The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (48 page)

At General Headquarters, Sir John’s staff knew that Moore was behind the move to have John transferred to Foulkes’s brigade. In the public eye, Moore was closely associated with the Manners family – his infatuation with Diana was well known. Under the circumstances, French dared not risk ordering John to St Omer unless he supplied him with proof that he had the necessary credentials to join the top-secret brigade. On his part, John refused to claim the expertise in ‘catapults’ or missile projectiles that French would need.

For six weeks, John dug in his heels. Yet despite his holding firm, in the last weeks of June the flat tone of his diary indicates that the pressure was beginning to take its toll.

On 19 June, John learned that his division was being drafted into the Ypres Salient. There, for the first time, they were to take part in an attack. ‘Damn,’ he wrote in his diary in response to the news. From that moment on, as I’d discovered, he had withdrawn from the dramatic events going on around him – as if something was preoccupying him.

Whatever it was, John had not confided it to his diary. However, a letter from Sir John French suggests that in the days immediately after the North Midlands received the order to move into the Ypres Salient, John was forced to reconsider the commander-in-chief’s offer. Before the order came through, the North Midlands were attached to the General Reserve: John knew that as long as they remained in reserve, his job as ADC to General Stuart Wortley did not expose him to danger.

The move to Ypres changed the position drastically. For the first
time, with the risk of his being killed far higher, he really did have to decide whether his first duty was to his family or to his country. It would explain why he wrote ‘Damn’ when he heard he was going to the Ypres Salient, and why, in the days that followed, he seemed so preoccupied.

John had ten days to reach a decision: his division was not going into action until 29 June.

But – around about 21 June – Violet forced his hand. After Charlie told her of the move to Ypres, she sent a telegram to the commander-in-chief.

It is evident from his reply that she had begged him to remove John from the firing line:

23 June 1915

General Headquarters, St Omer

Dear Violet

On receipt of your wire I told them to ask the Division to let Granby join my Staff for a few days temporarily during his General’s absence.

I send you the reply which came from them by return.

This must presume that he himself wishes to remain with his Division and I feel even they would have sent him to Headquarters if he had wanted to go. I can quite understand his desire to remain with his own Staff.

I am afraid in such circumstances there is nothing more to be done.

Please write when you think I can be of use.

Yours etc, John French

It was John’s last chance to escape the fighting. He had turned it down. Whatever guilt he felt over the death of his brother, he hadn’t allowed it to sway his decision. His first duty was to his country.

This was the situation on 23 June, as the commander-in-chief relayed it to Violet.

Sixteen days later – on 9 July – John was invalided home from the Front on a hospital ship. He never returned.

His departure coincides with the start of the last and the most mysterious of the gaps in the family letters at Belvoir.

Years later, when John came to look back on this episode, he had wanted to wipe the record entirely. He had done all that he could to make certain that no one would ever discover that he had been invalided home from the Front.

It was his War Office file
that had revealed the details of the event he’d spent a good part of his life – and his final hours – trying to conceal. Among the documents inside it was a report, written by an army surgeon, which detailed the circumstances of his departure:

The above-named officer [Lt. J. H. M. Marquis of Granby] was sent back from France on 9 July suffering from diarrhoea, the effect of old malarial poison contracted some time ago in Rome; of a very obstinate character, with abdominal pain and symptoms of dyspepsia. It is surmised that the abdominal discomfort may indicate a condition of chronic appendicitis.

The putative cause of John’s illness, as I’d discovered, was nonsense. The ‘old malarial poison’ was alleged to have stemmed from his time at the British Embassy in Rome in 1909. Yet there was no evidence whatsoever to support the claim that he’d ever had malaria.

If the cause of his illness was specious, it cast doubt over whether he was in fact ill when he left France. Certainly, from what I knew of his activities at Belvoir after 9 July – fishing, shooting, a round of house parties – he appears to have been fit and well.

But, at the same time, I could not believe that John would have faked illness to escape the Front. From September 1914, he had resisted every one of his mother’s efforts to keep him out of the war – the last, just sixteen days before he was sent home. The impression I was left with was of a brave man with a strong sense of integrity. It wasn’t of a man who was contemplating, or who would have countenanced, running away.

There was something else. Among Violet’s gold-dusted letters, I’d found a note which suggested that she had fixed the outcome of the medical board John attended in September, two months after he left France. Even Violet realized that she had behaved appallingly.
‘Darling – I must fight! Don’t be cross with me,’ she begged Charlie. ‘Other mothers do
nothing
. What do they get for their bravery?
The worst
.’

It appeared John didn’t fail the board because he was feigning illness: it would seem he failed it because Violet told the War Office to fail him. The morning after, clearly ignorant of his mother’s manoeuvrings, he’d sent a telegram to his sister Marjorie: ‘Six weeks more leave STOP Damnation STOP Bitterly disappointed STOP.’

But then, if he was innocent, why had he wanted to destroy the records for this period?

And if he hadn’t been faking illness, why had he left the Front?

The obvious assumption was that, somehow, Violet had been behind his escape.

For once, however, it seems Violet was innocent. As far as I was able to, I checked her movements over the course of the week before John left for France. I couldn’t see anything untoward. From 28 June to 3 July she was at Arlington Street. Judging from the letters that remain at Belvoir, far from plotting to spring John from the Front, she was preoccupied in hosting a lunch party for the Aga Khan. She seemed caught up in the arrangements – and, afterwards, as she reported to John, in the gossip she had learned from her guests:

Violet Asquith, I hear, is going to marry that ugly man Bonham-Carter (nickname ‘Bongy’) – a long and ancient wish on his part. Her father’s secretary!

Then Sonny Titchfield!!!
*
Marries a girl of 30!! (he is 22!). An old maid like that!! She is stuck up and narrow-minded so dear Sonnie hasn’t a chance of getting out of a groove.

Miss Venetia Stanley who has only just stopped a very very serious flirtation with the Prime Minister – some say they loved each other so much he was meditating eloping!!! (hence no care for his high office and High Explosives!) – well, she is going to marry Mr Edwin Montagu. To do it she has to change her religion and be a Jewess!!

Then – after 4 July – it was Diana who monopolized Violet’s attention. In the early hours of that morning, Diana broke her leg falling down some steps on Brighton beach. She was with Duff Cooper.
*
It was a bad break and Violet took charge of the search to find a top surgeon to operate. ‘Your mother is nearly off her chump just now with trouble upon trouble,’ Charlie wrote to John: ‘Diana, poor dear, has had a baddish smash. Both leg bones broken, the smaller in two diagonally, and part of the knob at the base of the larger one. She goes to hospital tomorrow or the next day. Sir A. Lane does the op: rather a serious one.’

Charlie was writing on 6 July. As was evident from his last paragraph, neither he nor Violet were anticipating John’s immediate return: they knew that his division was in action in the Ypres Salient: ‘Your mother almost demented with one thing and another,’ Charlie reiterated: ‘dreadfully nervous about you – longing to get you over here again. I suppose there’s no chance, but don’t miss one if there is. The family are badly in need of you. Your father looked worried to death, poor man, but is behaving well.’

Charlie’s letter pointed to one conclusion: if neither he nor Violet were expecting John back from the Front, they couldn’t have played a part in his departure.

More puzzling, however, was the letter I found to John from Rothesay Stuart Wortley. He was John’s fellow ADC. Oddly, though his letter was dated 10 July – the day after John was invalided home – both he and the division’s commanding officers were expecting him back at headquarters at any moment. Further, Rothesay’s letter intimated that John
had
in fact been ill.

So what had actually happened?

It was only when I read the war diary
of Colonel Beevor – the North Midlands Chief Medical Officer – that the blurred events of that week came into focus.

It seems John
did
leave the Front for medical reasons. They were not the ones stipulated in his War Office file, but it looks very much as if they were genuine.

According to Colonel Beevor’s
diary, around the time John left, a virulent stomach bug was circulating through the North Midlands in early July. Whether it was viral, or caused by contaminated water, is unclear, but a large percentage of the troops went down with it. By mid-July, Colonel Beevor was describing it as an ‘epidemic’. As his entry on the nineteenth reveals, the bug claimed its victims quickly:

19 July

7.30 am. Went to Ouderdom to examine 140 sick reported as left behind by the 5th Leicesters when they went into trenches last night. There were 4 cases suspicion of paratyphoid and over 50 with diarrhoea. This latter disease is so prevalent just now. Inquiries confirm that the men generally are most careful about the water they drink. I consider it due chiefly to catarrh of the intestine brought about by the recent cold winds and rain. The 5th South Staffords had 120 cases of it yesterday.

The illness hit the North Midlands just as the division’s brigades were completing their first tour of duty in the Ypres Salient. Captain Hills was with the 5th Leicesters, the night they left the trenches. It was 5 July, and they had been in the line for six days:

We marched back
to Ouderdom, feeling that we had escaped from our first tour in the ill-famed salient fairly cheaply. Even so, we had lost two officers and 24 Other Ranks wounded, and seven killed, a rate which, if kept up, would soon very seriously deplete our ranks. On reaching Ouderdom, we found that some huts had now been
allotted us instead of our bivouac field, and as on the following day it rained hard, we were not sorry. Our satisfaction, however, was short-lived, for the hut roofs were of wood only, and leaked in so many places that many were absolutely uninhabitable and had to be abandoned. At the same time some short lengths of shelter trench which we had dug in case of shelling were completely filled with water, so that anyone desiring shelter must needs have a bath as well. This wet weather, coupled with a previous shortage of water in the trenches, and the generally unhealthy state of the salient, brought a considerable amount of sickness and slight dysentery, and although we did not send many to Hospital, the health of the Battalion on the whole was bad, and we seemed to have lost for a time our energy. Probably a fortnight in good surroundings would have cured us completely, and even after eight days at rest we were in a better state, but on the 13th we were once more ordered into the line and the good work was undone, for the sickness returned with increased vigour.

As Hills described, by the end of their fourth day in the trenches, a fifth of the battalion was suffering from the illness:

The weather throughout
the tour was bad, but on night of 17th/18th, when we were relieved at midnight by the Sherwood Foresters, it became appalling. We were not yet due for a rest, having been only four days in the line, and our orders were to spend the night in bivouacs at Kruisstraat and return to the trenches the following evening. Weakened with sickness and soaked to the skin, we stumbled through black darkness along the track to Kruisstraat – three miles of slippery mud and water-logged shell holes – only to find that our bivouac was flooded, and we must march back to Ouderdom and spend the night in the huts, five miles further west. We reached home as dawn was breaking, tired out and wet through, and lay down at once to snatch what sleep we could before moving off again at 6.30pm. But for many it was too much, and 150 men reported sick and were in such weak condition that they were left behind at the huts, where later they were joined by some 40 more who had tried hard to reach the trenches but had had to give up and fall out on the way.

These were the troops Colonel Beevor saw on the morning of 19 July. ‘Four officers were sent to hospital,’ he noted in his diary: ‘one so ill he had to be sent to the Base.’ Other ranks were left to recover in their water-sodden billets. ‘I hear the 120 cases of diarrhoea in the 5th South Staffords all recovered in 2 or 3 days after resting in huts,’ Beevor reported a few days later.

It was Colonel Beevor who sent John home to England. But, as a jocular letter from Rothesay Stuart Wortley reveals, the doctor had only sent him home for a few days.

Rothesay was writing to John on 10 July – the day after he left France:

I am actually pulling myself together to write you a letter. You have no idea what the effort is costing me. The primary reason is to send you a pass, without which it seems you cannot return to this country. What with the difficulties the authorities put in the way they would appear to think one wanted to come back!