His uncle was Archibald Hamilton Charteris, Professor of Liberal Criticism at the University of Edinburgh and Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (1892).

[4] Charteris received his early formal education at Kelvinside Academy from 1886 to 1891, then spent a year studying mathematics and physics at Göttingen University in Germany.

[4] When Haig was appointed to Corps Command at Aldershot in 1912, as Assistant Military Secretary Captain Charteris was one of the trusted officers who found a place in his retinue.

[4][5][7] In August 1914, on the outbreak of the First World War, whilst still at the junior officer rank of captain, Charteris was appointed an Aide-de-Camp to Haig, whom he accompanied to France with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF).

[5] Lord Derby, then Secretary of State for War, began to have doubts about Charteris in the role as the BEF's Intelligence Chief after an incident in February 1917 when he failed to censor an interview given by Haig to French journalists.

These reports were influential in Haig's decisions affecting the conduct of military campaigns, and were increasingly criticised by Major-General George Macdonogh, intelligence advisor at the War Office.

Herbert Lawrence, who became the BEF's Chief of Intelligence briefly in early 1918, testified to the efficiency of the organisation he inherited from Charteris when he replaced him after his dismissal.

[4] Bourne argues that although Charteris was wrong about the wider issues of German morale and manpower, he was effective at predicting enemy troop deployments, immediate plans and tactical changes.

[4] An official inquiry blamed intelligence failures by Charteris' Department for the near debacle at the Battle of Cambrai, where a German counter-attack had retaken almost all the British gains.

[12] Phillip Knightley says that all the evidence suggests that the story originated in newspaper reports about a real factory for rendering animal corpses.

He confessed to sometimes amplifying from memory but by and large the reconstructed "diary" is consistent with records which he kept at the time, e.g. his entry for the First Day of the Somme which he states was "not an attempt to win the war at a blow", and that "weeks of hard fighting" lay ahead.

If authentic, this may be the earliest account of the rumour, predating Arthur Machen's The Bowmen—widely held to be the source of the Angels of Mons legend.

They had three sons, all of whom became officers in the British Army (one of them, Euan, was killed in the North African Campaign during the Second World War on 3 December 1942 with the 2nd Battalion, Parachute Regiment).