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 rifle grenades. Suddenly they started bombing us with trench mortars as well. One went off quite close to me, and my heart started again. I’ve seen the MO and he says I’ve got a large heart, and must take a fortnight’s rest. He is seeing the colonel also. He has stopped me smoking cigarettes & alas! struck me off beer! I think it is only excessive excitement that brought it on. I’ve not told Mother.
Then on 29 September: ‘We are in a bust-up tomorrow, so I thought I’d let you know. The artillery starts today. I only told the colonel the other day I was married and he said it was a pity I had not told him before, for in case anything happened to me, it would be difficult for Elly to get a pension. I just mention this in case of events, as I know you would help to straighten it out. Give my love to dearest Mother.’ On 5 October, at Loos, the 7th Surreys’ war diary recorded laconically: ‘A [trench mortar] battery in D Coy’s trench got a severe shelling about 8am resulting in several casualties. Lt. Hastings was killed also two men and 9 others wounded.’ Aubrey was among four officers and sixty-eight men from the battalion who became fatal casualties that month. His letters reveal no lust for glory, only a deep dismay at the predicament in which he found himself. Since he was the family’s only fatal loss of the war, among three brothers who served in France, the Hastingses came off lightly. But it cannot have seemed so to Aubrey’s hapless widow.
Even as casualties rose, Basil continued to be rejected for active duty – the medical examiners categorised him B2. Mac described his father as ‘Pickwickian’. Part of this persona was that Basil, short and stout, was ill-constructed for physical exertion. Nonetheless, so desperate was the demand for men that in 1917, at the age of thirty-seven, he donned the uniform of a corporal in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. It seemed absurd even to the staid spirits of the War Office that a talented writer approaching middle age should waste his time guarding some remote encampment. Thus he was transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, and spent the last year of the war producing a weekly newspaper for flight trainees, entitled Roosters and Fledglings. Many of its columns were taken up with recording the grisly roster of training accidents, which killed more embryo British pilots in World War I than did the Germans. Basil finished with the rank of lieutenant in the new Royal Air Force, though his commissioning letter emphasised: ‘He is clearly to understand that he is appointed for ground duties only, and in no circumstances will he be permitted to go into the air, except in connection with the actual duties of his appointment.’
Throughout the war, Basil continued to work on further plays, though West End audiences craved light entertainment. He embarked on a collaboration with the novelist and playwright Eden Phillpotts, who wrote from Torquay in January 1917:
Dear Hastings, Now I hear [H.B.] Irving has changed his mind again and may use [the stage adaptation of Phillpotts’s novel] ‘The Farmer’s Wife’. But there is something so volatile and contradictory about the actor’s mental make-up that one rather despairs. It is because the game is worth the candle – one real success worth working for – that we put time into play-writing. It’s a pure gamble of time. Drinkwater suspects that there will be a tremendous demand for plays after the war; but not khaki plays. I like your construction, but feel it won’t be worth putting the time into until we both feel we’ve got a likely proposition for [the actor-manager Gerald] du Maurier, or somebody of that sort. I’m holding ‘A Happy Finding’ and will send it in at once, when you let me know. With [Sir Charles] Hawtrey it would be bound to do well, for it is very funny, and a shrewd hit at our disgusting divorce laws. Try and get Hawtrey interested again. Yours always EP.
Mac was seven when, in 1917, he followed the usual family path to Stonyhurst’s preparatory school, Hodder. A two-horse brake carried him from Whalley station to his new abode, full of fears which were soon fulfilled. Unlike his father and grandfather, Mac possessed no piety. He found his new residence mindlessly cruel, was himself ‘unutterably miserable’, and was bullied from the moment of his arrival. When his tormentors suspended him from a ladder in the gym, the prefect who released him – at Stony-hurst masters rather than senior boys were called ‘prefects’ – slapped his face to check his tears. ‘Physical violence, so it seemed, was a way of life…I make no excuse for the bitterness of my pen,’ he wrote long afterwards. At seven especially, but likewise afterwards, he found incomprehensible the religious tracts which he was obliged to read. At confession, he was driven to invent imaginary sins. ‘The round of daily mass and prayers
