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    A Subaltern’s Share In The War: Home Letters Of The Late George Weston Devenish Lieut. R.A., Attached R.F.C.
    A Subaltern’s Share In The War: Home Letters Of The Late George Weston Devenish Lieut. R.A., Attached R.F.C.
    A Subaltern’s Share In The War: Home Letters Of The Late George Weston Devenish Lieut. R.A., Attached R.F.C.
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    A Subaltern’s Share In The War: Home Letters Of The Late George Weston Devenish Lieut. R.A., Attached R.F.C.

    By Lieutenant George Weston Devenish

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    About this ebook

    Lieutenant Devenish celebrated his twenty-first birthday, his last in peace-time, on the 25th of July 1914; he was by this point in his short life a soldier by profession and by choice. Having left Charterhouse with a taste for military ways after training in the O.T.C., he decided that his chosen profession should be spent in the Royal Artillery and entered into further training at Woolwich. By the time war begun in 1914 he was a fully-fledged officer. However, an indomitable spirit and a thirst for a more personal form of combat led him into the Royal Flying Corps.

    The R.F.C. would mourn his passing on the 6th of June 1917, after only a year of having him in their ranks. George Devenish’s name is inscribed on the walls of the Arras Flying Services War Memorial, one of the many Allied fliers who lost their lives during the First World War fighting in the skies above the Western Front.

    A kindly, sensitive man, but filled with a great deal of passion and pride, his letters are almost always upbeat and despite the carnage around him during the war, he never changed his “sunny disposition”.

    Author — Lieutenant George Weston Devenish 1893-1917

    Text taken, whole and complete, from the edition published in London, Constable and Company Ltd., 1917.

    Original Page Count – xviii and 177 pages.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLucknow Books
    Release dateApr 12, 2012
    ISBN9781782890768
    A Subaltern’s Share In The War: Home Letters Of The Late George Weston Devenish Lieut. R.A., Attached R.F.C.

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      Book preview

      A Subaltern’s Share In The War - Lieutenant George Weston Devenish

       This edition is published by PICKLE PARTNERS PUBLISHING—www.picklepartnerspublishing.com

      To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – contact@picklepartnerspublishing.com

      Text originally published in 1917 under the same title.

      © Pickle Partners Publishing 2013, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

      Publisher’s Note

      Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

      We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

      A SUBALTERN’S SHARE IN THE WAR

      HOME LETTERS OF THE

      LATE

      GEORGE WESTON DEVENISH

      LIEUT. R.A., ATTACHED R.F.C.

      WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES

      BY

      MRS. HORACE PORTER

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Contents

      TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

      ILLUSTRATIONS 5

      POEM 6

      INTRODUCTION 7

      POEM 12

      PART I—GOING TO WAR 13

      AUGUST TO NOVEMBER, 1914. 13

      POEM 27

      PART II—UBIQUE 28

      JUNE, 1915, TO APRIL, 1916 28

      POEM 49

      PART III—PER ARDAU AD ASTRA 50

      APRIL, 1916, TO JUNE, 1917 50

      Letter from Major Holt to Mr. Weston  Devenish. 68

      POEM 174

      CONCLUSION—BEFORE THE DAWN 175

      ILLUSTRATIONS

      GEORGE WESTON DEVENISH, R.A., 1914

      GEORGE DEVENISH, aged 5

      AN OBSERVATION POST

      ARTILLERY MANSIONS

      GEORGE DEVENISH, 1917

      POEM

      He was the soul of joy and happiness,

      All things he loved, and took them as they came;

      In war, in peace, at labour, or at ease,

      He laughed and counted each one just the same.

      The echo of his cheery, joyous life—

      His memory which nothing clouds or mars—

      We hold of him for ever in our hearts,

      Tho’ he has passed through hardships to the stars.

      -C. D.

      INTRODUCTION

      AMONG our early memories of George

      Devenish, there stands out one of him as a sunny-faced, knicker-bockered little fellow, spinning one of childhood’s interminable yarns for the edification of his nursery companions.

      So then, a fresh episode began abruptly, a dragon came out of the forest.

      Stop a minute, Georgie! urged his little sister, following with eager interest. "What kind of a dragon was it?"

      A difficult question, some of us older listeners thought, but one of George’s characteristics was always his imperturbable readiness in facing difficulties.

      Oh! just an or’nary kind of dragon, came the serene rejoinder, and the narrative resumed its course.

      Just an or’nary kind of dragon, the phrase passed into a household word, and it comes to one’s mind in gathering together these few glimpses into what one young officer among many thousands thought, and saw, and did in the Great War: He would emphatically have summed himself up as just an ordinary kind of officer, and the whole British Empire has cause to thank God that the phrase is true, and that the strong, keen, gallant young leader in danger, equally free from fear and from self-consciousness, is indeed and in truth the ordinary "man upon whose matter-of-course self-sacrifice the fate of the Empire hangs.

      It is this very fact—that to the wide world outside that home where his place will be forever empty, George Devenish is only one in the long ranks of brave men who have bravely died—which gives to his impressions of the war their touch of general interest, recorded, as they are in his letters, with the direct simplicity characteristic of him.

      Simplicity and directness were the keynotes of his character, producing that utter absence of self-consciousness which showed itself alike in his disregard of danger and in the good-night reminder to his mother, given as openly as his kiss to her, from his earliest school-days, up to his last night at home :

      Good-night, mother! I’ll call when I’m ready. The call in question being the signal for her to come up to his room, when he was in bed, for the brief Bible-reading he never allowed her to forget. It was by his own wish that the boyish custom was continued after boyhood’s days were done; and among his mother’s most dearly cherished memories is that of the winter’s night, in the first days of 1917, when George and his brother slept together for the last time in the boys’ room, and George’s cheerful call summoned their mother to read to them, and tuck them up in their beds, and kiss them a last good-night as usual.

      But upon the deepest and most sacred things which belong to the intimacy of home-life this is not the place to dwell. They are most fitly cherished in the hearts of those whose love for that gallant, blithe young life reaches beyond the grave, and who sorrow not as those that have no hope.

      All that can be attempted here is to sketch one or two of the more external characteristics of the personality which lay behind George Devenish’s light-hearted records of his own small share in the Great War.

      That merry heart of his did indeed go all the way in meeting whatever dangers or disagreeables fell to his lot. Still, it wasn’t so bad! was his usual summary of any un-pleasing experience. Extreme cheerfulness in all circumstances was the chief characteristic put down to him in his first Woolwich report.

      He was a soldier by profession, and most emphatically by choice. From the day he went to Woolwich, two years before the war, he was repeatedly assuring his parents that in the R.F.A. he had found the most entirely desirable career that the whole world could possibly have to offer. The training met his tastes at every point. During his public-school days at Charterhouse he had already taken every opportunity offered by the gymnasium and O.T.C. to make himself proficient in drill and rifle shooting and physical exercises. A touching little frame, arranged by his mother under his directions, still hangs over his empty bed, displaying the various badges of distinction gained in his Charterhouse military training. He had enjoyed that training with his usual zest, and the life at Woolwich he found still more completely to his mind. It fell in exactly with two of his most pronounced tastes—his bent for all things mechanical, and his love of animals. Every detail, theoretical or practical, connected with the guns, interested him keenly, and he not only distinguished himself in the riding school but formed friendships with the horses he rode.

      That was always George’s way with the animals under his care. They were never mere pets to him; he made them into friends. More than once during his time at Woolwich, on occasions when his people were away, and his home shut up, he has been known to slip down to the dismantled house for an hour or two, on a Sunday afternoon, simply to look up the dogs, because he felt it must be so beastly for them, with no one to keep them company.

      Side by side with George’s sympathy with animals one seems instinctively to think of his love of music, not that there is any connexion to be seen between the two, but because each was so distinctive a part of his sunny nature. He had never yet had time, in his short and full life, to attain any high degree of proficiency with any instrument, but he could make himself happy with a piano for any length of time; he played the French horn in the Charterhouse orchestra, and was always ready to take his part in the chamber-music which he revelled in at home.

      Could you come and do some music? was always one of his first requests to either or both of his parents when he got home on leave, unless he had some mechanical enterprise on hand, necessitating the immediate concentration of all available forces upon the scene of action in the workshop where he and his father had passed so many happy holiday hours together.

      Ten days before the fateful 4th of August, 1914, George Devenish had his twenty-first birthday, and celebrated it in a manner destined to be strangely dramatic. No one dreamed, when those birthday festivities were so light-heartedly planned and so joyously carried through, that they would prove the ending of an era. The arrangement for that coming of age had been devised, in every detail, with the sole object, on the part of George’s parents, of realizing, as nearly as might be, his own ideal for the great occasion, and that this aim was triumphantly fulfilled was George’s own unhesitating verdict. His birthday, July 25th, fell on a Saturday that year, so he elected to have a dance on the Friday evening, to dance the great day in. A real summer dance it was to be, in the beloved home of all his life, with the terrace made part of the dancing room, and seats in the fragrant dusk of the garden, with the tall white lilies as torchbearers, and the jessamine stars overhead. Rain there simply must be none, according to his plans, and there was none.

      Looking back upon that night, memory calls up one brief, joyous pageant of youth and gaiety; of brilliant enjoyment in the present, and yet more brilliant hopes for the future; of young men and maidens with the world before them, dancing together in the lamplight, or flitting out among the shadows, with light feet and lighter hearts. The youngest of young officers were there—George’s own friends—and older men who never dreamed of warfare for themselves, and girls to whom life was one long holiday; and as the leader in the

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