Gladys’ aggressive optimism was matched in dining rooms and kitchens, on buses and trains, in offices, stable yards and cornfields throughout the country on that morning of August 5th. The Foreign Secretary’s pledge to stand by France and Belgium united all political factions; and it was clear to all that the German bully needed a lesson that only Britain and the united forces of the Empire could teach him. War to the British was something dashing involving scarlet uniforms and gallant cavalry brigades – nothing that could last; and it was widely held that by autumn or Christmas at the very latest, the whole thing would be over, with the Union Jack flying triumphantly from some strategic flagpole in Berlin and the pattern of life elsewhere returned to normal.
The Navy and Regular Army were already mobilised. It was announced that, including Reservists and Territorials, there’d be six hundred thousand men under arms within a week; and when Lord Kitchener called for an additional one hundred thousand unmarried volunteers of between the ages of eighteen and thirty, the urban recruiting offices were overwhelmed with young men eager to prove their fighting worth before the war was over.
In the chalk hills of Sussex and across vast tracts of rural England where August still meant harvest first and foremost, the call to arms was less enthusiastically received. The march of the seasons was set to an older more compelling rhythm, and it was to be a demanding season that year with unusually heavy crops and changeable weather mid-month. But many enlisted, nonetheless. Several families in Sellington had sons in Newhaven or Brighton who’d responded to Kitchener’s beckoning finger – and it was fortunate for Ned that of the ten men in Bury employ, only two were strictly eligible for the New Army. The foreman, Shad Caldwell, was married and well over age. The same applied to Bat and Zachy Cheal and the groom, Henshaw. Dan Goodworth was the same age as Ned himself, both now thirty-one; and although the youngsters, Jem and Shaver Tinsley and the stable boy, Warry Hurst, were desperate to join the colours, none of them would be eighteen for at least another year.
Ned thought the whole thing was likely to prove a flash in the pan in any case. Everyone had long known that war with Germany was possible, or even inevitable at some stage. But despite his father’s predictions for a long engagement, Ned was still convinced that the powers-that-be would extract themselves by diplomatic means from an almighty conflict no one could afford. So when Jake Armiger and Stumpy Pyecroft, the two eligible Bury men, began to talk of enlisting, he’d done his best to talk them out of it.
‘The way things are going, old Kitchener will have his hundred thousand before they’ve time to kit you two out in uniform,’ he told them. ‘So why not just sit on the fence for a bit while things are sorted out? There’ll be plenty of time later if they still need volunteers – and the harvest isn’t going to wait while they’re recruiting.’
Little Stumpy, who hated upsets as much as Ned himself did, shifted his weight from one foot to the other blinking nervously. But Armiger was made of sterner stuff. The way he saw it, not even a Sussex Ashby could dictate to a Sellington man on matters of conscience, and pushed his cap back off his face to make that clear ‘That’s as mebbe, Mus Ned, but ’tain’t what they’re askin’ is it? Wars want men to fight ’em, there’s no gainsayin’ that; an’ the more the merrier, I reckon.’
Poor Stumpy nodded his agreement. But if Ned felt sorry for him then, he felt a good deal more so a day later, when he’d come back to say they had rejected him for being too short. Admittedly he stood little more than five feet out of his boots. But Stumpy was broad with it, and despite his name, no one who knew him had ever doubted his physical capability.
‘Wouldn’ take me, Mus Ned,’ he said with a brave attempt at a smile. ‘Man says ’t’were just as well as I’d more’n likely be needed on the land, what with Jake enlistin’ an’ all. An’ I says if they go an’ lose the bleddy war without me, they’ll only ’ave theirselves to blame!’
In fact the harvest hadn’t proved a problem, despite the loss of hands and unusually heavy yields. The weather settled, and two lads from the village made up for Armiger, with Helen shocking-up or acting standfast for the horses, and Meriel in corduroy trousers and an old shirt of Ned’s driving the second waggon. The Military Remount Service had already requisitioned The Bury’s hunters and carriage horses at a price forty pounds apiece including tack. But they’d left the old cob, Archie, for carriage duty and the heavy teams for farm work.
Up at the house, Margaret Ashby voluntarily sacrificed her ‘peace hour’ to form a ladies’ sewing circle, making dressing gowns and warm pyjamas for the troops; and Ned’s father, Walter, left his library to join the Voluntary Home Defence Corps, assisting local coastguards with patrols. Down the coast at Newhaven, cross-Channel ferries were converted into troop carriers and auxiliary warships, and the port itself entrusted with sea-transport of stores and ammunition. In camps up on the downs near Seaford raw troops were trained in every aspect of infantry warfare – and permitted to electrify the prim resort with mass nude bathing from its beaches. In the wake of the shocking news that Liège had fallen to the enemy, a flood of homeless Flemish refugees had descended on hotels and boarding houses in Eastbourne and Brighton and other large seaside resorts. Everywhere committees and subcommittees sprouted like mushrooms at the end of a wet summer; a War Refugees Committee, a Committee for Red Cross Supplies, War Savings and War Distress Fund committees – and the euphemistically named ‘Emergency Committee’, charged with preparations for a German landing on the Sussex coast.
Daily newspaper reports of events across the Channel were uncertain and confusing. Accounts of Belgium’s heroic defence made each engagement sound successful; and yet the German host continued to advance.
The Sellington Sheep Fair had always marked a high-point in the farming calendar; and this year assumed a new importance, in view of the Government’s demands for increased food production. For the weeks before the event, Helen Ashby had been busy producing Useful and Fancy Work for the traditional Bury bric-à-brac stall, working with clumsy persistence in the mediums of pipe-cleaners, seashells, crochet, lacquered fir cones and passé-partout. Up in the village the cottagers were also hard at work. Drunken cabbages were staked upright, yellowing onion tops combed into line, curtains laundered, windows cleaned and polished, and every item on the shelves of Pilbeam’s Post Office and Stores laboriously dusted and replaced. At the Lamb Inn a special consignment of Tipper Ale was ordered well in advance from the brewery at Newhaven for the greatest influx of the drinking year; and down in Sellington Meadow the area laid off for the cricket pitch was freshly mown and rolled.
One way or another most of the smaller village fairs had fallen by the wayside in recent decades. Less land under the plough had meant less folding and fewer sheep on the hills, while cheap New Zealand lamb and rail access to the great sheep fairs of Lewes and Chichester had made cross-country droving less worthwhile. But the fair at Sellington survived. In the days of Ned’s great-grandfather, Jonas, it had been a purely local event; a time at the end of the shepherd’s year for the eastern downland flockmasters to exchange rams, cull surplus ewes and sell off store tegs for fattening. But the coming of the railways in the eighteen forties had brought new buyers for Southdown stores from the big arable farms to the north and west – and Sellington’s position at a junction of chalk ridgeways that linked it with the railway yards of Eastbourne, Polegate and Seaford ensured not only its survival, but its expansion.
‘Waste o’ bleddy time if you ask me, Mus Ned,’ Bat muttered glumly as he surveyed a pen of square-trimmed wether tegs with an artist’s appreciative eye. ‘Bloomin’ furriners can’t tell the back end from the front side anyways.’
‘Which isn’t too surprising after what you’ve been doing to them,’ Ned told him as he crossed the shearing yard with a new batch of wattles. ‘But if they’ll pay us thirty shillings for a wether, they can take him backside forwards and you won’t hear me complaining!’
But Bat had moved on to the final stage of the beautification process, and wasn’t listening. ‘Now than, Jem m’boy, look slippy an’ fetch us up the waterin’ pot an’ raddle shaker,’ he commanded with the air of a head chef calling for the Hollandaise, ‘an’ let’s us see what a bit o’colour bloom’ll do for matchin’ ’em up.
‘That’s it, boy,’ he added when Jem returned with a large zinc-plated watering can and a perforated tin canister like a giant pepper pot. ‘Rain first, then sunshine.’
With which he’d hitched his smock to climb into the lamb pens, watering the beasts like vegetables to right and to left then dusting them all liberally from the red shaker. ‘If there’s one thing that improves an or’nary ol’ wether,’ he said, ’tis colour. Puts a shillin’ on the price for sure.’ And he whistled a flat little tune to himself through his beard, as he massaged the red ochre dye into the fleeces, up his own arms and down the homespun skirt of his working smock. Some years he used a yellow shaker to dye the lambs a bright canary, but on the whole he preferred the deeper, richer tones of the raddle.
While old Vine was trimming and colouring the last of the Bury store lambs in the shearing yard, Ned and the others were putting the final touches to the parallel ranks of sheep pens in the meadow. The six long ranges of wattle enclosures were erected back-to-back in the traditional way, with supporting spines of chestnut stakes and open access lanes between each double row. But as ever, there was scope for argument over what to allocate to rams and ewes, and which pens to save for Harding, Gilbert, Paul and other favoured local flockmasters – and at the end of a hot afternoon of soul-searching and head-scratching, Ned was desperate for any change of topic – even to discuss the war.
‘Has anyone heard the latest from Belgium?’ he said, reaching for another pitch-bar to knock into the chalky soil. ‘I haven’t seen the papers yet. Did your missus hear anything at lunchtime, Shad?’
‘Not a lot.’ Shad Caldwell was wiring name signs to the gates of the far-side pens with a look of professional gloom on his long face. ‘She knows I ain’t so terrible wrapped up in this ’ere war.’
‘You told me Missus Pilbeam ’ad the numbers from the postboy, you ol’ bugger.’ Dan Goodworth had appeared from the direction of the milking shed, with Stumpy at his heels. ‘Another five ’undred wounded, weren’t it, come in yesterday?’
‘Well what if it were? ’Taint nothin’ ter go cluck over is it? We ’ad three ’undred more’n that the day ’afore.’
‘Thirteen hundred in two days?’ Ned’s eyes met Goodworth’s with a question, as they had so often in their childhood when Danny took the lead. ‘They must have come from…?’
‘Mons,’ Dan confirmed without a flicker. ‘Rare ol’ losses for our boys up there, Mus Ned, an’many more to come. Kitchener’s askin’ for another ‘undred thousand, ain’t ’e, just to stop the gaps. Some say ’e’ll ’ave half a million of us ’fore ’e’s through.’
‘My bible oath, ye don’t say so! ’Arf a million for sure?’
But if Stumpy was astonished, Shad Caldwell remained unimpressed. ‘Ye may be sure our boys ’ave got them off-scourin’ Germins by the bollocks,’ he said, wiring up another sign. ‘They can’t ’ardly ’ope to best our Empire, can they Mus Ned? An’ anyways ’t’aint goin’ to rain tomorrer – so there’s a comfort, men.’
On the morning of the fair a thin grey mist crept up the valley from the sea, to confirm Shad’s forecast of a fine day in prospect. Up in the village, every cottage step shone chalky-white in the first thin rays of sun. Every cottage gate stood firmly latched against ovine invaders. Down in the meadow, the striped poles and dappled horses of Harris’s steam-driven merry-go-round reared though the swirling ground mist – and in the warm fug of the Bury milking shed, alternating milk streams fizzed and frothed in waltz time to Dan Goodworth’s bass rendition of ‘After the Ball’.
On his way down from the house, Ned could already smell the odour of warm wool that would soon fill the valley; a sovereign cure, some said, for every kind of ailment. Bat’s rusty wether lambs already occupied the five pens nearest the farm. But most stood empty still and waiting.
‘Hee-ar! Hee-arr!’ The first incoming flock announced itself as a muffled echo from somewhere in the mist above them, and within minutes the business of the day had started. The mist rose like a curtain to reveal half a dozen tightly-knit little flocks, advancing across the downs to Sellington by ridges and sheere-ways which had borne sheep since the Bronze Age, in times when wolves were still a threat. Between the flocks the racing shadows of the dogs were visible, circling to keep them apart; and as they descended from all sides, the air was filled with shouts and whistles, clouds of dust and the drumming of a multitude of little hooves.
In Sellington most deals were struck in the old-fashioned way, beginning with pipe-chewing and visits to the pens to feel the backs and view the teeth; progressing through a pantomime of cap-adjustments and appeals to heaven, and ending with a hearty handshake. And if by noon a few young rams and the odd pen of lambs remained unsold, the great majority found buyers. But long before the last hard bargain was driven in the pens, a brisk trade in crooks and sheep bells and gypsy remedies for foot-rot had been established on the far side of the cricket pitch; while for those who saw a country fair as an excuse for merriment, there were the usual coconut shies and catchpenny stalls – and the mechanical organ of the merry-go-round thumping out ‘Oh, oh Antonio!’ for all that it was worth.
All the Useful and not a little of the Fancy bric-à-brac stall had quickly sold, and Meriel had just decided to abandon Helen to what was obviously a sinking ship, when she caught sight of her husband on his way up from the sheep pens, to join the boys and Betty for the Punch and Judy show.
‘Give me sixpence out of the War Distress Fund,’ she demanded on a sudden impulse. ‘Come on Helly, they can certainly afford it.’ And she twitched the sixpenny bit from Helen’s doubtful fingers to make a beeline for the ice cream float.
By the time she reached them with the penny ices dripping from her hands, Ned had little Robbie hoisted on his shoulder for a better view. She watched them chuckling together at the puppets; both so flushed and handsome, so ridiculously alike, with Patrick clinging to his father’s sleeve and laughing too – her children, never dearer to her than when they were with their father; her menfolk!
‘Here you are, chickabiddies. Ice creams!’ she called out to them as casually as the pride and the happiness inside her would allow. ‘One for Daddy too and one for Betty; and who’s going to run the other down to Auntie Helly on the bric-à-brac – Patrick?’
Major Rab Attwood was nobody’s fool when it came to recruitment. In the chance offer of motor transport from the rally at Hove back to his barracks at Colchester, he recognised an opportunity that was too good to miss, and planned his route with the foresight of an experienced strategist – Seaford by eight to intercept the clean-collar men on their way to work, at the station and all along the bus route – Sellington Sheep Fair at noon for a ready-made audience of brawny shepherds and men of the soil – Eastbourne at three to catch the holidaymakers on the promenade and confront them from the Grand Parade bandstand – on to Bexhill for another captive audience amongst the pierrots of the Kursaal Pavilion; then another early start in the morning for more clean-collar workers before proceeding to St Leonards and Hastings and turning inland through Kent.
‘Dash; enthusiasm; initiative.’ Attwood repeated to himself the three key-words that he employed so often with subordinates. ‘And if the Battalion isn’t a hundred men the better by this time tomorrow, then by George I’m not the man I think I am.’ He allowed himself a bristly little smile at the thought of such unlikelihood.
Seaford, he had to say, had been something of a disappointment, with women by far outnumbering men on the pavements and the railway platform, and no kind of an audience to get one’s teeth into. He’d felt sure that the combination of his rank and experience, the substance of his message and his friend Butterwick’s chauffeur-driven Belsize motor would prove effective with recruits. But the patriotic ladies of the town had been there before him, awarding white feathers for cowardice to every able-bodied man they could find out of uniform. The few hardened cases that Attwood ran to earth were stubbornly entrenched in their resistance to appeals to honour and to duty. When pressed, a dozen or so had said they would consider enlisting. But when it came down to it he could only feel confident of one sure recruit in Seaford – a poor stick whose wife had listened intently to all the Major had to say, before announcing her determination not only to part with her Alfred, but to escort him to the Recruiting Office there and then.
From Sellington, however, Attwood had reason to expect a good deal more. As the Belsize chugged down through the village and out into the open valley, he’d run a professional eye over the gaily dressed crowds around the cricket pitch and noted with approval that almost half of them were men – men in archaic smocks and gaberdines and unbleached drill jackets; men in corduroys and salt-and-pepper tweed; a pair of muscular wrestlers stripped to the waist; cheapjacks, booth-men, paper windmill hucksters with impudent polka-dot hats and floral waistcoats – rude, healthy looking fellows, every man jack of ’em, and a good many quite respectably young.
‘By jove,’ the Major thought, ‘they may be undisciplined bucolics now, but the material’s there right enough. Get them into uniform and give ’em a fortnight at the Eastern Division in Colchester with a first rate Sar’ Major to lick ’em into shape, and we’ll have a platoon of soldiers out of that field; damned if we don’t.’
The moment that the Belsize spluttered to a halt, the Colour Sergeant jumped smartly down to distribute the broadsheets they’d had reprinted from the Battalion’s newspaper advertisement.
APPEAL. 7TH SERVICE BATTALION, THE ROYAL SUSSEX REGIMENT.
This battalion of Lord Kitchener’s Second Expeditionary Force of 100,000 is forming at Colchester, and is SHORT OF MEN.
Major R. B. Attwood appeals to ALL SUSSEX MEN, including ex-N.C.O.s and Soldiers, to COME FORWARD NOW WITHOUT DELAY to join the Battalion and fill the ranks with men of Sussex, who will sustain the honour of the Regiment abroad.
The age limit for enlistment has been extended from nineteen to thirty-five (or in the case of ex-soldiers, forty-five). Height 5’3’ and upwards, chest 34’ at least.
Report at the nearest Recruiting Office, and INSIST ON SERVING IN THE 7TH BATTALION FOR THE PERIOD OF THE WAR.
GOD SAVE THE KING!
Ned had a leaflet thrust into his hand by the pugnacious little sergeant before he could perform his duty as an Ashby to receive the Military in a proper manner. But by then the Major had already slipped Fred Harris a half-sovereign to stop the merry-go-round, and stepped up to address the crowd.
‘Men of Sussex – will you answer your country’s call?’
Ned felt Patrick’s sticky little hand jerk in his at the raw challenge of the man’s voice, and smiled down at his son in reassurance. The words were as intrusive and unwelcome as the corseted, khaki figure who pronounced them, and every bit as pompous. Although it occurred to Ned as he listened, that the Major in his uniform was as much a puppet in his way as the policeman in the Punch and Judy show he’d just been watching. His speech was very obviously a formula, already tried and tested and set to the authorised refrain of the military Pied Piper.
‘It may be that many of you here do not fully understand the nature of that call, and it is my purpose and duty to enlighten you. I have no doubt that all you able-bodied men would have been ready to enlist before this, had you felt that England herself was in danger. But gentlemen, I am here today to assure you that England is in the most perilous danger, together with all she stands for in the way of liberty, peace and honour. Do not deceive yourselves into thinking that we are in for a swift or an easy victory over the Hun. I can tell you at this very moment our Empire is poised on the brink of the greatest war in the history of the world – and it is for us gentlemen, for you and me, to decide its outcome.
‘It was my privilege on Sunday last to attend at Hove Town Hall the first of many great recruitment rallies that are to be held in the months to come. I should like to quote to you from the speech that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made on that occasion. “The enemy,” he said, “is almost within sight of our shores. We have had to change the base of operations, and there is a possibility of disaster.” A possibility of disaster, gentlemen! Perhaps those words will seem more real to you if I tell you that you are in fact less distant from the Flanders battlefield here in Sellington than you are from your own English cities of Plymouth and of Derby!’
The Major paused for his words to take effect, standing dramatically with one hand resting on the arched neck of a merry-go-round horse, his pale boiled-gooseberry eyes inviting a reaction. But there were no oohs and ahs. The farmers and stall-holders in Sellington Meadow were regarded him in unwinking silence to a man. But if the speaker himself was disappointed, Ned had seen that closed-up look on the faces of too many interested buyers at too many cattle auctions and sheep fairs to be deceived. He had their full attention.
‘Business As Usual might be a good maxim for you farmers to adopt,’ the Major continued on a more abrasive note, ‘but Happiness As Usual is something we no longer have a right to expect – not when our gallant boys are returning wounded to our shores, anxious only to be well enough to rejoin their comrades at the Front. Lord Kitchener himself has spoken of a long and arduous struggle, and of sacrifices beyond any that have been demanded of us in the past. I am not here, gentlemen, to offer you an easy choice. I’m here to take you from your families and from the peace of these pleasant hills – to take you to a place where men are – to set you a task which will demand sacrifices of you and your loved ones, and all the selfless courage and endurance that you have. For I tell you that no price is too high to pay when honour and freedom are at stake.’
‘Rot,’ Meriel declared with one eye on her husband’s profile. ‘Don’t listen to him, Nog. He’s talking rot, you know he is!’
‘We are not a militaristic people like the Prussians who enjoy fighting for its own sake,’ the Major insisted. ‘But when it’s a question of fighting a bully to preserve our own decent way of life, then by God we are the hardest folk on earth to beat! We hate war, and that’s the very reason we must fight. For if we win – and make no mistake, gentlemen, we shall win if we set our minds to it – the finest of our politicians are pledged to see to it that there will be no more war! This sacrifice of ours will be the sacrifice to end them all. Yesterday and the day before, each day thirty thousand valiant Englishmen have rallied to their country’s call. But we need more men still for all the days to come.
‘So step forward, step up, men of Sussex,’ the Major cried, unconsciously adopting the fairground cheapjack’s pitch. ‘Step up and answer that call! YOUR KING AND COUNTRY NEED YOU NOW! ’
‘Yes I daresay they do,’ said Meriel as the merry-go-round spun back into motion and ‘Antonio’ once more reverberated through the valley. ‘But if you’re thinking of making the sacrifice to end them all, Ned Ashby, you can think again!’
She pounded her palm with a small, clenched fist to hammer at the fear inside her. ‘Because this place and your own family need you – I need you, much more, a damn sight more than they do!’