Blood and Thunder (27 page)

Yvo Alan Charteris was the third son of the Earl of Wemyss. Tall, fair haired, with broad shoulders, a slender waist and a tendency to look rather solemn he had arrived in College in 1910. He was a gifted public speaker, with a distinctive deep voice and possessed diverse passions, from modern English poetry to medieval alchemy.

Slightly older than Robin but still not 18, Yvo Charteris did the same. He was fed up before he even got back to Eton. He had waved his eldest brother, Hugo, Lord Elcho, off to war in August and half of the staff at Stanway, his family home, had gone by the end of the month. Even the women in his life were fully involved. Two of his own sisters were nursing, as were John Manners' and Monica Grenfell, both of whom he was well acquainted with. When one of his sisters admitted to going down with ‘khaki-fever' – crushes on soldiers – his flippancy could not mask his foul mood. ‘As everyone is in khaki it seems hopelessly indiscriminate and rather banal.'

Yvo sat shivering through early school on a dreary morning before breakfast, rueing the fact that all of the best people, including Peter Llewelyn Davies, had left for the war. Yvo felt ‘crushed with ennui'. Not even the OTC could satisfy his military appetite because it no longer offered the opportunity for buffoonery that it used to. It was all horribly efficient. Eton seemed pointless, people left almost daily to take up commissions, so that reading classics and playing games just felt horribly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

He returned home for leave at the beginning of November but no amount of grovelling could make his parents back down. They had agreed to let him leave at Easter, but no sooner. Yvo returned to school after Christmas and was miserable half a day later. His desire to join the army, and he was not alone, was becoming an obsession. ‘I have been extremely happy here and it is a pity to leave with a nasty taste in one's mouth.' Anyone with any ‘gumption' as he put it had already gone and he was beside himself. He had already decided on joining Peter Llewelyn Davies in the King's Royal Rifles and ordered a uniform. In February his parents relented and he left in the middle of the half. As the cab pulled away from the school Eton receded into the fog and Yvo felt that he was leaving perhaps the happiest years of his life behind, but he was content. He had done the right thing.

Across the road at de Havilland's house Robin Blacker was similarly being driven mad by the routine of school life whilst it seemed that all those around him left for the war. The thought of joining the army was all consuming, as was the desperation to accomplish this feat as swiftly as possible. During his last year at Eton Robin had specialised in history and become close to Foss Prior. Acting as an unofficial recruiting agent of sorts for the 8th Rifle Brigade, Foss arranged for Robin to join him, and shortly after Yvo he too departed Eton College for good. He was not yet 18 years old.

Thus far 1915 had yielded nothing but misery for the allies. Neuve-Chapelle in March had been the first solo effort of British troops against the German lines. That and Aubers Ridge in May, again aiming to make a decisive breakthrough in front of Lille, had failed and resulted in long lists of casualties being telegraphed through to the War Office. The Russians had been trounced on the Eastern Front and Gallipoli had been a catastrophic waste of time and resources.

The BEF had continued to expand rapidly with the arrival of Kitchener's recruits and by autumn it held a line from the Ypres area down over the French border to Lens. A large-scale battle had been in planning since the beginning of the summer but where the British would play their part was a contentious issue. The French intended to make a large push in Artois and Champagne. They therefore wanted their allies to push just on the north of their lines. Unfortunately this area, around Lens itself, was appalling as a potential battlefield. It was flat, dreary mining territory littered with houses, giant slag heaps and pit heads. The British still wanted to pursue the Lille objective but ultimately the government line had to be toed, and that was, in the end, an order to co-operate fully with the French.

Knowing that they were attacking in a spot that was far from ideal did not put the breakers on Haig's enthusiasm. The BEF was by now split into two armies and it was his that would undertake this main offensive. They were to push over the area around the town of Loos and advance 5 miles, taking what had been dubbed Hill 70, to the east of the town. Bursting through the German lines they would create a gap to pour into, flood behind the German lines and send them running for their lives.

The planning was awful. There were no stages to the advance. It was a free-for-all that lacked artillery, men and experienced officers.The attack was due to begin at dawn on 25 September with a forty-minute release of gas followed by the boldest British advance of the war so far, despite the fact that the big French offensive it was originally supposed to be a subsidiary of had now drifted off miles to the south. Unit commanders had been given objectives but generally vague orders, so remained unsure of how they were supposed to achieve them. Just to crown the ludicrous situation that senior officers and battalion commanders now found themselves in, the Germans were dug in in strong lines of defence with many machine guns lined up ready to rip through the attackers.

Yvo Charteris left Stanway on 16 March 1915, had his portrait taken and delivered himself to Sheerness. It was his first time out in the real world proper and he promptly bought a large motorcycle over which he had no control whatsoever. His mother referred to it as ‘that infernal machine' with due cause. He had never so much as sat on one before and now he was excitedly running amok on the Isle of Sheppey, his golden hair blowing in the wind, and running an unfortunate rifleman off the road. ‘However, saluting from the dust he apologised profusely, thus showing the glorious spirit of discipline that pervades the British Army and will eventually bring the Kaiser to the doom he deserves,' Yvo reported cheerfully.

Lord Wemyss soon decided that he would much rather his young son served in the Grenadier Guards. Yvo was not entirely happy in the King's Royal Rifles anyway. His mother thought it was more to do with being so far away from all of his friends and family for the first time. There was a chance he might be viewed as fickle by colleagues but he wasn't too bothered. In actual fact he thought he would much prefer the Grenadiers, who were based in London. He left it to his father to work out. ‘I should like papa to take the responsibility as no one could mind his asking.' Yvo did have a ‘most awful fit of indecision' as it all went through. As casualty lists poured back from the front necessitating officers being sent out to the King's Royal Rifle battalions he asked his mother for advice; but the countess felt ‘so lacking in conviction, or the knowledge or the power to judge' that she abstained from getting involved.

Robin Blacker had made the journey away from his rifle regiment too. When the 8th Rifle Brigade left for France in May 1915 he was still 17 and they had enough officers to be able to leave him behind. The simple logistical fact was that the regiment had so many battalions that he could find himself waiting for some time to be sent out to replace a casualty. He received a letter from an Eton friend, Willie Edmonstone, who pointed out that the Guards regiments had far less battalions. Thus it stood to reason that if he transferred to join him in the Coldstream Guards he had a far better chance of getting to the front. That was all the convincing that Robin needed and he was off back to Windsor with new insignia on his uniform. Not only did Robin Blacker take Willie Edmonstone's advice and transfer the to the Coldstream Guards at Windsor, but he had convinced Pip to try to do the same. The elder of the two brothers had been considering forsaking the idea of the Devonshire Regiment in favour of one that was a little less choosy but in the end it was one of the old Eton masters who facilitated his way to a commission in the army. Mr Conybeare pointed him towards a ‘broad-minded' doctor who Pip was sure had purposely set up his waiting room in front of the eye chart so that, with his glasses on, he might memorise the letters before his eyes were ‘tested'.

One morning at the beginning of August, Pip returned to the room that they were sharing at the White Hart Hotel opposite Windsor Castle to find Robin in a complete state. The news of the 8th Rifle Brigade's plight at Hooge had reached him. ‘Torn by grief and frustration,' Robin learned of the deaths of his former friends and men. And he had transferred, so he would not be able to replace them. What if Foss, Sheep and the others thought that he had moved to ‘shirk' the fighting? He wanted to go back to the Rifle Brigade. The authorities forbade a second transfer but Robin, aged 18 years and 2 months, managed to get his move to the front expedited. Their father begrudgingly signed a letter of permission and on 26 August, having been marked for the 1st Coldstream Guards, he waved goodbye to Pip. His elder brother returned to the White Hart and got out his diary. ‘I put the chances four in ten that I never see him again.'

The day after Hooge, Yvo Charteris bid farewell to Stanway and went for a walk there with his mother. His hands were deep in his pockets. They walked largely in silence, ‘charged with deep emotion and thoughts beyond all words'. Soon afterwards, she watched him sleeping in front of her on the train as he returned to London for the last time, laid out across the seats opposite. She was overcome with fear at a vision of his cold, dead body laid out in a similar manner.

All of the Guards regiments had been pulled back to St Omer to form their own specific division. Lord Cavan had been at home with his sick wife when word reached him that it was to be his. Yvo was all calmness and serenity as he boarded the train to join them. As he did so he took a small embellishment from his uniform out of his pocket and pressed it into his mother's hand. As the train moved slowly away from the platform at Charing Cross his travelling companions crowded the window and the last glimpse that the Countess of Wemyss got of her boy was him leaping above them to see her.

By the third week of August Yvo had found his way to his battalion, the 1st Grenadier Guards, where he was beginning to feel at home. The new Guards Division was marking time, playing drunken games of ‘hunt the slipper' and throwing Perrier water at one another. Yvo came away from one gathering with the remnants of a pigeon egg on his forehead. The guns rumbled low in the far distance ‘like distant breakers' reminding them of what lay in store.

At 6.30 a.m. on 25 September, after spraying gas and wafting a smoke screen not wholly effectively towards the German lines, the first waves of British troops went over the top at Loos and streamed eastwards. Fighting was fierce all morning and success varied. Generally things went better in the southern part of the attack but the difference in how individual commanders had planned, interpreted and carried out their orders was telling. To the north, back towards La Bassee, some troops got absolutely nowhere whilst others got bogged down heavily after initial gains.

By mid morning, Haig's army had had the best of the success that it was going to encounter that day. The decisive break had not been made and what was needed now was quick exploitation of the gains to be able to push on. But the errors and failings of attacks earlier in the year came back to haunt them. Communications had fallen apart and therefore the artillery support was failing because it lacked information while the organisation of the troops in reserve that were supposed to be brought up was dire. They had broken in, but breaking out the other side and having the Germans turn and run for the border was going to be an entirely different story.

William Winterton was another Etonian who had done his very best to try to get to the front as swiftly as possible. Born in January 1896 he was 19 years old, his recently widowed mother's eldest son. He had arrived at Heygate's house in 1909 and appeared to have it all. He was a talented athlete, oarsman, footballer and a cadet officer in the OTC. Whilst not a genius academically his scholarly qualities were sound. He worked hard, but he was most memorable to the younger boys he had left behind for a selfless attitude and his ‘indefatigable efforts' to support them as they made their way through the school.

William had been nominally attached to the Royal Berkshire Regiment in 1914 but when he left Eton at the same time as Robin Blacker and Yvo Charteris, he had opted to take a commission in the 11th Royal Scots. In May 1915 the SS
Invicta
carried the battalion to war and by the time the Battle of Loos commenced on 25 September they were in the thick of it. They had been working day and night under the watchful gaze of the Germans, digging additional trenches, improving communications and lugging stores to various dumps. The digging they hated, but it beat hands down carrying heavy stores through muddy, slippery trenches. Worst of all though was transporting the gas cylinders to the front lines by hand. The weight was not the concern, it was ‘the nerve wracking fear' that a chance shell might explode nearby and set one off, resulting in horrifying death for the whole party.

William's battalion were in support on the first morning of the attack. The Highlanders in front of them had carried the advance forward towards the village of Haisnes through the pit head known as Fosse 8 and the forbidding Hohenzollern Redoubt. They had then begun pouring eastwards towards the next objective: Pekin Trench.

All the while the 11th Royal Scots had been moving up towards the forward trenches. At dawn on that miserable soggy day, twenty minutes before the gas was due to go off, they began their struggle to reach the front lines. The instant the battle commenced the communication trenches leading to the scene of the fight were crammed with howling, bleeding men and parties carrying supplies up. William and his men had been scheduled to occupy these lines as soon as the Highlanders in front left them but in the reality of the battle the plan evaporated.