Blood and Thunder (24 page)

Ted moved off to explore his surroundings, helping to drag more men in and ordering them to stay put, trying to form a line of defence. A machine gun was playing along the top of the trench incessantly and it had become lined with corpses and moaning, broken men. It transpired that they had taken up residence in an old communication trench, far too narrow to be used effectively under fire. Ted had to get the men he passed to kneel down in 1ft of water so that he could climb over their backs without exposing his head.

Right at the end of the line, holding on with what was left of his company, Ted found Sheep. Dick Durnford's contingent had been luckier. At 2.45 p.m. a subaltern had led out a party of bombers and was followed by two companies. Taking heavy losses they managed to take some trenches but could go no further so they began consolidating their position.

As evening approached, Ted decided to find his colonel. On his way down the trench he found Ronnie MacLachlan, an OE and commanding officer of the 8th Rifle Brigade instead; he was frantic, in a state of total shock. Ted tried to fill him in as to what had happened and by the time he returned to his own men he found that their second-rate trench was overflowing with wounded men being brought in from the darkened battlefield. Stretcher bearers were trying to move them along, but the numbers were overwhelming and they lay unattended everywhere. Survivors struggled across the battlefield dragging their wounded friends whilst others, including Bones Drummond, were never heard from again. The 7th Rifle Brigade had walked something like 20 miles and had one meal in twenty-four hours, notwithstanding the actual fighting, and finally they were relieved. Overcome by sadness and their loss they began the long walk back down the Menin Road.

If the carnage at Hooge was hard to comprehend for the likes of Ted Kay-Shuttleworth and Ronnie MacLachlan, then it was impossible for those at home. Dick Durnford's company had been in support as the 9th King's Royal Rifles retook the trenches to the left of Hooge. They were busy consolidating their position when Dick came up to offer to help. He was greeted by a friend who then turned away to give directions to a bombing party. He was just walking back down the trench when he saw Dick fall, hit by a chance bullet. Dick's poor mother could neither comprehend the manner of his death nor the subsequent loss of the grave his men had dug for him. In her grief she became fixated on the whereabouts of one item, his revolver, and why it could not be found and returned to her. It fell to one of Dick's fellow officers to try to convey the horror of Hooge to her without causing her more pain some months later. In the mayhem, John Christie, another Etonian master, had passed Dick's revolver to another OE in the Rifle Brigade as he didn't have his own.
3
Christie had not seen the grave himself. He had been the last man of the 9th King's Royal Rifles to leave those trenches. By then anyone who might have known the whereabouts of the grave had fallen too. ‘Conditions were very bad,' he told her. For example, in his bit of trench he had had to live with the body of a young subaltern for days as it was too dangerous to try to bury him. He could not so much as find a shovel and they had not so much as a field dressing to try and treat the men bleeding next to them.

Ronnie MacLachlan's 8th Rifle Brigade was relieved and when he arrived in billets all he wanted to do was sit and sob. He began the agonising task of writing to the families of his officers. Nineteen out of twenty-four of them were dead or unaccounted for and hundreds of men were gone. Billy Grenfell, to his father's desolation, had to be left where he fell owing to how far forward he had managed to get. The idea of his boy lying abandoned on the battlefield would haunt Lord Desborough.

A fortnight after the German attack at Hooge the situation had improved somewhat and Ronnie MacLachlan began badgering the authorities about the prospect of recovering Billy's body. He was told that it was not safe for him to send up a search party but that the troops in the vicinity would do as much as they could. Sheep, however, had absolutely no intention of leaving his young subaltern on the field of battle. Attempts to find him and lay him to rest at Vlamertinghe with his relative, Francis Grenfell, had failed. On 15 August the 3rd Rifle Brigade moved into the area. A sergeant had seen a body in no-man's-land but snipers meant that he could not approach it to find out who it was. A corporal tried and managed to retrieve the identity disc. It was Billy. After dark they went out, collected him and managed to bury him just to the north of a trench dubbed Fleet Street, 250 yards due south of Hooge
4
.

Barely two months after losing their eldest son, Lord and Lady Desborough had lost their second. He had been at the front for a little over two months and his and Julian's deaths rocked the upper echelons of society. Lord Kitchener had no family of his own; he was uncomfortable socially and he thought of Taplow Court as a home of sorts. When the news of Billy's death arrived it was the only time that the Secretary of State for War was known to break down. He left his desk, on which sat a photograph of Julian in a silver frame, and went for a walk to pull himself together.

Foss Prior was lucky to be alive. Shot in the back the bullet had narrowly missed his spine and come out the other side. It was finally deemed safe enough to ship him home in the middle of August aboard the SS
St George
. Ted Kay-Shuttleworth had found himself the only officer left across two companies. Only seventy men remained in his own and of his officer's mess, his jolly mess, he was literally the only one left. He sent a list of the fallen home to his wife, including his best man and overflowing with the names of OEs who had been claimed by this one solitary German attack. He had lost as many friends in a day as a man might expect to lose in years.

Walking towards Ypres, Ted came across a quartermaster that he knew. When the man told him how glad he was to see that he survived, Ted burst into tears. He ate breakfast and tried to get to sleep but it was impossible. He rolled over and over, absorbing the day's events. Their proud battalion was in tatters, almost half of them dead or missing. Disconsolately, he wrote to his wife: ‘I feel an outcast to be alive.'

Notes

  
1
  In a rare occurrence they took his body back to England and buried him at home in Buckinghamshire in Moulsoe churchyard.

  
2
  Captain Spencer Heneage Drummond.

  
3
  By the time Christie wrote his letter, this OE too had died. Gerald Boswell KS was severely wounded and died on the Somme in 1916. Aged 24, he was laid to rest at Abbeville Communal Cemetery.

  
4
  With both of their graves lost in subsequent fighting, Billy Grenfell and Dick Durnford are commemorated on the Menin Gate at Ypres.

  5  Edward Kay-Shuttleworth survived his friends by a little over two years. In the summer of 1917 he was killed in a motorcycle accident in Essex. His brother, the Hon. L.U. Kay-Shuttleworth had been killed on 30 March 1917 with the Canadian infantry and laid to rest at Villers Station Cemeterey.

9

‘Till Berlin'

The instant that war was declared the world of European finance was plunged into turmoil. Embroiled in the mayhem was J. Henry Schröder & Co. The company had been established in London in 1818 so, despite its German roots, it was no stranger to the City. Baron Bruno von Schröder had lived and worked in London for years at its head. His children had been born in England and his two sons educated at Eton, but his nationality meant that on the outbreak of the Great War the company could be seized by the government.

His business partner went to work immediately to try to rectify the situation. The fate of von Schröder's company was of great importance. In August 1914 London's financial hub was in a state of meltdown; should it be sequestered von Schröder had £11m in outstanding acceptances that it would not be able to honour. As such the governors of the Bank of England were onside and took the matter up with the Home Secretary. It would be, they said, ‘a disaster if the doors of Baron von Schröder did not open on the following morning.' Separate appeals were made by friends to the Prime Minister and Baron von Schröder was given immediate naturalisation. As early as 7 August 1914 he had received both a certificate confirming his status as a British citizen and a licence to trade and reside in the country from George V himself.

That von Schröder and his colleagues had curtailed the possibility of being sequestered did not alleviate all of their commercial issues. In many circles there was outrage at his rapid conversion to British citizenship. In October the aldermen of the City of London passed a resolution of protest and the Home Secretary was forced to continuously bat away the issue in Parliament throughout November. At the forefront of the howls of protest that were latched on to by the press was the fact that Bruno von Schröder's 19-year-old son and heir, a territorial, was mobilising for war and heading for the Western Front – with the German Army.

Born in Kensington in 1895, Rudolph ‘Bruno' von Schröder arrived at Mr Hill's house at Eton in 1908 and made his way through the school relatively quietly, not surprisingly making off with school prizes in German. In 1913 he went straight into the family business and headed straight to his father's native Hamburg to learn his trade. Once there Bruno immediately joined a cavalry outfit, Dragoner-Regiment 18 or the ‘Parchim Dragoons' as an
Einjährig Freiwilliger
or one-year volunteer.

It was a regiment with a proud heritage. The Parchim Dragoons had close ties with the city of Bremen and had helped to besiege Paris in the Franco–Prussian War. Hamburg citizens were not obliged to join the PRussian Army, but Bruno's father had served with the regiment in his youth so there were familial connections with this Mecklenburgian regiment. Gefreiter (Fahnenjunker) Bruno Freiherr von Schröder, his rank that of an NCO acting as the lowest rank of officer was already on the Western Front attempting to wrestle Liege from Belgian hands when his OE counterparts in the British Army had yet to cross the Channel.

With the arrival of the BEF in France and Belgium in the middle of the month began the only recorded instances of Old Etonians fighting against each other in the Great War. In fact Bruno and his men were pursuing cavalry regiments packed full of his fellow OEs, including at least one boy who had been in the same house with him, through the French countryside.

Bruno von Schröder was not the only Old Etonian joining an illustrious mounted regiment in a foreign army. Russia had at her disposal what seemed like infinite reserves of manpower. The Tsar could put literally millions of men to war against the Central Powers inside a month at the outbreak of war. His army was mobilised on 31 July 1914 and Germany declared war the following day. In the east the immense might of three powers; the Kaiser's, the Tsar's and that of Austria–Hungary, were lining up on an immense Eastern Front to do battle.

George Schack-Sommer was the son of an established merchant. Suffering from delicate health as a child, he radiated charm and had impeccable manners. He arrived at Eton in 1903 and was a keen member of the OTC, leaving school four years later bent on being a mining engineer. He started off right at the bottom in Cornwall, working as a miner himself to get a feel for it. Experience gained, he went off to the Royal School of Mines and three years later, at 20, he finished his studies and went out into the world. He had worked in Norway and India, where again he had volunteered for territorial service with the Kolar Goldfields Mounted Rifles, but ultimately had become an assayer and a cyanide operator at the Tanalyk Mine in the Urals. He was an animal lover and had much experience with Siberian ponies. In spring 1910 he had interviews with Robert Falcon Scott for his South Pole expedition but ultimately Scott felt that George was too young for the rigours of the expedition. Ultimately he took Lawrence Oates to maintain the ponies, an older OE who had the added advantage of offering substantial financial support.

In November 1914 George left his job in Siberia and embarked on an epic journey to offer his services to the Russian Army, as he rightly thought it would be faster than travelling home to apply for a commission. He began his 1,700-mile odyssey with a thirty-six-hour troika ride to get to the nearest railway station. Eventually he rolled up at the Grand Hotel d'Europe in newly renamed Petrograd having travelled via Chelyabinsk, Ekaterinburg where the Tsar would be executed in 1917, and Vologda. It would be no more dangerous than going down into the mine, he attempted to convince his mother ‘Think of the Russian people I live with going off … surely it would look terrible for an Englishman to sit tight and leave it to others.'

As a foreigner George had to petition the Tsar to be allowed in to the Russian Army as an ordinary soldier and doggedly stuck at it until they let him into the ranks. Numerous regiments turned this thoroughly determined Englishman down, but he was on familiar terms with a minister who introduced him to his brother; a colonel of a cavalry regiment, who agreed to take George down to Kiev to join the 12th Artirsky Hussars. ‘If anyone asks why I went to scrap from this side,' he told his family, ‘tell them it was because I thought it would be the quickest way to get to the front.' He was bullish in backing up his decision against those who may scorn him. ‘Jump on anyone who thinks I have in any way sunk my nationality. I have your Union Jack in my breast pocket,' George assured them, ‘and it is going to fly somewhere, before I've done with it.'

George entrained for Galicia to join his regiment. Here four Russian armies were lined up against Austro–Hungarian forces fighting a war of movement. Whilst the war on the Western Front was grinding to an industrialised halt, this was a throwback to a bygone age. Cavalry performed in traditional role, skirmishing and scouting.

The journey had been incredibly arduous. He had covered nearly 2,500 miles since leaving the mine. George arrived in Lviv
1
, recently liberated from the Austro–Hungarians, just as the fighting around Ypres was subsiding at the end of 1914. It appeared to him, thus far, to have been a walkover for the Russians. He thought the residents of Lviv ‘poor devils', mostly Polish Jews seemingly fairly pleased with the outcome, ‘chiefly because they were so neglected by the Austrian government'.