Fatal Glamour (47 page)

Rupert met his fate in the Gallipoli expedition, which was Churchill's war and the worst of his many strategic blunders. He conceived an attack on the Dardanelles as a giant flanking movement around the Western Front. It also had the attraction of giving a central role to the forces he controlled personally: the Navy and the Royal Naval Division (
RND
). Asquith was guilty of egging him on. A few days after Antwerp had surrendered, he suggested to Churchill that it was “time that he bagged something, and broke some crockery.”
¹
Britain and France were about to declare war on the Ottoman Empire, so the Turkish china shop was the obvious place for Churchill to send in his bull.

War with Turkey came from another of 1914's disastrous chain reactions. Two powerful German warships, the
Goeben
and the
Breslau
, had taken refuge at Istanbul in August 1914. On 27 September the Turks closed the Dardanelles to all shipping; this was aimed at their historic rival, Russia, which sent 90 percent of her trade through the Straits. A month later, the
Goeben
and
Breslau
entered the Black Sea to attack Russian ports and warships. Germany and Turkey appeared to be hand in glove, so the Allies responded by declaring war. That implied making war, through a naval counterstroke against the Turks. Churchill was happy to oblige though many others, from Asquith on down, were ready to give him support.

On 3 January 1915, Churchill formally asked Admiral Cardan if the Mediterranean fleet could re-open the Dardanelles. In an ominous phrase, Churchill suggested that “Importance of results would justify severe
loss.” Losses would indeed come, but not the hoped-for results, and a more level-headed strategist could have seen this in advance. But Churchill took pride in drawing no lessons from Antwerp. “I care for nothing but the future in war,” he would write in
The World Crisis
.
²
In any case, the loss of Antwerp could be blamed on the failure of the French to arrive in time. Then there were the rich prizes of victory in the Dardanelles. As soon as the British and French fleets arrived in the Sea of Marmara, bringing Istanbul under their guns, Turkey would have to sue for peace. Istanbul would go back to being called Constantinople because the Allies had promised to hand it over to Russia. The Orthodox mass would again be celebrated in Hagia Sophia. British and French munitions would flow to the Eastern front, while Russian grain could be sold in the west for ready cash. There were obvious flaws in Churchill's plans, not least that the Allies were barely holding their own on the Western Front and could not spare any guns or ammunition to send east. But everything else depended on whether it was feasible to open the Dardanelles. That was a question of tactics rather than strategy and the Allies, under Churchill's influence, got it disastrously wrong.

Such was the background in high politics to Rupert's five months as a soldier in England after Antwerp. His war sonnets assumed that as soon as the
RND
was trained it would go to France to join the British Expeditionary Force. The need for reinforcements on the Western Front was acute, but Churchill held back the
RND
, in part because he wanted them for combined operations with the Navy. Once they were committed to Gallipoli the prime minister, thinking of his son, confided to Venetia Stanley: “How lucky [the
RND
] are to escape Flanders and the trenches and be sent to the ‘gorgeous East.'”
³
If the Dardanelles could be opened by naval bombardment only, the
RND
might land unopposed to occupy Istanbul after its surrender. Knowing nothing of these pipe dreams, Rupert had his mind set on France. A staff officer told him to expect 75 percent casualties for his battalion when they got there. In January there was still no news of the Hood's deployment. “It's
TOO
bloody,” Rupert commented, “to have
THREE
more months of life, when one hoped for three weeks.”
⁴

Having staked his claim to heroic martyrdom with the war sonnets, Rupert now faced an indefinite stay in the damp and dismal huts of Blandford Camp, though with frequent leaves to Rugby and London. Between August 1914 and February 1915 he met often and intimately
with Churchill. He was fond of Rupert, though this never prevented his putting him in harm's way. Violet and Arthur Asquith took Rupert twice to Walmer Castle: “a divine and Paradisal interlude . . . a moment of peace.”
⁵
His host there was the Earl of Beauchamp, a member of Asquith's Cabinet and warden of the Cinque Ports. Beauchamp, the supposed model for Lord Marchmain in
Brideshead Revisited
, maintained a flagrantly gay domestic establishment, with decorative footmen and louche hangers-on. He was finally driven into exile in 1931 by his brother-in-law, the duke of Westminster, who threatened to expose him. Of contact between Beauchamp and Rupert there is, unfortunately, no record.

Rupert's closeness to Liberal aristocrats did not soften his hostility to another key group of Liberal supporters: wealthy or otherwise prominent Jews who found more acceptance among Liberals than among Tories. Rupert had long fulminated against the presence of Jews in the National Liberal Club. They were there because most of the older-established clubs would not admit them. Herbert Samuel and Rufus Isaacs had been attacked by Belloc and Chesterton for their alleged corruption in the Marconi scandal, but Asquith kept them in his government. In November 1913, when he was in the Pacific, Rupert told Eddie Marsh that he wanted to resign from the National Liberal Club because Isaacs was a member.
⁶
In December 1914 he was “all in favour of shooting the rich and tyrannical
here
, beginning with Sir Edgar Speyer.”
⁷
Born in New York, Speyer was of German Jewish origin; he was a financier, patron of the arts, and a Liberal supporter. In 1914 there was a McCarthyite campaign against him as a German fifth-columnist. Other Jews, such as Ernest Cassel, felt obliged to make public professions of loyalty to England. In Rupert's eyes, Jews were both enemies of the old England of the greenwood, and friends of Germany, where many of them had their roots. Christopher Hassall, in his biography, suggested that Rupert's anti-Semitism was little more than a private quirk that he indulged in with Jacques Raverat.
⁸
Insofar as it had any rational basis, Rupert's prejudice aligned him with the guild socialism of Belloc and Chesterton, which held that financial capitalism was destroying the traditional order of artisans and peasants. But hatred of Jews was more than Rupert's secret vice. Jews were one of the five horsemen of his demonology, the others being feminists, eunuchs, pacifists, and intellectuals. They should all be purged from that “forever England” for which Rupert wanted his friends to fight and die.

Blandford Camp had none of Rupert's bugbears, but in January it was cold, wet, and muddy. For most of the month he suffered from colds and flu. “They've discovered,” he told Violet Asquith, “that no one
ever
gets better in these miasmic huts.”
⁹
At the end of the month he went up to Eddie's to be nursed by Mrs Elgy. But he still got worse, and Mrs Elgy went home at night, so on 4 February Violet carried him off to 10 Downing Street. Blandford Camp was a nasty place in winter, but Rupert suffered more illness than his fellow officers. His lifelong vulnerability to infection was probably being made worse by a weakened immune system. It would only need one more major attack for his health to break down altogether.

In the warmth and comfort of a bedroom at Downing Street Rupert managed to get back on his feet. By 7 February he was trying to make an assignation with Eileen Wellesley; this was difficult because a “Jew artist” – Mark Gertler – had taken his place at Eddie's flat. For the 5th, Violet Asquith had arranged for Rupert to have lunch with Henry James; he had to come to Downing Street because Rupert was not yet strong enough to go out. James had not seen Rupert since they had gone punting at Cambridge in 1909. It had been a tremulous occasion for the Master, though this second encounter was equally moving: “Nothing certainly could have been called more modern than all the elements and suggestions of his situation for the hour, the very spot in London that could best serve as a centre for vibrations the keenest and most various; a challenge to the appreciation of life, to that of the whole range of the possible English future, at its most uplifting.”
¹⁰

This was part of James's posthumous tribute to Rupert, in the Preface to
Letters from America
. The tribute would be a lavish one, though with the usual Jamesian indirection. It was typical that he did not identify the “centre for vibrations” as 10 Downing Street. “Rupert expressed us
all
,” James wrote, “at the highest tide of our actuality.” It is fair to say that James was infatuated with Rupert, as he had been with other handsome young men. Yet he wondered about the chances of Rupert's “development,” when he was so much shaped by the glow of admiration, and by his own wandering inclinations: “Why shouldn't the art of living inward a little more, and thereby of digging a little deeper or pressing a little further, rather modestly replace the enviable, always the enviable, young Briton's enormous range of alternatives in the way of question-begging movement, . . . the enormous habit of holidays?” James cannot have
known much about Rupert's question-begging movement from one woman to another, but he sensed how far Rupert's boyish pose may have covered a fundamental lack of purpose – life itself as one long holiday. Except, of course, the sacrificial purpose of April 1915, to which James could only respond, when told of his death: “of course, of course!”
¹¹

Caught up as he was in the national cause that led him to take British citizenship three months after Rupert's death, James saw him as the finest flower of British culture. In the essay “An Unusual Young Man,” Rupert had described his conversion experience in August 1914: “With a sudden tightening of his heart, he realised that there might be a raid on the English coast . . . The idea sickened him. He was immensely to perceive that the actual earth of England held for him a quality which he found in A______, and in a friend's honour, and scarcely anywhere else, a quality which, if he'd ever been sentimental enough to use the word, he'd have called ‘holiness.'”
¹²
James would praise the “noble beauty” of Rupert's war sonnets, and his whole tribute endorses the myth of sacrifice: that a nation may only survive by offering up its most perfect youth to death in battle, “the consecration of the event.”
¹³

That death, as James sat by Rupert's bedside, was now less than three months off. Rupert had dinner with Churchill at the Admiralty on 14 February, and found him “very confident about the Navy and our side of Europe.” A week later, with no concern for security, Rupert was telling his mother and friends that the division was going to the East: “It will be much more glorious and less dangerous than France.” He was thrilled to follow in the footsteps of both the Crusaders, and of Lord Byron. “I've never been quite so happy in my life, I think,” he told Violet Asquith, “Not quite so
pervasively
happy; like a stream flowing entirely to one end. I suddenly realise that the ambition of my life has been – since I was two – to go on a military expedition against Constantinople.”
¹⁴

Both Churchill and King George V came down to Blandford on 25 February to review the
RND
. Two days later they marched across country to Shillingstone, where they entrained for Avonmouth. The Hood and the Anson battalions boarded the
Grantully Castle
, a small liner that had been converted into a troopship. On 28 February the ship sailed, with
Violet Asquith on the quay, waving to Rupert and to her brother Arthur (“Oc”). On boarding the ship Rupert had been given an amulet with a note from Eddie: “My dear, this is from a very beautiful lady who wants you to come back safe – her name is not to be divulged . . . It's a very potent charm.”
¹⁵

From Malta, Rupert wrote to Eddie, asking him to thank the donor, though saying that he wasn't sure what kind of luck her gift might bring: “I can well see that life might be great fun: and I can well see death might be an admirable solution. At that, quote to her something appropriate from the
Apology
, & leave her to her prayers.”
¹⁶
In the
Apology
, one of Socrates's arguments is that we cannot know for certain whether death is a good or an evil thing. The amulet might be a blessing whatever happened, so Rupert was happy to wear it round his neck with his identity disk. It was a pentacle: a circular medal with a five-pointed star inscribed within it. The early Christians believed that it protected against demons. In the twelfth century it was adopted by the Templars, which suited Rupert's mission since they were the first warriors to enter Constantinople in 1204, during the Fourth Crusade.

Who was the woman who sent Rupert the amulet? Most likely it was Lady Gwendoline Churchill, who sat next to him at his farewell dinner on 24 February. Anonymity was prudent because she was married to Churchill's younger brother John. She was a renowned society beauty and a Catholic, who might like the medieval symbolism of the pentacle. The medal itself was not mentioned by Rupert's burial party; presumably it lies with his bones in the grave at Skyros.

The Crusades were being revived, Rupert told Jacques, and should be carried out in the same style: “The early Crusaders were very jolly people . . . when they got East, to the Levant and Constantinople, were they kind to their brother Christians they found there? No. They very properly thwacked and trounced them, and took their money, and cut their throats, and ravished their daughters and so left them: for that they were Greeks, Jews, Slavs, Vlachs, Magyars, Czechs, and Levantines, and not gentlemen.”
¹⁷
On his ship, Rupert had been reading up on the history of Constantinople, so he knew that what the Crusaders did there was a hundred times worse than anything the Germans had done to Belgium. He enjoyed competing with Jacques to see who could come up with the most bloodthirsty rubbish, rather like Kingsley Amis and his cronies in recent times. Neither Rupert nor Kingsley actually did anything terrible,
so is it fair to harp on their terrible words? On the other hand, we could argue that Rupert said to Jacques what he really felt, whereas with others he held back out of fear of offending them. At the least, we should mind the gap between the ideal English soldier of the war sonnets, and the Rupert who boasted about how many wogs he hoped to rape and kill.