Blood and Thunder (54 page)

A company of Scots Guards was meanwhile attempting to come up to meet them along the sunken road in a miserable drizzle. Two OEs, Colonel MacKenzie and Arthur Kinnaird, whose father had lifted the FA Cup as part of the same side as Marcus de Paravicinis, had edged up in a snowstorm the night before to try to get some understanding of the situation. Unfortunately the road proved not to be quite so ‘sunken' as they thought in some places and sloped uphill, giving the Germans in Fontaine a clear field of fire to scythe them down as they attempted to approach the village.

As they crawled towards Fontaine, Kinnaird's men were subjected to murderous machine-gun fire. Arthur was hit in the leg. As he attempted to turn around on the floor to try to escape he was hit again, this time in the back. One of his sergeants, a Glasgow policeman named Thomas McAulay, dragged him 400 yards to safety, fighting off two enemy soldiers as he went and clambering back up after being floored twice by concussion from nearby bursting shells. Attempts to get up to Fontaine cost his company all its officers and half its men. Only McAulay was left to lead them in beating off a German counter-attack. For his actions that day MacKenzie nominated Thomas McAulay for the Victoria Cross, which he was duly awarded. Despite McAulay's efforts, Arthur Kennard could not be saved and died in a nearby dugout. He was 32 years old.
3

Henry Dundas would consistently refer to the affair as the ‘Fontaine Massacre'. For all their efforts, the Guards were doomed to fail, just as Feilding had predicted. They simply did not have enough men to hold the village and, in the face of mounting counter-attacks, they were overrun and forced to withdraw to their starting line. By 29 November, when the division was withdrawn, they had chalked up over 1,000 casualties, including nearly forty officers. Waiting for them to the rear was a thank-you note from General John for their efforts. His own division had been battered before they too were finally pulled out of Bourlon Wood and the nearby village.

To all intents and purposes, the British attack on this sector was now over. They were expecting some sort of counter-attack in return, but little did they know that the Germans were planning a brutal, large-scale assault, battering both sides of the British salient that had formed in an attempt to cut it off.

As darkness fell on 29 November Marcus de Paravicini and the 11th King's Royal Rifles trudged up to relieve another battalion in the line near La Vacquerie. At 7 a.m. a magnificent din opened up to their right as the enemy came barrelling towards the British positions further south. The German counter-attack rolled like a breaking wave towards the battalion. The division next to them had been broken and men streamed back towards Gonnelieu. Marcus and his men were next. The artillery arrived first, cascading down all over the British front and severing communication lines. The Germans used high explosive, gas and smoke to screen their advance. Then came dozens of aeroplanes, almost skimming the ground they flew so low, unleashing torrents of machine-gun fire into panicking troops. Emerging out of the smoke at 8 a.m. came the infantry, breaking into the battalion's ranks from in front and behind, rifles trained on the fleeing British soldiers.

Marcus fled his battalion headquarters on his hands and knees with nothing but a revolver for protection. One of his riflemen followed close behind. They had made it some 20 yards when a low-flying enemy aeroplane came bearing down on them and opened fire. The rifleman screamed out in pain as he was hit in the leg. He looked up just in time to see Marcus' revolver shot out of his hand. He watched as the young major scrambled on a few more yards and threw himself into a shellhole. The King's Royal Rifles had been overrun. They had no choice but to fall back as lines and lines of German infantry descended upon them. Men with machine guns perched up on Welsh Ridge attempted to pin the enemy down but they too were overwhelmed. They removed parts from their guns and abandoned them.

Rifleman Field languished on the ground until the Germans rounded him up with other prisoners. Rumours abounded as to the fate of the young major. Field never saw him again and the only other account was from an unknown rifleman who claimed he had seen Marcus de Paravicini running from a support trench when he was shot down by a low-flying aeroplane. Marcus' family were still hounding everyone from the War Office to the Netherlands Legation in 1919, but the 22-year-old was never seen or heard from again
4
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The situation at the end of the day was critical. Marcus' division was without reserves or any artillery support. The German attack had advanced as far as 3 miles in places. Men of the Sherwood Foresters had been sent to help plug gaps and the 11th King's Royal Rifles cowered in the Hindenburg Line. It was imperative that men be found from somewhere to try to counter-attack. Eyes began to turn to the exhausted Guards Division, still catching their breath after their ‘massacre' at Fontaine-Notre-Dame.

Even before the Germans had launched their infantry assault on Marcus de Paravicini and his battalion, a telegram arrived at Guards Division HQ to say that the Germans were assaulting with great force and that they ought to be ready to move at a moment's notice. They had barely finished breakfast. They couldn't believe it was possible. It wasn't until the isolated khaki figures appearing, running over the hill, turned into a mob that the gravity of the situation began to sink in. Shells started to drop closer and closer to the camp.

Two hours later three brigades of Guards were stumbling about the front amidst conflicting orders whilst men streamed the other way, fleeing the onslaught. The 3rd Guards Brigade had been ordered to take back Gonnelieu. They advanced across the open ground and flung themselves bodily at the German defenders. Along with the arrival of tanks, the Guards action at Gonnelieu was instrumental in grinding the impetus out of the German counter-attack.

No less than twenty-four Etonians fell during the operations around Cambrai in the closing months of 1917. For OEs the year had seen mounting casualties, with name after name being read out in the chapel at school. Nobody understood this better than Patrick Shaw-Stewart.

He arrived home from Gallipoli completely spent. During 1915 he had lost Julian Grenfell and his brother Billy, as well as Charles Lister. His loneliness was compounded by being sent to Salonika to act as a liaison officer with the French Army. He was not at all impressed with the lack of activity on this front, especially when his own battalion, the Hood, had been sent into the thick of things on the Western Front. It gave him plenty of time to mourn his ever-decreasing circle of friends.

Having stuck at it for several months, Patrick became determined to escape Salonika and made more than one attempt. Sadly, as an intelligence officer he proved too intelligent and they didn't want to let him go. There he sat on his quiet front pushing pins into maps and stewing about his wasted energy. ‘Nothing,' he told Julian and Billy Grenfell's mother, ‘can conceal from me the fact that I am superfluous here.'

The best promise he could extract was that he could join a battalion in the east, not his own in France. ‘Being killed in France … in the Hood with my old friends is one thing: being killed chillily on the Struma after being pitchforked into God knows what Welsh Fusiliers or East Lancashire Regiment is quite another,' he sulked. Finally, having returned home sick at the beginning of 1917, Patrick managed to manipulate his way to France, arriving there in April. He even managed to convince the military authorities that he was fit for service, but not anywhere in the east where the climate would rekindle his supposed health issues.

In the aftermath of Cambrai the whole of the frost-covered Welsh Ridge had been put in the hands of the Royal Naval Division. There was no end in sight. The British Army was exhausted, depleted and depressed as 1917 came to a close. It felt to Patrick like death came daily. ‘I wonder if this war has been especially hard on my friends,' he had speculated as early as 1915, as Charles Lister lay dying. ‘John Manners … [George Fletcher], the other Fletcher, Julian and Billy.' The list went on, taking friends and academic rivals. Only acquaintances that he cared little for seemed able to escape the grim reaper.

Many believed that the dead had gone to a better place but Patrick didn't have such faith. He needed evidence and he had seen none. He was lonely and depressed, but he still displayed a doggedness about seeing the war through, albeit with none of the exuberance that had accompanied the first volunteers, him included, as they dived into uniform. ‘We had lost most of our old illusions,' wrote his friend Ronald Knox, who shared his pain as far as their Eton and Balliol friends were concerned. ‘The time had not yet come when we were to draw our breath and then sigh it out again in relief at the tidings of victory.'

When Raymond Asquith fell on the Somme in 1916 Patrick was crushed:

It makes me more inclined than anything that has happened yet to take off my boots and go to bed. When people like Julian died, you felt at least that they had enjoyed war, but Raymond! That graceful, elegant cynic, who spent his time before the war pulling Guardsmen's legs, to be killed in action in the Grenadiers, it is so utterly incongruous … that it was seems to make it almost the blackest thing yet – and for me personally there seems to be no man left now whom I care a brass button for, or he for me, except darling Edward.

Then came the final blow. Darling Edward, Edward Horner, fell on 21 November at Cambrai with the 18th Hussars. ‘I suppose it's the same for everyone,' Patrick surmised glumly, but it didn't make it any easier. ‘Every time I remember that nearly all my friends are dead, I take some form of imaginary morphia, and promise myself work, or love, or letters, or fall back on the comforting reflection that I may soon be dead myself. Wonderfully cheery that.'

By December Patrick had a company of the Hood under his command. In fact, the banker who had had to call on Julian Grenfell to be shown how to operate his Sam Browne belt was briefly in command of the battalion. ‘Lord bless my soul,' he exclaimed. Patrick thought some that had gone before him might roll over in their graves, but there was nobody else left. ‘It just shows what we are all reduced to nowadays,' he told his sister.

Nothing much had been occurring in their sector in the run up to Christmas, but on 29 December, as darkness fell, the Germans shelled them violently with gas. At dawn the next morning, Patrick was doing his rounds of the lines when the enemy put up a barrage again, smashing in trenches, sending dumps of ammunition sky high and destroying dugouts. Patrick was being accompanied by an artillery liaison officer, who urged him to send up an SOS rocket, but Patrick did not want to. He maintained that it was only a minor raid on another part of the line and that if he sent up an SOS everyone would think he was ‘windy'.

In fact, white-clad Germans, camouflaged against the snow, were about to emerge from the mist. Patrick would never see them. As the barrage continued a piece of shrapnel ripped off part of his earlobe. Blood spattered on to his face, ran down his forehead and into his eyes, obscuring his vision. The artillery officer was insistent that he go back and get himself fixed up, but Patrick was determined to finish his rounds. He had barely moved off when another piece of shrapnel flew up towards his face and killed him instantly.

The day before his death he had reiterated how worthless his own life seemed now that all the friends that he had loved were no longer with him. His prediction about joining them had been borne out. Patrick Shaw-Stewart joined Julian and Billy Grenfell, Charles Lister and Edward Horner on the ever-increasing list of casualties at Eton. The penultimate year of war had cost 205 OEs their lives.

The United States of America may have entered the conflict, and the blood shed at Passchendaele might have masked the chaos within the mutinous French ranks, but Russia had finally capitulated, embroiled in revolution. Germany might have looked as if she were staring into the void in 1917, but it was the Kaiser's men who looked to the last year of the war with hope. At the onset of 1918 they were utterly determined to crush Allied resistance and bring the Great War to a close.

Notes

  
1
  Ralph Vivian Babington was laid to rest at Ruisseau Farm Cemetery, Langemarck.

  
2
  Victor had previously declined the offer of a staff job. However, the Household Battalion was disbanded at the beginning of 1918 and so he went willingly to act as an advisor to General Sir Henry Wilson who had just been appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff and military advisor to the Prime Minister. He never married, but was a godfather to Elizabeth Taylor. He was killed in an air crash in 1943.

  
3
  His brother, Captain The Hon. Douglas Arthur Kinnaird, also an OE, had fallen in October 1914 with the battalion. He is buried at Godezonne Farm Cemetery.

  
4
  John Marcus de Paravicini was commemorated on the Cambrai Memorial along with 7,056 other men who vanished in November and early December 1917. Eleven of his fellow Old Etonians who also disappeared on the battlefield are remembered on the panels with him.

20

‘Shaking the Faith'

If the young Etonians on the Western Front thought that they had seen it all before the end of 1917, the final year of the Great War was to eclipse anything that they had yet witnessed. ‘The year of Our Lord 1918 was sensational and astonishing,' wrote Pip Blacker. The stagnant trench warfare that he and his fellow officers had survived thus far was about to be replaced by the drama of a war of movement, but as yet he noted an air of ‘staleness and apathy'.

As far as the men were concerned, they had done their bit. The French and British had earned the right to take a step back and ‘take it easy until 1919 or 1920 when the war was finished, mainly by the Americans'. There was no inkling amongst any of them that this would be the year in which the conflict would draw to a close. ‘It is easy today,' Pip wrote in the aftermath, ‘to forget how dubious the future looked till just before the end.'