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hundred of them. It was our first fear.
    Of the men who left the Belvoir estate for the war, 249 did not come home.
    At the edge of each of the Duke of Rutland’s villages stands an oak or an ash. They mark the point where the volunteers had turned to wave to their families, who stood in the middle of the village streets watching them go.
    Up at the castle, Henry John Brinsley Manners, the 8th Duke of Rutland, had played a large part in their going. Without his intervention, many of those who rushed to the colours in the summer of 1914 would not have done so. On the eve of the war, the Duke’s hold over the men and women living on the estate had barely altered since his family had first settled at Belvoir. Then, and over the centuries that followed, the power conferred by their thousands of acres had enabled them to raise huge armies, for a succession of monarchs. While the feudal obligation of military service in return for land had long since been abolished, the Duke’s power was undiminished: thousands lived in his cottages and were dependent on him for a living.
    A few weeks after war was declared , a memorandum, signed by the Duke, appeared on the noticeboards at the gates to the churches in his villages. It was an appeal for volunteers: ‘All who serve the Colours will have their situations kept open for them,’ the headline read. The Duke had offered his tenants and employees further inducements: the families of men who volunteered would be entitled to liverent-free in their cottages; the men’s wages – less their army pay – would continue to be paid to their dependants. The local newspaper had applauded the Duke’s generosity: ‘In common with all other great landowners of the country, the Duke of Rutland has come forward in a most patriotic manner. As an inducement to his employees who are able to serve with the Colours, he has made very generous guarantees, which no doubt will be accepted by a large proportion of the servants and workmen on the Belvoir Estate.’
    For the majority of those who accepted the Duke’s ‘generous guarantees’, it was the first time they had ventured more than a few miles beyond the villages where they were born. Aged between eighteen and forty, they belonged to a generation that knew little, if anything, of the realities of modern warfare. There had been no war between the Great Powers since 1871. ‘ No man in the prime of life knew what war was like,’ wrote A. J. P. Taylor: ‘all imagined that it would be an affair of great marches and great battles, quickly decided.’
    I wanted to follow the journeys of the Belvoir volunteers: to look at what became of them and how, when the war ended, their experiences rebounded on the way of life on the Duke of Rutland’s estate. Yet it was not only the stories of these men that drew me to Belvoir Castle: it was the remarkable story of a ducal family.
    In an age when the word ‘nobility’ conveyed a meaning that was entirely secure, a mystique and an aura attached to the dukes, unlike that which attached to any other members of the aristocracy. The title was the highest honour that the Crown could bestow. In the 577 years since its first creation, in all, fewer than 500 individuals had had the right to call themselves Duke (or
suo jure
Duchess).
    In 1914, there were thirty dukes. Within living memory , they had enjoyed privileges that seem scarcely credible. Until the reforms of the nineteenth century, they were above the law: no one could arrest them; they could run up debts to infinity without punishment. In politics, they had control of Parliament, many of the seats in the House of Commons being within their gift. Such was their grandeur that, in the course of their public appearances, it was customary for trumpeters to announce their presence. ‘Flattered, adulated anddeferred to,’ as Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote, ‘they were the leading celebrities of their day.’
    Of the ducal families, the Manners family was among the