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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9 October 1914

Posted on October 9, 2014 by Patrick Miles

The 3rd Cavalry Division had arrived in Belgium with a crack infantry force, the 7th Division.  The latter’s orders were to go to Antwerp, sixty miles away, to assist in its defence.  Little did they know that on the night of 8 October Winston Churchill’s Royal Naval Division was already leaving the city, which had become an inferno.

Yesterday afternoon at 4.30 the 3rd Cavalry Division set off southwestwards from Zeebrugge to the ‘fashionable watering place’, as Calderon called it, of Blankenberge (about five miles).  Here, Dick Sutton wrote, ‘The inhabitants cheered us and could not do enough for us.  The men were plied with chocolates, cake and beer whenever we halted for a moment, which we did frequently, as the Colonels had not received orders where to go.’ At dusk they left Blankenberge on the Bruges road, but after a mile, George wrote Kittie,

[we] plunged aside into the sand dunes (just like St Andrews) and bivouacked there for the night.  Very cold and very beautiful.  Sea plashing, moonlight, long grass and red smoke of camp fires.  Many awake all night for the cold.  The sand too soft for picket pegs.  I lay half the night holding two horses that awoke me, plunging after tufts of feather grass whenever I nodded off.

Today, at eight in the morning, they set off for Bruges, ten miles away.  The weather was mild, autumnally fine.  As they entered the town, ‘news came whispered from officer to officer that [Antwerp] had fallen’, but even three days later George had ‘not met a native who knows about it’.  Nevertheless, Dick Sutton wrote in his diary for 9 October that on the Bruges road ‘a lot of refugees from Antwerp came through, also cyclists and artillery’.

‘So we passed on,’ George wrote Kittie, ‘trotting and walking.  It’s a pleasant monotonous business is war, as far as I have seen it, standing patiently at a horse’s head, not knowing what is happening.’  Tonight the Blues were billeted on the outskirts of a village ‘in the great iron buildings of a horticulturist (the great business here); the endless gardens around, nothing but rows of tubs of Portugal laurel trimmed like the trees in a Noah’s ark’. He spent ‘two hours or more telephoning the Colonel, to establish communication with our Brigade Headquarters’. This involved foreign-language work with the mayor, ‘a typical peasant with a cap, shy ironical eye and hands in pockets’.   Calderon got to bed ‘after everybody and slept on the bricks among the horses’.

About thirty miles away, Rupert Brooke, with the Royal Naval Division, was living through what he described as ‘one of the greatest crimes of history’.  As well as the carnage of the siege of Antwerp itself, he witnessed thousands of refugees fleeing for their lives.  ‘Three civilians’, he wrote, ‘have been killed to every one soldier […]  Has ever a nation been treated like that?  And how can such a stain be wiped out?’

A year before, Calderon and Brooke had been in civilised correspondence about finding a producer for Brooke’s one-act play Lithuania, which appears to be a flattering attempt to replicate George’s success with his Russian curtain-raiser The Little Stone House.

Next entry: 10 October 1914

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8 October 1914

Posted on October 8, 2014 by Patrick Miles

The transport ship ‘Huanchaco’ arrived at Zeebrugge at 5.30 this morning.  Mid-morning George wrote to Kittie that the voyage had been ‘much like other sea voyages; meals, tobacco, chat and a little music’,

But down below something between a menagerie and a beehive; sad horses’  faces looking out in rows over plank partitions; men sleeping in invisibly dark corners everywhere.  All night the stamping of horses’ feet.

Natives of this country have gone to fetch newspapers; I must go out and meet them.  We have had a good talk with officers and soldiers of the foreign nation, and heard many interesting things of the battles they have been in.

It seems to me that the Belgians’ courage and initiative are greatly underplayed in accounts of the first year of the War, though the reasons for that may be understandable. Now the Belgian army was concentrating on defending Antwerp.

Next entry: 9 October 1914

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Darkness

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Patrick Miles

By yesterday night the Blues had embarked at Southampton.  But the transport ships did not move, as there was suspected U-boat activity in the English Channel.  They may not have moved next day either, or they may have steamed eastwards hugging the coast.  They presumably spent most of tonight at anchor and with their lights out.

An element of darkness will now enter this blog as well, since Calderon was not supposed to say in his letters where he was, and when he did the words were blacked out by the censor.  I wrote to the Household Cavalry Museum Archive some months ago (and paid!), to find out where the Blues were from day to day between 8 and 29 October 1914, but the Archive is overwhelmed with requests at the moment, a situation that I can understand.

By a stroke of luck, however, we have the personal war diary of Sir Richard (Dick) Sutton, the twenty-three-year-old son of Kittie’s friend Constance.  Dick Sutton was in the 1st Life Guards, which like the Blues was part of the 7th Cavalry Brigade, and he embarked with them.  His diary names places, so this helps track some of Calderon’s movements.  It is published in Richard Vincent Sutton: A Record of his Life Together With Extracts from his Private Papers, ed. by Mildred Isemonger (London, George W. Jones, 1922).

Today is a hole in Calderon’s biography.

Next entry: 8 October 1914

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The ‘off’

Posted on October 6, 2014 by Patrick Miles

‘So as not to crowd’ Ludgershall station, as Calderon wrote his mother yesterday, at six o’clock that evening the Blues set off on horseback from Windmill Hill Camp across Salisbury Plain to another station (presumably Amesbury).  The Life Guards had left earlier.  By 2.00 a.m. today, 6 October 1914, the whole 3rd Cavalry Division, comprising about 7000 men, had reached its ‘rest-camp’ at Southampton.  In the afternoon, they rode down to the docks.

He wrote to Kittie this evening from on board the H.M. Transport “Huanchaco”, ‘a little cargo and steerage ship of about 3000 tons, in which 2 regiments of cavalry and other details are all packed.’

No beds for officers; I don’t very well understand the object of that.  War has its hardships; no need for the War Office to invent new ones, such as spelling me ‘Cauldron’ in the Gazette 2 days ago.  You might drop them a line asking them, for your convenience, to spell the name rightly in dispatches and casualty lists.  (That […] is a joke; don’t pass it on to Whitehall.)

Rum thing me leading a big horse down into a hold, in darkness with lamps here and there, dragging him up gangways and down steep inclines and through narrow passages.

No-one, he wrote, knew what their destination was.

Next entry: Darkness

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5 October 1914

Posted on October 5, 2014 by Patrick Miles

                                                                             Windmill Hill Camp

Monday

Beloved little Mrs Pete

I saw you on the platform long after you had lost sight of me.  I could see you blindly waving till the train turned and bent me away.  I met [Surgeon-Major] Pares at Basingstoke and arrived at almost eleven o’clock after a very slow journey.  Everybody else had been back 24 hrs before, or nearly; many roused in the night and flying on motor cars.

My nose is out of joint as an interpreter — 3 more have arrived in the regiment; and the Brigadier and everybody has them.  We have a band with a large white INT on it on the arm.

We put on all our fig [uniform and gear] this morning for inspection and to be ready: but here we are still at 2.20 p.m. still in the dark, liable to go off at any moment, all packed and saddled, playing cards, mooching about, reading papers.  A lot of ladies about; they were let in to lunch, which never happened before.

I am jolly glad I have got just in time into B squadron.  They gave me a fine black warhorse (almost the only black regular warhorse in the regiment — an officer’s charger) that rocks like a rocking horse, full of spirit, broad and strong and good natured, that nibbles and noggles when you stand at his head. He has a great big bold rocking action when you ride, and I had the infernal luck to jog my back again climbing up a bank with him and I’m as stiff as an ironing-board again.  Never mind; it’ll be well again in a day or two, and I’ll give it a good rest in my bunk, or get somebody to rub it right in Southampton.

Goodbye my little love; live like a dog and never think of me except at 9 of an evening.  Goodbye.

(Ever since their courtship, Calderon had been inclined to believe in the therapeutic power of thinking of each other at an agreed time.)

It was a packed day for him.  In addition to the military preparations and writing to Kittie, he wrote to his mother — who was back in St John’s Wood — and drafted a long letter to a newspaper.

He told his mother that he was very pleased to have been transferred, at his own request, to a ‘jolly’ squadron with an Irish captain and Scots NCO, and to have been given the Hussar Paterson as his permanent servant, who would groom his horse, which was a ‘genuine old black Blues’ charger’.  ‘It was capital and friendly of these fine fellows to find me such a good horse.’  He finished: ‘Goodbye to you, dear Mother, and to the family.  The Germans are nearly beaten now.’  Whether he believed this is doubtful.  He may have said it because he knew Clara was a compulsive worrier: as an Oxford undergraduate he had had to persuade her that rowing and hill-walking were not lethal activities.

First page of Calderon's draft letter to the press, 5 October 1914

First page of Calderon’s draft letter to the press, 5 October 1914

The departure point of George’s letter to the press, date-stamped this day possibly by an army censor, was that the Tsar and the Kaiser were professed Hegelians who believed in ‘the imposition of the newest and highest [national civilisation] on the world at large’. This argument, which had echoes of George’s paper ‘Russian Ideals of Peace’ to the Anglo-Russian Literary Society in 1900, was widely believed in Europe.  The ideology, as we might put it, that the Tsar sought to impose on the world was thought of as Panslavism, Slavophilism, Russian Orthodoxy, or at least Russian nationalism.  ‘It would be a poor office for the Belgians, French and British if we were fighting merely to set up a Slav world-domination instead of a Teutonic’, wrote George from Windmill Hill Camp.

In fact there was already widespread opposition in Britain to the alliance with autocratic, anti-Semitic, repressive Russia.  But as Jonathan Haslam has written, ‘even at its most self-consciously Slavophile, [Tsarist] Russia never held itself up as a substitute model for capitalism and democracy in the very West itself’ (Russia’s Cold War, Yale University Press, 2011, p. 394).  That, of course, was to come after the next World War.  In a way, then, one could claim that George was prescient.  The letter was signed pseudonymously and does not appear to have been published anywhere.  Nevertheless, it is evidence that his thinking about the war, and hence his reasons for joining up, were geopolitical well before his recorded pronouncements of 1915.

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4 October 1914

Posted on October 4, 2014 by Patrick Miles

It was Sunday.  Kittie probably went to church.  She fervently believed in the power of prayer, and one can imagine what she prayed for.

After lunch, they set out for Waterloo station.  As George was coming out of 42 Well Walk, their housekeeper, Elizabeth Ellis, burst into tears.  ‘It was always a surprise and touched him to find people cared for him’, Kittie wrote later.

‘I can see that train disappearing disappearing, I can feel the chill of the subway which seemed to strike right into my heart.’

Next entry: 5 October 1914

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3 October 1914

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Patrick Miles

This morning, which was a Saturday,  Kittie suddenly received a telegram from George to say that, in her words, ‘after all a lot of them were getting 24 hours leave and he would be home in a few hours’.

When he arrived, it seems that the gardener was working in the small garden Kittie had designed at the back of 42 Well Walk.  This man, William Hogsden, had worked for them for years.  He now came to bid George farewell.  As Kittie described it, he said ‘in such a heartfelt voice, “I wish I were young enough to go as your servant, sir”’.

After dinner, George went with Kittie to say goodbye to the Hedleys (see my post ‘The Godfather in War’ for 26 August).  Coote Hedley must have had mixed feelings about this, as privately he believed George could be of more use to the war effort in a different role.

Next entry: 4 October 1914

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