Those Wild Wyndhams (50 page)

The final news came on 1 July. The French Red Cross confirmed Lord Elcho’s death at Katia. He had been twice wounded, had had the wounds dressed and, despite his batman’s entreaties, had gone back into battle. A shell had blown out his chest, killing him instantly. ‘Oh God – Oh God, my beautiful brother that I have loved so since I was a baby – so beautiful
through
and
through
! Can it be true that he’ll never come back?’ asked Cincie.
⁵¹
Mary was at Clouds.
⁵²
Hugo wired through, asking Guy Wyndham to break the news to his wife. For Mary it was confirmation of a still, small feeling in her deepest heart: ‘Ego told me – when he died … for I saw him in my dream,’ she told her mother. ‘I never really
felt
that he’d come home – from the War – but of course I didn’t
know
.’
⁵³
But so cataclysmic was the final confirmation of Ego’s death that, ever afterwards, Mary could not remember whether it came on the 1st or the 2nd of July.
⁵⁴

Instances of people sensing a loved one’s death from many miles away are not uncommon. It can be felt as a shift of energy, a tickertape of images running through the mind, an inexplicable sense of discombobulation and loss. There is no rational explanation; many will think it simply imagination. But Mary thought that the vision – which seems to have coincided exactly with the time of battle – was the product of ‘a strenuous love’. Ego had reached her at his time of greatest ‘mental stress and strain’. She clung to that, determined ‘not to fail’ Ego and to create for his sons the life that he now could not.
⁵⁵
‘I’m
not
going to be wonderful! I’m sick of the word,’ she told Arthur.
⁵⁶
‘[B]ut there is no other word for it,’ Cynthia said.
⁵⁷

After Ego’s death, Mary struggled – though she would never say it – with the fact that he had died in such a small battle, with no medals or mentions in dispatches to prove his valour. In a further wrench, General Sir Archibald Murray’s official report of the battle, published in
The Times
in September 1916,
⁵⁸
did not even mention Ego’s name. The baldest account of Ego’s death gave Mary the most comfort: a wire received from Hyatt, Ego’s sergeant, now a prisoner of war, several months after Ego’s death: ‘Lord Elcho twice wounded – then shell carried away chest. Acted magnificently.’ ‘
Acted magnificently
’ Mary underlined, immediately sending to Ettie and Evelyn this last shred of news. Such words, from a ‘simple, unsuperlative sergeant’, must mean something.
⁵⁹

The day confirmation of Ego’s death was received was – although this must have been reduced to the periphery of the family’s thought – the first day of the battle of the Somme. It is strangely apposite: both such monumental tragedies, the difference only one of scale.
Mary had heard the rumours of a new campaign back in January. ‘I suppose you know (I’m not asking you!) that there’ll be heavy fighting in March or April,’ she wrote to Balfour at the time.
⁶⁰
Intended for spring, the campaign, a concerted Anglo-French offensive, devised, in the wake of Gallipoli and the British attack on the Eastern Front, to end the war on the Western Front once and for all, was delayed until July by the German offensive at Verdun. For a week beforehand the Allied forces had bombarded the German trenches with artillery. The sound was so loud that Asquith heard it in Downing Street. So confident were the generals that, as Raymond Asquith wryly wrote to his wife Katharine shortly before, ‘An order has just come to say that there is to be no cheering in the trenches when peace is declared. No-one can say that our Generals don’t look ahead.’
⁶¹

At 7.30 a.m. on 1 July 1916 the first troops went over the top. They were assured by their generals that they could make their way across no man’s land ‘with a walking stick’, that not even a rat could have survived the bombardment of the German trenches.
⁶²
At Angelina’s, Angela fried 800 eggs in three hours.
⁶³
A short distance away, wave after wave of soldiers, weighed down by 60-pound packs, walked steadily into a line of German fire, mown down, toppled like ninepins, entangled and shredded by barbed wire, pulped under the feet of the men who came up behind them only to fall themselves. A total of 19,249 British soldiers, including 993 officers, died that day; almost 40,000 more were wounded. The battle, which the generals had so confidently expected to be a rout, lasted in total 140 days. Nothing illustrates the generals’ failure of intelligence and apparent disregard for human life more than the catastrophic Somme.

Bim turned nineteen on that first day of the Somme. His battalion was posted nearby, and in combat, on and off, that summer. But his letters home dwelt on ‘do you remembers’, literary discussions and his anxiety about
Worple Flit
’s publication (Bim knew that his work was not ‘fashionable’ and feared the critical response: ‘I daresay if I wore black shirts … and wrote verse that was quite incomprehensible, the reviewers would take it for genuine “poesie”’).
⁶⁴
He wrote to Pamela, leaning on one elbow while lying on a blanket in a field surrounded by poplars, telling her about a nice new company commander who ‘laughs at my jokes’, and alluding to a brief love affair with a young, ‘very pretty and very well-dressed’ French woman called Ninette, promising to send his mother a photograph of her.
⁶⁵

Bim’s letters that summer were love letters, reassuring Pamela of her youth and beauty, mourning with her Hester’s loss, marvelling at her courage and strength. There are only brief hints at a darker truth, a pointedly casual reference to a corporal in his battalion who had received a ‘Blighty’ wound only that morning (‘He was hit in the ankle and fore-arm, and was simply jubilant. The other chaps envied him a good deal, and so did I’);
⁶⁶
a passing reference to the difficulty of sending mail (‘We are moving around a lot’); a capitulation at the end of a long letter (‘I would give the last ten years of my life for six months’ rest now’);
⁶⁷
and, in August, a plea (‘I do wish you would tell me what the High Brows think? The P.M. and sic-like …’).
⁶⁸

The war drove a rift between the generation that fought and those who sent them there, nowhere more so than among the elite. The mechanistic chain of command and incomprehensible orders gave the upper classes serving a glimpse for the first time of the impotence felt on a daily basis by most of Britain’s populace. Suddenly there was a ‘They’: generals and politicians who made decisions with no regard to what the men – even officers – thought.
⁶⁹
Those fighting were part of an anonymized mass, aristocrat and common man alike, buried where they fell. Many of those officers felt angered at the betrayal of their generation by their parents, and for the children of the Souls this was in many cases a literal statement – none more so than Raymond Asquith. The Coterie’s acknowledged leader wrote to Diana Manners, savagely tearing apart the Souls who continued to chatter and talk:

Their minds are almshouses … We do not hunt the carted hares of 30 years ago. We do not ask ourselves and one another and every poor devil we meet ‘How do you define Imagination?’ or ‘What is the difference between talent and genius?’, and score an easy triumph by anticipating the answer with some text-book formula, originally misconceived by George Wyndham in the early eighties at Glen, and almost certainly misquoted by Margot at the borrowed house of a Frankfort baronet, not because it was either true or witty or even understood, but because it was a sacred obligation to respect whatever struck the late Sir Charles Tennant as a cut above what he had heard in the night school at Paisley where they taught him double-entry …
⁷⁰

Raymond’s cousin Bim could not say this – he could not yet comprehend this. But he was no longer the child who had gone to war and who wrote to his mother, ‘I think I shot a German the other day; if I did, God rest his soul.’
⁷¹
In the dog-eared
Oxford Book of English Verse
that he carried always with him, the poems underlined all dwell on farewell and longing. In June, while at Poperinghe, he wrote ‘The Mad Soldier’. Written in the vernacular, it is the voice of a dead soldier, decaying beneath a heap of bodies in the trenches where ‘rats eat Body-meat!’

It’s a sin …

To say that Hell is hot ’cause it’s not:

Mind you, I know very well we’re in hell.

In a twisted hump we lie heaping high,

Yes! an’ higher every day …
⁷²

Bim’s innocence had been corrupted – although it has been rightly noted that he could still only express this horror in a voice very different to his own. He sent it to Pamela, with anxious enquiries about whether she liked it. He had to ask her view several times before she gave it. Eventually, she appears to have replied with praise: but the delay is indicative. To read ‘The Mad Soldier’ would be a shock for any mother. For Pamela it must have been a striking blow to her world view.
⁷³

Bim’s battalion was sent up to the front line of the Somme on 9 September. His first three days in the trenches were spent under intense shelling: ‘We have had all the kicks and none of the ha’pence in this show, as other batt[alion]s had the fun of repulsing attacks and killing hundreds, while we had to just sit and be shelled … the C.O. is very envious of what he calls the “other chaps’ hellish good shoot”,’ he wrote home.
⁷⁴
After three days behind the front line, his battalion returned to the trenches again as support. This time Bim was shaken – or wired – enough to reveal details he normally kept hidden. He had been directed to follow the Guards to their new location and then bring his battalion, which was in support, alongside. It required three trips back and forth along no man’s land. During the first, he was ‘shot at by Boches on the high ground with rifles … with bullets that scuffed up dust all around with a wicked little “zump”’. The second was ‘an unpleasant journey’ of ‘about half a mile over nothing but shell-holes full of dead and dying, with any amount of shells flying about’ and with only an orderly beside him. Intercepted during the third, he spent ‘that afternoon, evening, and night in a large rocky shell-hole’ with his commanding officer, the adjutant and the battalion’s doctor under severe shelling; ‘about four men were done in in the very next shell-hole a couple of yards away. That night was one of the coldest and most uncomfortable it has ever been my fortune to spend with the stars to see.’

There was another day still of leading, dodging, weaving to go. ‘My worst job was that of taking messages down the line of trenches to different captains. The trenches were full of men, so I had to go over the open. Several people who were in the trench say they expected every shell to blow me to bits.’ His battalion were relieved at midnight, and got back behind the lines at 2.30 a.m., ‘dog-tired’, to ‘Soup, meat, champagne, and cake … That is the time one really does want champagne, when one comes in at 3 a.m. after no sleep for fifty hours. It gives one the strength to undress.’ Already, from along the lines had come rumours of the dead: ‘Guy Baring, Raymond Asquith, Sloper Mackenzie, and many others … Death and decomposition strew the ground … I must tell you of other things.’

And so Bim retreated into memory. He told his mother of a pleasant walk of a few hundred yards taken a few days earlier with a Corporal Jukes who, it transpired, was the son of a former keeper at Clouds. Corporal Jukes remembered Pamela’s wedding; remembered when Icke the butler was a mere footman – his sister had been housemaid at Glen under the Bart: ‘And so he is altogether a great family friend … We had a very good talk about people like Mr. Mallet, Mrs. Vine and suchlike hench-folk. Do write and tell me if you remember him?’ So Bim ends an account of forty-eight hours of hell with an enquiry more suited to a polite dinner-party.
⁷⁵

Raymond Asquith’s death – shot in the chest as he led his men out in an advance from Ginchy, lighting a cigarette to reassure them, and dying before he reached the dressing station – made headlines in England.
⁷⁶
‘It seems to take away one’s last remains of courage,’ said Cincie.
⁷⁷
Everyone had thought that Raymond would be the man to lead his country into a new era. ‘What a glorious company they are by now, recruited every week from our best and most radiant,’ Asquith said to Ettie, ‘those who, we fondly imagined, were going to make & guide the future here.’
⁷⁸
If Asquith regretted not once writing to his eldest son while he was at the Front, he did not show it. It appears he did not, for he never once wrote to Beb either.

Four days later, Bim’s battalion were ordered back into the trenches. They were to go ‘over the top’ the next day in an attack over 1,200 yards. Bim wrote to Pamela. He knew, in all likelihood, it would be his last letter. ‘Our Brigade has suffered less than either of the other two Brigades in Friday’s biff (15th), so we shall be in the forefront of the battle,’ he explained. He had taken Communion that morning, slept ‘like a top’ the night before, and was ‘full of hope and trust’. He invoked the spirit of his ‘fighting ancestors’, buoyed up by the thought of ‘all the old men … in the London clubs … thinking and hoping about what we are doing here!’ ‘I have never been prouder of anything, except your love for me, than I am of being a Grenadier,’ he added. Bim told Pamela that on going into action he would carry as always ‘four photies [sic]’ of her, and that ‘that line of Harry’s’ from ‘Non Nobis’ rang through his head: ‘High heart, high speech, high deeds ’mid honouring eyes’. ‘Today is a great day for me,’ he ended. ‘Your love for me and my love for you, have made my whole life one of the happiest there has ever been …’
⁷⁹

Bim played the role expected of him by Pamela to the last, even invoking lines written about her own great romance with Harry Cust. Doubtless puppy-doggish, sweet-natured Bim genuinely believed the sentiments he invoked: the aristocrat worthy of his ancestors and the Guards who went before him. But this was also the officer who had dodged bullets and cowered inwardly in shell holes through long, freezing nights while trying outwardly to appear unmoved; who wrote ‘The Mad Soldier’, and who in ‘À Bas la Gloire’, another poem from that time, mocked the stout generals in their gleaming cars behind the lines. This is the generous spirit of the boy who on first getting a motorcycle drove along Wiltshire lanes with a cardboard placard attached to the back on which was written, in letters three inches high, ‘Apologies for the dust’,
⁸⁰
one who feels, as Bim wrote in his letter, ‘rather like saying “If it be possible let this cup pass from me”’ but then invokes God’s will and the ‘triumphant finish … [that] steels my heart and sends me into this battle with a heart of triple bronze’.
⁸¹