The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (40 page)

On the rare occasions when Sir John French was in London, he attended the Dances of Death.
‘The Commander-in-Chief
himself looked in on the revels,’ Diana remembered. ‘He would not stay long.’

Whether, in the course of one of their brief meetings, Diana spoke to Sir John about her brother, or whether George Moore had interceded on her behalf, she does not record. But a cryptic note to her mother, written in the second week of January 1915, suggests the favour had already been asked: ‘No word from GM or guest,’ she told her.

The ‘guest’ was a reference to Sir John.

French was in London to attend meetings at the War Office. He and Sir Douglas Haig, the Commander of the First Army, were planning
a spring offensive. Neither man doubted that the German Army could be beaten. ‘Given an improvement in the weather, and adequate supplies of ammunition,’ Haig told
The Times
that January, ‘we could walk through the German lines at several places.’

They had been waiting for the opportunity to attack for some time.
Out in France
, it had rained incessantly. There had been just eleven dry days since October. In the sodden plain between Ypres and Cuinchy – the northern and southern points of the British line – the trenches had become little more than culverts. In these conditions any serious forward movement would be suicidal.

Along whole stretches of the line, the water in the trenches was waist high. For the British troops massed there, it had meant weeks of enduring extremes of physical privation. Lieutenant Charles Tennant was with the Seaforth Highlanders outside Armentières.
‘Water is the great
and pressing problem,’ he wrote: ‘The weather has been almost unprecedentedly wet and the whole countryside is soaked in mud and like a sponge. Owing to its flatness it is generally impossible to drain the trenches, and every day of rain has made them more and more unpleasant until now the chief question is how to keep the men more or less out of the water. In a summer campaign it would not matter, but when a hard frost sets in at night, and we have had several, frostbite sets in at once and the man is done for so far as his feet and legs are concerned.’

At the War Office, and at General Headquarters, getting the men out of the water and on to higher ground was the priority. By mid-February, after weeks of discussion, the battle plans were in place. But French had to wait. He could not launch his offensive until the country had dried out.

It was at the eleventh hour that Violet received the ‘word’ she had been waiting for. Six days before John was due to embark for the Front, a note arrived from the commander-in-chief.

‘My Dear,’ French addressed her:

Please don’t worry yourself or be unhappy. Trust me to see that he is all right so far as anyone can be so in this kind of war. Of course,
I needn’t say how necessary it is for you to keep our correspondence on such a subject absolutely secret. If he once knows of it nothing can be done. But I have a good plan which our mutual friend will explain to you.

Indeed, I understand and feel most deeply for you but I hope this assurance will make you happier. I am not one of those who believe in a very long struggle – it will go on some time longer, of course, but you will probably have him back much sooner than you think.

The ‘mutual friend’ was, of course, George Moore.

Violet forwarded a copy of the letter to Charlie. Attached to it was a note:

Darling,

This I got this morning and at 3am I get up and see G Moore in Diana’s bedroom next door. Oh dear.

Yr loving VR

For understandable reasons, Diana never wrote about what occurred in the early hours of that morning. Whether, as a reward for securing her brother’s safety, Moore forced her to submit to his advances, she does not record. But he had evidently extracted some sort of price. For a married man to be found in a debutante’s bedroom at that hour broke every convention.

Nor can we know Diana’s feelings towards her mother. Violet had effectively prostituted her daughter to save her son; she had forced Diana to seduce a man she loathed. Yet Diana does not write of the contempt she must have felt.

‘
If he once knows of it nothing can be done
.’ The need for secrecy prevented Sir John from committing his ‘good plan’ to paper. Moreover, he told Violet, he would not address it for a while. First, he had important business to attend to out in France.

Unaware of his mother’s intriguing, John finally left for the Western Front on 26 February. That morning, he went to Arlington Street to say goodbye to her. Disingenuous to the last, Violet wrote to him
afterwards: ‘Remember darling, never do anything foolish or foolhardy. Be clever. Charlie and I don’t know how to bear it all. 6 months of waiting makes it doubly worse. But I didn’t seem to mind a bit, did I? Were you proud of me? I was – but you wouldn’t be now!! Oh, do your best for me, I beseech. How I worship you.’

It was 9 March – the eve of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle – and Sir John French was dining with his old friend Lord Esher at 20 Rue St Bertin, an elegant eighteenth-century house behind the cathedral at St Omer.
A short distance
from General Headquarters, the town’s leading notary had placed the house at the commander-in-chief’s disposal.

The two men were dining alone. A fire blazed in the grate; outside, the temperature had plummeted and it was threatening to snow.

‘The spider in his web
,’ as one contemporary described him, Lord Esher shunned public office, but through his friendship with the royal family and Britain’s senior politicians wielded great influence. He had been instrumental in ensuring that French was given the post as Commander-in-Chief of the BEF. As early as 1903, he had reported to the King that he believed French to be the outstanding general of his generation, not only a brilliant commander in the field, but also a man who cared deeply for the troops who served under him.

The evening was marked by a flurry of signals and telegrams as the final preparations for the battle were put into train. From time to time, there came the clatter of hooves on the cobbled street outside – a single horse ridden at an urgent trot delivering last-minute messages from GHQ. Other sounds filtered into the dining room; the ringing of distant telephones, the brisk steps of staff adjutants in the hallway – and on the stone stairs that led up to the commander-in-chief’s private office.

French was delighted that Lord Esher could be with him on such an important occasion.
His mood was euphoric
; at 07.30 hours the next day he was to launch the first systematic British attack since the commencement of trench warfare. He had waited for this moment for months.
‘Winter in the trenches
,’ he acknowledged, had been
‘trying and enervating’. The attack, he believed, would raise the troops’ morale.

Nowhere had
their experience been more ‘trying and enervating’ than in the sodden meadowland at the southern end of the British line. It was here, in the valley of the Lys and the Layes, some fifteen miles west of Lille, that Sir John proposed to launch his offensive.

Earlier in the day, at General Headquarters, he had shown Lord Esher a map of the battlefield.
The front along which
he proposed to attack lay beneath Aubers Ridge. It was not much of a ridge; approached by a gentle slope, it rose to a height of just fifty feet. Yet if the ridge could be captured, the British troops would be out of the boggy ground and in position to push on, over the plain, to Lille.

Other considerations – besides the ridge’s strategic importance – had played a part in his calculations.
Using spotter planes
, and information gleaned from German prisoners of war, the Intelligence Corps had identified this sector as the weakest point in the enemy’s line. In advance of a major offensive against the Russians, the German High Command had pulled every available man, gun and shell out of France. At Aubers, they had denuded their front more extravagantly than elsewhere. Just six companies, with only twelve machine-guns between them, had been left to defend the ridge. As 1st Intelligence Corps had observed, their trench system was shoddily constructed. The firing trench – a single line of sandbag breastwork – could be easily breached; the wire in front of it was little more than two rows of
chevaux-de-frise
– portable trestle-like structures that two men could lift to one side.

Against this flimsy barrier
, French proposed to use his troops as a battering ram. The attack was to be narrow and deep. No fewer than forty-eight battalions were to be hurled at the enemy along a front that was just two thousand yards long.

Everything, French explained to Lord Esher, depended on speed.
If Neuve Chapelle
– the village at the foot of the ridge – could be quickly captured, his troops would be on top of it before the Germans had time to bring up reinforcements. With this objective in mind, he planned to begin the offensive with the ‘biggest bombardment in the history of the world’. For a full thirty minutes, 180
British guns, configured deep behind the lines in a horseshoe opposite the village, would pound the German trenches, blowing open a path for his troops to advance.

Sir John had spent
the previous week inspecting artillery positions. The very fact of the coming attack, let alone the proposed date, or details of the weaponry to be used, were top secret. But while letters home from officers and other ranks were strictly censored, no one censored the commander-in-chief’s letters. Regardless of the security risk, he could not resist confiding the details to Winifred Bennett, his mistress.

‘I’ve just come back from
a long day at the Front,’ he wrote on 6 March, four days before the battle. ‘More rain. Rain! It seems to do nothing else! I was on a horse for most of the morning and got a soaking! I’ve been looking at one of our big guns being put into position. It is what we call a 15 inch and throws a shell of 1400lbs weight – double the size of the biggest guns the Germans have used against us. All our preparations are complete for the
Great Event
. Every man is in splendid heart and spirit and only anxious to be “doing”. The mail has just arrived and brought me a letter from you. I will answer it in a day or two – before we “begin”. I know you won’t tell a soul!’

Sir John’s self-belief
was boundless. He saw the assault at Neuve Chapelle as the prelude to a larger battle, one that would see the German Army driven out of France.
On the morning of 9 March
– the day before it began – he wrote to Winifred again: ‘I don’t expect to write more than one long letter for 2 or 3 weeks!’ he told her. ‘But be sure I shall write something every 2 or 3 days to tell you how we get on. I am always thinking of you my beautiful Beloved Lady, my beautiful Guiding Star! You are the mainspring of it all, my inspiration. Victory, when it comes, will be yours!’

That evening, shortly after nine o’clock, the low rumble of an approaching motorbike disturbed the sleeping residents of St Omer. It turned into the main square, the beam of its headlights sweeping across the shuttered windows; as the rider dropped down through the gears, the noise of the revving engine boomed off the walls of the houses and echoed around the square.

A few minutes later, an adjutant stepped into the dining room at 20 Rue St Bertin. He handed Sir John a copy of the Special Order which, minutes earlier, had been issued to the fifty thousand British soldiers massed beneath Aubers Ridge. It was a rallying message to the troops from Sir Douglas Haig, French’s second-in-command:

We are now about to attack
with about 48 battalions a locality which is held by some three German Battalions.

Quickness of movement is of first importance to enable us to forestall the enemy and thereby gain success without severe loss. At no time in this war has there been a more favourable moment for us, and I feel confident of success. The extent of that success must depend on the rapidity and determination with which we advance.

Zero hour – the scheduled time for the start of the battle – was set for 07.30 hours. Momentarily overawed by his own omnipotence, French turned to Lord Esher:
‘It is a solemn thought
,’ he said, ‘that at my signal all these fine young fellows go to their death.’

There was one ‘fine young fellow’ he did not need to worry about.

‘
Trust me to see that he is all right
so far as anyone can be so in this kind of a war.
’

French had not forgotten his promise to the Duchess. The preparations for the offensive prevented him from putting his ‘plan’ into train, but he knew that for the time being at least, ‘Young Granby’, as he referred to John, was not in danger.

The previous week
, French had placed the North Midland Division under his immediate command. They were now assigned to General Reserve. His intention was to keep these troops back until the main body of his army broke through the German lines. Only then would he deploy them to sweep up pockets of resistance and to press forward the attack.

That day, to make certain there was no confusion over the position of the General Reserve troops, he summoned General Allenby – their commanding officer – to headquarters:
‘I explained to him
clearly,’ he noted in his diary, ‘that his forward units of the General Reserve were not to engage in any action until he received distinct orders from me.’

Later, after dining with Lord Esher, French wrote one last pre-battle letter to Winifred:

Darling, I must finish
this quickly. We are very active and busy tonight for the big thing happens at daybreak tomorrow. The infantry fight won’t develop till well on in the day, but the guns start early. I am looking for great things from the 15 inch – known throughout the 1st Army as ‘Grandmama!’

‘Tomorrow,’ he added, I shall go forward with my war cry of “Winifred”!’

Then, with a confident flourish, he signed the letter ‘Peter Pan’.