Fatal Glamour (48 page)

As the
Grantully Castle
steamed into the Mediterranean, and past the site of ancient Carthage, Rupert vowed to come to Africa after the war. He had plenty of time to write to his ladies: most profusely to Violet Asquith, but also to Cathleen, to Eileen, and to Ka. But not Noel; they had exchanged their last letters. Noel had kept telling him about her meetings with the Bloomsbury pacifists. She knew that this would infuriate Rupert, and perhaps that was just what she wanted to do. He went to see
Tosca
at the Malta opera house, and re-embarked on the troopship. On 11 March they sailed into Mudros Bay, on the island of Lemnos, where they would spend two weeks. Rupert had time to address his literary and sentimental legacy. He chose Dudley Ward to sort out his affairs – a solid, married man, not a literary intellectual. Rupert's first concern was to preserve the reputations of Elisabeth van Rysselberghe, Eileen Wellesley, and Ka by ordering Dudley to destroy all their letters. None have survived, so we can assume that Dudley did as he was asked.
¹⁸

A week before, Rupert had tried to atone for his romantic misadventures by returning Ka to the place of honour:

I suppose you're about the best I can do in the way of a widow . . . Let [Mrs Brooke] think we might have married. Perhaps it's true.

My dear, my dear, you did me wrong: but I have done you very great wrong. Every day I see it greater.

You were the best thing I found in life. If I have memory, I shall remember . . . I hope you will be happy, and marry and have children. It's a good thing I die.
¹⁹

Even when Rupert is doing his utmost to speak the plain truth, he cannot. The “wrong” that Ka committed was no more than an inconclusive flirtation with Henry Lamb, followed by sleeping with Rupert because she was sorry for him. Neither act would have made marriage to Rupert impossible. His problem was not Ka, who loved him deeply, but marriage itself, with anyone. Ka did marry, have children, and become a beloved
member of her little community in Zennor, Cornwall. After her period of youthful angst she led a normal life. Rupert knew that this was beyond reach for him, hence the fatal attraction of a warrior's death.

A great Allied fleet had assembled off Lemnos, just a few miles away from Turkish waters and the entrance to the Dardanelles. Churchill's plan for the fleet was a signal piece of folly. The entrance to the Dardanelles was about five miles wide, narrowing steadily to less than a mile at Canakkale, where there was a fort on each side. There was high ground on both sides of the strait, lined with shore batteries and mobile howitzers. The gun crews were directed and trained by German officers. The Allied fleet had many semi-obsolete ships, considered expendable by Churchill. They did not have armoured decks, which made them vulnerable to plunging fire coming down on them from the heights. Between the entrance to the strait and the narrows, a distance of about ten miles, the Turks had placed a gauntlet of ten rows of mines, plus another row on the right side of the strait that the Allies had not detected. Their ships would be advancing into a naval Valley of Death.

On 18 March, sixteen capital ships steamed into the strait, with three French ships in the lead. Minesweepers manned by civilians were supposed to clear a way for them; not surprisingly, their crews did not like being shelled from the heights, and they retreated without completing their task. The warships then had to turn back as well. The French battleship
Bouvet
hit a mine and turned turtle, drowning more than six hundred of her crew, with only about fifty survivors. Five other Allied ships were either sunk or crippled by the end of the day. “They ought to have gone on,” Churchill told an American journalist, “What did it matter if more ships were lost? The ships were old and useless.” If they had gone on, even more sailors would have died and the attack would still almost certainly have failed.
²⁰

While the naval battle went on, Rupert and his comrades were embarked with full battle gear. They spent the day offshore, kept in ignorance of the disaster that was unfolding in the straits, then returned tamely to Mudros Bay. The Turks now knew that the Allies had a landing force ready, which gave them six weeks to thicken their defences against invasion. The
Grantully Castle
stayed at Lemnos until 24 March, then sailed for encampments near Port Said. There was no room on Lemnos for troops to train; in Egypt they could march around in the desert and practise their musketry. At no time, though, did Rupert's division
practise landing under fire, which was supposed to be a standard mission for marines. The price of unreadiness would be paid a month later.

As soon as he could, Rupert left his fly-infested tent for a night at Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo. He managed to fit in the Pyramids, the Sphinx, and a camel ride, but was feeling unwell by the time he returned to camp. He spent the next day in the desert regardless, marching and firing at targets. In the night he was sick and the next day, 2 April, he could do nothing but lie on his camp bed under an awning. At this point his illness was probably no more than heatstroke and the shock of being in a subtropical climate. As he lay there, feeling feverish and generally miserable, General Sir Ian Hamilton paid him a visit. He was the commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, all the British and Anzac divisions whose objective was Istanbul.

Hamilton was an unusual general, a poet and intellectual who had also been twice recommended for a Victoria Cross. In his
Gallipoli Diary
he wrote the epitaph for his own career: “There is nothing certain about war except that one side won't win.”
²¹
In the 1930s he became an admirer of Hitler. Hamilton had met Rupert before but did not know him well. Nonetheless, he offered him a position on his staff, which was the closest thing to a guarantee that Rupert would survive the war. The proposal probably started with Churchill, nudged by Eddie. They may have decided that Rupert's health could not hold up at the front; they certainly knew that after 18 March there was going to be a bloody struggle on the ground against the Turks. Rupert sensed his commander's misgivings. He told Violet Asquith that Hamilton was “a little fearful – not
fearful
, but less than cock-sure – about the job.”
²²
To his credit, Rupert knew that he must resist temptation and stay with his friends in the Hood. He left open the possibility that he might accept later, after he had proved himself in combat. How would it look if the man who wrote “The Soldier” dodged the coming battle to become an
aide-de-camp
with no clear duties, and no previous training as a staff officer? Hamilton had thrown Rupert a life-line, but his poetry made it impossible for him to grasp it.

One respite Rupert was willing to accept was to move from his camp, with its heat and blowing sand, to the large and luxurious Casino Palace Hotel in Port Said. Rupert shared a room with Patrick Shaw-Stewart, a friend since Antwerp. A year younger than Rupert, Shaw-Stewart had been a brilliant classicist at Eton and Balliol. Elected to an All Souls fellowship, he then made a career at Barings Bank. A snob of the first water,
Shaw-Stewart complained that his men smelled, and boasted that “He had never met a Duke he didn't like.” He and Rupert suffered constant fever and dysentery for a week.

After two days – on 4 April – Rupert was bothered by a sore on his upper lip, which the battalion medical officer said was of little importance. If it was a mosquito bite, this was an ironically trivial cause for a fatal illness. By scratching the bite, Rupert might have given infection access to his system. But he might have picked up a staphylococcus infection in other ways – for example, from his hotel dinner on 1 April, after which he had vomited during the night. In the past he had often suffered from conjunctivitis, normally a staph infection. In any case, the combined shock of dysentery, fatigue, and the Egyptian climate had weakened him enough for the infection to take hold. Without antibiotics, septicemia was virtually untreatable; even today, it can often be fatal. Rupert was not a special case. One of his men had died on the ship on the way to Egypt, and in the Gallipoli campaign, bloody as it was, two-thirds of the two hundred thousand Allied casualties were caused by disease rather than enemy action. Going to hospital in Port Said might have helped Rupert, but he was determined to get better on his own and be with his men for the coming offensive.

Meanwhile, the powers that be proceeded on their fatal course. After the naval failure of 18 March, the Allies had three choices. One was to send the ships in again, hoping that this time they could force the narrows and arrive in front of Istanbul. Even Churchill realised that the risk of another debacle was too high. The second choice was to admit that Turkish defences were too strong, given their favourable terrain and short lines of communication, and give up the dream of taking their capital. The Mediterranean forces of ships and men could then be redirected towards the Western Front (this happened in 1916, after the
RND
and the Anzacs had been withdrawn from Gallipoli). The third choice was to make a landing on the Gallipoli peninsula, so as to control the western side of the Dardanelles. Once the Allied army had been moved to the Turkish front there was great psychological pressure to bring it into action, rather than quietly withdraw it for use elsewhere.

Somewhere in these calculations lay the Homeric precedent of the Trojan War. It should not have carried any weight in the strategic planning for Gallipoli. But the public schoolboys of the
RND
were thrilled to be following in the tracks of Agamemnon and Menelaus, some thirty-one
centuries ago. “Do you think
perhaps
the fort on the Asiatic corner will want quelling,” Rupert asked, “and we'll land and come at it from behind and they'll make a sortie and meet us on the plains of Troy?”
²³
His fellow invalid at Port Said, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, had accepted a staff position as liaison officer with the French First Division, which would land near Troy as a diversion from the main effort on Gallipoli.
²⁴
After Rupert's death he went ashore on Imbros, some twenty-five miles from the site of ancient Troy. Having a copy of
The Shropshire Lad
with him, he wrote his own poem on the end-papers:

Achilles came to Troyland

And I to Chersonese:

He turned from wrath to battle,

And I from three days' peace.

Was it so hard, Achilles,

So very hard to die?

Thou knewest, and I know not–

So much the happier I.

I will go back this morning

From Imbros over the sea;

Stand in the trench, Achilles,

Flame-capped, and shout for me.

The chosen objective for the invasion force was the west side of the Gallipoli peninsula. This was a long, narrow hog's back, rising to 971 feet at its highest point. The Allied troops would have to climb up to the top of the ridge, then go down the other side to knock out the Turkish guns that dominated the straits. There were only a few small beaches where they could land, thick with barbed wire and swept by concealed machine guns. Even if they gained control of the peninsula the Turks would still have their minefields, and their batteries on the other side of the straits. The Allies had a poor opinion of the enemy, thinking of them as Orientals who would turn tail at the first whiff of cordite. In fact, they were brave and capable troops, well led by a mixture of German and Turkish officers. But Churchill was driving the enterprise ahead, and there was no one with power or will to hold him back.

On 10 April the Hood battalion re-embarked on the
Grantully Castle
. They steamed very slowly because they were towing a barge for putting the troops ashore when the time came. Rupert had lost weight and was still semi-invalid, excused from standing watch and spending hours in his cabin. He was mulling over another long poem about England, to be called “an Ode or Threnody: a very serene affair, full of major chords and larger outlooks, like an English lawn at sunset.”
²⁵
It sounds like a reconsideration of “Grantchester,” but taking on darker questions than whether there will still be honey for tea. Perhaps Rupert had realised that the Edwardian summer was over, and even if Britain won the war it would be a different country. The poem remained unwritten.

In the evenings Rupert joined the little group of friends who called themselves “the Latin Club.” As they sailed by Lemnos, they would be remembering that the Greeks had left Philoctetes there as they approached Troy because he had an infected wound that stank unbearably. Later they had to go back, having learned that without Philoctetes and his bow they would be unable to take Troy.
²⁶
Whether or not the club would make the connection between Rupert and Philoctetes is unknown, but without doubt they were excited by the connections between the classical myths and their present expedition. Their club had seven members: Rupert, Shaw-Stewart, Oc Asquith, Denis Browne, John Dodge, F.S. Kelly, and Charles Lister. All had gone to Oxford or Cambridge except Dodge (a cousin of Churchill's), who had been born in the United States and went to McGill in Montreal. Lister, Kelly, and Shaw-Stewart were Etonians; Rupert and Browne Rugbeians; Asquith a Wykehamite; Dodge went to St Mark's, where the curriculum was almost entirely Latin and Greek. The “glittering prizes” of the Latin club are too many to list. Shaw-Stewart won so many awards at Eton that he was written up as “the cleverest boy in England.” Kelly had a gold medal from the 1908 Olympics, where he rowed in the British eight. He would die on the Somme in 1916. Shaw-Stewart returned to the front line when the
RND
moved to France, and was killed at Cambrai in 1917. Browne and Lister would die on Gallipoli. Only Asquith and Dodge survived the war. Asquith lost a leg and Dodge went on to serve heroically in the Second World War. Between the two of them, they earned four Distinguished Service Orders, a Distinguished Service Cross, and a Military Cross.