Blood and Thunder (21 page)

Aubrey missed the onset of the new offensive as he was off on nearby islands in his capacity as an intelligence officer. He arrived back on 7 August and spent the day interrogating prisoners. The following day he watched the attack. ‘It looked so cruel I could hardly bear to see it.' It seemed like a horrible dream sequence to him. ‘[I]n the beautiful light, with clouds crimson over them, sometimes a tiny gallant figure in front then a puff of smoke would come and they would be lying still.'

Again the sight of the wounded distressed him greatly. Outside a hospital of sorts he came across an acquaintance who had been wounded during the battle and spent an excruciating day lying out in the sun. ‘He recognised me and asked me to help him, but he was delirious. There were fifty-six others with him.' It was unbearable having to walk past them all. The smell was appalling as none of the wounded men had been cleaned and he heard some of them call out, ‘we are being murdered.'

One of the objectives in the August offensives was the peak of Chunuk Bair in the Sari Bair range. Aubrey Herbert's New Zealanders, in his absence, had forged a path towards the summit before they were relieved by the British and trudged back over tall cliffs, deep ravines, and dry river beds and through wooded country in the dark. Early on 10 August Mustafa Kemal launched a counter-attack and thousands of Turks came pouring over Chunuk Bair and tore the British infantry to shreds. The fighting was hand to hand, ‘so desperate a battle cannot be described'. The enemy came at them in waves, washing the British aside.

Down on the beach the wounded on the sand and the men attempting to treat them were under sustained rifle fire from the Turks above. It seemed that nowhere was safe. In his capacity as an interpreter Aubrey didn't have a specific job to do at that precise time, so once again his concern for the broken men being brought down from the battle came to the fore. They lay in rows, ‘their faces caked with sand and blood'. He grabbed another officer and together they commandeered 200 exhausted New Zealanders of the Canterbury Battalion who had not slept in three days and began carrying them to safety. They passed around all of the water they could. Nobody was of a mind to move the wounded Turks, but Aubrey could not bear their crying. An order had come that they were not to be evacuated until all of their own men had gone. ‘This is natural but was of course an order of lingering death.' Aubrey went back with water and tried to drag the wounded Turkish soldiers into some shade. He wanted to go up to the battlefield where more men could be heard, of both sides, crying for water but the general refused him permission. What right did he have? Aubrey fumed. ‘Tempers have got very short.'

He found General Birdwood and learned that the prognosis was not good. The Turks had pushed the invaders off Chunuk Bair and the battle appeared lost. The enemy, he said, had been magnificent and Aubrey feared that the New Zealand Infantry Brigade had ceased to exist. ‘The lines of wounded are creeping up to the cemetery like a tide,' claimed Aubrey, ‘… and the cemetery is coming to meet the wounded.' On 13 August Aubrey himself contracted a fever. He was full of resolve to carry on, but eleven days later he was put on a hospital ship. Struck down with dysentery he was still claiming to be fit enough to stay when he fainted during an interview with a doctor. Having had three week's sick leave in Egypt he did return in September but lasted approximately a fortnight before his health completely broke down. As he left Gallipoli, this sideshow of a front, Aubrey wrote ‘I never want to see again a mule, or a backdoor, or a sideshow, or Winston, or flies or bully beef.' ‘Sooner or later,' his granddaughter wrote, ‘he saw them all again.'

Meanwhile Charles Lister had returned to the Hood, again sitting in reserve. He had already proved his worth to the men's morale when he had come back to them after 4 June. Cleg Kelly recalled just how miserable and depressed the battalion's survivors were until Lister arrived with his irrepressible spirits to charm them back into acceptance about their situation.
2
Charles was flagging though. ‘I feel that we shall never fight or move, and I shall not know what has happened if I wake up one morning and don't see Achi Baba on the skyline.' His thoughts had already wandered to what he had lost; whether it be on the peninsula or on the Western Front. ‘It will be sad coming back.' So many friends had died and their old haunts would be ‘full of ghosts'. Things would never be the same again.

On 19 August Charles and his men were preparing to go back into the firing line where he hoped that they would sit tight and forego any more fruitless attacks. This played out when he reported from the trenches a few days later that he was catching up on his reading, but soon afterwards the Turks began tossing shells at them. He shuffled his men along to safety and then went back down the trench thinking the show was over, only to be hit by a piece of flying shrapnel which struck him on the pelvis, damaging his bladder and causing slight wounds to his legs. Charles was operated on immediately but remained unsure as to what exactly had been done as he bobbed up and down on a hospital ship. His doctor, however, was quite pleased with his progress.

After the failure of the August attacks inertia had set in. General Hamilton became a victim of his own failure and ineptitude and was relieved of his command. Patrick was no longer with the battalion, having replaced a liaison officer with the French who had been badly wounded. He was ensconced in ‘inglorious safety on the gilded staff … speaking French for dear life'. A few days later news reached him that Charles had worsened and he died on 28 August. He was devastated. At the time ‘Lord Lister', as his men called him, had been fending off, despite Patrick's encouragement, approaches from intelligence people contriving to give him work away from the trenches. He was laid to rest on Mudros.

By October, Patrick was convinced that he too would die on the peninsula, quite possibly of old age as his residence there seemed to be ‘smacking of eternity'. He was soon put out of his misery though. A new front had opened up in the Balkans and it was decided that enough was enough. Patrick Shaw-Stewart was one of the last men to exit this doomed theatre of war as a line was drawn under a disastrous campaign and the Allies prepared to depart. ‘It is pretty sad when you think of what it has cost us,' he wrote in January 1916, although he was convinced that it was the right decision to go. Of the French contingent only he, the guns and his commanding officer remained, lighting fires and burning anything the Turks might use. ‘I have burnt some queer things, including a bowler hat.'

As Patrick prepared to board the
River Clyde
the Turks continued to shell them from the direction of Troy. On the beach it was ‘as quiet as the grave'. Not a man was lost during the evacuation of the Gallipoli peninsula, which is more than can be said of the nine months before. There are twenty-nine Old Etonians buried or commemorated on the peninsula as testament to a shambles of a campaign. Herodotus was useless as a guidebook to Patrick now. Each island, each beach, each objective was marred by death and stained with the sacrifice of his friends. As he turned his back on the Dardanelles he wondered what was next. He left behind the ghosts of Charles Lister and Rupert Brooke. In 1915, at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, almost his entire circle of friends would be slaughtered.

Notes

  
1
  Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, the famous theologian.

  
2
  Lt Commander F.S. Kelly was killed on 13 November 1916 on the Western Front. He is buried at Martinsart British Cemetery.

8

‘I Feel an Outcast to Be Alive'

Field Marshal Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener was a national hero. The victor of Omdurman and a commander of British forces during the Second Boer War; he accepted the role of Secretary of State for War on 5 August 1914 with the sentiment, ‘May God preserve me from the politicians.' Convinced from the beginning that war would last at least three years and isolated in this opinion, he understood better than most that Britain would need men and a coherent structure to bring them to arms. Almost immediately he made the bold decision not to raise troops for the war effort through the existing county scheme for territorials, but by way of separate recruitment, forging a ‘new army'. Scenes at recruiting offices in London were mayhem and enlistment fever rapidly spread. By 25 August 1914 Kitchener could count his first 100,000 volunteers, soon to be dubbed K1, and appeals went out for another 100,000 men. K2 was raised in less than a week, and the queues of men intending to enlist had not yet diminished.

Richard Selby Durnford, or ‘Dick', came from a thoroughly Etonian family. The great grandson of the fabled headmaster, Dr Keates, his uncle, Walter, was also a master for nearly thirty years. Dick himself had arrived at school in 1899. Captain of the Oppidans, captain of his House and an editor of the
Eton College Chronicle
, he was good-natured, ‘highly principled' and enthusiastic. He went from Eton to King's College, Cambridge, where he was a feature of the dramatic society and began a career as a schoolmaster at Lancing College. It was perhaps always inevitable that he would end up back at Eton and that he did in 1909. Dick, 29, loved every minute of his life at the school, from teaching lessons and pupil-room to his participation in games and the OTC. Nevertheless, as soon as war broke out, he felt compelled to go.

As a territorial Dick should have waited for a summons to his regiment but instead he raced off and managed to offer himself for service in a New Army battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps. The logistics of training so many men were proving horrifying. There were massive shortages of accommodation, uniforms, weapons, bedding and food. Nearly half-a-million men had enlisted in the army and Dick sat waiting for his uniform to turn up. Most of the men were in khaki, but there were missing caps throughout and only one-third had a rifle. The King's Royal Rifle Corps and the Rifle Brigade had each stumped up three new battalions of volunteers immediately the war commenced; the 7th, 8th and 9th of their respective regiments. They were some of the earliest formed of Kitchener's first 100,000, so if they were lacking any equipment or comfort, Dick didn't feel that they were particularly hard done by when he considered K2 and K3 further down. ‘Picture what is happening lower down.'

Aldershot, where the two regiments were based, was fast filling up with Eton masters who were abandoning their posts at school. In all sixteen of them had now left and numbers amongst the younger men willing to carry on teaching whilst their friends went into uniform were continuing to dwindle. Foss Prior was one of George Fletcher's closest friends at Eton. He was a brilliant scholar as Patrick Shaw-Stewart, his academic rival, found to his chagrin. His grandfather was bishop of Westcott and very fond of Foss and his siblings. Whilst taking tea when he was a little boy, the bishop would draw railway engines for them. ‘I remember his lifting up his hands in amazement,' another relative recalled, ‘as he reviewed all the animals of the Noah's ark arranged in procession round the dining-room table, and how he delighted the children by pretending that the camel was an elephant … so as to leave behind an agreeable impression that he was a well meaning but sadly ill-informed old man.' He would even descend to the floor to assist in building operations. In 1900, Foss and several siblings and cousins accompanied their grandfather to a picnic at Bolton Castle where the old man found little Foss peering into a dungeon. The bishop stooped down to look too and remarked, ‘Do you think that is where we are to have tea?' When Foss laughed and replied that it wouldn't be in that dark hole, the bishop professed to be much relieved.

Foss could come across as quite rigid and shy when first met, but he was a treasured companion amongst his closest friends; always of a gentle temperament. Whilst at University College, Oxford, he was offered a clerical Fellowship and he had been considering holy orders with some seriousness. He spent several months at the theological college at Wells but in 1912 he decided ‘after grave searching of the heart' to postpone the idea of ordination. This coincided with a job offer at Eton and he put his religious ambitions on hold and returned to his old school gladly.

Although he was willing to go to war within a few months, everybody knew that Foss was not born to be a soldier. This was not based on ability but on his temperament. He wrestled greatly with his conscience at the outbreak of hostilities but ultimately could not bear inaction. He was massively enthusiastic about all aspects of his life as a master at Eton with the exception of his involvement in the corps; which as an officer he found boring and loathed that it required him to give up parts of holidays. Nonetheless his sense of duty banished his reservations and as soon as war began he went to spend his summer helping the Cambridge OTC at Royston. He returned to school at the end of September for little over a month before he packed his things and joined the new 8th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade. He was joined by another Eton colleague, Arthur Sheepshanks. He may only have stood 5ft 3in but ‘Sheep' was to prove that stature was not dictated by a tape measure on a battlefield.

Dick Durnford was ensconced at Blenheim Barracks where his battalion, the 9th King's Royal Rifle Corps, was sharing barracks made for one unit with the 9th Rifle Brigade. They were muddling along without too much discomfort. The most pressing concern, so far as he could see, was a disturbing lack of junior officers and NCOs to command these new battalions.

Kitchener was by no means ignorant of this issue. At the outbreak of war he had available to him a shade under 30,000 officers, but with the number of men he had raised he would need to double this figure. However that did not take into account replacing those who were by now beginning to fall at the front in high numbers. There were a few hundred officers at home on leave from India in August 1914 and he seized them before trying to smooth things over with the Indian Government. Dick's battalion was initially lucky as they had inherited some Gurkha officers who reported for duty but they were liable to be called off at any moment, leaving them extremely short handed.