9th-12th-Lancers - Year 2003 - Page 0075
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| Regiment | 9th/12th Lancers |
|---|---|
| Year | 2003 |
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REGIMENTAL JOURNAL OF THE 9TH/12TH ROYAL LANCERS (PRINCE OF WALES’S) 73 Martln Hunter The Life And Letters OfA Subaltern In World War I artin Hunter was born in November 1897, the only son of Colonel James Hunter, who had served in the Ninth Lancers in the Afghan War, his only son and the third of his four children. His uncle Goughie, Colonel Bloomfield Gough, had commanded the Regiment in the Boer War. His mother, Jessie, kept many of his letters which he wrote home from the time he went to preparatory school in May 1907. He was a spir- ited boy, deeply attached to his parents and sisters, addressing his father as Dado and his sisters Jean and Hyacinth, Hy to her family, as Jeano and Hyo. When he wished to make a special point he would end a sentence ‘bow wow’. Like all his family, he loved field sports, especially hunting and fishing. Hy, who was particularly close to him and shared his way with words as well as being a talented artist, wrote of him: ‘As will be seen from his earlier letters, spelling was not his strong point, he took his words as he did his fences, without regard for conse- quences!’ In his first letter home he told his father: ‘School is a lovely place’ adding ‘have you been shooting any crows. I sur- pose you have been catshing samon and troute’. As the years rolled on the spelling mistakes grew less and finally vanished. By the summer of 1914, Martin was in his fourth year at Eton and, like most of his contemporaries, had joined the Officers Training Corps. At the end ofJuly the Corps went to its annual camp at Aldershot. When Britain declared war on August 4th, camp broke up two days earlier than planned and Martin, still in his Corps uniform, arrived at his family home in Berwickshire, late in the evening of August 5th. The war drastically altered his life. In peacetime he would have stayed at Eton,probab1y until the end of1915. Like many of his contemporaries in the Corps, he had passed Certificate A, a test of competence, which included drilling a squad, elementary tac- tics, map reading and marksmanship. The War Office had ruled that boys who held Certificate A would be put on a fast track to obtaining a commission. After attending a crammer in London and passing the entrance examination for Sandhurst, he returned briefly to Eton, strangely empty of senior boys, early in October before joining the Military College at the end of the month, shortly before he turned 17. He passed out in March 1915 and was commissioned in the Ninth Lancers, as his father had been before him. He was posted to the 7th Reserve Cavalry Regiment at Tidworth on Salisbury Plain, where he enjoyed hunting. On one day in November 1915 with the Beaufort, and despite three falls, he was one of only six, two of whom were also Ninth Lancers, out ofa field of 100, left at the end ofa ten mile run. He loved polo, keeping two polo ponies, which he sent to his family home, when he went to France. Hy called them ‘wild’ and described how, to her horror, one of them ran away with an unfortunate officer who was recovering from shell shock at a local hospital. In February 1916 Martin joined the Regiment in France, cross- ing the Channel with a fellow-subaltern, Christopher Peto, later to be both Commanding Officer and Colonel of the Ninth. 125 letters written from France over the ensuing two years and his War Diary give a vivid picture of the life of a cavalry subaltern in that war. They reveal a huge zest for life and an unquench- able sense of humour in often adverse conditions. The extent of the responsibility placed on officers of only 19 or 20 also becomes evident. The Ninth formed part of the 1st Cavalry Division, which was kept in reserve for the breakthrough, which Mart/n Hunter, 9r Lancers, on 8010, A gust 7976 would hopefully follow the successful breach of the German trenches in the so-calledbig push on which the High Command set such store. No such breakthrough came in Martin’s lifetime. The Ninth were frequently on the move, their billets ranging from the barely adequate to the downright atrocious. In April 1917 he told Hy: ‘Our Mess is present in a house where we occu- py one room. There are six of us there at present and we all eat and sleep there. There is one bed and the rest of us sleep on straw and as it is a stone floor, we generally wake up a bit stiff. The atmosphere is generally wonderful...’ The previous October Martin and seven other officers were billeted on an archetypal dragon landlady, who clearly had no great love for the British army in general and the Ninth in particular: ‘We have been having the most awful trouble with the good lady whom we are billeted on. She turned us out of her house, and put us in the pantry where there was not enough room for four people let alone eight, so we thought we would have our own back on her, so we first invite her husband in to have a drink with us after dinner in his own pantry; so he had to invite us afterwards in to have a drink with him just to show we were not such terrible people.. but it has no effect, so we got fed up with the lady, who seemed to rule the house with a voice like a tea-kettle so we went to the Major and got a requisition ...for a mess which she could not refuse as we were backed up by the French Gendarmes, so now we have turned her out of her dining room and she is liv- ing in the kitchen just to make herself look like a martyr, while all the while she has another enormous dining room which is not being used, and she is absolutely dumb with filry. We always point out that we are not in this damnable country for fun but to protect them from the Huns, but it has no effect\’ On October 16 he wrote: ‘Our good landlady has gone away for the weekend so now we have roasts to eat as when she is at home our chefs are not allowed to enter on pain of instant death, but it is wonderful what happens as soon as madame is away. All French people seem to see how much of a nuisance they can be to their unfortunate allies’. Two days later: ‘There is nothing much doing here except plodding in appalling mud: the air is full of rumour. Our good landlady comes back today and we are going to straff (sic) the place the day before we go because she was so horrid about letting us into her beastly house. We keep on telling her that ‘we ain’t on a blooming honeymoon’ (as the men say).’ This incident reminds us that the Entente between Britain and France was not always Cordiale. |
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