6

‘To Die Would Be an Awfully Big Adventure’

More Etonians with literary connections played their part in the Great War too: Charles Dickens’ grandson went straight to France in 1914 and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s would serve with the Rifle Brigade, whilst Arthur Conan Doyle’s son Kingsley would also serve; but it was a less conventional connection that dragged one of the writing celebrities of the day into the conflict.

James Matthew Barrie was born in Scotland in 1860. Relocating to London in the early 1890s he eventually moved to Gloucester Road with his wife and their dog Porthos, just a short walk away from Kensington Gardens. A large, sprawling escape for Londoners, it was full of nannies wheeling perambulators whilst their elder charges scampered alongside. One day in 1897, by which time he was becoming an established writer, Barrie was walking his dog when he made the acquaintance of two little boys wearing distinctive, red tam-o’-shanters. The eldest, George, was a beautiful, dark-haired little boy; cocky, obnoxious, honest and inquisitive without a hint of self-consciousness; all the qualities that Barrie thought wondrous in small children.

As his star rose, the author had all the time in the world for his friends’ children, filling the void where his own might have been. One of his first cohorts had been Bevil Quiller-Couch, who in 1914 was the young officer who had dug his friend Regie Fletcher’s grave in the gardens of Veldhoek Chateau; but the Llewelyn Davies brothers would become increasingly influential in Barrie’s eyes. He became acquainted with their parents; their father Arthur, a handsome barrister who had been a master at Eton for a single year and their mother, the beautiful Sylvia Du Maurier, sister to Gerald and aunt of Daphne. Engaged within weeks of meeting, the couple’s family grew quickly after they married. George was born in 1893, Jack, the only brother who would not go to Eton, followed. Peter joined them in 1897, Michael in 1900 and the family was complete when ‘Nico’ was born in 1903.

Barrie had long been incorporating friends and acquaintances into his work. With George he would concoct stories, the little boy pressing his hands to his temples to ‘remember’ what it was like to be a baby. In 1902 Barrie published The Little White Bird, based on their friendship. On a family holiday in Surrey in 1901 the three eldest boys were given the roles of ‘the boy castaways’ and he took innumerable research photographs of how they might behave on their own little island. He played the evil pirate, George hunted with a bow and Peter walked the plank. Once again, in 1903, based in part on their castaway games, Barrie sat down to write; this time a play. Rehearsals began in October 1904 under a blanket of secrecy. Actors hardly knew the title of the work as they underwent ‘flying’ lessons on wires above the stage.

The curtain rose on Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up at 8.30 p.m. on 27 December 1904 at the Duke of York’s theatre. Each of the Davies boys, who had attended rehearsals and practiced flying for themselves, had lent their name to a character; George Darling, Peter Pan, Michael Nicholas Darling and John Darling. The eldest three in particular had been Barrie’s inspiration. The ‘spark’ had come from them and the play had been forged by ‘rubbing the fire of [them] violently together, as savages with two sticks produced a flame’. Barrie himself was completely unsure as to how this labour of love would be received, and yet Peter Pan was a success before the curtain fell. When the actress playing Peter asked the mainly adult audience to clap if they believed in fairies the response was so overwhelming that she burst into tears.

For George and his brothers, the frivolity of fairies and pirates, and their childhood, receded into the background when their father was diagnosed with cancer in his jaw in 1906. Barrie dropped everything and put himself entirely at the family’s disposal; assuming all the financial burden for the excruciating treatment that Arthur Llewelyn Davies would undergo. Despite a brutal operation that removed a large portion of his jaw and the roof of his mouth, the cancer spread. George was by now 14 and remained at home, but his father’s ‘last selfless gesture’ was to send the little ones away so that they would not see him die. He passed away in 1907 at the age of 44; a few months before George was despatched to the house of his old friend Hugh MacNaghten at Eton.

In 1909 further tragedy engulfed the Llewelyn Davies boys. Their mother Sylvia collapsed and was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. A number of relatives were to act on behalf of her boys, but she did not want them separated and therefore it ultimately made logistical sense for the wealthy Barrie to adopt them and for their faithful nurse to remain in a prominent position. Sylvia died in 1910, aged 43, and that autumn Peter arrived at Eton, not as an Oppidan like his brother but as a Colleger.

George was an unmitigated success at school and found a happy home with MacNaghten, far happier that Peter who lived in the teasing shadow of the character to whom he had given his name, wishing that somebody else had had the honour. George was a fine cricketer and, like Gerry Freeman-Thomas, had been a member of the XI that took on Harrow at Lord’s in 1912. The prospect of him appearing at Lord’s had excited his late mother. J.M. Barrie told George that she talked about it ‘with shining eyes’; and two years after her sad death her eldest son did not disappoint her. When Gerry was caught out for 64 on the first day it left his team at 116 for 4. Then Eton took a risk. For the Winchester match, the traditional precursor to Lords, George, primarily a bowler had sat at ten in the Etonian batting order. He had had a successful match. As well as taking four wickets for just eighteen runs, when George went in to bat in his only innings he had hit a curiously impressive 42. As a result, he had been bumped up to six in the order, a decision which was considered dubious by some.

George had already made a fantastic left-handed catch that found its way into the national press along with his photograph, but it was for his batting that George was to be commended that day. He began a little shakily, nerves perhaps, and in the face of one of Harrow’s better bowlers he was failing to inspire the sweltering July crowd with any confidence. He should have been stumped for a single run, but luck was with him. Given a little time, George began to hit freely; beautifully even. Harrow had no fielders in the deep and in that situation he could begin swinging away with little risk of being out. He began hitting over the boundary and put together a string of fours, two of them in one over in ‘a most dashing innings’.

Peter described George as having ‘absolutely no vanity at all’. He quite clearly idolised his dashing older brother. In a lot of ways George resembled their father, and was quite reserved. He was never very vocal, in fact he was rather shy, but he was charming. His sense of humour was ‘exquisite’ and when Peter arrived at Eton he was left open mouthed and in complete wonderment at his brother’s colourful language.

George went up to King’s College, Cambridge in 1912 and Peter was about to follow when war was declared. He was at the OTC camp at Mytchett Farm and when it was turned out he hurried to Scotland where George and the rest of his brothers had joined Barrie for a fishing holiday. In his hand he was brandishing a circular from the adjutant of the Cambridge University OTC, ‘pointing out that it was the obvious duty of all undergraduates to offer their services’. Dutifully, that night the two brothers boarded a train going south.

To say that every young man in Britain was dying to join the army would be an exaggeration. George and Peter would be partly buoyed by their fellow passengers. They sat in a carriage full of reservists overflowing with a ‘pack up your troubles’ mentality, but it had begun to ebb by the time they were redirected to the rifle depot at Winchester. George had served in the ECOTC too but never took it seriously, which was a common sentiment before the war. He joked about his awful shooting and was more vocal about the ‘topping rag’ on the way back to school in the train than serious military matters, although he thought it was all rather fun ‘seeing an enemy skulking along about 500 yards off, and potting at him’.

Peter had ‘odd sensations’ in the pit of his stomach as they climbed the hill from the station. George had a funny turn outside, ‘something between a fainting fit and a sick headache’ and had to sit down and pull himself back together outside the barracks. Peter was all for running away back to London ‘humiliated but free’, but George took a deep breath, steadied himself and marched them both through the door.

When George and Peter entered the rifle depot they found themselves face to face with a lieutenant colonel who appeared to be busy and showed little interest in their presence. Where were they at school? Eton. Were they in the corps? Yes. Did they play games? As soon as he established that George was the Davies who had made that 59 at Lord’s in 1912 in front of his very eyes, for his old school, this fellow OE who himself had been in the XI changed his tune and immediately became more congenial. Peter met his approval by way of being related to George and with that, they were in the army.

When George and Peter reported to Sheerness to join the King’s Royal Rifle Corps in September it was in a depressed mood. They watched baby-faced officers being sent off to replace those who had fallen in the early days of the war and as they undressed in their tent to go to bed that first night, George said: ‘Well, young Peter, for the first time in our lives we’re up against something really serious. F*** me if we aren’t.’

Life in the Intelligence Corps had not been entirely plain sailing for George Fletcher, even if he was far removed from the action he craved. He had been grazed by shrapnel during the retreat but it could have been far more serious. ‘A man a few yards off was biffed … I stole his Greatcoat which kept me alive.’ He had even been arrested. One night he was rattling along on his smell when he ran into a party of Germans. Thinking quickly, he started chattering away in German and they failed to notice that he was not one of them. Unfortunately for George he was overheard by a British contingent lurking nearby and dragged off for incarceration as a spy. There he sat until a fellow OE chanced by and asked him what the devil he was doing locked up.

In fact, George had become so tired of motorcycles and of intelligence work that he had been ‘touting’ to every staff officer he could get within earshot to try to secure a transfer to an infantry battalion. George was attached to the 2nd Royal Welsh Fusiliers. ‘Henceforth I march on my feet like a man instead of scorching on my tail like a monkey.’ He had arrived in time for the beginning of the battle for Ypres in October but they occupied a section of the line to the south, away from where Regie was involved in the thick of the action. George was still unaware of his brother’s death when he and his men were pulled from the lines in November. He set to work shaving off the scratchy beard that had grown in the fortnight spent in a cramped, makeshift ditch.

As the snow began to fall the men of the BEF who had survived the slaughter got ready for a winter of inactivity as far as large-scale battles were concerned. George sat ‘begloved and bemittened’, wearing every item of clothing he possessed at once, draped in all of the blankets that he could find. He was convinced that he and his men would remain where they sat until the following March. ‘We shall stay facing one another in trenches the whole weary winter,’ he suggested to his parents, ‘and in the Spring, we shall go for them.’ If this was the case, then the lines hurriedly scraped into the earth as the battle had raged around them simply wouldn’t do as accomodation.

One of the first priorities was to make a solid bottom to the trenches, by whatever means possible in the worsening conditions; be it brushwood, bricks, sacks of straw, timbers or ammunition crates. The digging of communicating trenches was also important so that the men could move to and from the firing line in safety. George was in a trench only 100 yards or so away from the Germans, so barbed wire entanglements were especially vital to keep the enemy out of their lines. George was trying to construct a dugout. He had an old door as a roof, which leaked; three more forming walls with the last side made out of ammunition crates. The entrance was hung with a waterproof sheet and he had found a long box to act as a bed and stuffed it full of straw and blankets. As yet, trench was an elaborate description for their home. They lacked a parapet to shield them and the addition of one of these was absolutely vital, as any attempt to dig down brought more water into the trench. Any attempts they were making to pave the floor with bricks were useless as they just sank into the thick, glutinous mud.

On his 27th birthday George was supervising the construction of a communication trench that filled up with water as soon as they dug it. It had rained continually for over a week and when he tried to walk to and fro the water nearly went over the top of his gumboots. He had been tying them on with webbing straps so that they did not get left behind when he lifted his feet but it was a losing battle. By the end of January pumps had arrived to bale out the trenches. The worst of it was that the water had nowhere to go, wherever it landed on the clay-like soil, it stayed. They had taken to pumping it out of one trench and into an old communication trench which had been barricaded with sandbags, but no matter what the men of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers tried, the water found a way to trickle back in.

The amount of mud shocked new arrivals. Ian Henderson left Eton in the summer that war was declared and subsequently joined the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders who were in the same brigade as George Fletcher’s battalion. Still a teenager, he was cloaked with a sometimes painful naivety. The crossing was wonderful, the men were wonderful, the weather fine and all was dandy until ‘beastly shells’ turned up and put him in ‘the most awful funk’. In one of his letters home he admitted to an ‘awful discovery’ he hoped that they wouldn’t be shocked, but he had found two lice in his vest, and he was not the only one. ‘I haven’t had my shirt off for eight days now or my boots. And terrible to think of, I haven’t had a bath for very nearly a month.’

On 11 November George reported that his feet had been wet for three days despite his new habit of rubbing vaseline all over them to try and keep the water out of his skin. His men had stood in a trench for three days. With almost nowhere to lie down and rest they spent day and night trying to bale out the trench with buckets only to see the water find its way back in. The men with the buckets were exposed all day long to German rifles, ‘but they, poor things were just as badly off’. It had created a sort of uneasy truce. They did not snipe at the Germans whilst they battled the water and vice versa.

One young woman who knew George Llewelyn Davies well said of her own Etonian brother, who would be killed in May 1915 with the 19th Hussars, that he thought the war was going to be ‘one long cavalry charge, everyone waving their swords – Smash the Kaiser! Terrific!’1 George Davies was never, she knew, under any such illusions. ‘He knew what he was in for from the word go.’ In early December the brothers had been separated. Peter, still seventeen, was left at Sheerness whilst George was sent to the 4th Rifle Brigade. The battalion had arrived home from India in preparation for being sent to war and he was to go with them. Leaning out of the train as it pulled from the station, George waved goodbye to his younger brother, calling out ‘Till our next merry meeting!’

George was subsisting with holes in his pants almost as soon as he arrived at the front but that was the least of his concerns. He had had a harrowing walk up to the trenches one night through thick mud in complete darkness. He was bringing up the rear and accidentally found his way into a silent, abandoned communication trench. He waded into mud up to his knees. There, unsteady and perhaps with a hint of panic setting in, he toppled over backwards. ‘Behold me sitting with exceedingly cold water trickling into me everywhere, unable to move and shouting for help.’ Another OE had told a similar, horrific story of a ‘missing’ man who had vanished whilst relieving troops one night. They assumed that he had stopped a stray bullet in the dark. Two days later when the same men came out of the trenches they heard groans coming from a waterlogged communication trench. They found the missing man up to his shoulders in mud. He had got lost and sank. It took them more than four hours to extract him and get him help but he died of shock and exposure almost immediately.

The spectre of death was always lurking in the trenches. The men of George Fletcher’s battalion used to sit discussing the spirits of dead men. They used to say that when the war was over, the ghosts of dead troops would be marching over their fields every night ‘cursing and grousing’ as they were moving along and that no farmer would be able to use the land again. They talked about whether or not the soldiers already claimed by the war could wander through space and look down upon them. One of their number was dry in his response when he replied that he ‘wouldn’t mind betting’ that at that very moment they were looking down and ‘dancing a two step and clicking their heels together in holy glee to think that they had scrounged out of this blasted misery’.

Dead, rotting men were turned up all over the Ypres Salient area when troops tried to drain or extend their lines. Many were in an advanced state of decomposition and the smell was harrowing. George Fletcher was sat right across from a turnip field that was full of dead Germans and he told one of the other Eton masters that it required ‘heartiness’ to see every day the remains of human beings laying face down on the ground ‘in lumps and rows’ right opposite where they slept and ate. The smell reminded them that they were there even if they could not see them.

Life was cheap. Just because there was no fighting going on, it did not entirely remove the threat of death. George talked about four consecutive sergeants getting ‘biffed in the head’ by sniper fire in a short space of time and shell fire still accounted for the lives of many. Every now and again something brought home to the OEs in the front lines that it was a human life like their own that they were referring to. George Davies went to great lengths to shield ‘Uncle Jim’ from the horrors that he was enduring, but he wrote home on one occasion of having seen ‘violent death’ just a few feet from him. He had been underneath a parapet when a man had exposed his head to a German rifle and George watched the top of his head taken off. ‘I oughtn’t write about these things … but it made an impression.’ Just four days later Barrie replied and informed him that his uncle, Guy Du Maurier, had been killed a few miles up the line. He urged, begged George to stay safe. ‘I don’t have any little desire for you to get military glory … You would not mean a featherweight more to me [if] you come back a General. I just want yourself.’ He ended on a desperate note. ‘I have lost all sense of war being glorious, it is just unspeakably monstrous to me now.’ At home on leave, Peter watched Barrie walking up and down in his room, ‘smoking pipe after pipe, thinking his dire thoughts’.

George Fletcher found it especially hard to have to utilise his German proficiency to read through the letters of dead enemy soldiers to try to glean information. Military relevance aside, he found it awful to have to read what their mothers had sent them. Finally though, he was confronted with his personal loss. Ten days after his brother’s death he was lamenting his broken wristwatch and that there was no Regie close enough to fix it for him. He supposed that he was still to the north, where he heard the artillery was busy. Nearly a week later, he was complaining that he had had no news. ‘I don’t know what he has done since going to his new battery … I expect Regie has had a fearfully exciting time … Please send me all his letters.’

He finally received the news that his brother had died on 16 November and it was brutal, shocking. All he could do, isolated in his trench with plenty of time to contemplate his loss was find solace in the fragments of poetry that he had stored inside his head. ‘This does not make me in the last more revengeful against the Germans except that I feel more willing to push the war right home to a decision’. Any murderous feelings he had went towards the pacifist MPs criticising the war and to the crowds who went to football and, in his opinion, cared ‘not two straws’ how many lives were being claimed, the best of men dying ‘while defending their worthless lives’.

Boredom was rife on the British front. George had been ‘snaffling’ in Armentières and managed to find a skipping rope and an eclectic collection of English books in the classroom of a school including Brer Rabbit and Robinson Crusoe. He was, he said, flabby and fat. By spring his men would be ‘as fat as Wiltshire hogs’, or worse still, as fat as Germans. His captain apparently had already begun morphing into a frog, ‘so podgy has he become’. He just wanted to hibernate until spring when he might be of some use. His father was sending him more reading material from his flat in Eton but it did little to alleviate the monotony. It was a blessing to have a vivid imagination. George Davies was dreaming of a family reunion at the Ritz when he got home, and Ian Henderson was imagining a posh dinner with his parents, a crisp white tablecloth, polished silver and lovely food. George Fletcher’s imaginings had transcended to a whole other level. He had been having a vivid dream about a talking goat wearing medals and causing a stink in his room. It disappeared eventually with a clap of thunder and he woke up to find that the thunder was in fact the artillery shelling German trenches in front of him.

The men of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers sang to keep themselves occupied. One of the corporals had a penny whistle and the rest would sing along. George thought that the Germans were better at it. It was ‘eerie and wonderful’ listening to their harmonies as they drifted across no-man’s-land. He sent home snippets of sights and sounds that coloured his image of life at the front. The rattle of maxims ‘like a very loud motorcycle’. Rifles made a double report when they were fired. There was a ‘pleasant hiss’ as British shells went overhead on their way to the German trenches. Aeroplanes buzzed above him, men chatted around him; their frequent blasphemy had a strangely contented ring about it. Then came the crack of a sniper’s bullet, the singing of the cat-like shrapnel.

His daily routine was not inspiring. George would get up just before dawn and stand to, barging his way down the trench, dragging out ‘snoring lumps of humanity’. He went stamping up and down with a pipe in one hand and the other shoved deep into his pocket, a light-hearted impression of his father. The day was spent supervising the men; making sure that they cleaned their rifles, arranging digging parties, wood-fetching parties, sawing parties, guard duty. Then he would have to censor the men’s letters. Before dark there was more organising, dictating who was going to fetch water, who was going to fetch rations, who would be put in one of the outposts. Any gaps in his day he attempted to fill with eating, drinking lukewarm tea or jumping up and down to keep warm. At night they waited for ‘water-cart’ – not only literally water but the nickname for the gossip that came with the drinking rations. (Most of the time it was fanciful. On one occasion it was rumoured, via a friend of Regie’s, that Kitchener’s army was to be equipped with knuckledusters with long spikes and with daggers; the officers were to get miniature axes.) Finally, George had checks to do at 9 p.m., midnight and 3 a.m. before he could attempt to sleep, before beginning all over again, until they reached the end of their five-day stint and were relieved for a similar period.

This stuffy atmosphere of course made for bickering and antagonisms. Most of George’s rage was aimed at the Scottish battalion that rotated in and out of the lines with his men. This was on the grounds that their only occupation was to undo any of the work that his men had done and he even took to drawing flaming red dragons on parts of the trench to make it clear whose territory it was.

It was symptomatic of his gift for endearing himself to his men. One hardened reservist in his battalion claimed that they were wary of young subalterns who were shunted into their path. They were judged by whether or not they showed guts in the trenches. On this score, George impressed immediately. The same man claimed that his men thought him ‘the bravest man in France’, with ‘more brains than all the battalion officers put together’. George had heard them talking about him in the close confines of the trenches: ‘T’aint ’arf a lark bein’ in that there Fletcher’s section … ’E speaks to the bastards in their own bloody language!’ In return George was already quite fond of them. He was massively amused by a conversation he overheard one morning between two of the soldier servants:

‘You go and wake Mr Fletcher.’

Mess servant: ‘You go and wake adjective Fletcher your adjective self; I’ve got this ’ere adjective bacon to serve up.’

They might have moaned a lot, but he thought they were remarkable. ‘They can carry any weight through any mud and dig any amount of wet clay all through the night.’ They required prodding, but as long as he was standing there cursing over their shoulders they were very efficient and thorough. One day he was marching them through Armentières when he decided to cheer them up by pulling out his penny whistle and playing the ‘Marseillaise’ in the highest possible key with electrical effect. After that they cheerfully swung through the ‘echoing and desolate town’ just like the mythical soldiers in the Daily Mail.

George had a somewhat unique perspective as far as the enemy was concerned. Having lived and worked in Germany, he couldn’t bring himself to hate an entire nation based on the indiscretions of a few. In the wake of Regie’s death, their eldest brother Leslie was raging. He wanted to hurt the Germans but George’s response was measured. He seemed to think that his brother’s position on a ship, isolated and not face to face with the enemy, had fostered this attitude. He was sure that Leslie would change his mind when he was required to rescue them from struggling in the sea, especially if he had suffered the same fate. It was different for him, ‘biting the same ground’, suffering the same hardships as the Germans. News had arrived at Oxford that Regie had fallen in British territory; that Bevil Quiller-Couch had buried him with his own hands. It caused some relief to their parents and to Leslie that he had not been touched by the enemy, but George’s mood was not much altered. It made little difference to him.

His command of the German language and his sense of humour meant that he became well known to the troops across no-man’s-land. The lines were only 100 yards or so apart and George held daily chats with the enemy; in this case Saxons. In mid December the battalion heard that three German ships had been sunk. The commanding officer decided that their opponents ought to know and so George chalked it up on a board in German and they waved it above the trench. The men began hollering to attract attention. There was a momentary pause, clearly whilst the Germans digested the information; and then bullets began to fly at their sign. The men tied a red flag to a long pole and waved it to signify hits or misses: ‘Yah! Put it down as a bloody miss!’

Christmas approached and presents began to flow in. His parents couldn’t send him the kitten he wanted to make his billet homely, but they had found him a penknife with cats engraved on the handle and he stuck it in the ground opposite his brazier so that they could warm their theoretical paws. George had ordered chocolates for his men and his parents were sending them pipes and tobacco. He was jumping at every package like it was his Christmas stocking in the 1890s.

George had been dreaming of integrating with the Germans for a Christmas party since the beginning of December and had no intention of leaving it to chance. He had been trying to persuade the men across no-man’s-land to partake in a ‘beer and sausage evening’ on Christmas Day. ‘You will provide the sausage and beer,’ he informed them, ‘and we will produce the plum pudding.’ All he got initially was loud guffaws in response. By Christmas Eve his plans had been downgraded to the erection of Christmas trees on the parapet and a meeting in no-man’s-land at midday, so he was still slightly hopeful. That was until his company commander forbade anything of the sort.

Despite the captain’s best efforts though, and perhaps as a result of George’s efforts, at about midday on Christmas Day two Germans appeared, rolling two enormous barrels of beer towards the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. Two men jumped out and went to fetch them. Before George knew it, white hankies were waving on both sides and men were streaming out into the space between the lines. They shook hands, cheered, laughed and exchanged cigarettes and food. George even saw one of his men emerging from the German lines smoking a fat cigar with a brazier under each arm. Some of the Germans had climbed out to start burying their dead and the Fusiliers helped. The lines were extremely close together and the company commander was wary of the Germans being able to see inside their defences. Too much ‘prowling about’ might have dire consequences at a later date and so he sent George out to put an end to the fraternisation. The men retreated into their lines and resumed waving their hankies in good spirits.

Miffed at the lack of festivities, George wandered off down the lines to the 2nd Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders to find a friend of his. There the trenches were much further apart and almost everybody was out. George joined them and found himself surrounded by kilted Scottish soldiers scampering about wearing German foraging caps. He and his friend went armed with cigarettes and newspapers to make friends with the German 133rd Regiment. They barely talked of war. Six of the men they met had won the Iron Cross and one of them let George examine his. They discoursed on football and exchanged calling cards for after the war. George thought their men rather ‘pipsqueaky’ but the NCOs were tall, intimidating fellows. They talked for nearly an hour before a bark came from the German lines and their men scurried home. At dawn the following morning a captain in George’s battalion pulled down the white flag and three shots were fired. The Germans put up a board saying thank you and fired three shots of their own. Heads went down. War had begun again.

Anything that could remind the men a little of home was a welcome diversion in the New Year. George Llewelyn Davies had long since had a ruse running at Eton whereby he would feign starvation and Barrie would promptly despatch hampers of treats from Fortnum & Mason. War was no different. He showered George’s mess with boxes and boxes, whether solicited or not. ‘I ask for the devil of a lot,’ George admitted, but Barrie did not care. ‘It is always a blessed thing for me when you want something, if you don’t want, go on inventing.’ The truth was, that whether it be food, cigarettes, mittens for men, pipes, writing letters to the wives of their men or even visiting them in hospitals at home when they were wounded, parents, grandparents and extended families just longed to feel useful.

Shades of Eton followed her old boys about the front as they cherished familiarity in their depressing setting. George Fletcher was able to walk down to the Rifle Brigade battalion and talk ‘tug-shop’ with another old Colleger. Billy Congreve’s position as an aide gave him a mobility that meant he could drop in on even more friends up and down the front. He found one old school friend ‘exactly the same as when we were at Eton together’. OEs swapped news of each other. Reggie Hargreaves was, so he heard, ‘disgustingly brave, so I suppose he is bound to get hit sooner or later’. George Fletcher, of course, was still fully connected with the school and had been fairly grovelling for news. His school colleagues had obliged. ‘It is very good of them to let me have a whiff of Eton in the middle of … blasphemous war,’ he told his father. Charles Fletcher had returned to Eton in January and was proudly showing George’s letters off. For the boys and masters who remained he became their window to the war. His tales of being arrested, of doing his daily rounds of the trenches with a cat on his shoulder, and the sights and sounds of the trenches became common knowledge amongst the various boarding houses.

Eton was, after all, his home for much of the year and George missed it sorely. He would have loved to have seen it just for one ordinary evening. ‘[A] College kickabout … or the hum of boys going into 5 o’clock school’, his father leading the way to the classroom with an enormous key in his hand. Masters made sure he had the Eton College Chronicle; bits of news that had reached home rebounded back out to him. One of his old College and Balliol friends, he heard, was on his way to the Dardanelles, ‘lucky devil’. The boys were sending papers and socks for his men along with sheaves of letters for him. ‘Curious little letters, full of the infinitely remote details of Eton life.’ George adored reading them. He took one batch on a march up to the lines and read them as he moved along. ‘The two worlds clashed strangely together’, house colours and football with the noise of rifles and artillery shells.

Now all George wanted was a real tabby kitten to sit in front of his brazier. He intended to feed it on tinned sardines and stash it in a gumboot when they advanced, but he feared that the censor wouldn’t pass it. But George’s prayers were answered. In January he got out of the trench one day to stretch his legs to the rear and was wandering past Stinking Horse Farm when he heard a little mew behind him. George invited the cat up on to his shoulder and took it for a walk. It ran up and down his arm, wandered off numerous times but came padding back again to climb on to his shoulder and rub his face against his stubbly beard. It ran off knowingly as he re-approached the trenches. ‘I will not forget you, o’ cat – visitor of comfortless mortals,’ he sighed.

One bit of work that George seized upon to break the spell of inactivity was night patrols. They at least made life more interesting. George was renowned for his ‘brave and brainy deeds’ and went out frequently. Usually with one other man to keep it simple, he went to ‘see what the Germans were up to’. He would pull on a Burberry, remove his underwear from under hia trousers (the less clothing that was soiled the better), put a pistol in an accessible pocket, wire cutters in another and finish off his outfit with a knitted cap and gumboots.

Gathering information was the intention. On one occasion some men up the line were convinced that they had heard noises coming from underground. Fulfilling the colonel’s request for information, George set off with ten men. He didn’t like taking out large groups and it disappointed him immensely when the men he took out didn’t share his enthusiasm. The ones that had a tendency to ‘lie doggo’ and wait for him to baby step them through the adventure ruined his fun, although if they lay petrified he knew they were ‘in a worse funk’ than he was, which was marginally satisfying.

When a patrol went out, word went up and down the lines and no shots were fired until they returned; unless it was a flare telling them to return. Off George would go, ‘bellying and elbowing along like a worm’, scraping through his own barbed-wire defences. It was a filthy, slow job and the first thing he would do was look for cover. One night he found a good ditch ‘not exactly a commodious lying place’, for it was full of water: ‘however we stopped and lay for a few minutes every ten yards. Elbows soaked, knees and legs immersed.’

Avoiding searchlights was a priority that George considered ‘great fun’. The most powerful searchlight one of his men saw in the entire war was in front of them. Every time it was switched on as they were carrying up to the trench they stopped dead in their tracks, ‘sinking our heads on our chests so that we would resemble stumps of trees, or posts’. Once it shone within inches of George, who rolled under some cabbages and hoped to God they wouldn’t move the beam over him.

If all went well he would get close enough to hear the Germans snore and the guards whispering. On these instances the noise of wire cutting was too risky so they lay listening to their conversations. The Germans, of course, were playing the same game. They would send out twenty–thirty men, spread out like a fan, and it was easy to get caught in the middle of a patrol coming the other way. Communications sometimes went awry and George could be in danger from his own men. One night he found a lovely looking bucket which he claimed eagerly to take home only to find that it was a British trap that rattled. When he lifted it men of his own battalion began shooting at him.

Of all the surprises that one might come across on a patrol, bloated, decaying corpses were the worst; a stark reminder of what could happen if you didn’t make it home safely. One night, George had made it about a 100 yards along a particular ditch when he came upon a German who had evidently tried the same things days before. George retrieved his helmet for the den at home. Bobbing about in the North Sea, his brother was desperate to have one. ‘Leslie will be disappointed, but the den is the real depot for all the common gear of “the boys”. He shall have the next.’

On another occasion George encountered a far more grizzly sight. He was crawling along when he saw against the skyline an ominous bayonet and the tip of a German pickelhaube helmet. ‘My revolver came out and I silently worked up to the helmet till I touched it with the barrel.’ The man wasn’t asleep, he was dead. Crawling along the rim of the trench, which ran back to the enemy lines George was greeted with a horrific sight. Much of the ditch had been roofed over but it had now collapsed. ‘Everywhere there were [bodies], German rifles, equipment, spades and other tools.’

The trench continued for some 30 yards, sometimes disappearing underground. It was impossible to count the dead. George found some sitting, some leaning, some lying down. He couldn’t imagine what had happened to them or why nobody had come to claim them. It was far too grim to think of pinching a helmet for Leslie and instead he focused his attentions on climbing along without disturbing the remains. It reminded him of climbing, like the holiday on Skye he had taken with Regie the previous summer: ‘working from point to point and saying so far, so safe, and now for the next part.’

Gareth Hamilton-Fletcher, who had had such bold ideas about Britain’s pre-war relations with Germany and another member of the Eton XI at Lord’s in 1912, arrived at the front in January 1915 with the Grenadier Guards. Sometimes, rather than keeping their distance, patrols turned into raids and unlike George Fletcher’s outings the onus was very much on making contact with the men opposite. Attached to the Scots Guards because they were completely devoid of officers in the aftermath of Ypres, Gareth went into trenches near La Bassee. Every single officer in his company was borrowed from another regiment. Gareth had been there precisely a day before they were the subject of a fierce, small-scale German assault. Situated in front of a number of brickstacks that had been reinforced to create a keep of sorts, at 6.30 a.m. on the morning of 25 January a German deserter came in and declared that in half an hour the enemy would begin bombarding them and blowing up mines planted under the British trenches prior to an attack. The deserter proved as good as his word. Sure enough mines went up and shells followed. Then came waves of hundreds of German troops. As the enemy came on the Scots Guards began retreating towards the keep to form some kind of makeshift defence. Gareth had been holding the right flank and they were knocked out almost immediately. Two Etonian officers fell in his company. One was Geoffrey Monckton, aged 19. His brother Francis, 24, had already been lost at Ypres some ten weeks before. Neither brother’s body was ever recovered. Gareth fought ‘like a hero’ and was wounded, carrying on until he too was cut down. Seven officers and well over a hundred men were lost. In just six months of war a second of the Lord’s heroes of 1912 was dead at the age of 20.

In mid January George Fletcher and his men were moved to Bois Grenier and found that the same care and attention that the Royal Welsh Fusiliers had lavished on their lines had not been spent on what was to be their new home. They found themselves in shoddy lines again and slowly began building. The weather that month was appallingly wet and by the end of it the River Lys had risen 6ft in a mere twenty-four hours. Two months later, just as they had finished a monumental effort aimed at making their lines suitable for living and working, to their utter dismay they were moved from them. To George’s disgust they found themselves shunted further along exchanging spots with a Scottish regiment who now moved in to reap the benefits of their hard work: comfortable dugouts, a firm parapet and even his cat.

‘What are your old trenches like?’ the departing Scot enquired. George laid it out for him. ‘Bulletproof parapet … thick wire entanglement, good dugouts for men, a nice mess for the officers, stores, tables, chairs and importantly, a proper construction of latrines and fully connected trenches to be able to move about in daylight.’ George then watched as the officer looked increasingly uncomfortable; knowing that in return the Welshmen would find next to none of the above in their new home. ‘May the devil stick a fork through their noses,’ George wrote. Despondent and exasperated at the thought of the work, his men began to dig, again.

For George, the only consolation was the prospect of new ground to skulk about in in the darkness. At the end of a diagonal ditch that ran in front of the Fusilier’s new line across to the Germans was a French flag fluttering on a pole where it was fixed to a tree. ‘The Sausagers had evidently pinched it from the Frogs,’ and as far as George was concerned it was taunting him. The Scottish captain passing the sorry-looking trenches over to him had offered five shillings to the man of his company who could shoot down the pole with his rifle. Five shillings did not make this feat in the slightest bit realistic. There had to be a better way. At midnight one night, a message went along the companies telling them to be careful of their fire. ‘Mr Fletcher and one man gone out on patrol.’

George had grabbed a willing apprentice and hoofed it out over the top of the crumbling parapet into no-man’s-land. He found a convenient furrow in the ploughed field and they dropped into it. It was a dark, dark night but he foresaw frequent flares being sent up and appreciated the additional cover. Keeping low, George and his man crawled across to the clump of trees and worked their way along them. At last they came upon the tree with the flag tied to it. They were on the wrong side of the ditch. They lay flat and still ‘for perhaps half an hour … listening to the spittings, coughings and grunts of the German sentries’. It was impossible to think of grabbing it whilst they were being periodically lit up by coloured flares. George lay there, scoping out his prize and noticed that as well as being tied, it was also nailed in place and tied by several bits of string to a tough-looking branch. If he wanted to grab it he was going to have to climb the tree under the noses of the mocking enemy and untie it with both hands. Having come so far, George was adamant. He’d be ‘jiggered’ if he was going home without his flag now.

Waiting for a bright flare to die down, he leapt up and swung into the tree with a ‘swish’. Another ball of light went up and he threw himself back into the mud. Waiting for darkness to resume again he shot up ‘like Israel Hands’ with his penknife between his teeth. Cursing under his breath, heart pounding, balancing on a tree trunk on one leg George slashed away at the strings one at a time. Finally the pole came loose in his hands. He threw it to the ground and swiftly followed it down as more flares were shot into the sky. The next morning he penned a note home. ‘The flag is now being waved over B Company’s parapet by a delighted Tommy, and is being shot at by infuriated sausage-eaters.’ His men were thrilled and his legend cemented.

The British Army was adjusting fully to the idea of complex trench construction and as George and his men began working at Bois Grenier there were sandbags, barbed wire and duckboards in abundance. Equipment to aid the day-to-day practice of surviving the enemy had begun to emerge too. Periscopes began to arrive; little mirrors were stuck up on the back of trenches and by day, sentries could sit on the fire step and observe no-man’s-land without putting their heads into the line of fire.

One Etonian who was going to find himself at the forefront of new technology as far as weaponry designed with trenches in mind was concerned was ‘Jack’ Haldane. Born in November 1892, John Burdon Sanderson Haldane came from a family of highly individual academics. His father John, a brother of the War Minister who instigated Britain’s pre-war army reform with a European conflict in mind, was a scientist and intensely interested in the nature of gases.

Precocious was an understatement as far as Jack was concerned. At 3, the same year that his father began using him as a guinea pig for his experiments, he cut his head open and asked if the blood dribbling down his forehead was oxyhaemoglobin or carboxyhaemoglobin. At 4, he was with his father in London as the latter hung out of windows on the Underground. Jack remembered the grime and the smoke breathed in as his father tested the atmosphere by collecting it in glass bottles. By the age of 8, Jack was fully engaged in helping his father analyse gas during his experiments and soon moved on to making simple mixtures for Haldane Sr to use.

It was always going to be a struggle for Eton to further the education of this prodigious talent. Arriving in 1905 he was that good a mathematician that it was rumoured that he taught the masters as opposed to the other way around. The headmaster was frequently frustrated with him; threatening him with the notion of becoming ‘a mere smatterer’ instead of being exceptionally good in one field if he continued to jump about between different specialities. Some of the masters just couldn’t comprehend him. ‘He is a baffling boy,’ one wrote in a school report, ‘and I shall be glad to be rid of him.’

When he went up to Oxford, Jack continued to help his father, who strove to expand his son’s scientific knowledge in a continuously unique way. Down a mine in Staffordshire he taught Jack the effects of breathing methane. He had him stand and recite Mark Anthony’s speech from Julius Caesar. ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen …’ He soon became short of breath and ‘somewhere about “the noble Brutus”’ Jack’s legs went from under him and he collapsed onto the floor, where of course the air was clear. ‘In this way,’ he explained pragmatically, ‘I learnt that [methane] is lighter than air …’

After fiddling with his degree and characteristically changing from maths and biology (he claimed that nobody could study mathematics for five hours a day and remain sane) to arts he came out of New College with a First to absolutely no raptures at all because the date was 4 August 1914. Like its Eton counterpart, the OUOTC was in camp. Jack had joined the Signallers with the express intention of grasping wireless telegraphy and was busily engaged with it when ‘the angel of death on a motorbike’ arrived with news of war. Jack volunteered immediately and asked for a commission in the Black Watch. The War Office duly obliged. After four months of training he crossed to France and joined the 1st Battalion as their bombing officer in February 1915.

Jack Haldane was fully aware that he might be killed at the front, and that ‘a huge waste of human values was going on there’ but it did not anger him. He rather enjoyed the whole thing, which he knew singled him out from most of his contemporaries. Neither did he appear to be afraid. In fact, he lacked any sense of fear to the point of recklessness. This endeared him to the men at least, who gave him nicknames like ‘Bombo’ and ‘Rajah of the Bomb’. He would crawl out alone into no-man’s-land at night to watch and listen to the enemy scuttling about their trenches. One night he had been gone for some time when a loud bang went off at the German lines, ‘succeeded by a tangle of very lights’ and the sound of rifles and machine guns. Silence fell and they waited ‘with some apprehension’ to see what would happen. In time a torchlight appeared and a filthy Jack climbed over the parapet. ‘The Boche was saying unpleasant things about us,’ he drawled. ‘So I just tossed a bomb over to them.’ On another occasion, to prove a point, Jack seized a bicycle and cruised across an exposed gap in full view of the Germans; stating that they would be too shocked at his brashness to take a shot at him. He was right.

His eccentricity, sometimes bordering on insanity, made him immensely popular, but his duties with a new weapon had the reverse effect. Other officers loathed the sight of Jack after he was appointed Trench Mortar Officer for the 1st (Guards) Brigade. Men would be sitting quietly in a portion of trench and along he would come with his team and their mortar. Unceremoniously they would plonk it down and begin firing its shells at a high trajectory with the intention of having them drop into the German lines just in front, attracting unwanted attention from the enemy. George Fletcher described them: a large bang, then ‘a slight swish in the air, and then an almighty roar’. Whenever they were ‘biffing’ in his sector the Germans threw a powerful searchlight on them looking for the offender or showered them with machine-gun fire. By the time this retaliation had started, Jack and his men would have packed up and moved along the line, leaving a distinctly nasty taste in the mouth of those who remained. Retribution occasionally found him. One day Jack was pulled up for not wearing his Glengarry and had to admit that it had been ruined when a neighbouring battalion had taken offence to his visit and pushed him into a ditch.

Haldane’s bomb squad, so to speak, was a funny little outfit. He had an NCO from the brigade’s Coldstream Battalion and a small team of hand-picked men that constituted his own little army. They were largely left to their own devices and spent their days playing with explosives. They were exempt from certain duties and didn’t turn out for guard duty, being focused on thirteen muzzle-loading mortars. Jack was in his element when Douglas Haig came across him and labelled him ‘the bravest and dirtiest officer in my army’.

As well as trench mortars, hand-held bombs were becoming a mainstay on the Western Front. Jack thought that they were fantastic. ‘The best people at it seem to be the reckless kind. The average man does not seem to like it.’ Ian Henderson had been on a training course on how to use them and seemed to fall into the latter of Haldane’s two categories as he returned to start imparting this new knowledge to the men. ‘They are beastly things,’ he complained. ‘Likely to go off at any moment. I live in deadly fear of them.’

Of all the weapons unleashed on the Western Front in the spring of 1915, the one that instilled the most fear and caused the most horrific damage was yet to come. In April and May the Germans used poisonous gas for the first time on French and then British troops. Peculiar yellowish-green clouds formed and began to drift towards the Allied lines. Chemical warfare had been outlawed at the Hague but every major combatant in the Great War at this juncture had been guilty of experimenting with it. In the opening days of May gas attacks were relentless. A battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers ceased to exist as a military entity with not fifty men available because of it. Thousands of British casualties were accumulating in medical posts where the baffled staff stared at them in dismay.

The British hierarchy immediately assumed that they were dealing with chlorine. The effects of this gas were horrific, to say the least, stripping the bronchial tubes. As the victims subsequently began gasping it proceeded to fully infiltrate the lungs. Tissue turned to mucus and the lungs filled with fluid. Throwing themselves to the ground did nothing for those that had been exposed as the gas sank. Men grasped at their throats and died with their fists clenched in agony. Casualty clearing stations were flooded with men who were quite literally blue, the result of their blood being starved of oxygen. The worst off died coughing, spitting and gagging as they drowned on dry land. British troops were promptly instructed to soak field dressings in bicarbonate of soda and use it as a respirator. Soaking it in some kind of alkaline solution was also thought to be effective; the most readily available source was latrine buckets full of urine.

As soon as he heard what had had happened Kitchener consulted Jack Haldane’s uncle who telegraphed his brother in Oxford. Within twenty-four hours Haldane Sr, with all of his specialist knowledge of gases, was on his way to France.

In the first week of May, Jack Haldane was promptly ripped from his unit and ordered to join his father at a large school in St Omer with a selection of other volunteers. In one classroom a miniature greenhouse had been constructed and they took to sitting in it and pumping it full of chlorine gas. Jack assisted as they compared the effects on themselves in various quantities; with respirators, without them; ‘it stung the eyes and produced a tendency to gasp and cough when breathed’. Having inflicted this horror on themselves, Jack and his colleagues sat in the greenhouse trying to crank a hand turned wheel as their respiratory system began to break down, they then burst outside and began doing 50-yard sprints in the grounds with respirators on to see what the effects of the gas were. When they had had enough they traded out and the next man rolled up for punishment.

‘None of us [were] … in any real danger,’ Jack claimed as they ultimately came up with a stop-gap form of protection for soldiers in the trenches. But a few men had to ‘go to bed for a few days’. Jack found himself short of breath and incapable of running for a full month or so after their experiments. Unfortunately for the young scientist, however, in a matter of days he was advancing across no-man’s-land in pursuit of the enemy.

On 8 May Jack Haldane was despatched back to Black Watch for ‘special duties’ in connection with the gas menace; there was even a suggestion that he might be named as some sort of advisor on the subject to Douglas Haig, but the point became moot. When he arrived back at his regiment, he found that his men were about to go into action and he was absolutely determined to go with them, at the head of his own platoon if at all possible. This push, known as Aubers Ridge, was a disaster. In the spring of 1915 the British had resolved to push towards Lille and this offensive followed a failure at Neuve Chapelle. Still suffering from the effects of the gas, Jack set off ‘with all the urgency of an old gentleman with chronic bronchitis’.

Years later he still had a distorted version in his mind of what happened. He mustered the reserves of Black Watch and was advancing through an orchard under heavy fire when he was hit by debris and fell to the ground. Dragging himself up, Jack resumed command of his depleted platoon and raced for the parapet. In no-man’s-land he went down again under the shock of another shell blast. He remembered, or so he thought, staggering back through reserve trenches towards a dressing station, caked in mud and blood, with his right arm and his left side bleeding.

Wandering through the ranks of wounded and dying men another Black Watch officer caught hold of him and flagged down a car to ask the driver to take Jack on to another dressing station. ‘Oh it’s you,’ the driver remarked casually when he saw Jack. They had met in 1913 at Oxford and, bleary eyed, Jack recognised that his chauffeur was the Prince of Wales. He was so far gone that in the days after the battle he ‘remembered’ reading about his own death in The Times. In 1961 he told Robert Graves that he thought it quite plausible that he had died that day in pursuit of Aubers Ridge and that the succeeding forty-six years had been a vivid dream.

In the early evening of 14 March 1915 a terrific bombardment opened. The German target was a small, loosely defended village on a crossroads named St Eloi, sitting midway up a gentle hill some 2 miles east of Ypres. The Germans had begun their attack by setting off a mine in the vicinity and news shot up the line that the enemy had managed to blow up several sections of the British front and rush men into their trenches. Approaching midnight a significant part of the British defences had fallen and the village too.

At St Eloi itself, George Davies’ battalion of the Rifle Brigade and the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry were ordered to support a counter-attack that was being planned. The counter-attack failed and at 3 a.m. on 15 March George and his fellow officers received orders to make the main attack in an attempt to retrieve the situation. Billy Congreve’s insanely brave schoolfriend, Reggie Hargreaves, was their sniping and bombing officer. By the end of their failed attempt to drive the Germans back out of the village and the British lines Reggie would be lying in the ruins of St Eloi, shot in the chest and the leg, with a broken arm and his left foot and right hand mangled by shrapnel. During the retreat he was left behind but four of his snipers ignored orders the following night and went looking for him. Reggie was barely breathing when they began dragging him on to a stretcher in full view of the enemy.

It was the middle of the night when George Davies’ youngest brother, 10-year-old Nico, was woken by the sound of the doorbell frantically ringing in the aftermath of St Eloi. He sat up in bed and listened to muffled voices drifting up the stairs. ‘Then I heard uncle Jim’s voice, an eerie banshee wail and an outburst: “They’ll all go Mary,” he cried to the boys’ nurse. “Jack, Peter, Michael, even little Nico – this dreadful war will get them all in the end.’ A little while later the door opened to Nico’s bedroom and Barrie silently entered and sat on the end of his bed. ‘I don’t think he spoke,’ Nico recalled, ‘but I knew George was dead.’

As George Llewelyn Davies’ battalion was advancing to drive the Germans out of St Eloi, he was not with them. He had marched up towards the fray with another OE, none other than Alfred Aubrey Tennyson, explaining a morbid premonition that he had had about being killed. On the way their colonel had sat them down in the early hours of the morning to explain the advance. Resting on a bank, George had not realised that he was sitting in an exposed position. A sniper’s bullet was the result. His colleagues took him back along the main road to Voormezeele, a sad, battered little village and buried him, covering his grave in purple flowers; his favourite colour.

A few days later, in amongst a bundle of black-edged condolences, a little envelope arrived on James Barrie’s doorstep. George had written one last letter just hours before he was killed. To the end he tried to console his guardian. He was not afraid, he claimed, nor taking any unnecessary risks. ‘And if I am going to stop a bullet, why should it be with a vital place? … Keep your heart up Uncle Jim and remember how good an experience like this is for a chap who’s been very idle before.’

It was five days later when another sniper struck a further blow at Eton. George Fletcher popped up to take a quick look over the inadequate parapet at Bois Grenier and was hit in the head. He died almost instantly. One of his men, Frank Richards, claimed that in the whole of the war, which he himself survived in its entirety, he never saw the battalion so cut up about an officer’s death. When another OE took over later in the year he found he was still living in George’s shadow. Charles Fletcher, who had lost two of his three sons in under five months, indirectly blamed the French flag for the attention it had drawn to the Fusiliers’ section of the line. At home, the den became a shrine to his two lost boys but George’s flag, the offending object, hangs today in the ante chapel at Eton.

But aside from this memento, George’s death was still to have a far more poignant legacy. Devastated, Charles Fletcher sent word of his middle son’s death on to Shrewsbury School. Evelyn Southwell, an OE himself, was mortified. To George’s former colleagues he was still part of their household, their extended family. Evelyn could not walk into their shared house without thinking of him. When he broke the news to his form, the boys responded with a loud burst of applause for George. ‘What else would you have?’ It was the cruellest blow that the war had yet sent him. ‘His personality lies stamped on all the little institutions of our life, and his name is mentioned almost every time we sit down together. He was, and is our d’Artagnan.’

With no interest in military matters and no practical experience, the next letter Evelyn wrote was to his own father: ‘You will have heard the news of Fletcher’s death. I think you will agree with me that the matter is now closed. I must go and take his place.’ To George’s father he closed with a final sentiment for the road. ‘I hope I may catch some of his spirit and show one hundredth part of his courage.’

Notes

  1  Lieutenant Gilbert Mitchell-Innes died aged 20 and lies in Vlamertinghe Military Cemetery in Belgium.

  2  ‘Tug’ was another term normally used by Oppidans to describe a King’s Scholar.

  3  Geoffrey Valentine Francis Monckton is commemorated on the Le Touret Memorial. His brother, Francis Algernon Monckton, is remembered on the Menin Gate. The third Etonian to fall in Gareth Hamilton-Fletcher’s company was Harold Sterndale Entwistle Bury, 26. He too is commemorated on the Le Touret Memorial.