Those Wild Wyndhams (48 page)

A month later, Bim was specially selected to serve at the Front, despite being just eighteen. Edward Grey was honest with Eddy Tennant: ‘The selection of Bimbo … is a great honour & compliment but a great trial for you & Pamela. There is no way out of the trial & I pray that all may be well.’
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The drumbeat was growing ever faster with George Vernon, Guy Wyndham’s elder son George, Julian and Billy Grenfell, Violet Rutland’s son John Manners and Charles Lister, son of the Ribblesdales, all among the recent dead. Bim left for France barely a week later, with a photograph of Pamela in his breast pocket. Less than a month after that, Mary suffered the same blow. She had stayed in London to be with Yvo, whose leave had been cancelled. In the late afternoon, Yvo, ‘dog-tired’, took himself to bed for a nap. Mary went to see Evelyn de Vesci for tea. When she got back to Cadogan Square at about 7, Yvo answered the door. Still in his ‘flame-coloured, Turkish’ dressing gown, his hair tousled with sleep, he held a scrap of paper in his hand. ‘I’ve got my warning,’ he said ‘in a voice tense with suppressed excitement’. All Mary could think was how young her son looked. She telephoned Evelyn. ‘Don’t let him out of your sight,’ said Evelyn, ‘not even for a moment.’
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The young officer: a charcoal of Bim in khaki, by John Singer Sargent.

Plans were made for a fleeting visit to Gosford, where the rest of the family were making a last visit before the house shut up for the duration of the war; that summer, Connor the agent had made it clear that this was the only way to meet death duties on Lord Wemyss’s estate, and that it was ‘out of the question’ to attempt ‘living in two houses’.
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The night that Mary and Yvo were due to leave, London was cast into confusion by a Zeppelin raid. Mary was dining with Arthur when ‘the row’ began. ‘I am responsible, and the guns are quite inadequate,’ said Arthur.
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Zeppelins were still an awesome and eerie novelty, their strange beauty illuminated by the copper glow cast across the sky by flaming buildings and the boom of the defensive guns. King’s Cross Station was pitch black and plunged into confusion as Mary waited for Yvo, who had been at the theatre with friends.
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They missed the sleeper, managing to get on a train that left at 4.55 a.m. Yvo slept on the train. Mary could not. ‘[H]e looked so white and still,’ she later recalled, ‘and though I said to myself, he is still safe, he is still alive and under my wing, yet all the time as I watched him sleeping so peacefully there lurked beneath the shallow safety of the moment a haunting dreadful fear, and the vision of him, lying stretched out cold and dead.’
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They were at Gosford for just hours – arriving late afternoon and leaving at eleven that night. The party was avid for details of the ‘Zep’ raid. Angela Forbes asked Yvo whether he had been scared. ‘Not a bit, after all why should one be presumptuous enough to imagine one would be killed?’ Angela thought the reply typical of Yvo: ‘he was born with the rare gift of seeing things in perspective’.
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That afternoon, Yvo went for a walk with Mary Charteris in the woods. The two were close as twins, and Yvo could speak to Mary more frankly than anyone. ‘You know I probably shan’t come back?’ he said. ‘Oh
don’t
say that!’ she replied. They both knew the odds
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– as everyone there did, and the atmosphere of forced gaiety could not conceal it. ‘Poor Bibs looked too desperately miserable, never taking her eyes off his face,’ said Cincie. That night she slept with her little sister in their mother’s bed.
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Recollecting Yvo’s brief visit Angela Forbes later spoke of the ‘Spartan’ courage of parents ‘who did nothing to thwart the enthusiasm of their boys’.
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It epitomizes how insensitive Angela could be. For, short of pulling strings to get them out of combat and into a staff position – which would be considered a dishonourable and deplorable dereliction of one’s patriotic duty – there was nothing these parents could do to stop their sons going.

Almost before Mary knew it, the day of Yvo’s departure came. His train was scheduled to leave at 8.30 a.m., and they had a hurried, early breakfast at Cadogan Square, before making their way through the crisp autumn morning to Charing Cross. The station was a scrum, packed with English and Belgian soldiers, nurses in their starched white uniforms, luggage underfoot, and friends and family hanging over barriers to see their loved ones off. There Guy Charteris joined them, and friends of Yvo’s, including the ‘hell-kitten’ and Coterie member Nancy Cunard. Yvo’s kitbag was stuffed so full that they had had to stand on it to squash it all in, and his mess-tin was crammed with coffee, sugar and tea. In the mêlée, Mary spotted a doctor she knew. ‘I flew to him and said “Yvo is here,”’ she recalled. ‘Dr. Atkyns spoke most kindly and said I was to tell Yvo to go to him if he was ill or if he wanted anything.’
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Mary was entrusting her tall fair son, still just eighteen, to the care of anyone she could find. Just before Yvo stepped up into the carriage, ‘he took out of his pocket the grenade [the ornamental badge worn by the Grenadiers] off his uniform, which was taken off when the less conspicuous ones were put on, and thrust it into my hand’.

Mary stood among the waving throng, her arms hanging by her sides, the grenade clutched in her hand, and watched the train move slowly off amid clouds of steam. As the train picked up pace, the other officers in Yvo’s carriage crowded to the windows to wave goodbye. For a moment Yvo was lost from sight. Then, wrote Mary, ‘Yvo leapt high into the air,’ allowing Mary ‘one more last glimpse of his beloved face’.
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Madeline Wyndham spent the war shuttling between Clouds, Stanway, Babraham and Wilsford to stay with her four surviving children; ‘the anxiety is almost more than I sometimes
can bear …
all
those
that I love best in the world Mary, Guy, Madeline & Pamela
all
&
each
one on the
rack
of anxiety & of
torture of heart & mind
…,’ she wrote to Wilfrid Blunt in October 1915, shortly after Yvo’s departure.
¹
That spring, Mary had visited Clouds, arriving with Guy Wyndham to find their mother ‘waiting in the dusky hall; her darling eyes as big as an owl’s with anxiety. Two telegrams lay waiting, she had watched them for hours without daring to open them, they were of no importance but I realized from the gulp in Guy’s throat, after he had read them, what a strain it is nowadays to get a telegram.’
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Half a century later and in a different world, Tommy Lascelles, a Coterie member who considered the Charteris and Tennant families ‘the salt of my earth’,
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wrote a cautionary note to his grandsons:
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If you read any of my war letters, you may feel that it wasn’t as bad as it has been painted. Don’t get that idea. In our letters, most of us deliberately omitted references to the many horrors and cruelties of war – to the dreadful sights one saw, to the hideous discomforts one had to endure, and the never-ending pain of the casualty lists. Such things were, obviously, better not talked about to friends who understood them well enough; but they were there all right. So in letters home, one tried to recount only the lighter happenings, which, thank God, were there too.
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To Yvo and Bim, war at first still did seem really like a great game. Yvo wrote to his family of having ‘one’s legs swung onwards by a thousand singing men’ on night marches, and forays under darkness across no man’s land to look at the German trenches returning with puttees torn from the barbed wire.
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He joked that, like a child waiting for Christmas, he could not wait for the cold weather to require him to use his new waterproof kit. He met up with Bim for ‘tea’, and the cousins compared notes on their experiences thus far, enjoying the contents of the hampers from Fortnum & Mason (‘the soldiers’ twin saints’, said Bim) that Pamela sent her son along with almost daily letters.
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For the first month in France, Bim, known to his men as ‘the Boy Wonder’, was well behind the lines of combat, digging trenches and learning how to set traps out of barbed wire. ‘It is rather fun making these entanglements and imagining the Germans coming along in the dark and falling over these things and starting to shout whereupon you immediately send up a flare … and turn a machine gun on to them as they struggle in the wire. It sounds cruel, but it is War,’ he wrote to his thirteen-year-old brother David in September.
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Yvo likened war to a fairground. The German rockets were ‘as good as any Roman Candles I have seen on the 4th of June’, he said.
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But it was a grotesque hall of mirrors that he evoked when he wrote to Cynthia from the ruins of Vermelles after a three-day stint in the trenches near Loos. A shell had landed on his billet that morning, almost burying him with falling earth and brickwork; and the town itself was little more than rubble. ‘I think one of the effects of this war will be that people will give up their feelings for ruins, qua ruins … there will be no more parties to Wardour Castle from Clouds,’ he predicted. He had a good mind to buy up the whole town and turn it into an amusement park like London’s White City: ‘with flying-boats from the ruined shaft-heads – a maze made out of the trenches and rifle-ranges with dummy Huns peeping from the windows and ruined walls – shells filled with chocolate bursting at intervals throughout the grounds. I shall lay the suggestion before George [Gordon] Moore.’
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The devastation of the landscape had shocked Charlie Adeane when he visited France that summer in his capacity as Honorary Treasurer of the Royal Agricultural Society, investigating how agriculture in war-ravaged areas might be restored. The blasted landscape was even more desolate than he had anticipated. What shells had failed to bring to rubble, the Germans had burnt. Charlie found villages deserted, only a few survivors living underground or huddled in the corners of a ruin. ‘The marvel is that cultivation should be carried on,’ he said, describing the sight of old men, women and children stoically loading carts and driving reapers through fields in which ‘the soldiers’ red kepis [caps] hang on wooden crosses … where they fell, and show like red poppies above the corn’. In a sun-bleached landscape, Charlie found himself outside a small church, almost the only building left standing, listening to the lusty singing of a congregation of French soldiers within. The service ended, the men streamed out, surrounding Charlie and his companions, while the shout rang out ‘Mort aux Boches!’
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The trenches were still worse. Trench life was ‘an exact inversion of what is natural to man,’ said Yvo.
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Men lived underground, worked through the night, and slept, with interruptions for meals, at what intervals they could during the day.
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Their hours were punctuated by the sickening boom of shellfire (‘an incomparably dreary sound, rather human – as though it loathed its mission’) and the sinister death-rattle of machine guns.
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Yvo, who turned nineteen while he was at the Front, was a platoon commander, the lowest officer’s rank. He, like most, had already grasped the disparity between the shallow, stinking, swampy Allied trenches and those of the enemy. ‘The Germans have dug-outs 27 feet deep, with a long periscope going up the trench with a machine-gun run up and down on a winch and fired by means of a periscope at the bottom (at least so they tell me), so they don’t stand to lose many men, even in a bombardment,’ he told Cincie. He had also grasped the essential futility of trench warfare. ‘I don’t see that there is any military advantage in the line being a mile nearer Berlin, unless a gap is made through which troops can be poured to stop the enemy establishing himself in a second line,’ he said.
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‘This war … seems weary of its own melodrama and does not know how to give up.’
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