The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery by Catherine Bailey Read Free Book Online Page B

of the young Marquis riding into battle flanked by loyal retainers. Yet in those first weeks of the war, people imagined that it would be won or lost by the cavalry. In France, the armies were still on the move: the horror of trench warfare was yet to come. War fever gripped the country. Violet, like everyone else, was caught up by the romance and glamour of it. On 4 September, in her capacity as patron of the Royal Leicester Hospital, she visited the first wounded soldiers to return from the Front. They were casualties from Mons, where the British Army had been forced to retreat after finding itself outflanked:
Darling J
    I was in Leicester Hospital yesterday. A wonderful experience!! Such gentlemen with speech like ours. Such longing to get back. I couldnot tear myself away. No excited exaggerations – all quite calm. Terribly pleased with their own feats and often saying, ‘I don’t think there were many left in my regiment.’ I go back again today.
    A great many small injuries, like ‘a horse trod on my foot.’ This was the only guardsman there and ‘I’m quite all right now’ ( so beautiful), a 4th Hussar. A red-haired airman with a broken collarbone. Shrapnel in fingers and wrists and lots of cases of rheumatism and abscesses on feet. Some saying, ‘England will neve r know what it was like!’
    Lots of incidents told very graphically in groups of cribbage or card players – and then lots of men talking alone to me from their beds. One boy had his father killed and 2 brothers wounded. He doesn’t want his mother told nor his sister. He’s hoping they’ll not know till the end of the war. He is a fresh, very young boy. Their chief misery seemed that when they thought they had just got the better of the enemy they were told to retreat (they almost hesitated at this!).
    A few horrors were told in a whisper. One officer, German, forcing his men to advance into barb entanglements, cut their heads off with his sabre when they refused. The Plymouth boy’s * death with 7 others was caused at night – he was guarding something and the Germans came dressed as French friends and killed them all.
    I was lost in Violet’s letters when Mr Granger appeared.
    ‘I thought you might like to see this,’ he said. ‘It’s the 9th Duke’s war diary.’
    He handed me the diary. It was bound in soft cream leather; the cover was grubby and worn. I read the first entry. It was dated 26 February 1915 – the day John left England for the Western Front:
Left Victoria by 5.55 train for Folkestone. The boat sailed soon after 8 pm. Good crossing and no sight of submarines, though the Captain was quite nervous. Hunlock, the King’s Messenger, was on board. Reached Boulogne 9.20. Slept the night at Hôtel Meurice.
    A newspaper cutting was pinned to the inside cover of the diary.John had been appointed Aide-de-Camp to the Commanding Officer of the 46th North Midland Division. The order to embark had been issued at short notice; in anticipation of a spring offensive, reinforcements were needed at the front.
    A week earlier, on 19 February, King George V had reviewed the North Midlands at their training camp in Hertfordshire. They were the first territorial division to be sent out to France. ‘The troops,’ the newspaper reported, ‘were honoured by the visit. But when the King addressed the twelve thousand men, the honour, he said, was his.’
    John’s father, Henry, Duke of Rutland, had accompanied the King. He had helped to raise the division’s twelve battalions. They were drawn from the Midlands county regiments – the Sherwood Foresters, the Lincolns, the Leicestershires and the North and South Staffordshires. The Duke had a number of subsidiary estates in the Midlands; he had offered the same inducements to the young men in the villages he owned in Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire as he had offered at Belvoir.
    The King and the Duke had wished the men good luck and God speed.
    Attached to the news cutting was