25 October 1914

Posted on October 25, 2014 by Patrick Miles

George wrote to Kittie this morning from his billet at, presumably, Nieuwkerke:

off this morning on motor trucks with the bully beef. I shall find Gen. Kavanagh tonight. I hope he’ll accept me. Perhaps I shall find the place taken already (Interpreter to 7th Cavalry Brigade, 3rd Cavalry Division).

Here, in French Flanders, I took another lesson last night; from a young woman in a kitchen, while papa and maman sat one on each side of the stove and murmured help every now and then. Quite a different dialect; almost a new language to learn. But not much use, I dare say.

The Germans were continuing to attack the Zandvoorde section of the front. This meant shelling, as the German cavalry later admitted they could not get within 1000 yards of the British cavalry because of the accuracy of their rifle and machine gun fire. German officers actually believed for a while that the British rifle fire was from machine guns. Their own cavalry were not equipped for trench warfare.  But their artillery was relatively accurate.

Both armies found the terrain impossible: small woods, undulating fields, hedges and frequent farmhouses. The Germans used the latter to conceal snipers, with dire effect. The cavalry had, of course, dismounted, and left their horses well back. Dick Sutton found himself in trenches with the Blues on his right. The last entry in his diary for 1914 reads:

October 25. The Germans were very quiet during the morning, but there was occasional sniping. […] We had almost got to think the Germans had retired, but at 2 o’clock they started bombarding us very heavily from several batteries, including one heavy battery. At 3 o’clock a shell burst on the traverse three feet away from me, and a piece of the shell hit me in the thigh. The bombardment lasted until nearly dark. We were relieved at 8 o’clock and I was put in an ambulance and taken to Zillebeke, and from there in a motor ambulance to Ypres.

Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913

Sir Richard Vincent Sutton
c. 1913

Within a few days he was in London, from where he was moved to his Berkshire home of Benham Valence, a wing of which was soon to become a Red Cross hospital. After a short rest there he was moved to Brinsop Court, where, his mother said, ‘he made a speedy recovery’. It is well worth Googling on Brinsop Court.

Next entry: 26 October 1914

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Another ‘Russian connection’

Posted on October 24, 2014 by Patrick Miles

It is also surprising that in his letter of yesterday Calderon did not mention Captain Fitzgerald, with whom he had shared a hotel room at Ypres. This ‘full-blooded Irishman, black and hairy’ had, we presume, accompanied George to Dunkirk with his injured foot. As Kittie confirms in her memoirs, George got on very well with him. One might have thought, then, that in Dunkirk Fitzgerald lifted his spirits.

Calderon and Fitzgerald had obviously talked of many things, because in his letter of 15 October George writes that Fitzgerald has ‘a Russian-descended Interpreter cousin with the Colonel, named Alexis Gunzberg. I find he is a connection of Baron Gunzberg, Diaghilev’s accomplice. Fancy Fitzgerald a cousin of quelque Baron!’. The Baron referred to here is Dmitri de Gunzberg, who played a murky part in the arrangement of Nijinsky’s marriage that led to the latter’s dismissal from Ballets Russes in 1913.

Just to remind followers, the Surgeon-Major of the Blues, who had helped George with his back problems when he arrived at Windmill Hill Camp in September, was the brother of Bernard Pares, with whom George and other Russianists had worked in setting up the School of Russian Studies at Liverpool University in 1909.

Today, Saturday 24 October 1914, Calderon shared a compartment with five doctors on a transport train travelling towards Ypres. They seem to have got out in the afternoon at Steenwerck, about nine miles from the Front, and gone on to the village of Nieuwkerke by tram. Here George ‘spent the night comfortably’ on a straw mattress in the ‘big loft of a tavern’. The place was milling with soldiers.

Next entry: 25 October 1914

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23 October 1914

Posted on October 23, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Today George wrote to Kittie from Dunkirk. It was his first letter to her for six days. ‘Dearest Mrs P.,’ he began, ‘I haven’t written, because there was nothing very gay to say.’ (See my posts of 29 August, 1 September, 2 October on linguistic matters.)

The surprising thing is that he doesn’t mention what the ‘Hospital base’ has been able to do for him. Did its medical officers simply accept the Ypres nunnery doctor’s diagnosis, that the blood in his urine was caused by gout crystals? If so, did they treat the condition, and how? If not, what was the new diagnosis? What care did he get?

Having as a biographer lived with George Calderon for some time, I feel that he was also depressed. Here he was, after all the excitement of the past month and of actually reaching the Front, suddenly far removed from the fray, ‘beached’ as it were at Dunkirk, in limbo. The haematuria must have been worrying. I am reminded of the low point of his trek round Tahiti in 1906, when he seemed trapped in a force field on the isthmus of Taravao and grew ‘despondent’ and even ‘irresolute’. Working on his travel book Tahiti in the winter of 1913/14, he had written of this moment that ‘the sense of depression close[d] over me, and of the fear of death alone on the seashore, away from England’.

However, he told Kittie that there had been a ‘development’:

As chance would have it two men arrived from the [7th Cavalry] Brigade staff; the Brigade Major and the Brigade Interpreter. I am well enough to go back, but no [sic] to ride. The Brigade Major has therefore appointed me to the Brigade Interpreter’s place; and I go back in an hour, with the supplies.

I have had all the difficulties in the world to find out how to go back. It is nobody’s business. There is no one central place where you can go and find a thing out. You have to trudge down cobbled streets and along cobbled wharfs to and fro to find out for yourself. And even then I don’t know.

But, vaguely, if I go some time this evening somewhere up the line and happen to get into the right train, I shall arrive.

Goodbye. I have had to jettison much good luggage and buy many new things. I have cashed a cheque for ₤5.

P.P.P.

[Pore Peeky Peety]

Back at Ypres, the French today made a desperate attempt to recapture Passchendaele and the Germans concentrated on weakening the 7th Division at Zandvoorde as the prelude to a massive assault planned for close by on the 28th. Dick Sutton, also in the 7th Cavalry Brigade (1st Life Guards), wrote in his diary:

At about 7 a.m. we were sent to relieve the 10th Hussars in the Zandvoorde trenches, but the trenches were being so heavily shelled that it was found impossible to relieve them until dark. We were under shell fire for some time, and our Brigadier-General (Kavanagh) had a lucky escape, as a shell burst close to him, one bullet going through his coat.

Next entry: Another ‘Russian connection’

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Kittie

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Most unusually, Kittie Calderon appears not to have gone to stay with friends at all since George embarked for Belgium on 6 October. We know this because the envelopes of George’s letters show that her housekeeper, Elizabeth Ellis, did not have to redirect any of them to, for example, Foxwold (the Pyms’ home), Acton Reynald (the Corbets’ estate), or Brinsop Court (Constance Sutton’s residence).

Kittie was probably fully occupied by her work as a VAD (see my post for 1 August) and the fact that she now had three male refugees from Antwerp staying in the house. ‘Our small house [five storeys!] was full to overflowing,’ she wrote later, ‘even George’s dressing room and study were commandeered.’ She also had lots of local friends, for instance the poet Sturge Moore’s family next door, the Masefields opposite, the Hedleys…

On this day, 22 October 1914, units of the German Fourth Army crossed the Yser river/canal between Nieuport and Dixmude. Would this be the Belgians’ Mons? If the Belgian Army here had to retreat, Ypres would be surrounded from the north.

Next entry: 23 October 1914

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21 October 1914

Posted on October 21, 2014 by Patrick Miles

At four o’clock this morning the hospital train arrived in Dunkirk. George could not name the town in his letter to Kittie of 23 October, but we know from his letter of 15th that this was his destination. He heads his letter of 23rd ‘At the Seaside’ and tells her that the ‘Hospital base’ he is now in is ‘lodged in a famous Casino’, i.e. probably at Malo les Bains.

A fine change after the nunneries and monasteries! A melancholy place, full of suffering. I and some of the other slightly suffering have taken our meals at restaurants. Imagine the great palms, and the egg-shaped ring of electric lights round the ceiling, its view of the bathing-machines and the sea; and it all full, from end to end, of wounded soldiers in rows side by side. […] and the operating theatre cut off only by a sheet.

On this day around Ypres the Germans attacked with renewed ferocity. Dick Sutton’s regiment was sent at first light to Zonnebeke to support the 7th Division, whose resistance was crumbling. Gun batteries further back eventually halted the massed German columns advancing upon it. In the northernmost section of the line, the Germans destroyed Langemarck with shelling, then poured waves of infantry through, day and night.  They fell in their hundreds to rifle fire from Haig’s 2nd Division troops.

The Germans’ Military Intelligence was poor, and as a result they consistently overestimated the Allied forces facing them at Ypres. On the other hand, Sir John French refused to believe the intelligence he was fed from aerial reconnaissance about superior German numbers, and had actually been planning offensive operations northwards and eastwards. He now gave the order to dig in. Both sides were discovering that in this new age of warfare the defenders could have certain advantages.

Next entry: Kittie

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20 October 1914: Hell breaks loose

Posted on October 20, 2014 by Patrick Miles

This morning the Germans began an offensive along the whole northwestern front from La Bassée in France to the Belgian coast. The German 4th Army was closing in on Ypres from the north and east, the 6th Army from the south. The B.E.F.’s II and III Corps to the south had not yet joined up, and Haig’s I Corps had not yet reached Ypres. The full force of the onslaught around Ypres was therefore borne by (1) Rawlinson’s IV Corps, containing the 7th Division (infantry) and 3rd Cavalry Division with which George Calderon had entered Belgium on 8 October, (2) Allenby’s Cavalry Corps to the south between Messines and Zandvoorde, and (3) French forces to the extreme north. It was still open country warfare and there were yawning gaps in the British line.  Passchendaele, where Dick Sutton had been only the night before, was lost and numerous defensive retreats necessary. Things improved, however, when Haig’s I Corps began to join the line north of Ypres in the afternoon. By the end of the day the German forces had lost heavily and ‘felt anything but invincible’ (Max Hastings). IV Corps, including the Blues and Life Guards, had spearheaded what was to become known as the ‘Ypres salient’.

Had George been with the Blues today, he would certainly have seen action. But around lunchtime, probably, the hospital train he was on crossed the border into France.

I shall produce a map of the military situation at Ypres when Calderon is able to rejoin his regiment.

Next entry: 21 October 1914

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The TLS link

Posted on October 19, 2014 by Patrick Miles

At four o’clock this afternoon, Monday 19 October 1914, George and other patients set off on a very slow train to their ‘Hospital base’ at Dunkirk.

It may seem odd that he had told Kittie to contact Theodore Cook, editor of The Field, about the state of the military ambulance system in Flanders, but Cook would certainly be interested: he was eventually awarded a knighthood for his magazine’s contribution to the war effort.

Similarly, George had not written for the TLS since 1912, but he still had good contacts there and at The Times: in 1911 the latter published his now much-quoted article on Ballets Russes and he was possibly the translator of Fokine’s famous ‘Five Principles’ of modern ballet printed in The Times of 6 July 1914.

It gave me huge pleasure, therefore, when the TLS ran a long item about George Calderon on its blog on 9 September. If you haven’t seen it, click on the link under ‘Related’ at the top of ‘Calderonia’ on the right. Michael Caines (whom I do not know) has written a superb, original piece that must have taken him a long time to research. It is, in effect, a fresh and notable addition to the literature on George.

I was particularly pleased that Caines discussed George’s essay on Chekhov published with his translations of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard in 1912. Caines concluded that Calderon’s ‘impassioned and insightful appreciation of Chekhov’ still seemed to him to be worth reading, and I agree. I shall return to the subject in November. (With other ‘personal’ themes which currently must take second place to the battlefield.)

‘Less admirable’, Caines also wrote, ‘a century on at least, are Calderon’s activities as the Honorary Secretary of the Men’s League for Opposing Woman Suffrage.’ Similarly, a follower emailed me recently that he was ‘disappointed to discover that Calderon was a strikebreaker’ (referring to George’s activities in the 1912 coal and dock strikes).

The important words here are Mr Caines’s ‘a century on at least’. In two chapters of my biography, entitled ‘The Trouble with Suffragism’ and ‘The Trouble with Trade Unionism’, I examine in detail what George actually said on these subjects; but I also examine his beliefs within their historical context, rather than the context of wisdom today. All I will say here is that in 1909-14 repeated polls showed that a majority of women were opposed to women’s suffrage, let alone the suffragettes’ methods, and in 1912, like Calderon, a majority of the British public appeared to support the miners’ and dockers’ wage claims and demands for better working conditions, but were opposed to the economic and social collapse that the ‘syndicalist’ movement seemed bent on.

For an absorbing account of the TLS during World War I, see Derwent May’s magisterial Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement (London, HarperCollins, 2001).

Next entry: 20 October 1914: Hell breaks loose

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Under distinguished protection

Posted on October 18, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Probably this evening, Sunday 18 October 1914, at eight o’clock, Calderon, Fitzgerald and other sick and wounded left Ypres in another juddering ‘motor lorry’. They drove for four hours. For the last two Calderon had to ‘sit outside to help find the way’, which presumably meant speaking French or Flemish.

Their destination was another transit camp, ‘this time a monkish seminary, dedicated to St. F. of Assisi, the family friend.’ George is referring here to the opening words of the 1753 Description, Arms, Origin and Descent of the Most Noble and Ancient House of Calderón de la Barca and its Descendants, as translated by his father P.H. Calderon: ‘So ancient and tender is the devotion, O Great Saint!, in which the family of Calderon hold your memory — that even before they took their present name, and ever since, journeying through Galicia, you honoured their House by resting under its roof, they have looked upon you as their tutelar Saint and Patron.’

Here in the ward I found the German officer from the wayside inn [i.e. the ‘estaminet’ of 15 October], sitting up, pretty cheerful, with one of his long strong arms cut off. Everybody treated him charmingly; he was a prisoner, but among brothers in the Officers’ Ward.

The phrase ‘among brothers’ is interesting. Truly, this was a ‘class’ War — not in any Leninist sense, but in the sense that when each class recognised itself in the enemy it treated him with impeccable manners as ‘one of us’.

Next entry: The TLS link

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‘Rich gift of anger’ is roused

Posted on October 17, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Calderon awoke this morning, Saturday 17 October 1914, ‘in a large comfortable double-bedded room, looking through tall windows into a big town square.’ He had breakfast in bed and ‘stayed there till eleven’. This afternoon he wrote to Kittie from the hotel:

Our military hospital system is the laughing stock of Europe. Hundreds of motorists offered their cars; wounded men and sick men could be whisked straight away to good hospitals, but some old fool-devil at the War Office refused all their offers and insisted on the refill jolting system, which would destroy even a healthy man. Get Bruce Richmond [Editor of the TLS] and Theodore Cook [Editor of The Field] to collect all the evidence and destroy the man at the War office and all his filthy ways; let him be wounded and jolted in a motor lorry and hanged on a high gallows in Whitehall. […] Bye the bye, I should have thought it was the job of the local military staff to stop trains going by undesirable lines themselves, instead of leaving me and the doctor to enquire whether the train was to go or not.

During the morning, ‘a nice doctor from the nunnery tracked us [Calderon and Captain Fitzgerald] down to our bedroom’. The doctor was amazed that no attempt had yet been made to diagnose George’s blood in the urine. He probably asked George about his medical history, and this prompted him to diagnose ‘gravel from gout’. But Dr Tebb’s original diagnosis of gout back in Hampstead around 1903 might not stand scrutiny today. Nor does George tell Kittie what his other symptoms are (apart from ‘a cold’). The most significant one was probably that it was painful for him to sit in the saddle.

However, this Belgian doctor prescribed ‘Contrexéville and some drugs, and thought I should be all right again in a few days.  I feel better this afternoon’. Whilst writing the letter, George was interrupted by the stationmaster, who asked him to go with him to the station to interpret for him to the military Commander of ‘the train’. It is not clear whether they stayed a second night in the hotel at Ypres; most likely they did.

When George came back and finished the letter, which he was going to try to get ‘censored’ by military staff also staying in the hotel, he added two postscripts:

A Corporal of our Brigade appears to have been murdered by Germans yesterday. He was seen captured unwounded. Then 3 shots rang out, and his identification label was sent across later into our lines.

The Canadians were forced by officials to leave behind them 40 beautiful ambulances that they were bringing. Regiments have no ambulance; stretcher bearers have no stretchers. One wounded officer with us was brought in in a farm cart.

One can well imagine that if he had been back in England he would immediately have started a campaign to sort out the military ambulance system, with Kittie’s help.

(For ‘rich gift of anger’ see my post of 25 September)

Next entry: Under distinguished protection

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Nuns fall for the Calderonian charm

Posted on October 16, 2014 by Patrick Miles

The motor lorries arrived at 3 in the morning. Sick and wounded were put in; a pleurisy case; a man from our Brigade with rheumatic fever from our so-called ‘billets’. He had been lying two days in an ambulance wagon in the wet field opposite the tavern.

The motor lorry has solid rubber tyres and apparently no springs. Going over the country roads and cobbles it jolts like artillery on the road. I had expected to sleep at last, but spent the journey kneeling in a corner, gasping and holding on to a stanchion. Nobody died on the way, I believe, but I cannot believe that the seriously ill or wounded can recover after it.

Three hours later they arrived at a girls boarding school in Ypres run by nuns, who were ‘all very kind and shocked’. It was not a hospital, but a transit camp.  Calderon climbed into a bed at 7.00 a.m. and two hours later was roused to ‘entrain’ for a ‘base’.

Three of the nuns fell in love with me and gave me 30 picture postcards of the school. We waited an hour or two at the station and were put into a train. As the only man who could get about, I was put in charge to deliver them safely at the base. ‘Having received certain information’, as they say in police court evidence, I and a doctor had the bright idea of applying to the staff of the district to know if it was a good plan to go where we had been told to go.

Calderon’s ‘propensity to act’ was kicking in, after sinking himself in the Blues for the past month. The town they were to ‘entrain’ for was the French port of Dunkirk. He may have known that battles were now raging between Belgian and German forces from the coast almost as far as Ypres, and that Dunkirk had actually been bombed the day before. It was wise, then, to question whether it was safe to travel the forty miles northwards.

We waited till 5.30 p.m. and the sick and wounded were then all carted back to the nunnery (where they still remain) without ever having left the station. Being in charge, I took my place in the luggage van with the worst cases, the wounded on litters; the rest could sit. (The very bad cases were not removed.) Result: I spent my day, still without sleep, in a very cold luggage van, or wandering out to buy food or what not and reflected on the doctors’ advice that I was to keep quite quiet and not tire myself.

After supervising the unloading of the train, George and Captain Fitzgerald decided that they had had ‘enough of official medical treatment’, and found a hotel for the night. ‘We had to steal away from the Army Medical Corps to save our lives; even with our slight injuries we could not endure it any more.’

By now the Belgian army was dug in along the west bank of the Yser canal, and on this day the Germans attacked Dixmude.

Next entry: ‘Rich gift of anger’ is roused

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15 October 1914

Posted on October 15, 2014 by Patrick Miles

On this day George wrote his next long letter to Kittie, ‘from a low estaminet by a muddy village wayside’.

During the night Captain Fitzgerald of B Squadron had ‘dropped something heavy on his foot in the dark stables and broken a toe’. He had to go ‘on the sick list’ and George decided to join him for ‘a few days rest’.

My illness is haematuria or blood in the urine, the result of a cold in the backside and riding for many hours a day. I am told that I shall be well in a few days. So will Fitzgerald. It is a pity; we were just getting to business. Now we have to be sent back a little way.

The men were taken to the ‘estaminet’ (public house) at nine in the morning in an ‘ambulance waggon’.  As the ambulance was leaving, an orderly from the Blues rode up and gave George ‘two petites lettres touchantes de Keety; my first post’.

Calderon and Fitzgerald were to be ‘evacuated’ from the estaminet, where they were surrounded by officer doctors, to a ‘base’, but nothing happened all day and they found they had to spend the night ‘on the lousy floor of the taproom (“lousy” is literal)’. From George’s next letter, we learn that this evening

3 German wounded prisoners were brought in and added to those lying on the floor in the taproom.  One merely a hole in the hand.  An elderly reservist dying, with his bowels ripped open by a bullet that struck a button.  A splendid young Prussian officer, a big muscular superman, with a square jawed cleanshaved eagle face, and scars of student duels on his shaven head and on his face.  I felt no dislike or anger for them, but great pity.  Everybody treated them tenderly, caressingly; I talked with the dying reservist, told him why they could not give him water, though he was thirsty.  The officer’s arm was splintered and swollen like a football; it had to be cut off.

George concludes the letter today by telling Kittie that he and Fitzgerald were ‘apparently destined for Dunkirk’ and ‘my interpreting, so far as it is useful, is usually for food and hot water’.  It is very possible that Kittie did not keep other letters, in which George may have referred to his being depressed.

On this day the Germans took Ostend and Zeebrugge.

Next entry: Nuns fall for the Calderonian charm

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They enter Ypres

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Clearly the Blues were not the vanguard of the 3rd Cavalry Division on the march (this Division, incidentally, possessed only 12 field artillery pieces). That honour seems to have fallen to the Life Guards, who had a far more ‘interesting’ time last night.

Yesterday, according to Dick Sutton’s diary, the whole column had set out to ‘join up with the British Army [i.e. B.E.F.], which was said to be on the other side of Ypres’. Before they reached the turning to Menin, however, they received intelligence that there was a German force there, so they proceeded south towards Menin. When they reached Geluwe they met their own advance guard, who told them that Menin was occupied by about 1000 Germans. Ostensibly it was too dark now to attack, but the real reason the Life Guards were ordered to withdraw to Izegem was that 3rd Cavalry Division H.Q. at Izegem had heard that a German force had arrived at Tielt, seven miles away, and Izegem needed protection. They set out for Izegem the quickest way, across country, which meant they bypassed the Blues, who were still on the Ypres road well short of the Menin turning.

At one o’clock this morning, 14 October 1914, after Sutton had had only two hours sleep, the Life Guards were ordered to ‘march at once [to Ypres] and if possible effect a junction with the British Main Army’. The fear was that if they didn’t do this they would be surrounded. Again they took the quickest route, via Sint-Eloois-Winkel, to meet the Ypres road presumably beyond the Menin turning.

At four o’clock this morning the Blues also set out for Ypres, and George Calderon with them. Assuming they were not taking the same route as the Life Guards, this would be a distance of about twenty miles.

George’s cold had got worse.  He was now run down and uncomfortable:

After a few miles I grew tired of lolloping up and down in the saddle on my diseased urethra and decided (with permission) to ride to battle on the baggage wagon. I waited at the roadside for a long time and saw the whole Cavalry division pass in fours, an immense column it seemed, regiment after regiment on tired but splendid horses […] and guns thundering over the cobbles.  As I looked forward after them and heard the guns booming ahead beyond them in the distance, and still no baggage wagon appeared even in the distance behind, it seemed foolish to miss the great event for a local ailment, so I turned and trotted after them again.

With the help of a drug he had bought at a chemist’s, he ‘kept up pretty gaily all day, now with one troop of our squadron, now with another’. At midday they reached the centre of Ypres. The Life Guards were already there, waiting for the arrival of the 7th Division (the infantry units that together with the 3rd Cavalry Division were to form IV Corps of the B.E.F. under General Sir Henry Rawlinson).

The streets and square were full of a fascinated and delighted populace. It seemed like history. Rows on rows of horses everywhere, all over the square and up the side streets, field and horse artillery too; the whole cavalry division, and fine sunny midday. By the greatest spectacular luck, a Taube floated over the city and the market place, with the same cool cheek as the day before, low and slow. With one accord a fusillade broke forth from every street and all over the Square at once; women shrieked faintly in the shops and shut the doors. I took a gun and had four shots myself. Machine guns in the Square, pointing upwards. And soon a universal shout went up from all the city as its nose fell and it floated slowly down. Detailed rumours of the death of the 2 airmen, with exactitudes as to the method; one with his face ‘clean blown away’ by the machine gun. The truth later; the aeroplane came down in a hedge 3 miles outside the town and the two Germans ran away and hid before anybody came up with them.

The Life Guards were billeted this evening a few miles southwest of Ypres on the road to Kemmel, where they made contact, in Sutton’s words, with ‘the cavalry of the Main Army’ (presumably the Cavalry Corps under Allenby, arriving from the Aisne). One assumes that the Blues were billeted not far away.

When George and his troop approached a farmhouse, they were offered ‘well-cooked chops’ for dinner. The farmer’s wife apologised for their being overdone: ‘They had been cooked for the Germans in the morning; but left on our approach and recooked for us.’

This evening was the first time he had been able to take his jersey off since leaving England:

As cavalry is in the front we have to be ready to start out suddenly at night, and I almost always sleep in my boots, gaiters and and spurs, in fact full panoply, with my belt and pistol by me. I have never changed my clothes, but am wearing the same socks, jersey and drawers as I wore when last I came home [3-4 October].  My drawers have never been off […]

At least, though, he had made it to Ypres on horseback and was sleeping tonight in a bed.

On this day German troops occupied Bruges.

Next entry: 15 October 1914

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Blood is spilt

Posted on October 13, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Presumably B Squadron of the 7th Cavalry Brigade of the Blues also bivouacked last night near Lendelede.

Reveille this morning, Tuesday 13 October 1914, was at four, and two hours later the squadron was moving south again, towards Gullegem, where it could turn westwards to approach Ypres. A German Taube reconnaissance plane ‘floated, with the motor off, slowly overhead down the line of the column as we wound by the cart track over the flat willowed fields’. The whole regiment dismounted to fire their rifles at it, ‘but it sailed slowly, gracefully and impertinently on, uninjured.’

The main impression of our work as yet (and it is typical, I think, of all cavalry work in war) is trotting and walking for hours along the soft part of the roads, clattering through towns and villages; dismounting, watering, feeding, riding on again.

This is accurate, since the traditional role of the cavalry was gathering intelligence about the enemy’s location and preventing him acquiring similar intelligence about one’s own. But since the Boer War the British cavalry had become more flexible than any other. It was the only one armed with rifles. It used machine gun and artillery fire to cover its flanks and charges were the exception rather than the rule.

This morning the Blues sent out their mounted patrols, one including George Calderon. There was no sign of the enemy, so they advanced.

In the afternoon, great excitement on the road. Colonels, adjutants, orderlies galloping madly up and down, and across the fields to the right flank German cavalry in sight. [Lord] Anglesey was sent with a patrol to gallop round in a big circle. As he rode forward parallel to our line a half mile away, we could see Uhlans (2 or 3) galloping away before him between the pollard willows. He never saw them, there were trees between. A force of 500 was reported to be coming down the road towards us.

Calderon observed this whilst taking a pee. He was startled to see that his urine had blood in it. Obviously, this can be a symptom of something serious.  For the time being, he did nothing about it.

An ambush was set for the oncoming Germans, for which purpose George ‘borrowed a gun’, but they never materialised. It rained heavily all afternoon and the fields were soaked. That evening the Blues trudged back to Lendelede, or thereabouts, arriving around eleven. ‘Men and horses tired, sick, and discontented.’

Next entry: They enter Ypres

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12 October 1914

Posted on October 12, 2014 by Patrick Miles

From the Château […] we went on to what they were pleased to call a ‘billet’ in the country, but it was only a bivouack, except for myself, who, having a cold, slept in the kitchen on straw. The others under the haystack and in the field by the picketed horses. I speak of our squadron.  The Brigade was scattered through the farms of a rustic stretch of country.

Dick Sutton, not far away in D Squadron of 1st Life Guards, describes in his diary how they set off at eight in the morning towards Izegem, twelve miles south, ‘certain we should meet patrols of the enemy’, but they did not. Presumably the Blues were following. They passed through Izegem and Sutton’s squadron was ordered to take up a defensive position near Lendelede, three miles away. It did so, but at dusk the Life Guards were ordered four miles back up the road, to Rumbeke. George, it seems, was spared all this.

‘Ypres was strategically vital. It was the last geographical object protecting the Allied ports at Calais and Boulogne-sur-Mer. The loss of these ports would have denied the shortest logistical supply route to Allied forces on the Western Front and would have had decisive strategic consequences.’ (Wikipedia, ‘First Battle of Ypres’)

Next entry: Blood is spilt

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Pause and enigma

Posted on October 11, 2014 by Patrick Miles

The Calderon quotations that feature in my preceding two posts come from a letter George wrote to Kittie today, 11 October 1914, which was a Sunday. This was now the pattern: every few days he would write her a long letter (the next one was over 2500 words) that filled in events up to that date, i.e. joined up with the previous letter. He wrote with a sharp blue indelible pencil that would survive the elements. These letters are detailed about his own experiences, but understandably contain few references to the ‘big picture’ of the Battle of Ypres that was gathering around him. Clearly he intended to use them as he had his letters sent home from Tahiti in 1906 — to write a book one day.

The châtelaine up all night, and this morning at 6 a long table set for breakfast with excellent coffee & bread & jam. […] We are having an easy morning, still with no orders.

They eventually received orders to move off at noon, but remained saddled up until four, then unsaddled and stayed a further night at this billet.  There was great uncertainty about the Germans’ movements. In fact their Fourth Army, under Duke Albrecht of Württemberg, was streaming westwards to take the Belgian Channel ports, and units of Prince Rupprecht’s Sixth Army were heading for Ypres from the south.

Meanwhile, followers of the blog may be interested to hear that I have received from the General Register Office birth and death certificates for Edwin Anthony Calderon (see ‘A Lacuna’, 27 September). This was the only child surnamed Calderon and born in Britain between 1897 and 1915 who might have shed some light on George’s much older brother Henry. Had Henry gone off on his own, married someone socially inferior, or even not married her, had a son by her, and become the black sheep of the Calderon family?

Er…we still can’t be certain. The mother of Edwin Anthony Calderon is recorded as ‘Saba Calderon, formerly Vecerro’. She would hardly have given ‘Calderon’ as her surname if she was not married to someone called Calderon. Her Christian name and maiden name suggest she was Spanish. Does this suggest that her husband was also Spanish? As I have stressed before, George’s family were thoroughly assimilated and considered English by themselves and everyone who knew them. But Calderon is a common Spanish name, so Mrs Saba Calderon’s husband could well have been a Spaniard.

However, not only was Saba Calderon’s son registered as ‘Edwin Anthony’, that is given as his father’s name too! This is perhaps not that odd, but it seems unusual if the father was Spanish. Enigmatic? When a biographer is trying to finish his last chapter, he needs this kind of distraction like the proverbial bullet. But I think we must establish who Edwin Anthony senior was, by finding his own birth and death particulars… Sadly, his son died of pneumonia aged seventeen months.

Next entry: 12 October 1914

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10 October 1914

Posted on October 10, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Up at 3.30 to go out on a Patrol with [Sergeant] Mackintosh, to see that the country was clear of Germans for the Regiment to move.  Out (with a little cocoa inside) between misty grey fields; very keen eyed at first, searching horizons for picketed Uhlan horses or remains of campfires.  Less lynx-eyed as the sun came up.  Villages rushed to the road to see us.

All through the night cars, taxicabs and London omnibuses had been passing their billet, full of Belgian and probably some Royal Naval Division troops making for Ostend, as well as refugees.  Now the patrol was met by ‘masses of wagons going in still another direction; the transport of a whole division’.  In fact five divisions of the Belgian army were fleeing Antwerp westwards, partly via Ghent, to take up defensive positions along the Yser canal that ran down to Ypres.

The Blues were looking to move southwestwards today along the road to Torhout (ten miles distant).  As it happened, the German 4th Cavalry Corps had been active for five days over a wide area thirty miles south of there, but were now withdrawing. Calderon and Mackintosh (who dubbed him ‘The Professor’) seem to have ridden almost as far as Torhout, found no sign of the enemy, and got back to base by 9.00 a.m., where they had ‘a bite and nap’.  At noon the brigade moved off.

George was beginning to experience the almost ‘comic’ contrasts, as he put it, that the war was throwing up.  That evening they emerged from ‘pitch black woods’ into ‘a park with a Château’.  It was ‘quite like a thing in […] a novel about a war’:

A real château, with a handsome young proprietor, in riding breeches and his father-in-law in patriarchal style.  The men bivouacked in the park just outside; we slept on the floors of a group of 3 boudoirs with glass chandeliers, with a log blazing in the chimney, on the soft piled carpet.  Dinner with piled fruits and long-stemmed wineglasses.  I dined with wise ones in the kitchen, near the base of supplies.  […]  The squire’s mother avers that the Germans are only ten miles away and begs us to induce her son to fly.

The beautifully stilted phrases of the last sentence indeed make it sound like romantic fiction!

Judging by Dick Sutton’s diary, this château was a couple of miles south of the village of Ruddervoorde; i.e. they had not actually reached Torhout this evening.

Next entry: Pause and enigma

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