Slide Rule (3 page)

For Fred and myself, that house opened up new country pleasures we had hardly dreamed of. There was a pony to be ridden or driven in a trap, hay to be made and carted, greenhouses to be walked through in wonder. Fred had not got on very well at Rugby, which at that time was rather a tough school, I think; he had two abdominal operations
while he was there and spent more time in the sanatorium than out of it. My father removed him when we went to Ireland and sent him to Trinity College at the early age of sixteen; he lived at home and went to Dublin every day. His room rapidly became filled with books. There was an exciting new poet called John Masefield writing about things that had never found a place in poetry before, so that the critics were saying scornfully that
Dauber
wasn’t really a poem at all. There was a terrific man called Algernon Blackwood writing mystical stories with a supernatural tinge, and there were the Pre-Raphaelites to be discovered, with
The Wood Beyond the World
and
The Water of the Wondrous Isles
, and presently there was Swinburne. Life was not all literature for Fred, though, because he acquired a very pretty little .22 seven-chambered revolver with which we both learned to shoot the weathercock with remarkable accuracy. I remember that little gun with pleasure even now, and wish I had it still.

There were other excitements, too. In those two years before the first war our girl cousins from Cornwall came to stay with us more than once. Patty was about Fred’s age and was his confidante, and it was from her that I derived what little knowledge I possess about Geraldine Fitzgerald. I only met Geraldine once; she was one of those ravishingly beautiful young Irish girls with dark hair and a perfect complexion, who wanted to go on the stage. There is a Geraldine Fitzgerald in Hollywood who played magnificently opposite Bette Davis in
Dark Victory
years ago, and since has played the lead in many famous movies; if she should be the same she will remember Fred Norway, who at the age of seventeen proposed to her on top of a Dublin tram and was rejected very kindly while she twisted her tram ticket nervously to pieces, and who died of wounds in France two years later. If not, perhaps she will forgive me.

That isn’t mine; I wish it was. It was written by E. F. A. Geach at Oxford a few years after the time of which I am writing, and to me it epitomises those years before the first war, and my early youth. It may not be good poetry to the critics of such matters, but it has pleased me for nearly thirty-five years.

In the spring of 1913 I left Lynams’ and went to Shrewsbury School, into Oldham’s house. Shrewsbury at that time was a fine school on the up-grade under a vigorous and imaginative young headmaster, C. A. Alington, and Oldham’s was the newest and one of the best houses in the school. I made many friends there who are close friends still, not least my old housemaster. On form the years that I spent there should have been a very happy time, and when I say that they were not I am saying nothing against Shrewsbury. I had been there little over a year when war broke out, in August 1914, and the remainder of my time at school was mostly spent in preparation for war till finally my own turn came, and I left school, and went to war myself.

In those circumstances I don’t think any school could possibly have been a very happy place, resilient though youth may be. I was in uniform already when the war broke out because, like most boys, I belonged to the school Officers’ Training Corps and the end of the summer term found me in the annual training camp at Rugeley. That
was a tented camp shared with contingents from many other schools under their own masters as officers, where a few regular army officers put us through manœuvres on a considerable scale based, of course, entirely upon Boer War tactics. Britain mobilised when we had been there only a few days and the regular officers and cooks and orderlies marched off more or less directly to France, and we were sent home, still in our khaki uniforms, all terribly excited.

When I got back to my home in Ireland I found that Fred had already applied for a commission in the army. He failed his medical and had to have a minor operation before going up again; in the meantime my father had had time to think it over and decided that Fred had better go in for a commission in the regular army so that if the war went on for years he would have a profession when it was over. Fred was very much annoyed about this because he reckoned that if he messed around too long he’d miss the war, but my father was adamant and Fred passed into Sandhurst in October 1914. In those days the sausage machine worked quickly, and by April 1915 Fred was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, Cornwall being our family county.

We had a motor bicycle between us by that time, a new Rudge Multi. My parents must have been very wise to launch out on this extravagance at a time when my father must have foreseen rising taxation, for the Rudge cost nearly £60, a lot of money in those days. Although completely unmechanical himself, my father saw good sense in Fred’s contention that every officer ought to know something about motors, revolutionary though that doctrine seemed. My mother had another angle on it; she foresaw that in the holidays my life would be empty without Fred since we had been so much together, and she thought that if I had a motor bicycle while Fred was away at the war it
would ease the loneliness. So in September 1914 when I was fifteen years old I took delivery of the Rudge from the depot in Stephen’s Green, Fred being in hospital. I had never ridden a motor bicycle before though I had a very comprehensive theoretical knowledge, and I was too shy to admit my inexperience. The Rudge mechanic gave me a shove off in amongst the trams and for a moment I was out of control while my body accustomed itself to the unfamiliar weight of the machine and the great surge of power that small movements of the throttle produced, for the Rudge was no lightweight but a man-sized, powerful machine. Then I got the hang of it and rode round Stephen’s Green a couple of times gingerly manipulating the infinitely variable gear, and finally rode it home in triumph. From time to time in life one gets a moment of sheer ecstasy; I had one of them that day.

Fred had the Rudge at Sandhurst through the winter, and I went back to school, where military training was now to take up much of our free time. In the spring he was commissioned and posted to the depot of the regiment at Falmouth, and in the Easter holidays my father and mother took me there to stay for a fortnight so that we could see something of Fred before he went to France.

I think war was still romantic in those days, early in 1915; certainly nobody yet had any conception of what casualties could do to a nation. Fred was very smart in his new uniform, his Sam Browne belt beautifully polished, his sword impressive, his revolver massive, new, and fragrant with clean gun oil. The only casualty that had touched me till that time was a distant cousin, Captain de Courcy Ireland, who was an officer in the regular army and in the Royal Flying Corps. Enemy action had not yet produced many casualties among flying people because we were still in the stage when if you saw a hostile aeroplane you manœuvred to get close enough to fire your revolver
at it, leaning from your cockpit in the most daring fashion to do so while you flew your own machine with one hand, in itself no small feat in those days. De Courcy was lost flying a Blériot from England to France on Christmas Eve; he took off from some field near Dover and was never seen again. Since then I have flown the Channel many times in my Proctor and I have never done so without a thought for my relation, staggering out across the black December sea in a single-seater powered by an engine of fifty dubious horsepower at the most, cruising at less than sixty miles an hour, incapable of getting higher than about three thousand feet, with no instruments except a rev counter, no radio, no compass, little fuel, battling on to get to France in order that the army might have eyes to see what the Germans were doing on the far side of the hill, and failing to make it.

Fred went to Flanders with a draft, and I rode the Rudge Multi home. It was the first big journey I had made alone in my life, and it took me four days to get from Falmouth to Holyhead. Nearly forty years later it is difficult to see why it should have taken me so long, for I did nothing else but travel. I can remember a vague impression that a hundred miles was an enormous distance and a good day’s riding, and I think the fact of the matter must be that roads were generally bad in those days, and motor bicycles much slower than we now recollect. Probably the bad roads, small tyres, and poor springing made a journey very tiring; I can very well remember aching wrists. In adventure and fatigue the journey was probably comparable in these days to a drive from London to Rome or from Boston to Chicago, and that I accomplished it without mishap gave my self-confidence a boost which was rather needed, for I still stammered very badly.

In the middle of the summer term Fred was badly wounded, at a place called l’Epinette near Armentières.
In the trench warfare of those days the curious operation of mining was common on both sides. Where the trenches were frequently within a hundred yards of each other you would collect a party of miners, coal miners in civil life, perhaps, and dig a tunnel underground till the end of it was beneath the enemy trench. The enemy was well aware of what was going on, because he could hear the men digging underground, but he was generally powerless to do anything about it. I doubt if such a thing could happen nowadays with the increased fire power of the infantry, but in that war it was a common tactic. The climax, of course, was that you filled the end of the tunnel with high explosive, fired it with a fuse at a suitable moment, and blew up the enemy trench; in the confusion you then assaulted with infantry and gained a few yards. In these days of mobile warfare it seems a great deal of effort for very little advantage, but that is the way things were in 1915.

Fred’s bit of trench was mined by the Germans and everyone knew it. The only things that could be done about it were retreat or counter-attack, and the local situation permitted neither. Those last days after the noise of tunnelling had stopped, waiting for the balloon to go up, must have been very trying for Fred; he wrote home a couple of jocular letters about it to my parents. It went up at dawn on June 13th and twenty-four of Fred’s platoon were killed or wounded by the explosion; at the same moment the Germans put down an artillery barrage. Fred was unhurt, but his sergeant and several men were buried by the débris. No doubt, having survived the explosion, he had the strengthening feeling that I know so well—‘This can’t happen to me’—for he led a party of men out from the remains of the trench to dig out his sergeant. There the shell got him.

In these days of sulfa drugs, blood plasma, and penicillin
nobody would die of the wounds Fred got, extensive though they were. He was evacuated down to the base hospital at Wimereux and for ten days or so he made good progress. Then gangrene set in and became uncontrollable, in itself an indication of the march of medical science, because the medical attention that he got was very good. My father and mother crossed to France to be with him, as was common in those days of gentler war, and he died about three weeks after he was wounded with my mother by his side. If Fred had lived we might have had some real books one day, not the sort of stuff that I turn out, for he had more literature in his little finger than I have in my whole body. He was only nineteen when he died, and after nearly forty years it still seems strange to me that I should be older than Fred.

For the remainder of my time at Shrewsbury I don’t think I had the slightest interest in a career or any adult life; I was born to one end, which was to go into the army and do the best I could before being killed. The time at school was a time for contemplation of the realities that were coming and for spiritual preparation for death, and in this atmosphere the masculine, restrained services in the school chapel under Alington played an enormous part. The list of the school casualties grew every day. Older boys that we knew intimately, one who had perhaps been monitor in one’s own bedroom, left, appeared once or twice resplendent in new uniforms, and were dead. We remembered them as we had known them less than a year before as we knelt praying for their souls in chapel, knowing as we did so that in a year or so the little boys in our own house would be kneeling for us. Most moving of these casualties, perhaps, were those in the Royal Flying Corps, whose joy in their vocation was so great, whose lives so short. With the love of aircraft that I was developing I envied them so greatly, though it was well known at
the time that the average life of a pilot on the Western Front was three weeks. What I did not know until the war was over was that they were being sent to France as fully trained fighter pilots flying Sopwith Pups and Camels with as little as twenty hours total solo flying experience. And in that war pilots went on till they were killed; there was no relief after a fixed number of missions.

I was writing poetry in the last year that I spent at school, all of it very bad.

In the autumn of 1915 my father took advantage of a break clause in the lease to give up South Hill, the house at Blackrock. I think he was concerned at the rising cost of everything due to the war and the mounting income tax, which was to rise to the unprecedented figure of six shillings in the pound. I think, too, he felt that the house held so many memories of Fred for my mother and myself that it would be better to get rid of it and start again. What he did seems curious now in these days of total war, because for the Christmas holidays he took my mother and myself on a trip to Rome and Naples.

Wars were localised in those days, when the range of aircraft was small and bombing far behind the lines was not a serious menace. The Western Front was ablaze with war from Switzerland to the sea but this war was completely static; there was nothing to prevent the normal express trains full of tourists from running as usual fifty miles behind the lines, and no currency restrictions then impeded foreign travel. One might have thought that the turmoil of war would have prevented my father from leaving his work to take his annual allowance of six weeks’ leave, but it didn’t. He was a very conscientious man who would never have put his personal interests above the job. I can only conclude that war affected daily life in those days less than it does now; probably civil service staffs were larger, also, for the work they had to do.