Wheatley was put in charge of the 4th Corps ammunition dump at the ruined Somme village of Ytres, and looked after it through September 1917. A railway wagon would arrive each night, and Wheatley would supervise the placing and camouflaging of the unloaded ammunition.
This left him with time on his hands, and he began his first novel. Inspired by a local chateau, it was called ‘Julie’s Lovers’ and featured an English and German officer staying at the chateau just before the war, both falling in love with the daughter of the house.
After his stint with the ammunition dump, Wheatley went to nearby Equancourt, where the Division was sent to rest after Ypres. This suited Wheatley, since Amiens was nearby. Wheatley remembered the best of the brothels as Madame Prudhomme’s, run by a dignified old lady with white hair. Clients were presented to the girls in the drawing room, so that a girl could veto a customer if she wished. Wheatley had five or six girls in Amiens, including Colette, “Big Fair”, and Marie, all of whom are neatly ticked in his list. Later in life he collected books.
“Amiens with Colsell” is another ticked entry. One night he and Captain Colsell picked up two girls in a café and the girls took them for a long taxi ride to a house where a dentist practised in the daytime, but where it turned out there was only one bedroom free. They tossed a coin, and Wheatley and his girl had to make do with the dentist’s chair, before joining the others upstairs and swapping partners.
Wheatley’s parents wrote regularly, and his father sent him a generous cigarette allowance of five thousand a month, straight from Cairo, so he could offer them to the men. From his father’s letters, Wheatley learned that London was being bombed by Zeppelins. Eclipsed by memories of the Blitz, the bombing in the first war was traumatic enough, particularly since nothing like it had occurred before. Several hundred people were killed, and the famous department store of Swan and Edgar’s on Piccadilly Circus was hit.
The manager of the Wheatley shop had left London to escape the bombing, and the window had been smashed by a bomb in South Audley Street, after which there had been looting. Drink was running short: bottles of Kummel had increased in price from five shillings to three pounds (at modern prices, from about eight pounds to about a hundred) and even gin was becoming expensive. Food was also short, and Wheatley’s father had started keeping pigs and rabbits.
Wheatley’s mother wrote more frequently, although he found her letters trivial. She was frightened by the bombing and spent time at Brighton, from where she complained to Wheatley about the number of Jews who were there, having fled the bombs. General Allenby was having a storming success in Palestine, where he took Jerusalem, and Mrs Wheatley sent Dennis the quip of the day: Allenby had taken Palestine to relieve Brighton from the Jews.
Close to Equancourt was Etricourt, where Wheatley was quartered in the garden of an old chateau, destroyed by the occupying Germans when they were forced to withdraw. Not wanting to spend winter under canvas, the Major decided that two men who had been bricklayers could make an Officer’s Mess from the bricks in the rubble. It was built as a lean-to in a corner, and inspired Wheatley to try his hand at what would later become his hobby. He built a two room ‘house’ for himself and the officer he was sharing with. He drew a map of it in his ‘Motor Trips’ notebook, labelled ‘My House.’
Wheatley knocked up a very creditable building, with a fireplace and a hot water tank to heat above it. His friends named his house “Crooked Villa”, and he went to look for it when he eventually returned to France, but never found it.
While he was bricklaying he had a strange experience. He left the Mess after dinner one night and started work; if the moon was good, he would lay bricks until one or two in the morning. While he was working he had an unpleasant sensation of being watched from the ruins of the chateau: “I saw nothing, but felt myself to be threatened by a spiritual force of overwhelming evil … I felt … some incredibly evil thing had its gaze riveted on the back of my neck … Suddenly my nerve broke.” Wheatley ran to his tent, lit his light, and sat on his camp bed shivering.
There was no one there, but Wheatley had felt as if a tiger was about to spring on his back. His only explanation was that the chateau had been a German field hospital (on taking over the site, the men had found bloodstained uniforms and some pickelhaube helmets, much prized as souvenirs). Germans had probably spent their final hours there in agony, and he believed this was related to the hate-filled presence he had felt watching him.
Wheatley makes no mention of this in his letters to Hilda, his ‘Motor Trip’ journal, or his First War reminiscences in Saturdays with Bricks. It is only in his late autobiography (and The Devil and All His Works of 1971, where he suggests he was menaced by an “elemental” spirit) that he produces this story. It belongs with another experience from the same period – whether the period is 1917 or the 1970s is hard to say – when the officer he shared Crooked Villa with (Picquet in his autobiography, Pickett in his letters) came back from leave in England.
Picquet had been home to be with his sister, who was mortally ill. She died while he was beside her deathbed, and as she was dying (their father having died some years earlier) she had said “Hello, Daddy.” Her brother-in-law Jacques was a captain in the French army, and the stranger thing was that she had then looked surprised, and said “What, you here too, Jacques?” As far as anyone knew he was alive, but next day a telegram arrived to say that he had been killed the day before Picquet’s sister died. This story, says Wheatley, “fully convinced me of the survival of personality after death”, a subject that was very close to his heart in the Seventies. Again, he makes no mention of it in his letters to Hilda1.
Picquet or Pickett, however, certainly existed. Wheatley wrote to Hilda that he was much consoled to have with him
one Pickett a subaltern of the old school to wit a most amusing card quite one of the best people, and when we get away in the evening to our house which I hear the Mater told you about we wile away the time by a little “game of chance” or reading to each other books (Some books I can tell you I got them in Harve [sic] and will show you some at Christmas) or telling each other little tales of adventures with the fair but frail …
Wheatley seems to have granted Hilda honorary exemption from the ‘fair but frail’ category. The dated usage ‘Some books, I can tell you’ means they were hot stuff, or at least very warm.
*
Having been sent on another course and returned to find the camp moved, Wheatley was at Bertincourt on the morning of November 20th, 1917, when the Battle of Cambrai began. This was an Allied offensive using the new secret weapon, the tank.
Attacks had previously been preceded by a massive artillery barrage, often lasting a week, during which the Germans were effectively warned and took cover in deep shelters. This time the barrage was simultaneous with the tank attack, followed by infantry, taking the Germans by surprise in what at first seemed like an extraordinary victory. Wheatley later noted “from the ridge you get one of the finest views in France, you can see CAMBRAI plainly and from here I watched the main phases of the seven days battle that followed the push.”
Hilda Gosling.
“My House”: the little brick house Wheatley built on the Western Front during the First War.
Wheatley as a lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery.
Before long the advantage was lost, and after several days the result was an inconclusive reshaping of the front line, but for a while it was a moment of glory. Bells were rung across England for the victory. “Let me hasten to add,” says Wheatley, “I played no part in the actual fighting. I performed only my allotted and inglorious task of keeping some of our guns well supplied with ammunition. But I was there, and privileged to witness the glorious triumph of British arms”.
After Cambrai, he was sent on yet another course. He spent a lot of time on these, and in November he had been on a PT course, where he joked with the instructors that he had trouble raising his hand higher than his mouth. “Still, there it is,” he wrote to Hilda about the course, adding the very First War sentiment “I certainly did not ask to come but some madman sent me.”
The new course was a month’s artillery course, but Wheatley spent three weeks of it in bed with bronchitis. His bronchitis had been playing him up almost from the start, and he was hoping it would get him home. He wrote to Hilda, “the Gods have been kind to me so far so I hope I shall not be in the last boat [back to Britain], anyway I think it’s very unlikely as my bronchitis has started off again …”
He wasn’t back for Christmas as he hoped, but he was recovered enough to celebrate in France, writing to Hilda “I went on a gunnery course over Christmas and on the way back I managed to get three or four days in Amiens which is quite a first class town Restaurants, Hotels, Shops Girls ect … the Devil must have had a particularly amusing and gratifying three days at my expense”.
It was a hard winter. Wheatley’s division were sent to back up the French at St.Quentin, where they suffered severe casualties. The trek there was a horrible experience of nineteenth-century style soldiering, with Wheatley on horseback through snow and ice, concentrating hour after hour to prevent his horse from slipping and breaking a leg. The cold was bitter, and one of the men died while billeted in a barn. Wheatley dressed as heavily as he could and kept rum and brandy in his pistol holsters, together with cigarettes, biscuits and bars of chocolate.
Their destination was the village of St.Simon, which they reached via the small town of Ham. It was at Ham that Napoleon III had been imprisoned, but made his escape disguised as a workman; escaping monarchs always caught Wheatley’s imagination. At St.Simon he was entrusted with the construction of horse-lines, and standing there frozen (whereas he thought the men at least kept warm with digging) he told the sergeant in charge, a Sergeant Watkins, to hurry up: “Waiting for you to get this job done is like waiting for the second coming of Christ!”. Next morning he was summoned before the Colonel and severely reprimanded. Watkins was a member of some zealous Christian sect, and he had complained about Wheatley’s blaspheming.
Wheatley and Colsell shared a billet at St. Simon in the local chateau. This had been blown up by the retreating Germans, but Wheatley found a single room with a turret roof. It was hexagonal, with one of its sides attached to the remains of the chateau, while the other five had tall windows with metal shutters. Wheatley described it as his “Pergoda” [sic].
Wheatley’s love of creature comforts extended to furnishings, and now he rode to the nearest town and bought wall paper and even some chintz, as he told Hilda: it had been a “a frightful hole” but “for the last few days we have had a “hen father papered the parlour’ sort of stunt”; a reference to the music-hall song2.
“We have made it really tophole now, quite luxurious in fact,” reported Wheatley: there were “little tables (with table cloths) … rugs on the floor, and a glorious marble fire place (quite ancestral)” – this last ‘baronial’ detail oddly looking forward to the decor of Hammer horror films – and in short, “we’ve really put up a jolly good show.”
This wasn’t Wheatley’s first attempt at interior decoration. While he was stationed at Ipswich he had picked enough wild flowers to make himself a bowl of pot pourri. Sated with novels and cards, he also had enough free time to take up the study of palmistry. Like ancestral fireplaces, this may have felt like a return to a reassuringly nineteenth-century world. Wheatley’s disrespect for Christianity had increased with the War. He was well aware that both sides attended Church Parade (the Germans even had their famous slogan, ‘Gott mitt Uns’, God With Us), and for many people the War involved a wider loss of faith in civilisation, rationality and progress.
It is against this loss of faith in the ideals of the Enlightenment that Wheatley’s absorption in palmistry on the Somme seems particularly appropriate. He started off with Cheiro’s Guide to the Hand and Palmistry for All (the latter under Cheiro’s other pseudonym of Louis Hamon), reinforced by Edward Heron-Allen’s A Manual of Cheirosophy (1885) and Katharine St.Hill’s The Grammar of Palmistry (1889). From palmistry Wheatley went on to numerology (he owned Cheiro’s Book of Numbers) and astrology.
Life was quiet, and as Mess Secretary Wheatley arranged to have tinned cream and similar luxuries sent out from the Army and Navy Stores in Victoria. He also rode to Ham once a week, to the French grocer. The only thing that spoiled this otherwise pleasant trip was that Wheatley had to ride past a Chinese labour camp. They had been hired from China (Wheatley thought they might have been convicts, which was not true) and they had little interest in the war. They would line the road as Wheatley and his orderly rode by, hissing and gesturing and trying to frighten the horses.
The quiet life was soon to end, and the war in Wheatley’s region began to intensify, partly caused by British efforts (initially regarded as foolhardy and unsporting) to stir up what had been a relatively amiable stalemate between the French and Germans. The man who commanded Wheatley’s division, General Sir Oliver Nugent, had boasted that a double decker London omnibus would hold all the men he intended to bring home alive.
Russia’s new Bolshevik government had made peace with the Germans, which freed their army on the Eastern front for France, and an onslaught was expected. German prisoners were questioned as to when this was due, but they had all been instructed to say it was tomorrow, keeping the British front line in a state of perpetual false alarm, manning the trenches at four o’clock every morning against an attack that never came.
One night Wheatley was having dinner with some other officers when they heard German bombers going over towards Paris, a sound they had become used to. A moment later there was a horrifying series of explosions; the target in this instance was not Paris but St.Simon. One of the officers Wheatley was with, “a splendid chap” who had come up from the ranks and won the Military Cross, suddenly dived under the table sobbing. He had cracked from the cumulative trauma of being at the Front. Wheatley and the others brought his case to the attention of the Medical Officer, and managed to get him sent home with shell-shock.
Colsell was home on leave, and Wheatley was alone in his chintz and wallpaper decorated pagoda when the last great German offensive started on the 21st March at 4.40 in the morning, launching seventy-six German divisions at twenty-eight British divisions. It began with a five hour artillery bombardment that included poison gas, followed by immense numbers of infantry.
Wheatley timed the onslaught to 4.43, when shells began bursting in such numbers that the sound merged into a continual roar. He was terrified, thinking his room would be hit at any moment. Eric had encouraged him to hold the Christian God in something like contempt, but Wheatley now lay on the floor and begged God to get him out alive, promising to pray every night for the rest of his life.
He bent the rules here, and from the safety and comfort of fifty or sixty years later, he wrote “He, or – shall we say – they, got me out. And I’ve kept my promise, although I don’t kneel down and it is to the Lords of Light that I pray.”
Wheatley pulled himself together enough to get dressed and see what was happening. Shells had made craters and overturned several limbers, but it was clear the real target was further on, at the village of Ham. The density of the barrage lessened, and individual heavy shells could now be heard going overhead with what Wheatley remembered as a noise like a train.
The men waited anxiously, and the order came through to pack up. While they were doing so they saw the occasional man rushing past from the Front, as if on some urgent errand towards the back of the lines; nobody realised at the time that they were deserting.
Wheatley’s column retreated in good order to Olezy and made a camp there, when the Major in command sent for him: they were now to move to Aubigny, and because Wheatley’s section was nearest to the exit of the field, he was to lead. Aubigny was closer to the front line, which seemed to Wheatley to be the wrong direction to be going in, but there was nothing he could do.
After a good few miles and several villages, an English officer on foot asked him where he was going. He then told him the Germans were already in Aubigny, and – when Wheatley asked where the front line was – told him he had already come through it. The officer himself was on a reconnaissance in what was now No Man’s Land, and after telling Wheatley to turn his men around or have them massacred, he slipped away.
Wheatley slowly turned the ammunition wagons around as quietly as possible, knowing that if the Germans heard them they would open fire. Years later he found out what had gone wrong: there were two Aubignys, one of them further back from the front, not closer to it. This was where he was meant to go, but the Major had pointed him towards the wrong one on the map. This was why he had retreated closer to the enemy, which struck him as odd at the time, but “Theirs not to reason why.”
The start of the last great German offensive was the nearest thing to a rout the British had experienced since the War began, although at terrible cost to the Germans. Wheatley couldn’t lose his way to Ham, because the sky above it was glowing. Burning buildings lit the night, and he saw the main street choked with retreating British troops.
The men were exhausted and Wheatley called a halt. They had only had the camp set up for a few hours when a man galloped past shouting “Get out! The Germans are coming!”. Later Wheatley was told that the Germans had sent English speakers ahead in captured English uniforms to spread panic. Drake’s famous words about finishing his game of bowls before defeating the Spaniards were then more widely known, and when there was a sudden move to get up from the table, Wheatley said “Gentlemen. Let us finish our coffee first and run from the Germans afterwards.”
This (“one of the few wisecracks that my slow mind has ever been inspired to make”) caused considerable amusement. They then moved off, in good order, and for the next few days took part in what became known as the March Races, racing to see who could retreat fastest towards Paris.
Wheatley had minor discipline problems, but he was backed up by a solidly professional Sergeant-Major, a Boer War veteran, and over the next ten days, having lost touch with his Major, he was effectively in charge of around a thousand men, including stragglers and even deserters. He kept them together until he met a larger British force, and Wheatley’s men were inspected by Brigadier-General Henry Brock. Brock was a professional soldier of the old school, who had recently won the DSO, and he kept a cow on hand at all times so that he could have fresh milk in his tea; whenever his HQ moved, an orderly was to be seen among the baggage carts, leading the cow.
Wheatley was proud of his efforts, particularly in rounding up stragglers from the Front and forming them into platoons, which were now marching in columns of four abreast behind the main section. Wheatley and Brock sat side by side on their horses as they watched the men go by. Brock said nothing: he asked no questions about the rout and retreat, and had no curiosity about who the men marching at the back might be. When the men had gone by, he turned to Wheatley and said “I see a number of your men have lost their steel helmets. Take their names, have them up tomorrow morning, and see that they are crimed for it.”
This was the less attractive side of the old style officering that Wheatley had been so enamoured of after his nightmare train journey. Recalling General Brock years later, Wheatley wrote “it seems to me a terrible thing that anyone so insensitive and mean in spirit should be given authority over other human beings.” In the event he didn’t have anyone crimed for losing their helmet. Instead he told the men that the Brigadier was pleased with them for having got back in such good order, particularly after what they had been through.
*
Wheatley and his section were now sent to Hornoy, near Amiens, which Wheatley lost no time in revisiting. The great German push had been largely halted, but Amiens was now within reach of German shelling, and the civilian population had been forced to abandon it. The streets were empty and the windows shuttered, with military policemen to discourage looters.
Wheatley hoped the Salon Godbert restaurant might still be open, but he had to ring the bell. A one-legged old man came to the door, and invited him to look around. It was like the Marie Celeste; the comparison that struck Wheatley was the Castle of Sleeping Beauty. Every place had a half-eaten plate of mouldering food, with glasses of wine beside it. Ice buckets full of water held magnums half full of flat champagne.
The place had been full of British officers when the order came to leave, and the exodus had been so final that the staff had left too. Wheatley went out and found a café still open, and as he walked around the town afterwards he met an English-speaking girl who told him all the other girls had left for the country. This was stupid of them, she said, looking straight at Wheatley, because in the villages there were no British soldiers to pay for “jigijig.”
This was a clear invitation, and in a few minutes they were in the girl’s apartment, in one of the tall old-fashioned houses that formed a valley-like corridor for the entrance of the railway into the town station. Wheatley noticed several of these houses were in a state of ruin. While they were in bed there was a tremendous explosion, and the sound of bricks falling nearby. As Wheatley writes it up in his autobiography, “I went rigid, but the girl did not stop her movement for a second and was impaled upon me so I was a prisoner beneath her. She simply smiled down at me and said ‘Eet is le bombardement. The Boche, ‘e is a creature of ‘abit. ‘E always starts at four o’clock.”
Having seen the newly shelled ruin a couple of doors away, Wheatley hoped she lived to enjoy the money she was making. He may have fine-tuned this story, but there was a real basis for it: “Amiens under bombardment” gets a tick in his fornicator’s Game Book.
*
All this time, Wheatley had a picture of Barbara Symonds around his neck in a locket. At Christmas 1917 he had sent her a box of French chocolates – now almost impossible to obtain in England – and to his delight she wrote to thank him, so he felt he could resume courting. She added that she was bored to death by the War because there were so few young men at dances, so she hoped it would be over by her 21st birthday, on the 27th November.
Wheatley also hoped it would soon be over. In January he wrote to Hilda that his friends thought “providing the Hun doesn’t send them a special packet, the war might end in time for them to be present at the christening of their great grandchildren, but who knows, the Boche is fed up and we are fed up, both fighting more or less for something that will not benefit either of us individually one iota”.
This was the period of General Haig’s famous “backs to the wall” order. Like many men who served in the War, Wheatley was extremely critical of Haig. Wheatley’s judgement was that you have to break eggs to make an omelette, but you don’t have to break them on the floor.
The second stage of the German offensive was launched on April 9th, and just before it began Wheatley’s Division was sent north, apparently to recuperate. This was a blunder, because the second attack came in the north. On the 14th April Wheatley had what he remembered as his worst day of the War, when the division entrained at St Roche, in the suburbs of Amiens. They had to get several hundred horses into vans, eight to a van, while the station was being shelled and the horses reared and kicked in panic. Several horses were killed, and more had to be put down. A number of men were also killed, and at one moment a shell hit an engine, blasting hot coal and boiling steam.
Wheatley had a more prosaic aggravation to deal with in the wake of his earlier retreat from the Front, since it was discovered that the Section’s cash box had gone missing during the journey. Along with the tin hats, this was the only thing lost, but Wheatley was held responsible and made to pay up.
Wheatley’s travails were coming to an end, although he didn’t yet know it: “praise be to the dear Gods, my days in France were nearly numbered.” It was bronchitis that brought him home in the end, as he had been hoping it would almost from the day he arrived. His cough had been getting worse, and in May he reported sick. The MO sent him to a British Red Cross Hospital in Boulogne and on May 14th he wrote Hilda a cheerful letter: “I hear you murmur, ‘the poor fellow, struck down in defence of King Country & Co, brave lad’, but no – it is nothing so tragic – merely my dear old friend the enemy Bronchitis.”
Wheatley’s bronchitis may have been aggravated by the presence of gas, since the Germans were using gas shells, but it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him at the time. His comment in Saturdays with Bricks, “There could be no doubt about it; I had been badly gassed” is distinctly retrospective. Compared to many gas victims (“… floundering like a man in fire or lime … As under a green sea, I saw him drowning … He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning”) Wheatley had got off lightly, as usual.
Wheatley’s army career had not been glorious, but he had done his duty; no less, if no more. He was well-liked by the men, seemingly because he was cheerful and humane. In later years he became President of the Old Comrades Association, where he was able to meet the men socially and get a better sense of what they thought of him. Far from seeing him as a monocled ubermensch, it seemed they regarded young Lieutenant Wheatley as a kind of mascot.
But for now he was coughing and writing to Hilda. “Oh to be in England now that Spring is here, how I should love it but I am afraid it is not to be, the Army cannot spare me”.
Let me tell you a secret Hilda, – I am the last hope of the General Staff, for nearly four years they have played the fool … but they know that without me they are lost …
Glorious news
Sister has just come in to say that I am to go off to England after all, have decided to leave the General Staff in the lurch, see you soon …
1 Nor have I found a likely girl among British death certificates during the period that Wheatley was in France.
2 “When Father papered the parlour / You couldn’t see him for paste / Dabbing it here! dabbing it there! / Paste and paper everywhere / Mother was stuck to the ceiling / The children stuck to the floor / I never knew a blooming family / So stuck up before.”