August [1914] Read online

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  AUGUST 1914: ENGLAND IN PEACE AND WAR

  by Mark Rowe

  Publisher Information

  First published in 2013 by

  Chaplin Books

  1 Eliza Place

  Gosport PO12 4UN

  Tel: 023 9252 9020

  www.chaplinbooks.co.uk

  Digital edition converted and distributed by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  Copyright © 2013 Mark Rowe

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder for which application should be addressed in the first instance to the publishers. No liability shall be attached to the author, the copyright holder or the publishers for loss or damage of any nature suffered as a result of the reliance on the reproduction of any of the contents of this publication or any errors or omissions in the contents.

  Dedication

  In memory of my mother’s father

  John Nunn 1894-1973

  who did not want to go to war, but had to

  And his brothers

  Joseph Nunn 1895-1916

  and Harry Nunn 1897-1918

  each buried near Albert, France

  who did not want to die in war, but had to

  Part One

  England at Peace

  Chapter 1

  First Shots

  The works of man’s hands are his embodied thought, they endure after his bodily framework has passed into decay and thus throw a welcome light on the earliest stages of his unwritten history.

  Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives, by Prof W J Sollas (second edition, 1915)

  I

  The Honourable Gerald Legge began 1914, the last full year of his life, in Sudan of all places. Other upper-class young men left midwinter England for Switzerland, the south of France, or Egypt, with friends and family. Legge passed through the Suez Canal at Christmas, on ‘a nice empty ship’, landed at Port Sudan, and took the train to the capital Khartoum. He went further, where few travellers have ever been, into waterless Kordofan, so waterless that he had to send camels 30 miles to wells: “They leave here one morning and get back two days later,” he told his father in a letter in March. You suspect from his letters that only in the harsh but simple wilderness did he feel truly himself.

  He had wintered far from England before. Born in 1882, the second son of the sixth earl of Dartmouth, he had served in the Army from 1900 to 1905, and had since gone shooting as far as Newfoundland and Java. The Kordofan country was very like the Kalahari, he told his father, ‘but the climate even better’. “Our hunting is usually done on camels as it is too hot to walk very far in the day time when we have to be chary with water. As soon as we strike fresh spoor we leave with camels and then go on foot and if we kill anything the camel has to carry it. I like these camels, they are wonderfully patient beasts and very forgiving; if only they didn’t stink and groan so much I would like them. I took a toss off one, one day; I was in a hurry to get off and shoot a guinea fowl and somehow managed to get off quicker than I expected but luckily I fell on my head, so wasn’t hurt,” he joked, “but missed the guinea fowl.”

  Legge was disappointed not to see oryx, but shot gazelle. The game was very wild and wanted good stalking, ‘and I am just as fit as blazes’, he wrote. On January 31 he arrived at El Obeid, the main place in that region, about 400 miles from Khartoum, paid off boys and camels, and went by train to Kosti on the Nile to find a boat. The country had hold of him already. He wrote of the ‘knowledge that you are bang away from every white man; the Nile will be all ginger beer bottles and orange peels, nearly as bad as East Africa I expect’.

  He wrote again in February ‘on a man of war on the Nile’, which had been waiting at Kosti. The inspector there had been at Eton with Legge. “It is the most luxurious form of travelling possible, bathroom, deckchairs, etc etc ... I am not much impressed with the bird life on this river after hearing so many wonderful accounts of it. It isn’t a patch on Ngamiland [in the Kalahari Desert] for that but maybe it will improve as we go south.” He noted storks, herons and cranes: “We have shot a good many duck mostly our own northern species.” Legge had skinned the ducks, ‘and a bad job it is as they are all so fat and greasy that each skin takes a very long time to clean’.

  The hunters shot anything, but the bigger and the faster the animal, the better. The day before he wrote, a fellow hunter, named only as Jack, had shot a water buck and a white-eared kob. While Legge was stalking through some very high and thick grass, he nearly trod on a lion. “He jumped up grunting and growling within four yards of me but of course I could see nothing except the grass shaking as he bolted. I ran like mad after him in hopes of seeing him cross an open space somewhere but never got a glimpse.” Legge shot what he was stalking and left some of the meat there in the hope that the lion would find it. Legge and his companion went after the lion early the next morning. A native shouted ‘Asser! Asser!’, meaning lion. Legge recalled: “I saw a great brute prowling around still a long way off and tried to get nearer but it was very flat and open and he saw me and slunk off. We ran after him and he started lolloping away so I had a long shot and got him plumb in that portion of his body least immediately fatal as he was going dead away but the bullet raked forward and he was dead in five yards. As soon as I fired Jack said he was a hyena and he was right! A great big devil too. So I had all the fun of shooting a lion without getting him.”

  The game was much tamer than Kordofan. The men set off in the dark at 4am to hunt buffalo, to get away from the river. Legge shot wide, and back at the river-boat, found that Jack had shot two bulls. “It was hard not to appear jealous,” he admitted. Another day, Legge shot a bull from 20 yards away. He wrote how he went for ‘the thin part of his neck just behind the head where his spine, windpipe and big blood vessels are close together’:

  At the shot he just rolled over without a kick but another bull I hadn’t seen jumped up and started looking about. I didn’t want to shoot another and expected him to clear off but no! he would wait for his pal and he just stood looking from me to his pal and back again. So I yelled and screamed at him and so did the man with me but he wouldn’t move. I liked him for that! He wouldn’t leave his pal. Then I fired in the air over his head and all the notice he took was to walk towards me looking very truculent. We still shouted at him and I was determined not to shoot at him but he just came on so I shinned up a tree with my rifle and cursed every hair on his enormous body. He came to within 40 yards and then turned and walked back to the dead one and stood there on guard. It was now just about dark so I came down off my perch and left him master of the situation and made a detour and came home. I have a greater respect for a buffalo now than before even. What a splendid beast to bluff me out like that. I am glad I didn’t shoot him. So this morning I went back at dawn. In hopes of finding a lion at the dead bull but nothing was there. But my friend of last night had been butting the corpse really hard to make him get up I suppose ... now I can take it easy as I have got what I came for.

  According to its postmarks, the letter, addressed to his mother the Countess of Dartmouth, left Khartoum on February 18 and reached the family estate at Patshull outside Wolverhampton by March 1. She was not there, so the letter followed her to the family’s London residence in Berkeley Square. On March 10 Legge was writing again before he returned to Khartoum. He was not sorry he was finishing his hunt on the Nile, calling it ‘altogether too
tame and touristy’ and grumbling: ‘... the whole trip is a hold-up from beginning to end and this Sudan steamers department are robbers of the worst kind’. He returned to his costs at the end of the letter: “I hear rubber is up but have seen no paper. I hope it is true as I am spending money like water here.” Legge had been working on a rubber plantation in Java in November 1907, when his sister Dorothy married Francis Meynell. (‘How are you? Married, settled down and lived happily ever after! Good for you,’ Legge wrote to her then, sounding like a man who was not for settling.) Usually, he kept his letters to his shooting: ‘the rest of my news will keep till I get home,’ he wrote on April 11, from Port Sudan Hotel. A boat was sailing on April 14, and he expected to arrive home on April 26, in time as it happened for his 32nd birthday. “Dear Mother, Just back from the hills as hard as nails and so fit!” he wrote. “Real hard work down there, with here and there a bit of climbing that nearly frightened me to death. Jack got what is nearly a record ibex, a real fizzer. I got two, one small, the other only moderate, but quite nice heads. But I am rather proud as I found them, stalked them and shot them with no-one to help at all and was previously told they could not be stalked!’ Legge hoped to go into the hills again in 1915. “This country has fairly got hold of me,” he had told his father in January. “I love it and the people. The Arab is the greatest gentleman I ever met; I wish some of the things that think they are gentlemen at home could live out here for a bit and pick up some wrinkles from the Arab.”

  II

  The brothers Clifford and Sydney Gothard, too, began 1914 with a bang. January 1 in their native Burton upon Trent, the Staffordshire brewery town, was fine all day, frosty then thawing, ‘slightly misty and dull in afternoon’. So Clifford wrote in his new Boot’s Scribbling Diary. In the morning he and Syd cycled uphill to Brizlincote, looking over the Trent valley, where his Uncle George Startin farmed. “Had a short chat with the two Miss James, uncle and auntie and went out shooting with Jack. Shot a cat which was ailing of some disease and killed a few small birds. Had lunch and then went out shooting again. Killed a few sparrows for the ferrets and enough blackbirds etc for a pie for them. Had tea, cleaned guns etc and played bridge. Syd and I v Uncle George and Miss James for three rubbers and then Jack took Miss James’ place for four more. Miss Nancy James and Aunty Louie went out to tea and only turned up again just as we started to have supper. Cycled home, roads very slippy and went to bed.” Next morning a thaw set in; Clifford went into town and bought the diary. He cycled to Bretby, and ‘shot two or three birds for the ferrets’.

  The shooting by the young Gothards - and many other farmers and their friends - had its uses. Besides ridding farmland of wild animals that might eat seed or grass, Gothard fed his ferrets. In a memoir in old age he explained further: “... the rabbits brought in were cleaned, hung in a game larder to cool and taken out the next morning in the milk float to the milk customers with whom the rabbits found ready purchasers. This brought a little income for the farm which far more than paid for the cartridges and had the advantage of keeping rabbits down to reasonable numbers.”

  III

  In India, British Army officers shot for pleasure, and kept the dead skins as souvenirs; and, they could claim, saved Indians from dangerous animals. One Royal Horse Artillery officer, Alan Brooke, wrote to his mother how in February 1914 he and a friend and fellow officer Ronald Adam shot duck and snipe. They found a tank snake, ‘a real big fellow, about eight feet long and about as thick as my wrist’, which they did not want to shoot for fear of disturbing ducks. “So I first chased him with a stone, but he defeated me by getting into his hole. However I caught him by the tail as he was going down and pulled him out, then I swung him by his tail while Adam tried to drop a rock on to his head. At last I put my foot on his neck and we finished him off. They are not poisonous but have got a very nasty row of teeth with which they could give one a nasty bite. I skinned him on the spot and have sent his skin off to be cured. It ought to make a very nice belt and perhaps a card case also.” One morning, news came of a panther in a cave. “So I went out in the afternoon. When I got there she had come out of her cave and was sitting out on rocks. I had a herd of goats moved about at the bottom of her hill to try and divert her attention while I climbed the hill and tried to stalk her.” But the panther had gone back to her cave. Brooke waited until dark when he heard the panther kill a goat. He switched on a lamp:

  “The panther was sitting like a great cat looking at the dead goat. It was not a very easy shot as I could not see my sights well and I let fly. There was a roar and I saw a streak of yellow and spots come straight at the lamp which was at my feet. In my excitement I took my finger off the switch and the light went out. The panther dashed past within a yard of me making the most unholy row. I heard her making a noise for some time then when everything was quiet I followed her up with the electric lamp and I am glad to say I found her stone dead about 150 yards away. It was only a dead rush that she made at the lamp but rather unpleasant for all that. She turned out to be quite a fair female six foot six long. While I was skinning her I found two large bullets in her neck with the wound quite healed over which accounted for her being such a cunning old brute and for her temper not being of the best.”

  As Brooke’s story suggested, the hunter did not always win, and he gave the story of a subaltern named Shaw, who shot a panther which had killed tame animals nearby. “It charged him, pulled him off the rug which he was sitting on by his leg and they had a rough and tumble together till the shitari came up and hit the panther over the head with the second rifle and drove it off. They got Shaw in by the next train and pushed him straight off to the hospital where he is now.” Despite having a hand amputated, Shaw died of blood poisoning.

  IV

  Here, then, is a reason why most of Europe went to war within a few days in 1914. Just as men thought nothing of killing other creatures with a gun, so nations sent their young men with guns to settle an argument with a neighbour, or to conquer some other continent. Which alliance your country was one of, how democratic you were, made little difference. Men - and women - from Europe turned to violence, if it suited them, or merely to pass the time. Eva Tibbitts gave the evocatively big address of 631 105th Street, Edmonton, in an undated letter from Canada to her mother in Gloucester. The only clue to the date was that she was ‘sorry the war broke out when it did as I had just worked up a connection in the colony’. She furnished studios for a living, and was living in a house with ‘artists and professionals’. Her ‘man’, Billie Stredmond, had taught her how to shoot, “and we make up a party amongst the boys and girls here nearly every week and go duck pheasant partridge and prairie chicken shooting. We have a motor car and drive on a bit and shoot and drive on again and shoot till we get 50 miles out. Last week we had a bag of 60 birds and 20 rabbits.” Her free days sounded as rich and, at root, empty as the rest of her life.

  War, like shooting, made a change from the boring working week; or from routine, if you were too rich to have to work. War was like the jar of mustard or the bottle of beer in your pantry. You might not even like mustard or beer, or only seldom had a taste for it, or only kept it to satisfy some visitor. Yet the chance was always there that you might bring them out one meal-time, and pour the bottle, or spoon some mustard on your plate. Even if you wished you hadn’t, you could not very well put the mustard back in the jar, or unpour the beer. That was how the brewers and the makers of mustard made their money.

  Chapter 2

  Ways to Die

  And now the time has come when we must part, and go our respective ways - I to die, you to live; and which of us has the happier fortune in store for him is known to none, except to God.

  Socrates; from Marginal Notes by Lord Macaulay, arranged by Sir George Otto Trevelyan (1907)

  I

  Clifford Gothard had his life ahead of him in 1914. On June 9, he was 21; on Friday June 12, he took the last exam of his last-bu
t-one year at Birmingham University, where he was taking mechanical engineering. He began another carefree summer: shooting hares as they fled the wheat-fields at harvest; planting strawberries in the garden; playing tennis at the family home in Winshill on the outskirts of Burton; some light study. He had some growing-up to do, however, in the early hours of Thursday July 9:

  At about 2.15am mother came and called us. ‘Do get up, dad is so ill.’ And I hastened to his bedroom and found him lying on his back and breathing heavily. His face being a trifle bluey. I raised him slightly and felt his pulse. It got very weak and so I wanted to give him some brandy but was afraid to pour it into his mouth as it may choke him. I dipped my finger in the brandy and then moistened his lips and mouth with it. It failed to revive him. I put a hot water bottle to his head with Syd’s assistance. He breathed less and less heavily and finally breathing ceased just before the doctor arrived here. He said death had taken place two or three minutes before he arrived. (He was not above ten minutes in coming from the time we telephoned to him.)

  As the eldest son, Clifford took charge. He drove with Dr Holford the three miles to his mother’s unmarried brother and sister at Home Farm, Bretby - where James Startin farmed, and Sarah kept house. Clifford knocked at the door and summoned his uncle: “I told him. Auntie guessed when she knew that it was me.” That day Clifford Gothard began settling his father’s affairs, taking letters to friends and relatives - ‘nearly 50 in all’ - telephoning others, having an interview with a reporter from the Burton Gazette, one of the town’s two daily papers, and before lunch going with ‘Auntie Sallie’ (Sarah Startin) into town ‘to see bank manager where I opened an account’. Suddenly he had to become a man. They buried Frederic Gothard on the Saturday afternoon, July 11. Clifford, and Syd, worked for the rest of the month on their father’s papers. When on the Wednesday, July 15 - according to his diary his first break from the accounting - Clifford took his father’s guns, ‘to kill a rabbit or two at Bretby’, you feel the son was turning to a favourite pastime for comfort, and symbolically taking his father’s place.