Fatal Glamour (45 page)

However historians may debate the origins of the Great War, Rupert cannot be blamed for lacking a foresight that was lacking everywhere else, including among those who had an actual power to shape events. Everyone looked to the precedent of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, which was settled by a single battle, two months after hostilities began. They might have considered rather the American Civil War, a war of attrition that dragged on for four years. Yet both precedents were largely irrelevant. In 1914 what mattered was, first, the global scale of a complex system of national alliances; second, the extraordinary industrial and technical advances of the previous four decades. There were revolutionary improvements in communications and logistics, and in the mass production of artillery (which accounted for more than half of all
deaths on the Western Front), machine guns, tanks, poison gas. About a million men had fought on the Paris–Berlin axis in 1870. In August 1914, ten million were mobilised by Germany, France, and Russia alone. The enormous civil and military cost of twentieth-century warfare should have been evident – and also the enormous mistakes that would be made. One of the first of these mistakes, which sealed Rupert's fate, came from his most powerful patron, and was called Gallipoli.

If history cannot be determined, at least individuals can determine how they will respond to it. Rupert was a hugely privileged young man in the summer of 1914, not destined to be mere cannon fodder. He knew the rational case for staying out of the war, articulated by fellow Apostles like Bertrand Russell and Lytton Strachey. But for several years he had dedicated himself to a process of reversion to type. We meet that type in the chapter of
Tom Brown's Schooldays
called “The Fight.” Tom Brown and Slugger Williams have it out behind the Rugby School Chapel, much to the author's satisfaction:

After all, what would life be without fighting, I should like to know? From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real highest, honestest business of every son of man. Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts or habits in himself, or spiritual wickednesses in high places, or Russians, or Border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them.

It is no good for quakers, or any other body of men, to uplift their voices against fighting. Human nature is too strong for them, and they don't follow their own precepts . . . The world might be a better world without fighting, for anything I know but it wouldn't be our world.
³⁹

Tom's closest friend, Harry East, becomes a professional fighter, and is badly wounded in the 1857 Indian Mutiny.

Rupert would have been a most unusual Rugbeian if he had opposed the war.
⁴⁰
Almost all the public school volunteers became infantry officers. The Navy required more extensive training, and the Army had always been favoured as a profession for younger sons of the aristocracy or upper-middle class. It was assumed that five or six years at a public
school was enough preparation for going into battle, sometimes with only a few weeks of actual military training. Such amateurism contributed to the appalling casualty rates for infantry subalterns, about twice as high as the rank and file under their command. Rupert had put in his time with the Officers Training Corps at Rugby, but it was not taken too seriously when for the last hundred years Britain had fought only wars of choice in distant lands, with a professional army of less than 250,000.

Once the war began anyone who gained an infantry commission could expect to see action in short order. Joining the army as an amateur meant getting on a train at Victoria and learning your trade on arrival, if you lived long enough. In
Goodbye to All That
, Robert Graves gave an expectancy of six weeks before an infantry officer was wounded or killed.
⁴¹
The odds at Gallipoli would be worse than that. But in the sacrificial mood of 1914, volunteers took for granted the prospect of death, and still went in search of any regiment willing to take them.

Rupert might have just floated along with the tide of enthusiasm for war, an enthusiasm that ran equally high in other countries besides Britain. Patriotism and national rivalry were the obvious collective forces that drew young men into battle. Less visible, but equally compelling, were the individual compulsions that pushed them to the front. There was a long tradition of seeing war as the best remedy for the existential crisis of any young male. The hero of Tennyson's
Maud
goes off to the Crimean War to purge himself of guilt over his beloved's death. Vronsky goes to war, seeking an honourable death, after Anna Karenina's suicide. His war is a crusade to liberate the Christian Serbs from the Turks (1876–78).

Although Rupert would memorably describe his mission as “into cleanness leaping,” it is not clear what was the dirt he hoped to wash off. He had apologised to Ka for the wrong he had done her in 1912, and told her it was best if they did not meet. If there was sexual “dirt” he needed to remove, he might have acquired it from Eileen Wellesley (or Agnes Capponi or certain Tahitians before her). Cathleen Nesbitt remained “clean” because their relationship was Platonic. The deeper sense of guilt in Rupert lay in the internal enemies called “evil thoughts and habits.” At the Rugby and Oxford of Thomas Hughes, those sins were masturbation, homosexuality, and lusting after barmaids. All of them were the sort of thing Rupert would be most concerned to hide from his mother. A sexual
revolution had been smoldering since he left school, though with many hesitations and dead ends. It seems disproportionate to blame the war on the sexual confusion of young men at the turn of the century. Yet the idea of war as a purging of sexual sin was not just Rupert's. It appealed to many young men of his class, along with the related idea of war as an antidote to the greed and anomie of commercial society.

Rupert's beliefs about the positive value of war were distilled into poetry later in the year, after he had a taste of combat in the Antwerp expedition. His first plan in August was to become a war correspondent, but he soon decided to enlist as soon as he could find a regiment. His service with the Rugby
OTC
guaranteed that he could enter the Army with a commission. Not surprisingly, his path was smoothed by Eddie Marsh. Churchill's military background was as an officer in the regular army, but as First Lord of the Admiralty he found a way to create a miniature army of his own. This was the Royal Naval Division (
RND
), cobbled together from eight battalions of sailors who were not needed at sea and four existing battalions of Royal Marines. The eight battalions each needed about thirty officers, to command a thousand men. The officers were seconded from other army units or, like Rupert, taken in off the street. He sent in his application for a commission on 15 September, spent a few days gathering his kit, and joined the Anson Battalion at Betteshanger Park on 27 September. One of his fellow sub-lieutenants was Denis Browne, a professional musician who had been his contemporary at Rugby and King's. Another was Arthur Asquith, son of the prime minister.

Churchill was thirty-nine years old at the outbreak of war. He liked rapid action, and the
RND
was one of his hasty enterprises. It provided a place to put Rupert but also sent him to his death, along with scores of ill-prepared other officers. One who survived was Rupert's commanding officer in the Anson Brigade, Colonel George Cornwallis-West. The same age as Churchill, he was also his former step-father: he married Lady Churchill after Lord Randolph died, then left her in 1912 to marry the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell. Cornwallis-West was a man about town, a handsome spit-and-polish officer in the Scots Guards. He was not pleased with his transfer to the
RND
, and his young officers were not pleased to be serving under him. For his part, Rupert had to absorb his first real contact with the working class: thirty former stokers, mostly
from Scotland and Ireland: “Occasionally I'm faintly shaken by a suspicion that I might find incredible beauty in the washing place, with rows of naked, superb men, bathing in a September sun or in the Camp at night under a full moon, faint lights burning through the ghostly tents, and a distant bugler blowing
Lights Out
– if only I were sensitive. But I'm not. I'm a warrior. So I think of nothing, and go to bed.”
⁴²

They may have been superb when naked, but most of the
RND
were ill-equipped and unprepared for the first mission Churchill sent them on. The German Third Reserve Army had invaded neutral Belgium, and found it more difficult than they expected to crush Belgian resistance. By the beginning of October they had laid siege to Antwerp. The British Expeditionary Force to the south was fully committed against the German advance in France. Churchill went to the Belgian front in late September, and made an impulsive decision to send the
RND
to the aid of the Belgian army. The division had no artillery, while the Germans were shelling the Belgian forts with “Big Bertha,” the world's largest gun. Cornwallis-West told his officers that they were sure to be wiped out soon after they arrived. Allegedly, Prime Minister Asquith had told Churchill it would be “idle butchery” to send the raw troops of the
RND
(including his son Arthur) to Antwerp. Churchill lied, telling Asquith that only the four trained Marine brigades would be sent.
⁴³

Rupert had been in uniform for exactly a week when the Anson battalion sailed from Dover for Dunkirk. His men had been issued semi-obsolete charger-loading rifles three days before. They went to Antwerp by train and marched through the streets on the morning of 6 October, welcomed with apples and chocolate, and cries of “Vivent les Anglais.” Cornwallis-West had lost his maps, and was stopping pedestrians to ask if they had a map of the city. The Ansons eventually found their way to Vieux-Dieu, southwest of the centre, but by the time they got there Churchill's gambit was already a lost cause. The forts protecting the city were crumbling under the German heavy artillery, and the city itself was being shelled at random. The rape of Belgium, as it came to be called, was well under way.

The Marine battalions of the
RND
had arrived earlier and been put in the front line on 4 October at Lierre, southeast of Antwerp. Churchill considered them trained and battle-ready. Their job was to buy time until reinforcements could arrive: the British 7th Division from England and French forces who had sailed from Le Havre. Churchill himself had arrived the evening before, in the hope of stiffening Belgian resistance. He was still there on the morning of the 6th, when the Anson Brigade was cheered through the streets, and may have seen Rupert march by. With his usual bumptiousness, Churchill had offered to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty in order to take command of British forces in Belgium.
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His offer was refused. General Rawlinson arrived on the afternoon of the 6th to take command, and Churchill returned to London.

After an uncomfortable and frightening night in an abandoned chateau, the Ansons marched to trenches on the southern approaches to the city. Churchill had decided to place them in an “intermediate position.” They would hold “a support and rallying line for the Belgian troops who were falling back . . . Solidly dug in with their rifles and plenty of ammunition, these ardent, determined men would not be easily dislodged.”
⁴⁵
As the German advance continued, the Ansons were moved back, without actually engaging the enemy. They dug in next to Fort 7, one of the inner ring of forts around the city.

The German heavy howitzers were able to destroy the Belgian forts in a matter of hours. The next step would be to destroy the city itself, and the Belgians prepared to surrender it instead. Their army, along with the British contingent, retreated westward across the river Scheldt. Some elements of the
RND
strayed across the Dutch border and were interned for the duration. Churchill could have ordered the remaining battalions of the
RND
to join the 7th Division at Ostend and Zeebrugge; from there they would have entered the First Battle of Ypres on 19 October, where the British Expeditionary Force would lose almost one-third of its strength. Eileen Wellesley's brother Richard would be killed there with the Grenadier Guards on 29 October. Fortunately for the
RND
, Churchill ordered it back to the UK, “to refit, reorganise and resume its interrupted training.”
⁴⁶
The Ansons marched twenty-five miles to the station at St Gilles, where they entrained for Ostend. Rupert was back at Dover on 9 October, five days after he had left. He had not fired his rifle, or seen the enemy face to face. But he was wearing an eye-patch for an outbreak of pinkeye, and the crowds cheered him as a wounded hero.

The formative experience for Rupert at Antwerp was not battle or the red badge of courage. It was the destruction and civilian suffering that were the byproducts of war:

After a bit we got to the land by the river, where the Belgians had let all the petrol out of the tanks and fired it. Rivers and seas of flame leaping up hundreds of feet, crowned by black smoke that covered the entire heavens. It lit up houses wrecked by shells, dead horses, demolished railway stations, engines that had been taken up with their lines and signals, and all twisted round and pulled out, as a bad child spoils a toy . . . [Hoboken] was like Hell, a Dantesque Hell, terrible. But there – and later – I saw what was a truer Hell. Hundreds of thousands of refugees, their goods on barrows and hand-carts and perambulators and wagons, moving with infinite slowness out into the night, two unending lines of them, the old men mostly weeping, the women with hard white drawn faces, the children playing or crying or sleeping. That's what Belgium is now: the country where three civilians have been killed to every one soldier . . . It's queer to think one has been a witness of one of the greatest crimes of history. Has ever nation been treated like that? And how can such a stain be wiped out?
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