Blood and Thunder Read Free

the Agadir Crisis of 1911 when the Germans felt the wrath of France for landing a gunboat at the Moroccan port. Europe was spiralling ever closer toward was. Interested British parties began to panic about the disposition of German warships, whether or not they planned to attack the Royal Navy. The SIS was called in and the chief of army intelligence sent a man to Brussels to undertake some intelligence gathering activity at German North Sea ports.
    A few weeks later his man was seized by the German authorities and detained on charges of espionage. Some accounts say he was dragged from his bed in the middle of the night, others that he was taken into custody whilst trying to dispose of a code book that had been planted on him by a German double agent in a public toilet.
    The arrested man was an Old Etonian. Bertrand Stewart came from an established Scottish family. He himself was born in London and went to Walter Durnford’s house at Eton in 1886. After Oxford he joined Markby, Stewart & Co. as a solicitor in London until the outbreak of the Boer War, when he enlisted in the Imperial Yeomanry and left for Africa.
    Bertrand was indicative of the enthusiastic amateur gentleman plying the espionage trade just prior to the Great War. Working directly under the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service he had that summer been firstly to Nijmegen to contact an agent working in Germany. Unwisely he crossed the border with him and he had been gathering information in Hamburg, Cuxhaven and Bremerhaven before the authorities caught up with him. It was plausible that the book had been planted. The chief of the SIS speculated that the agent he had travelled with had sold him out, having been a decoy all along. ‘It is annoying,’ stated his associate, the Director of Naval Intelligence, ‘but we must expect drawbacks such as these in this kind of business.’
    Bertrand Stewart’s trial by the Supreme Court of Germany opened at Leipzig on 31 January 1912. Throughout he continuously proclaimed his innocence amidst a media storm; claiming that he barely spoke enough German to order meals and to talk to natives at train stations and hotels. The charges against him mainly related to naval defences that he had apparently never seen. The only specific evidence, it was claimed, was that of a penniless ex-criminal in the employment of the prosecutors. After a trial lasting four days, Captain Stewart was nonetheless found guilty, which for all of his bluster he was, and he was sentenced to detention for three and a half years.
    Before leaving the court Captain Stewart proudly declared to his captors that if their distinguished nation was ever at war with Britain, he hoped he would be fighting against them. As he was dragged away to serve his sentence at the fortress of Glatz, Europe was less than three years away from a monstrous industrialised war the likes of which the world had never seen. Bertrand, Gareth Hamilton-Fletcher and nearly 6,000 fellow Old Etonians, whether they wanted to or not, would get just such an opportunity to participate. Over 1,200 of them would not return.

2
    â€˜The Faces of Souls in Hell’
    â€˜The sky was just beginning to light up: a pale yellow streak had appeared in the east. The clouds were tinged with pink. In a few moments the horizon was ablaze, yellow, gold, orange and blood.’ It was 5 August 1914, the end of a Bank Holiday weekend at Ramsgate. The day before had been bright, sunny, ‘glorious’ with a clear blue sky. Scores of families had flocked to the seaside but there were unsettled tones running underneath their careless frivolity. For three or four days there had been one strange word whispered by everyone … War. ‘It sounded terrible enough, and yet, to the uninitiated, it was a word of excitement, it almost sounded romantic.’
    The young man watching the sun rise had had a troubled night’s sleep after news arrived that Britain had declared war