Calderon found Brigadier-General ‘Black Jack’ Kavanagh last night about three miles from the front and presented his letter of recommendation from Kavanagh’s brigade major in Dunkirk. This afternoon he told Kittie the result:
It is not certain that General K. can keep me, as movement by motor car is not always feasible, but, if the worst comes to the worst, I must blue my pay on a cart and a driver rather than get left behind.
The point was, presumably, that it was too painful for him to ride a horse. Where the pain was, he never specifies, but the implication of earlier letters was that it was ‘in the backside’ and ‘urethra’. Neither is there any mention still of a plausible diagnosis.
Reading between the lines, I think George was now politely marginalised as an interpreter. This morning he had nothing to do, so ‘I’m in the sun by the roadside on a chair, studying Flemish’. He had called on the Blues and was ‘delighted’ to see them. ‘I hear that Dick S. was wounded yesterday, but not badly, and is quite happy.’ Evidently the Blues asked him to liaise with the locals:
Village life rather interrupted here. Peasants and women wanting to drift by nearer to the trenches to milk cows, feed pigs, get their bread ‘from my sister’s oven’ and the like. But the ‘doorgang’ [thoroughfare] is ‘verboden’ [prohibited]. I went along half a mile with one man, and it was all quite true. I made him feed his pigs and drive his cows back. We saw a farm catch fire a mile and a half ahead. There was one blazing a little way off last night.
Yesterday was in fact Calderon’s first experience of battle (in the distance) since arriving in Belgium on 8 October.
There was the bang of shells along the low hills to front and sides, like doors slamming and horses kicking in empty barns, bright flashes of the shrapnel bursting in the twilight, distant white puffs of the Jack Johnsons [six-inch German artillery shells], like Grampuses blowing at sea. Dead horses here and there in the fields and at the roadside.
The noise was probably from German artillery pounding the tip of the salient at Kruiseecke. It was being defended by the infantry division of IV Corps, which had now lost 44% of its officers and 37% of its other ranks. Yesterday evening Rawlinson had telegraphed French that IV Corps was ‘only hanging on by our eyelids’.
By this evening the Germans had captured Kruiseecke, not far from the main Menin Road into Ypres.
Next entry: ‘Stellenbosched’
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Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
George Calderon, 1912
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
George Calderon c.1901
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Captain of the 11
26 October 1914
Calderon found Brigadier-General ‘Black Jack’ Kavanagh last night about three miles from the front and presented his letter of recommendation from Kavanagh’s brigade major in Dunkirk. This afternoon he told Kittie the result:
The point was, presumably, that it was too painful for him to ride a horse. Where the pain was, he never specifies, but the implication of earlier letters was that it was ‘in the backside’ and ‘urethra’. Neither is there any mention still of a plausible diagnosis.
Reading between the lines, I think George was now politely marginalised as an interpreter. This morning he had nothing to do, so ‘I’m in the sun by the roadside on a chair, studying Flemish’. He had called on the Blues and was ‘delighted’ to see them. ‘I hear that Dick S. was wounded yesterday, but not badly, and is quite happy.’ Evidently the Blues asked him to liaise with the locals:
Yesterday was in fact Calderon’s first experience of battle (in the distance) since arriving in Belgium on 8 October.
The noise was probably from German artillery pounding the tip of the salient at Kruiseecke. It was being defended by the infantry division of IV Corps, which had now lost 44% of its officers and 37% of its other ranks. Yesterday evening Rawlinson had telegraphed French that IV Corps was ‘only hanging on by our eyelids’.
By this evening the Germans had captured Kruiseecke, not far from the main Menin Road into Ypres.
Next entry: ‘Stellenbosched’
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