Those Who Fought for Us Read online

Fig. 1 Map Showing Gloucestershire

  Prologue

  I was born in Gloucestershire, England in 1893, in the waning years of the reign of Queen Victoria, during what we British term ‘The Victorian Era’. I was too young to really comprehend that period, but now, seventy years on, I suppose in retrospect that it was indeed a golden era. The French called it la belle époque, the beautiful epoch, but regardless of how one describes it, there is now, and never shall be within the course human history, any possibility of going back.

  My father, Lord William, the twelfth Earl of Winston, was a colonel in the British Army. Perhaps because he was often away on assignment, I was born when he was, at forty-two, a bit ‘long in the tooth’. Indeed, by the time I was ten, he was already retired from military duty. He nonetheless dispensed his paternal duties with a certain military fortitude, and I in turn grew to manhood understanding that military service eventually lay in my future.

  One incident that I recall distinctly occurred in the summer of my twelfth year. Sir William, intent upon commencing my military training forthwith, took me on a sojourn to Culloden Battlefield, in the north of Scotland. In those days, a trip from Western England to Inverness, near the battlefield, was quite a journey, especially for a boy of eleven who had never been farther from home than London.

  I remember wondering as we stood on that vast plain, made even more immense by the frigid gale-force winds of mid-February, why my father hadn’t chosen a more clement time of year for this lesson, if indeed that was what it was. Of course, I now know better. By all accounts, my father was, if nothing else, a brilliant military tactician. I am therefore certain this was my first lesson in the harshness of warfare, the memory of that day remaining surprisingly fresh over the course of a lifetime.

  Standing rigidly before me, struggling to maintain his balance in the gale, my father called to me above the buffeting gusts, “This is where it happened, Son. On this site, in April of 1746, the Duke of Cumberland destroyed the Jacobites. It was the last battle ever fought on British soil.”

  “Who exactly were the Jacobites?” I asked, somewhat inanely.

  “They were the rebellious Scots! They were attempting to overthrow the Hanovers, the successors to the house of Stuart. It all began when Queen Elizabeth died childless in 1603. Her successor was James VI, King of Scotland. A progression of Stuart monarchs increasingly inflamed the English populace, eventually leading to the Hanoverian succession in 1689. The Jacobites intended to overthrow the Hanovers and reinstall the Stuarts to the throne of England. By the time of Culloden, the Jacobite leader was Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Stuart pretender to the throne.”

  “Right. I knew that,” I recall responding with affected self-assurance.

  Lord William thus continued, expounding, “You see, we Sutherlands are Scots. Before we were English, we were Scottish, and when the Jacobite rebellions ignited with the Hanoverian succession, the Sutherland Clan split right down the middle. I say the ‘clan’, because in 1689, the Sutherlands had not yet been fully assimilated into English culture. Accordingly, by the end of the seventeenth century, a fair portion of the Sutherland family had returned to Scotland, thereby becoming in the process Jacobites.

  “By the time the rebellions reached their peak in 1745, the Jacobites had made a fair mess of the British Isles, capturing Scotland and much of Northern England. I will spare you the historical details, as you shall learn it all in due course, but suffice it to say - the English eventually set themselves to rights, sending an army north by ship under the command of the Duke of Cumberland. To make a long story short, the English surprised the dispirited Jacobite army right here on this spot, on a cold and blustery day, much like today, subsequently butchering the Scots. And if you will look right over there, you will see the mounds where more than two thousand Jacobites are to this day buried.”

  I gazed in the direction he had pointed and, walking towards the spot as if drawn inexorably to it, I ultimately inquired, “But what was it really about, father?”

  “Who knows? Who knows what war is really about, Son?” he responded, falling into stride with me. “The fact is, we are a species that is prone to kill off our fellow man. We seem to be the most prolific species on this planet at such acts of barbarism. Only the Good Lord knows why,” he bellowed. By now we had arrived at the burial mounds, and, as if in deep contemplation, he added, “However, that is why I brought you here today, so that I might hazard a guess.”

  Whenever Lord William said the phrase ‘hazard a guess’, I was attuned to the fact that he was about to impart some momentous words of wisdom. I therefore perked up, straining expectantly despite the horrific conditions to understand the anticipated insight.

  Clearing his throat above the encroaching gale, he proffered, “You see, Robert, the Sutherlands were there that cold wintry day, led by the last of the Scottish Sutherlands, MacTavish Sutherland. We know little of him today, but it is said that he was a man of strong purpose. It would seem that this is so, for somehow he managed to hold a ragtag group of twenty or more disparate Highlanders together, and it is recorded that the Sutherlands fought well right to the end.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “They all died. They are buried on this spot before us, mound number thirty-two.”

  “My…my goodness…” I stammered, suddenly overwhelmed by the realization that the blood of my blood lay yet beneath the surface in this godforsaken place.

  Lord Sutherland, sensing the penultimate moment had arrived, now added, “The women of the clans arrived, later that horrendous day. After the butchery had ceased, and each and every Scot lay dead or dying, the women made their way onto the field of battle, in search of the remains of their loved ones. The body of MacTavish was located, surrounded by a tangle of opposing dead, his corpse riddled with sword wounds. He had died gloriously, or so it is written.”

  He paused for a moment to steady himself, he too now clearly moved by the moment, subsequently continuing with, “And now, I come to the climactic point of our journey, my son. It seems that old MacTavish carried one final surprise with him that day – a short but nonetheless prophetic poem. No one knows who wrote the poem, but as it was found in his sporran, still bound about his body, it has come down to us as ‘MacTavish’s Verse’,” and at this, he handed me the sporran, saying, “This is now yours - the family sporran. Always wear it with pride, my son.”

  He then continued, saying, “Now, I have here the original poem, which I shall endeavor to read in its entirety, in my best imitation of the original Scottish brogue:

  It comes tae me fray countless scrapes-

  The soul ay man doth live tae fight.

  Whoever wins, aught victor be,

  Tis futile folly - win or lose.

  And, when the dust ay battle clears,

  The souls ay those who’ve noo departed

  Shall beckon frae the graves beneath-

  Let nae oor blood be spilt in vain!

  Tae ye who now trod ower thes ground

  Hear thes message frae the tomb-

  That born ay folly by thes battle,

  Tis folly too if aught be gained.

  At this my father paused and, speechless for the first and only time I ever witnessed him so, he silently thrust the poem into my open palm.

  Staring at the tattered and blood-stained verse, I inquired, “What does it mean, father?”

  He stared off toward the battlefield and explained, “It means that it is the conceited nature of humans to seek profundity in their lives, whether it be in love or in war.”

  Since, at the age of eleven this explanation was somewhat over my head, I sought clarification, querying persistently, “Uhm, what might that mean, Sir?”

  “Let me put it this way, Robert,” he exclaimed above the blustering breeze, “In life, all is in reality mundane. Live your life as best you can, avoiding harm to others whenever and wherever possible.”

  Had
it not been for the lengthy trip, punctuated by the stark reality of Culloden Battlefield in the dead of winter, I might not have remembered my father’s advice to me that day. But remember I did and, little did I know then, the time would come when ‘MacTavish’s Verse’ would guide me in the course of my own life. As it was, I placed the verse within the family sporran, thinking no more on it, at least for the time being.

  The subsequent calamities resulting from two World Wars have rendered the social mores of those first years of the twentieth century to seem somehow idyllic, to say the least. If my youth was borne during the beautiful epoch, then conversely, my adulthood spanned the period of time that can only be described as the epoch of folly.

  When one is embroiled within world altering events, they somehow do not seem such at the time, but only later on, when one looks back, do the enormous changes diffuse into one’s comprehension, the far-reaching import overwhelming in magnitude. And so it is, that I, the Earl of Winston, sit in my parlor at Wharton Manor, gazing out the window, much as I did in the summer of 1912, a time only slightly removed temporally from the era of my youth, but in all other ways irrevocably altered.

  The parlor somehow looks much the same as it did then. The furniture is unchanged, the patterned rug perhaps now a bit worn and dated, but otherwise, little has changed. The view from the window is incongruously similar, and although the tennis court has been added, the lawn is much as it appeared nearly forty years ago.

  And yet, sitting here in the summer of 1964, in the autumn of my years, I am desperately aware that something has indeed changed, something momentous. In the intervening period, perhaps one hundred million lives have been sacrificed to war on this tiny planet. Try as we may to avoid culpability, my generation bears the responsibility for the wanton annihilation of more of our fellow humans than any other generation in the history of our species.

  This is I confess for me an enormous burden. Why do we humans do such things? I have no rational answer for such a question. Absent any whatsoever, I would nevertheless hope that such a devastating era shall never, ever, be repeated on our planet. And though I cannot explain it, I nevertheless feel the immense responsibility to those who succeed me, to do my very utmost to dissuade each of you from participating in such madness ever again. How might I accomplish such a magnanimous challenge? Again, I have no ready or simple answer.

  Lacking the literary skills of my antecedent, MacTavish Sutherland, to encapsulate profundity within a single compact poem, I have chosen, now in the waning years of my life, to compose this diary for you, my descendants, the family of the Earldom of Winston. It is my earnest desire that this recounting shall somehow shepherd each of you toward a better path, a path of understanding, a path that will ensure that humans shall never again engage in the wanton obliteration of others.

  Henceforth, here, without further ado, is my story, the story of my passage through the epoch of folly.