Blood and Thunder Read Free Page A

on Germany. That morning he looked down on the crowds from the pier. ‘It did not seem to make much difference whether there was war or not.’ On the sand was ‘a seething mass of humanity, happy bright faces, huddled together in a great jumble. The children jumped over one another, burying their heads in the sand and laughing. Below, in the calm sea there were little groups of yelling persons, bobbing up and down, knee deep in warm water.’ As he watched them he was already uneasily settling on the prospect of offering his services to his country for the duration of the conflict. This restless Old Etonian was 21 years old. He would not see 24.
    In August 1914 enthusiasm for war ripped through the ranks of Old Etonians and they prepared to fight in their hundreds. Anti-war sentiment was not generally found amongst old boys who were getting ready to depart for France with the British Expeditionary Force. One OE from a military family had a way with words and he encapsulated the sentiment that many displayed when they scribbled their last letters home. He declared that if Britain failed to intervene ‘we are as chicken-hearted a lot as ever existed … Nobody will ever help us or trust us again.’
    Born in April 1880, another, Aubrey Herbert, was an unlikely volunteer who would be amongst the first Old Etonians to depart for war. A Member of Parliament, he had seen his fellow politicians in London as they had stumbled towards oblivion. Ashen, they had ‘the faces of souls in hell’. A son of the 4th Earl of Carnarvon, it would be Aubrey’s elder half-brother who would open Tutankhamen’s tomb with Howard Carter in 1922. Aubrey was the eldest son of the earl’s second marriage and his father doted on him. Lord Carnarvon died when his son was 10 and Aubrey was still being privately educated at 13 when his aunt began advocating a public school education. He arrived at Benson’s house at Eton in 1893 with no experience of school life and crippled by awful eyesight.
    Aubrey was practically blind. His mother had to employ the services of a tutor to go through Eton in his company, reading aloud to him throughout his time at school, though he was already showing a remarkable aptitude for languages, speaking fluent Italian and French, and good German. Owing to his disability though, his performance at school was moderate. He also found it hard to adjust to life in the house and found solace in spending his pocket money too quickly and adopting any pet he could find, be it jackdaws, squirrels or mice. On one occasion he discovered some larks in the town being kept in a ‘dreadfully’ small cage and conspired with two schoolmates to buy them and set them free.
    In 1897 Aubrey went to Germany to undergo radical eye surgery and it had a massive impact on his life. The operation was carried out cautiously on one eye and he found that he could read for himself, distinguish people from across the room, even shoot. He went up to Oxford the following year to read history but was famed more than anything else for his climbing. One acquaintance remembered Aubrey, ‘finger holds alone’ and 40ft off the ground swinging from ledge to ledge along the tall houses on King Edward Street. It was not unusual for him to tap on the outside of a window and wave to the people inside three floors up. He once managed to get from Christ Church to Balliol by nothing but rooftops, gutters, window sills and pipes. T.E. Lawrence, a near contemporary and future acquaintance in Egypt, reminded Aubrey during the war of how he had been traversing rooftops and singing Italian love songs when he fell into a bank and was held up at gunpoint as a robber.
    After Oxford Aubrey began a career in diplomacy, firstly in Tokyo and then in Constantinople. He travelled greatly in the years before the outbreak of war, taking in the United States, Canada, the Balkans, Africa, the Far East, Spain, Italy, Greece and