Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey (22 page)

Almina needed the distractions of work more than ever and flung herself into life at Bryanston Square. She had brought much of the hospital equipment from Highclere and spent her own money on topping it up with more beds, linens and crockery. But Alfred was continuing to pay for staff costs, both for the nurses and the household staff. There was a cook, a dozen maids and several footmen. Even more crucially, he supplied more reserves to install the state-of-the-art equipment and essential medical supplies that Almina needed to save more lives.

Alfred was by this time a broken man. He had been something of a hypochondriac all his life but now he was genuinely suffering. He was plagued by the combined effects of years of high living and emotional fatigue. He had been sick at heart ever since the declaration of war, and nothing that had happened since had done anything to relieve his gloom. His closely knit but far-flung extended family had found themselves on opposing sides, just as he feared. There were branches of the Rothschilds in central Europe that were now lost to him, and the world in which he had lived his life – the banks, the family holidays with Continental cousins and the social whirl – had been comprehensively destroyed.

Alfred’s only consolation was his support for the Allies’ war work. Later in the year, once the bloodbath of the Somme got under way, he offered the glorious beech trees from Halton House to the Timber Control Board, to be used as props in the waterlogged trenches of northern France. For now, he concentrated on maintaining Almina’s hospital.

Almina’s X-ray machine was her pride and joy. X-rays had been discovered in 1895 and their relevance to military surgeons was immediately obvious: being able to locate a bullet precisely without messy interventions was incalculably useful. Bryanston Square now had the means to carry out cutting-edge procedures on fractures and gunshot wounds. There was no shortage of patients in need.

In February, the Battle of Verdun, which eventually claimed 306,000 lives, got under way, and a man called Bates arrived at Almina’s hospital. Harold Bates was a padre, an Army chaplain, a reserved and stoical person who, even forty years later, refused to discuss what he had seen and done in the Great War. He had been on the Western Front since August 1914 when he was sent out with the 6th Division. At some point late in 1915 he was wounded at Ypres, shot in the leg.

There have been Army chaplains for as long as there have been armies, but their role expanded, of necessity, in the Great War. For the first time in history, large numbers of men were living on the battlefield in atrocious conditions, for weeks and months at a time. They were in desperate need of comfort and guidance, and the padres, while being unarmed non-combatants, were often in the thick of the horror. Clearly Mr Bates was close enough to take a hit,
and quite a nasty one, since he ended up spending seven months in Almina’s care at Bryanston Square. He was a dedicated churchman who went on to serve the Church of England until his death in the 1960s.

At the hospital he carried out his duties with determination and dignity, accompanying Almina on her rounds from the moment he was able to get out of bed and limp. Despite the X-ray machine, the operation and excellent nursing, Bates, who was a tall, broad man, was lame for the rest of his life. He used a stick and always struggled with stairs. When he was finally well enough to leave the hospital, he was discharged from the Army. He was an excellent padre, but his days of wading through mud to comfort injured soldiers were behind him. He had got out just in time.

Mr Bates’s war was over, but Aubrey Herbert, despite his severe disillusionment in the aftermath of the Gallipoli campaign, was gearing up to return to the Middle East. In March 1916 he was sailing for Mesopotamia in the company of the Commander-in-Chief of Egypt, the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean and the Prince of Wales. It was the first time Aubrey had met the eldest son of George V and Queen Mary, who was briefly Edward VIII before his desire to marry Wallis Simpson sparked the abdication crisis. Aubrey, clearly somewhat underwhelmed, commented that at least ‘he was more imaginative than I expected. He said that he hated being at home, it worried him thinking of the others in the trenches.’

British military involvement in Mesopotamia had started
out as an operation to safeguard the oil fields in what is now Iraq; crucial given that the naval campaign in particular was heavily oil-dependent. But it was spiralling into a humiliating disaster, and Aubrey’s language skills and local knowledge again made him indispensable.

The 6th Indian division had been dispatched to the region from the Army’s bases in Bombay, under the command of General Townshend, but they were woefully poorly supplied in terms of both food and transport. As the military problems escalated, such cost-cutting measures proved catastrophic. Aubrey had a very bad feeling about the whole thing, but was hoping to be proved wrong. When he arrived he wrote back to his great friend Sir Mark Sykes, who was still based at the War Office. ‘Well, the position here is absolutely bloody.’

General Townshend had retreated to Kut al-Amara, which he was trying to defend against the vastly superior Turkish forces. Attempts to relieve him and break the siege had failed. His troops were starving; some aerial drops of rations had been made but, even so, by April, the men were down to four ounces of food a day and riddled with disease. There was no choice but to surrender.

Aubrey wrote to Colonel Beach, the head of Military Intelligence in the region, offering to accompany General Townshend to the negotiations – he knew some of the leading Turks very well. While he was waiting for a response, he visited Turkish prisoners of war in the British Army camps and noted that their morale was high. They believed that after Gallipoli, Salonika and now Kut, they were going to win. Aubrey’s response was typical of the bullish determination that persisted in the British forces and public, despite
the shock of failures. He informed the confident Turks that it was his country’s ‘national habit to be defeated at the beginning of every war and to win in the end.’

A year to the day after Aubrey’s arrival at Gallipoli, he was reunited with his friend T. E. Lawrence, and sent to go and talk terms with the Turkish High Command. The two men’s hopes were limited to being able to secure a truce to allow the wounded soldiers to be shipped out, but the British government seemed to have a longer-term goal in mind. The men were authorised to offer
£
2 million and the promise of not launching further attacks on the Ottoman Empire. This offer was rejected and, although there was a truce to allow for an exchange of prisoners, on 29 April 1916 General Townshend surrendered. Thirteen thousand British and Indian soldiers were taken prisoner.

The whole incident was a tremendous humiliation for the British Army. It must have been hard even for Aubrey to remain positive about the national chances as he surveyed the River Tigris, full of bloated corpses. They washed up on the riverbanks and bumped up against the small boats that plied their way up and down. There had been a cholera outbreak that raged through the already weakened troops. Of the 13,000 prisoners of war, more than half died of starvation or at the hands of their captors.

Aubrey wasn’t the only Highclere man out in the region. Major Rutherford, the Earl’s agent, had a son serving as a Lieutenant in the ¼th Hampshire Regiment. He eventually made it back to Almina’s hospital and survived the war. Lord Carnarvon wrote to Aubrey asking him to find out what had happened to ‘[his] boys from the stud farm and the estate.’ He ‘hoped to send money or some small comforts.’ The news
trickled back agonisingly slowly. Albert Young, Charlie Adnams and George Digweed had all been gardeners and joined up together, also serving in the ¼th Hampshire Regiment on the ill-fated attempt to take Baghdad. Perhaps when the flies and the stifling air and the stench of the cholera-infested corpses became too much, they dreamt of the peaceful walled gardens and talked about the Dutch azaleas that would be flowering on the Castle’s east lawns. They were all buried in Mesopotamia. Adnams and Digweed were taken prisoner at Kut and died in captivity. Thomas Young was killed in action at the crossing of the Shumran Bend on 21 January 1916 as was Frederick Fifield. His body was never found. His young brother was still at home at Highclere, working in the buildings department. Only Tom Whincup, who worked under his half-brother Charlie Whincup at the stud, and Charles Steer who had also worked there, survived the campaign and were lucky enough to avoid being taken prisoner.

Aubrey made it back to Britain in early July and went to Highclere. He wanted to see his brother. All his life, even after he had established himself as a man to call upon to negotiate for soldiers’ lives, Aubrey felt the need to touch base with his brother. Lord Carnarvon was of course delighted that Aubrey was safe and in a position to tell him exactly what had gone on. He was also infinitely frustrated that he could only play a part on the sidelines. Through his friendship with Moore-Brabazon he had become closely involved with the development of cameras and interpretation of aerial photography carried out by the Royal Flying Corps, but he wished ardently that his health permitted him to do more.

It was the second time in a year that Aubrey returned
from the Middle East feeling helpless and despairing. He wanted the comfort of being home.

Just weeks later, seven more men left the Highclere estate. Henry Berry from the saw mill, Charles Brindley, a plumber, Charles Choules, a woodsman, Willie Kewell who worked at the farm, Ernest Barton also a woodsman, Gilbert Attwood and William Bendle, both from the buildings department were all spurred on by the news Aubrey brought of their colleagues’ deaths. They headed for France. They were heading for the Somme.

Summer 1916 was dominated by the nation’s dismay and grief over the death of Lord Kitchener. K might have lost his aura of the unimpeachable hero, but in death he was restored to mythic status. The naval battle had been escalating brutally as the effects of the British blockade on Germany’s trade routes and food supplies began to bite. The war at sea claimed its most high-profile casualty when the HMS
Hampshire
was sunk by a mine on 5 June. Six hundred and forty-three men, including Lord Kitchener, lost their lives.

The Carnarvons were even more devastated than most as he had been a family friend. Porchy, who had two more months to go at Sandhurst, was utterly laid low: K had been his great inspiration for a career in the Army. He was due to go to Ireland for four months’ training at the end of the summer, but was mopy and uncharacteristically reflective for weeks. If K’s loss was a hammer blow to British morale, already shredded by stalemate and surrender, nobody could have predicted how much worse things were about to get.

The Battle of the Somme was planned by General Haig as a decisive breakthrough in the stalemate in France. Instead it has passed into British and Canadian consciousness as the
epitome of catastrophic and futile loss of life. On its opening day, 1 July 1916, the British Army suffered 60,000 casualties – still the highest number ever sustained in a single day of combat. The 1st Newfoundland Regiment was totally annihilated as a fighting unit, with 500 of 801 men killed. Over the course of the battle’s four and a half months, that story was repeated over and over again. Whole battalions of men, who had joined up together and came from tight-knit communities, were wiped out, creating lost generations back home. Highclere, like thousands of other places all over the Empire, was about to suffer a test of its ability for self-sacrifice the like of which it had never known before.

The impact on every hospital in the country was enormous. Four hundred doctors were killed and injured in July, increasing the pressure on the already horrifically overstretched medical corps. Patients were sent back to Britain in a barely controlled flood. The Somme was characterised by the use of very heavy artillery. It was also marked the debut of a new weapon – the tank. As well as their physical injuries, the men were suffering from devastating shell shock. The human frame couldn’t withstand the impact of this new, fully mechanised slaughter on a grand scale and the number of cases of mental breakdown began to increase exponentially.

Lady Almina had to step up to the task. The staff at Bryanston Square had been working steadily, with the same attention to every little detail as ever. The work was tough, but the routines were in place now and there was a palpable sense that the results were enough to justify all the labour involved. Everyone was tired and demoralised by the war, but at the same time keenly invested in and positive about the hospital. Into this stability crashed the vast numbers of
officers arriving with complex injuries and severe trauma from the battlefields of the Somme.

One such man was Charles Clout, twenty-one years old, a Cambridge-educated linguist from a modest middle-class home in south London, who had been recruited by the War Office in August 1914, on the strength of his military cadet training at Cambridge University. Clout joined the Territorial Army and was gazetted to the rank of 2nd Lieutenant in the 20th Battalion the London Regiment. He was a serious-minded man who, even in later life, disapproved of the use of first names except between close friends of the same sex. This seriousness made him an excellent officer, and he took pride in training his men up before they shipped out to France on 9 March 1915. Clout was terribly disappointed when on disembarking he was moved to another battalion that was in need of a good officer to lick it into shape.