From the double biography of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, Basil and Willie...

Amongst the Hollywood Raj, there were several First World War veterans. Ronald Colman, the uncrowned king of the British ex-pat community, had been wounded in action and invalided out of the London Scottish in 1915. Twenty years later, Colman and Bruce would play opposite each other in the Hollywood classic The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo. Rathbone would, also share screen-time with Colman, being virtually unrecognisable as King Louis XI, before he and Bruce would embark on the first of their many films as Holmes and Watson.

They all did their bit for King and country, although they rarely, if ever, spoke of their ordeals at the Western Front. Born in the reign of Queen Victoria, sons of the British Empire, theirs was to die or die, not to reason why. Post-traumatic stress disorder would have been as foreign to them as their surroundings when they had first ventured eastwards to Los Angeles and the Dream Factory that was Hollywood. They may have been mere players in the so-called Great War conflict but it had an indelible effect on their lives.

Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914 and Bruce enlisted the same day. His brother, now the eleventh Baronet of Stenhouse and Airth had been in the armed forces since 1912, the year their father had died. Sir Michael had been a lieutenant in the 8th Middlesex Regiment, then seconded to the BSA Police Force, serving against natives in Portuguese East Africa, now Mozambique, during 1913 and 1914. He had also fought rebels in Transvaal and been wounded. He would also see action at the Dardanelles, in France and German East Africa, being wounded twice more. Bruce followed his brother into the armed forces, having previously being training as a stockbroker.

Rathbone, meanwhile, was still concentrating on his acting career. Domestically, life was looking up, as he had fallen for fellow actor, Marion Foreman. By October 1914, they were married and in the following July, she would give birth to their only child, a son called Rodion. As the First World War began, there was no hurry to enlist. Famously, this was the war that would be over by Christmas. As the new recruits marched off to the troopships that would take them to the killing fields of France, the shock of what was to come was but simply beyond their ken.

For Bruce, Colman and Rathbone, it would be a turning point in their lives. The very first chapter of Rathbone's autobiography is simply entitled War and it would have a profound effect on all their lives, both personally and professionally.

He may have worked in America most of his adult life, paying taxes, raising a family and investing there, but Rathbone never took up US citizenship. His reasons were simple. He had fought for England and lost his brother in the conflict. He could, or would, not abandon his roots so easily. It had also led to the demise of his first marriage forcing him to abandon his young son for a time. Some soldiers, at least in the Second World War, had a ‘good war' but for Rathbone in the first truly global conflagration the world had ever seen, it would be a bittersweet experience.

Rathbone continued in the theatre, Bruce now in No 3 (or C) Company of the 1st Battalion Honourable Artillery Company (Infantry). His Regimental number was 852 and he sailed for France on 18 September 1914 on the SS Westmeath. The battalion landed on the other side of the English Channel on 20 September. This was the first time of the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC that a unit had ventured overseas where it had been officered and manned by members of the HAC on active service. The HAC was one of several British territorial regiments to take part in the First World War, including the London Scottish and the Liverpool Scottish.

Private Colman, whose mother was from north of the border, had enlisted with the London Scottish Regionals. They were considered the crème de la crème of the army's territorial forces, but his time in the armed forces would be brief and bloody. On 31 October 1914, during the Kaiser's "Halloween Party", the first battle of Ypres, he suffered injuries to a knee and ankle, sustaining shrapnel. By May of the following year he had been discharged from the army. Contrary to popular myth, he was neither gassed nor decorated but was left with a noticeable limp.

Rathbone's family was Anglo-Scottish, and he too joined a kilted regiment. He originally enlisted on 13 November 1915 as Private 7352/513303, but was immediately released to the Army Reserve. He was eventually recalled for duty on 30 March 1916. By some strange quirk of coincidence he enlisted with Colman's old regiment, joining the 3rd Battalion London Scottish for training as Private 513303 at Richmond Camp in 1916. Herbert Marshall and Claude Rains, who would play Prince John to Rathbone's Sir Guy in The Adventures of Robin Hood, would also spend time in the London Scottish.

Meanwhile, Bruce was at Kemmel, when he was wounded on 6 January 1915. The 1st Battalion's War Diary, and the regiment's official history, recorded starkly what happened to the young soldier, not yet twenty years of age, and his comrades in arms.

"C" Company was holding their usual front, when the Germans had got into a position where they could fire on "F" trench. "F" trench would be one of the trenches at Kemmel that the battalion would defend from November 1914 to October 1915. During their time in France, they would share their trenches with not only the London Scottish but the Liverpool Scottish too. Colman, Bruce and Rathbone's combined destinies, however, were yet to converge.

Private G F Sadler wrote in a letter to his father, dated 9 January 1915, that they had had the bad luck to lose one of their captains. This was Captain W S Newton, whom Sadler refers to as "an awfully nice fellow and universally popular." Newton was killed "instantaneously" at 9am, and was considered a great loss "for, beside a champion shot, he was absolutely fearless." Three men were wounded by machine gunfire. By the time Bruce was shipped back to England on 25 January, he had spent less than six months in France.

Reports were received from hospital on 2 November giving Bruce leave till 12 November. On 13 November he was discharged to a commission in the 3rd Somerset Light Infantry, holding the rank of Acting Captain (attached Officers' Cadet Battalion). This did not end his relationship with his previous regiment.

On 22 April 1922, the Secretary of the HAC had written to Bruce at 9 Berners Street Mansions, replying to a letter from him asking why he had received no notices or communications from them. Previous letters had been sent to his family's address in West Drayton, but had been returned marked ‘Gone Away'. The Secretary had also noted that he owed two guineas. By now Bruce had embarked on an acting career and in their printed membership list, his address is given as Comedy Theatre on London's Panton Street. He was re-admitted to the Veteran Company of the HAC on 1 October 1934, giving his address as the Garrick Club, WC2. On 16 July 1935 he resigned, just as his film career in Hollywood started to take off.

For the rest of his life, Bruce's war wounds would cause him health problems. He was still having operations thirty years after the cessation of hostilities. Far from preventing him leading an active life, he could still play a round of golf, when his war wounds were not playing up, as well as shooting. He also turned out for the Hollywood Cricket Club, alongside David Niven and C Aubrey Smith; who had played with cricket's first batting superstar, W G Grace. Whenever Bruce went out to bat - he was an accomplished batsman - he would have to use a young lad as Bruce's runner.

By the time Bruce had been gazetted as a captain to the Somerset Light Infantry, Rathbone was still a Bensonian, a member of his cousin Frank's theatre company, as well as a married man with a young child to support. As the war in the trenches dragged on, he feared that he was being "pigeon-livered". Conscientious objectors were few and far between and a great deal of anti-German feeling abounded in the land. Zeppelins had begun bombing raids over England and enemy warships fired shells onto towns overlooking the North Sea. The Royal Family was forced to change its from the rather Teutonic-sounding Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the more Anglophile Windsor.

Rathbone left the Bensonians, Marion and Rodion and enlisted with Colman's old regiment, the London Scottish. Lady Benson recounted in her memoirs that so many of the young actors were leaving that it was difficult to find replacements to that they had to use women in the roles to fill the lesser male roles. Ronald Colman, unable to resume soldiering, found a job in the theatre, because the London stage was so man-short due to the war. Rathbone's acting career was put on hold, as his country still needed him. Oddly, it would be his time in the theatre that led him to being awarded the Military Cross.

Years later, he was interviewed about his part in the war, sounding almost dismissive: "All I did," he said, "was to disguise myself as a tree and cross no man's land to gather a bit of information from the German lines. I have not since been called upon to play a tree."

He may have sounded casual about his own small part in the First World War, but he had good reason: he was one of the lucky ones to survive without barely a scratch. Rathbone's emotions were never too far from the surface, but it was an age when people still kept their feelings to themselves. There was no equivalent of survivor guilt, just the stiff upper lip as spiritual consolation. The scale of the losses at the front had dwarfed any previous conflict within living memory to a mind-numbing degree. The Somme offensive still holds the record for the heaviest casualties in British military history in a single day. In a twenty-four hour period, nineteen thousand men were killed outright and forty-seven thousand wounded.

Rathbone admitted in his autobiography, that he was far from an enthusiastic recruit. The very thought of soldiering appalled him, but as a boy growing up, he was engulfed by images of Empire. From the stories of Rudyard Kipling to pictures of Lord Kitchener, The Charge of the Light Brigade and The Thin Red Line on his nursery walls. By 1916, and despite the added pressures of marriage, fatherhood and his burgeoning acting career, he, in due course, and, in spite of himself, finally joined up.

Richmond Park is just outside London, famed for its deer, but in 1916 it was the training camp for new recruits. Along with the other raw recruits plucked from their cosy civilian lives, Private Rathbone learned the skills necessary to deal with the Boche. Fed lurid tales of their war crimes, including bayoneting babies, making it all the easier to was train in the way of the bayonet, as well as the rifle and Lewis gun.

He came to loathe bayonet practice, in particular, rushing frantically towards a sack of wet straw. Thrusting his bayonet into the dummy figure, turning the blade sharply to increase the size of the wound and then withdrawing the cold steel, merely to turn to the next dummy and repeating the exercise.

To buy time, he applied for a commission and been accepted. He was sent for Officer Training on 5 October 1916 in Gailes, Ayrshire. Its golf course used to be one of the most difficult not only in Scotland, but the world. He was even further from the battlefields of northern France, thereby avoiding an early baptism of fire on the Western Front. He was commissioned on 25 January 1917 and sent to the Liverpool Scottish, Second Battalion.

Due to reasons best known to the War Office, the 57th Division, to which the Second Battalion was attached, would be held up in England for several months. He eventually said his farewells to his parents at Victoria Station, bound by train to the troopship waiting for him at Folkestone. It was poignant moment, as Rathbone would never see his mother again.

It would not be until 1918, in the last six months of the war, that Rathbone would experience the very highs, as well as the very lows, of his army career. Rumours in June of that year had spread throughout the British line that the Germans were planning to withdraw from their positions. At night, noises emanated from behind enemy lines that indicated the movement of artillery and transport.

No man's land was covered with thick vegetation that enabled men to creep from crater to shell-hole without being detected. Second Lieutenant Philip St John Basil Rathbone was now Patrols, or Scout, Officer responsible for intelligence gathering performed by missions carried out by scouts accompanied with snipers. His success was due in no small part to his time as an actor, but he would need to convince his commanding officer first.

Once or twice a week, night time reconnaissance patrols, led by Rathbone, were sent out to bring back useful information about what the Germans were planning. Four men, in diamond formation, would crawl through no man's land in the pitch black, risking capture or death. To avoid being shot on sight as spies - if found to be wearing their kilts - they wore overalls. The First World War would be the last major conflict in which Scottish regiments would wear their traditional garb. Indeed, so fearsome was their reputation, German intelligence had dubbed them the "ladies from Hell."

This procedure would normally take little more than an hour, after which the patrol would return to base, Rathbone would then write his report. Until they were lost in a fire, he kept copies of these reports in an old theatrical basket. This was appropriate, as although some were based in fact, most were conjecture, hardly worth the paper they were written on. There was a great need for "news items" from the top brass. His imagination was thoroughly tested, attempting to supply information, however flimsy, to make his report acceptable to Battalion HQ.

Crawling through the mud, blood and detritus of no man's land, night after night, coming up with scraps of, largely useless or inconclusive, information, was, Rathbone concluded, rather unsatisfactory. During his time in the regiment, he and former Bensonian, James Littlewood Dale had provided the benefit of their theatrical experience to the regiment's Battalion Concert Party, the "Kinky Roos". Their help led to the troupe rendering a creditable scene from Othello at one of their concerts. Their high-sounding title was a corruption of Quinque Rue's. There was a common practice amongst the British troops to purposely mispronounce French place names, as in Wipers for Ypres.

After the war, Dale would also resume his acting career. He returned to the theatre, but his voice became known to millions, as his namesake Dr Jim Dale on the long-running BBC radio series Mrs Dale's Diary. He lived to be over ninety years of age.

Lieutenant-Colonel D C D Munro, Rathbone's commanding officer, therefore, would have been aware of his young officer's theatrical experience. So when he proposed that he and Corporal Tanner should creep out into no man's land, just before dawn, and wait until sunrise, Munro was intrigued. Further to Rathbone's suggestion, bringing out the "ham" in him, they would use camouflage to compensate for the lack of darkness. Munro officer was sold on the idea and gave his permission to proceed.

Woken by his batman Private Isles, Rathbone rose just before the sun had risen. With hands blackened with burnt cork and wearing wreaths of freshly plucked foliage, he and Tanner crawled through the wire at five in the morning and waited in no man's land for the first rays of dawn. The sentries were made aware of their presence, as four-man patrol rested with the enemy trenches in their sights. Along with Private Norman Reginald Tanner, formerly a butcher from Hoylake on the Wirral, there was Private Richard Burton of Preston, Lancashire, and one other, as they crawled their way into enemy territory.

After several days, it became apparent that the Germans were oblivious to their movements. Without raising suspicions from the enemy, they were able to locate crucial machine-gun nests, relay their positions to the artillery and have them put of action. They were also able to support High Command's supposition that the Germans were planning to withdraw, by observing the paucity of their front-line positions.

Emboldened by his men's efforts, Munro ordered Rathbone to take a prisoner or capture positive identification. He assured Munro that he could handle it.

The next morning, the same procedure, but the routine was slightly different. Just as the patrol was venturing from beyond their line, out of the sky came two German aircraft. From their colour, one black and the other red, it was the legendary Baron von Richthofen and Hermann Goering, future leader of the Luftwaffe, along with several lesser-known pilots in tow. They strafed the British lines, greeted by return fire from the trenches below, eliciting cheers from the other side. Soon the planes were gone and they waited before making their move.

Picking a spot between two machinegun posts, they finally reached the wire, cut their way through and rolled over into the German front line. They remained motionless for several minutes, then made their way into the enemy trenches.

They encountered no resistance, as they made their way through the seemingly empty trenches, until Rathbone came face to face with a German soldier. Struck dumb by the British officer's odd attire, Rathbone realised that he and Tanner were too far from their lines to take a prisoner. Without hesitation, Rathbone shot the man twice with his revolver. Tanner tore off the corpse's identification tags, as Rathbone rifled its pockets, taking a diary and some papers. Voices assailed them from both sides and they now made their escape.

Scrambling out of the trench, so fast that Rathbone snagged his right leg on the barbed wires. Scars would remain as souvenirs of the mission, he and Tanner ran for the nearest crater. Machinegun bullets pitted the rear of the shell-hole, as they sheltered in the near lip of the crater, narrowly escaping being caught in the crossfire of the enemy. They were within distance of making it back to base, but they had to split up to do so, confusing the German twin gun positions, saving each other's lives. They arrived home safely at the same time, although half a mile apart, the information received was put to good use. For this, Second Lieutenant Rathbone was awarded the Military Cross and the Military Medal was awarded to Privates Tanner, Battalion scout, and Burton, who had acted as sniper. Tanner was promoted to corporal.

When Rathbone finally accepted the role of Arthur Conan Doyle's master detective, he had slightly more in common with the author than just a resemblance to the detective that had illustrated Doyle's tales in Strand magazine.

Doyle's fascination with the occult stemmed from the loss of his son, Kingsley, in the First World War. Educated by the Jesuits, he was a lapsed Catholic, and unlike Holmes he was hardly a fine example of rationality. Not only did he write History of Spiritualism, he quite literally, believed in so-called little people. Indeed, one of his earliest stories was entitled The Coming of the Fairies. Doyle died in 1930 and never witnessed Rathbone's interpretation of Holmes.

Lieutenant John Ernest Vivian Rathbone served with the 1st Battalion, Dorsetshire Regiment, also known as the Dorsets. He was Rathbone's younger brother and they were very close. In the early part of 1918, Rathbone received a telephone call from John. The Dorsets were stationed near by and he was due some leave. Rathbone's commanding officer was sympathetic and granted his consent so that the brothers could spend the day together. They had always been very close.

They spent a day together, then had dinner in the Mess, where John's infectious sense of humour ingratiated him with Rathbone's fellow officers. They retired late into the night, having imbibed Scotch whisky and good food. They shared a bed and were soon asleep.

It was still dark outside, when Rathbone awoke from a nightmare. He had just witnessed John's death. He lit a candle and held it to his brother's face. It took a short while to calm himself and realise that John was still breathing. He blew out the candle and rested his head back on his pillow, but was unable to rest. He was haunted by a premonition that the new day failed to dispel.

Several weeks later, Rathbone was sat in his dugout on the front line. He was consumed by a need to weep, and did so, as he had just begun to think of his brother. The letter he wrote to John at the time never received a reply. He received news of his younger sibling's death at precisely one o'clock, 4 June 1918. The exact time that John was killed in action.

Captain J E V Rathbone is buried in Frances's Berles New Military Cemetery at Berles-au-Bois. He was serving with the 1st Battalion in line in the region of Hamlincourt on 4 June 1918. The day had generally been quiet, but there had been a little shelling. Unfortunately, casualties had been severe, with several soldiers, including two officers, wounded. However, Captain Rathbone was killed along with others. He was a mere twenty years of age.

With their fellow officers and men of the Liverpool Scottish, lieutenants Rathbone and Dale were demobilised in 1919. The 10th Battalion had been the first of Liverpool's Territorial Force to leave for service overseas and were the last to return home. During the war, Rathbone not only lost his brother, but his mother as well. When he returned, he noticed that his father had aged noticeably and that the deaths of their mother and brother had also affected his sister deeply.

Not all Rathbone's memories of the war were bad. In the summer of 1934, when he received a telephone call, as he listened to Arturo Toscannini and his Symphony of the Air Orchestra played on the radio. He and Ouida were in a hotel in Toledo, Ohio, with a production of Romeo and Juliet, preparing it for its opening in New York. When Rathbone's wife answered the telephone, she found that it was for her husband. This was strange, as he was certain that he knew no one in, or from, Toledo. To his surprise, an English voice greeted him down the wire. It was Norman Reginald Tanner, once Corporal Tanner, now a local policeman and an American citizen to boot. They hooked up, and with Ouida, celebrated into the early hours. As Rathbone commented: "Some of the ghosts in my life have come back to haunt me, and some of them have been astonishingly real."

© Howard Watson 2009