Blood and Thunder (30 page)

Two days after the outbreak of war, Ego bid his family goodbye and, in his capacity as an officer of the local Royal Gloucestershire Hussars Yeomanry outfit, joined his regiment. It all seemed surreal. It wasn't until his mother saw him at church parade three days later in uniform that her heart sank at the prospect of him and his men, with their ‘quiet earnest faces' going off to fight. This was not occurring for the foreseeable future though. At the beginning of December 1914 the Gloucesters remained on British soil. ‘The Front seems farther than ever from us now.' Ego complained. They had not heard so much as a whisper about a departure date, but rumours were circulating that included the possibility of a departure to Scotland or even Egypt.

Ego had inherited a somewhat unwilling servant. ‘Scorgie,' a native of Cheltenham, was ‘well over 50' and not exactly enamoured with the idea of becoming a soldier servant as he thought that it would make the other men look down on him. Ego was in a dilemma. If he could not get a man of his own troop to take on the job, he reasoned, he would look like an unpopular officer. Scorgie agreed to give it a go. ‘If you do my horse as well as you do your own,' Ego told him, ‘I'll be satisfied.'

It was not until the beginning of April 1915 that the Gloucesters finally left for war, their destination Egypt. Ego's departure was an emotional affair. He said goodbye to his sons and Letty hung the cord with his identity tag around his neck, whilst his mother, who had recently capitulated and agreed to let Yvo leave Eton, raced to the regiment at Hunstanton to see him off. The night they were to leave he came and lay beside her and she struggled to contain her emotions. ‘Ego had never failed me and I could not fail him then.'

They left a few hours later in darkness. At midnight the Gloucesters filed past the Countess of Wemyss, Letty and the other assembled well-wishers ‘singing or crooning a wild, rather lovely song which mingled with the tramping of the horses and the clinking of their bits'. Then the singing faded and the procession passed by silently. As Ego approached he managed to pause slightly for one last goodbye. Then he and his men rode off into the night. The transports rumbled by and then the Gloucesters were gone; ‘the place was utterly deserted'. The countess turned sadly for home. In just a few weeks she would be making her way to Charing Cross with Yvo.

By January 1915, 70,000 troops were in Egypt, not including the Egyptian Army which was there to protect the country and defend the Sudan. The troops were there to maintain the security of the Suez Canal following Turkey's entry into the war. Linking the Mediterranean to the east and therefore far-flung Imperial troops to the war, it was the ‘jugular vein of the British Empire'. In itself the Suez Canal was a hindrance to any invading army. Up to 148ft wide and 100 miles long, it ran from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, which unfortunately made it difficult to defend. The plan had always been, in the event of hostilities with Turkey, to abandon the Sinai desert and fall back on its banks. The British had promptly started digging trenches along both banks of the Suez and strung up barbed wire.

Meanwhile the Turks were planning an invasion of Egypt largely in the hope that when they arrived the native population would revolt against the British. They moved off in the middle of January 1915 from Beersheba with a paltry force (given the task and allowing for the fact that the Egyptians might not be spoiling for a fight) of 20,000 men. They tried to cross the canal, failed, tried again and then gave up. By the time that Ego and the Gloucesters had boarded their transports at Avonmouth the canal had re-opened to merchant traffic and everything had returned more or less to normal.

It had become apparent that the whole set up about the Canal was perfect for employing mobile cavalry. Roads were lacking, a very limited railway ran to and from Cairo and there was a vast amount of territory to try and keep tabs on. The arrival of the Gloucesters coincided with a reduced Turkish interest in the area. The burden of Gallipoli, a front in Mesopotamia and one in the Caucasus against the Russians meant that the Turks shelved any plans to conquer Egypt until at least 1916.

All of this meant that when Ego arrived in Egypt with his regiment and a number of other Yeomanry units, nothing much was occurring. Aubrey Herbert was a little shocked by the frivolity of Cairo when he arrived at the end of 1914 to take up his intelligence role. The social life in Egypt was intense. By now his brother Mervyn had arrived too and Aubrey joked that it felt like the whole of the peerage and House of Commons had travelled east. ‘This place was as grotesquely unreal with Christmas trees and race meetings as the war was grotesquely real.' In fact, the scene was so relaxed and un-warlike that many of the officers had their wives follow them out to take up residence in Alexandria or Cairo. Letty, along with Ego's sister Mary and Mary Herbert, Aubrey's wife were all involved in nursing work in Egypt in 1915, treating the wounded as they came off hospital ships from the Dardanelles. If their wives were busy the Gloucesters were beside themselves with boredom. ‘We seem never likely to hear a shot fired in anger,' Ego reported in June 1915. ‘Poor old Yeomanry.' News of what was transpiring on all fronts came in only through his mother.

Whilst he kicked his heels in Egypt the disaster at Gallipoli was being played out, casting its shadow across to northern Africa and the troops stationed in Egypt. The broken men being stretchered off hospital ships brought with them stories of an ailing campaign. ‘You don't realise the awful waste,' Ego told his mother. ‘The horror and the hopelessness of the Dardanelles stunt.'

In August things took a serious turn for the regiment with a surprise order to get ready to depart for Gallipoli for the assault at Suvla Bay. However, four officers and a hundred men of each Yeomanry regiment were to be left behind with the horses in Egypt. Ego was to be in charge of the contingent left out for the Gloucesters and it was heart breaking for him. ‘I was sulky at being left,' he recalled, ‘but the Brigadier would not hear of anything else.' The morning before his regiment left they conducted a practice route march and Ego shed a few tears. His colleagues all boarded the
Ascania
and made for Suvla Bay. Their lot, as one of them put it, was to take part in the ‘fag-end' of the expedition, when for all of the bravery and enthusiasm they could have no impact on the campaign.

All of the sketchy accounts Ego received portrayed the peninsula as ‘the last word in Hell'. Egypt was clouded in pessimism and willing the whole Dardanelles stunt to be over. ‘You never hear anything but bungling and ghastly casualties' and it was rumoured that the only Gloucester man to have actually killed a Turk was the A Squadron cook. Aubrey Herbert arrived in Alexandria much to Ego's joy for his three-week convalescence. He was full of anecdotes about life on the peninsula, making Ego laugh with the story of his respirator. ‘He did not know how to work it … so he handed it on to his Greek, who used it as a poker mask … on the beach!'

In mid October, news of Yvo's death at Loos reached Egypt. Their sister Mary, especially close to him and in Egypt still, was shattered. All Letty could remember was him kissing her two little boys goodbye before leaving for the Western Front. Ego could articulate nothing at all on the subject. ‘When your own mother and brother are concerned it is futile to talk about sympathy.' His father had adored his youngest son and he was ‘awfully sorry for Papa'. As for his mother, she had sat beside Lady Desborough just weeks before and comforted her on the loss consecutively of both Julian and Billy. ‘A woman with sympathy loses many sons before her own,' he remarked. ‘The only sound thing is … to expect absolutely nothing for oneself … to write down everyone one loves as dead and then if any of us are left we shall be surprised.'

In a matter of days Ego was drinking champagne and playing bridge with another OE, a colonel in the Australian infantry, as they sailed towards the peninsula. It was his companion's third trip. He had been hit four times and had a suppurating wound in his knee. No medical board in England would pass him fit for overseas service so he had bought a ticket to Egypt, where nobody knew about his injury, and contrived to get back out to the fighting. Champagne, with regular doses of morphia, ensured that he could sleep through the pain.

Ego spent the rest of the voyage separating British soldiers (who were apparently gutless) from Australians (who were accused of being ill-disciplined yobs). It was the closest he came to a real fight, as the Yeomanry were recalled to Egypt. Letty's prayers were answered when the ship reached Mudros and he was told that he was going to be sent back. ‘Poor Ego,' he said of himself, ‘destined to be a buffoon in life, could [it] have happened to anyone else?'

On 10 January 1916 General Sir Archibald Murray assumed command of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force and having taken over, the policy in Egypt became markedly more progressive. Most notably he started a railway line and a freshwater pipe from the canal out into the desert towards Palestine and Ottoman territory. The Gloucesters were to find themselves remounted and part of a large cavalry force being pushed into the desert on reconnaissance and raids.

The British hierarchy had come to realise that placing all of their defences on the west bank of the Suez Canal meant that they could not stop the Turks from approaching the waterway and harassing the canal and its traffic, even if they were only approaching in small numbers. The effort was moved to the east bank and three defensive lines were formed. Closest to the canal were fortified bridgeheads on the bank itself; just over 3 miles further east was a defensive position and further on from that the front line was formed.

‘We are still by the old pyramids,' Ego reported soon afterwards. ‘But alas soon moving out to some lonely spot in the desert.' He found himself second in command of A Squadron behind another OE, Michael Lloyd-Baker, and they foresaw long months of training and toil before the regiment would drill its replacements sufficiently and the Gloucesters would shape up again. Ego was realising more and more the loss of his younger brother. ‘I used to like to make him laugh, and often think of him when certain things strike my sense of humour.'

His work was cut short by a particularly virulent bout of flu and Ego found himself first in hospital and then sent to recuperate. Lady Quenington, whose husband ‘Mickey'
1
was an OE and a Lieutenant in the Gloucesters, had fallen foul of the same thing and was far worse off. She had been suffering an excruciatingly high fever for several weeks. Poor ‘Mickey' came and went, keeping vigil at her bedside but all of the inoculations that she had had in England did her no good at all and pneumonia ‘sadly destroyed her in the end'. Ego's fellow Old Etonian was absolutely devastated. Ego himself got off comparatively lightly and even managed to cram in some sightseeing with Letty before he was signed off as fit to return to the desert. Their tour guide through the sites of ancient Egypt was Howard Carter whose work in the Valley of the Kings, funded by Aubrey Herbert's elder brother Lord Carnarvon, was on hiatus because of the war. He spent his time instilling in Ego a brand new passion for Egyptology and hieroglyphs which the latter carried in the shape of new books back to the regiment.

By the end of March the Gloucesters were a few hundred yards to the east of the canal. From their vantage points the high banks made it look like the great ships passing up and down the waterway were cruising through the sand. The only thing they lacked, in fact, was an enemy. ‘Not a sign of one yet,' Ego said of the Turks. His squadron was engaged in pretty menial work, escorting camel convoys and patrolling alongside the precious new water pipes.

Two weeks later Ego and Tom Strickland, an Etonian in the regiment who had married Ego's sister Mary whilst they were all in Egypt, managed to finally catch sight of the enemy. They located a couple of camps and took one prisoner in raids, but the others made off as soon as they saw the British Yeomanry coming. The Gloucesters were rather pleased with themselves. The British pushed on to a new base at Romani; a palm grove just inland that had all the prospects of becoming a centre of operations in the area.

Affairs, as Tom put it, then began hotting up. Once the new canal defences were in place, and the grinding monotonous work done, the British struck out south-east from their main camp at Romani towards Qatiya on the old caravan route towards Palestine through Sinai; an oasis 25 miles east of the canal.

There had been rumours that the Turks were planning to use the Qatiya region as a base for further operations so the British seized it first. It sat at the western end of a series of oases that extended 15 miles to a place named Bir el Abd and had drinking water in abundance; making it the nearest point to the canal that could sustain a significant force. For now aeroplane reconnaissance seemed to intimate that there were no significant bodies of enemy troops in the area, but things were about to change.

In mid April 1916 the Turks despatched 3,500 men, six pieces of artillery and four machine guns into the sands and set them on a collision course with the Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire Yeomanry scattered throughout the Romani area. They began creeping across the desert and by 19 April they had reached British outposts. When they attacked it came as a real surprise to the three regiments scattered throughout the desert as aeroplanes had yet to pick up the enemy presence. The Turks brought with them a contingent of mounted Arabs that terrified Tom; Four hundred men of the Hedjaz, so he had been told, known as the Mecca Camel Corps wearing long red cloaks and apparently famed for being fanatically anti-Christian. ‘They gave one a cold shiver to look at … Dark skinned individuals with gleaming teeth, waving curved swords, riding swift camels and thirsting to kill!'

On 21 April the Gloucesters were told that they would be leaving Romani for Qatiya to replace the Worcesters, who were in turn moving out to another new site further east named Oghratina. As far as Ego was aware, they would only be at Qatiya a day or two until a contingent of Australians arrived and by the end of the week they would be back at the canal, which he was anticipating eagerly.