The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (32 page)

Until the King arrived
, the order was to ‘Stand easy’. With five thousand pairs of eyes directed at him, John watched the small ripples of movement that ran up and down the lines of men as they shifted about on their feet and clapped their hands to keep warm. While he did not share their enthusiasm for the war, he was stoic in his approach to it. ‘It is a mouldy business. God knows how long it will last,’ he confided in a letter to Charlie: ‘As far as I can see there is no reason why it shouldn’t last for over a year, or even two years. Anyhow, there it is. It will have to be seen through.’

At Stockwood Park
, it was the long evenings in the officers’ mess, rather than the interminable route marches and the monotonous hours spent drilling on the parade ground, that John found challenging. The week after war was declared, he had turned down the opportunity to switch from the Leicestershires to one of the smart Guards’ regiments. His duty, he believed, lay with his county regiment: he felt obliged to serve alongside men who came from the estates that he would one day inherit. His decision set him apart from his fellow officers: the North Midland Division was composed entirely of other county regiments, with the consequence that he was the only titled officer on the staff.
The others – the sons of brewers
, woollen hose manufacturers, and colliery, brick factory and tannery owners – had grown up in the industrial towns that gave the Black Country its name. Feeling friendless, and anxious to ingratiate himself, John had sought Charlie’s help: ‘He made a
great
point of getting his father to send some grouse as soon as possible for his Staff mess,’ Charlie told Violet after seeing John briefly in London: ‘They are 10 people. So 5 or 6 brace would be the least to send, and if it can be done, it should be done
at once
. The idea is that it would be thought a very nice attention from Henry, and also it would be a great thing for John, who is, of course, very shy among people none of whom he knows, and wants to be as nice and attractive as he can be. Vegetables from Belvoir he also wants. The General is fond of
good young salads. He says it would be best to address these things to the General himself at Stockwood Park.’

Facing the prospect of months – if not years – in close proximity to his fellow officers, John was hoping to persuade General Stuart Wortley to find places for his friends in the division. Having failed to obtain a commission in other regiments, a number of his contemporaries from Eton had written to ask if they could join the Leicestershires. One of them was Henry Bunbury, the son of Sir Charles Bunbury, 10th Baronet:

The Manor House

Mildenhall

Suffolk

My dear Beaver

In desperation I am sending you a line to ask if you could get, by any chance, myself and Reggie
*
commissions in your Regiment? We have been trying every known bloody thing, but the answer is ‘we will let you know later’ or ‘you are not wanted.’ So here we are doing bum all and thoroughly well fed up.

Reg has tried Needham
^†
– he, I believe, is in the front of the show somewhere. Julian Martin Smith,
^‡
I hear from Reg, has got out with the Intelligence crowd. By the way, all the soldiering we have had was in the dog porters at Eton. I did about 18 months I think as a tommy, and Reg was in the band, if I remember right, but does that matter much?

I don’t suppose you will have a minute to write a long letter, Beaver, but if you could, just drop either of us a line to say what you think we had better do. If we could get into your show so much the better.

So long, Beaver, and the best of luck.

Guy Charteris, the second son of the Earl of Wemyss, had also written:

My Dear John,

I have been unable to join Ego’s
*
regiment and am making frantic efforts elsewhere. I suppose you could not get me a commission in yours?

I got the news of the fall of Namur yesterday and food for much thought it gave me. Things look bloody bad. Our troops are bound to lose heavily whilst retiring, especially cavalry. People will cease to laugh at German shock tactics soon. I hope you are enjoying yourself and that your men are giving short shrift to all deaf mutes who fail promptly to answer a challenge. Please give me a sketch of your life.

I am just off to London to importune the War Office in general and ‘Uncle Jack’,
^†
the Under Sec. in particular.

8 battleships and 2 cruisers spend considerable amounts of their time off Littlesham protecting the Dab Beds and Kentish Plovers, presumably for the Prussian foe.

Yours, Guy C

It was a quarter to eleven when the King’s car, a ‘fine six-cylinder Daimler’, drew up on the parade ground. As General Stuart Wortley and John greeted the King, the order was given for the General Salute. ‘
Just as His Majesty took the salute
,’ the local paper reported, ‘the sun was making a pretty successful effort to shine boldly through a rift in the clouds. With no brightly-coloured uniforms or brave trappings to catch the eye, it would have been a dull scene but for this touch of sunlight, which was reflected in myriads of flashes as swords and rifles, with bayonets fixed, were brought to the “present”.’

Following the salute, the King went over to inspect the troops. As he did so, one of the battalion’s bands struck up the national anthem, the notes of which were barely heard above the wind.

Only a portion of the twelve thousand
-strong division could be accommodated on the makeshift parade ground, which until August had been the polo ground. Yet still, it took the King half an hour to inspect the five thousand troops. ‘The faces of those he spoke to wore one common expression,’ the newspaper reported: ‘of enthusiasm at the prospect of leaving shortly for France, and of devotion for His Majesty, who stood in front of them, dressed in khaki, like them. “We’re counting the days to the off, Sire”; “We’ll be in Berlin before you know it,” they replied to his solicitous enquiries.’

As he progressed through the ranks of infantry and artillery, the King, a slight figure, barely five foot six inches tall, had to look up to every one of the soldiers he passed.
In September 1914
, a man had to stand five feet eight to get into the army. A month later, so great was the need for recruits, the minimum height requirement was lowered to five foot five; in November, after the losses sustained in the First Battle of Ypres, it was lowered again, to five foot three.

After completing his inspection
, the King returned to a spot near his car to watch the troops march past. The Duke of Rutland joined him. Through their grandparents’ friendship, they had known each other since they were children. For a full thirty-five minutes the troops streamed past, before splitting into columns to march through the park. The infantry led the way, then came the artillery, with the Field Ambulance bringing up the rear; the beat of a drum and the sound of a bugle set the pace.

Standing only a few yards from the soldiers, Henry looked on with pride. Many of the faces were as familiar to him as they were to John. He knew a large number of the men in the two Leicestershire battalions – of which he was Honorary Colonel – and there were others he recognized. The soldiers in the Sherwood Forester battalions came from Alfreston, Ilkeston and Bakewell – towns that lay within his Derbyshire estates.

From the outset, Henry had embraced the war wholeheartedly. He subscribed to the view – widespread in the popular press – that war would be good for the country: the unity, dedication and sacrifice that it demanded would shake England out of the sloth induced by
years of peace and prosperity. It was a view promoted by his close friend, Edmund Gosse, the influential editor and critic, and a frequent guest at Belvoir. ‘
War is the sovereign disinfectant
and its red stream of blood is the Condy’s Fluid that cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect,’ Gosse wrote in a much discussed essay published in the
Edinburgh Review
: ‘Our late past years of luxury and peace have been founded on a misconception of our aims as a nation, of our right to possess a leading place in the sunlighted spaces of the world. We have awakened from an opium-dream of comfort, of ease, of that miserable poltroonery of the “sheltered life”. Our wish for indulgence of every sort, our laxity of manners, our wretched sensitiveness to personal inconvenience, these are suddenly lifted before us in their true guise as the spectres of national decay; and we have risen from the lethargy of our dilettantism to lay them, before it is too late, by the flashing of the unsheathed sword.’

Other leading cultural figures took up Gosse’s theme, among them H. G. Wells, whose jingoistic articles were appearing in the
Daily Chronicle
: ‘One talks and reads of the heroic age and how the world has degenerated. But indeed this is the heroic age, suddenly come again. No legendary feats of the past, no battle with dragons or monstrous beasts, no quest or feat that man has hitherto attempted can compare with this adventure, in terror, danger and splendour.’

The notion that there was something wrong
with England, that, like some Edwardian glutton, it must take the cure, was held across the political spectrum. ‘Diagnoses of that disease varied,’ the historian Samuel Hynes wrote, ‘depending on what guilts, resentments, private quarrels and self-interests the diagnostician brought to the case. But most Englishmen who confronted the question agreed that whatever the disease was, it had deflected the nation from its proper course. The war had been sent to put England right.’

The years before the war had been the most divisive that anyone could remember. Trades unions, the Suffragettes, and the situation in Ireland were all exerting pressures against established society and its mores. In 1912, the government had once again tried – and failed – to get a Home Rule bill for Ireland through Parliament; in the same
year, the miners went on strike for seven weeks, and the Suffragettes began their attacks against London property. By the spring of 1914, the sense of threat had greatly increased. Ireland was in a state close to civil war and British troops at the Curragh were threatening to mutiny. In London, the suffragettes’ campaign accelerated to new levels of violence as houses, churches and public galleries were smashed and women rioted in front of Buckingham Palace. Class conflict was also rife: for the first time, in a bid to secure higher wages and workers’ rights, the trades unions were proposing to call a General Strike.

‘
I do not suppose any country
was more actively engaged in quarrelling amongst itself than was England at the very time war was being sprung upon us,’ Henry told his estate workers at a recruitment meeting in late August: ‘Now we must put those quarrels behind us and pull together to defeat the worst menace the world has ever faced. I have stood on this platform on a good many occasions before now, but never on an occasion when I felt more ready to do what little I can to try and help the country.’

His motives were not entirely altruistic. The Edwardian era, with its eight years of radical Liberal government, had eroded his authority both locally and nationally. Lloyd George’s vicious attacks against Britain’s dukes had called into question his very existence: ‘A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep up as two dreadnoughts, and Dukes are just as great a terror, and they last longer,’ the Chancellor of the Exchequer famously remarked in his ground-breaking speech at Limehouse. The taxes he had introduced – coming as they did on top of the agricultural depression – were crippling Henry, reducing his capacity to hold sway in his locality through the distribution of jobs and largesse. Simultaneously, the government’s Parliament bill had dramatically clipped his political power. Passed on 10 August 1911, it removed the aristocracy’s right of veto over financial legislation and restricted their veto over ordinary legislation to two years. A diehard Conservative, Henry had resisted the bill to the last. The war, he hoped, would reassert his moral authority. It demanded discipline, obedience and endurance – values that turned on deference and a unity of purpose.

But though he welcomed the war, he doubted that it would be won easily. ‘
There is one point I particularly want to press
on you today,’ he urged his audience: ‘Some people seem to think that by one great strategical coup, or one great victory, the war might come to a premature or rapid end. But it will not. It is going to be a very long war, a war which will tax to the utmost the energies and resources of every country involved in it. It is undoubtedly a war that will be a record war. Though not one that we will be proud of possessing. It has now come out officially that Germany has been preparing for it for a great number of years past. The German nation has been breeding men solely for the purpose of becoming soldiers, and they have evolved one of the most tremendous wars ever thrown upon an astonished and horrified world. It has been manufactured in a most careful way, by the most skilful of men who care not a rap for what it might mean to country, whether that country be big or small. This is the engine against which we have to fight, and it is a machine that cannot easily be put out of action.’ He ended his speech with the same impassioned plea that he made at every speech he gave that summer: ‘Come forward. The more of you who go, the quicker the war will be over. This is what I want. And what England wants. And I am confident that what England wants, you will not forget to give her.’

So convinced was Henry
that the war would last for many years, on 21 August, a day when a partial eclipse of the sun shrouded the country in semi-darkness, he instructed his kennelmen to destroy all but four of the Belvoir Hunt’s twenty-four couples of foxhounds. The army had already commandeered fifteen thousand hunters and most lawn meets had been cancelled. ‘I am unwilling to pay for the upkeep of the kennels, when it is unlikely that the hounds will be hunted for many a year,’ he told Violet.