‘D’ Squadron of the Imperial Light Horse was composed of the sort of men whom Bulldog Drummond would have applauded – Currie Cup rugby players (who included Lewis himself), boxers, athletes, horsemen all, well accustomed to firearms. Together with the troopers of other units such as the Natal Carabiniers and Rand Rifles, they celebrated riotously at their camp outside Cape Town before boarding the ships which carried them to South-West Africa in September 1914. Once in the Kalahari Desert, Lewis and the other Light Horsemen were deployed as scouts and intelligence-gatherers for the main British column. The South Africans found themselves skirmishing with Uhlans of the German regular cavalry, quite unversed in bush life. ‘The squadron bag in the first three days consisted of about a dozen Huns, three camels and an adolescent seal,’ wrote Lewis. The latter poor creature, miles from the sea, had been the mascot of a German unit, and was now adopted by the Light Horse. Lewis was delighted to meet the seal again a few months later, ‘pleased and glossy in Pretoria Zoo’.
Trooper Hastings enjoyed himself shamelessly, despite the atrocious conditions prevailing on the battlefield. ‘All desert campaigns have much in common, and we suffered the usual pests of sandstorms, veldt sores, heat, dirt and flies. The supply system was scandalous. It wasn’t only that we were on starvation rations and that a diet of dry biscuit and bully caused rampant desert sores, but the equipment supplied by rapacious profiteers in the Union was rotten. Nearly all the water-bottles developed leaks in the first twenty-four hours.’ In one skirmish, Lewis was hit on the shin by a spent bullet, and dismounted to have the wound dressed. His hard-living general, old Sir Duncan McKenzie, chanced to gallop by at that moment. He blazed at Lewis: ‘What the hell are you doing here? You can ride, can’t you? Then why the hell aren’t you with your troop?’ Lewis hastily remounted, though when the action was over he was obliged to retire to hospital for a fortnight.
He loved his time in the SouthWest, mostly serving under a tough old Boer named Jacobus van Deventer, who when war came in 1914 had mustered his Commando, then cabled General Botha: ‘All my burghers armed, mounted and ready. Whom do we fight – the British or the Germans?’ On one march in April, the South African horsemen covered two hundred miles in eleven days, despite being obliged to haul forward in trucks every gallon of water for horse and man. German resistance was feeble: in the entire campaign only 113 South Africans were killed by enemy action, as against 153 who died from disease or accidents. Hardship rather than peril was the hallmark of the experience, as Lewis readily acknowledged.
By early 1915, the South Africans deployed 43,000 men in South-West Africa. The Germans, heavily outnumbered and lacking a commander to match the genius of von Lettow-Vorbeck in Tanganyika, surrendered in July. When Lewis’s unit returned to Cape Town, he was among many men who hastened onwards to England, to join a vastly more serious war. Commissioned into the Royal Field Artillery, he spent the rest of the war in France, entirely happy commanding a battery of eighteen-pounders, finishing as a major with the Military Cross. He saw the terrible first day of the Somme from an observation post in the front line, and never forgot ‘the orderly rows of British dead in front of the German wire’. He wrote to Basil on 29 April 1917: ‘Recently I’ve seen dozens of air fights, which are the cream of spectacles when you get anything like a near view. The Bosch is now getting it in the neck up above, thank goodness. For the present, we’re more or less in trenches again – but a moving order may come at any moment. I’m writing this in an OP in the outpost line on a comparatively peaceful and sunny morning. Love to Billie and the youngsters, yours ever, Lewis.’
For the rest of his life, though Lewis readily acknowledged the scale of 1914–18’s horrors, he was exasperated by those who professed that the experience was worse in kind than any other conflict. In 1963, when I was working as a researcher on what became a legendary BBC TV series, The Great War, he wrote me a letter about his own memories. He said that he had just finished reading a new book on the Waterloo campaign. ‘You know,’ he said,
those three days in 1815 were as full of mud and blood and horror and blunders as the long Somme agony was. A review of Henry Williamson’s book on the Somme by some hysterical nitwit claimed that all the good and brave and the potential leaders were annihilated, and apparently on the first day! Frightful as it was, one must remember that it was followed by the large-scale battles of ’17 and the bloody squalor of Passchendaele. British fortitude and capacity for sacrifice were not written off in November 1916. Moreover, though I know beyond peradventure that our chaps in 1918, especially after the great German attacks in March and April, were on the whole below the heroic standards of the British armies of 1916, they were still capable of inflicting upon the German Army in August, September and October 1918 the greatest defeats in German history, and of capturing more men, more guns, and more territory in that final victorious onslaught than all our bloody allies put together – French, Belgians, Americans etc. This is always forgotten. Wish I could tell you some more – about horses! About mules! Yes, the poor bloody mules!
Basil’s other brothers found the experience of war vastly less rewarding than did Lewis. Aubrey, twenty-eight years old, was commissioned into the 7th East Surreys, a unit of Kitchener’s New Army, in the spring of 1915. His battalion was sent to France that summer. Thereafter, Aubrey wrote frequently to Basil, in a vein much more familiar to modern students of the First World War than Lewis’s exuberant scribbles. He described, with mounting dismay, the usual murderous manifestations of trench warfare – shelling, bombing, sniping, losses, flies, relentless tension. By August he had become desperate to escape, and wrote to Basil asking whether his brother could exercise any ‘pull’ to secure him a transfer to the Royal Flying Corps: ‘I’ve got a certain amount of mechanical knowledge and I think my CO would recommend a transfer, on the ground of being married.’ Actuarially, had the poor man but known it, his prospects of survival as a pilot would have been more precarious than as a junior infantry officer. But in that place in those days, any posting seemed preferable to serving in the line with an infantry battalion. Aubrey wrote to Basil on 17 August 1915:
Thanks very much for enquiring about the Royal Flying Corps. I do hope it comes to something. My appearance in the casualty list for 13 August refers to the second time I’ve been hit – only slightly, Thank God! The Hun put over some shrapnel – registering shells, I think. Willie Martin and I were in command of Support trench with 3 platoons (Willie is our second captain – a ripping fellow – regular officer) we got the men in dugouts and were returning to the telephone dugout…We heard the usual whizz, it went off bang and I felt a sting in my right shoulder. As soon as it was over we emerged and I took my coat off and found I’d been hit with two splinters. They only made a small patch of blood on my shirt. It’s not the fact of being hit, Basil, it’s the frightening effect of shells etc that make you so nervy. I’m much more nervy today than when I first came out.
PS I don’t say anything to the women about the fighting, of course.
On 21 September, Aubrey wrote:
My company commander Capt. H.J. Dresser is going on leave today. Could you give him two seats for the play? He is going to stay at the Jermyn Court Hotel, Jermyn Street. I expect to go to a rest camp, in a day or two. Had two nasty heart attacks in the trenches. The first time it occurred was the day we were being relieved. I had been fooling about and joking etc, delighted at the thought of getting into billets, when suddenly at teatime I collapsed. The 2nd time the Germans were sending over