Blood and Thunder (65 page)

The survivors had to try to build a life in the aftermath of a conflict that had entirely reshaped their consciousness and in many cases brought an abrupt end to a sheltered childhood. Victor Cazalet was one of a multitude of young men who now matriculated late at Oxford and Cambridge. It was a muted atmosphere, but they were all in it together. The nature of university life seemed trivial, juvenile and irrelevant given all that they had seen.

The feeling of uncertainty remained unsettling for those who had to return to work. The whole life experience for many young Etonians returning home was waging war. Oliver Lyttelton wanted to marry the daughter of a duke. ‘I had a few hundred a year and my pay and nothing else. I looked likely to revert to being in second-in-command of a company.' Promotion looked distant. ‘You could hardly get into the Guards' Club for officers.' He would embark on a political career and with Harold MacMillan would serve in Winston Churchill's cabinet during the Second World War. In 1957 the latter would become prime minister himself.

Aubrey Herbert ended the war operating as a liaison with the Italian army in Albania. He lost his sight completely not long after the conflict ended and was advised that having all his teeth extracted would help to cure his blindness. The operation resulted in blood poisoning and he died in 1923. He left a widow and four children. He was 43 years old.

When the war ended Ian Napier had flown some 200 hours, shot down one enemy aircraft in flames, put seven more on the ground, forced two to land on his side of the lines and shot down three out of control. He returned home and joined the family business in the first of many business ventures. He was twice married and fathered three sons. He died an old man, two months short of his eighty-second birthday in 1977.

Aside from those who fell at the front many Old Etonians had been maimed. Night flying in particular caused a constant stream of deaths but it was essential for the air defence of London from German raids. Philip Babington and Eustace Ralli were exact contemporaries at Eton and in May 1918 were practicing flying by night with the aid of a searchlight. The pair were involved in a tragic smash. Babington suffered ‘serious injuries' but, in the passenger seat, Ralli's back was broken. He spent over a year in hospital before he ultimately succumbed to his injuries at the RAF Hospital in October 1919. He was 21 years old.

Perhaps one of the saddest victims of all was David Stuart Barclay. Barclay served in Henry Dundas' battalion, arriving in 1916. A quiet boy, he was five days younger than Henry. His life was shattered on 15 September 1916 when he was struck in the face by a bullet as this final stage of the Battle of the Somme raged. His injuries were horrific. ‘Poor David Barclay is wounded very badly,' Henry told his parents. ‘Shot in the face somewhere he is blind in both eyes and his hand is very badly shattered
…
what a wicked thing this damned war is.' David survived, blinded and mutilated, for seven months before he finally weakened and slipped away at his home in Norfolk in April 1917. He was 20 years old.

But in many, the wounds were not visible: a generation of young men emotionally scarred and tormented by the horror that they had witnessed. Some Old Etonians would never come to terms with what the conflict had done to them. Reginald Mendel was just 18 when he left Eton in 1915 for the Royal Field Artillery. His family situation was complicated as far as the war was concerned. His father was a director of Harrods but of part-German descent. His mother was visibly distressed by the stigma of this Germanic connection. ‘Rex' as he was known, was at the front when his father died at the beginning of 1917. On 3 May he was wounded whilst walking through Arras when a shell burst nearby and threw up some paving stones. Rex was thrown to the ground, dazed and his lower abdomen and the top of his legs suffered crush injuries. He suffered in silence for a week before he delivered himself up as sick and during his recovery was working at the War Office. One morning at home, he got out his revolver, put it to his head and pulled the trigger.

His heartbroken mother wrote a frantic letter to the War Office, lest they think her boy was a coward. ‘Fear, through ill health of not getting back on active service preyed on his mind, with results as per certificate.' Rex's colonel seemed of a mind to try and ease her distress. ‘No one was keener to fight for his country than he was, and he did splendidly during the nine months he was out with me here – With such a brilliant career before him – I mourn his loss more deeply than I can possibly tell you in words, and feel as if I had lost a very dear and brave son.' The truth was though, that 20-year-old Rex could not bear the thought of going back to war.

One of his contemporaries in College, Charlie Pittar, had survived the last rush of the Guards towards Germany following Moyenville, including being gassed, and witnessed the armistice after his exploits of August 1918. Following his demobilisation he gained a nomination to follow his father into the Indian Civil Service and for two years he worked as a probationer at Queen's College, Oxford, whilst helping to teach classics and mark papers locally at the Dragon School, his old prep school. He was preparing to go off to India to begin his career but the war had robbed him of his ability to take part in sport, whether it be the effects of being gassed or the emotional strain brought on by shell shock and the loss of his friends, which manifested itself with persistent headaches, insomnia, dark moods and fits of depression.

One Sunday night in August 1921 Charlie bid his parents goodnight and went off to his room after supper. His mother popped up to see him. He was working and she asked him if he was busy. He waved her away. ‘Yes, I'm very busy.' Shortly before 8 a.m. the following morning his father went to his study. On the desk was a note from Charlie warning his father to be careful of gas upstairs. Rushing to his son's room he found that it was full of fumes. His 23-year-old son was dead in his bed, with a tube attached to a gas stove and the supply switched on. His body was cold.

‘I cannot ask you to forgive me for what I am going to do,' he had written in a note to his mother. ‘And I don't think you will ever realise my general state of mind. There seems to be a sort of cloud which oppresses me. Today I've been throughout in a most extraordinary state – a mixture between deep depression and wild excitement, and always this cloud.'

Eric Greer and Billy Congreve were just two newlywed OEs who died leaving pregnant widows. Both gave birth to baby girls. In 1919 Billy's best man, William Fraser, committed himself to helping to raise his friend's daughter and married Billy's widow. Eric Greer's daughter, Erica, was born at the beginning of 1918. In another tragic twist his young widow, Pam, would not live to see the end of the war. A victim of the influenza epidemic that ravaged Europe in 1918, it fell to Eric's parents to raise their little girl.

Parents who had lost their sons found a myriad of ways to come to terms with the void created by their deaths. Ralph Gamble's heartbroken father gave up his post in the Indian Civil Service, shattered by the loss of his only son. A workaholic, William Garstin, was to commemorate his boy Charlie in the best way that he knew how. He went to work. In 1917, with all of his knowledge of the East and his experience of public works, he was made a founding member of the Imperial War Graves Commission, and with it not only assumed responsibility for honouring Charlie's sacrifice but in part for that of every one of His Majesty's subjects who fell during the war.

At the beginning of 1918 Pip Blacker had spent a good deal of time with the father of one of his best friends at Eton. E.W. Hornung, author of the Raffles books about a gentleman thief, had lost his only son, Oscar, in 1915 and, as Pip put it, ‘reacted in rather a peculiar way'.
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He felt an overwhelming need to put himself as close to the front as possible, to share his son's experience. He had begun work for the YMCA which provided canteens for soldiers behind the lines.

E.W. based himself in Arras, but instead of establishing his canteen in as safe and comfortable place as he could find, as was the norm, he opened his ‘tea-totallers bar' close to the front line. This humble little abode was in fact a hole dug out of the side of a sunken road, with corrugated iron walls and a makeshift roof. There he dispensed hot, sweet tea in half a dozen battered enamel mugs with biscuits to passing soldiers. Word got around that he was a celebrity and, dressed in basic khaki, as the kettle steamed away he chatted with his beloved ‘customers' about their homes.

E.W. was a portly gentleman and he suffered greatly from asthma in the damp, cold conditions. However he appeared to revel in his ordeal. ‘The worse the hardship, the more he was pleased; the nearer he felt to Oscar, whose experience he was sharing.' Whenever his path crossed with his friend's father, Pip thought that E.W. appreciated greatly the chance to talk about his son and another of their friends, Bartle Frere, who had been killed in 1916.
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E.W. spent a night with them in January 1918 and Pip put him up on the bed of a fellow officer who had gone on leave. ‘Before going to sleep we talked about Oscar. Any new thing I could tell him, he said, was like a priceless jewel.' They talked about what they might do if they survived the war but Pip was unconvinced. ‘He supposed, he said, that he would go on writing, but I could see that he had misgivings. He had lost zest and seemed to have little to live for.'

For his part, the elder man revelled in every moment spent in their dugout and in the opportunity to talk for a prolonged time with someone who had known his Oscar so well. ‘He was now out here in his grave; but which of them was not?' Pip was the last one left and his safety caused E.W. no small amount of anxiety. ‘I lay awake listening to his even breathing, and prayed that he at least might survive the holocaust yet to come.' Pip believed that there was something stoic and heroic about the actions of this one grieving father:

The hardship to which he was subjecting himself during the long hours in his sunken road derived from his bereavment. He was honouring the memory of his son by giving the humblest service to those whose experiences came close to Oscar's.

Henry Dundas' family faced an uphill struggle to come to terms with the death of their precious boy. By the early 1920s his father and his eldest sister, Anne, had journeyed the length and breadth of the Western Front, visiting his grave at Boursies and looking out over the Canal du Nord. When his remains were transferred to Hermies Hill British Cemetery 2 miles away in 1925 his parents visited him every year until the outbreak of the Second World War. The inscription on his headstone matched that upon Ralph Gamble's 30 miles away: ‘I thank my God for every remembrance of you'. Seeing the front for himself brought his father some measure of comfort given that his child lay so far away from home. ‘I have seen myself hundreds of cemeteries,' he told the assembled crowd at the opening of the Slateford War Memorial. ‘From Ypres to Armentières and down to the Vimy Ridge: from Arras all round by Bapaume to Havrincourt and Cambrai: along the Hindenburg Line to St-Quentin, all round the region of the Somme and south as far as the forest of Villers-Cotterêts … where our men fell in the early days of the war. All these cemeteries are well cared for, and, though still uncompleted for the most part … they lie, officers and men side by side, symbolising the comradeship that was theirs.'

Henry's mother never recovered from the loss of her only son and the rest of her life was tinged with a bitterness that she would take to her grave. Her relationship with her daughters was coloured by the admission that, given the choice, she would have elected to keep him with her instead. Her hatred for the Germans never subsided. Every Sunday she attended St Martin's church in between Slateford and the Haymarket in Edinburgh. ‘She would frown and cough with disapproval should the rector ever be reckless enough to murmur from the pulpit some pious sentiments about forgiving our enemies.' She trained him to refer to the Germans as ‘the Boche' or ‘Huns' in his sermons and even claimed to have hit former Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin over the head with her umbrella in the mid 1930s over his failure to rearm.

When she passed away, some three decades after the battle on the banks of the Canal du Nord, Henry's mother left instructions that in her coffin should be placed a small flag he had made for Left Flank Company HQ on his final leave. Henry had hand-stitched one for each of his battalion's companies, believing that they would be a source of pride for the men.

His sisters idolised him for the rest of their lives. Anne carried in her handbag well into old age her brother's final letter, urging her to behave herself at her seventh boarding school after being expelled or having run away from all the others. She ensured that the annual commemoration for her brother appeared in
The Times
well into the 1990s when she herself died, making it the longest running of all such notices. Her greatest fear as an old lady was that when she passed away, so much time would have elapsed that she would not recognise Henry when she got to heaven.

In the spring of 1919 Eton's hierarchy invited thirty-one OE generals of the rank of major-general and above to visit the school so that they might show their appreciation. ‘Nowhere are [your] services more highly honoured and valued than at Eton, to which you are … and which is proud to number you amongst its sons.' A staggering 165 OEs reached the rank of brigadier-general and could not be accommodated, but eighteen exalted military figures were available and they arrived in late May to cluster together outside the chapel to have their photograph taken and to address their audience.

It fell to General Plumer, as the senior officer present, to give a speech worthy of the occasion. ‘We all of us realise that we are not here today as individuals,' he began. ‘We are here as representatives of the great army of Etonians who have, during the last four-and-a-half years upheld the honour of their school in the service of their country.'