The onset of the First World War was greeted with enormous enthusiasm all over Europe, like a particularly exciting sporting fixture with religious undertones. As the midnight ultimatum rolled closer, Wheatley was in front of Buckingham Palace with Cecil Cross and Douglas Sharp. They were part of a great crowd that spread back down the Mall towards Charing Cross. Taxis were caught in the crowd, and people climbed on their roofs to wave Union Jacks. Everybody sang ‘Rule Britannia!’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, and ‘For Auld Lang Syne’.
Drawn out by repeated renderings of ‘God Save The King’, the King and Queen came out on to the balcony and the crowd reached fever pitch, with frantic cheering and repeated singing of the National Anthem. The King and Queen went inside, but the undiminished noise of the crowd left them little alternative but to come out again, as if for an encore.
Wheatley, of all people, should have had misgivings about the war. Germans had been kind to him, he had loved them, and he had had close German friends even while he was in England. But he was as caught up in it as the rest. His enthusiasm was inexplicable, he wrote later; but everyone in the crowd was “completely war-mad … swayed by that most terrible of all evils – mob psychology.”
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The excitement died down over the next few days, to be replaced by anxiety among the middle classes. There were fears of a run on the banks, and worries about trade. Wheatley’s father had built up a thriving business as the agent for a German mineral water called Moselaris (the Wheatley letterhead at this period proclaims ‘Moselaris Sparkling Natural Table Water’ in a flourish of red lettering). All that was ruined.
Lord Kitchener’s face was now appearing on recruiting posters, pointing a finger – aligned with his intense expressionless stare – straight at the viewer, above the words ‘Your Country Needs YOU’. Wheatley took a dislike to Kitchener, based largely on his appearance (“Kitchener’s face always appeared to me to be that of a narrow, harsh and bigoted man”). It may not be irrelevant that he looked rather like Wheatley’s father.
Wheatley attempted to join the Westminster Dragoons so he could be with his friends, but it was necessary to ride. Wheatley lied (he had once been on a donkey at Margate, and that was the limit of his experience) but the truth became embarrassingly obvious when they put him on a horse. The Westminster Dragoons were decimated at Gallipoli in a Crimea-style tragedy of slaughter followed by disease, and he later felt he had been lucky.
Wheatley’s enthusiasm for his motorcycle inspired him to reply to an advert asking for motorcycle owners to act as despatch riders in France, but he never received a reply. Once again, this came to seem lucky when he met a man who had been involved in organising the motorcyclists; most of the first batch had been killed or captured in the first few weeks.
The HQ of the ‘Artist’s Rifles’ was near the Wheatley business, and Wheatley tried to enlist there, but he was too short, at five foot eight. It tells a grim story about the death rate that within a year or two the Army would form ‘Bantam’ regiments, recruiting men under five feet tall.
It transpired that Wheatley’s grocer uncle, Uncle Dennis, was a former member of The Honourable Artillery Company, and he gave him a letter of introduction to the adjutant. Wheatley took it down to Artillery House on City Road, with its crenellated top edge giving it the look of a toy fort, and they put his name on the waiting list.
All this time Wheatley had been trying to enlist as an ordinary private soldier, which didn’t strike him or his father as odd until a friend of his father’s, a Dr Dutch who was now a major in the Royal Army Medical Corps, learned that Wheatley was trying to join the HAC as an ordinary gunner. It made him mad, he told Wheatley’s father, to see middle-class officer material wasted in the ranks.
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Like the fortunate distinction between wine merchant and grocer, this was one of the luckiest breaks in Wheatley’s life – and his social ascent, the two being virtually inseparable – without which his later persona would be almost unthinkable. “There were two worlds in those days,” Wheatley wrote in a filmscript, “That of officers, and that of men. I picked up a lot from brother officers who had been at Eton, Harrow, and Winchester.”
Wheatley was now excited by the prospect of becoming an officer, and after seeing the officer class in Germany he had an exalted idea of what was involved. Dr Dutch gave him a note of recommendation for the colonel of the 4th Battalion, London (Territorial) Fusiliers, based in Hoxton.
Hoxton was then one of the worst districts in London, somewhere out in the mysterious East. Writing years later at his desk in Cadogan Square, Wheatley described it as “somewhere in that vast Eastern stretch of London which very few Londoners know anything about. I had never been there before, I have never been there since, and I think it highly improbable that I shall ever go there again.”
The colonel that Wheatley needed to see was at a camp in Kingston. When he tracked him down the colonel interviewed him informally, asked him to sign a piece of paper, and told him he would be gazetted as an officer in due course.
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Shortly after his Fusiliers interview, Wheatley went for two weeks in Wales with his parents. They didn’t much like Wales, where the religious observances meant there were no tobacco shops open on Sunday, and no delivery of Sunday papers. They had not been back long when Wheatley’s military fortunes changed once again.
Wheatley’s father banked at what was then the National Provincial, on the corner of South Audley Street and Mount Street, and one day he saw his manager, a Mr Buchan, stepping out of a chauffeured Rolls-Royce in a colonel’s uniform. It turned out that Buchan’s father-in-law, a general, had suggested he could help out with forming a pay department.
Buchan was appalled to think Wheatley was joining the Fusiliers. “You cannot possibly go into the Fusiliers,” he said, “they walk!” As a junior infantry officer Wheatley would have had to lead infantry charges from the front, walking into machine gun fire armed with a sword and revolver. This was what he was unwittingly volunteering for. It wasn’t the carnage Buchan was worried about – still largely in the future – but the fatigue and indignity, and he assured Wheatley he would get him a commission in a cavalry regiment. Wheatley remembered his old problem of not being able to ride and in any case he doubted if he had enough money to be a cavalry officer.
Buchan saw Wheatley’s problem with the riding, and advised him to take lessons. Perhaps the cavalry would still be too much, so he suggested the artillery. And with that he wrote Wheatley a note for an artillery colonel named Nichols. Wheatley found Colonel Nichols at the First City of London Territorial Royal Field Artillery, based in Handel Street, near Russell Square. Nichols asked Wheatley a few questions, had him fill out another form, and at last he was in; and he was an officer. He never ran across Mr Buchan again, “But I hope that the Gods have reserved a specially comfortable place in the most charming of heavens for that very charming and kindly mortal.”
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On the 23rd September 1914 Wheatley was gazetted an officer. In a telling phrase of the time – applied to officers who had received commissions only for the War, and not the old professional officers – he was now a “temporary gentleman.”
Wheatley felt that his fellow Territorial officers could be divided into three categories. There were the “huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ ” county types, who tended to be socially superior to their urban contemporaries. They weren’t over intelligent, but they made good leaders and were popular with their men. Then there were the ‘Jobsworth’ officers, who predominated in the city regiments. These were people of no great social status in civilian life who enjoyed the army because it enabled them to order people about. And then, thought Wheatley, there were the men of real ability: these were rare.
Wheatley was one of half a dozen fledgling lieutenants, and began to make friends. Bertie Davis was a solicitor in civilian life (and “like myself … a quite undistinguished suburbanite”), while Douglas “Dolly” Gregson was a well-connected public schoolboy who had been to Winchester and lived in Kensington. Wheatley was in awe of Gregson’s metropolitan life (“Mayfair … Claridges … Berkeley … Savoy …”) and admired him for his charisma and unsnobbish popularity.
The early days of Wheatley’s soldiering were distinctly amateur, and very different from what had been going on in Germany. The men had no uniforms, and would march in motley order wearing bowler hats, straw hats and cloth caps. As they marched up Tottenham Court Road towards Regent’s Park, the public would cheer them, and run up to give them chocolate. As he led his column up the road, Wheatley noticed old ladies weeping, and old men taking off their hats and standing bareheaded to watch them go by.
Having got the men to Regent’s Park, there was dismounted cavalry drill, PT, and signals practice; mainly semaphore, instructed by recruits who had been Boy Scouts. There were no guns, but an elderly carpenter made them a wooden cannon, and the men practised with that while Wheatley and his fellow officers shouted commands out of the instruction book.
Wheatley was proud of his new uniform, and before long his tendency to dandyism came into its own. His first breeches were narrowly cut, unlike his later pairs with a “beautiful full cut”, giving the much prized ‘elephant ear’ effect on the outer thigh. Wheatley also replaced his ordinary field boots with another pair (“almost unbelievably beautiful”) which had originally belonged to Baron Rothschild, the man with the opera tickets.
After the Baron had left for Germany his steward disposed of his household contents, and the boots had come to Wheatley. Let’s hear Wheatley on those boots for a moment:
Those boots must have cost a small fortune. The leather was shiny outside and velvety in: its thickness could not have been more than one-eighth of an inch, and each boot was cut in one complete piece, so that there was no break from the knee right down to the toe; and the soles were as thin as those of a pair of dancing pumps. The leather was so flexible that, apart from the sole and heel, one could have rolled up and stuffed the whole boot into one’s trouser pocket.
The only problem was that they didn’t fit, and if Wheatley had to keep them on for long he was in agony. “However,” he writes, “I am convinced that nobody in the army had a more lovely pair of field boots, and they proved the envy of all my friends.”
Wheatley was generally well-liked, but one of his fellow officers had reservations about him. Maitland was a snobbish man who had run a prep school, and he seems to have considered Wheatley to be a “bounder,” a word which had connotations of ill-bred social climbing. Another item in Wheatley’s bounderish kit was a monocle, still quite a common affectation at the period.
Wheatley’s officer kit also included a sword, but the regulation item proved hard to obtain, and Wheatley’s father found him one second-hand. Wheatley liked his sword, which made him feel like D’Artagnan. For all his enthusiasm Wheatley was not very good with it, and during mounted sword drill – an anachronistic procedure, which involved unsheathing the sword at the gallop, without injuring one’s neighbour – he was distressed when he cut his horse’s ear.
Wheatley was never at ease with horses; he thought they were stupid, and he was frightened of them. On one occasion he saw a young veterinary officer hit two horses with a stick to separate them when they were standing back to back and kicking at each other; a moment later he had been kicked in the face, with horrific injuries, and his war was over.
Wheatley had taken Buchan’s advice about riding lessons. Having become reasonably proficient, he was on a horse one morning when it bolted down Kilburn High Road. Before Wheatley could bring it under control it mounted the pavement, upsetting fruit and veg stalls, and his misadventure was further emphasised by the practice of having a trumpeter follow mounted officers. Wheatley’s trumpeter could actually ride. “He adhered strictly to his duty and made my misfortune even more ludicrous by spurring his mount then, upright and poker-faced, following me at full gallop along the pavement.”
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Several of Wheatley’s fellow officers were memorable, like “Frothy” Hurst, so called because his violent temper made him froth at the mouth. One of the oddest was Wheatley’s battery commander, Major William “Shitty Bill” Inglis, “a very queer individual.” Wheatley believed Inglis to be “a sexual maniac”, a man whose drive for women became a “pathological abnormality”: “the way he used to eye any fresh young woman who was introduced to him was positively nauseating.”
Inglis was unpopular, hence his nickname. He was harsh and unpredictable, forming his subalterns into a tyrant’s court: “like a Roman despot he would treat one of us as a boon companion one night and, without the least scruple, have us flung to the lions the next. We soon came to the conclusion that he was slightly mental …”
Despite being a married man in his mid-forties and a commanding officer, Inglis would go out with second lieutenants Wheatley, still only seventeen, and Bertie Davis, eighteen, with the aim of picking up young women. This was unprofessional, to say the least, as Wheatley realised at the time. Their favourite hunting ground was the long slope up Richmond Hill, leading towards Richmond Park, with its superb view and its old pubs. In those days it was thronged by young people from all over London; “a moving crowd as thick as one would see on the Parade at any popular holiday resort.”
Picking up women was easy with an officer’s uniform and the excitement caused by the war, with its suspension of normal standards. Many of the crowd had come with the intention of getting off with somebody. At one point a policeman looking over the crowd said to Major Inglis – one uniform to another, as it were – “There’s miles of it, sir. Miles of it, just for the asking.”
One of the problems of going out for the night with Shitty Bill was that he had first pick of the women. Fortunately he seems to have been rather stupid and could be easily steered. As Wheatley remembered it, “One had only to whisper to him something such as ‘Look at the width of that dark girl’s nostrils. That’s a sure sign she’s terrifically hot stuff.’ ”
If the girls were agreeable then after drinks they might go to Richmond Park and disport themselves in the grass. Wheatley kept a list of women he’d had relations with between 1914 and 1921, most of them probably prostitutes. Some of the women in Wheatley’s list have ticks beside them, and the end of the list he scores himself forty out of seventy, corresponding to forty ticks out of seventy women.
It seems likely these ticks mean full intercourse. “Red head Richmond” is unticked, for example, but near the Handel Street hall Wheatley seems to have had a girl in 1914 remembered as “Marchmont Street [tick].” Wheatley seems to have got down to casual fornication on a larger scale from around 1916, and ticks are rarer before that.
It is noticeable that Wheatley is likelier to reach the ticking stage with women whose names he doesn’t know: Carmen, Vera, Dolly, Margery, Joan and Little Jewess Rachel are all unticked, for example, whereas things seem to have gone further with “Scotch Girl”, “Florist Paddington”, “Red Petticoat”, “Tavistock Square (soulful)”, “Lame girl fur coat”, “With Davis”, “good figure”, and “Whisky and soda offer”, along with a few named ticks like Babs, and some fairly unambiguous prostitutes such as “Mecklenburg Square” [tick], which was then a red light district.
Wheatley kept Hilda informed of his doings throughout the war, and it is further noticeable that he associates the Devil with sex; a point which hardly needs to be laboured in its relation to his later literary output.
At one point he tells her “You may be interested to hear that if I have not been particularly good I certainly have not been particularly naughty – neither God nor the Devil seem to get much forwader.” [sic] Complaining from the Western Front about a lack of women, Wheatley writes “there is not a petticoat … for at least twenty miles in any direction, except that of the Hun who by all accounts does himself jolly well still in the way of the way of the world, the flesh, and the devil …” This situation was not permanent, and later Wheatley wrote of a visit to Amiens “By Gad the Devil must have had a particularly amusing and gratifying three days at my expense still goodness knows one needs something to buck one up after the desolation of the line …”
Later still, having been for months “nearly always at least 10 miles from a petticoat, and even that generally a very undesirable one, I feel that I am greatly in arrears in paying Old Nick his just dues, in oats …”