The Last Great Cavalryman Page 3
His early departure also meant that Dick was too young to be invited to join the largely social societies which exercised a profound impact on life at Eton. He never became a member of his house debating society or house library, let alone of ‘Pop’,7 all of which admitted members only by election and which provided the nearest equivalent of house and school prefects. This, his innate shyness and the loss of a large percentage of his generation to the Great War may have meant that he inherited less of a network than some, but the mere fact that he had been at the school bound him to other Old Etonians. Dick’s near contemporaries included a future prime minister, Anthony Eden, and two men who would play a significant part in his military career, Oliver Leese and Herbert Lumsden, but there is no evidence that he knew any of them at the time.
Holidays from Eton, as latterly from St Michael’s, were spent largely at Greenhill House, although there were visits to the seaside and, during the Christmas holiday of 1913/14, a trip to Switzerland. Minnie kept to her agreement and the boys were allowed to spend time with Walter at Bilton Park and on one occasion accompanied him to the family villa in Italy, although Walter used to complain bitterly that he was never allowed to have Christmas with them. For all his faults, he remained devoted to his children, wrote to them regularly in the most affectionate terms and encouraged them to see him as often as they could. Whilst at Bilton they were able to ride every day, hunting and playing polo as soon as they were old enough, and to be driven by their father very fast in one of his many cars, the favourite in the immediate pre-war years being a Lozier, one of the most expensive American models, which Walter decided to have armoured at even greater cost as war approached in 1914. Dick inherited both his father’s interest in cars and his love of speed. He learnt to drive before he left school, taking out his grandmother’s Singer, but never really enjoyed being a passenger, partly due to being prone to car sickness.
Dick sat the Sandhurst entrance exam in February 1915, the earliest possible opportunity after his seventeenth birthday. He wrote to his father that he believed he had done well and so it turned out. He was placed third in the list of those destined for the cavalry, the arm which he had already chosen, and 22nd overall out of 212 successful candidates, with many more having failed. De Havilland wrote to Minnie:
Here is a last report that rightly ends a set in which I do not call to mind a single bad one. It isn’t that they have been merely dull and proper, they are reports to be proud of, I really mean it. He has brains and uses them and in addition of late he has developed very considerably in himself. I think he was sorry to leave or so the boys tell me and I know we were sorry to lose him. His size prevented him doing much good at games but I am certain that he will make not only a keen but highly intelligent cavalry officer. You may be well satisfied with his time at Eton.
Chapter 3
The Western Front
Dick received the results of the Sandhurst entrance exam on 8 April 1915 and shortly afterwards was ordered to report to the College. With enormous officer losses on the Western Front, especially at the First Battle of Ypres in October and November 1914, the overall intake had been substantially increased by dint of doubling up in rooms and taking over the nearby Staff College, which was closed for the duration, whilst the course had been reduced from a year to barely four months. This scarcely allowed enough time for the cadets to learn drill and musketry, let alone the rather more practical skills required for survival on the Western Front.
Most of the officers commissioned during the Great War came from the Reserve of Officers, the Special Reserve, the Territorial Force and the ranks, although more than 20,000 were accepted on the strength of their experience in the OTC alone. In the circumstances it seems surprising that Sandhurst, together with the Royal Military College at Woolwich for those destined for the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers, remained open to gentlemen cadets – indeed, as the war progressed the courses became longer again, eventually reverting to one year. The rationale may have been to retain the concept of the regular commission for those intending to make a career in the Army, while most of the other officers would be expected to return to civilian life as soon as hostilities were over. In practice, shells and bullets did not distinguish between the regular officers and the others, and many who had volunteered or been conscripted subsequently applied for and were granted regular commissions. In the Second World War, by contrast, both institutions were closed immediately war was declared, to become only two of many Officer Cadet Training Units, turning out officers with emergency commissions only.
Of Dick’s intake at Sandhurst, a significant percentage would not survive the war. Of those who did, only two featured strongly in his later life, Gordon MacMillan of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, who would in due course be a fellow student and close friend at the Staff College and would himself go on to become a senior general, and Christopher Peto of the 9th Lancers, whom he got to know well as a fellow cavalryman and who would serve under him in 1940.
On 11 August 1915 Dick was commissioned into the 12th (The Prince of Wales’s Royal) Lancers as a Second Lieutenant. Why he chose this regiment or, indeed, why it accepted him, is a mystery. Given the strong family connections found in British regiments, and particularly cavalry regiments, one might have expected him to follow his grandfather into the 7th Dragoon Guards, although the death of John McAdam in 1910 meant that no specific influence could be exercised from that direction. It was certainly known that Dick was going to the cavalry before he took the Sandhurst entrance exam, so the choice must have been made during his last years at school. It is possible that there were members or former members of the regiment in Dorset or Somerset who could offer an introduction and recommendation, but another likely source was one of Walter’s polo playing friends.
The 12th Lancers had an illustrious history. Raised as Bowles’s Regiment of Dragoons in 1715 the regiment served on the Irish Establishment for much of the eighteenth century, recruiting locally during that time. The great Duke of Wellington joined the regiment, by then the 12th Light Dragoons, for two years prior to purchasing a captaincy in an infantry regiment and, following excursions to Corsica, Italy, Egypt and the Netherlands, it fought under him in the Peninsula, distinguishing itself at Salamanca and Waterloo. Of all his cavalry commanders the Honourable Frederick Ponsonby, who was wounded leading the regiment in a great charge at Waterloo, was one of those whom Wellington rated the highest. Employed thereafter against the Kaffirs in South Africa, in the closing stages of the Crimean campaign, during the Indian Mutiny and in the Boer War, by 1914 the regiment’s reputation was as high as any.
Dick, however, was not to go to the 12th Lancers immediately, but was instead posted to the 6th Reserve Regiment of Cavalry, which was based in Dublin. Seventeen reserve regiments of cavalry were formed in 1914, although these were later reduced in number. Other than those for the Household Cavalry, each of these units had several regular or yeomanry regiments affiliated to it and in the case of the 6th these were the 5th and 12th Lancers and the 1st County of London Yeomanry (the Middlesex Hussars). Their primary purpose was to accept all new recruits, both officers and other ranks, and provide them with basic training. This included instruction in equitation, but by this time Dick was already an excellent horseman. There were a number of other skills to absorb, including the use of the cavalryman’s basic weapons, the lance, the sword and the rifle and, for officers, the pistol – to gain some proficiency in the last two Dick attended the school of musketry at Dollymount. There was also an introduction to field operations and tactics, including mounted attacks by troops, squadrons and regiments, dismounted attacks and defence, reconnaissance and movement by day and night. The instructors were largely officers and NCOs who had been brought back from the reserves but were considered too old for active service, although as the war continued there were a number who had been wounded and were posted there during their recuperation.
Much of the specialist cavalry training received at the rese
rve regiments was to prove of little value. By the time Dick reported to his regiment in France on the penultimate day of 1915, the war of motion had long since passed and the opposing armies had settled into trench warfare in which the opportunities for the cavalry to engage in its traditional role were few and far between. It had not always been thus, indeed for the opening months of the war the 12th Lancers had operated exactly as it had been trained to do. The regiment had arrived in France just thirteen days after the United Kingdom’s declaration of war and moved up immediately to join the British Expeditionary Force as part of 5 Cavalry Brigade in which, together with the 2nd Dragoons (Royal Scots Greys) and the 20th Hussars, it would serve for the duration.
The brigade was at Binche, east of Mons, when the Germans launched their major offensive and it acted as a rearguard to the BEF during the ensuing retreat. On 28 August 1914, near the village of Moy, the 12th Lancers fought one of the few successful cavalry actions of the time, when its HQ and C Squadrons surprised and almost annihilated the HQ and a squadron of the 2nd Prussian Dragoons in a textbook charge. It went on to inflict serious damage on the remainder of that regiment and rendered a whole enemy brigade ineffective for some days,1 although it could do little to stop the overall enemy advance. The retreat from Mons was eventually halted south of the Marne and followed first by a strong Allied counter-attack which pushed the Germans away from Paris, and then by the ‘race for the sea’ as each side attempted to outflank the other before reaching stalemate with their flanks on the English Channel. By mid-October the 12th Lancers were positioned south-west of Ypres, where they were engaged in a number of skirmishes before being withdrawn from the line in late November.
Throughout 1915 the 12th Lancers, and indeed the cavalry as a whole, experienced the frustration which was to last for much of the war. One after another, attacks or more major offensives were planned, but in every case they were either cancelled or, if put into action, did not meet with enough success for the cavalry to be able to pass through the infantry into the open spaces beyond. The lack of employment for thousands of cavalrymen at a time when the BEF was taking serious casualties exercised the high command as well and, a few days before Dick arrived in France, a reorganization took place which enabled them to operate in an infantry role, whilst keeping them available for possible mounted operations. Each cavalry brigade provided a dismounted infantry battalion, with each regiment in the brigade providing a company, one of which at any one time would include the HQ. On 2 January 1916 the Dismounted Company of the 12th Lancers, comprising 15 officers and 372 other ranks and including the initial elements of the Dismounted Battalion’s HQ, proceeded to the front for the first time to take over a section of the trenches at Vermelles from the infantry.
When Dick arrived a few days earlier at the regiment’s winter quarters at Campagne les Boulonnais, about 20 miles from Boulogne and thus well behind the front line, he was posted to B Squadron, in which he would remain for the whole of his active service during the war. It was commanded during the period by two officers, the first being Captain (later Major) Willy Styles, the second a man with whom he would be long associated and who would be one of his mentors, Harold Charrington, usually known as ‘Rollie’. Charrington had joined the regiment in 1905 and, other than an attachment to the Egyptian Army, had served with it ever since. Like Dick he was a very keen rider and an excellent polo player and the two men, despite the disparity in their age and seniority, had a great deal in common.
Dick was initially christened ‘Nosey’, a nickname which happily for him did not survive long. It was coined for his prominent nose, rather than any personality trait, indeed Charrington described him very many years later as shy and modest, going on to write that ‘even in those early days, enthusiasm, ability and devotion to the interests of his men and the regiment were the outstanding elements of his character.’2 It was not long before Dick had some experience of the trenches, going up in the last week of January with two more officers and 38 other ranks to join the Dismounted Company in the trenches as replacements for casualties and those who were sick. Activity on the front was muted at the time – only 4 men had been killed and 11 wounded by the time that the Dismounted Company returned to the regiment on 15 February, a modest tally by the standards of the war.
Conditions in the trenches were unpleasant, but the billets in Campagne were not a great deal better and were not improved by the bitter winter weather: if it was not freezing, the camp was a sea of mud. Dick’s life was significantly improved by food parcels sent directly from Harrods by his mother and grandmother, usually including cakes of all varieties, but also items such as chicken and pork pies, which enabled him to vary his diet. Perhaps surprisingly, however, he reported that the food in the officers’ mess was good. He also asked for and was sent some warm clothing, including a woolly waistcoat and a strong pair of boots.
Although the weather improved and by late April Dick was writing that it was as hot as summer, there was little real activity, and he was able to take leave in early May. Back with the regiment boredom was the main enemy, and it was vital to keep the men occupied and the horses exercised in the absence of any action. Numerous training schemes were organized, whilst 2 Cavalry Division, 5 Cavalry Brigade’s parent formation, held a horse show. There were also boxing tournaments and athletic events, but any form of hunting or shooting was strictly forbidden by the high command, although there was at least one occasion on which a boar was illicitly pursued and riders also chased hares from time to time. An attempt by the Royal Horse Guards to hold a race meeting was stopped at the last moment by the killjoys at divisional headquarters. In early April the regiment moved to a new billeting area about 15 miles north, with B Squadron at Zouafques, where its officers’ mess was located in ‘a nice little chateau’. The Battle of the Somme began in July, but there was no employment at first for the 12th Lancers, although the Dismounted Company was in the line again further north.
At last, on 6 September, 5 Cavalry Brigade was ordered to move south and the regiment marched to Bray-sur-Somme, arriving there eight days later. A working party was immediately formed to build cavalry routes up to the front and on 16 September the brigade was put on half an hour’s notice to move. The plan was for 2 Cavalry Division to operate on the right flank of the Fourth Army, with its objective being Bapaume and the higher ground to the north. At last it seemed that the regiment would see some action. Nothing happened, but the division was kept at one hour’s notice for the whole of the following day, before being stood down on 17 September and ordered back to the Bonnay area. There were two other flurries of activity, first with C Squadron, sent to Mametz under the orders of XIV Corps on 19 September, and then A Squadron, sent up to Carnoy under the orders of 5 Division – in each case nothing came of it and on 2 October the 12th Lancers moved to a new camp north of Combles.
The autumn of 1916 passed without any action. Some attempt was made to keep the men amused, including a sports day in competition with the neighbouring 125th French Infantry Regiment, and once the regiment had moved to its winter quarters at Auchy-les-Hesdin it had access to a cinema and a gymnasium in an old tobacco factory. One real problem was the increasing difficulty of keeping the horses fit, as unrestricted U-boat warfare was having a marked effect on supplies of oats and the ration was reduced to 7lb per day, not enough to keep them in peak condition and exacerbating the impact of the weather, which was particularly wet in the autumn and then very cold. On the other hand, the lack of military activity meant that most officers were able to take home leave, Dick himself going on 10 December, although he was back by Christmas.
By the end of his first year in the 12th Lancers, Dick was almost an old hand. His troop commander, Victor Cartwright, had thought he looked far too young when he joined the regiment, but soon appreciated his qualities. ‘He was an outstanding character in every way… popular with everyone, with a great sense of humour. I can never think of him without some sort of laughter coming from him.’3 Undernea
th this cheerful exterior, however, Dick was by now extremely frustrated. His military activity consisted of incessant training schemes, duty as the orderly officer and, on one occasion, going mounted with two other subalterns and 136 other ranks to work on cable-laying. Possibly because of his riding skills he was detailed as a galloper to 2 Cavalry Division, but was only likely to be called for when the division was on the move and it remained resolutely stuck in winter quarters. Desperate to see some action, he approached his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Fane, who had recently returned from convalescence after being injured at the First Battle of Ypres, to request a transfer to the infantry. In spite of pleading his case passionately, he was told that no transfers from the cavalry would be permitted for the foreseeable future.4 He comforted himself with frequent food parcels and was asked, ‘by popular demand’, to request his grandmother to send a white tablecloth for the mess, ‘dining room size just right’.
Chapter 4
Disaster and Triumph
1917 opened to bitterly cold weather, with heavy snow from mid-January into the second week of February. The horses continued to deteriorate and many of the men, including Dick, went sick. He had left his ‘British Warm’1 behind in England during his December leave and missed it greatly. As February progressed he felt increasingly unwell, experiencing headaches at first, then developing full-scale bronchitis. He was admitted to a military hospital in Boulogne, which he found very cold. The nurses, he thought, were good, but the matrons ‘seemed to have very “cushy” jobs with nothing to do except walk round and call everyone by the wrong name.’2 After a short time he was sent to Michelham House for Convalescent British Officers at Cap Martin, near Menton on the French Riviera, where the weather was much more benign and he was able to admire the orange trees.