Blood and Thunder (61 page)

An initial raid on Ostend and Zeebrugge had taken place at the end of April 1918 to try to block the port of Bruges, which sat some 6 miles inland. Populated by U-boats. The Germans had been developing it since 1914 and used it is a base to launch their U-boat attacks on Allied shipping. The plan was to sink two old cruisers in the mouth of the canal at Ostend and three at Zeebrugge to stop submarines getting out. The raid on Zeebrugge enjoyed limited success, but at Ostend they failed completely.

On the night of 9 May the Royal Navy attempted to resolve that failure. A host of volunteers from the first attempts to cut off Bruges put up their hands again. HMS
Sappho
and
HMS
Vindictive
were selected, stripped bare and reinforced with concrete ready to be sacrificed. Admiral Keyes took four monitors along for support with eight destroyers and five motor launches, including
ML254
. They sailed in under a smoke screen, with support from an RAF bombardment and artillery on the water. Once in position the two cruisers would scuttle themselves whilst the monitors and destroyers covered them. Then Geoffrey and the other motor-launch commanders would pull up alongside and take off the volunteers.

The Royal Navy contingent sailed from Dunkirk after dark on 9 May. En route,
Sappho
was hampered by a minor explosion that forced her to turn back after her speed plummeted to six knots. They were down to one cruiser but the operation pressed on. By 1.30 a.m. they had approached Ostend. The fog had thickened considerably and now completely shrouded the water as the aerial attacks and the Royal Marine artillery bombardment began. Two piers marked the entrance to the canal but
Vindictive
was forced to sail back and forth looking for them. The motor launches supporting her had lost sight of their charge. Geoffrey too was flailing but turned inshore and luckily managed to find her again.

‘Just as I got there
Vindictive
loomed up going all out.' His launch sped off, but try as they might it was all they could do to keep up with her. At the third attempt she had managed to find the canal. German artillery immediately began showering
Vindictive
with shellfire. One dropped by the side of
ML254
and Geoffrey was blown off his feet. ‘The fireworks were amazing and very pretty. The star shells were red, green, blue and yellow.' Then there were the flaming onions being flung in consecutive green strings. ‘I got one string along my bridge; it took off the back of my right hand and broke everything there; signal lamps, switches etc. but by the mercy of Providence the compass and its light and the telegraph handles and chains were untouched.' Shells continued to dog the motor launch. One burst right by the mast, killing a crew member and maiming the coxswain and Geoffrey, a copper driving band plunging into the back of his left thigh.

Already damaged from the Zeebrugge raid, one of
Vinidictive
's propellers was severely hampered. As she attempted to swing sideways to block the harbour entrance, crippled by shellfire, her commander was killed along with most of the occupants of the bridge. His wounded first lieutenant, Victor Crutchley, tried desperately to manoeuvre but the ship would not respond and she drifted into a sandbank and came to a stop, only partly blocking the canal.

Geoffrey, detailed to pick up her crew, approached her. They had just reached the piers at the mouth of the canal when a bullet penetrated his collarbone. In the fog he could barely see what was happening and he ripped open the canvas roof to his bridge. Despite his wounds and the numbness brought on by serious blood loss, Geoffrey hauled himself up to balance on a shelf, his head and shoulders sticking out into the open whilst he worked the telegraphs with his feet.

Crutchley was not going to be able to rectify the situation and so he ordered everyone to evacuate
Vindictive
and for the ship to be scuttled. Whilst the charges were being prepared he staggered around the decks looking for men to shoo on to
ML254
. The plan had been for Geoffrey to approach her on the opposite side to the enemy fire, but things had gone awry when
Vindictive
's steering ceased to function.

Geoffrey was forced to sail his launch alongside in full view of the enemy. Lit up by searchlights, machine-gun bullets raked
ML254
, two lodging in his duffel coat. Men were throwing themselves on to his motor launch, scrambling down ladders whilst being sprayed by machine-gun fire and peppered with shells. Some of them broke their ankles as they jumped down on to the packed deck of the little vessel.

ML254
began to back away with thirty-eight of
Vindictive
's volunteers cowering on her deck. Still hanging on to the wheel despite his wounds, Geoffrey headed out to sea towards Admiral Keyes and HMS
Warwick
. His launch was badly damaged and he flashed out SOS signals on his electric torch. They went dead slow to try to keep her afloat as every wave lapped over the forecastle. Their wardroom was ablaze, perilously close to their petrol supply. Crutchley, who was proving to be ‘a tower of strength' in organising men to bail out the drowning launch, now frantically tried to apply a tourniquet on Geoffrey's numb leg as he huddled by the wheel. His trousers and shoes were saturated with blood and it had seeped out on to the deck all around him.

Bleeding heavily and clinging on to consciousness, Geoffrey pulled up alongside HMS
Warwick
.
ML254
was so waterlogged that she was almost unsteerable. Once all the occupants were safely off a charge was set to destroy her. At the last minute one of his engineers seized the ensign and they shredded it and distributed the pieces between the survivors.

Geoffrey, who would almost lose his left leg, might have considered himself lucky to be aboard
Warwick
. But his ordeal was not over yet. He was sitting in the wardroom semi-conscious in an armchair when it suddenly collapsed underneath him. Light bulbs fell all around him as the ship struck a German mine off Ostend. Another officer dragged him up by his shattered arm, which shook Geoffrey to his senses and urged him forward. ‘I staggered after him dropping one leg down the ammunition hatch which woke me further and crawled up the ladder on deck.' A destroyer was lashed alongside and they made for Dover.

The raid could hardly be considered a success. HMS
Vindictive
had only partially blocked the approach to Bruges. Nonetheless naval personnel had performed bravely and three Victoria Crosses were handed out, one of them to Geoffrey Drummond and another to Victor Crutchley.

The injuries that Geoffrey Drummond suffered at Ostend did nothing for his existing health problems after the war. However in 1939 he was determined to play his part. Not considered fit for the RNVR, Geoffrey eventually ended up in the Royal Naval Patrol Service as an able seaman. In April 1941 he was carrying a heavy sack of coal aboard HMS
Pembroke
when he took a fall, hitting his head on the deck housing. Lieutenant-Commander Geoffrey Heneage Drummond VC died on 21 April in hospital at the age of 55, a worthy example of the service rendered to their country by the tiny fraction of Old Etonians who chose to make their contribution at sea.

Notes

  
1
  Three more OEs were killed when their troop transports sank. These were Captain David Salomons, Royal Engineers (HMS
Hythe
, 29 October 1915), Lord Kesteven, Lincolnshire Yeomanry, aged 24 (SS
Mercian
, 5 November 1915) and Lt Geoffrey Ashmore, Royal Engineers, aged 42 (SS
Transylvania
, 4 May 1917).

  
2
  This figure does not include the boys who joined the Royal Naval Air Service. When the Eton war list was compiled in the early 1920s E.L. Vaughan included them with the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force.

22

‘The Light that Failed'

Despite the failure of the German Army to barge its way to victory on the Western Front in the spring of 1918, the end of the war seemed anything but a foregone conclusion to the exhausted troops now trying to regroup after their ordeal. ‘The possibility that the moral and material resources of the Germans had fallen so low,' wrote Pip Blacker, ‘that the war might be won in the autumn did not seriously occur to us till later.' Whilst everything moved north in April the Guards waited, now part of Byng's Third Army,
south of Arras.

The weather was miserable at the end of April. It did not look like the Germans were at all interested in an advance, in fact it looked more like they might begin retreating as patrols of Grenadiers found abandoned forward trenches south of Ayette. Some captured Germans seemed to give the impression that rather than contemplating an attack, they were afraid of being overrun themselves. The idea of the Guards advancing slightly to assume a ridge around the village of Moyenville began to take shape, but aside from some desultory artillery fire and the odd enemy raid, it felt as if they were in a lull as far as fighting a war was concerned.

There really was a sense that the British Army was drawing on the last manpower available to it. Ralph Gamble had found himself in command of one of his old masters from Eton, which was a bizarre feeling. Geoffrey Headlam was nearing 40 but had requested a transfer from the OTC, which he had joined on the outset of war. In the 1st Scots Guards, Henry was bemused by the arrival of Hugh Marsham-Townshend. A 40-year-old former militia man whose younger brother Ferdinand had already been killed with the regiment back in 1915, he had a son, John, who had just arrived at Mr Goodhart's house at Eton. Now Henry found him serving as his subordinate. ‘He calls me Sir!' he exclaimed.

For Henry though, one person at the front had gained an importance far above any of their fellow officers. He and Ralph Gamble had become utterly inseparable. Hardly more than acquaintances at Eton, they had moved in different social circles and had differing interests. At the front though they shared a loathing of the war along with an intense passion for their old school. The memories of Eton were all, as young men who had gone straight from Eton into the army, that they had to fall back on to try to escape the horror around them. They spent all their spare time together and whenever an invite was extended to one, it was unthinkable that the other should be excluded. Once away from their battalions they took immense pleasure reliving school days, talking about friends and acquaintances, which they called ‘Eton Shop.'

One by one Ralph and Henry had seen their friends falling around them, whether dead or sent home wounded, and it had created an unbreakable bond between two young men who found empty spaces nearly everywhere else at the front. Oliver Lyttelton pointed out the extent to which Henry Dundas valued companionship and friends at the front. ‘I remember him many times in the winter of 1916–1917 walking five miles along the Somme roads in the rain and five miles back again for the pleasure of exchanging a quip with the brigadier.' Of Ralph and Henry he said that ‘their intimacy was so close that it barely escaped sentimentality. [Henry] had more friends than most men and yet besides this one friend all others were as nothing. He would have given anything that he possessed to him, he would have followed him anywhere'.

Jeffrey John Archer Amherst, Viscount Holmesdale, had been a contemporary of both young men at Eton. An officer in Ralph's battalion, he was a fan of both Ralph, with his ‘unmistakable quality of innocence', and Henry, with his ‘dazzling smile and scintillating sense of humour'. He described their friendship as ‘a David and Jonathon relationship without a trace of anything unhappy, difficult or questionable'.

Henry articulated his own views on friendship. He had been reading Kipling's
The Light That Failed
, which championed the close relationship between two young men:

What a wonderful thing friendship is, and how easily misconstrued … intellectually speaking – into gross homosexuality. It is considered a dreadful thing to say ‘I love so and so', yet ‘love' is the only word which describes one's feelings to really great friends, and it is only the people who realise this who succeed in the sphere of friendship.

By the end of spring 1918 Henry was back in command of Left Flank Company, living with a French family comprising an elderly couple, two teenage girls who appreciated his gramophone and a small boy whose favourite pastime was swinging a cockroach attached to a piece of string around his head. He had by now proven himself a more than competent commander. McAulay VC had told him that having him in command of them was a source of pride. ‘I almost embraced him,' wrote Henry in response. He had himself already been awarded the Military Cross in the Cambrai area in late 1917 for a brave, pitch-dark attack and consolidation and in May 1918 he received this gallantry award a second time.

A patrol of Guardsmen had been sent out under another officer to try to identify the enemy troops opposite and the moon emerged, lighting them up in full view of the enemy. They were caught under heavy fire. Only two men returned unscathed and four men had vanished, including the officer. Henry seized an NCO and off they went in search of their missing friends. Coming under the same fire, Henry was shot in the elbow but his companion, who had a bullet pass through his helmet and miss his skull, managed to help him home. Henry's wound continued to bleed profusely and his servant McIntosh tried to insist that he go with him to an aid post. But Henry would not hear of it. It would have left one single officer with the company and so he swallowed the pain and remained, making out his reports and waiting for his men to stand down the next morning before he would let his servant drag him off to seek treatment. Along the way Henry's only preoccupation was getting food for his companion. ‘Can you give my friend … some food,' he asked, ‘as he has not had anything to eat since last night?' ‘I have often thought since,' wrote McIntosh, ‘[how many] officers would have referred to their servant as their friend?'