Fire from the Sky

When World War I began, the planet was only 12 years into its romance with aircraft. It was still a novelty for the people of Europe to look up to the sky and see anything but birds.

In a scene from my novel, Albion’s Millennium, eight-year-old May is staying with her sister who is in service at a house in Sussex. It is early summer in 1914, and there have been rumored sightings of German airships above the British coast: 

            May looked upwards, shielding her eyes from the light pouring from the open French windows. She could see there were gradations of darkness up there, different layers of night like overlapping curtains, some denser than others, and behind these shifting layers an occasional gleam of glassy, star-pocked sky.  

            She heard a lady guest say, “How exciting. The Times said they’ve been taking civilian passengers up. I can’t see anything, can you?”

            The second she stopped speaking, her husband shouted, “Look!” and pointed to the sky. Something had moved out from behind a cloud - a long slim shadow, barely visible against the greyness. A sinister, looming presence, so indistinct it could almost have been an illusion of the retina, an image left behind on a closed eyelid. But as May craned her neck, she saw it steal very slowly across a gap between two night clouds, so high that she could hear no engine noise. Beside her, she heard Tessie’s awestruck whisper, “How can there be people up there in that thing?”

                       

During the war, aerial bombing was in its infancy, but there were several raids by German airships and fighter planes on the mainland UK, particularly from 1916 onwards. The British government instituted a rudimentary warning system consisting of maroons and whistles and (absurdly) policemen cycling round the streets wearing sandwich boards, while the end of a raid was signaled by boy scouts playing bugles.  

Here is an extract from Virginia Woolf’s diary describing a night raid near her home in Richmond, west of London:

Thursday December 6, 1917: Last night... nothing was further from our minds than air raids; a bitter night, no moon up till eleven. At 5 however, I was wakened by L. [her husband Leonard Woolf] to a most instant sense of guns [anti-aircraft guns firing from nearby]: as if one’s faculties jumped up fully dressed. We took clothes, quilts, a watch & a torch, the guns sounding nearer as we went down stairs to sit with the servants [Lottie the maid and Nellie the cook] on the black horsehair chest wrapped in quilts in the kitchen passage. Lottie having said she felt bad passed on to a general rattle of jokes & comments which almost silenced the guns. They fired quickly, apparently towards Barnes. Slowly the sounds got more distant, & finally ceased; we unwrapped ourselves & went back to bed. In ten minutes there could be no more question of staying there: guns apparently up at Kew.  Up we jumped, more hastily this time, since I remember leaving my watch, & trailing cloak & stockings behind me. Servants apparently calm & even jocose. In fact one talks through the noise, rather bored by having to talk at 5am than anything else. Guns at one point so loud that the whistle of the shell going up followed the explosion. One window did, I think, rattle. Then silence. Cocoa was brewed for us, & off we went again. Having trained one’s ears to listen one can’t get them not to for a time; & as it was after 6, carts were rolling out of stables, motor cars throbbing, & then prolonged ghostly whistlings, which meant, I suppose, Belgian work people being recalled to the munitions factory. At last in the distance I heard bugles; L. was by this time asleep, but the dutiful boy scouts came down our road [blowing the bugles] & wakened him carefully; it struck me how sentimental the suggestion of the sound was, & how thousands of old ladies were offering up their thanksgivings at the sound, & connecting him (a boy scout with small angel wings) with some joyful vision – And then I too went to sleep: but the servants sat up with their heads out of the window in the bitter cold-frost white on the roofs-until the bugle sounded, when they went back to the kitchen and sat there till breakfast.”

Twenty-two years later when German flying machines once again dropped bombs on Britain, this was no longer something new and inconceivable. This time the British people were all too prepared for the fire that rained down from the sky.

At the Going Down of the Sun

Almost 6 million men from the British Isles fought for their country in the Great War of 1914 to 1918. There can't be many British families who didn't have at least one member who served. Both my grandfathers were too young, but my great-uncle John Charles Teasdale (Jack) Mackintosh answered the call. 

Uncle Jack was born in 1893, the eldest child of John Teasdale and Madeline Foister. The family lived in Dalkeith just outside Edinburgh, from where young Jack’s father ran the Scottish branch of the family's mapmaking business. They were a typical prosperous, middle-class family of the late Victorian age until February 1902 when John Teasdale died unexpectedly of heart failure, aged only 35. 

Jack’s mother Madeline (my great-grandmother) had to become the breadwinner for four children under the age of nine. She had been trained as a teacher and for the next 25 years earned her living as a schoolmistress in various small rural schools all around the Midlands and southern England. It was always a struggle to make ends meet. (In the picture above Jack is standing behind his sister Dorothy (Dodo), brother Malcolm, and youngest sister Edina (Ina) outside the school house at Kirkby Mallory in Leicestershire - one of their mother's placements.)

In 1914 Jack was 21 and was training as a teacher to follow in his mother’s footsteps. When war was declared on August 4th, like many other young men all across Britain he rushed to enlist. At the Drill Hall in Nottingham he was signed up for the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment (otherwise known as the Sherwood Foresters). The picture on the left shows Jack in his uniform as a private. It was taken in December 1914 in Luton near where his unit was training.  He sent it as a postcard “To all at home with love and good wishes for the New Year.” 

In late February 1915, Jack’s unit - the 1/7th (Robin Hood) battalion - was part of the first Territorial division to be sent to France. The unit was involved in the defense of the Belgian chateau of Hooge in July 1915 and then in the losing British assault on the Hohenzollern Redoubt during the Battle of Loos on the 13th October 1915. A soldier who went through that action described it as: "absolute hell with the lid off. Dying and wounded all over the place. Shall never forget this day."

And the Robin Hoods were in action on the terrible first day of the Somme - July 1st, 1916. In the attack on the Gommecourt Salient, the battalion lost 424 officers and men, including 181 of the men who had enlisted with Jack in Nottingham on the first day of the war. 

Three times he could have been killed and three times he escaped with his life, not to mention all the sniping and shelling in between.And yet he came home not just alive but miraculously uninjured.

At some point, Jack was transferred to the 2/1st Staffordshire Yeomanry, which stayed on English soil for the remainder throughout the war. The picture below of Jack on horseback was taken at Leybourne Camp in Kent in June 1917. A couple of months later the 2/1st was converted into a cyclist unit, moving first to Tonbridge and then to Canterbury where Jack met the young woman he would marry, Gladys Heaton. 

 After the war, Jack became a teacher of English and French at Robert Mays Grammar School in the lovely Hampshire village of Odiham. He and Gladys had no children of their own, but Jack adored his nieces and nephews. His nephew Ian (my father) remembered Uncle Jack as having a great sense of fun. Together they used to flush paper boats down the toilet and then rush out to the garden see the boats emerge in the cesspit. Like many veterans, he never spoke of what he experienced as a soldier in the trenches. He must have known he was lucky to have survived and perhaps that's why he threw himself into his civilian life with gusto. In the picture below taken in his garden in Odiham, he is dressed up as a mother with his younger brother Malcolm (my grandfather) as the baby.

Even though he survived the trenches by 20 years, Jack's life was nevertheless to be tragically and brutally cut short. On the night of November 29th 1937, he and Gladys were driving home from Winchester. On Kempshott Hill outside Basingstoke, Jack got out of the car to clear ice off the windshield. A car coming from the other direction driven by a man who had been drinking heavily all evening struck Jack so hard that his head was all but severed from his body. He was only 44 years old. 

He was buried in Odiham and his funeral was attended by the entire staff and pupils of the Robert Mays School. The cortege was preceded by members of the Odiham branch of the British Legion carrying their standard draped in crepe, which was dipped in respect as the coffin was lowered into the grave.  After the Vicar had said the last woods of the Anglican burial service, the chairman of the branch recited the British Legion exhortation from Lawrence Binyon’s poem “For the Fallen”:
 

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

The Bloody Bruise of War

It's easy to forget when reading the many great novels written in the 1920s that they were written in the aftermath of a great and terrible schism. Their main characters are often young men returned from the war, and even if the narrative isn’t explicit about their experiences, they are haunted by what they’d seen in the trenches. 

Think of Jay Gatsby (in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby), who commanded the Lewis machine guns of the ninth machine gun battalion and was decorated for valor for his participation in the Marne and the Argonne. Think of shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith (in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway) who hallucinates about his friend and commanding officer Evans who’d been killed in Italy just before the Armistice. And think of Christopher Tietjens (in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End), unable to forget the young boy whose eye was shot out as Tietjens was trying to carry him to safety. His soon-to-be lover, Valentine Wannop, suddenly understands that he had been through hell. “Hitherto, she had thought of the War as physical suffering only; now she saw it only as mental torture. Immense miles and miles of anguish in darkened minds.”

In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence shows how the aftermath of those four years of unimaginable suffering affects everyone, even those who had never set foot on the front line. Sir Clifford Chatterley is shipped home “smashed” in 1918 to his young wife Constance. He is confined to a motorized wheelchair, the lower half of his body destroyed, with no chance for either himself or his wife of a sexual life or of children. It is a novel notorious for its frankness about female sexuality, but it is also masterful in its depiction of a general sense of disaffection and ennui, and the pointlessness of existence left over from the great slaughter. In observing the intellectual chatter of her husband and his friends, Constance begins to understand the damage that has been done to her entire generation:

“...It was the bruise of the war that had been in abeyance, slowly rising to the surface and creating the great ache of unrest, and stupor of discontent. The bruise was deep, deep, deep... the bruise of the false inhuman war. It would take many years for the living blood of generations to dissolve the vast black clot of bruised blood, deep inside their souls and bodies. And it would need a new hope.”

“All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day to day. Home was a place you lived in, love was a thing you didn’t fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people, a father was an individual who enjoyed his own existence, a husband was a man you lived with and kept going in spirits. As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing. All that really remained was a stubborn stoicism; and in that there was a certain pleasure. In the very experience of the nothingness of life, phase after phase, étape after étape, there was a certain grisly satisfaction. So that’s that!”

Unfortunately that wasn’t that. There was another conflagration still to come, and yet more millions of people around the world would be killed or have their lives and bodies smashed and broken. Constance was right when she foresaw that it would take “the living blood of generations” to diffuse the deep, deep bloody bruise of those two wars.

Long Way to Tipperary

The damage inflicted by the German Navy on the commercial district of Papeete, September 22nd, 1914

For much of 2013, I was absorbed in reading books about or set in the First World War. Most recently I read “Life Class” by Pat Barker and “The Home Front” by Sylvia Pankhurst and dipped into “Testament of Youth” by Vera Brittain, which made me cry as much as the first several times I read it. All this reading has been for the purposes of Albion’s Millennium to help me keep my facts straight about life on the home front - about convalescent hospitals, munitions factories, and Zeppelin raids. 

We tend to remember World War I as a European conflict, but across the other side of the world in Tahiti, the war was just as present and vivid and the national enmities just as strong. Tahiti as a French colony was automatically a combatant in the European conflict.

The biggest event of the war on Tahitian soil took place only weeks after war was declared. On the morning of September 22^nd 1914, two warships hove into view beyond the reef at Papeete. The cruisers – large and grey and menacing – flew no identifying flags. A big crowd gathered on the shore to watch the ships including the Governor and the Bishop of Papeete. Ex-Queen Marau was there with her daughters as was her brother 64-year-old Tati Salmon.

Tati Salmon

Rumors and counter-rumors ran rife among the crowd. Were they German ships? What were their intentions? A bugle began to be played at the barracks to sound the call to arms, and the local defense troops hurried to man the town’s defenses. People started running along the streets, carrying bundles, getting ready to flee up into the mountains behind the town. Even the Governor’s wife was seen getting into an official car with her belongings. 

Suddenly without any warning the cruisers began firing 8½ inch shells over the heads of the spectators on the shore. At first the guns were aiming at a small fort in the hills, but many shells fell in the heart of the town. Fires were soon raging throughout the commercial quarter where the buildings, nearly all made of wood, burned quickly. Clouds of black smoke also came from the 2,000 tons of coal stored at the naval dockyard, which the local commander had ordered to be set alight so it couldn’t be seized by the Germans.

Marau rushed back to her house. Her relatives urged her to join the exodus inland, but she was loath to leave town because her 25-year-old son Ernest Salmon was one of the defenders. 

Ex-Queen Marau of Tahiti

“I packed my papers and most precious possessions in the trunks, which were always held ready in case of cyclones without, however, being able to decide to go and leave my son behind. His post was at the battery of Mount Faiere, which the Germans were peppering with shells. None however had exploded because they were falling onto clay ground. My sister, Manihinihi, my daughter, Terii, and other members of my family whom I was urging to go and shelter somewhere out of the town, declared that they would not go without me. Realizing that I did not have the right to put them at risk and that my presence could not in any way protect my son, I decided to go in the car belonging to one of my nephews which took me to the bottom of a valley a short distance away from Papeete.”   

Princess Takau Pomare

Before they left, Marau’s younger daughter Takau ran through the town to fetch Ernest’s wife Josephine who was eight months pregnant with her first child. The two women had just left Josephine’s house when it was hit by a shell and burst into flames. After delivering Josephine to Marau, Takau insisted the car leave without her while she ran back to her mother’s house to rescue her little dog whom she found hiding terrified under a sofa. With shells flying perilously all around, she and the dog managed to find a place in another car full of people heading inland. 

Tati watched the whole barrage from under a tree in front of the American Embassy. He wrote in a letter to Henry Adams, “I think it was the flag, the stars and stripes at the top of the flagpole, which saved the houses behind it [including] Marau’s house (our old one) and... the old palace.” The German ships fired more than a hundred shells at the city in total. After over an hour of constant firing, the guns suddenly ceased and, under cover of a sudden squall of rain, the warships sailed away to the north. By this time, two onlookers had been killed, and all of the buildings up to the Catholic cathedral had been destroyed by the fire, including Papeete’s famous Municipal Market, a total of £150,000 worth of damage.

Meanwhile, up in the mountains, members of the Teva clan erected a native shelter for ex-Queen Marau and her family, and her sister Manihinihi was able to supply food and other necessities from her own house which was nearby. The women saw the cruisers withdraw but feared they might make a landing at another part of the island. It would be three days before the commander of the local defenses sent word to the women that it was safe to return to town. The excitement had been too much for Josephine Salmon. Two days after returning to Papeete, she gave birth one month early to Marau’s grand-daughter, Monique. 

Lieutenant George Darsie Jnr

Since the end of the civil war in 1847, peace had reigned on Tahiti, so the bombardment was a rude awakening, bringing home the grim reality that this would truly be a global war. While there was to be no fighting on Tahitian soil, a total of 1,057 young men from Tahiti and nearby islands sailed to Europe to serve in the French army. The Battalion Mixte du Pacifique (BMP) played a key role in the capture of three strategic towns from the Germans in the second Battle of the Marne and received a citation for valor. Queen Marau’s son Ernest was one of the Tahitian poilus as was Norman Brander’s son Jock. Both survived the war, but 17 other men from the Salmon/Teva clan were not so lucky. Another member of the family ‒ George Darsie, one of Titaua’s two sons with her second husband ‒ also served, in this case in the British Army in the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry. He was fatally wounded in July 1918 at the second Battle of the Marne – the same battle in which his cousins from the far South Pacific played such a vital part.