Blood and Thunder (2 page)

Whilst Eton College is iconically British, her doors were not closed to boys from abroad and it was not only home forces that were represented by former pupils. Whether by national allegiance or circumstance, armies from all corners of the Empire found Etonian representatives, be it Canada, Australia, New Zealand or India. Beyond the influence of the British flag, OEs wore the uniforms of the United States, Italy, and France as well as Serbia and Russia. Neither did every Etonian represent the same cause, for one solitary boy would serve with the Kaiser’s army.

It stands to reason then, that the war experiences of Old Etonians were not limited to the trenches of the Western Front. As it was for the rest of the world, so it was in microcosm. The Etonian experience of the Great War was truly global. As well as France and Flanders, old boys fought and died at Gallipoli, in Africa as well as the Western Desert and Egypt; in Palestine, Mesopotamia and Persia, in the waters of the Atlantic and the Baltic and on fronts in the Balkans, the Alps, India, Siberia and Northern Russia.

The first Old Etonians to see action were professional soldiers, regulars and reservists who had made a choice to answer a call to arms. With these and close on their heels came the Territorials, the Yeomanry; part-time soldiers who volunteered to go abroad. Eton’s old boys not only swelled the ranks of the armed services and Sandhurst on the outbreak of war, but with them the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. Members of Officer Training Corps, they knew as little of life in the wider world as they did of the realities of war when they followed their elder brothers and former schoolmates to war. And then there were the schoolboys themselves. Washed into the army on a wave of patriotism when war was declared, by 1916 it was a very different story. The Military Service Act, not enthusiasm, dictated a boy’s path into the forces whether he wished to serve or not. The Old Etonian of this generation sat dejectedly in his house library or at the dinner table with his friends as his departure loomed. They debated regiments, not professions and spoke of where their futures might lie only in terms of which cap badge would adorn their uniforms. These boys marched straight out of school, into the army and then on to the battlefields before they had left their teenage years behind.

Wellington’s great-grandson may strike a chord, as would Charles Dickens’ grandson or the father of Bond author Ian Fleming, but a total of 1,168 Old Etonians are now known to have given their lives as a result of the Great War and the sons of clergymen, bankers, peers and businessmen were as valuable to those that knew them as the notable names.

That the surroundings of their education were privileged is undoubted. But privilege does not follow a man, or indeed a boy, on to the field of battle. Life or death is dictated by sheer dumb luck. Littered amongst the Victoria Crosses and the famous names are the muted ends of people’s fathers and the as yet undiscovered heroism of sons and brothers. For that reason, this book is dedicated to the hundreds of fallen Etonians who have no space dedicated to them within it.

1

‘God Grant I May Be Old Enough'

Gareth Hamilton-Fletcher was interested in international politics even at Eton. In addition to being a top-notch cricketer he was a talented linguist, carrying off school prizes in French and German. In 1909, at the age of 15, he wrote home to his mother on the subject of Germany. He had been reading about the Royal Navy in the
Daily Graphic
. ‘Why are we deceived into thinking that Germany really means well to us?' he fumed. ‘We are not really deceived; we only say so because it is a good excuse and we would rather go and have a game of golf or have a day's hunting. What fools we are!' Gareth didn't doubt for a moment that war was imminent. ‘God grant I may be old enough to fight for my country when the time comes. God help us!'

Spy fever was at its zenith. Paranoia about the might of Germany and her intentions sent a chill through vast numbers of Britons. The Secret Intelligence Service, the forerunner to MI6, came into existence that year. A large part of their remit became, naturally, German naval construction and the arms race. If it seemed at all likely that war was about to break out then information on naval mobilisation and troop movements, especially in the northern German ports, would become an overwhelming priority.

Britain's new intelligence agency was tested thoroughly during the Agadir Crisis of 1911 when the Germans felt the wrath of France for landing a gunboat at the Moroccan port. Europe was spiralling ever closer toward was. Interested British parties began to panic about the disposition of German warships, whether or not they planned to attack the Royal Navy. The SIS was called in and the chief of army intelligence sent a man to Brussels to undertake some intelligence gathering activity at German North Sea ports.

A few weeks later his man was seized by the German authorities and detained on charges of espionage. Some accounts say he was dragged from his bed in the middle of the night, others that he was taken into custody whilst trying to dispose of a code book that had been planted on him by a German double agent in a public toilet.

The arrested man was an Old Etonian. Bertrand Stewart came from an established Scottish family. He himself was born in London and went to Walter Durnford's house at Eton in 1886. After Oxford he joined Markby, Stewart & Co. as a solicitor in London until the outbreak of the Boer War, when he enlisted in the Imperial Yeomanry and left for Africa.

Bertrand was indicative of the enthusiastic amateur gentleman plying the espionage trade just prior to the Great War. Working directly under the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service he had that summer been firstly to Nijmegen to contact an agent working in Germany. Unwisely he crossed the border with him and he had been gathering information in Hamburg, Cuxhaven and Bremerhaven before the authorities caught up with him. It was plausible that the book had been planted. The chief of the SIS speculated that the agent he had travelled with had sold him out, having been a decoy all along. ‘It is annoying,' stated his associate, the Director of Naval Intelligence, ‘but we must expect drawbacks such as these in this kind of business.'

Bertrand Stewart's trial by the Supreme Court of Germany opened at Leipzig on 31 January 1912. Throughout he continuously proclaimed his innocence amidst a media storm; claiming that he barely spoke enough German to order meals and to talk to natives at train stations and hotels. The charges against him mainly related to naval defences that he had apparently never seen. The only specific evidence, it was claimed, was that of a penniless ex-criminal in the employment of the prosecutors. After a trial lasting four days, Captain Stewart was nonetheless found guilty, which for all of his bluster he was, and he was sentenced to detention for three and a half years.

Before leaving the court Captain Stewart proudly declared to his captors that if their distinguished nation was ever at war with Britain, he hoped he would be fighting against them. As he was dragged away to serve his sentence at the fortress of Glatz, Europe was less than three years away from a monstrous industrialised war the likes of which the world had never seen. Bertrand, Gareth Hamilton-Fletcher and nearly 6,000 fellow Old Etonians, whether they wanted to or not, would get just such an opportunity to participate. Over 1,200 of them would not return.

2

‘The Faces of Souls in Hell'

‘The sky was just beginning to light up: a pale yellow streak had appeared in the east. The clouds were tinged with pink. In a few moments the horizon was ablaze, yellow, gold, orange and blood.' It was 5 August 1914, the end of a Bank Holiday weekend at Ramsgate. The day before had been bright, sunny, ‘glorious' with a clear blue sky. Scores of families had flocked to the seaside but there were unsettled tones running underneath their careless frivolity. For three or four days there had been one strange word whispered by everyone … War. ‘It sounded terrible enough, and yet, to the uninitiated, it was a word of excitement, it almost sounded romantic.'

The young man watching the sun rise had had a troubled night's sleep after news arrived that Britain had declared war on Germany. That morning he looked down on the crowds from the pier. ‘It did not seem to make much difference whether there was war or not.' On the sand was ‘a seething mass of humanity, happy bright faces, huddled together in a great jumble. The children jumped over one another, burying their heads in the sand and laughing. Below, in the calm sea there were little groups of yelling persons, bobbing up and down, knee deep in warm water.' As he watched them he was already uneasily settling on the prospect of offering his services to his country for the duration of the conflict. This restless Old Etonian was 21 years old. He would not see 24.

In August 1914 enthusiasm for war ripped through the ranks of Old Etonians and they prepared to fight in their hundreds. Anti-war sentiment was not generally found amongst old boys who were getting ready to depart for France with the British Expeditionary Force. One OE from a military family had a way with words and he encapsulated the sentiment that many displayed when they scribbled their last letters home. He declared that if Britain failed to intervene ‘we are as chicken-hearted a lot as ever existed … Nobody will ever help us or trust us again.'

Born in April 1880, another, Aubrey Herbert, was an unlikely volunteer who would be amongst the first Old Etonians to depart for war. A Member of Parliament, he had seen his fellow politicians in London as they had stumbled towards oblivion. Ashen, they had ‘the faces of souls in hell'. A son of the 4th Earl of Carnarvon, it would be Aubrey's elder half-brother who would open Tutankhamen's tomb with Howard Carter in 1922. Aubrey was the eldest son of the earl's second marriage and his father doted on him. Lord Carnarvon died when his son was 10 and Aubrey was still being privately educated at 13 when his aunt began advocating a public school education. He arrived at Benson's house at Eton in 1893 with no experience of school life and crippled by awful eyesight.

Aubrey was practically blind. His mother had to employ the services of a tutor to go through Eton in his company, reading aloud to him throughout his time at school, though he was already showing a remarkable aptitude for languages, speaking fluent Italian and French, and good German. Owing to his disability though, his performance at school was moderate. He also found it hard to adjust to life in the house and found solace in spending his pocket money too quickly and adopting any pet he could find, be it jackdaws, squirrels or mice. On one occasion he discovered some larks in the town being kept in a ‘dreadfully' small cage and conspired with two schoolmates to buy them and set them free.

In 1897 Aubrey went to Germany to undergo radical eye surgery and it had a massive impact on his life. The operation was carried out cautiously on one eye and he found that he could read for himself, distinguish people from across the room, even shoot. He went up to Oxford the following year to read history but was famed more than anything else for his climbing. One acquaintance remembered Aubrey, ‘finger holds alone' and 40ft off the ground swinging from ledge to ledge along the tall houses on King Edward Street. It was not unusual for him to tap on the outside of a window and wave to the people inside three floors up. He once managed to get from Christ Church to Balliol by nothing but rooftops, gutters, window sills and pipes. T.E. Lawrence, a near contemporary and future acquaintance in Egypt, reminded Aubrey during the war of how he had been traversing rooftops and singing Italian love songs when he fell into a bank and was held up at gunpoint as a robber.

After Oxford Aubrey began a career in diplomacy, firstly in Tokyo and then in Constantinople. He travelled greatly in the years before the outbreak of war, taking in the United States, Canada, the Balkans, Africa, the Far East, Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey as well as the far reaches of the Sultan's empire. His career as a diplomat lasted until 1905 when at the age of 25 Aubrey left Constantinople. He soon decided to resurrect his travelling and toured extensively through the Mediterranean, Arabia, Palestine, the Caucasus, Mesopotamia and India. Compelled by an agreement with his mother that he would settle down to life in politics he returned glumly to England.

By 1912 Aubrey had married and been elected as MP for Yeovil. He proved enthusiastic in his political endeavours; but within a year he was off again, this time to the Balkans, travelling from Vienna to Sarajevo and then on to Albania. He would fall wholeheartedly in love with this last country. At the conclusion of the First Balkan War, Aubrey assisted an Albanian delegation visiting London for a peace conference. This rendered him a national hero to the extent that he would twice be offered the throne. He toured the country in 1913 triumphantly, but politely declined the opportunity to become King of Albania.

With his eyesight, Aubrey never would have been passed fit for military service. He was, however, determined to take care of unfinished business, having missed out on the Boer War. Having volunteered to go to Africa, concerns about what the dry climate might do to his eyes compelled him not to go and he had long felt it a stain upon his honour. In August 1914 he resorted to buying a khaki uniform and attaching himself to the 1st Irish Guards as they marched out of barracks and headed for France. The battalion's commander was complicit and his presence was only revealed after their transport had sailed, but by then it was too late. With his fluency in multiple languages he was to act as an interpreter.

Another of the first OEs to report for embarkation with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) but again not one of the most likely, was Walter George Fletcher. As war was declared he was with a contingent of over 500 Etonian boys and masters at Mytchett Farm near Aldershot with the Eton College Officer Training Corps. Every year, in addition to field days and parades the OTC, which provided the boys with basic military training, would congregate under the supervision of regulars with contingents from other public schools and universities for a two-week camp. In 1914 the camp rapidly broke up as it became apparent that war was imminent and as the regulars were mobilised the boys were turned out and sent back to school early.