After the ceremony, he hurried back to the front: he had received orders that the British command was launching an unprecedented assault, with the aim of ending the war. In early July 1916, Fawcett and his men took up their positions along a placid river in northern France, providing cover as tens of thousands of British soldiers clambered up ladders propped against the muddy trench walls and marched onto the battlefield, bayonets gleaming and arms swinging, like in a parade. From his perch, Fawcett would have seen the German gunners, who were supposed to have been destroyed by weeks of bombardment. They were emerging from cavernous holes, unleashing machine-gun fire. The British soldiers fell, one by one. Fawcett tried to offer cover, but there was no way to protect men walking into a hail of bullets and eighteen-pound shells and liquidy bursts from flamethrowers. No force of nature in the jungle had prepared him for this man-made onslaught. Bits of letters and photographs that men had carried into battle fluttered over their corpses like snow. The wounded crawled into shell holes, shrieking. Fawcett called it “Armageddon.”
It was the Battle of the Somme-or what the Germans, who suffered massive casualties as well, referred to in letters home as “the bath of blood.” On the first day of the offensive, nearly twenty thousand British soldiers died and almost forty thousand were wounded. It was the greatest loss of life in the history of the British military, and many in the West began to portray the “savage” as European rather than as some native in the jungle. Fawcett, quoting a companion, wrote that cannibalism “at least provides a reasonable motive for killing a man, which is more than you can say for civilized warfare.”
When Ernest Shackleton, who had been trekking through Antarctica for nearly a year and a half, emerged in 1916 on the island of South Georgia, he immediately asked someone, “Tell me, when was the war over?” The person replied, “The war is not over… Europe is mad. The whole world is mad.”
As the conflict dragged on, Fawcett often remained at the front lines, living among corpses. The air smelled of blood and fumes. Trenches became bogs of urine and excrement and bones and lice and maggots and rats. The walls caved in from rain, and occasionally men drowned in the slime. One soldier sank slowly for days in a mud hole, without anyone being able to reach him. Fawcett, who had always found refuge in the natural world, no longer recognized the wilderness of bombed-out villages, denuded trees, craters, and sunbaked skeletons. As Lyne wrote in his diary, “Dante would never have condemned lost souls to wander in so terrible a purgatory.”
Periodically, Fawcett would hear a gong-like sound, which meant the gases were coming. Shells unleashed phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. A nurse described patients “burnt up and blistered all over with great mustard-coloured suppurating blisters, with blind eyes… all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke.” In March 1917, Nina sent a letter to the RGS saying her husband had been “gassed” after Christmas. For once, Fawcett had been injured. “He was troubled for some time by the effects of the poison,” Nina told Keltie. Certain days were worse than others: “He feels better but not quite right.”
All around Fawcett, people he knew or had been associated with were dying. The war had claimed the lives of more than a hundred and thirty RGS members. Conan Doyle's oldest son, Kingsley, died of wounds and influenza. A surveyor with whom Fawcett had worked on the South American boundary commission was killed. (“He was a good fellow-we all thought so,” Fawcett informed Keltie. “I am sorry.”) A friend in his brigade was blown up when he rushed to help someone-an act, Fawcett wrote in his official report, “of purely unselfish self-sacrifice.”
Toward the end of the war, Fawcett described some of the carnage that he had witnessed in a missive published in an English newspaper under the headline “British Colonel in Letter Here Tells of Enormous Slaughter.” “If you can imagine 60 miles of front, to a depth of 1 to 30 miles, literally carpeted with dead, often in little hills,” Fawcett wrote. “It is a measure of the price paid. Masses of men moved to the slaughter in endless waves, bridged the wires and filled the trenches with dead and dying. It was the irresistible force of an army of ants, where the pressure of the succeeding waves forced the legions in front, willingly or unwillingly, into the shambles. No thin line could withstand the human tidal wave, or go on killing forever. It is, I think, the most terrible testimony to the relentless effect of an unbridled militarism.” He concluded, “ ‘Civilization!' Ye gods! To see what one has seen the word is an absurdity. It has been an insane explosion of the lowest human emotions.”
Amid this onslaught, Fawcett continued to be heralded in dispatches for his bravery, and, as the London Gazette announced on January 4, 1917, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order medal. But if his body remained intact, his mind appeared, at times, to be wavering. When he visited home on leave, he often sat for hours without speaking, holding his head in his hands. He sought solace in spiritualism and occult rituals that offered a way to communicate with missing loved ones-a refuge that many Europeans turned to in their grief. Conan Doyle described attending a séance where he heard a voice:
I said, “Is that you, boy?”
He said in a very intense whisper and a tone all his own, “Father!” and then after a pause, “Forgive me!”
I said, “There was never anything to forgive. You were the best son a man ever had.” A strong hand descended on my head which was slowly pressed forward, and I felt a kiss just above my brow.
“Are you happy?” I cried.
There was a pause and then very gently, “I am so happy.”
Fawcett wrote to Conan Doyle about his own experiences with mediums. He recounted how his dreaded mother had spoken to him during a séance. The medium, who channeled her spirit, said, “She loved you so as a little boy and she has remorse for treating you badly.” And, “She would like to send her love but fears it might not be accepted.”
In the past, Fawcett's interest in the occult had been largely an expression of his youthful rebellion and scientific curiosity, and had contributed to his willingness to defy the prevailing orthodoxies of his own society and to respect tribal legends and religions. Now, though, his approach was untethered from his rigorous RGS training and acute powers of observation. He imbibed Madame Blavatsky's most outlandish teachings about Hyperboreans and astral bodies and Lords of the Dark Face and keys to unlocking the universe-the Other World seemingly more tantalizing than the present one. (In The Land of Mist, Conan Doyle's 1926 sequel to The Lost World, John Roxton, the character said to be partly based on Fawcett, embraces spiritualism and investigates the existence of ghosts.) There was a rumor among some officers that Fawcett used a Ouija board, a popular tool of mediums, to help make tactical decisions on the battlefield. “He and his intelligence officer… would retire to a darkened room and put their four hands, but not their elbows, on the board,” Henry Harold Hemming, who was then a captain in Fawcett's corps, wrote in an unpublished memoir. “Fawcett would then ask the Ouija Board in a loud voice if this was a confirmed location [of the enemy's position], and if the miserable board skidded over in the right direction; not merely would he include it in his list of confirmed locations, but often order 20 rounds of 9.2 howitzer to be fired at the place.”