Part Three

War Abroad

Chapter 19

Going

It is impossible now after the bitter experience of two world wars to recapture the spirit of this country in August, 1914. As I marched through those cheering crowds I felt like a king among men.

A Full Life, by Lieutenant-General Sir Brian Horrocks (1960)

We have already been sceptical about the cheering crowds in London and other capitals at the outbreak of war; we can be kinder towards the well-wishers waving off the then 18-year-old Lieutenant Horrocks from Chatham, with 95 men of the Middlesex Regiment. Towns such as Chatham with a military tradition would want to do right by such men. Even if you knew none of the men leaving, the march to war was the event of the year, like an overturned tram or a factory fire; and cheering, like gawping, was free. For anyone who did know the men marching away, marchers and watchers alike would want to put on a brave face. Any farewell tears were best cried in private, before the procession, or after your son or brother left. Besides, even if they might not have wanted to upset family by admitting it, some departing young men, like Albert Batty, enjoyed the prospect of something more thrilling than everyday life:

I was proud to think that I was a fully trained Saturday afternoon soldier in the Horse Transport section of a divisional field ambulance, as I had trained assiduously and attended three annual two week camps.

Batty, and four Salford friends, had joined the Territorials from the same church and cricket club. Whereas at work and in their leisure such young men were junior to their elders, with little to look forward to except becoming elders themselves, Batty’s memoir (based on his diary of the time) shows how he relished what the Territorials gave him, even before a war: responsibility for a wagon and horses, a small but guaranteed part in something big, and hard work for your country. ‘Never had a more excited time’, he wrote on August 8, though later in the month he admitted it was ‘graft on no food and no sleep’. Batty reported for duty at 9am on August 5 - the depot had turned him away, the evening before - and was soon a victim of stupid army discipline. He went home to sleep on August 6 because there was nowhere to lie down, and next day was told he was under arrest. It meant little, however, while the unit was busy taking in civilian horses and equipment of all shapes and sizes, the only available: “mineral water carts with a high dicky seat, parcel vans which served as ambulances and large butts on wheels with which the corporation watered the streets to keep the dust down”, Batty recalled. Three weeks later, as the British retreated from Belgium, the German captain and novelist Walter Bloem misunderstood the abandoned commercial vehicles he passed, ‘from apparently every big town in England ... England obviously regarded this war as a business undertaking’. It did not occur to Bloem that the British army had scraped together any transport it could.

Bloem saw motors with burst tyres or broken axles; horse-drawn transport brought its own troubles. On August 19, as Batty’s unit took to the road, his horses took fright, until he pulled them up only feet short of a ditch. Understandably, noise from well-wishers made animals bolt. In Bristol on August 10, two Territorial battalions of the Gloucestershire regiment left their drill hall and marched, separately, down to the city centre. Two horses pulling a wagon of baggage, leaving first, became restive and galloped out of control; down steep Park Street they swerved and hit a wagonette standing outside Newcombe’s, a carver and gilder at number 73. The wagonette turned over and crushed an old lady inside a parked horse and trap. She died later. One of the two horses, with a broken leg, was shot where it lay; all this watched by the crowd, until a cart took the carcass away.

The Glosters got on trains in the city. The picture we might like to have in our mind’s eye of the departing troops - a band leading them, hundreds cheering in the market place - is true enough. What we don’t imagine so readily is what happened after the last townsman accompanying them out of town turned back, and a turn in the road or a watershed hid their last view of home, and the marchers were left with themselves: the sun in their face or on their neck, the clump of boots, and the 70lbs of kit on their back. As two days’ rations they might have had a 2lb loaf. Some units had further to walk than others, but terrain and weather made a march feel longer, not only the number of miles. Ashbourne’s 50 Territorials set off on the Buxton road on Wednesday August 5, crossed the Derbyshire dales to Matlock by evening, and arrived at Chesterfield the next day, a good 20 miles in all. The 5th North Staffs took two days to march the 30 or so miles from the Potteries to Burton-on-Trent, in mid-August, resting overnight at Uttoxeter; at times the weather was ‘almost tropical’, according to the Uttoxeter paper. Newark Territorials had a similar journey, to Derby, stopping halfway at Radcliffe-on-Trent.

For whatever reason - the still familiar surroundings, their relative freshness, the euphoria of the extraordinary, the goodwill of householders offering tea from the roadside, and perhaps more - some men had yet to knuckle down. Aubrey Moore was a young lieutenant (he would celebrate his 21st birthday on August 30 with a bottle of champagne in a Luton hotel) of the Hinckley company of the Leicestershire Territorials. He recalled in old age how he arrived in Hinckley on Wednesday morning, August 5, to find it had gone ‘mad’: “By midday the pubs were running short and men were crowding into the drill hall to sign on for enlistment with us, being quite prepared to take on the whole German army single handed.” Moore was one of the few memoir writers of August 1914 to admit the part played by beer. His men had about 20 miles to walk, to Loughborough, resting overnight at Groby outside Leicester. On that first day, Moore recalled that ‘a contingent of ladies followed us from Hinckley on cycles who proved to be a bit of a menace’, by ‘luring’ the men from their Groby billets into a park. Why, Moore (the son of a clergyman) did not say. The rest of the month saw the Leicestershires in Belper for a few days, before a march to Derby and another train (through Loughborough) to Luton in Northamptonshire.

Gradually the army put its stamp on man and beast - literally, as blacksmiths stamped a number on horses’ hooves, and men wore an aluminium disc stamped with their name, number, company and regiment. The further the men went, the fainter the contact with home and the more the army took over their lives. Letters were hard enough to write, if you never held a pencil from one month to the next in peacetime; visitors were even more the exception. ‘An Old Newarker’ described in the Newark Advertiser how he saw men of the town among the thousands leaving Derby on Saturday August 15. “All seemed in a jovial mood as they marched on to the ground, sometimes whistling, sometimes singing national airs and ragtime but all in high spirits.” While the men waited at Osmaston Park sidings for their train, wives and mothers of railway workers living nearby offered ‘large washstand jugs of hot tea’. Grocers, showing more enterprise than charity, sold bananas, pears and tomatoes. Troops tucked the fruit away in kitbags for the journey. ‘Newarker’ spotted that the soldiers still had unmilitary mementos of home: “Many men carried their pet mascots, teddy bears, dummy dogs and dolls tied on their knapsacks whilst one private had a live black kitten with red ribbon tied around its neck.”

Officers had more freedom to roam thanks to money and, if they ran a car, transport, except that command tied them to a place as surely as discipline bound their men. Francis Meynell of Hoar Cross Hall began the war with his battery in Stafford and was able to nip home to his estate at night. He may well have passed within sight of it on the way to his next base, Burton-on-Trent, where he was in charge of an advance party. He was tempted to commute the six miles to sleep at home, rather than in the ‘little anteroom off the town hall’ he wrote to his mother about on August 12. “It is very tantalising being here on my own, yet not being able to leave for fear the telephone may ring.” He like many Territorials, let alone the new recruits, had to get used to waiting to be told where to go next. At the end of August Meynell told his mother from Northamptonshire that he was starting 16 weeks of training ‘and then shall be supposed (?) competent to go into the field abroad’.

More impatient were Oliver Lyttleton and his friends, whether because they were young (Lyttleton was 21; his friend ‘Bobbety’, Viscount Cranborne, turned 21 in August 1914) or because as aristocrats they expected to get their own way. In August Lyttleton was on guard duty on the nervous East Anglian coast: “Sometimes a sentry on the shore fires a shot and then you rush out with a revolver and find that a bathing machine is riddled with bullets. Officer after admonition returns to his tent,” he told his mother with dry humour in an undated letter. He was doing an officer’s work, but he and his friends did not have the all-important commission:

Though the War Office gazetted six officers all complete outsiders yesterday to the regiment, none of us. The regiment is furious because they loathe having outsiders in them .... six fellows of a sort they do not like and no doubt it will do the battalions a lot of harm after the war because they will not get the right people from the country. However Lord Salisbury has been to the WO and has raised hell I believe so I may yet be well.

As ever, a private word was the way to smooth someone’s path; Lord Salisbury was the son of the former Tory prime minister, and father of ‘Bobbety’.

It seemed that regular army officers were fretting that the need for a far bigger army, to beat the Germans, would lower the tone. In fairness, the snobs had a point. Every war had an ending; armies were usually at peace. If a war made ‘outsiders’ into soldiers, the upset would last for years after the war, just as if a business took on too many staff in a boom time, the staff already there would resent the change to their quiet life, and might be out of a job altogether when trade went back to normal. Lord Kitchener, as war minister, was taking as long a perspective, albeit as a military statesman rather than the army equivalent of a trade unionist.

In The Times on August 15, under the headline ‘The policy of Pitt - Preparing to see the struggle through’, the newspaper’s military correspondent, Colonel Charles Repington, set out Kitchener’s plan. (Though not one word of Kitchener’s was inside speech marks, by the conventions of journalism of the day this was as plain a statement of policy as Kitchener, or anyone in power, made that month.)

Kitchener made the reasonable point - though allies might have seen it as selfish - that Britain’s ‘voice in the terms’ of peace would be equal to ‘the weight of our sword’. Kitchener was not to know that four years of trench warfare would so cripple Britain (and France) that they dared not stand up to Hitler, or Mussolini or anyone, a generation later. Two weeks into the war, before the BEF had seen a German, Kitchener had in mind the need for a big army, as big as France’s or anyone’s, not only so that Britain would be on the winning side, but so Britain could bargain with its allies for a better deal. As Britain was ‘dreadfully in arrears’ of everything military, organisation, men, arms and equipment, so Kitchener put it, he was having to start from scratch. This would take time; this assumed the war would last well beyond 1914.

Kitchener was proved right. Not that being right ever does anyone any good. Liberal ministers resented that Kitchener had shown up their pre-war ‘callous indifference to defence’, as Repington put it in the article. Gossips at the time and historians since have argued whether Kitchener was out of his depth as war minister from 1914, or as skilled a schemer as any politician. Surely it’s more to the point that as the lone military man in cabinet, surrounded by civilians, he had enough to do without making enemies, or worse enemies. Repington had his scoop, but - a warning to every journalist managing his contacts - it was the death of his relationship with the scoop-giver. Lord Kitchener told Repington it was ‘as much as his life was worth’ to see him again. (Had Kitchener, the newcomer to cabinet government, broken the unwritten rules of politics by speaking plainly through Repington, and was bullied into not doing it again? Or had Kitchener had his say and had no more use for Repington?)

Leaving aside the squabbles at the very top, Kitchener was proposing a wholly new army. As the ‘New Army’ had no history, it did not appeal to the Oliver Lyttletons of this world. “We are angry because it seems possible that we may be gazetted to K’s army,” he told his mother. A ‘New Army’ meant that whatever was already around - the Territorials - did not matter so much. Kitchener, so he told Repington, proposed to divide the Territorials in two: those willing and able to serve abroad, and those not.

Given the choice, whether because they did not feel they belonged truly to the army, or because they only wanted to do what they had signed for - home defence - a fair few Territorials did not volunteer to go abroad. The 4th battalion the Lincolnshire regiment, for instance, set off by train from Lincoln on August 11 with 1020 men; four officers and 432 ranks who had not volunteered, or were not passed fit for foreign service,e returned home on September 4. Though Repington reported Kitchener’s view that Britain needed both kinds of Territorials - because the stay-at-homes freed somebody else to go abroad - some got bullied for taking the less warlike option. Some 270 Newark Territorials came home on Saturday September 5, half unfit, half by choice. After a Sunday church service, they formed up in Newark Market Place for their depot commander, Colonel G S Foljambe, to tell them he was ashamed of the number of young unmarried men who came back to the town. Not surprisingly, the next day some ‘volunteered’ for foreign service.

II

The country waited for news of the men who had marched away, and who did not come back unfit, or who were not sending postcards from camps in the shires. Where had the British army gone? The newspapers of mid-August did not say, or even speculate about the most newsworthy question in the biggest news story of the century.

For a clue, as faint as the wind on the Wiltshire downs at dawn, you had to read the inquest into two airmen, pilot Robin Skene and his mechanic passenger Raymond Barlow. They and their 3 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps (RFC), were at Netheravon airfield. Above the Avon valley, a few miles from Stonehenge, it was one of the first homes of British military aviation - though flying was still in its early days, and in an emergency any flat field would do to land in. On the morning of August 12, Skene took off, with full petrol tank, tools and other gear. At 150 feet the machine turned to the left, lost speed, and dived vertically, killing both men. Was the aeroplane over-loaded? So the court asked. Other aircraft had taken off loaded as much, it heard.

Even if you saw the case, which only made the local papers, it would take some deducing. Why were the aeroplanes flying so dangerously heavy? It could only be, because the squadron was moving. Where? To the war.

III

Much later - wars later, in 1952 - one of the men taking off from Netheravon that morning, Philip Joubert, recalled the crash in his memoir The Fated Sky. The aircraft had stalled when taking off - always the most dangerous part of a flight, besides landing. Joubert called the crashed Bleriot monoplane his ‘old friend’; he used to fly it.

Like the other young men of the RFC, Joubert shrugged off death, as something that happened to other people. What else could they do? They had chosen the newest military tool since man had tamed the horse. They learned to fly the same as they had learned to ride a horse; they stayed on or fell off, except that an aeroplane usually fell from a fatal height. Everything the pilots tried was new: flying upside down; flying in the dark (and landing); taking photographs from the air (an interest of Joubert’s). What they could do changed by the year, as aeroplanes flew faster and longer. Joubert’s squadron’s 140-mile hop from Netheravon to Dover was a day’s work in August 1914; in 1908, it would have set a world distance record. Could the aeroplane become an army’s eye in the sky, to spot the enemy, and return with warning, many times faster than the cavalry that every army had relied on for the last few thousand years? The airmen - and the enemy airmen - would find out soon what (if anything) an aeroplane was for.

Aeroplanes were still fragile, untrustworthy things; engines could stop, pieces could break. Few of the airmen, setting off for France the next morning, had ever crossed sea before. Some had flown to Ireland (and back), but only by the shortest crossing, the 16 miles from Stranraer. Anything more was risky. Joubert and the pilots leaving Dover early on August 13 - before the inquest at Netheravon would open - were each given a motor-car tyre inner tube, ‘which we were instructed to blow up and wear around our middles’, Joubert recalled, ‘in case we fell into the ‘Drink’ on our way to France’. One pilot tried to drop his like a quoit on the lighthouse at Cap Gris Nez.

Chapter 20

Forward

He was at the age of hope, and something within him, which did not represent mere youthful illusion, supported his courage in the face of calculations such as would have damped sober experience.

The House of Cobwebs, George Gissing

Even to see the sea was a novelty for some, to the condescending amusement of others. While at Dovercourt, guarding the ports of Harwich and Felixstowe, Oliver Lyttleton ended a letter to his mother: “I hear a sentry behind me saying to a pal watching a school of porpoises, ‘look at that bloody great fish’. Local colour OL.”

A sea voyage was even more exotic if you had never been beyond the seaside, or the horizon. Not that the soldiers had a good view, or any view. John Harding, a private in the Queen’s West Surrey regiment, recalled the next month how men were packed on their ship ‘like sardines in a tin’, some crowded on deck, some below, some even crammed in the lifeboats. Neither they nor the crew knew where they were going.

A fuller account of a crossing came from the brothers Harry and Will Woodin, who did at least hear that they were heading for France. In peacetime they each drove motor omnibuses between Alfreton and Derby; each had joined the Army Service Corps as drivers. “We had a fine-send off from Liverpool,” they told their parents in a joint letter. “All the ships in the river cheered us as we passed with their whistles. We could not hear ourselves speak when they were all on at once. There were hundreds of people on the banks cheering us, and the ships were signalling ‘good luck’ with their flags.” After they set off at 11am, on Saturday August 15, they did not have much to write home about, apart from a Saturday night concert, and an ‘exciting few minutes’ on the Sunday afternoon when they saw a ‘big battleship making straight towards us’:

We could see a big battleship making straight towards us. We began to wonder whether it was a German. Our ship ran up a lot of signal flags. It still made right towards us, till we could see it plainly. It had four funnels. It turned out to be an American battle cruiser ...

On Monday they did nothing except sleep between meals, ‘which were: cheese and biscuits for breakfast, bully beef and biscuits for dinner, and jam and biscuits for tea’. By the Monday evening they were sailing up a French river, so they thought:

The French people at the villages on each shore of the river were cheering and waving flags. A lot of them came out in boats and got on the ship, and gave flowers all round.

On the Tuesday they landed, in Rouen; they had come up the Seine:

The place is packed with soldiers of all sorts. The French soldiers look very funny in their uniforms. There must be thousands of soldiers here. I keep seeing whole regiments marching off to the front. There are eight or nine ships unloading soldiers at once. As fast as one ship goes another comes to its place. I have discovered a post office. With best love from Harry and Will.

If the Woodins knew what censorship was yet, they had broken it. Plainly they were still thinking like civilians; understandably, as they were doing the same work as at home. As their local weekly, the Alfreton Journal, did not print the letter for a couple of weeks, by that time the world knew where the British Expeditionary Force had gone. The government censor allowed the papers to break what The Times on August 18 called a ‘conspiracy of silence’, and the country heard the BEF had landed in France, without a casualty.

There were a few casualties soon after landing, who only had themselves to blame. The ‘right royal welcome’ as Private John Harding put it stuck in the memory of many that month: “It was one of the finest times in our lives,” he recalled a few weeks later, with a smile, to a reporter of the Essex County Standard. “As we marched along, the roads were lined with people holding tobacco, cigarettes, jugs of wine and baskets of fruit. The men had only to put out their hands to help themselves.” J L Dent, a lieutenant in the 2nd battalion, South Staffordshire Regiment, left Aldershot on August 11 and landed at Le Havre on August 13. “The town was en fete, flags and banners welcoming les braves anglais were displayed on all sides,” he wrote in his diary: “ ... we had been to some pains in teaching the men the Marseillaise and there were a good many mouth organs among the company so that when we struck up there was a tremendous burst of enthusiasm ...” Unfortunately, after two sleepless nights of travel, and little food, of the hard biscuit variety as endured by the Woodins, the march out of town to a camp was enough to exhaust some of the South Staffs. Well-meaning French people poured wines and liqueurs down the flagging soldiers’ throats. “Many fell out,” Dent recorded. “These were increased when the men in the ranks passed those who had fallen out and saw them being fanned, bathed with eau de cologne and revived with brandy by pretty French girls.”

A rail journey, and days on the march followed, “in the hot sun, along the dusty, stony roads,” as Harding recollected: “the nights were just as cold as the days were hot”. Whether because the French would only risk sending trains so far towards the enemy, or because you could always rely on the soldier, the Tommy, to walk, the soldier walked. The intoxicating welcome to a foreign country - at Le Havre ‘civilians fairly hugged us’ recalled a Royal Engineer corporal, Charles Wallbank, later - was only a break in the deadening limbo of travel. Wallbank described his train to train to Landrecies in northern France as ‘tedious and miserable’. It all created an air of unreality which Wallbank was one of the few to note afterwards. “Hardly a soul imagined that we were really going to fight, not at all serious,” he wrote.

On the march, no longer with women around their necks, they went back to soldiering at its most basic, no different from the armies of Wellington, or King Alfred for that matter. Men carried what they needed, heading (they assumed) for the enemy, who was doing the same. Weapons, true, had changed with the times. The BEF wore khaki, as the fashion for red-coats to scare the enemy had passed. Now you were not supposed to advertise where you were; you found cover, a hedge or wall, or made your own, a ‘fire trench’ dug three feet deep or more, and waited to shoot the enemy off the battlefield. If you knew where the enemy was; and if your feet lasted long enough to take you there.

II

Private Dixon, a postman from Pudsey, had a rupture. “We pressed on and on, night and day, with a load of 80lbs on our backs, and from 100 to 500 rounds of ammunition.” Dixon, and everyone, was carrying the equivalent of a small person on his back. “We had very little time for meals. Men who were in South Africa say they never suffered so much. I stuck it until I dropped by the road, and was picked up by a Scottish regiment.” Dixon was serving in the Munster Fusiliers. “I bandaged myself as best I could with a puttee,” the long strip of cloth with a Hindi name that the soldiers had to wind from their ankles to their knees, as support, “and was placed in the ambulance.”

We can hardly expect such men to remember, or care, where they were or which day it was. From now on the wounded, or the incapacitated like Private Dixon, offer the best stories, as their time on the campaign was cut short. Or occasional civilian witnesses offer a different point of view: such as an English couple, the Taylors, living in Quievrain a few miles inside Belgium, halfway between Valenciennes in France and the Belgian mining town of Mons. British troops began arriving on Saturday August 22. As a sign that the clash was expected, Mrs Taylor had to tell the Quievrain villagers that the soldiers were British, not German. Besides feeding hundreds, so she told the Loughborough Echo after fleeing to England, she was much in demand to translate:

The British soldiers were all enchanted with their reception in France and Belgium and many said they wanted for nothing as the inhabitants came out with food and drink which they freely distributed among the troops ... I saw several of the men carrying French children as they marched along while their mothers walked at their sides.

By later on Saturday, Mr Taylor was concerned, so he said later, whether they were in front of, or behind, the armies:

All Saturday night troops poured in and on Sunday we distinctly heard the firing of guns but could not distinguish the exact locality. Airplanes were soaring over at a great height over the village during Sunday afternoon and towards evening one of the English soldiers told me that they had to harness up immediately. I went into the village and saw a great deal of activity, horses and artillery being prepared for evident departure. The staff officers were also on the move ... several of the soldiers told us they thought we ought to have been already gone several days. About 11.30pm the tocsin bell which is rung at the churches in case of a national calamity such as war began to ring and I was told that volunteers were wanted to dig trenches around the district and it was then that I finally decided to start for England.

III

Private Thomas Cross of the 2nd South Staffords, a veteran of South Africa, was among the first to fight and the first to be wounded, in front of Mons on Sunday August 23. “The Germans were like bees on honey. As fast as we shot one down others came up in rows. After about 20 minutes of this the order came to retire and as we were doing so I was knocked in the right side by a shell from a big gun which luckily for me failed to explode. It knocked me down and for a time I was unconscious. I got back with the regiment and didn’t know I was so badly hurt.”

Private John Jennings was an old soldier called up from the loco department of the Midland Railway Company - or rather, he re-joined the Royal Irish regiment before the call-up papers reached his Derby home. “I expect you have heard about the battle of Mons,” he wrote a couple of weeks later, in hospital at Netley. “We had enough to do, but I can tell you we gave them something, though there were thousands of them, and they kept coming.” Another wounded reservist, Bombardier William Simpson, told an Ashbourne Telegraph reporter that the German fire at Mons ‘defied description’:

He did not think there was a man amongst them who believed he would get out of the battle alive, but thanks to the skilful tactics of their officers the retiring movements were carried out most satisfactorily. The English guns were hopelessly outnumbered, but it was evident that the Germans were surprised and angry at the stubbornness and pluck with which the English fought.

We can query how Simpson could tell what the Germans were feeling. He may have felt he had to sound knowledgeable to the newspaper reporter. He was the town’s first returned hero, welcomed off the train by the same band that sent off the Territorials the month before, and carried to his parents’ house by two men on their shoulders. He had every reason to praise his side (and hence himself). Yet however he tried to hide it, the Germans were too many and too strong; the British had fallen back. Or rather, as that did not sound heroic enough, the British made ‘retiring movements’, leaving Mons in flames. (Mons was the first town they reached in the country they had gone to war to save; the BEF was back in France and the Belgians were on their own.)

Already the pattern was set, whether you bumped into the enemy or he bumped into you, or a little of both, as happened to Harry Mason, a cyclist of the 2nd South Staffords, from Walsall. He, too, was one of the very first British units to fight. He rode all through Saturday night, August 22, he wrote to friends from hospital, and at daybreak on Sunday ran up against uhlans, German cavalry with lances.

We were only about 180 strong and the job we had in front of us was a very hard one. We occupied rather a good position and caused the enemy to open out but after scrapping for about nine hours they got their artillery up and then I experienced the hottest time in my life. After being shelled for about half an hour we had the order to retire and then the fun began. Knowing we were part cyclists and that we could only get away by the road they had the range already eyed, so when we began to get away they simply dropped shell after shell after us. I think when we got to the next rise we only had about 70 men left.

Here Mason got his wound, in retreat down a hill: “I was riding by the side of one of the hussars. This poor chap was killed by the shells that were sent after us as also was the horse, the poor thing taking the best part of a shrapnel shell. It fell on the top of me and at the rate we were going you could guess what a nasty spill I had.” Picked up unconscious, he came to in a Belgian nunnery. Here was the pattern: the British, infantry or cavalry (or cyclists, a sort of mechanical mix of both) could fight other infantry or cavalry well enough. Another Walsall man, 19-year-old Private Charles Broadhurst, spoke of ‘ten hours’ continuous scrapping’ at Mons. He saw a captain’s head blown off, had a bullet pass through his cloth cap, and but for the kit he carried, would have a bullet in his back; yet they ‘revelled in their work, and those who were unfortunate enough to get wounded’, like Broadhurst in the thigh, ‘were as bright and jolly as those who were more fortunate’. Man firing at man (on foot or on top of a horse or bicycle) was reasonable enough ‘work’, if you like Broadhurst, Mason and the rest were under cover, killing German after German until their rifles became hot - too hot to work, even. The battle became ‘hotter’, in the soldiers’ slang, when the Germans fired something heavier, artillery shells, from guns you probably could not even see. You either ducked, until the shells hit you and killed you, or the Germans stopped firing, or fired at someone else; or you fled; and by showing yourself you put yourself in even more danger until you were beyond the shells and out of sight or under better cover; as Mason found.

The battle of Mons, and the first battles of August 1914, are supposed to hark back to previous wars, the battle of Waterloo, even, while the rest of the First World War dragged on in trenches, until a few more open months at the end. In truth the British were digging from the very start, as they were trained and for their own good, the same as they did in the Second World War. Private Charles Dudley Moore of the Yorkshire Light Infantry was wounded within half an hour at Mons:

The shrapnel shells of the Germans were bursting over the trenches where we were lying and I was struck in the foot with a piece of shell which took the heel of my boot clean off. Five minutes later when I was trying to help a fellow near me who had been hit in the shoulder, I was struck in the right thigh by a pellet from a shrapnel shell. This was my first experience of actual fighting, and I can tell you it is a funny sensation at first to see the shells bursting near and around you, to hear the bullets whistling by you, and to see men being killed and wounded near you, but you soon get used to it all.

Or as Charles Wallbank of the Royal Engineers put it, with a few words that hinted at the agony of suspense and then the shock of violence: “My God, to think of that first day.”

The British understood well that the killing power on the battlefield had become so great; they had seen what their firepower had done to the Zulus, Sudanese and enough others. Now that the British faced firepower like their own, they knew they had to burrow, to have more chance of survival. The problem - and the failure to get around the problem would be counted in deaths - only became plain later, when the front line settled and the British and French found they had the task of pushing the invaders scores of miles back to Germany (let alone as far as Berlin). Until then, the first wounded returning to England in early September agreed: the German infantry couldn’t ‘shoot for toffee’, they shot from the hip and didn’t take aim; you were quite safe from it at 100 yards. But their artillery! Men called it ‘simply terrible’. Some did not like to admit it, and claimed even the German artillery couldn’t shoot. “It’s numbers that does it, nothing else,” said one wounded man. But more men were killed and wounded by the artillery than anything else. Either the Germans had more or bigger guns, and machine guns, than the British, or they made better use of them. Private J R Tait, of the 2nd Essex regiment, wounded at Mons, spoke for many: “Their rifle shooting is rotten; I don’t believe they could hit a haystack at 100 yards. Their field artillery is good, and we don’t like their shrapnel.”

IV

To put across the sights and sounds of their first battle, to people who would never go near a war, the soldiers fell back on what they did know: the natural world. Private Frederick Bruce of the Suffolk regiment, wounded in the shoulder by a shell, told his parents in Cambridge the German artillery was ‘worse than being in a hailstorm’. Charging British hussars cut Germans down ‘like chaff’, an easy comparison to make if the cavalry rode across fields. Private C E McLoughlin of the Coldstream Guards spoke of shooting Germans, caught on barbed wire in a village one night, ‘as easily as shelling peas’. Other infantry spoke of shooting Germans ‘like rabbits’, whether because at a distance the men looked smaller or because some of the shooters were used to shooting rabbits (whether legally like Clifford Gothard, or as poachers). If Germans on the attack lost heart, they ‘ran like rabbits’, someone invalided home told The Times on August 31. When the British in their hastily dug trenches shot gaps in the packed lines of attackers, the Germans filled the gaps ‘like marionettes’. It sounded as if men in battle saw the enemy - and any civilians in the way - as less than human. Private Shepherd of the 1st Lincs spoke of ‘being compelled’ to open fire on old men and women in front of him, ‘mown down like so many sheep’ - ‘the occasion was not one for squeamishness’.

Another vocabulary to explain the battlefield came from religion. Sgt Crockett, a gardener and Royal Welsh Fusiliers reservist, the first wounded man home to Burton-on-Trent, called the artillery ‘hellish’. Likewise to Private Thomas Cross ‘it was like opening the lid of hell when the first shots came upon us’. Bombardier William Simpson went even further: “It was worse than hell, if it could be expressed that way,” he wrote home to his parents; and he only went through the first two days.

Chapter 21

Back

Retirements in face of the enemy must be conducted with the greatest circumspection.

Infantry Training, War Office manual, 1914

I

That Infantry Training manual, helpfully printed on August 10, 1914 - and so official that any other training was ‘forbidden’ - had chapter after chapter about drill; plenty to say about attack, and defence; but barely a page about ‘retirements’. British soldiers were evidently not allowed to go backwards on the battlefield; it was altogether best not to think about it. Yet after a couple of days at Mons, the British were .... retiring.

Retirement did rather suggest that that you thought you were not winning. And as the manual was quick to point out, in case anyone was too dim to spot it, a ‘hurried retreat’ not only might panic your side, but gave ‘a great encouragement to the enemy’. You were giving the enemy the impression that he was winning.

II

Like all things, a retirement (or withdrawal, or whatever you wanted to call it) could be worse, or better. How far you retired, and how fast, would affect how well your army managed, because no matter how strong your will, and young and fit your body, you could only take so much for so long. Lieutenant JvL Dent and the South Staffords began marching back too on the Monday night, August 24, after they had been shelled, but before they had fired a shot. Joseph Dent found that bad for morale. So began days of marching, and nights of entrenching:

I shall never forget the march, the terrible heat, the feeling of disaster which one scarcely dared admit even to oneself, the struggle to maintain march discipline and keep the men going at all and the terrible sight of the villagers crying and rushing to pack their belongings, realising what our retirement meant.

By the Tuesday night, Dent was making himself stay on his feet, ‘to avoid falling off to sleep’. Even so, several times he fell sleep standing ‘and crashed to the ground’. By then the order had come for men to leave their packs, so they could walk with less load, and Dent ‘lost’ his ‘useless’ sword. Tiredness may have dulled Dent to the physical discomforts. His last night under a roof had been on the Saturday, August 22. The nights were cold enough to leave a nip in the air and dew on the ground by early morning, which men would feel in the open as they had thrown away their bedding. Or, discomforts may have depressed an already tired man, no longer able to think straight, so that he felt the confusion and the shame of retreat all the more. In a diary entry for Thursday August 27, he wrote:

.... it must be remembered that since the beginning of the battle of Mons we knew absolutely nothing, operational orders were unknown and we were never told anything ... we were undergoing the most terrible privations and fatigue, without sleep, completely in the dark and without being permitted to turn and show fight. That the Army survived such a terrible test of morale is a marvel.

On Friday August 28, they reached La Fere, 60 miles south of Mons as the crow flies. (Another 60 miles would take them to the River Marne, level with Paris.) “General French came around and personally addressed each unit. He told us that he had never been prouder of a British soldier and that the Army had saved the French from annihilation after having undergone the most terrible test an Army can experience.” Dent and his men cheered, ‘and everyone felt much better’.

III

Even assuming that a few words from the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, General Sir John French, made the suffering feel worthwhile, was the general right? Was anything (let alone everything) better, after days of retreat?

Even while the going was good, the BEF seemed to be living off the land and the goodwill of the locals. Once in battle, every man and unit had to fend for themselves. True, the Germans were having as hard a time, if you believed the captured ones. At least the Germans, by going forward, might find food left behind by Belgian and French civilians, now refugees, and the British. Lieutenant R Macleod of the Royal Field Artillery began retiring on the Monday evening: “They outnumbered us about five to one,” he told a public meeting in the village of Waterbeach outside Cambridge a couple of weeks later. “On Tuesday our transport ran into the Germans and they had to burn it so we got no breakfast. The inhabitants were very kind and gave us bread and eggs and fruit. We had a 30 mile march and I don’t think any of us would have lasted it if it had not been for this.” The German captain Walter Bloem, to his mind in pursuit of a defeated enemy, likewise came across abandoned heaps of tins of Fray Bentos corned beef, burned to deny it to enemies like him. Setting it on fire merely cooked the meat in the tins, however: “It was excellent!” Bloem added.

If you lost your unit, through exhaustion or battle, you were even more on your own. Sgt Bird and Private Woolgar of the 4th Dragoon Guards, for example, had their horses shot under them, and took shelter in a hen house, with a German sentry outside the door, because the Germans made the adjoining building into a headquarters. They joked afterwards: “So that we could say we dined with the German generals that night, the only difference being that they were inside and we were outside; they were having wines and we had swedes and no &c.” The men escaped the hen house, and travelled south-west with the sun as their guide, dodging German troops, and trusting to the kindness of Belgian people.

Airmen were above it all. If they saw any enemy planes, they were finding it difficult to do much damage to them; even L A Strange, who had had the idea of fitting a Lewis machine-gun to his aeroplane. More danger came from his own artillery, which he noted ‘had a nasty habit of firing at every aeroplane they saw ...’

In his diary for Friday August 28, he called the retreat ‘hasty but orderly’:

... many stragglers and some confusion along the line of retirement but perfect discipline and order extending back to the fighting line which is very difficult to define as so many little separate battles are going on in isolated spots, some so forlorn that they are obviously only desperate last stands.

Here lay the reason a ‘retirement’ could lead to catastrophe, and you did not need a training manual to tell you why. In retreat, you had all the problems of an advance, of one unit not tripping over another; plus, you had to go faster than the enemy, or the enemy caught up with you and made you fight, when and where he chose, maybe before you dug a hole or even knew he was there. The more you retreated, the more men got lost and found themselves in hen houses; the more could go wrong, until the army didn’t look like one any more.

One story that made the newspapers was of a wounded man, an unnamed sergeant in the Inniskillings, who was shot in the shoulder after an all-night march on the Tuesday, August 25. He had his wound dressed at a French farm. When he set off again, Germans were nearby, and nearly captured him. He found himself in a village with a couple of hundred men, from mixed units, which was always a bad sign of confusion. These 200 stragglers did not know that the main British force had retreated further; in ignorance likewise, the Germans thought the British had left the village:

There was a lot of dead lying about too, men who had been carried there and had died on the way. When they were doing the charge one German shouted to us in broken English to surrender. We never spoke, but let them come on, and when they were within about ten yards we let them have it with the rifle. A few of them got up close enough to bayonet about two or three of our fellows, but they were only slight wounds. One fellow got a bayonet through the neck. Then we beat them off.

The British, so nearly over-run, took the chance to slip out of the village: “We had to leave our transport behind us, but we filled our bandoliers with ammunition.” The soldiers were learning that ammunition was most important to carry, more important even than food; and living was most important of all, more important than burying your dead. The life of one mattered less than the lives of many. Later, when these stragglers were sheltering in a wood, the man on guard was captured by two German cavalrymen: “... we saw them taking him away, and they were prodding him with their lances.” The British officers would not let their men shoot; not, you suspect, in case they shot their captured comrade, but so they stayed hidden and safe. They kept marching by night until they found their division again. The Royal Engineer Charles Wallbank, ‘like heaps of fellows’ got lost, all the way back to Le Havre.

Such was the BEF’s retreat; not a neat campaign, of orders given one day and carried out the next, as according to the commanders’ memoirs, and historians’ maps. The hunter chased the hunted, with never a word from a general, let alone a hot meal, or a letter from home. Every day the men became more exhausted, more likely to make mistakes. Private C E McLoughlin, ‘a fine, upstanding Irishman, and a typical Guardsman’, according to the Burton Evening Gazette, was digging trenches at Mons on the Sunday night, August 23. All Monday night, his Coldstream Guards retreated, without sleep. Time was so short, officers and men alike ate turnips from the fields.

It may have been on the Tuesday, August 25, that McLoughlin found himself at Landrecies, an important road junction 25 miles south of Mons:

About half past eight that evening, my company, numbering about 120, were ordered on outpost duty. It was raining dismally at the time, and shortly afterwards a thunderstorm burst. A party was seen advancing not far away, but in reply to our sentry’s challenge no reply was received. A French officer then challenged the oncomers, and the reply, ‘We are French’, came from the advancing party’s commander. The latter walked up to our sentry, his left hand extended in friendly greeting. The next instant a sword flashed in the commander’s right hand, and the unsuspecting sentry’s head was severed at a stroke. One of our men, unable to control himself, rushed madly at the treacherous German - for such he proved to be - and flooring him commenced a violent struggle on the ground. Our boys were now getting ready to fire, and the man struggling with the German was ordered back to the ranks. As he was returning, however, the officer rose to his knees and brought our man down with his revolver. I need not tell you that when we received the word to fire, more than one of us had reserved our first shots for that German traitor ... The advance guard retreated bellowing and screaming like madmen. The wounded also shrieked horribly; it was more nerve-racking to hear them than it was fighting.

The longer the soldiers lasted, the more they learned about war. Let us assume that all of McLoughlin’s vivid story was true, and not pieced together with others’, and not (in parts at least) unknowingly altered by his mind, suffering as it was on a third night (or more) short of sleep. Who or what had the German been a ‘traitor’ to, by tricking the defenders into thinking he was friendly? Was it unfair, that the German killed the sentry, to give his side the advantage of surprise? In the end, were McLoughlin and his fellow guardsmen any less fair towards their enemy, shooting them and leaving them to shriek?

The troops were learning morally, and practically. The Germans were using what some soldiers called ‘searchlights’; a sort of shell fired at night, that lit the battlefield like day. If this German flare caught you moving, bullets or shells could follow. Soldiers on all sides were learning to be hard. They did show some feelings for suffering civilians, who did not belong on the battlefield. Bugler Tom Reeves of the 9th Lancers was yet another man hurt by a bursting shell (‘I shall probably have to lose one or two of my fingers’) who wrote from hospital: “It is a lot different to what most of us expected. Women and children leaving their homes with their belongings. Then all of a sudden their houses would be in ashes - blown to the ground.” Sgt Crockett was one of many to claim that the Germans used women and children as a shield to advance behind: “It nearly broke some of our boys’ hearts to have to keep on firing, but we had to do so to preserve ourselves.” The Germans denied the crime, and we can ask besides, how or why would the Germans have pushed Belgians (who, whether French or Flemish speaking, would not understand German) in front of them? Would that not have been more trouble than it was worth? More likely, Crockett was seeing civilians simply caught between the warring sides and running wildly, like rabbits in a harvested field with nowhere to go - except the waiting guns of sporting shooters such as Clifford Gothard.

As soldiers on both sides were absorbing the shock of their first close combat, they learned to be indifferent to others. Lance Corporal Ball, from Walsall, stood his ground with his fellow Grenadier Guards when Germans made a bayonet charge: “I don’t know how many I accounted for, I lost count, but it was a terrible slaughter.” A day or two later, while he and the Grenadiers were in reserve, he saw a British cavalry charge:

The spectacle of the horses thundering down on them and the men with their lances ready was too much for them. Some began to run as fast as they could go, others went down on their knees and held their hands up for mercy, and another lot made a rush for a neighbouring haystack. The way they scrambled up the side of that stack was the most comical thing of the lot. We absolutely roared with laughter.

Men were learning to laugh at absurdity of war when they could, even during the act of killing and being killed, because of another cruelty: the man doing the killing one day could be killed the next. Were their commanders, who normally were spared all this, harder and wiser too? If they had blundered into a fight with far too large a part of the German army, were they learning from the experience, of fighting the first European enemy in their working lives? At the time, and afterwards, the closest observers thought not.

IV

The lesson is: don’t be too senior at the beginning of a war!

The Path to Leadership, by Field Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein (1961)

We can make an even more general point than Lieutenant Bernard Montgomery, as he was in 1914. It’s a risk to be the first to do anything, whether looping the loop in an aeroplane, or (as by the time Montgomery was writing in retirement) riding the first rocket into space. Other people, maybe not as good as you, learn from your mistakes and you, the one who had the harder job, never get the credit. Just as the campaign of August 1914 had echoes of 1815, so it had the seeds of the blitzkrieg, over some of the same country, of May 1940. The Germans of 1914 had the blitzkrieg spirit: to first put themselves where the enemy did not expect them, or want them to be, and then to pin the enemy, cut off his retreat, and make him give up or kill him. The Germans in August 1914 had many of the ingredients of May 1940. What Sgt Crockett, the Welsh reservist, said he went through would have sounded familiar to men of the second BEF, 26 years later:

Their aeroplane service was also very effective. When we were lying in the trenches we were fired at from aerial craft. Almost as soon as an aeroplane hovered above us the aviator would drop a signal to let the enemy know our approximate position, and they would immediately direct their hellish artillery upon us.

What the Germans of 1914 lacked were tanks, which were artillery moved by motor, rather than horses. Tanks made a difference not so much because of the armour protecting the men inside, because enemy tanks would have the same armour and more or less the same guns to pierce that armour, but because the engine gave the tank speed, making it ten times as fast as a man or a horse. In 1940, the second BEF retreated to the beaches of Dunkirk and barely had time to sail home. For a while, the Germans of 1914 seemed to produce a similar effect, without tanks: had J L Dent retreated not 60 miles south from Mons, but east, he would have been well on the way to Dunkirk, and well within the May 1940 rate of retreat. In 1914 as in 1940, the Germans upset their enemy not only physically, but psychologically. Both times the British did not help themselves, by being so surprised by the Germans’ tempo. Take the staff officer Sidney Clive, head of the British missions at French general headquarters, where he arrived on Tuesday August 18. He had a ‘quiet’ first couple of days, and a relaxing enough Saturday August 22, to have time to visit Rheims cathedral. After Mons and the days of retreat, his next Saturday was quite different; he met the BEF deputy chief of staff Henry Wilson at Compeigne (about two-thirds of the way from Mons to Paris, as the crow flies). Clive wrote in his diary: “Much dismayed at Hy information that we must go to Havre and home.”

By ‘we’ Henry Wilson (‘Hy’) meant the BEF. Now it might have been natural to wish for a break in a hard fight, even though probably impossible; but to say so was foolish and would only provoke alarm. Nor was this an exception. In a telegram to Kitchener, on August 24, Sir John French suggested ‘immediate attention’ to the defence of Havre. Did the BEF commanders think that the French would lay on trains? Perhaps the French would have liked to return home, too, and let Paris defend itself? What would the Infantry Training manual-writer have made of the British army leaving a war after one week? In between the two Saturdays, besides the clash at Mons and the start of the retreat, had come the battle of Le Cateau, on the Wednesday, August 26. How the battle had to be fought was both cause and effect of the British breakdown.

Half of the BEF, Douglas Haig’s I Corps, carried on retreating from Landrecies after the Tuesday night fight. That left Horace Smith-Dorrien’s II Corps alone at Le Cateau. General French’s headquarters was then at Saint Quentin, a good 20 miles further south of either. As a British official document of 1933 ahead of a tour of the battlefield put it, under the title ‘lessons’ (always the polite way of saying ‘this is what went wrong’) St Quentin was too far away; the headquarters gave orders to its two corps without knowing where they were. It was only through headquarters that I and II Corps knew where each other were. HQ had told Smith-Dorrien to carry on retreating and did not know (and nor did Haig) that Smith-Dorrien had decided to stand at Le Cateau for the day. Smith-Dorrien in the middle of Tuesday night decided he had no choice as his men were, as the 1933 document put it, ‘already thoroughly exhausted’. More to the point, so were the cavalry that would have to cover any more retreat. Not that the brigades of Smith-Dorrien’s brigades heard of the decision to stand, until dawn, if they ever did (let alone the battalions, companies and the men at the very front about to do the fighting).

One reason for the fouled communications, that meant thousands died where they did, was the impossible job of the motorcyclists carrying messages, such as J K Stevens. His equivalent at the battle of Waterloo rode a horse; but only took a few miles to go from one end of the battle to the other. The messenger of 1815 and 1914 alike was shot at, shelled, and outdoors in all weathers. Stevens told his local Cambridge Daily News: “We were soaked to the skin when we reached Le Cateau and wet as we were we were glad to get a couple of hours’ sleep on the top of wet corn sheaves. The worst of being a motorcyclist was that even after settling down for a sleep we were invariably called up to take a message.” Around this time - Stevens may have muddled his story by the time he told it, a few weeks later - a piece of shell had chipped his motorcycle’s petrol tank; a farrier patched it with some solder. Another time, while Stevens had to make another repair to his machine, he lost his brigade. Once he reached St Quentin, he took a message for a field ambulance, until five miles out of town he skidded and buckled his front wheel. He put his motorcycle on a passing horse-drawn wagon and rather than add himself to the load he walked alongside the convoy, ‘as the horses were done up’:

Never shall I forget the trek along that road. There were the stragglers of the army who had fought at Mons. Men who had not shaved for a week, men footsore and weary with nothing but their uniforms. Many had lost their caps and most of them had discarded their equipment. Some had cut the heels from their shoes on account of soreness. Every few hundred yards was a dead horse while I counted no fewer than 15 motor lorries abandoned by the roadside. Boxes of ammunition, sacks of flour, tins of meat, Cardigan waistcoats, caps, rifles, broken bicycles were scattered along this long, straight road. Here and there a few men had stopped to make a fire to boil tea, others gathered apples from the gardens of deserted cottages.

This part of the British army, at least, sounded beaten; it did not sound like an army at all. After the Germans mauled half of the BEF at Le Cateau, the BEF made sure to retreat until they had outrun the Germans. From Le Cateau on August 24, the RFC moved airfields ten times in the next 11 days. Stevens walked 20 miles with the convoy as far as La Fere, where he had his machine repaired again. Stranded again, he went a dozen miles more, to Laon, where - maybe because he had in ignorance strayed away from the rest of the BEF -gendarmes held him for two days until an English officer freed him. His war for the time being was over.

V

In his great novel August 1914 Alexander Solzhenitsyn sends his main character, Colonel Vorotyntsev, into and around the battlefields of the Masurian Lakes to show how badly the brave and faithful Russian soldiers were led, so that the more agile Germans first exhausted them, then surrounded them - as the Germans in the west would have done to the British, given more of a chance. As Montgomery said, it was a ‘wise decision’ of Sir John French’s to retreat from Mons (though would it not have been even wiser not to have gone there in the first place?). In the climax to the book, Vorotyntsev tells his story to the commander in chief, the czar’s uncle, Grand-Duke Nicholas, in front of the failed and guilty headquarters staff, with the hope that the truth will lead to change for the better. Vorotyntsev fails; he is asking too much for the system to reform itself. Solzhenitysn and his readers knew well what followed; the fall of the czar, and a much worse, soviet, tyranny. Yet would a real, British Vorotyntsev have done any better? The nearest equivalent - a piece of journalism from a roving reporter, not a staff officer - suggests not.

Though a necessary character as a thread through the novel, Vorotyntsev is believable, as a man with permission to rush from battlefield to commander’s table. Journalists, from neutral countries, or allies, or even following their own troops, were not welcome on any battlefield. This was, partly, for their own good. In any war, before and since, strangers or foreigners asking questions were suspect. Reporters could easily find themselves under arrest, as spies. The British authorities, as much as their French hosts, did not want journalists finding out things for themselves, in case what they printed gave the enemy clues, or encouragement. No news was good news. In mid-August The Times noted that they had heard very little from Russia since its mobilisation began in July 30; it had to suppose that the ‘grim silence of Russia means much’. The silence was ignorance; and the ignorance a sign of incompetence. In Solzhenitysn’s novel and in reality Russian officials said little about the battle of Masurian Lakes, the crushing of their invasion of East Prussia, and instead talked up a lesser, flawed, victory over the hardly more competent Austrians.

Hence The Times’ news of a ‘broken’ and ‘beaten’ British army in one of their special Sunday editions on August 30 was so shocking, both unexpected and as an outbreak of truth; an unwelcome shock, to the Liberal government. In the House of Commons the day after, Asquith commended the ‘patriotic readiness of the whole of the press from the beginning of the war’, with the ‘very regrettable exception’ of the Times on an ‘alleged disaster’ to the British army. By the formal standards of the day, the prime minister was condemning The Times. What proved to be the single piece of news nearest the truth - the setback to an army that everyone, then and since, took for granted as the best that ever left Britain - was deplored, for rocking the boat.

Why then had the censor, the Unionist politician F E Smith, allowed the article - and, bizarrely, even added a few lines, to urge readers to join the army? With more honesty, Asquith did admit that the country was ‘entitled to more prompt and efficient information’ from the war. With that line he might have been - again, without rocking the boat - putting pressure on the army to tell the people (including the politicians) what was going on. In his war memoir Lloyd George recalled how the cabinet at this time had no news of the BEF for days, and was ‘bewildered by the scrappy and incoherent reports given to it each morning by Kitchener’.

If the most junior Guards officers, like Oliver Lyttleton, felt so opposed to ‘outsiders’ joining them, we can imagine how the army would resent journalists scratching around for news. Newspapers, so the generals and politicians liked to think, ought to know their place like everyone else - for newspapers did have a place: printing what rulers chose to tell them. Thus for example, the day before The Times made its stink, Lady French, the wife of the BEF commander, sent an appeal to the newspaper, “for knitted socks &c for our troops. It is indeed a crying need as the War Office allowance is only three pairs for each man and a long day’s march will wear socks into holes.” Local newspapers widely picked this up from The Times. Similarly, a few days later in Staffordshire newspapers Lord Dartmouth appealed for ‘comforts’ for the troops: “Socks, Coloured Pocket Handkerchiefs, Shirt Collar Studs, Towels, Soap, Tooth Brushes, Pipes, Tobacco, and later on Woollen Helmets and Warm Underclothing.” As that list suggested, the authorities by now were expecting the war to run into winter. As with the families left behind by the soldiers, it was taken for granted that charity (collected by a small committee of ladies, Dartmouth suggested) would make good hardships. Yet was it not asking too much of the state, to give enough socks? The state did give a soldier a rifle and a uniform (a reservist had his old uniform which, hopefully, he had not grown out of). Did the War Office not know that a soldier might march for days?

Who was responsible? The administrators, or the ministers of either main political party, in and out of office every few years? The king and his family? Because King George V and his relatives, even the more German-sounding ones, such as Louis Battenberg, took particular interest in the military, because it was one of the few jobs fit for them, and the army was the ultimate institution that kept a monarch in power (or not, as the German kaiser and Russian czar would soon find out). Did the politicians keep the army so short of money, that it could not afford more socks, or was there a lack of sympathy, a sense that three pairs of socks were plenty for the common man? As for the officers, a sword had long been no good as a weapon or as protection against bullets; so why carry one? These small things mattered on the retreat, as men’s feet ached and every unnecessary load rankled. Such institutional shortcomings - being set in their ways, always preparing for the war they had last fought, or not preparing at all because a quiet life was easier - were hardly only Britain’s, though only Britain had the cheek to call itself ‘great’. If you rocked the boat by asking questions, of any institution, you rocked them all.

VI

That was why so many people did not like Winston Churchill. He was a boat-rocker. A grandson of a Duke of Marlborough, the son of the Unionist politician Lord Randolph Churchill, he was in rather too much of a hurry, too obviously ambitious, for some tastes. He made a name for himself, first, in the army and as a war correspondent, and then in his father’s footsteps in parliament - only to rather spoil it, by switching from the Unionists to the Liberals. Churchill had a way of getting on by ‘being Winston’, energetic and sure of himself, not by attracting a following - which was as well, judging by the diary of Richard Holt, the businessman turned Liberal MP. Holt seldom made comments on politicians; he made an exception for Churchill, who clearly riled him. “I don’t like the clever Home Secretary Winston Churchill. He has a bad face,” Holt wrote in May 1911. To Holt, someone ‘clever’ seemed suspect, for in July 1911 he called F E Smith ‘clever’, ‘too clever, and unprincipled; a nice pair with his friend Churchill’. Soon after, Churchill switched to the Admiralty, and nettled more people; or the same people, in new ways. Ben Tillett in speeches in 1914 singled out Churchill as an imperialist, for wanting to build more battleships while families had to do without food or chairs.

Why did Churchill get up the noses of such different people, without, it seemed, even trying? Neither Holt nor anyone else might mind a clever person; it was what Churchill did, or tried to do, that annoyed people, whether he was proved wrong or right. By August 1914, not quite 40, he was one of the leading, rising Liberal politicians; much of the dislike he provoked may have been envy. Some would have liked his job, or would have been glad to see him out of his job.

VII

The trouble for Churchill by later August 1914 was that his job - any job, except the very top job in British politics - was not enough for him. The British army reached France safely; the German navy was not showing fight. The Admiralty warned the home fleets on August 12 to beware that the ‘extraordinary silence and inertia of enemy’ might be hiding an attempt at invasion; as days passed, the silence looked simply like inertia.

G C Harper, the cadet, started the war well, on the cruiser HMS Endymion; on August 26 the captain raised him to midshipman, and Harper proudly added home-made patches of rank to his uniform. On August 31 he reviewed the month of patrolling. Like many on land and at sea, he always felt tired: “Every third day you get a day’s work of 24 hours with three hours sleep, ie from midnight to midnight, sleeping from four to seven in the morning. But the other two days you can get seven hours with good luck.” After four weeks of the same breakfast - ‘porridge, brown sugar, kippers, bacon and eggs, uneatable butter, bread and marmalade’ - he was sick of it, though he said he did not want to grumble (or grumbling to himself in his diary made him feel better). Otherwise, the sheer routine, domestic nature of his diary - and as he admitted, no real hardship - suggested he was having an uneventful time:

The main trouble is that you cannot get enough water either to drink, wash in or wash your clothes. I am speaking of the gun room of course. We have been at dinner without anything to drink. We often could not get a bath in the mornings; it was the utmost luxury to get a third of a can of warm water to bathe or wash in. It was very difficult to get people to wash clothes but I must say they did their best in spite of the lack of water and no drying arrangements. Of course starching and ironing was unknown. My collars are still holding out but when our collars run out we wear them soft ... as to food they make the great mistake of trying to keep up appearances and we have proper meals in style instead of giving us plenty of plain food. A typical dinner consists of one small fish, a perfectly microscopic helping of beef and potatoes and one sardine (as savoury). Perhaps some beastly dried fruit takes the place of the sardine and on a great occasion a small cup of nasty coffee follows. Now see how much more satisfactory dinner would be if it was an unlimited supply of good bread, eatable butter and jam with plenty of good coffee. Yet that would not be a proper dinner you see with the regulation courses. The butter is generally uneatably disgusting, there is no milk but the rest of the food (what there is of it) is good.

The navy did have a small battle, off Heligoland, in late August. It gave Oliver Lyttleton, still guarding the coast at Dovercourt on the north tip of Essex, something to write home to his mother about. It made a change from his own news (‘still no commission!’), his friends (‘Bobbety insists upon making the most infernal row on a mouth organ which is rather distracting’) and the war news from France (‘isn’t it awful!’). Lyttleton and his fellows visited the destroyers from the battle at Harwich, ‘the most thrilling thing I have ever done’. Lyttleton and friends went on the Laertes, ‘or rather were dragged on board’, by ‘a red bearded young naval officer’. He showed the shell holes on the ship, ‘one which went through three cabins and then burst’. British destroyers had attacked German destroyers to bring out the German cruisers, but for a while the British destroyers had to fight the bigger German cruisers. A ‘mouldy’ (a torpedo) disabled the Laertes; the disabled ship tried to hitch a hawser to another destroyer, the Laurel, but it broke. Men on the Laurel cheered; the naval officer telling the story to Lyttelton had shaken his fist at them and cursed. Just as German battle cruisers came out of the mist, and it seemed that the Laertes had a minute before destruction, “boom whroo-oo-oo zip the Crecy let off a broadside and one funnel was all that was left on the cruiser’s deck. ‘God I cried like a child,’” the naval story-teller said, “and upon my word he nearly wept again at the mere description of it,” Lyttleton added.

Otherwise, the threats to the navy were unglamorous: the floating mine and the submarine. An early loss was the Amphion, blown up in the North Sea by a mine, a German tactic Lady Goonie Churchill deplored in a letter to her husband Jack as ‘a low, base game’. The most junior of the Amphion’s four wireless operators, William Cash, at home on leave a few days later in Walsall, told the Wolverhampton daily paper the Express & Star on August 15: “I had been off duty for two hours and was asleep on the mess desk at the time the explosion occurred.” The reporter may have tidied his English. “The uproar was terrific and the first thing I remember was that I was going up in the air.” That Cash came out without a mark appeared miraculous, the reporter said to him. Cash laughed, as if he realised that civilians hadn’t a clue about war and what he had been through. “The first thing I did was to get out,” he said. That was obvious. What was of interest was the way that military drill had taken hold of the men, as they understood that a panic to save yourself would only make it worse for everyone. “Everyone was right quiet and the people behaved just as though they were at exercise in harbour. There was no rushing about and we were transferred to other boats in a few minutes.” Also foreshadowing what men home from the BEF would say soon, Cash said that he already felt anxious to go back: “We are all eagerly awaiting the chance to go back to have a pot.” Churchill, too, wanted a pot at the Germans.

Chapter 22

An outing to Ostend

.... and another thing that appealed to us was that we would be travelling overseas and would be able to see what the other part of the world was like.

A Fortunate Life, Albert Facey (1981)

I

After it was all over, the expedition by Royal Marines to Ostend made excellent photos in The Graphic of September 5; the port and Belgian seaside resort hardly looked as if it were at war. It helped that readers who had journeyed to the Continent had quite likely passed through Ostend - and from there taken the train to more historic and beautiful places than the rather plain towns in northern France that the BEF was having to march forward and back through. One photo showed the Marines marching past the ‘Royal Yacht Hotel’. Ostend had that in-between feel - not England but not quite Belgium either - that, you suspect, satisfied neither the locals nor visitors.

Churchill had sent the Marines there, ‘for reasons which seemed sufficient to the Government and the military authorities’, he had told the House of Commons airily. Another picture showed Marines following the horse-drawn coffins of policemen, killed defending the town against German cavalry raiders. Evidently the war had come as far as this corner of Belgium, 60 miles from England. Yet the war was not raging enough to keep a large crowd, mainly of men, from the funeral; and clearly the Marines could spare men for the ceremony. The very fact that the newspapers had pictures suggested this was not the front line; or did the British have a reason for allowing publicity?

II

George Aston had had a busier August 1914 than many. He began the month as the second commandant at the Royal Marines barracks at Eastney, along the prom from Portsmouth. He was in his early 50s; the Marines had been his life. He had gone into staff-work at the Admiralty, and written some naval books. On Sunday August 2, after helping the called-up Marines reservists find uniforms that fitted, a telegram ordered him to the Admiralty the next morning. He left from the nearest station, Fratton, at 8.20pm and arrived at London Waterloo late, finding excited crowds cheering naval reservists. He checked in at the Grand Hotel. Next day he found himself a member of a special committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence to look into ‘oversea attack’ and moving and escorting British troops by sea. Fourteen-hour days followed, of conferences that wore him out, ‘but intensely interesting’.

At 6.30pm on Tuesday August 25, he was asked whether he had any uniform, because he had to command a Royal Marine brigade off Ostend, at once. Aston said that he had a brigadier-general’s uniform, at his tailor’s. He left at once, to collect it; then went to the home of a friend, Lady Tryous, to put it on. He had moved out of the hotel, to be a guest of George Tryous. He returned to the Admiralty, for ‘a hasty meal in my room and instructions from First Lord followed by official orders in writing signed by secretary at 9.20pm’. Aston caught the 10pm train from London Victoria for Chatham, to meet his new command. Aston was qualified, available, dressed for the part, and away within three and a half hours. But why Ostend? Why then? And why the hurry?

This was Churchill’s way, with what forces he had under his control, of taking part in the land battle. News from France was ‘disappointing’, as he put it in an Admiralty message on August 24. He warned that the Germans might ‘control Calais and the French coast’. In fairness, this was Royal Navy business. Ostend sounded even more at risk, judging from a Daily Mail reporter, who returned to England from the port on August 25 and rang the Admiralty with news at 8.30pm. (The press had its uses.)

The correspondent had left Ostend that day, as German troops were approaching. Ostend’s garrison of 4000 had gone along the coast to Antwerp the previous Friday, August 21, leaving only 200 gendarmes. They had seen off the 300 German cavalrymen. “The gendarmes suffered about 45 casualties and having defended the honour of the town now intend to surrender when larger forces of Germans arrive,” the Admiralty noted from the Mail reporter. Whether you thought the Belgians ought to try rather harder, or that the outnumbered defenders had done all they could, this did not sound promising territory to enter. “First Lord informed who decided to make no change to orders.” Churchill had indeed already told Aston to occupy Ostend, and to send cyclists on reconnaissance to the towns of Bruges, Thorout and Dixmunde, each about a dozen miles away. Churchill was asking Aston to create a diversion, ‘favourable to the Belgians who are advancing from Antwerp’, although the latest news had suggested the Belgians were doing exactly the opposite, and to threaten the western flank of the German southward advance. “It should therefore be ostentatious.”

The Admiralty would supply details about the enemy (such as: were they waiting for him to land?). “The object in view would be fully attained if a considerable force of the enemy were attracted to the coast. You will be re-embarked as soon as this is accomplished,” his orders ran.

Aston reached his command at Chatham at 1.30am on the Wednesday, August 26. On the way the Admiralty had sent him another telegram, which already made a dangerously vague and contradictory mission worse. If, on arrival at Ostend, he found the enemy, ‘you must act according to circumstances and their strength, endeavouring to avoid bringing calamity upon the town for the sake of a minor operation’. Some of that was contradicted by yet another message on the way to Belgium; if the enemy were in Ostend, Aston was to land somewhere else, and turn them out (and never mind the townspeople?). Aston had an impossible job. As he wrote later, putting the best face on it, the hope “was that my little force would be looked upon as the advance guard of a strong British army and have some moral effect. Failing that if it drew down upon it a strong enemy force that would otherwise be launched into the decisive battle in France it might be considered to achieve a strategic effect.” Put less kindly, he was bait. If the Germans took no notice, he was wasting his time; if he succeeded, and made the Germans think he was a threat, they would smash him, and Ostend.

Aston arrived off Ostend on the Wednesday night. The admiral carrying him was against landing the Marines in a choppy sea in the dark. Aston did not have any staff, ‘not even a servant to look after my kit’. He landed at 3.30am on the Thursday, August 27, and began preparing for his 3200 men and 300 tons of stores, ‘designed mostly for the defence of Scapa Flow’. He had besides to deal with the mayor of a town of 25,000 people ‘in a state of panic’, the Belgian military, and the British embassy at Antwerp, as the Germans had marched into Brussels days before. “Then ended the longest and heaviest day I have ever spent,” Aston recalled. “But ended with men on the approaches to the town and entrenched.” For that he had to thank his ‘magnificent men’, mostly old reservists, who however were not trained to work in battalions; nor were there many officers to go around. Aston set up 3000 men on a seven-mile perimeter, thin by the standards of war, and which as he wrote would have ‘sufficed to keep off a cavalry raid’, but nothing more serious. The month ended with Aston ordered to return to England ‘at your earliest convenience’. That meant fetching all the 300 tons of stores, including many tons at a barracks a mile from the quay. “Well,” said a doubtless by now thoroughly weary Aston, “the men rose to the occasion magnificently. Men who had lain on outposts all night came in marching order also carrying WP [waterproof] sheets, blankets and boxes of ammunition. Then did fatigue work on the quay.” All 300 tons went back the way they had come, and the Marines embarked in the dark, ‘cheered by the town as they cheered the British in’, Aston noted cynically. Ostend had been a town ‘that did not want us’, because they did not want the war to hurt them or their property. So much for Britain going to war to save them.

III

Aston landed at Portsmouth and took the train to London, returning to the Admiralty one week after he left. What had he - and his hard-working men - achieved?

They had not fought any Germans, which Aston implied was as well, because his brigade of four battalions was ‘not really battalions but just herds of old reservists’, and ‘recruits who had never fired their rifles’. “The main difficulty,” Aston summed up, as if men too rusty or untrained to be any good were not difficulties enough, “is that no-one will explain to the First Lord what a battalion or a brigade is and what it requires in the way of officers, organisation and equipment to make it a mobile unit in the field.” Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, was only ever interested in being a commander, issuing commands; he had been born into an aristocratic family that had been telling other people what to do for centuries. How to make Churchill’s commands work was for lower ranks to fix; or not, as Aston found out, and as others would find out later.

IV

In London again by the end of August, Lady Gwendoline Churchill kept up twice-daily letters to her husband Jack, still asking him to write to her and console her. Not that she was doing a very good job of consoling her husband, who was the one who faced the prospect of going to war. She wrote to him on September 1 after lunch at the Admiralty, with news about him, from Kitchener, via her brother-in-law Winston; Jack’s yeomanry would train for three or four months, then go to war: “I am not happy as you may imagine as that means you will go face to face with those swines of Germans who by that time will be more savage and desperate than ever,” she wrote, tactlessly. She did however do an excellent job, passing on gossip. In another letter that day after a visit from Winston’s wife Clemmie she reported that Winston was too tired to motor to see Jack: “W had only three hours sleep last night; there was something critical, I don’t know what ...”

The next day, she called the war news ‘pretty grim’: “Do you think we will be able to hold the Germans long enough to give the Russians time to march on to Berlin, I doubt it very much.” Again, we see that faith in Russia to do the hard work, sooner or later to be disappointed. She shuddered at the long list of missing troops in the newspapers, and yet again in a self-obsessed way urged her husband to visit her and give her courage to bear it all (but wasn’t her husband the one in need of comfort?). In the afternoon she was ‘so miserable’, still haunted by list of missing men, but cheered by her biggest piece of gossip yet; from Winston and Asquith. She marked this letter ‘secret’:

The PM was at lunch and he told me that our Army is the best, better than the Germans and better than the French. The German individually are rotten, cannot face steel, cannot shoot, but their headquarter staffs is splendid, organisation and strategy.

Was Asquith unconsciously projecting his dissatisfaction with the panicky, dumb British headquarters on the Germans?!

August 1914 ended with many men where they had not started the month. Alan Brooke was in Cairo. He saw the sights, such as the well where Potiphar was supposed to have imprisoned Joseph, and (more likely genuine, and more likely to interest Brooke the artilleryman) the marks made by Napoleon’s guns on the city gate and nearby mosques more than a century before. On August 30 he took a trip to the Sphinx and then the Great Pyramid:

...and went right up to the King’s chamber in the very centre. It was desperately hot and stuffy inside and stank of bats but I would not have missed going inside for a lot. We then climbed on to the top and were well repaid by the magnificent view from the top. I felt I could have stopped all day on top looking around. On our way back we dropped into the zoo and had tea there ...

For many, in the same place as ever, life went on as ever. Frank Balfour in Sudan was ‘wrestling very inadequately’, so he told his friend Irene Lawley, ‘with one of the plagues of Egypt’: locusts. Working out of a steamer along 20 miles of both banks of the Nile, his weapons against the pests were paraffin and arsenic:

A swarm of locusts is a thing to wonder at. The eggs from which these have hatched may have been laid years ago - as soon as there are good rains and food for the young crawling locusts they hatch out. As we have them now they are bright green-yellow and an advancing swarm looks as if the ground was all on the boil. Later they will go black and shed their skins - after that they can flie - the object is to kill them all before that happens. It’s a brutal business - you drive hundreds of thousands into a clump of bushes, surround it with dry stuff - pour paraffin on top and apply the match - or else you lay poisoned grass on the ground, let them eat that.

On August 31 William Swift’s daughter-in-law Annie called on him in Churchdown. Her son Reginald, who had joined the army’s commissariat (food supply) branch in mid-August, had left the Bristol port of Avonmouth for abroad. “He has sent his photograph. He is a nice looking lad. Annie will get a dozen taken from it. He is in uniform, looks well. She took a bag of apples back with her and brought me a bottle of jam.” The next day Swift rose early as usual, just before 6am. As a man in his 70s, he was asking a lot of himself by working five hours in the garden: “Had two or three swoons perhaps the effect of the heat and of my hurrying to get the potatoes out while the fine weather lasts.” A letter from his Aunt Sarah asked him to tell Mr Hooper, her landlord - who wanted to move into her house - that she would not leave until the proper time, April 1916. That may have seemed a way off to a man like Swift, who might have sensed he was near the end of his time, and who was anxious for the young men of his family heading for danger.

Shadowy as the first battles in Europe were, it was dawning on some that war between two of the most powerful nations ever would be on a scale not seen before. As Donald Weir, the army officer in India, wrote to his mother on August 27, having heard the first news of the BEF: “The war will no doubt last a very long time and the losses will be enormous on both sides before any final result is attained.”

Chapter 23

To the end of the world

The world has indeed never been the same again, and never will be.

Antony, A Record of Youth, by his father, the Earl of Lytton (1935)

The same amateurism that made a shambles of the Ostend expedition at the end of August 1914 had already doomed the Gallipoli campaign by the time Gerald Legge landed in July 1915. Even on the battlefield, he could not help telling his father, Lord Dartmouth, about the wildlife - ‘some topping birds’ - with a difference; he was no longer the lone hunter: “No big birds ... which surprises me as they would get lots of cheap meals here now.”

He kept his hunter’s instinct and curiosity. He wrote of ‘wandering about the front line’ for two days before he led his company of South Staffords there for the first time. “I am enjoying myself hugely at present,” he said, “it is only the smell and flies I object to.” All he left unsaid was what was making the stink and so many flies, and what vultures, if there had been any, could feed on. The locals, too, seemed to evoke his travels in Sudan the year before. “Their snipers are very accurate and very quick and I respect them. They, the Turks, are real gentlemen and fight as such. They could shell our hospitals and hospital ships for certain but never yet have they fired at either.” It did not seem to occur to Legge that the Turkish defenders were saving their guns for the men they had not hurt yet.

From a friend of a friend, Legge had heard how the attack, meant to capture the Turkish capital Constantinople and change the war, had gone wrong before it even began: “... if only the fleet had not come fooling around before the Army was ready we could have gone straight through with little trouble.” Three months on, the campaign had stalled, and what Legge called ‘this old hill Achi Baba’, a commanding point on the Gallipoli peninsula, was a long way off yet. He summed up: “Now we have many thousands of men here and can move but very slowly with thousands of lives lost. It seems like a baddish bit of self-advertisement by someone.”

A letter to a friend dated August 5, after nine days in the trenches, had much the same tone; and if you sensed any faltering in his good cheer, any wistfulness, and brooding on death, you may have been reading too much into his words, written on very small sheets of (unusually for him) plain paper.

It was most interesting and in spite of flies, heat and stinks I was completely and entirely happy there. It seems odd that there are people who can be happy with all that noise and suffering going on all round and I am rather ashamed of it in a way but still I am sure a contented and happy man in command of a company is an asset even if he is a damned bad soldier. The Turks are gentlemen and fight as such; their snipers are sportsmen and I respect them. I had an exciting bout with one, one night I went out to stalk him but he knew his job too well, which was to lie still while I had to move the result was he located me before I located him and he put two or three all round me so I gave him best and crawled back to the trench with my tail down ...

Again, despite the suffering due to the extreme climate of the Mediterranean midsummer, let alone the fighting, Legge credited the Turks as gentlemen, and likened war to sport. He went on:

... it is extraordinary how one can carry on with very little sleep for a long time and how fit one feels on it but I expect it tells after a time. I wish we could get done with this old war all the same; I long for the old life again but I suppose it can never be the same with all those good fellows away. Did you see that Woosham was killed out here. That is the greatest loss I have had in this war. After all he and I have been through together it seems hard for him to go out like that. I wish I could tell you all that I believe we are going to do today I hope it is going to have a big effect out here but I am sworn to secrecy. Write and tell me anything cheerful you can. Yours ever Gerald Legge.

Four days later he and his company left their trenches to attack machine-guns, and snipers who seemed to aim at leaders. Legge was dressed conspicuously in shorts, puttees and light boots with rubber soles. One of his men, Private Apdale, wrote later that he bandaged the wounded Legge’s arm and leg. “The most marvellous thing about all this, how I was not riddled with bullets I shall never understand if I live to be a thousand. God alone knows why I was spared ... the only reason I can give that I was not riddled with bullets is that the Turks seeing me dressing wounded may have refrained from firing at me.” He wrote clumsily, like a man not used to putting his words on paper, and trying to make sense of something as inhuman as battle. Apdale told how Legge’s servant, Private Walters, came to them, with a wounded wrist, and Legge was hit again. Legge supposedly told Apdale to find stretcher bearers. ‘Shall I take my equipment?’ Apdale claimed he asked.

No, he says, so I took my rifle and bayonet bandolier water bottle and made a dart across the open, back to find any stretcher bearers, the snipers firing at me as I ran. I ultimately found the stretcher bearers but they informed me that it was a certain death to venture up as far as the hole where Captain Legge was. Anyhow I tried several times to get someone to go back with me but they appeared to have plenty of work in looking after wounded who had managed to come out of the battle towards more safety.

Then, according to Apdale, came the order to retire. Stumbling on ungrammatically, but doing his best, Apdale went on:

Now your lordship is what most certainly happened because I saw it, the ground where Captain Legge lay and also the rest of the wounded was set in flames by the Turks and I very much regret to inform your lordship that the wounded was burned. It may console your lordship when I say that in my opinion Captain Legge was either unconscious or dead before the ground was on fire as he was wounded four times while I was there his servant Walters no doubt dead by him.

Apdale ended this account for Lord Dartmouth of the death of his son: “I hope you will excuse my rather illiterate way of explaining what happened but of course you will understand.”

Other letters reached Lord Dartmouth with different stories; one said that when all was quiet that night, Legge was buried with respect and a small cross put on his grave. Several wrote of Legge, while wounded, urging his men on, with the shout ‘get on Staffords’. But as one man admitted, men circulated stories that others knew to be untrue. Apdale may have felt a need to explain away why he left Legge dead or dying, to be burned. Surely, even if the Turks were wicked enough to burn their enemies alive, it made no sense for them to set fire to the attackers’ ground, because any smoke would hide the busted attack and aid the retreat. More likely the shooting had set things alight, one more mishap in a failed and pointless attack.

It says something about the power of an aristocrat, and something about the humanity of the surviving South Staffordshire soldiers, once miners, shop workers and labourers, that although about half their fellows were killed in those few minutes, some took the trouble to write letters to Legge’s father, in the simple, only way they knew. A Sgt Cooke wrote to his wife, who forwarded the letter to Lord Dartmouth, that Legge ‘used to expose himself so much, didn’t know what fear was d-d it’:

He was my ideal type of an English officer and gentleman, I got on splendidly with him. We were talking together all night on the 7th, he was telling me about the travels in different parts of the world. He used to go all over the world, collecting or something of that sort. It is a pity but I somehow felt he would get knocked out. I cannot explain the feeling but there it was, he had an exaggerated idea of the Turk, he used to say the Turk was a gent and fought like one.