Blood and Thunder (49 page)

He returned home twice on leave before the summer of 1917 and his sister Marjorie noticed that he'd changed. He ordinarily wouldn't speak about ‘the unpleasant part' of the war but she could tell by his manner that it had taken its toll. Marc was still there, but he was solemn. Every now and again he would refer to isolated incidents or scenes. A German aeroplane crashing to the ground, the pilot tumbling down in flames whilst Tommies on the ground cheered. At a ruined farm near his guns Marc wandered through a sprinkling of officers' graves, dotted about the weed strewn and unkempt fields. ‘It somehow looked so indescribably lonely. Out here one is always as gay as possible, but I think this made me feel quite sad.' Marc spoke to her of removing an identity disc from a man who had been dead and unburied for a long time. ‘But you soon have to readjust your point of view,' he reasoned. ‘And you simply have to give up associating death with everything beautiful and reverent like you do at home.' As he walked about at night on his own Marc, passionate about poetry, was haunted by the words of Coleridge:

Like one that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round walks on,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows, a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread.

The garden in which Marc's guns were parked reminded him of a post-apocalyptic version of his family home in Norfolk. The field guns sat in rose beds where the flowers still grew out of ‘a wilderness of weeds'; the shattered greenhouse was covered in straggling vines. There was no glass left in the frames and the metal was twisted and bent into fantastic shapes by shellfire.

Over 3,000 guns were being assembled in Flanders. Gradually their rate of fire increased as they worked towards a horrific preliminary bombardment, bigger than that on the Somme. On 1 July Marc's entire neighbourhood had been under sustained heavy fire when frantic news arrived at about 8 p.m. that a howitzer battery further along had suffered a direct hit from the Germans countering their fire. The battery's commander was a fellow OE and a friend of Marc's, Jack Bligh, and Marc was determined to go to see if he could help them. Running off with a South African doctor who was attached to the artillery, Marc grabbed a Red Cross car from the nearby field ambulance and drove off to see if they could find any survivors in the mangled dugout. They drove up as far as they could over the pock-marked ground and then got out to walk the rest of the way. They were less than 100 yards off Marc's haunting rose garden when a high-explosive shell came whizzing in and exploded almost on top of them, wounding both men seriously.

At 9 p.m. the car returned, carrying Marc and his South African companion, driven by two men of the Hampshire Regiment who had found them and were returning Marc and Dr Cohen to the field ambulance. The doctor had been struck in the head and across his body, but was conscious and able to tell them what had happened. He was severely wounded but the medical attendant thought that he had a fighting chance and so he was sent down the line
10
. As for Marc, he was deemed a lost cause. He was unconscious from the shock of his injuries and he barely had a pulse. His right foot had been blown off and as well as substantial injuries to his other foot he had a nasty wound to his arm and significant burns. He had lost a vast amount of blood.

By chance one of the medical personnel present knew him. A Corporal Daldry had been a clerk in the estate office at Marc's home prior to the war. He helped to dress the young Etonian's wound and put his arm in a sling. Then there was nothing to do but make him comfortable. They covered him in hot-water bottles and gave him a little brandy, at which point he began to regain consciousness. Marc was largely coherent, clear enough to give his name and other personal details. They were surprised to find out that he was adjutant of his brigade at only 20. When they asked him his religion though, he became upset. ‘Why do you ask that? Am I going to die?' Daldry lied to him and told him it was purely for administrative purposes.

Marc was in a substantial amount of pain. At 10 p.m. they gave him a large dose of morphia. He spoke a little, on and off about his guns, his battery, signals. He passed away just before midnight, still lying on a stretcher propped up on trestles with a screen around him and a single acetylene lamp burning by his head. Sewn up in an army blanket under the watchful eye of Daldry he was buried, still wearing his uniform and his arm still in a sling, in the grave near the fellow OE he had been hoping to help. Jack Bligh, 24, and Marc Noble, 20, lie two graves apart in Ferme Olivier Cemetery. The latter had been killed by the very instrument of warfare that his father and grandfather had devoted their lives to developing. Death, the ‘frightful fiend' stalking Marc down lonely Flanders roads, had caught up with him on the eve of the next great offensive in Flanders.

Notes

  
1
  Francis St Leger Greer was killed on 1 February 1917 and buried at Heilly Station Cemetery.

  
2
  Every year in November the Oppidans take on the Collegers at the Wall Game. In 1912, with Logie at the helm, College scored an emphatic victory.

  
3
  An Etonian term for Captain.

  
4
  A spot on the Thames at Eton used for rowing.

  
5
  A reference to cricket colours.

  
6
  Mr Broadbent.

  
7
  These tickets were a form of punishment at Eton at the time. The white slip entailed a trip to the headmaster and was considerably worse.

  
8
  A traditional Eton song sung at the end of the summer when boys leave the school.

  
9
  A formation from the Field Game, another form of Etonian football played at the time.

10
  Dr Benjamin Cohen subsequently died of his injuries on 3 July and was buried at Mendinghem Military Cemetery.

18

Setting the Tone

For most of the time that Marc Noble had known the area around Elverdinghe it had been a quiet sector. But it was now obvious to the Germans perched on the Pilckem Ridge watching Allied activity that events were pending. They upped their game accordingly.

Brigade by brigade the Guards travelled to the rear, to the town of Herzeele, to undergo intensive training in ten-day stints. General Feilding, commanding the division, sought to verse his men fully in attack methods. Near the village trenches had been dug in an open stretch of ground and the Guards practised assaulting them. Much emphasis was put on working with aeroplanes, signal communications and the medical arrangements. Close to divisional headquarters a sand model had been erected projecting the whole of Lord Cavan’s corps sector. Evelyn Fryer and his NCOs studied and studied it to learn all the features of the landscape that they were about to assault. On 6 July even the king himself was present with the Prince of Wales to watch rehearsals with Hubert Gough. When they were not physically practising their attack there was no respite for the Guardsmen. There were conferences, map and aeroplane studies.

In the weeks running up to the move Logie Leggatt had been on all manner of courses on topics such as bombing and bayonet fighting. Pip Blacker had been on the latter course. It was made clear to the pupils that they were not fighting by Queensberry Rules. In addition to sticking your opponent with the bayonet the men were told to smash him in the face with their rifle butt, as well as attempting to knee him or kick him in his crotch. They were told to kick, stamp, claw, gouge and bite whenever they got the chance.

When work was completed for the day the ‘Eton Ramblers’
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atmosphere prevailed. Henry Dundas was the star of the mess. He would intersperse his singing of a vast repertoire of Harry Lauder and Gilbert and Sullivan songs with the mock Scotch sermons that he had been perfecting since he was five. ‘The most elaborate and ridiculous perorations came rolling off his tongue enriched by absurd parables, painted by the most characteristic quotations, and driven home with the unctuous insistence and bucolic pedantries of the original.’ Henry’s buoyant attitude benefited those around him. Oliver Lyttleton claimed that, at least outwardly, he didn’t care two straws for the daily and nightly doses of shellfire. ‘His nonchalance was remarkable.’

Hugh Ross, an Etonian major in the Scots Guards, had been in a dugout along the garden wall at Elverdinghe for some time and had been intensely shelled day and night. Several of his men had been buried alive and they had had to dig them out. Hugh, at this time, was a shadow of a man and probably should have been nowhere near the line of duty. He arrived at brigade headquarters for dinner one evening covered in brick dust, exhausted and ‘nearly through’. Henry was in tremendous form and by the time he finished his routine, despite the fact that outside shells were dropping in the grounds, Hugh was singing along with him. Eventually they both collapsed on to the floor laughing and, for a time at least, Hugh felt a little better.

Their dinners were a primary source of entertainment. Logie was a frequent visitor, Eric Greer rarely absent – ‘a brilliant and amusing talker and a great theorist on the war’. They would debate long into the night, cigars in mouth, as they discoursed on life and death. Just four days after the 4 June dinner at St Omer there was another ‘Pan-Etonian’ gathering, this time just a handful of officers, overseen by General John with Viscount Holmesdale and Ralph present. Two days later Ralph and Henry escaped again. ‘We talk pure Eton the whole time,’ Henry reported, but ‘bitter criticism of the higher command’ was another prevalent topic.

Occasionally, on an evening walk, Henry and Oliver Lyttleton would play a four-hole round of imaginary golf. There were pretend clubs, carried by the brigadier and John Dyer. Logie Leggatt was fortunate enough to get over to see his aunt more than once. He was spoiled by the ladies present with two good meals and even a set of tennis before a sing-song.

In the middle of July though, Logie picked up a minor injury that again threatened to remove him from duty right before a major offensive. The offending foot became infected but he was determined that he would be ‘skipping about quite happily’ by the time the Coldstream Guards attempted to cross the Yser Canal at the end of the month. Gilly Follett had organised for him to be treated at headquarters to ensure that Logie wouldn’t be removed from the battalion’s strength and whisked off to a hospital somewhere.

Whilst laid up, Logie had time to contemplate what was about to occur. For some months his mother had been urging him to keep a diary. Now, with nothing else to do but mark time whilst his foot was repeatedly bathed in iodine, he decided to give it a go. ‘Perhaps it may be interesting to chronicle, as far as possible, my feelings during the next few days.’

The plan for the big push was ambitious indeed. The man-made earthquakes at Messines had opened a lock on the Western Front so to speak. Now, if the situation was to be exploited, Haig needed to kick the door down. The offensive east of Ypres was to be the main thrust aimed at ending the war as far as British contingents were concerned in 1917. Following the abject failure of Nivelle’s attempts on the Aisne and the mutinous consequences of his disastrous campaign, there was no longer going to be French co-operation on the scale originally intended. Any thoughts of abandoning the attack were out of the question. If the Germans caught wind of the seditious atmosphere in the French Army and chose to capitalise on it, there could be disastrous consequences.

Whilst political wrangling went on, military preparations continued. Gough had handed over all of his men in the Arras area and was given a new collection of troops with the same title of Fifth Army that would be based further north and included the Guards Division. Generals Plumer and Rawlinson had come up with an initial outline for the offensive but Haig decided that it wasn’t aggressive enough and amended it to incorporate a colossal 5,000-yard advance, beyond the range of friendly artillery towards Passchendaele.

It might not have been the first battle in the area, but this would be the first major British offensive. It would also be the first time that the Guards had done all the preparation for a major offensive and then taken part in the initial assault, having been held in reserve at Loos and on the Somme. The sector they had been given was not ideal, primarily because of the presence of the Yser Canal. Up to 70ft wide it was shallow but composed of soft mud ‘into which a man sank like a stone’. It provided a sufficient obstacle for both sides to have let it be thus far in the war, content to look at each other from opposite banks. Now, in order to advance towards Pilckem Ridge, the Guards would have to cross it in the midst of battle. The Royal Engineers had constructed an imitation of it near Herzeele for practice, but it was still likely to cause heavy, heavy casualties.

Plans were also being made for the all-important artillery bombardment that would precede the battle. More than 3,000 guns had now been drawn into action and positioned almost wheel to wheel, ready to blaze away at the Germans along the entire front. In the run up to the big day the countryside would be gradually pounded out of all recognition as the Allied artillery attempted to weaken the German position.

Yet again progress across the battlefield was to be marked by a series of coloured lines. The first, the Blue, constituted the German front line and the Gheluvelt Plateau. Gough’s men would then move on to the Black Line, the second enemy position on the reverse side of the Pilckem Ridge. Further south it would take in more of the Gheluvelt Plateau. Advancing on to the Green Line the Fifth Army would move across the Steenbeck, a stream that became a flooded nuisance in bad weather. The fourth objective, the ambitious Red Line, was way off towards Langemarck.

Logie Leggatt was jotting down his thoughts on his sickbed and had put them into categories including courage, friends, memories and death. He decided to expand on some of his themes. ‘Of myself I expect I am the most hopeless coward,’ he wrote. ‘I am imaginative, absurdly soft-hearted and cut a contemptible figure at the dentist.’ He had been chatting with a fellow OE and Colleger in the artillery at Poperinghe a few weeks beforehand and he had remarked to Logie that it must be very difficult to be gutless if you were in the Guards. ‘I appreciate what he means,’ Logie wrote. ‘If one is at all impressionable – and I am very – the discipline, the whole atmosphere begins to grip one as soon as one joins the Division.’ As a sportsman he had never shied away from a good struggle and this, he hoped, was an indication that he would do himself justice in the coming fight.