached to the Scots Guards because they were completely devoid of officers in the aftermath of Ypres, Gareth went into trenches near La Bassee. Every single officer in his company was borrowed from another regiment. Gareth had been there precisely a day before they were the subject of a fierce, small-scale German assault. Situated in front of a number of brickstacks that had been reinforced to create a keep of sorts, at 6.30 a.m. on the morning of 25 January a German deserter came in and declared that in half an hour the enemy would begin bombarding them and blowing up mines planted under the British trenches prior to an attack. The deserter proved as good as his word. Sure enough mines went up and shells followed. Then came waves of hundreds of German troops. As the enemy came on the Scots Guards began retreating towards the keep to form some kind of makeshift defence. Gareth had been holding the right flank and they were knocked out almost immediately. Two Etonian officers fell in his company. One was Geoffrey Monckton, aged 19. His brother Francis, 24, had already been lost at Ypres some ten weeks before. Neither brother's body was ever recovered. Gareth fought ‘like a hero' and was wounded, carrying on until he too was cut down. Seven officers and well over a hundred men were lost. In just six months of war a second of the Lord's heroes of 1912 was dead at the age of 20.

In mid January George Fletcher and his men were moved to Bois Grenier and found that the same care and attention that the Royal Welsh Fusiliers had lavished on their lines had not been spent on what was to be their new home. They found themselves in shoddy lines again and slowly began building. The weather that month was appallingly wet and by the end of it the River Lys had risen 6ft in a mere twenty-four hours. Two months later, just as they had finished a monumental effort aimed at making their lines suitable for living and working, to their utter dismay they were moved from them. To George's disgust they found themselves shunted further along exchanging spots with a Scottish regiment who now moved in to reap the benefits of their hard work: comfortable dugouts, a firm parapet and even his cat.

‘What are your old trenches like?' the departing Scot enquired. George laid it out for him. ‘Bulletproof parapet … thick wire entanglement, good dugouts for men, a nice mess for the officers, stores, tables, chairs and importantly, a proper construction of latrines and fully connected trenches to be able to move about in daylight.' George then watched as the officer looked increasingly uncomfortable; knowing that in return the Welshmen would find next to none of the above in their new home. ‘May the devil stick a fork through their noses,' George wrote. Despondent and exasperated at the thought of the work, his men began to dig, again.

For George, the only consolation was the prospect of new ground to skulk about in in the darkness. At the end of a diagonal ditch that ran in front of the Fusilier's new line across to the Germans was a French flag fluttering on a pole where it was fixed to a tree. ‘The Sausagers had evidently pinched it from the Frogs,' and as far as George was concerned it was taunting him. The Scottish captain passing the sorry-looking trenches over to him had offered five shillings to the man of his company who could shoot down the pole with his rifle. Five shillings did not make this feat in the slightest bit realistic. There had to be a better way. At midnight one night, a message went along the companies telling them to be careful of their fire. ‘Mr Fletcher and one man gone out on patrol.'

George had grabbed a willing apprentice and hoofed it out over the top of the crumbling parapet into no-man's-land. He found a convenient furrow in the ploughed field and they dropped into it. It was a dark, dark night but he foresaw frequent flares being sent up and appreciated the additional cover. Keeping low, George and his man crawled across to the clump of trees and worked their way along them. At last they came upon the tree with the flag tied to it. They were on the wrong side of the ditch. They lay flat and still ‘for perhaps half an hour … listening to the spittings, coughings and grunts of the German sentries'. It was impossible to think of grabbing it whilst they were being periodically lit up by coloured flares. George lay there, scoping out his prize and noticed that as well as being tied, it was also nailed in place and tied by several bits of string to a tough-looking branch. If he wanted to grab it he was going to have to climb the tree under the noses of the mocking enemy and untie it with both hands. Having come so far, George was adamant. He'd be ‘jiggered' if he was going home without his flag now.

Waiting for a bright flare to die down, he leapt up and swung into the tree with a ‘swish'. Another ball of light went up and he threw himself back into the mud. Waiting for darkness to resume again he shot up ‘like Israel Hands' with his penknife between his teeth. Cursing under his breath, heart pounding, balancing on a tree trunk on one leg George slashed away at the strings one at a time. Finally the pole came loose in his hands. He threw it to the ground and swiftly followed it down as more flares were shot into the sky. The next morning he penned a note home. ‘The flag is now being waved over B Company's parapet by a delighted Tommy, and is being shot at by infuriated sausage-eaters.' His men were thrilled and his legend cemented.

The British Army was adjusting fully to the idea of complex trench construction and as George and his men began working at Bois Grenier there were sandbags, barbed wire and duckboards in abundance. Equipment to aid the day-to-day practice of surviving the enemy had begun to emerge too. Periscopes began to arrive; little mirrors were stuck up on the back of trenches and by day, sentries could sit on the fire step and observe no-man's-land without putting their heads into the line of fire.

One Etonian who was going to find himself at the forefront of new technology as far as weaponry designed with trenches in mind was concerned was ‘Jack' Haldane. Born in November 1892, John Burdon Sanderson Haldane came from a family of highly individual academics. His father John, a brother of the War Minister who instigated Britain's pre-war army reform with a European conflict in mind, was a scientist and intensely interested in the nature of gases.

Precocious was an understatement as far as Jack was concerned. At 3, the same year that his father began using him as a guinea pig for his experiments, he cut his head open and asked if the blood dribbling down his forehead was oxyhaemoglobin or carboxyhaemoglobin. At 4, he was with his father in London as the latter hung out of windows on the Underground. Jack remembered the grime and the smoke breathed in as his father tested the atmosphere by collecting it in glass bottles. By the age of 8, Jack was fully engaged in helping his father analyse gas during his experiments and soon moved on to making simple mixtures for Haldane Sr to use.

It was always going to be a struggle for Eton to further the education of this prodigious talent. Arriving in 1905 he was that good a mathematician that it was rumoured that he taught the masters as opposed to the other way around. The headmaster was frequently frustrated with him; threatening him with the notion of becoming ‘a mere smatterer' instead of being exceptionally good in one field if he continued to jump about between different specialities. Some of the masters just couldn't comprehend him. ‘He is a baffling boy,' one wrote in a school report, ‘and I shall be glad to be rid of him.'

When he went up to Oxford, Jack continued to help his father, who strove to expand his son's scientific knowledge in a continuously unique way. Down a mine in Staffordshire he taught Jack the effects of breathing methane. He had him stand and recite Mark Anthony's speech from Julius Caesar. ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen …' He soon became short of breath and ‘somewhere about “the noble Brutus”' Jack's legs went from under him and he collapsed onto the floor, where of course the air was clear. ‘In this way,' he explained pragmatically, ‘I learnt that [methane] is lighter than air …'

After fiddling with his degree and characteristically changing from maths and biology (he claimed that nobody could study mathematics for five hours a day and remain sane) to arts he came out of New College with a First to absolutely no raptures at all because the date was 4 August 1914. Like its Eton counterpart, the OUOTC was in camp. Jack had joined the Signallers with the express intention of grasping wireless telegraphy and was busily engaged with it when ‘the angel of death on a motorbike' arrived with news of war. Jack volunteered immediately and asked for a commission in the Black Watch. The War Office duly obliged. After four months of training he crossed to France and joined the 1st Battalion as their bombing officer in February 1915.