Blood and Thunder (6 page)

Rivy Grenfell was not with B Squadron that afternoon. He had been commandeered by de Lisle as a galloper after the morning reconnaissance with Francis. ‘A rather weary task on a heavy horse.' He had spent most of the day alone, riding about the Belgian countryside, under fire, looking for staff officers and passing along orders for the brigade. Searching for de Lisle, he rode into Audregnies and found it almost empty. He was told that his regiment had just charged. Then he was engulfed by a herd of wounded horses … ‘galloping everywhere … bullets and shells were falling like hailstones.'

With no target in sight, the charge began petering out and self-preservation began to take hold. As one trooper went cascading to the ground, his horse going from under him, he heard Campbell give the order for the mess of cavalrymen to right wheel away from the German guns. As he lay cowering on the floor, they began to change direction ‘like a flock of sheep'.

On the main road, a 1½mile north of Audregnies, a red-brick sugar factory with a tall chimney and a large yard dominated the vicinity. It appeared to be their best chance of cover, but as the cavalrymen approached their horses reared. The brick yard itself was bordered by a high fence and all about the property were more wire barriers. Bundled into a corner the horses crowded in and chaos ensued. The factory itself was now being used for target practice by the German artillery. ‘We simply galloped about like rabbits,' Francis recalled. ‘Men and horses falling in all directions.' In the intolerable heat of mid afternoon the squadron commanders of the Ninth began frantically to try to bring about some order. Any sort of formation had disintegrated completely and there was no telling Lancers from Dragoons. Behind a house where he had taken cover, Francis frantically tried to find a trumpeter to give some kind of signal, but there was nobody in sight. He began blowing on his officer's whistle whilst he ‘cursed with vehemence anybody he found out of place'.

Not everybody had made for the sugar factory. Some men, whether by providence or by choice, were dismounted and now they were attempting to keep the enemy at bay with rifles and the assistance of the artillery that continued to pound relentlessly, throwing shells high over their heads. Others had seized a cottage nearby and from there Dragoons were running out into the open to collect the wounded. Riffkins had hidden behind one of the isolated mounds of slag with Colonel Campbell, who instructed their crowd to hold the factory before riding off to find de Lisle. He could make no sense of it at all. ‘A few silly fire orders – nothing to shoot at – then the Colonel disappears – for three days.'

Lucas, now the senior officer on the scene, had also found ‘scanty cover' behind yet another pile of cinders and like Francis was attempting to organise the mixture of troops that had joined him. He took his ramshackle outfit and attempted to get them out of harm's way to a nearby quarry through yet another tornado of shrapnel. Francis was in a similar predicament. The house he had been using as shelter had been blown to pieces and now, cowering under an embankment, he began attempting to sort out his following. Recalling that on one occasion the regiment had been ordered to trot in South Africa under heavy fire he attempted to use the same method to keep the men together.

In the middle of the afternoon it looked to Campbell and Mullens as if their regiments had evaporated. Coming out of the cover of his embankment with the resilient band that included Lennie and Douglas, Francis Grenfell ran headlong into the 119th Battery of the Royal Field Artillery. They were in a terrible state. Outnumbered three to one, they had been engaged in a duel with German gunners and the results were telling. All about the guns lay the pulverised remains of more than a quarter of the men. Now, ordered to disengage, their Commanding Officer Major Alexander did not have enough men to get his guns out of harm's way. While they were discoursing on this predicament Francis fell victim to yet more shrapnel.

‘It felt as if a whip had hit me,' he wrote afterwards. Pain shot through his hand and his leg. One of A Squadron's officers, a young OE named ‘Bunny' Taylor-Whitehead, was on hand and got to work with a handkerchief to try to stem the blood spurting from the wound. Out came a copy of the Field Service Regulations. They leafed through the pages trying to find out how to apply a tourniquet. ‘Of course we found out how to stop blood in every other part of one's body except one's hand.' Eventually they got it together but by then things had begun to spin a little for Francis. He suddenly remembered that in the wallets of the horse he had inherited he had seen a flask of brandy, so he promptly emptied it. ‘I now felt like Jack Johnson instead of an old cripple.'

As well as being mauled by three batteries of German artillery, the 119th and their cavalry helpers were also under a sustained and intense tirade from machine guns and rifles, and Francis' first task, having volunteered to help, was to find a suitable place for them to extricate their guns to. Leaving everybody else under the embankment he mounted his borrowed horse and got on his way, riding out through the silent British guns alone, as the German's continued to shell with enthusiasm. He made it to safety, found a safe place to aim for and then had to ride back. It might have been the brandy talking but he was determined to retain his dignity in front of the troops. ‘It was necessary to go back through the inferno as slowly as possible, so as to pretend to the men that there was no danger and that the shells were more noisy than effective.'

Having informed Major Alexander that he had found a way out, Francis was told that the draught horses were gone. The only way to save the guns was to drag them out of the way by hand. Minus a decent amount of blood, ever so slightly influenced by alcohol and having just survived a game of chicken with the German artillery, Francis was full of confidence. Ordering his crowd to dismount in front of their horses he gave a rehashed version of the colonel's speech at Tidworth and asked for volunteers to help manoeuvre the guns to safety. Hands shot up, including Bunny, Lennie and Douglas. In all eleven officers and a host of men offered their hands. Francis glowed with pride. ‘Every single man and officer declared they were ready to go to what looked like certain destruction.'

Then they got to work. One by one they ran out into the storm of metal and started attempting to drag tons of heavy machinery out of enemy range. Slowly the guns had to be turned in the right direction and then the hauling began. In direct enemy range, one gun had to be dragged over the body of its fallen gunners. In all, Francis thought that they had managed to accomplish the task with the loss of only three or four men, although they had to return more than once and the enemy reached within 500 yards before the last gun was dragged to safety. He reflected on the actions of his men proudly. ‘It is on occasions like this that good discipline tells. The men were so wonderful and steady that words fail me.'

Francis held on, light headed until Lucas arrived and assumed command, and then he began to collapse. His friend was kind yet firm in talking him into the idea of getting into an ambulance. Francis' fingers were badly cut up and a piece of shrapnel had torn a lump out of his thigh. He had a bullet hole in his boot from the morning, another through his sleeve, he had been knocked over by a shell and his horse had been shot; ‘so no-one can say I had an idle day', he said drily. A French staff officer took pity on him and drove him to Bavay, where, as luck would have it, his good friend the Duke of Westminster was there to mollycoddle him. Rivy, having been ordered to rally what troops he could on the way south, soon arrived too. Dejectedly wondering what he could do to find news of his twin, he found that he was already in the town. Francis thought much more of his brother's exploits on that first day of the retreat than he did of his own. He told their friend John Buchan, author of
The 39 Steps
, that his twin's ‘solitary act of reconnaissance, all alone, was braver than anything he did; a raw civilian riding for hours under heavy fire on a tired horse on missions of vital importance'.

The nation disagreed. In August 1914, specialist publications about the war sprang up. One in particular took its coverage of the supposed exploits carried out by mounted troops to obsessive proportions. The charge led by the 9th Lancers, with all its romanticism and connotations of the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, was irresistible. With truth not getting in the way of a good story, artist's impressions of Francis, leading his men with resolve on his face, in point-blank range of a gun emblazoned the pictorial press. The Germans cower in the foreground, a trooper who had lost his horse charges the enemy on foot, sword in hand. As far as the British public were told, the enemy had captured the British guns and were hell bent on turning them on their owner's troops. Francis and his men stormed to the rescue. Starved of information about the chaotic retreat, John Buchan remembered (and not without irony) how in the confusion of those first weeks of war ‘the exploits of the Ninth emerged as a clear achievement on which the mind of the nation could seize and so comfort itself'.

For Francis, convalescing at his uncle's house in the knowledge that not only had none of those guns fallen into German hands but that he himself had not been within a few hundred yards of any concentration of enemy troops, it was embarrassing. Despite his arguable display of bravery, his only concern was his squadron and how they were faring in France. ‘I have never felt such a fool in my life,' he declared, by now aware that he had been nominated for a Victoria Cross, which baffled him. ‘After all, I only did what every other man and officer did who was with me.' Thanks to a ‘lot of rot' penned by ‘infernal correspondents' he was receiving fan mail and all kinds of exalted visitors. The king himself had stopped by, as had Mrs Asquith, who was thoughtful enough to ask after Rivy. There were fellow OEs: Prince Arthur of Connaught who sat with him for an hour and the legendary Field Marshal Lord Roberts, who had begun his own cavalry career lifetimes ago, a full decade before the Indian Mutiny. He badgered him for every last detail: who did they charge, how and with what aim? In his weakened state, all Francis could do was watch the clock, entertain well-wishers and take every ‘wild story' as it came. In France though, just as he feared, the war continued without him and the Ninth would suffer many more hardships before he managed to find his way back.

On 24 August, as darkness descended and rain began to fall, Lucas took charge of the tattered remains of the regiment. He fell back, taking a third of the Ninth's strength, including the Harvey brothers and Bunny Taylor-Whitehead, over the border into France and on to the town of Ruesnes. Other straggling collections of men were arriving in other little towns along the frontier, like Wargnies-le-Petit, where Colonel Campbell had found 100 more cavalrymen. The BEF had evaded von Kluck again, but to the survivors of the charge it seemed like a catastrophe. That evening, with the men scattered, it seemed as if two regiments had simply disintegrated. The 4th Dragoon Guards could only find seven of its officers and only eighty men had answered one roll call. Not until the end of the week, when the various contingents began collecting at St-Quentin, did it transpire that things were not at all as bad as they had seemed.

As it turned out, one single officer of the 9th Lancers had been killed that day, and it was Charlie Garstin. One late summer morning his mother was cutting out garments for soldiers at her dining-room table, surrounded by pins, patterns and fabric. The door opened and her friend George, ‘with
The Times
in his hand and his face working awkwardly', called her out of the room. ‘Mary,' he stammered, ‘Mary darling.' But he could not say it. He could only point to the obituary column with a trembling hand. Sir William made no contact with her and she died believing he had failed to tell her of Charlie's fate out of spite. In actual fact there had been some confusion as to what had happened to Charlie and the answers lay with a prisoner, which disrupted the flow of information.

Another officer of the 4th Dragoon Guards had crawled into a cowshed with a broken leg and found several other wounded men. Shortly afterwards a German officer appeared ‘with a tiny popgun of a pistol' which he kept trained on them as he inspected his new prisoners. More men were marched in whilst, as darkness set in, the Germans set fire to two haystacks and began throwing rifles and saddles into the blaze. ‘The merry popping of small-arm ammunition commenced', bullets whizzing in their direction. Their captors brought wine for them and danced about the burning haystacks like demented shadows to the sound of two accordions, ‘a weird sight in the fitful light'.

The wounded British men were ushered and carried to a convent in Audregnies. One officer was lying there several days later with some 200 other men when the local priest arrived at the window with an exhumed body. The villagers had buried a British officer in some haste and the father had decided that he ought to be properly identified. It was Charlie. The identification process was repeated for two Cheshire officers and then all three of them were conveyed to Audregnies churchyard.
1

Charlie Garstin was 20 years old when he charged at Audregnies. Rivy Grenfell had run into Colonel Campbell as he searched vainly that afternoon for Beau de Lisle. On the same fruitless mission they sat together. ‘He had been ordered to charge towards Quievrain,' Rivy recalled. ‘Why, he did not know, as there was an open space for about a mile and he had lost nearly all his regiment.' ‘Balaclava like,' the newspapers called it. If a futile action, with a ludicrous and unrealistic objective that the man who ordered it would try and wash his hands of responsibility for was what was meant by that, then it can be said to be true. That night the commanders of the Ninth and the 4th Dragoon Guards were seething with rage at the man who had issued the order that had seemingly cost them so many soldiers. When someone sought to cheer up Campbell by telling him that he had been nominated for a Victoria Cross he snapped. ‘I want my squadrons back,' he retorted, ‘not VCs or medals.' In his official write up, Beau de Lisle held firm to the view that he had merely told his regimental commanders that it ‘might be necessary' to charge. All of the evidence to the contrary, though, placed the responsibility for this botched footnote in the Great War in his hands; and with it too the death of Charles William North Garstin, his former sweetheart's only son.