what I feel is ... it is a most beautiful and peaceful valley, where the people are kind and helpful— and I was glad to get out of it in one piece, Colonel.”
They stared at each other for one more moment, then the Colonel turned to his colleague. “Aye . . . Well, show him the papers, Andrew. Sheet by sheet, if you please. He’s ready for them now.”
The Special Branch man half-turned, to pick up a grey folder which had been hidden behind him within the jumble of stacked dummy1
ecclesiastical furniture half-filling the cell. From the folder he passed a single sheet of closely-typed paper to Benedikt.
Herbert George Maxwell was born in 1912, the son of Lieutenant- Colonel Julian Robert Maxwell MC, Grenadier Guards, who was killed in action in 1917 shortly after succeeding to command the 2nd/21st West Yorks at Ypres, and who as ‘Robert Julian’ was widely recognised as one of the most lyrical of the war poets while his military identity remained a close secret shared only with a few close friends.
The Maxwell family has lived at Duntisbury Manor, in Duntisbury Chase, Dorset, since the Reformation. From the time of Marlborough the first-born son of the house without exception has served the sovereign as a soldier, invariably rising to command a distinguished regiment of cavalry or battalion of infantry, and often retiring from a higher command still.
‘Robert Julian’s’ poems were nothing exceptional in the Maxwells; most of the soldiers among them were considered by their colleagues to be ’brainy‘, and army gossip and gaps in their recorded service indicate a remarkable range of interests, from the collection of antiquities in Italy and Greece to friendship with Darwin and Huxley. At the same time, the Maxwells traditionally devoted much of their lives to the service of the family estate, of which the Manor was the centre and the surrounding farms of Duntisbury Chase the greater part, which pursuit was not in those days incompatible with a military career.
Herbert Maxwell differed from his ancestors only in joining the dummy1
Royal Artillery. After his father’s death he was brought up by his mother, but with help from her brother, Major William James Lonsdale, who had lost an arm commanding a troop of field-guns at Mons in 1914, and who looked after the estate at his brother-in-law’s request until 1917 and thereafter until his nephew’s majority, retiring to Bournemouth then, where he died in 1934.
Herbert was educated, as his father had been, at Wellington, and, as his uncle had been, at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.
He was commissioned in 1932, serving subsequently with pack-guns on the North-West Frontier and later with the Home Forces, latterly as an instructor in Gunnery at the School of Artillery, Larkhill, not far from his beloved Duntisbury Chase. He was a devoted—
The sheet ended there, and Benedikt looked up, to receive the next one.
Husband? There had been no mention of wife and children yet—
— student of symphonic music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and officers who served with him remember his books on musicology, his portable radiogramophone apparatus dismantled for carrying in steel cartridge-boxes, and his box of gramophone records.
On the outbreak of war in 1939 Maxwell left the School of Artillery
— the Commandant later remarked that he all but cut his way out of Larkhill— and returned to take command of a troop in his old dummy1
regiment, which was one of the first artillery formations to go to France in that autumn, and one of the last to leave, via Dunkirk in June 1940. Awarded the Military Cross for gallant and above all effective conduct as one of his regiment’s Observation Post officers in actions from near Brussels all the way back to Ypres and then to Nieuport, he remarked of this period long afterwards that if there were a military manoeuvre more difficult to do well than a fighting retreat, he had yet to see it; and that while it was not a test he would choose, nothing revealed the quality of units and formations more clearly than did a lost battle— not even the debilitating stalemate they had endured between September and May.
Soon after returning to England with the remnants of his troop, Maxwell was appointed General Staff Officer Grade III Liaison at Divisional Headquarters. He said of this period afterwards that it was his most entertaining and unrewarding military job: all he had to do was stand about pretending that he knew what was going on, until called upon to dash off on a powerful motor-cycle to talk to some senior officer who knew even less than he did.
By the end of 1940 the division of which Maxwell’s regiment formed a part was back to full strength. But for many months the war was conducted without the help of what its officers and men considered to be the best regiment in the best division in the British Army. Early in 1943 the command of Maxwell’s troop fell vacant and he returned to it, however— which was correctly recognised by members of the regiment as a sure sign that their long wait would soon be over.
dummy1
The second sheet ended on that note of high expectation, but Benedikt was beginning to become confused again. This was all very interesting, the ancient history of the Maxwells—or, at least, it would have been very interesting to Papa, whose guns had been the best ones in his beloved Division Afrika zur besondern Verfugung—the immortal goth Light—and who, come to that, knew exactly how Major William James Lonsdale had felt at Mons, and afterwards. But where did it all fit into the modern history of Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith and Duntisbury Chase?
In March the division sailed to Algeria, to join the First Army in its assault on Tunisia. Herbert Maxwell promptly fell ill with a bad case of dysentery, and so missed the spoiling attack by the Germans across the Goubellat Plain south-west of Tunis. The attack was launched with their customary elan and professionalism in an area where the British forces were not well deployed for defence. However, when the German armour made contact south of Medjez-el-Bab it had the misfortune not only of encountering two of the most capable of the British divisions (one arriving and the other about to depart), in a sector where a single brigade might
