A correction?

Posted on September 3, 2014 by Patrick Miles

It was perhaps a bit glib to say in the blog for 30 August that the B.E.F. ‘simply had to regroup’ etc.  However, Arthur Moore in The Times was certainly wrong to describe the B.E.F. as a ‘broken army’, and Sir John French wrong to believe it had to ‘refit’ beyond the Seine.  It represented about 3% of the allied force and the French Fourth, Ninth, Fifth and Sixth Armies were now protecting it.  The B.E.F. needed rest, but it was possible to re-energise it to go on the attack — as events would shortly show.

Next entry: 4 September 1914

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The Peter Pan Factor

Posted on September 2, 2014 by Patrick Miles

If ‘Adventure’ was essential to Calderon, as Kittie said, what part did this play in his so desperately wanting to get to the Front?  Probably quite a lot, as my last quotation in ‘Thirty Quotes from George Calderon’ on this blog suggests.

It is well known that upper- and middle-class Edwardian women were attracted to being V.A.D. nurses also by the ‘adventure’ it promised — a form of emancipation from their conventional social identities.  But although their experiences were every bit as visceral and traumatic as the men’s (see Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth or Enid Bagnold’s A Diary without Dates), they were in less danger of being killed outright or physically maimed.  For the men to say that they were going to Flanders ‘for the adventure’, strikes us as chillingly trivial or romantic.  Did they actually believe with Peter Pan that ‘to die will be an awfully big adventure’?

This could only be entertained by someone who did not know, could not yet imagine, what dying on a World War I battlefield was like.  And it is one of the most difficult things, I find, to get one’s head round today about the attitudes of public school men like George Calderon to signing up in the first year of the war.

Next entry: A correction?

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Kittie again

Posted on September 1, 2014 by Patrick Miles

The other ‘st’ word of the Edwardian period is ‘stout’, as in ‘stout fellows’ (used by soldiers of their comrades).  It is described in dictionaries today as ‘arch.‘, and meant ‘dauntless’ — another word that today surely qualifies as ‘archaic’. In 1914 ‘stout’ seems to have been a more middle-class or colloquial version of ‘stalwart’ or ‘staunch’.  It could therefore have been applied to Kittie Calderon’s stance towards George’s desire to go to war, but it would be impossible for the biographer to use it today, because of its dominant meaning ‘inclined to corpulence’ (O.E.D.).  Kittie was actually slim and short with very pale skin, and nicknamed ‘Swan’…

Next entry: The Peter Pan Factor

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30 August 1914

Posted on August 30, 2014 by Patrick Miles

On this day Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief of the B.E.F., telegraphed Joffre, his French counterpart, that he could not contemplate putting the B.E.F. back in the front line ‘for at least ten days’ and was intending to withdraw beyond the Seine.  Actually he wanted to pull the B.E.F. out of France altogether.

It beggars belief.  After a fierce rearguard action by II Corps at Le Cateau on 26 August, the B.E.F. had managed to complete a disorderly retirement to the Aisne, although it had lost 15,000 killed, wounded or taken prisoner.  It simply had to regroup, refresh, and display inspiring leadership.  Many of French’s own colleagues thought he was not up to the job, but his telegram suggests he had lost his nerve and was completely without understanding of the political issues, namely Britain’s commitment to the French through the Entente and to the Belgians through the 1839 Treaty of London.

On the same day, the ‘Amiens Dispatch’ was published in The Times.  It came from the newspaper’s reporter Arthur Moore in France and described the B.E.F. as ‘broken’.  It was so graphic that Asquith and others denounced it as sensationalist.  Moore concluded that the B.E.F. had suffered ‘terrible losses and requires immediate and immense reinforcement […] it needs men, men, and yet more men’.  At least this led in the following weeks to some of the highest enlistment totals of the war.

Next entry: Kittie again

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Kittie

Posted on August 29, 2014 by Patrick Miles

It should be clear from my posts of 18 and 27 August that Kittie Calderon felt deeply frustrated by her husband’s ‘finality’, as she called it, about going to the Front when no-one was asking him to enlist at the age of forty-five.

Since they married in November 1900 they had become a very close couple indeed, almost symbiotic (Kittie was also his literary agent).  The thought that George might actually get killed was, I believe, terrifying to her.

But she had always claimed to take the view that a man must do what a man must do. During the London Dock Strike of 1912 she fretted that he was risking his life, and he was. Nevertheless she wrote that there would have been ‘no smallest use’ in her saying ‘is it fair to me that you should risk your life?’, because ‘it was his job — he saw it — he had to do it’.

When Calderon went on recuperative cruises, or on a six-month anthropological quest to Tahiti, she did not accompany him, because she felt ‘Adventure was essential for George — and a man can’t have completeness of adventure if he has got a woman with him’.

One of the biggest difficulties of understanding a past and writing the biography of someone who lived in it, is that people used words which still exist in our language but now carry a completely different weight.  For the Edwardians, ‘staunch’, or ‘stalwart’, or ‘gallant’ (of an officer), or ‘charming’ (of literature) embodied very important values that we have lost.  Kittie Calderon was ‘staunch’ and ‘stalwart’.

Her friends, however, were appalled at what George was doing.  Kittie had lived with her mother Mary Hamilton all her life, even when married, but her mother had died in 1906, and because of a geographical split in her father John Hamilton’s large family Kittie was left with hardly any relations in mainland Britain.

Next entry: 30 August 1914

 

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Interpreter preparation

Posted on August 28, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Calderon was fluent in French, had ‘learnt Flemish while shaving in the mornings’ (according to his composer friend Martin Shaw), and incredibly enough had once made a special study of Walloon dialects.  His German was also competent.  He had absolutely the right languages to be an interpreter in France and Belgium, therefore, but his register in these languages was purely literary.  He now had to set about methodically learning lists of military vocabulary in French and Flemish — and learn them fast.  Fortunately, he was a past master at this kind of intensive language acquisition.

He would also need an official testimony to his proficiency.  In his thirties he had worked for a translation/interpreting agency, Flowerdew’s, and he had only recently interpreted for Fokine in French and Russian.  But he had no certification of this experience. The only time he had not been self-employed was 1900-1903 when he had worked at the British Museum as an Assistant in Printed Books.  For this he had had to sit the Civil Service examinations in Russian and French, in which he scored high marks.  He now wrote to the B.M. for a reference that would attest to the latter.

Next entry: Kittie

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Confusion, or subtlety?

Posted on August 27, 2014 by Patrick Miles

From a hundred years on, it is difficult to make sense of Calderon’s new situation.

If he was taking Hedley’s advice that the quickest way of getting to the Front was as a military interpreter, why was he continuing his officer training course with the Inns of Court Regiment?  British Army interpreters in France, of whom there were not many because the French had organised them in advance, seem to have come from a variety of non-commissioned ranks.  Calderon wanted to become combatant, but during combat interpreters were usually put in a safe place. Conversely, if he had decided to stay with the Inns of Court Regiment, why couldn’t he improve his riding skills with them?  Did he tell the Colonel at the Inns of Court O.T.C. that he was aiming to become a military interpreter as soon as possible?  If so, what was the Colonel’s reaction? In the fullness of time the Colonel could get him a commission — the I.C.O.T.C. trained 11,000 officer cadets in the First World War who were then commissioned into regular regiments — but could he get him a job as a military interpreter with a regiment that was about to be sent into action? Or was Calderon relying on Hedley and his other military contacts to pull that off?

The facts seem to be that after Haldane’s military reform of 1908 the Inns of Court Regiment became basically an officer training unit and Reserve infantry regiment.  There were probably no facilities, therefore, for intensive equestrian training, so for that Calderon had to go to the Royal Horse Guards’ riding school.  At forty-five he found it hard work. Yes, interpreters were non-combatant, but in Kittie’s words:

This non-combatant commission did not for one moment take me in — I knew it was only regarded as a stepping-stone to a combatant one.  He felt sure if he could only get out there the combatant one would soon come along and no fuss about age.

But for that to happen, of course, Calderon had to have qualified as an officer; hence he had to stay the course with the Inns of Court Regiment.  His contradictory-looking actions were more likely, then, to be deep strategy of the kind that his mind relished!

It still did not solve the problem of how he was going to find a combatant regiment that would take him on as an interpreter once he had finished his advanced riding lessons, interpreter preparation, and officer-training…

Next entry: Interpreter preparation

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‘The Godfather in War’

Posted on August 26, 2014 by Patrick Miles

About now 1914, George Calderon went again to see his golfing acquaintance Coote Hedley. He turned up at his house at 9.30 in the evening, wearing his O.T.C. ‘reach-me-down’. However, as Hedley told Mrs Hedley, ‘even in that awful old Inns of Court private’s uniform […] he managed to look such a soldier.’

It seems very likely that Calderon did not know how high in the war machine Coote Hedley really stood.  Hedley was made a General Staff Officer, Grade 1, at the War Office in 1911 and was in command of the Geographical Section, which had to provide the British Army with the best possible maps of every area of the world other than the UK.  (In 1916 this Section became part of Military Intelligence.)

Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley, c. 1920

Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley
c. 1920

As Hedley wrote in 1920, Calderon made it clear that his ‘heart’s desire’ was to ‘get to the front as soon as possible’.  Applying his intimate knowledge of the military mind, Hedley now advised George that at his age ‘the most feasible way of doing this appeared to be to go as an interpreter, for he was an accomplished linguist’.  Calderon took this on board.  He then asked if there was anything else he could do to ‘get out’.

I said, ‘An interpreter should be able to ride.  Can you ride?’  ‘Not very well,’ he said, ‘but I can learn.’  I said, ‘Have you any riding breeches?’  He said, ‘No.’  I lent him a pair of these necessary articles and he was in the riding school of the ‘Blues’ at 7.30 a.m. the next morning.

Between themselves, George and Kittie dubbed Hedley ‘The Godfather in War’.

Next entry: Confusion, or subtlety?

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25 August 1914

Posted on August 25, 2014 by Patrick Miles

On this day the first accounts of the Battle of Mons started appearing in British newspapers.  The Times headed its main report ‘Namur Lost, German Success in Belgium’ and led off: ‘The battle is joined and has so far gone ill for the Allies.’  Elsewhere an editorial entitled ‘The Germans Strike Hard’ admitted: ‘Yesterday [when the B.E.F. had retreated further southwards] was a day of bad news, and we fear that more must follow.’

However, after it came another editorial headed ‘England’s Call’, which appealed to men to join a ‘new army’ that Kitchener was assembling: ‘We shall want every man who is able and willing to do his duty by his country in this crisis of England’s fate.  It would be rank folly to reject such men.’  Interestingly, it made no reference to age.  The numbers of men volunteering now rocketed.

Next entry: ‘The Godfather in War’

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23 August 1914

Posted on August 23, 2014 by Patrick Miles

At about 7 a.m. today the Germans began to attack British positions around Mons.  It was the British Expeditionary Force’s first action of the war.  At first the German surges were mown down by rifle-fire.  Gradually, however, von Kluck’s troops gained a foothold south of the canal and advanced in overwhelming numbers.  The B.E.F. lost about 1600 men (including prisoners) and fell back a few miles.  By nightfall the Germans had taken Mons.

Next entry: 25 August 1914

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…and impatient!

Posted on August 20, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Calderon had not by now heard whether he had been given a commission, so he went to see his golfing acquaintance Lieutenant-Colonel Coote Hedley, who lived not far away in Belsize Avenue, to ask what he, George, could do to hasten becoming ‘combatant’.

‘My dear fellow, unless it comes to a case of the nation in arms you’ll never be accepted as a combatant,’ Hedley told him straight.

Events were to show that this was not accurate: before long the territorials were being drafted into France.  But Calderon could not wait till then.

Next entry: 23 August 1914

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Determined

Posted on August 18, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Calderon’s approach to issues of the day (Russia, suffragism, unionism) was to study them in depth, analyse them, then decide what was the right course of action for him and stick to it through thick and thin.  This was why many of his friends called him the most honest man they knew.  He always did what he believed.

During the Coal Strike of 1912, which brought Edwardian Britain to its knees, he came to the conclusion that the miners deserved more pay and better working conditions but ‘making war on the Community’ to achieve them was not right; therefore ordinary citizens should go to work in the mines to show that the Community would not be bullied. When he took his curtain call after the first night of his play The Fountain in Oxford on 4 March 1912, he made a passionate speech calling on undergraduates to meet him next day to form a Strike Emergency Committee and go down the mines.  However, he had not told Kittie that he was going to do this and as she listened to him she was ‘simply cold with terror’, as she wrote later.  He spent the next five months raising volunteers to work in the mines and as stevedores during the London Dock Strike.

The third and last time I was up against that sense of finality in him  was when the War came.

I couldn’t say any exact moment when I grasped that it meant going to any of the Fronts.  It was home defence that was in my mind at the very beginning of things. […] but certainly well before August was over I was up against the other quite definitely.

He had decided what he should do.

Next entry: …and impatient!

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Writer’s self-block?

Posted on August 16, 2014 by Patrick Miles

There is no evidence that Calderon wrote anything new in 1914 after signing up.  Yet the previous seven months had been packed with literary-theatrical work: he had written or assembled most of his posthumous best-seller Tahiti, finished a pantomime The Brave Little Tailor with William Caine (music by Martin Shaw), translated the international sensation Reminiscences of Tolstoy (by Il’ia Tolstoi), worked as interpreter/fixer for Ballets Russes during their London visit, and written two libretti for Michel Fokine, Diaghilev’s choreographer.  The aborted trip to the Isle of Wight at the end of July seems to have been the first break he had.

Now, judging by his letter to his mother yesterday, a day’s military training left him with no time or energy to write.  However, he had always been so ruthless at prioritising that some of his friends felt he just ‘dropped’ projects and causes when he got tired of them. Perhaps he had simply lost the inclination to write?  Although he did not share with many people his reasons for joining up, his overriding personal priority seems to have become to contribute to defeating the Kaiserreich’s attack on freedom and decency.

Calderon’s lifelong friend Laurence Binyon remembered how at a dinner party around this time George ‘startled the company by maintaining that England never fought a war except for an idea’.

Next entry: Determined

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14 August 1914

Posted on August 14, 2014 by Patrick Miles

The British Expeditionary Force was still moving up to join the French Fifth Army near the Belgian border, and in London today the weather was ‘grilling hot’ (Mark Bostridge, The Fateful Year).  That evening George Calderon wrote to Clara Calderon in Hampshire:

My dear Mother,

Just a line before I go to bed, which I shall be doing about half-past nine.  Not much time for anything, and pretty tired of a night.  Get up about 5.30, read military books; breakfast at 8; go off early, usually with a bit of shopping to do, a knife or a compass or something to buy.  Drill all the morning in the beautiful garden of Lincoln’s Inn, among the Chancery lawyers: the rest of the battalion in the Temple Garden and Gray’s Inn.

In the afternoon, more drill, and lectures on the grass under the trees.  Tea, and then signalling, and back home for dinner; a little bit of reading and then bed.

Waiting for news from the War Office; our Colonel has recommended me for a commission, and in a few days I hope to know the result.  Till then, rather unsettled.

We had expected to be sent to a camp; but nothing is heard of it.  No uniform even yet; we go about in knickerbockers or flannel suits and leather belts.

Last Sunday we had a capital day prancing like goats among the bracken in Richmond Park, attacking a hill.

I wonder you don’t all want to be up in London, when history is being made at such a pace — to keep level with the latest news.

Kittie sits patching me shirts and sewing blankets, meditating Red Cross and what not…

Clearly Calderon was training hard.  He had probably ‘cultivated’ the Colonel, who may have been not much younger than himself and certainly his social equal, as this was his method of getting what he wanted in subsequent regiments.  But the military reality of the situation in the Inns of Court O.T.C. seems indicated by what they were wearing (Kittie called it ‘a reach-me-down out of the general pile!’).

Next Entry: Writer’s self-block?

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A biographer worries…

Posted on August 13, 2014 by Patrick Miles

A big challenge for the biographer when his subject died in the trenches is, frankly, stylistic: should he/she go with the deepening muffled drums, the lugubrious blanket that descends on your prose as the end draws closer?

No, in my opinion.  The biographer must carry on as though he/she does not know the end. He/she must always write ‘in the present’ and not give way to culturally approved, even ‘ritualised’, ways of  narrating World War I death.  Leave it to your subject to say when he/she was becoming depressed by it all.

About three years ago, the last sentence of the last chapter of George Calderon’s life ‘came’ to me.  I filed it in memory and lived with it for two years.   Then it struck me as too portentous and another came to me.  Since then I have binned about six ‘last sentences’. Now I understand that I have to live with no last sentences at all.  The story of his last ten months has to be made present to the reader as I write it, and that is all.  Where the last sentence is concerned, what will be will be.

Tomorrow, then, back to the ‘present’ (August 1914).

Next Entry: 14 August 1914

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A biographer dreads…

Posted on August 11, 2014 by Patrick Miles

A very successful biographer asked me how George Calderon died.  I replied that he disappeared in the smoke of battle.  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s lucky for you: you’ve got a clean ending, not long years of decline, dementia etc.’  As a technical observation, I suppose, that’s true.  But I have to say I’ve long dreaded reaching that ending.  I didn’t like Calderon much when I first encountered him thirty years ago, but over the last three years of researching and writing his biography I’ve got closer and closer to him.  I feel I understand him and deeply sympathise with him.  Knowing how his life ended before getting to it (in a way, before he knew) is depressing; of course I baulk at parting from him. Yet I know that the aftermath of his death is inspiring, and the thirty-five years by which Kittie survived him were filled with love and a kind of heroism. So actually there will be two chapters beyond Calderon’s death; the book itself will end in 1950.

Next Entry: A biographer worries…

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