Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey (19 page)

By this point the British Expeditionary Force was taking part in the first battle of Ypres. The pressure on the Western Front had increased since the Russians suffered a heavy defeat on the Eastern Front. The Allies were holding the line, but it was already abundantly clear that with more than a million men on both sides dug in across Belgium and northern France, this war was definitely not going to be over by Christmas.

The Carnarvons heard that Winifred’s nephew, Bar
Maitland, had been killed by a shell. His brother Dick, a delicate boy who had pneumonia most winters and was an artist, volunteered to take his brother’s place and obtained a commission in the Scots Guards. Then came the news from even closer to home. Two of the young lads who had volunteered from the estate, Harry Garrett and Harry Illot, had died while serving in India and France respectively. They had both been gardeners under Augustus Blake who had succeeded Pope in about 1908, and Harry Illot’s family had been working at Highclere for the past twenty years.

The casualties were high, much higher than the men in charge of strategy had ever allowed for. As Almina could have testified, the wounded and the dead were frequently experienced soldiers. The cream of the Allied professional fighting forces was being shipped home in bits.

Almina seems to have responded to the horror in a very characteristic way: by using her money and determination and contacts to keep up the pressure to get more done. She decided that they needed more expertise at Highclere and so, by mid-October, Robert Jones was operating in the Arundel room on a succession of men with broken bones.

Jones, who was later knighted in recognition of his work, was already an experienced orthopaedic surgeon who had learned how to treat fractures from years working as the surgeon-superintendent on the construction of the Manchester Shipping Canal. He devised the first comprehensive accident response service in the world, and implemented it along the length of the canal, so he was accustomed to treating lots of people in stressful conditions. By contrast with the on-site service he provided for the canal labourers, the damask curtains and carpets of the
Arundel bedroom must have made a surreal backdrop. Jones was fifty-seven years old and felt a huge duty to do his bit on the home front, given that so many of his younger colleagues were in the field hospitals, battling with conditions that made the ship canal look like a Sunday stroll around Highclere’s gardens.

Two-thirds of all casualties during the First World War (those who survived long enough to reach a hospital) had injuries to bones from shrapnel and gunshot wounds. There was a lot of work for orthopaedic surgeons. (Abdominal wounds, by contrast, were considered too complex to treat and these men, like Aubrey Herbert, were simply dosed on morphine; and, unlike him, most died.) Jones was adamant that by using a particular technique called the Thomas splint, which had been developed by his uncle Hugh Thomas, in the treatment of compound fractures, the mortality rate could be brought down from 80 per cent to 20 per cent. It seems odd to us now to imagine that a broken leg could kill you, but on the battlefields of the Great War, it frequently did. The femur is the longest bone in the body and the muscles surrounding it are correspondingly strong. When the femur breaks, the muscles contract, pulling the bone ends past each other, causing additional injury, dangerous loss of blood, nerve damage and a lot of pain. Jones’s idea was to use traction to ensure that the two broken pieces of bone were held end to end so healing could take place. It was a brilliantly successful treatment and saved countless lives at Highclere and throughout the war. The patients who benefited were so grateful and so conscious of others’ needs that they frequently returned their splints to Almina’s hospital once they were done with them.

Almina and her team got to December before having to deal with someone dying in their care, which suggests that someone at Southampton docks was making the right decisions about whom to prioritise for their attention. Robert Jones left Highclere, having instructed Lady Carnarvon and Dr Johnnie, who assisted at numerous operations, how to carry out the more straightforward procedures themselves. The next eminent medical man to come down to the hospital was Hector Mackenzie. He was a renowned specialist in chest surgery but, despite all his best efforts, one of the patients he operated on, a man called Thompson, died. When it became clear that her patient was not going to recover, Almina sent a wire to his daughter and invited her to come to stay at Highclere. Agnes Thompson wrote to Almina later. ‘I will never forget my few days’ visit to Highclere and that I saw the death of Daddy and the very kind treatment that he received from your hands. I do hope you are feeling better … you looked very ill.’

The family spent Christmas 1914 at Highclere. Almina did her best to decorate the house and create a special Christmas for everyone. There was the usual enormous Christmas tree in the Saloon, beautiful winter flowers scattered on the tables and garlands of greenery. The visitor book records that the house was full to bursting with wounded soldiers as well as a few close friends. Those who could leave the house attended services at the village church, along with the entire household, from the nurses, who would not be taking any holiday, to the maids and estate staff. The kitchen staff had been preparing for a celebratory dinner for days. Lord Carnarvon’s worries about securing enough food for the hospital were getting more acute, but
this was not the day for stinting, and Streatfield and his team of footmen served the patients soups, then roast goose followed by a plum pudding, in the north Library. Lord and Lady Carnarvon joined them in the Library afterwards and they shared a brandy in front of the fire.

Out on the Western Front, there was a strange meeting taking place, an event that has assumed an almost mythic status. It began when German and British soldiers called out Happy Christmas to each other across No Man’s Land. Tentatively, disbelieving, the soldiers negotiated their own totally unofficial truce for a day. Unarmed soldiers from both sides went over the top to collect their dead and, when they met in the bog of blood and mud that lay between them, they shook hands and agreed to bury their fallen comrades together. Somebody suggested a game of football. Provisions were produced and exchanged: sauerkraut and sausages for chocolate. That night, as the men at Highclere thanked their lucky stars they were tucked up in warm beds, comfortably full of brandy and pudding, the sound of ‘Silent Night’ being sung in German and English rose from the trenches. For almost twenty-four hours there was peace on the Western Front.

It was the tiniest respite. The first battle of Ypres in October and November had left the British Expeditionary Force scrambling to adapt its tactics in the face of morale-devastating losses. The following year, 1915, was set to deliver loss of life on an even greater scale.

At Highclere, Lord Carnarvon invited a few friends, including the stalwart Victor Duleep Singh to stay on for a week between Christmas and New Year. There is a dejected scrawl in the visitors’ book. ‘Seeing the New Year in … the saddest and most trying owing to the awful war.’

In early January the household readied itself for the arrival of more patients. Most of the twenty men who arrived for treatment were from the 9th Bhopal Infantry and the 8th Gurkha Rifles, but not all of them. In a letter to Winifred, Lord Carnarvon related the story of one patient, a sailor, who had arrived in the first week of January. The man was called S. W. Saxton, and he had had an extraordinary escape. He had been serving on HMS
Formidable
, which was out on exercises on New Year’s Day when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat. As the ship went down, Saxton clung to the propeller, despite his injuries and the immense waves, strong winds and hail that threatened to wash him away. When he lost his grip on the blades of the propeller, his instinct to swim pushed him to head for a distant trawler boat, but when he eventually made it, he found he was totally incapable of hauling himself up the side of the boat. He was about to give up and let himself drown when a huge wave caught him up and swept him on deck. Saxton arrived at Almina’s hospital with broken bones, shock and hypothermia – but he was one of the lucky ones. The
Formidable
was the first dreadnought sunk in the war, and only 199 men of the 750 on board were saved.

Saxton responded brilliantly to the regime at Highclere and was soon well enough to be sent out to one of the convalescent homes that were used as staging posts before the men were returned to their duties. Many of these homes were run by acquaintances of Almina’s, and she would arrange transport and ensure that the men were transferred with all their records of treatment. Trotman, the Earl’s chauffeur, would drive them to the station to catch their train, all wrapped up in rugs for the journey and with a store of
provisions. Sometimes Trotman drove them all the way to their destination. On several occasions, Almina accompanied him, and would later receive a letter from a grateful parent who had not realised that the lady who had escorted their boy back home was the Countess whose hospital had restored his health.

By the end of January 1915, the British High Command had decided that any recovered British Expeditionary Force officers should not be returned to the front line to face almost certain death, but retained in Britain to train the men of Kitchener’s New Army, hundreds of thousands of whom were needed. Vast numbers of those men would of course be heading for their own deaths in due course. The year saw the war expand to Italy, the Balkans and the Middle East, and conflict deepen everywhere.

In the meantime, although Almina felt she had found her vocation in life, exhaustion was setting in at Highclere. No one had had any time off since the hospital opened. The nurses were shattered; the staff were at breaking point. The scale of what they were dealing with was now becoming horrifyingly apparent. Almina had been working constantly since her decision to open the hospital back in July 1914 and was exhausted, physically and emotionally. She decided that they all needed a break. The Castle was closed for six weeks so that it could be readied for more patients in March, and Almina and Carnarvon headed for Egypt and a rest.

After six months of listening to horror stories from the Western Front and tending desperate patients, the familiarity of the winter trip to Egypt must have felt like a return to a rapidly vanishing world. Travel to North Africa was still possible, though difficult.

They were following in Aubrey, Mary and Elsie’s footsteps, all of whom had separately made the journey just before Christmas. Aubrey had recovered from his injuries and been passed for active service. In four months he had gone from being an object of mild fun, stowing away because the Army didn’t think him fit enough to serve, to desperately needed and rubber-stamped for duty. Attitudes had changed since the war had shown itself to be a bloody
nightmare. Now, virtually everyone was welcome in His Majesty’s service.

Aubrey headed for Egypt on the strength of his expertise in Middle Eastern affairs and knowledge of several local languages. He set off with nothing but a few random clothes and his typewriter, and arrived to find that General Sir John Maxwell, commander of the Army in Egypt, was still feeling confident that the Turks would be unable to pose much of a threat. Life was carrying on much as it ever did in Cairo, with the usual entertainments still in place for the winter tourists and the same cast of oddballs and adventurers flitting around. Aubrey met T. E. Lawrence, who went on to become a close friend but whose initial impression of Aubrey was the entirely typical one of amusement. ‘Then there is Aubrey Herbert, who is a joke but a very nice one: he is too short-sighted to read or recognise anyone but speaks Turkish well, Albanian, French, Italian, Arabic, German.’ Aubrey described the man who would be Lawrence of Arabia as ‘an odd gnome, half cad – with a touch of genius.’

Aubrey’s mother, Elsie the Dowager Countess of Carnarvon, sailed across the Mediterranean to Alexandria to be with him, but arrived in Cairo just a few hours before he was sent to the Dardanelles. She found her daughter-in-law Mary already there and, having decided she could be useful, began the task of organising the logistics for the hospital ships: once the campaign got under way, they would be coming and going out of Alexandria’s port. Within four months there were dozens a day, ferrying the survivors from the slaughter at Gallipoli back to Britain.

Almina and Carnarvon stayed at Shepheard’s Hotel, as
they had been doing for more than ten years, and Almina focused on recuperating enough to be strong for her return to work. The problem was that Egypt was turning from an upmarket tourist destination to the next theatre of war. The aim of the campaign was to use combined naval and military power to capture the Turkish capital Constantinople, thereby securing the sea route to Russia via the Black Sea. That way the Russians fighting on the Eastern Front could be properly supplied and some pressure would be taken off the Western Front, which was in a state of hopeless stalemate. A young Winston Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty, was one of the chief architects of the plan.