Blood and Thunder by Alexandra J Churchill Page B

found 100 more cavalrymen. The BEF had evaded von Kluck again, but to the survivors of the charge it seemed like a catastrophe. That evening, with the men scattered, it seemed as if two regiments had simply disintegrated. The 4th Dragoon Guards could only find seven of its officers and only eighty men had answered one roll call. Not until the end of the week, when the various contingents began collecting at St-Quentin, did it transpire that things were not at all as bad as they had seemed.
    As it turned out, one single officer of the 9th Lancers had been killed that day, and it was Charlie Garstin. One late summer morning his mother was cutting out garments for soldiers at her dining-room table, surrounded by pins, patterns and fabric. The door opened and her friend George, ‘with The Times in his hand and his face working awkwardly’, called her out of the room. ‘Mary,’ he stammered, ‘Mary darling.’ But he could not say it. He could only point to the obituary column with a trembling hand. Sir William made no contact with her and she died believing he had failed to tell her of Charlie’s fate out of spite. In actual fact there had been some confusion as to what had happened to Charlie and the answers lay with a prisoner, which disrupted the flow of information.
    Another officer of the 4th Dragoon Guards had crawled into a cowshed with a broken leg and found several other wounded men. Shortly afterwards a German officer appeared ‘with a tiny popgun of a pistol’ which he kept trained on them as he inspected his new prisoners. More men were marched in whilst, as darkness set in, the Germans set fire to two haystacks and began throwing rifles and saddles into the blaze. ‘The merry popping of small-arm ammunition commenced’, bullets whizzing in their direction. Their captors brought wine for them and danced about the burning haystacks like demented shadows to the sound of two accordions, ‘a weird sight in the fitful light’.
    The wounded British men were ushered and carried to a convent in Audregnies. One officer was lying there several days later with some 200 other men when the local priest arrived at the window with an exhumed body. The villagers had buried a British officer in some haste and the father had decided that he ought to be properly identified. It was Charlie. The identification process was repeated for two Cheshire officers and then all three of them were conveyed to Audregnies churchyard. 1
    Charlie Garstin was 20 years old when he charged at Audregnies. Rivy Grenfell had run into Colonel Campbell as he searched vainly that afternoon for Beau de Lisle. On the same fruitless mission they sat together. ‘He had been ordered to charge towards Quievrain,’ Rivy recalled. ‘Why, he did not know, as there was an open space for about a mile and he had lost nearly all his regiment.’ ‘Balaclava like,’ the newspapers called it. If a futile action, with a ludicrous and unrealistic objective that the man who ordered it would try and wash his hands of responsibility for was what was meant by that, then it can be said to be true. That night the commanders of the Ninth and the 4th Dragoon Guards were seething with rage at the man who had issued the order that had seemingly cost them so many soldiers. When someone sought to cheer up Campbell by telling him that he had been nominated for a Victoria Cross he snapped. ‘I want my squadrons back,’ he retorted, ‘not VCs or medals.’ In his official write up, Beau de Lisle held firm to the view that he had merely told his regimental commanders that it ‘might be necessary’ to charge. All of the evidence to the contrary, though, placed the responsibility for this botched footnote in the Great War in his hands; and with it too the death of Charles William North Garstin, his former sweetheart’s only son.
    Notes
    Â Â  1   The body of Charles William North Garstin