Blood and Thunder (41 page)

Looking about for something further to do, Oliver decided to try to attack the next objective with the hundred men that he had originally put together. Despite the fact that the timed British barrage had long since crept out of contact, there seemed to be great confusion amongst the Germans and Oliver thought he might be able to ‘pick something up cheap'. He discovered a communication trench leading away from the line to the east and took his men along it. Chancing on a practically undefended position they had made it to within sight of the enigmatic Red Line; the last of the four objectives for the day. Les Boeufs lay ahead, within reach, but with only one hundred men and no support on either side he began fashioning a defensive position and sent a message back for help. Relinquishing command to a major who arrived on the scene, Oliver hoped that with a battalion they might take the village.

An hour passed whilst the sun beat down on them. Oliver was distraught. It seemed to him that they had the chance to take the initiative. He watched through a telescope as the German gunners calmly packed up and left. He watched bodies of infantry retiring. ‘I was sure that if we had even a brigade handy, we could go for a mile or two without a casualty.' Another hour passed. Then another and another. Unknown to Oliver, a further attack was ‘out of the question'. All the Guards battalions active that day had been heavily engaged. Three quarters of their officers were down and two thirds of the men. Finally the Germans re-took the initiative and several hundred of them rushed his mixed body of Guardsmen and jumped into the trench.

Oliver fired all the ammunition from his revolver straight at them. It was utter confusion. One German knelt down and levelled a rifle at him from 5 yards away. Oliver pathetically threw his revolver at the man's head. Luckily the man thought it was a bomb, dropped his rifle and covered his head with his arms. The situation was now hopeless as far as proceeding with the attack was concerned. All hopes of glory and the Red Line were gone. His men being ‘hopelessly outnumbered', Oliver scrambled out of the back of the trench and began blowing his whistle to signal a retreat.

For all Oliver's best efforts, little progress had been made on the flanks and he and the other surviving officers were ordered to stand fast and put their lines into a good state of defence. He was sent back to find John Ponsonby to report on what he had seen. Oliver found the brigadier at his headquarters; an old trench with some camouflage thrown over it. He made his report and downed a glass of port whilst Ponsonby joked about a bullet in the seat of Oliver's trousers. He himself had not even noticed it. ‘He asked me which way I was facing when I got it.' Joking aside, Ponsonby told him to take a nap for a couple of hours under the table in his dugout. Oliver fell asleep instantly.

The men of the Guards Division, according to Henry Dundas, were ‘simply gun fodder'. He would not forget Guillemont, Ginchy in a hurry. He claimed bitterly that ‘the dear ones at home in England', preoccupied by Zeppelins over Hertfordshire,
3
would forget those names in a heartbeat. There were bodies absolutely everywhere, ‘awful, grinning, greenish black faces with their staring sightless eyes and yellow teeth … [with the] awful mottled wax-like pallor of the newly fallen corpse'. Harold MacMillan was similarly disgusted. The act of death on a battlefield might, he thought, be a noble and glorious one ‘but the actual symptoms are, in these terrible circumstances, revolting only and horrid'.

That night Pip Blacker could not sleep. They had managed to get Treffry to a young medical officer who took one look at him and said it was hopeless. There was nothing to do but put him to sleep and wait for the end. ‘I begged him to pump in all the morphia that he could spare.' But Treffry had a tough constitution and did not die till nightfall. Pip heard that as the Cornishman had marched out of Bernafray Wood on 15 September he had told a sergeant that he was convinced that he would die. Pip tossed and turned throughout the night following that awful September morning. ‘I could not banish the persistent images … there he was … happy, then his broken body.' It was as if he were looking at a photograph album of him. The middle-aged volunteer who had ‘lost his sparkle' at Ypres and his life on the Somme wouldn't leave Pip alone.

Henry erroneously believed that the Guards Division was ready for their curtain call as far as the Somme was concerned. ‘The Great Biff is over,' he wrote home. His battalion of the Scots Guards had gone in about 750 strong and came out with just 142 men. ‘To intensify the general jolliness of the situation', the weather then turned on them completely.

Harold MacMillan was carried by fellow Grenadiers to a doctor who sent him off for further treatment with another officer. The route was being shelled so they dispensed with the stretcher bearers so as not to put them at risk and decided to try to walk. They got separated and Harold found his way out of danger. ‘Then I was safe, but alone and absolutely terrified because there was no need to show off anymore, no need to pretend … then I was very frightened … I do remember the sudden feeling – you went through a whole battle for two days … suddenly there was nobody there … you could cry if you wanted to.' He collapsed into a ditch and lay there until some Seaforth Highlanders found him and moved him on again.

‘Having all one's friends killed makes one rather bitter', Henry raged in the aftermath of his introduction to war. ‘And then one sees 180,000 are employed in the air defences of Great Britain. Stout fellows. One Zeppelin [taken down] in two years … Jolly good … and the filthy press and the damned people go on as if it were the biggest thing in the whole war.' Henry had seen whole swathes of his friends and fellow OEs fall in a single day. In fact, 15 September 1916 was the costliest day of the war for Eton College, with twenty-one former pupils wiped out in less than twenty-four hours. It was ‘perfectly heart-rending.' ‘I should like to have it pointed out to me where all the honour and glory lies,' Henry raged. ‘It is curiously elusive.'

In the 2nd Coldstream Guards only two officers were unhit and it was the same in the 3rd Battalion. In the 2nd Irish Guards ten officers were out of action and in Oliver Lyttelton's battalion, the figure was even higher. Seventeen officers were killed, wounded or missing. The high concentration of Etonians amongst the Guards battalions meant that Henry could reel off whole lists of those he knew. He had counted amongst his friends at Eton Robin Blacker and now Willie Edmonstone, another of their friends and the boy who had suggested that Robin transfer to the Guards, was also dead. Very tall, shy and reserved, ‘young as he was when war broke out, he wanted to go at once.' He was killed leading his company when a shell burst in between him and one of his sergeants. He was still 19.

The worst reminder of the loss befell the likes of Henry and his fellow survivors when they were sent out on to the battlefield to lay to rest those bloated, grinning corpses, their friends. He helped miserably to bury the body of the 2nd Coldstream Guards' adjutant and eight men who lay strewn nearby. ‘Not very jolly.' Evelyn Fryer was sent out for a day to inter as many as he could find in front of Ginchy. The weather had been hot and the bodies were almost jet black. They buried some 200 men, the Germans outnumbering their own fallen friends. Henry stood and watched in the pouring rain as the body of Guy Baring was buried at Fricourt, ‘a melancholy spectacle'.
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They had also found the body of one of their own, a Scots Guards OE, and had set about making a cross for him. ‘Poor old Tim and Willie and Bunny Pease and Lionel Neame and a hundred others.'

Etonian sorrow was not limited to the Guards Division by any means. During the 8th Rifle Brigade's advance Foss Prior had fallen wounded. He was in the process of being patched up when he was hit again, this time fatally. Although he had had to assume command of the battalion, Arthur Sheepshanks was utterly determined that his fellow Eton master would not lie exposed on the battlefield or end up in an unmarked grave. He rounded up some volunteers and he and these men scoured the area under fire until they found him. Foss was saved from anonymity and thanks to his brave friend and Eton colleague, one of the last of the original officers of the 8th Rifle Brigade lies in Bernafray Wood Cemetery.

‘Every successive minute' of his war had been an increasing burden on this young man who never believed that he belonged in uniform. Nonetheless he had volunteered to fight alongside his fellow Eton masters. They realised just how much of a sacrifice his participation demanded of him when he took a commission in 1914. Another reluctant schoolmaster and OE had gone with him, Shrewsbury's Evelyn Southwell. Both had followed George Fletcher's example in going to war, no matter how unsuited they thought they were, and in a little over a year both had shared his fate.

Over 160 Etonians now lay dead on the Somme; thirty-eight of them without a grave and destined to be commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial. Seventeen OEs had been buried in Guards Cemetery, Les Boeufs alone. That is to say nothing of the likes of Guy Cholmeley, who had been shipped maimed to England with the threat of death still hanging over them. Attempts to force the German Army into submission on the Western Front in 1916 had now absolutely failed. Winter was about to intervene. Attacks continued until mid November when large-scale assaults were shelved. As had been apparent to Henry Dundas from the moment he arrived in Flanders and to those at the front with him, this was no place for blind optimism. The war was not over. They had not yet even suffered the worst that it could throw at them. The whole sorry mess was now set to continue at least into 1917, pulling more and more of his young schoolmates into action with him.

Notes

  
1
  William Herbert Gladstone was killed with the Coldstream Guards in 1918 at 20 years old. He was buried at Sanders Keep Military cemetery near Havrincourt.

  
2
  The name of one of the playing fields at Eton.

  
3
  The newspapers at home were much preoccupied with the downing of a Zeppelin at Cuffley, Hertfordshire, on 2 September.

  
4
  Lieutenant Colonel the Hon. Guy Victor Baring is buried at Citadel New Military Cemetery, Fricourt.

  5  2nd Lieutenant Evelyn Southwell was also killed on 15 September with the 9th Rifle Brigade. He is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial.

15

‘The Abomination of Desolation'

At the end of 1916 Europe was tired of war; the home front as well as the fighting men. Everyone was feeling the strain. But the decisive break had not come and an increasing number of nations faced another year at arms.

Henry Dundas' mind was still on fallen friends and colleagues. As the cold set in one day he went for a wander through the cemetery at Corbie. He took note of the graves of two OEs including Billy Congreve. ‘What a record! VC, DSO, MC … and within an ace of becoming a Brigadier at 25. Incredible!' Impressed as he was by Billy's contribution to the war effort, Henry was most drawn to a desolate little patch where a handful of Germans who had died in British hands had been hastily buried. ‘Poor Fritz Kolner of the 2nd Grenadier Regiment. I can pity him almost as much as John MacDonald of the [artillery] who lies a few ft off.' The fact that he was German did not bother Henry in the slightest. ‘It is impossible to blame the individual for the sins of the nation … Those at the top make [wars] and profit by them, but the rank and file who bear the burden of it all – what do they get? Nothing.' Pip Blacker was still having nightmares about Treffry and his last mumbled words. His parents too had had about as much as they could stand. With Robin gone and Pip in danger they could not face going home to Vane Tower and had settled in Brittany while the war lasted. ‘This war is
not
going to end this year,' Pip assured them at the end of 1916. ‘Next spring or summer we will have more big offensives and more colossal losses.
It is useless to hope
.'

Although the Battle of the Somme ended officially in mid November, Douglas Haig wanted pressure sustained on the enemy. For the Allies, as always, the emphasis was on driving the Germans back from the territory they had occupied and over their own borders. Haig still coveted his Flanders offensive, and this was being planned for the summer, but General Nivelle, now commanding the French, had very different ideas. He began planning for a massive push down on the Aisne and the Chemin des Dames in April. For Haig this was happily removed from the usual French determination to ask for more and greater British attacks. However, Nivelle would need the British to take over some of his own trenches to free the men in them for his attack and he wanted a diversionary attack in the British sector. It may have been planned as a diversion, but the Battle of Arras would be a huge undertaking for the British Army.

The Germans by no means intended to be idle. They dreaded the wasteful attrition that had characterised 1916 on the Western Front. They began putting their heart and soul into developing defensive doctrine, coming up with the idea of a more flexible front line that would not require the sort of manpower to cling desperately to it that had cost them dearly during the past year.

Richard William Byrd Levett did not have the kind of constitution as a boy that would have convinced anyone at Eton that he was cut out for life as a soldier. Born in 1897, when he went up to Eton it was to join his cousin Jacinth, who was like a brother to him. He arrived in January 1911 but his inability to get involved on the playing fields did not impact on his happiness at school. He was fit enough throughout his time at Eton to involve himself in the OTC and he developed a burgeoning interest in photography, getting special permission to photograph the chapel and other restricted areas. History was a passion too and the Vice Provost gave him leave to rummage about in College Library. ‘Dick' was ecstatic when he found copies of two letters that Charles I wrote mentioning a distant ancestor, William Levett, a page who had ultimately stood on the scaffold next to the condemned king.