The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (36 page)

Thirty miles to the east
of GHQ, along a 25-mile line that stretched from La Bassée in the south to Ypres in the north, the British Expeditionary Force was poised to attack. Massed on either side of it were the French and Belgian armies.

The offensive
, planned by Marshal Foch, Assistant Commander-in-Chief of the French Army, and Field Marshal Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, was designed to win the war. For five weeks now, in the southern sector of the line, the Germans had failed to gain ground. After halting their advance on the Marne, the Allied armies had pushed them back to the Aisne. The chance had come at last to outflank the Kaiser’s army. If the attack, centred on Ypres, succeeded, they could liberate Belgium and force the Germans out of France. The stakes, however, were high; if the attack failed, and the French and British armies
were overrun, there was nothing to stop the Germans from reaching the Channel ports, where they could launch a strike against England.

So confident was Sir John in the success of the offensive, he was willing to risk his entire army.
At the battles that had preceded it
– Mons, Le Cateau, the Marne and the Aisne – British losses had been unexpectedly heavy: 31,709 men had been killed or wounded – far in excess of the figure that actuaries at the War Office had estimated at the outset of the fighting. To bring the BEF back to strength, four new divisions – a force of upwards of fifty thousand men – had been rushed to the Front from England, as had every last available reservist. Until the territorial divisions arrived – of which the North Midland was to be the first – Sir John had no other reserves to fall back on.

Two days earlier, General Smith-Dorrien, the Commander of II Corps, had questioned the field marshal’s strategy. ‘
He was sad and depressed
at the condition of his two divisions,’ Sir John noted in his diary: ‘He says they have never got over the shock of Le Cateau – that the officers he has been sent to replace his tremendous losses are untrained and ignorant and that there is no great fighting spirit throughout the Corps.’

It was true of half the British Army. Of the 154,000 soldiers massed along the 25-mile Front, 50,000 had been fighting almost continuously since the third week in August. Still reeling from their experiences, the men were exhausted and demoralized and their stocks of supplies and ammunition were low.

Prior to the offensive, Smith-Dorrien’s was the only voice of dissent. At the War Office in London, Britain’s senior military commanders shared Sir John’s conviction that with one more push the war could be won. Yet that Sunday morning, as they stood gathered in front of maps of the battleground, no sooner had the offensive begun than their carefully drawn plans began to go awry.

At 7.10 the previous evening
, General Rawlinson, the commanding officer of IV Corps, had been given what the chiefs at the War Office considered to be a relatively simple task: at first light, he was to attack Menin, a small, strategically important town to the east of Ypres. No
opposition was expected; the few German units defending the town were isolated outposts, lightly manned.

By noon
it was evident from the communiqués flying between GHQ and IV Corps HQ at the Front that Rawlinson had failed to carry out the order. Initially, after a liaison officer was dispatched to IV Corps HQ to investigate the reason for the delay, a mix-up over the wording of the order was blamed, and at 13.45 hours new orders were telephoned through to him. But still, Rawlinson held back.
He had received
intelligence to suggest that large numbers of German units were concentrated at Courtrai, twelve miles to the east of Menin. Until he could verify the report, he was not prepared to risk his troops in the attack.

The report was one of a number
that had trickled through that week. They had come from spies in the occupied zone who, besides telling of German troops concentrated at Courtrai, had reported a large force congregating from the north. Yet the heavy cloud that had shrouded the Flanders plain throughout the week had made it impossible for the Royal Flying Corps to send up their spotter planes to verify the reports.

The following morning, the cloud lifted, proving that Rawlinson was right to be cautious. At 10.30 a.m., when the grounded reconnaissance planes were at last able to take to the skies, the pilots spotted a vast army on the move. Flying high above the designated battleground, they could see German soldiers converging in their thousands. The long lines of guns and troops were coming up fast on the roads across the plain. And they were making for the British lines in front of Ypres.

They were the troops of the Fourth Army
. Unbeknown to Sir John French and the High Command at the War Office, in the break since the fighting on the Aisne, the Germans had also been planning an offensive. Their intention was to encircle the BEF. Stealthily, under cover of darkness, they had moved their soldiers into position. Commanded by Albrecht, Duke of Württemberg, the Fourth Army had 130 infantry and rifle battalions and 20 cavalry squadrons. Standing facing the BEF, separated by a distance of just a few hundred yards in places, they outnumbered the British by two to one.

Extraordinarily, though the evidence
of a large concentration of enemy troops was incontrovertible, when confronted with it, Sir John French refused to believe it. ‘How the devil do you expect me to conduct my business, when you keep bringing up these new corps?’ he thundered at Colonel George MacDonogh, his chief of intelligence. When MacDonogh, knowing the truth of the reports, threatened to resign, French still refused to believe him. Dismissing his intelligence out of hand, he accused MacDonogh of conjuring ‘celestial’ divisions and ordered his corps commanders – and particularly the recalcitrant Rawlinson – to press ahead with the attack.

His decision would cost him what remained of the original British Expeditionary Force.
Numbering 84,000
in August 1914, at the close of the battle
*
the BEF had sustained losses of 82,060. The greater part of this loss fell on the infantry battalions that had landed in France in August. By mid-November, on average, only one officer and thirty-one other ranks remained in these battalions – a casualty rate of 97 per cent.

But this was to come.

On that fateful Sunday, around the time that Sir John French sent his adjutant to IV Corps HQ to investigate why Rawlinson had failed to attack, Violet’s letter arrived at the War Office.

Addressed to General Bethune, it contained the ‘details of John’s case’ – the ‘how and when and where’, as she had cryptically mentioned to Charlie.

The letter has not survived; the general probably destroyed it as soon as he had read it. But at some point later that afternoon, he set aside his war work to compose a reply to her.

‘My Dear Duchess,’ he wrote:

I received your letter this afternoon. No one shall ever know that I have been in communication with you over this matter.

I have started on one project – which may or may not succeed. If it does not then I must try something else. One thing and one only will be an insuperable block, and that will only occur if your son insists on
going with the Division. We could do nothing against that, but I must try and devise some means of getting round that.

Even as a professional soldier I cannot see that there is any good reason for his going on the continent untrained.

I will do all I can to help and no one shall trace your influence in the matter.

Believe me,

Yours very sincerely,

Edward Bethune

The ‘project’ he had ‘started on’ had necessitated writing another letter.
It was to General Edward Stuart Wortley
, the commanding officer of the North Midland Division. Acting on information that Violet had given him, he told the general that John was concealing a serious heart condition. Until he could supply the War Office with a certificate of good health, he was not to embark for France with the division.

While there was a grain of truth in the story Violet span to General Bethune, she had lied to him. She knew there was nothing seriously wrong with John’s heart. Some years before, it was Dr Hood who had first detected that his heartbeat was arrhythmic. But, as he had assured Violet, it did not point to a serious condition. John smoked upwards of sixty cigarettes a day: Hood’s view was that the action of his heart was being overstimulated by excessive amounts of nicotine.

Six weeks before the meeting with General Bethune, Violet had forced John to seek a second opinion. In the hope that he did in fact have a more serious condition – one that would keep him out of the war – she had sent him to see Dr Colman, a leading heart specialist. He had concurred with Dr Hood:

My Dear Duchess,

I am glad to say there is nothing more serious than cigarettes.

His heart is perfectly sound. There is a little irritability due entirely to tobacco. I gave him something to quiet his cough, but have told
him knocking off cigarettes for three weeks is the only thing that will be of use. I do not think, in any case, you need be especially anxious about him.

Events moved quickly after General Stuart Wortley received General Bethune’s letter.

At four o’clock on the afternoon of 19 October, a telegram boy appeared over the brow of the hill at the top of the drive leading up to the castle. Hot and breathless after the long cycle from the post office in Woolsthorpe, he propped his bicycle against the battlements and crossed the terrace to the small priest’s door that was set into the corner of the portico. There, he handed the telegram to the hall porter.

The telegram – addressed to Her Grace the Duchess of Rutland – was from Henry, who was at Boodles, his club in London. He had just had lunch with General Stuart Wortley:

Have seen ESW. He takes Division abroad. He has had letter from War Office which utterly perplexes me. Am writing to you but fear you must come London tomorrow as position is very difficult and unpleasant and I cannot explain by wire. Rutland.

Straightaway, Violet forwarded the telegram on to Charlie. Knowing there was nothing wrong with John’s heart, and dreading the ‘interview’ with her husband, she scrawled a note on the back of it: ‘This means Bethune has done something!! Oh I am frightened!! If I come up tomorrow, I
must
see you before Henry.’

No record exists of what was said when Violet and Henry met. But it is clear from the fragments of evidence that remain at Belvoir that it was Charlie, not Violet, who orchestrated what happened over the course of the next twenty-four hours.

The details are sketchy
. Almost immediately, to suit his own objectives, and for reasons of realpolitik, Charlie swore the principal players to secrecy. But, at a few minutes to three o’clock the day after Stuart Wortley received General Bethune’s letter, John emerged through the arch that led from the courtyard outside his parents’ house. Looking fit and tanned after the long hours spent training with the North Midlands at Luton, he was wearing his service uniform. Turning left, he headed up Arlington Street towards Piccadilly.

He had come up to London for the afternoon to obtain the medical certificate the authorities at the War Office were demanding. It was a crisp fine day and he was enjoying the break from the routine at Luton. After his appointment with the doctor, he planned to go to Maggs, the antiquarian bookseller. Then he was hoping to have tea with Charlie. Exactly how the War Office had got wind of his heart condition puzzled him. But he was not anticipating a problem; only the previous month, Dr Colman had pronounced his heart ‘sound’.

After passing Gordon Selfridge’s house, and the Marquis of Salisbury’s, he crossed the road and rang the doorbell at number 7 Arlington Street. A tall narrow Georgian house, it was the home of Dr Vernon-Jones, an eminent GP.

What John did not know as he stood on the doorstep waiting for the doctor’s servant to answer the bell was that the outcome of the medical examination that was to follow had been predetermined.

That morning, after catching an early train from Belvoir, Violet saw Dr Hood at Arlington Street. At Charlie’s instigation, she asked him to persuade Vernon-Jones to deliver the diagnosis they required: ‘Hood absolutely alive to all our wishes,’ she reported back to her brother: ‘says he can easily tell him in confidence exactly the importance of the delay etc and can vouch for its coming out as we wish.’

Whether – fortuitously for Violet and Charlie – Dr Colman was unavailable that afternoon, or whether they persuaded John that it was Vernon-Jones and not Colman that he should see, is not clear. What is clear, however, is that the doctor did exactly as Hood asked him.

Shortly after the appointment, Vernon-Jones’s servant retraced John’s route along Arlington Street. At the gatehouse to number 16, he handed a letter to Mrs Seed, the Rutlands’ elderly gatekeeper.

The letter, which was addressed to the Duke, contained a short summary of the results of John’s medical examination:

7 Arlington St

London, S.W.

My Dear Sir

I am sorry to say that I found Lord Granby’s heart very rapid in action and intermittent and dilated.

I should hardly think that the War Office knowing this would let him go on Active Service.

Believe me, My Lord Duke

Yours faithfully

L. Vernon-Jones

In the twenty-four hours that had intervened since Henry’s lunch with General Stuart Wortley, it seems that Violet had talked her husband round; when he showed John the contents of the letter, he forbade him from getting a second opinion.

The row that ensued has to be imagined. The cross words exchanged between John and his parents on that ‘uncomfortable afternoon’ – as Charlie would later refer to it – were not recorded. But the fact that there was a blazing row, one in which John accused his mother of influencing Vernon-Jones’s decision, a decision which, before leaving that evening for Luton, he told her he intended to challenge, becomes apparent on reading the letter that Charlie sent him the following morning: