Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey (27 page)

Sidney was out by Christmas 1917 and able to go back to his parents’ place in Worthing with his leg in a splint. Not all of Almina’s patients survived, though. Sid Baker arrived at Bryanston Square at about the same time as Sidney Roberts, but all Almina’s skill and nursing couldn’t save him. When he died he left a little daughter and his widow, Ruth, who wrote to thank Lady Carnarvon for not
merely sending a beautiful wreath but actually attending his funeral. There is the familiar moving struggle to express limitless gratitude and appreciation. ‘I am unable to find words to express my thanks for your sweetness and kindness.’

It was the end of the most terrible year. Battlefields all over the world were still filling up with corpses, and cities were acquiring more widows like Ruth. Whoever officially won the war, it was starting to feel impossible to establish what victory would look like. The moral and mental exhaustion was too great to allow any meaningful assessment.

As the Carnarvons embarked on 1918, they had dramas of their own to focus on. In the middle of January, the Earl spent a morning out shooting with a friend and was just finishing lunch at the Castle when he was taken ill with agonising abdominal pain. Almina received the telegram at Bryanston Square and dropped everything to race down to Highclere, fetch her husband and bring him back to the hospital, where he was immediately operated on for appendicitis. Almina’s longstanding colleague, Sir Berkeley Moynihan, who had rushed to help, told Lord and Lady Carnarvon after the operation that with half an hour’s delay, the Earl might have died. Lord Carnarvon wrote to his sister Winifred to tell her what had happened and attributed his recovery to ‘the skill and devotion of my wife’.

The Earl’s lucky escape had to be set against the loss of Alfred de Rothschild just three weeks later. The old man, who had never recovered his
joie de vivre
after the outbreak of war, had been getting frailer and frailer for years. He died on 31 January after a short illness. Almina was already exhausted, and had only just recovered her calm after her
husband’s close-run thing. Now she was devastated. Lady Evelyn came to London the moment she heard the news and found her mother weeping uncontrollably at Alfred’s deathbed in Seamore Place.

Alfred was buried with great ceremony at the Willesden United Synagogue Cemetery in north London the following day. His extraordinary generosity and boundless affection for his family had sustained Almina in the enviable position of being both well loved and also gifted with every material thing she desired. His loss was a terrible blow and was to have profound implications for Almina’s future life.

Almina had lost her father, just barely saved her husband and had a son fighting in the Middle East to worry about. Once more she threw herself into her work; it was the best possible distraction. Lord Carnarvon remained in London until March, recovering from his operation and fretting about Porchy. Every time he received a scribbled message from him, he rushed round the corner to Winifred’s house to read it to his sister. He was also worried about Aubrey, whose record of voting with Labour had made him so unpopular with his Conservative constituency that he’d left the country for Italy and Albania, leaving Mary to deal with the fallout.

The news from the Continent was all bad. The Central Powers judged that the time to secure a decisive victory was now, before the US troops could arrive in France in big enough numbers to make Allied victory all but inevitable. General Ludendorff planned a spring offensive for the Western Front, and threw every last resource into the battle. Seven hundred and fifty thousand men were made ready and on 21 March, vast quantities of artillery pounded the British
positions. The German Army proceeded to advance forty kilometres and the British fell back to Amiens, retreating over the fields of the Somme that they had been inching across for the last three years. It was only when the landscape reasserted itself and the heavy German artillery became bogged down in the mud, that the offensive slowed. British reinforcements were sent in to Amiens in red double-decker buses and the two armies paused to assess.

It was the biggest movement in any direction since 1914 and, with hindsight, the start of the end of the war, but it was also the end of Field Marshal Haig’s dominance. He placed himself under the command of an outstanding French General, Ferdinand Foch, and on 26 March, General Foch was appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied forces.

The Germans were still advancing and on 13 April Haig told his troops it was ‘backs against the wall’, urging every last man to ‘fight on to the end’. Everyone was praying that the US Army under General Pershing would deploy in time to give the Allied forces the boost they so desperately needed. The Germans lost at least 110,000 men at the Battle of the Lys, and the Allies even more. But by the end of April it became clear that the Germans were overextended and undersupplied. The British, for all that they had lost the ground they had spent years defending, had in fact conceded little more than a muddy swamp. By 29 April the extraordinary German advance was again temporarily halted. The outcome of the war was felt to hang in the balance. Both armies gathered their forces, called up more reserves, and then Ludendorff moved emphatically against the French, northeast of Paris at Aisne, catching them completely by surprise. The German Army reached the River Marne and
Paris was within sight. Kaiser Wilhelm was elated – the Germans thought victory was near. Their elation was short-lived.

The Battle of Château-Thierry on 18 July was a day of fighting as ferocious as anything that had been seen earlier in the war. But now, finally, the American Expeditionary Force had arrived: hundreds of thousands of untraumatised, well-rested men. It was a turning point. American machine gunners fought alongside French colonial troops from Senegal and beat the Germans back. At last the Allies had gained the initiative.

Summer 1918 saw a series of strategic wins, but men kept dying and Bryanston Square was still full to the rafters. Major Oliver Hopkinson of the Seaforth Highlanders was wounded for the third time in France in 1918, and to his relief it was serious enough for him to be evacuated back home. He had pleaded to be returned to Lady Carnarvon’s hospital. ‘If you knew what a difference it made to me the last time I went to France, knowing that if hit again I should have every chance of being under your special care …’ he wrote to Almina when he was discharged from the hospital for the last time.

Almina became firm friends with some of the returning men and invited them to Highclere to take their convalescence there. Kenneth Harbord was with the Royal Flying Corps and had spent a month at Bryanston Square in 1916. British pilots in the First World War were incredibly lucky to survive being shot down because, unlike their German counterparts, they were not issued with parachutes. If they were hit they had no option but to try to land their plane safely. Many of them suffered horrific burns because the
planes caught fire on the way down but they couldn’t bail out. Kenneth Harbord survived this ghastly Hobson’s Choice not once but twice. He had asked to be passed fit after his first crash landing and recovery, but he got shot down again and was back in Almina’s hospital at the end of 1917. He again recovered and Almina, who was deeply impressed by his bravery, invited him to spend the weekend at Highclere with Lord Carnarvon.

Almina was naturally thinking of the good it would do Kenneth Harbord, but she was also worried about her husband. He was having a dreadful few months and needed cheering up in good company. His childhood friend Prince Victor Duleep Singh had died of a heart attack in June in Monte Carlo. Victor had been an immoderate eater all his life and by the end he was clinically obese. Lord Carnarvon was utterly cast low. He was also furious with Aubrey, who had got the Carnarvon name mixed up in a libel trial.

Lord Carnarvon had only met the defendant in the ‘Billing Trial’ once by chance for ten minutes, but Aubrey, who didn’t have a judgemental bone in his body, had been inviting him to Pixton rather indiscriminately. The case revolved around a delusional American eccentric and a libellous poem entitled ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’. Conducted by Mr Justice Darling, the trial degenerated into farce, albeit one the newspapers adored. By the time the case came to court that summer, Aubrey was abroad again, heading up the British Adriatic Mission and co-ordinating special intelligence in Rome. It was left to his older brother to handle the fallout as the newspapers raked over the stories of anyone even remotely connected to the defendant. Carnarvon had
to instruct Sir Edward Marshall Hall, QC, Aubrey refused to come back, and Carnarvon tried to ignore the whole matter.

Kenneth Harbord proved to be extremely congenial company and was invited to Highclere several times. The Earl of course shared Harbord’s passion for flying. He invited another house guest, a longstanding friend of his, to participate in their conversations about planes and aerial reconnaissance. John Moore-Brabazon was the first Englishman to fly, albeit in a French machine, and in August 1914 he had joined the Royal Flying Corps. Lord Carnarvon’s knowledge of photographic technique was highly regarded, and he had discussed reconnaissance with Moore-Brabazon throughout the war. By the time the Allies launched their Hundred Days Offensive, which effectively ended the conflict, the Royal Flying Corps had been combined with the Royal Naval Air Service to form the Royal Air Force and was playing a crucial role in intelligence.

The Germans believed that the great losses suffered by the Allies in 1917 would preclude the British and French from undertaking any major offensive in 1918. The Germans knew that they had to strike before American troops arrived in force and the general consensus was that there would not be enough American troops in France until early 1919. Allied activity in 1918, therefore, would have to be restricted to meeting the planned German advance. The Americans did not want to amalgamate their troops into French and British battalions, preferring to wait until an independent American Army could be shipped to French soil, which exasperated the Allies. Events rapidly overtook the disputes as salients were pushed forward or held, and the estimate
of early 1919 for the arrival of the American force turned out, crucially, to be wrong.

August 1918 really was, at last, the endgame. By then, 200,000 American troops were arriving every month, and the British Army was reinforced by the return of large numbers of troops from the Middle East and Italy. The British Navy’s blockade of Germany had destroyed the German public’s spirit and the Central Powers’ resolve folded in a series of heavy defeats. In the end, after four decimating years of death, victory came in just three months of sharp, decisive battles that cost the Germans two million men killed, captured or injured. Once the Allied forces had broken the Hindenburg Line of defence, the German Army was in retreat. By October the Allies were claiming victory and the exhausted General Ludendorff, who had been certain that his men were on the brink of capturing Paris just four short months before, had a nervous collapse. Across what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire, countries were declaring independence; now it was the turn of the politicians to begin the long and painful process of working out the terms on which to end a conflict that had engulfed millions of people.

Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated on 9 November and the guns stopped at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918. The war had stuttered to a close, with rearguard actions being fought right up to the very last moment. The Germans sat down to negotiate US President Woodrow Wilson’s proposal for peace, with General Foch. The Armistice was signed in a carriage of his private train, stopped in the countryside north of Paris. The news was passed as fast as possible to the armies, and hundreds of
thousands of men from dozens of different countries finally dared to hope it was really all over.

The end hadn’t come soon enough for everyone in the last little band of Highclere men to go to fight. Fred Bowsher who probably worked in the gardens had joined up with several Sheerman and Maber boys in the gloomy days of 1917. Both the Mabers made it back to Highclere but one of the Sheerman boys, Harry, was drowned when the HMS
Leinster
was sunk by a German submarine in the Irish Sea a month and a day before the Armistice. Fred Bowsher was killed on 21 June, aged twenty-one. His friend Arthur Fifield, whose brother had been killed in Mesopotamia back in 1916, was buried in France in the summer of 1918. The last Fifield boy made it to Armistice Day and went home to his mother.

Of course, after the initial disbelief, there was euphoria everywhere, from the battlefields of Flanders to the servants’ hall at Highclere. David Lloyd George issued an official communiqué at 10.20 a.m. on 11 November, announcing the ceasefire, and by the end of the day, Newbury was decked with flags and the local newspaper reported fireworks and ‘liveliness’ in the streets. Aubrey walked through the crowds in London, which had ‘gone wild with delight’, according to the
Daily Mirror
, and noted their jubilation. It wasn’t until a few days and weeks later that sheer fatigue overtook people, civilians and soldiers alike. Across the Middle East, North Africa and all of Europe, millions of men were crisscrossing countries,
trying to get home. Florence, the former housemaid from Highclere, whose husband Tommy’s body was never found, had to face a future without the man she loved, like so many other women across the world. Nerves had been stretched almost to breaking point over four years, and now, as the Peace Conference of Versailles got under way, it was time to ask the question: what had it all been for?