22 September 1914

Posted on September 22, 2014 by Patrick Miles

On this day Kittie had lunch with Nina and Reginald Astley at the Royal Automobile Club and visited Nina’s son Sir Roland Corbet (Jim) in hospital at Grosvenor Gardens. He had a lot of visitors, so, as Kittie wrote George today, ‘I was not able to hear much of what he had to say.  Nina says he likes talking, doesn’t fight shy of it like some people do. […] The “boaard” have to sit upon his case before he is allowed to go home.’

A mutual acquaintance, Gerard Thorpe, was also having lunch at the ‘Automobile’, and Kittie asked him what he thought of the fact that George had had his servant withdrawn because, as Colonel Wilson apologetically explained to him, it turned out that interpreters (of whom Wilson had another eleven arriving) were not entitled to a servant and were supposed to groom their own horse.

He [Thorpe] says you had much better just pay one of the men to come and ‘do’ for you — the only point is that that [way] you have not a servant entered as yours — you might find out about that — he says that is certainly what he’d do.

As to grooming your horse I’d do that at any rate for a bit not to seem as if you minded.  I’ll tell you why.  Can you believe it, some men who went out as interpreters with the first lot were such creatures that they made objections to having to groom their horses on active service — can you believe it — (they were Members of ‘Whites’ and were sent back!!), but anything not to be mixed up with such scum.  For of course you would never mind what you did — only there on Salisbury Plain when someone else might easily do it and you might be doing something else of more important training, as G[erard] T[horpe] said, it is waste of time.  As a matter of fact you’d want to do it for a bit to get to do it well.

Post goes.  Hugs, K.

That afternoon Nina wrote to Kittie:

your magnificent courage is just as wonderful as George’s and that is saying everything.  I feel I am perfectly useless and can do nothing for him nor for you — but love you both and that I do without measure.  Your faithful Dina

This clearly referred not just to Kittie’s work with the Red Cross, but to her fortitude in the face of Calderon’s obsession with getting to the front line.

Next entry: Status

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The thickness of events…

Posted on September 21, 2014 by Patrick Miles

When writing a biography, you can go for months in its subject’s life without hearing a word from them, as it were: no letters from them to anyone have survived, they are not recorded as having said anything to anyone else, indeed as having ‘been anywhere’ at all.

On the other hand, when long letters have survived from them every day and when they are caught up in cataclysmic events that are also affecting their friends and the whole nation, there is an almost overwhelming abundance of connections between their life and others’ and the whole country’s.  How does the biographer select from this thickness of events?  Someone told me that he thought the story of George Calderon in World War 1 was a book in itself (maybe, but not yet, please!).

Here are some strands in George Calderon’s life over the last four days that I doubt whether I could find space to weave into the biographical narrative.

On 19 September Calderon received news from Kittie that Jim Corbet had been badly wounded at the Marne (see my post of 8 September).  ‘Perhaps “badly” means half an arm or a leg gone; but I am sure it must be less than “dangerously”’, he replied to Kittie, and enclosed a letter for her to send on to Jim’s mother.  The day after, he heard from Kittie that Jim was better than expected.  In fact, we know from Jim Corbet’s diary that five days after he was wounded by shrapnel in three places the wounds were ‘healing nicely’, and eight days after the event an X-ray showed that he did not have a bullet in his stomach after all.  He arrived back in London twelve days after being wounded, ‘wearing the same pyjamas and dressing-gown together with a pair of khaki knickers and the woolly I was wearing when I had been hit.’  He was sent to Sister Agnes Hospital, Grosvenor Gardens.

I am told that most people do not post or read blogs on a Sunday, so I was going to take the day off myself, but today is such an important literary and national anniversary that I would anyway have had to mention it.  On this day, 21 September 1914 (a Monday), Laurence Binyon’s poem ‘For the Fallen’ was published in The Times.  It was written a while before at Polzeath, in response to the publication of the first B.E.F. casualty lists, and in effect contains the most-read lines of any of our War poets.  Binyon was a close friend of Calderon’s from their days together at Trinity College, Oxford.

Units of the Blues had seen action at Mons, Le Cateau and the Marne, and were now engaged in the chaotic Battle of the Aisne.  At Windmill Hill Camp officers received letters from their comrades at the Front, so they were well aware of who was being killed.  This led George Calderon to return to a theme that obviously preoccupied him — how men behaved when they actually went into battle:

Those Germans are piling up a big debt of vindictiveness; great slabs of conversation are concerned with casualties and rumoured casualties; ‘poor old Jimmie’s been killed’, ‘So and so’s other son is wounded’ and the like.  These things will be remembered when they charge; not in a terrifying silence, but with a sudden spontaneous cheer.

Amusingly, the ‘Russian theme’ suddenly pops up in George’s letter of 19 September.  ‘Amusingly’, because his knowledge of Russian was totally irrelevant in his new role, he seemed to have bundled all that into a cupboard and slammed the doors, but he was after all one of the top Russianists in the country and couldn’t forget it.

He observes the officers around him and compares them with War and Peace, one of his and Kittie’s favourite books:

[Tolstoy’s] types are here; one young commander (the young rule the old) is a bristly hairy ruddy Denisof, with black deep shining jolly eyes.  Another impudent faced Dolokhof commands another squadron, and spends a lot of time chaffing and ragging, with a serious face, a very tall fair lad, Lord Alastair something, who is an object of general sport, though not at all ridiculous, but, for all his youth, able to take care of himself, good humouredly, in simple philosophic phrases.

The last sentence has a rather Tolstoyan syntax, and in the same letter George even refers to the Ballets Russes, with whom he had been working in London up to the end of July:

In the sun today, the mellow autumn sun, the camp looks like the Polovtsian camp in ‘Prince Igor’, with tents and hills in groups, fading away into the distance; but no Polovtsiennes to dance among them to cheer your little Prince Igor.  The greyhounds [belonging to an officer] give a feminine touch. Ladies come in motorcars in the afternoon, a few, mothers and wives of officers, and walk about and have tea.

The ‘Polovtsian Dances’, choreographed by George’s friend Fokine, had created a sensation in London during Ballets Russes’ first, 1911 visit.  But what George is really hinting at here is his lack of female company and his own irresistible urge in female company to charm and lightly flirt.  As he wrote to Kittie in 1899: ‘I am undermined in all my actions by the desire to please an audience.’

Soon after the Fokines had arrived back in Paris, war was declared.  Usually they would now have returned to St Petersburg to perform in the winter season, but they were wondering how, with Russia at war as well, they were going to get there.  George was in touch with them by letter.

Next entry: 22 September 1914

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20 September 1914

Posted on September 20, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Calderon had only been separated from Kittie three days, but was missing her.  Yesterday was a Saturday.

My servant wanted to go up to see his wife; I thought of my old ‘ooman with a tearful sigh, and told him to stay as long as the regulations allowed.  The Colonel’s gone too and left the big dogged bullocky fellow named ‘Beef’ in charge; he’s the second in command; he’s Lord Tweedmouth.  I feel rather out of it not being the Marquis of anything or having three chargers and a motor car; but daresay it will come right in the end.  I’m a good deal alone, of course, being a new boy — even in the mess-tent.

He closed his letter yesterday with a list of things he needed (a sponge, 2 or 3 safety pins, an electric torch, a ‘cocoa-brick’), and the words ‘With greatest love’.

Kittie was right to worry about him and too much solitude: he was prone to plummeting depression in such circumstances, and on one occasion on Tahiti had almost suffered a nervous collapse.  But today, Sunday, he wrote to her that he felt ‘robuster’ and ‘more at home here’.  He covered three small sides with a list of more things he wanted her to buy and send down to him, some of them equestrian equipment, but closed with what seems a sudden development: ‘I’ve got my little pigeonhole on the letter-stand now, labelled “2nd Lieut. Calderon”.’  So although ‘only’ an interpreter, he had a foot on the military ladder.

Next entry: The thickness of events…

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Kittie’s feelings

Posted on September 19, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Kittie Calderon also wrote almost every day to George, but thirty years later she directed that her letters be burned after her death and only one has survived (from which I shall quote on 22 September).  Nevertheless, after the War she told Percy Lubbock how she herself viewed George’s going to serve with the Blues at Windmill Hill Camp after being thrown from his horse in London:

What I regretted was besides the fact of the horrid pain, that he should go into this strange world of the ‘Blues’ so unlike himself. I felt it would so handicap him and so stand in the way of the men there finding out what manner of man he was.  How much it may have done this I don’t know. […] His letters [tell] how much he felt like a very new boy on his first day at public school when he walked into Camp.  Also how nice and kind they were to him.  But I truly think that was one of the bravest things he ever did.

Next entry: 20 September 1914

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A possible penny drops

Posted on September 18, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Yesterday Calderon sent his wife three large closely written pages of letter, today he sends her four.  He describes tents, ‘messing’, people, clothes, furniture, military equipment, horses, exercises, soldiers, officers, all in vivid detail and thick with names.

His back was still painful and he would usually have to be heaved into the saddle.  At dinner on the 17th, however, he had made a surprising and useful acquaintance:

I sat between the jolly-faced (not handsome) fellow I mentioned yesterday and Surgeon-Major Pares, brother of Bernard Pares the Professor of Russian at Liverpool […].  Pares gave me belladonna lotion for my back, which took out all the pain so that I slept softly for some hours.  Though bed felt hard later on.

In 1909 George had been instrumental in setting up the Liverpool School of Russian Studies, to which Bernard Pares was Professor (later he became Director of London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies).

Although nominally only an interpreter, Calderon got up at 5.15 reveille today and reported for duty:

I went down to the parade of my Squadron, but nothing happened; they rode off (all very friendly greeting).  So I took my German to the mess tent, where the Colonel found me; said I had better ride, and ordered me a horse.  We set off, three together — the Colonel, myself and ‘Beef’ or ‘Beefy’ or ‘Beefer’, I haven’t discovered his name; the bald conscientious bullocky man who had the range finder yesterday — to find the Regiment in the hills.  As we galloped over the first I lost my cap and had to go back, but picked up the Colonel later, tracked him down with Beefer, in the corner of a field, visiting the machinegun section.  He explained how the machinegun was the ‘pivot of an attack’ that hinged round on it.  Range finding and judgment of distance.  Then we went through shallow woods and along bristly hill sides to find the squadrons: climbed a steep round hill and came to an old Roman Camp with trenches 20 feet deep; crossed the first and found one of the troop-horses lying dead in the second.

Unaccustomed to being picketed, the hunters and hacks in the camp break loose sometimes and run away at night and break their legs and necks in steep places in the dark.  Beefy and the Corporal-Bugler who rode with us climbed down and examined the body.  Then we rode down a long hill and came on the Regiment; three squadrons at long distances apart.  My cap blew back and hung on the back of my head by the chinstrap (which, like most, I wore under the chin, for there is a brisk half-gale still blowing) as I came down to the nearest squadron, a little spoiling the effect.  I followed the Colonel about wherever he went, dismounted now and then to rest the horse and hopped on nimbly, thanks to the belladonna lotion.  Sometimes we met Generals and things in the open […]. The Brigadier cropped up again and criticised and advised.  The Regiment formed column and line and changed direction to all the airts [quarters], and I spent my morning trying to steer clear and get out of the way; but kept being nearly caught by a sudden new evolution of the Squadrons or the machinegun section, which galloped nobly over dips and ditches, like two small boats in a storm.

[…]

Soldiers know one another so much, that they feel personally about the enemy: ‘Those are the fellows that killed dear old so-and-so, and so-and-so’.  They go out to meet real personal enemies.  And by the bye, soldiers are not called ‘Tommies’, so I gather, but ‘men’.

And so Calderon writes on.  He closes today’s letter to Kittie: ‘I have written at length to give you the first impressions.  After this, I shall not write so fully; for I must be using the time I am awake in study, of a hundred things.’  Yet through the next six weeks he does continue to write to her at length!

Along with other reasons that I have touched on, it begins to dawn on me that he wanted to join up and become ‘combatant’ for writerly reasons, although this is not once alluded to.  Perhaps at this stage he was not even aware of it himself.  He thought he was ‘odd man out’ in the Blues — although warmly accepted — because he was an ‘interpreter’ and ‘a private’, but actually his position approximates more to that of a war correspondent. Perhaps Colonel Wilson, whose wife had been a war correspondent during the Boer War, foresaw that, since he must have been aware that George was a professional writer.

These letters, which I have never read closely before, resemble those that he wrote Kittie whenever he was abroad: detailed descriptions, wry observations, thoughts, records, sometimes ink sketches.  Although his letters to her from Tahiti have been lost, they must have been like this, because he used them to invoke the spirit and facts of his 1906 stay on the island when he came to write his book in the winter of 1913/14.  Perhaps he would have done the same for a book about the Great War.

To write his early short stories, his two novels, his articles, his plays, and the letters that he used for Tahiti, he had had to have Kittie to write to and to bounce his writing off.  She was the exclusive ‘other’ of his life.  All the time he could write to her, he was in ‘touch’ with her.  ‘When he was at home’, she wrote later, ‘I hardly ever went away even for a day.  He at once seemed to feel left and lost.  He absolutely needed one.’

Next entry: Kittie’s Feelings

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17 September 1914

Posted on September 17, 2014 by Patrick Miles

In the morning, George and Kittie left Ringwood and travelled to Southampton.  Here they said goodbye for the time being and Kittie returned to Hampstead.  After lunch George caught the train to Ludgershall and walked to the vast Windmill Hill Camp above the village.  Presumably his luggage was still at Ludgershall station.

He wrote to her at six o’clock this evening:

The plain begins here, hill after hill of dried grass, broken only by the railway line and a road here and there, and clumps of trees, and camp after camp on every side; here simply masses of horses in line, with the little tents between.  Life Guards on both sides and the R[oyal]H[orse]G[uards] in the middle.  The brigadier just behind a little wood at the top, with a row of tents for his staff.  Little groups of motor cars in sheltered spots. Down on the lines, here and there a saddler, or an armourer’s tent, and Gipsy smithies, where chargers are being reshod between an anvil and a pile of wooden boxes.

I went to a big tent which I was told was the RHG mess and a group of very big men came out, and one of them took me to a little tent and produced the Colonel; who then introduced me to the group and took me inside the mess tent and introduced me to everyone else in there.  All very big and robust; one young man with a charming face; I didn’t catch their names, except one or two.  ‘Dick’ (I think his surname), a sharp-faced man of 35 with 10 inches of medal ribbons on his left chest, called his motorcar and chauffeur out of the wood for me and sent me down (nice man) to fetch my luggage up in it.  They all seem to know each other well and have short names, like ‘Beefy’ or ‘Chips’.

One resolute bald robust fellow was very busy between the tents with a new range finder, and they all followed him and watched and helped over that.  And I and the particularly pleasant-faced young man chatted about ranges and judgment of distance.

Inside the mess-tent, another big fellow (the Duke of Roxburghe, I think he was) exhibited and explained a new pocket cooking apparatus, which he had had put together, with collapsible drinking cup, and everything inside everything else; and they all considered that with the same grave attention as they did the range finder.

I left them as soon as I had my tent, and have spent the rest of the time alone in my tent and on a long walk round the brigade and the neighbouring hill, to take the stiffness out.  I was attached by the Colonel to C squadron […] and the Quartermaster fetched up a soldier who is to be my servant.  He told me, with what sounded uncommonly like a break in the voice, that he had no duties henceforth but to look after me; but I couldn’t think of anything to tell him to do.  His name is Paterson.  I must look into this.  If there is nothing for him to do for me, except fetch a little water, surely I could ‘double-up’ with someone else on half a man.

Reveille at 5.30, parade at 7.  I know nothing as yet, as to whether to fall in or not; but I shall go in case.  Anyway no more tonight.  I must go to the mess tent and find what change of clothes to make for dinner.

I kept clear of them today a little out of policy; to get them used to the sight of me, without worrying them.  But when it’s dark I’m bound to go as I can’t sit by the light of a dull dip.  Heaps of love.  P.

It is interesting how detachedly, almost anthropologically, Calderon observes ‘them’.  A ‘dip’ is a night-light, and P stands for ‘Peter’, or ‘Peety’.

Next entry: A possible penny drops

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16 September 1914

Posted on September 16, 2014 by Patrick Miles

This morning, ‘between us’ as Kittie put it, Calderon was got up and dressed, his luggage was put on (sic) the car, and he and Kittie came out of the house just after eight o’clock.  At that moment, a telegram was delivered to him from Colonel Wilson saying that he need not be in camp until the following day.

Since he was dressed and packed, Calderon decided he could not turn back.  The luggage was deposited at Waterloo Station and he went with Kittie to say goodbye to his only visitable relation in London, the painter Frank Calderon, and family.  This was possibly at 54 Baker Street, where Frank Calderon had run the School of Animal Painting since 1894. He then wired his mother at Crow Cottage, Ringwood, in the New Forest, to say that he and Kittie would be arriving this afternoon to stay the night.

Clara Calderon, née Storey, was the widow of Victorian painter and Keeper of the Royal Academy Philip Hermogenes Calderon.  Normally she lived in London, but she spent long holidays at her cottage in the New Forest, usually with one of her two daughters.

Next entry: 17 September 1914

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15 September 1914

Posted on September 15, 2014 by Patrick Miles

On this day, Calderon was thrown from his horse at the riding school.  He was quite a short man (five foot nine and a half), slightly built.  The horse tossed him against a wall and his back was very badly bruised.  He arrived home at 42 Well Walk in great pain. Unfortunately, he was supposed to leave with the Blues for Salisbury Plain next day.

The doctor said, of course he could not possibly go the next day. As he said it I wondered in my own mind if the doctor quite knew his man.  I said as much when alone with him.  He smiled and said the pain and stiffness would be such he could not possibly go.  In reply to my further question, ‘if he insisted would it make make him worse’, he said, no.  Moving him would do no harm, but he would not be able to go.

When I returned to George’s room from seeing the doctor off, he said: ‘Of course, you know I am going.’  Relays of hot fomentations went on all night and some little sleep towards morning — orders had been given to call him at 6 a.m.

(Kittie Calderon’s memoirs)

Next entry: 16 September 1914

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‘Who is George Calderon?’

Posted on September 13, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Obviously, this is a question I am often asked.  Sometimes it is even delivered with a kind of reproach, as to say: ‘Why are you writing this biography of somebody no-one knows, rather than of someone we all know, (a celebrity) like Charles Dickens or Katie Price?’ Someone even spluttered at me: ‘But nobody has ever heard of him!’, when the speaker himself had been at a well-attended lecture not long before at which Calderon’s translation of The Cherry Orchard was discussed.

Theatre people (Harold Hobson, Laurence Senelick, Jan McDonald and many more), literary people (Percy Lubbock, E.M. Forster, Derwent May), and Russianists, have always known who Calderon is, but of course he isn’t a household name.

Viktor Shklovsky wrote ‘there are no unrecognised geniuses’, but he was wrong.  Emily Dickinson, say, or Mendel, or Kafka, or Gerard Manley Hopkins, were unrecognised for a long time, and are hardly household names now!

In any case, ‘genius’ is not a Platonic Idea.  Shakespeare, I would contend, is a Renaissance genius, Dickens a Victorian genius, Dante a medieval genius…which is why they have not always been recognised as geniuses by later generations.  Calderon, in my view, was an Edwardian genius, and this is a variety that has not really been identified hitherto; indeed for some people it may be a contradiction in terms.

He was brilliant, and radical, in a fan of apparently unconnected fields — journalism, satire, Russian literature, drama, politics, anthropology, ballet — but until recently much of this work was not associated with him because it was published anonymously.  In any case, for seventy years his and his wife’s personal papers seemed to have disappeared without trace, so that those who did want to research his biography (and there were some) could not.  The extant core of the Calderons’ archive has only recently been assembled and sorted  (900 letters, 700 photographs, 250 books, etc).

So it is possible now to write a detailed narrative of Calderon’s life, quoting many personal letters, and to run this blog for 1914-15.  The factual, ‘historical’ answer to the question ‘Who was George Calderon?’ will be in the biography, then, but I hope readers will also find their own answer there, and in this blog, to the rather different question: ‘Who is George Calderon?’.

Next entry: 15 September 1914

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A biographer bifurcates

Posted on September 12, 2014 by Patrick Miles

The object of this blog has always been to present the why and how of George Calderon’s self-sacrifice in World War I; but to show these things by posting events and documents in a species of ‘real time’, exactly one hundred years after they were happening. It was very gratifying, then, to receive an email that described the blog as ‘a fascinating experiment in creative history’.

(But every so often I have nothing to show on that day, so you get digressions and commentary like this.)

I also said at the beginning that the timeline approach of the blog would be ‘a great help to me as I piece together the narrative of the last chapter of my biography’.  Where that is concerned, things haven’t turned out so straightforward.  There has been a development I didn’t foresee.

To compose a post, however short, for a specific day in the life of your man one hundred years ago, you have to check and recheck your facts.  Researching those from day to day has probably meant that I have gone more deeply into them, particularly their context, and discovered many more connections between them, than if I hadn’t been running the blog but just completing my research for the chapter and continuously writing it.  That’s got to be a good thing.  However, when I have gone back to writing the chapter, I’ve found that the nature and style of the blog have infected my writing of ‘continuous prose’.

Each posting presents a ‘moment’, whereas the chapter is ‘a story’.  It’s a bit like haikus: they can only stand alone, they can’t be linked to form a western-style plot (narrative poem). The posting implies an attempt at depth/verticality, whereas the chapter is progression/horizontality.  Some might say that the posting is ‘synchronic’, the chapter ‘diachronic’.  Or that the ‘chronotope’, i.e. ‘time/space form’, of a blog is quite different from that of a chapter in a biography.  Or that the blog is ‘paratactic’, i.e. juxtaposed fragments without conjunctions.  If someone comes to read this blog when it is over in July 2015, they will, of course, get a ‘story’, it will be a kind of narrative; but it will be a quite different kind of narrative from the 1914-15 chapter in my book.

Well, when I came from posting a few days blog to writing the next few hundred words of the chapter, dealing with the very same events, I found the natural urge was to use many of the same words, merely meld the moments together, and ‘under-propel’ the prose.  The day-by-day approach of the blog was watering down the narrative energy that biography must have.  Fortunately I spotted this, although it produced a day or two’s wobble. Basically, writing the blog and writing the book use different parts of your brain.

I’ve identified this bifurcation, so can try to do something about it.  But who can control their own brain?  I suppose I shall slowly manage to insulate the two areas from each other, but meanwhile I have to admit that the blog hasn’t had as positive an effect on writing and completing the biography as I’d hoped!

Next entry: ‘Who is George Calderon?’

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Things

Posted on September 10, 2014 by Patrick Miles

There is no documentation of what Calderon did between now and 15 September. Presumably, however, he had to set about equipping himself for active service.  Officers had to buy some of their equipment, clothes, and food themselves; they even had to pay a fee to join some regiments!  Similarly, they had to buy all the personal accessories they would need on a campaign.

Like many Edwardian men, George was particular about close shaving, well starched collars, quality toiletries and leather goods, personal hygiene etc.   This is a monogrammed linen face towel that may well have accompanied him into the field:

George Calderon Towel

What we know never occurred to him at this stage was that he might need a servant, or have to have one to go with his status.

Next entry: A biographer bifurcates

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9 September 1914

Posted on September 9, 2014 by Patrick Miles

On this day the B.E.F. began to cross the Marne.  Momentously, an emissary from Moltke had arrived the day before and now persuaded both von Kluck and von Bülow that they must retreat northeastwards or be encircled by the Allies and destroyed.  The Battle of the Marne, which had been on a knife edge for four days, was now, at the cost of more casualties per day than any Western Front battle ever, becoming a victory for Joffre.  The great Schlieffen Plan for defeating France was running into the ground.  Some said it was the turning point of the war.  Moltke had a nervous breakdown.

It was about now that George Calderon’s strategy for becoming combatant came to sudden and unexpected fruition.

He had been continuing his officer training with the Inns of Court Regiment, attending the Royal Horse Guards (‘The Blues’) riding school every day for a fortnight, and preparing himself for military interpreting in French, Flemish and German, when he was approached by the Blues themselves about accompanying them as an interpreter to the Front.  George had evidently caught the eye of Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Chesney Wilson, commanding officer of the Blues, Old Etonian, and himself in his fiftieth year.

Kittie takes up the story:

 He had a great respect and gratitude for Colonel Wilson — gratitude because he took him on as interpreter and also because of the way he encouraged him to come and learn all he could at camp.  The other interpreters only turned up just before they sailed.  This made me think Colonel Wilson recognised the stuff this man was made of who came to him at the age of 45 in a private’s uniform of the Inns of Court — on the recommendation of the Corporal Major of the riding school!  [Wilson] heard more about him from others later but George always said it was the Corporal Major who got him the job.

Calderon had by now received a testimonial to his knowledge of French and Russian from A.R. Dryhurst, Assistant Secretary at the British Museum, and he presumably produced this and his Oxford M.A. certificate as proof of competence, since both were found together among his papers.

Next entry: Things

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A friend is wounded

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Patrick Miles

On 8 September 1914 the B.E.F. moved towards the Marne and began to be attacked by von Kluck’s rearguard.  In one such engagement a dear friend of the Calderons was hit by shrapnel.  This was the 22-year-old Sir Roland James Corbet, serving with the 1st Battalion of the Coldstream Guards, which had been in France since 13 August.

‘Jim’, as he was known to all, was the surviving son of Sir Walter and Lady Caroline Corbet, and the latter (‘Nina’) was Kittie Calderon’s lifelong friend.  His father had died in 1910.  Nina had married Reginald Astley in 1913 and that summer George and Kittie attended the public festivities at Acton Reynald in Shropshire to celebrate Jim’s coming of age.  Jim had a very strong sense of duty, but was kind, self-effacing, and a serious ornithologist.  The present that Kittie and George gave him was two books by the naturalist W.H. Hudson.

Jim Corbet c. 1914

Jim Corbet
c. 1914

As Jim described it in his diary:

We were ordered to advance and just as we had got through a little village called La Trétoire we were told to get into Artillery formation.  Half my platoon under me, we went on down the road, and the other half went off to the right.  I was just starting to double when BANG — a German shrapnel arrived and burst just right over us.  It knocked down every single man in the half platoon, I believe.  I went over with the rest and found myself on my hands and knees in the road not quite knowing whether I was killed or not. However, as I saw the others crawling away, I thought I had better do so too.  So I crawled to the side and lay down beside a small apple tree some ten yards off the road.  I felt pretty bad then and I remember clearly wondering whether I ought not to try and help some of the other men who had been hit and were lying in front of me.  But somehow I seemed to have no energy in me. […] the Germans burst about three more shells in the same spot.  […]  As a man in my platoon lifted me up, I noticed the trunk of the apple tree I had been behind was quite studded with shrapnel bullets, so it was lucky I had been able to crawl behind it.

He had been hit in three places and it was thought a bullet had lodged in his stomach. Several men around him had been killed.

Next entry: 9 September 1914

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7 September 1914

Posted on September 7, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Von Kluck now moved the left wing of his First Army almost forty miles northwards across the front of the B.E.F. to join his counter-attack on the French Sixth Army.  On this day the B.E.F. marched about fifteen miles towards him, but hardly engaged with the cavalry screen he had left behind.  The French armies on the B.E.F.’s right were still locked in bloody and indecisive battles with von Bűlow’s Second Army.

Next entry: A friend is wounded

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6 September 1914

Posted on September 6, 2014 by Patrick Miles

The initial strength of the B.E.F. was four infantry divisions and one cavalry.   However, the cavalry had been particularly hard worked: they had been the only effective cover and communication between the B.E.F.’s two army corps during the whole retreat.  On 6 September 1914, therefore, the 2nd Cavalry Division was formed under Brigadier-General Hubert Gough, and it was soon to be in the field.  It could only be a matter of time before a third division would have to be formed.

On this day the First Battle of the Marne proper began along the whole front.  The French Sixth Army on the B.E.F.’s left had lost the element of surprise on 5 September and von Kluck now swung the right wing of his First Army northwards to meet them.  This opened a gap, whilst von Kluck’s left wing was being engaged by the French Fifth Army and von Bűlow’s Second Army being attacked by the French Ninth.  Into this gap the B.E.F. began cautiously to creep.

Next entry: 7 September 1914

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4 September 1914

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Patrick Miles

This evening Joffre was brought a message from Sir John French that the B.E.F. was ‘prepared to assume the offensive’, i.e. at least five days earlier than he had told Joffre on 30 August.  So what had put some fire into French’s belly?

On 1 September he had been confronted at the British Embassy in Paris by the War Minister, Lord Kitchener, in full field marshal’s uniform and medals, and given his orders from Asquith’s government: he was to get the B.E.F. into the fighting line and ‘conform to the movements of the French army’.

Joffre could now launch his great plan, for which he had been frantically bringing up troops from the Alsace front and Paris garrison.  The B.E.F. was to provide the base of a sack whose left side was the French Sixth Army and right side the Fifth.  These sides could now fall on von Kluck’s exhausted and disoriented First Army, which was blundering into the trap.  Joffre decided to launch the offensive on 6 September.  At 9.15 this evening, 4 September, Sir John French telegraphed his consent.

This development would very soon impact on George Calderon’s private campaign to get to the Front with a regular company…

Next entry: 6 September 1914

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