The golden boy who begged to go into battle
On May 25, 1917, Mary, Countess of Minto, wrote in her diary how, that afternoon in London, she had found it frustratingly difficult to find a taxi. ‘I have always accepted my luxurious life as a matter of course,’ she wrote in selfreproach, before noting that her younger son, Esmond, then on leave, had ‘always had a tremendous feeling for people whom Providence has placed in less favourable surroundings . . . He feels so strongly that no one in this country can even faintly imagine the horrors of warfare.’
Esmond Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound could have remained aloof from those horrors. Born in 1895, he arrived at Eton measuring 4 ft 6 in and weighing 4 st 6 lb and was forced to wear calipers at night to ‘correct his gait’. By the time he left, he was a foot taller and cox of the First Eight, but a medical board ruled him unfit to fight on account of his beanpole frame.
affronted, he joined the Home Defence and, 16 months later in February 1916, after many of his Eton friends had been killed in action, he crossed the Channel as aide-de-camp to Major General Geoffrey Feilding. a few years earlier, Feilding had been aDC to Esmond’s father, when ‘Rolly’, 4th Earl of Minto, was Viceroy of India.
The ‘youngest, most loved and treasured’ of the Mintos’ five children, Esmond was, in his housemaster’s description, ‘an antidote to all depression’.
He had learned French aged five while his father was Governor General of Canada, had shot rapids, tobogganed, skied and sailed, ridden across the prairies and stood within inches of the tomahawks of the Sioux and Blackfoot tribes, resplendent in their war-paint and headdresses.
Privileged but unspoiled, Esmond possessed a charm which the Bandmaster of the Coldstream Guards said he had ‘never felt equalled’.
Concluding that his role as aDC was ‘wholly unnecessary’, Esmond convinced Feilding of his desire to ‘see some action’ and joined the Scots Guards. Mary, widowed in 1914, gave her blessing.
‘It is because I love you so that I wouldn’t wish you not to go,’ she wrote; he had already told her, aware of the slender odds of his survival, that ‘if he had completed his appointed task on Earth he would not come back’.
Simultaneously vivid, stoical, candid and boyish, extracts from his diaries are the heart of the book. at one moment, they record casualties (‘two men killed in the morning from shellfire’); at the next, ‘ a very amusing evening with plenty of champagne . . . a most awfully happy lot of fellows’; or the ‘ three enormous parcels’ sent from Paris by his sister, Violet, with ‘1830 champagne, excellent pate and cold bird’.
The casualties are remorseless: ‘The doctor, who had only just come to us, was killed coming out of the line.’ and Esmond’s dugout is hit, ‘blowing the entrance in ... several wounded and Sergeant Morden killed. Such a nice man who came out from England with us . . . Poor Jollyboy [a fellow officer], the best that ever breathed, killed at 1 am.’
Eventually, in July 1917, comes the chance to attack. Esmond — the ‘best boy I’d got,’ says his commanding officer — is selected to lead a raid on the yser river.
He returns with invaluable intelligence, but frustrated by the absence of Germans.
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days later, Mary attended a remembrance service at westminster abbey beside the King. afterwards, she took communion in Knightsbridge. In the evening, she went to Holy Trinity Brompton.
none of it yielded solace. ‘Dread has taken possession of me,’ she wrote. That night, Esmond was hit by a bullet which pierced his lung; he died four hours later. He was just 22. Though his destiny is known to us from the outset, it still seems impossible someone so abundantly alive could die. His platoon sergeant writes to Mary: ‘we have lost our idol.’
She, heartbroken, learned after the war that only a fifth of the fallen had their ages recorded on their headstones, and led a successful campaign for change, emulating her beloved son whose thoughts were so often with those ‘whom Providence had placed in less favourable surroundings’.