The Spy Net (2 page)

To see a country, to study its language and the ways of its people, to look under the façade which is dressed up for the tourist, and finally to learn its topography, there is no better way than a walking or bicycle tour. The energy expended is well repaid in rich dividends of experience and information gained. If I never visit Holland again, I shall ever remember that the road from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, via The Hague and Haarlem, is as flat as a pancake, and that, on the contrary, there are appreciable hills around Arnhem. Even if memory failed, the muscles of the legs would jog it.

Here, then, for almost four years, six months in the year, I was learning the ‘feel’ of Europe – absorbing a knowledge of the actual land and furthering a familiarity with its intimate life. It was a continuation of the days at Dresden, but with the field vastly greater, and the enjoyment enhanced by mature observation and judgement. All unwittingly, I was preparing myself for the role which I was to play during the war.

I
N JUNE
1913, having graduated, I left Cambridge with still two years to be spent at a mining school, if I wanted to qualify myself thoroughly as a mining engineer. To this end, three mining schools presented themselves: the one in London, Freiburg in Germany, and the Colorado School of Mines.

Ever ready for an excuse to travel, I decided on a personal tour of inspection, beginning with the college most remote. In July I sailed for Quebec as a steerage passenger in the company of two other Cambridge men. After a day’s experience, two of us decided to transfer to regular accommodation, however expensive it might prove. We were willing to suffer hardships, but we
were afraid of disease: cleanliness was not an inherent characteristic of the steerage passengers from Galicia and southern Russia. Our chief occupation during the rest of the voyage was sneaking food out of the first-class saloon to pass on to our companion left in the steerage.

I was duly impressed by the usual round of sights offered to the tourist in the United States, but my one urge was to get out west. In Denver, I ran short of money. I was thoroughly unprepared for the difference in the cost of living in Europe and the United States, and I dared not apply to my father, who had not been consulted about my American trip. On impulse, I decided to work out the six weeks on a cattle ranch, and managed to be hired by the Carey Brothers, whose place is one of the biggest in the United States. I spent a happy six weeks oblivious of mining and studies, earning $2 a day, plus the best of food and lodging. The work, pitching hay, or tramping it down on the top of a haystack, was hard, but I was young and healthy, and the work did me a world of good. I thoroughly enjoyed the company of the cowboys, listening to their tales of early times in the West, and putting up with the many tricks they played on me; they broke me into the intricacies of the western saddle, and on privileged occasions I was allowed to ride the ranges.

Toward the end of September, I went to Golden, ready to give the Colorado School of Mines a trial. The London School of Mines opened on 15 October, so I knew I could still reach London in time for the opening if I wished. To a graduate accustomed to Cambridge with its serene reserve, its lecture and tutorial system, its traditions, its culture, its beautiful old colleges with their lawns and walks, the Colorado School of Mines
was a direct contrast. Set among mines, where students could get practical experience, it was then, and probably is today, the finest mining school in the world; but my sole memory of it is the general instruction of the classroom system, which was too much for me, and the ragging of the freshmen, which as a post-graduate I was permitted to escape, but which, as a privileged spectator, I was allowed to witness. I wonder if the freshmen are still forced to roll eggs with their tongues across the stage of the local movie theatre, or whether enduring raw egg shampoos, and coats of green paint are still the order of the day?

If I had stayed in Colorado, the following years might have been very different for me; but on an impulse, which was perhaps homesickness and perhaps fate, I returned to England, and entered the London School of Mines as a post-graduate.

During this year, I worked incessantly, and the records of the School of Mines will show that I repeated my Cambridge successes by heading the lists in most of my classes. But though work was my chief interest and almost my whole occupation, the most memorable event of the time was my first innocent debut in diplomacy – the diplomacy of romance. Once again, it was chance that played the leading role.

One evening, dropping into the Empire in Leicester Square, I saw a young and beautiful girl among the demi-mondaines of the theatre’s then notorious promenade. She was so obviously out of place that my curiosity was piqued and I spoke to her. She told me her sad little tale: a stepfather in Lincolnshire, family trouble, the leaving of home to find work in London, no success, hunger, a chance acquaintance who had showed her the easy way, and had loaned her a dress. This was her second week as a
daughter of joy. Had I been older, I would have treated her story with a shrug, but I was young and romantic, and I believed her. I found that her flat was being paid for by an Australian, a young Cambridge student to whom she introduced me. By agreeing to put up £10 a month for six months, I got him to agree to do likewise to enable her to go straight.

With an appropriate story about her being one of his relatives, he introduced her to a charming London family. Only an irresponsible youth could have done such a thing, but it all ended very happily: cultured and coming from a respectable family, she was able to pass it off with success. In later years, I often met Elsie; she married a colonel in the British Army and was for a time divinely happy. He was killed in the war, leaving her quite well off. I often saw her riding and her happy smile amply repaid me for anything I had done. There were only two of us who knew her secret, and she knew we would keep it well.

I met the sister of my young Australian friend, who was stopping with her mother in London. Time with her passed by as a delightful dream; she brought a tenderness into my life which I had never experienced before. I had known very few girls, and this was my first love. In March 1914 she and her mother sailed for Melbourne. They were to return in six months for our marriage.

The summer of 1914 I spent surveying in a lead mine in Flintshire, where I heard the first news of the British declaration of war. War was furthest from my mind at the time; I was happily in love, and filled with ambition. I had my life mapped out: one year more at the School of Mines to qualify as a mining engineer; then the mines on the Rand and in Rhodesia for experience; and after that London as a consulting engineer. But this was not for me.
Restlessness seized me, and in short order my mind was made up. It was a surprised mine manager who saw me dash into my lodgings one morning to pack my bag in time for the London train leaving within the hour. But I scarcely made a coherent explanation to him. Here was the great adventure.

My first thought in the morning was to join the Honourable Artillery Company, a volunteer corps, but at their headquarters I was informed that for the time being they had no vacancies. I secured a personal letter of introduction to Lord Denbigh, the commanding officer, and was on my way back to HAC headquarters for a second attempt, when chance took me into the Royal Colonial Institute, of which I was a fellow. Here I ran into Mousely, a New Zealander, an old Cambridge man, who was on his way to Australia House to join the Australian Volunteer Hospital, which was then in the process of formation.

People were saying the war would be over in a few weeks, and in view of my rebuff that morning, and of my never having had any military training, I jumped at Mousely’s suggestion that I should accompany him for an interview. The Hospital was due to leave, he said, in a few days. Here, at least, was a sure way of getting out to France. By nightfall, we were members of the Australian Volunteer Hospital, under orders to leave for France as soon as the unit had been completed. Quarters for the time being were the Ranelagh Club, where the polo field proved a splendid training ground for us, and the club rooms excellent quarters for our officers; we slept in the horse boxes, and were glad of them at the end of a day’s drilling.

The next morning, regular army uniforms were handed out to about eighty of us, who comprised the rank and file, and we
found ourselves in the presence of our officers: Colonel Eames, the commanding officer, and a group of Australian doctors who had been recruited from the London hospitals. I still remember with respect the regular army sergeant major, who knocked us into soldiers in those few days. We broke his heart at times, but we were willing. Infantry drill and stretcher drill was the order of day from reveille to dusk. At the end of about ten days, we were ready to join the Expeditionary Force. We were inspected by a RAMC colonel from the War Office, and orders were given to entrain. All was excitement. We had been trained as a field unit, and we had visions of ourselves dashing under shell and rifle fire to the rescue of the wounded. We thought we should be at the Front within forty-eight hours.

We embarked at Southampton in a troop ship, and found ourselves in the midst of other units, mostly infantry battalions which had been rushed home from Gibraltar and Malta. When we reached Havre, the retreat from Mons was rapidly proceeding. For a week we never moved from the wharf. Wrapped in our blankets, we slept on the hard cobblestones and the filth of the dock; we missed the horse boxes of Ranelagh. Rumours were rife: Uhlans had been seen on the outskirts of Havre; spies had been caught at the headquarters of the Allied forces. Confusion was all we knew to be a fact. Troops, including the French Marine Corps, kept arriving and departing.

Suddenly, at a moment’s notice, we were piled into a transport, packed to capacity with units from a dozen regiments, and we were off into the unknown destination. We slept on the deck where we stood. There were rumours of Bordeaux, but eventually we heard that our destination was St Nazaire.
There, some public building probably a school, housed our unit. We had expected to see service as stretcher bearers; instead we found ourselves as orderlies carrying coverings, bandages, trays, bedpans, attending to the pitiful unceasing demands of an overcrowded hospital. The wounded kept coming in until some had even to be left on their stretchers.

I cannot describe the horror of the next few weeks. Nothing I subsequently saw in the trenches equalled it. Most of the wounded had lain for days in cattle-trucks, with only a rough field dressing for the most desperate cases. Practically every case meant amputation; here was horror worse than any battlefield. I subsequently saw men shot down next to me with limbs torn off by shells; but here I saw them slowly die in agony; I heard their cries for water and their groans. There was no supply of anti-tetanus serum on hand, and of the many who developed the dread disease all succumbed. With rubber gloves on, to protect ourselves, we stood helpless and watched them slowly die. I can still see the convulsive twitching of their haggard faces, the contorted look of horror of locked muscles, the frenzied, lost despair in their eyes.

The doctors and nurses did more than gallant service; they worked night and day. Many of the wounded were saved; but if so many died, it was certainly not the fault of the hospital or its staff; gangrene had set in and the tetanus germ was there long before these men, desperately wounded, ever reached St Nazaire.

I think it was in November that we eventually left St Nazaire. Entrained in cattle-trucks, we had great hopes that at last we were going to the Front, for we still had all our field hospital
equipment with us. But our hopes were again dashed; after several days of shunting and slow progress, we detrained at Wimereux, and realised that a base hospital was to be our lot.

The war had already resolved itself into trench warfare, and Lord Kitchener was appealing for volunteers on the basis of a three years’ war. To serve in a base hospital was not what I had joined up for; at all costs, I wanted to get to the Front. I am afraid Mousely and I had made nuisances of ourselves; we had repeated interviews with Colonel Eames, the commanding officer, and with Lady Dudley, the wife of a former governor of Australia, who was intimately connected with the hospital, until finally, probably in order to get rid of us, our applications for a commission were recommended. In December 1914, I was gazetted a second lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery, and was appointed to the brigade of a division, then in the process of formation at Ewshot.

I thoroughly enjoyed the four months of training we went through. Most of the subalterns were overseas Englishmen, who had hurried home at the outbreak of the war. There were men from India, China, South America, and other parts of the globe – an interesting group who were excellent company. The remaining officers were mostly ‘dug-outs’ – retired officers whom the exigencies of war had once more called to active service – and, as the training proceeded, we received a few ‘regulars’, chiefly recovered wounded, and a few ‘rankers’. The traditions of the regiment and of the officers’ mess were kept up; we all tried very hard to do the correct thing, and I am sure even the ‘dug-outs’, who were very critical, agreed we did very well, though I did once, flustered by having a general seated on my right, start the port in circulation in the wrong direction.

Most of the officers were good horsemen, but few of the drivers could ride; they were chiefly from the East End of London, chosen because of their small stature. Horses they managed with difficulty, but the South American mules, of which we had many, played havoc with them until they learned to keep out of reach of vicious heels. However, perseverance, practice, and willingness of spirit, carried the day; eventually they were turned out a credit to their instructors, upsetting the theory that horsemanship must be learned from youth up. Gradually as the few months went by, we acquired discipline, training, and, above all, equipment. Old French guns, even wooden guns, were all we had, until about a month before leaving for France. The officers went off to Lark Hill for a course in gunnery; brigades and their batteries went through target practice on Salisbury Plain; we were reviewed by the King and by Princess Mary. We were ready for the Front.

Life had been very pleasant for four months, at the government’s expense. We had had everything a healthy man desires: good, clean exercise, good sport, fine companions, the best of food and accommodation, the joy and responsibility of authority, hard work, and London, with its amusements, within easy reach on week-ends. This was all to change now; we had to get down to the grimness, the hardship, and, above all, what was the most terrible, the monotony of war.

In April 1915 I found myself once again on a transport ship under sealed orders for a port which turned out to be Boulogne. We entrained for the St Omer area, where we remained in rest billets for a few days. Then we slowly moved into the line in the Armentières sector, probably the quietest at that time on
the Western Front. Everything was prepared for us: gun pits, telephone lines, observation posts, and billets; it was simply a question of relieving and taking over from the outgoing division. Simple as it was, I probably experienced the greatest thrill I ever got in the firing line: it was my first contact with the enemy, my first entry into a zone where I imagined death was constantly lurking in the form of a bullet or a shell. Later, I was to laugh at those first fears, for, in reality, it was the calmest of nights.