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.
12
War Heroes
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.
Cairo was filling up with volunteer troops from New Zealand and Australia in their thousands. These were the men who formed the ANZAC force that went on to suffer staggering losses in the Dardanelles over the next year. Almina wandered the streets; they were thronged with young men still full of the optimism and determination that she had seen in Aubrey and his friends before they set off for northern France. She knew what those boys looked like when they returned, with legs in need of amputation and nerves shot to pieces. It was heartbreaking to see the same thing happening all over again, and it made Almina desperate to get back to Highclere and do everything in her power to help.
By early March, Highclere had regrouped. In Almina’s absence only the very sickest men who were too ill to be moved had stayed, with a couple of nurses in attendance. Once they had been seen off to convalescent homes, the entire staff had a rest. The pause didn’t last long. By April the Allies were suffering huge losses in France and in the Mediterranean and the hospital was busier than ever.
On the Western Front the second Battle of Ypres was under way. The Germans launched a major attack to try to break through the Allied lines and, on 22 April, introduced a new and particularly horrible weapon. Gas. They followed up the artillery shelling with the release of 168 tonnes of chlorine gas into the Allied positions. It was totally unexpected and terrifying. Five thousand French soldiers died within ten minutes of the gas dropping down into the trenches. A further 10,000 were blinded and maimed as they tried to flee. Everything was chaos as the Germans advanced, fitted with their rudimentary gas masks, picking off the desperate French soldiers as they went. The Allies were completely wrong-footed and, over the next month, the Germans gained three miles. They repeated the gas attack, with the same devastating results, on the British Expeditionary Force. One hundred thousand men died, more than two-thirds of them Allied soldiers, and thousands more were sent back to Britain with a whole new raft of symptoms for the medical staff to treat.
Things were no better in the Mediterranean. Three days after the Germans used gas for the first time, the British, French and ANZAC forces arrived beneath the towering cliffs of Gallipoli and began to disembark onto the beaches. The Turks had had plenty of time to install artillery on the cliff tops and lay out barbed wire on the beaches to protect machine-gun posts. As the first troops waded from their ships on to the beaches, the Turkish Army opened fire. The Allied soldiers died in their hundreds, their blood turning the sea red. Of the first 200 soldiers to disembark, only 21 made it ashore. Those who managed to struggle up the beach met the machine gunners, who were running out of ammunition but not determination. The Ottoman 57th Infantry Division were wiped out; the regiment lost every single man as they fought with nothing but bayonets. Their sacrifice allowed enough time for more troops to arrive and the battle to grind on.
Any Allied survivors were forced to cling to narrow ledges on the cliffs and watch as their comrades died around them; medics picked their way through the chaos with stretchers, hunting for the wounded. By the end of the first few days of landings, it was obvious that the anticipated swift victory was not going to happen. As the campaign continued, it turned into a brutal disaster with enormous numbers of casualties on both sides. The ships that the Allied forces had arrived on were transformed into floating hospitals, and
morgues.
Aubrey Herbert was there, forcing his way through the battle, picking his way past the trenches that were full of men trying to stay sane enough to fight, despite the hell that was unfolding around them. Aubrey was trying to reach the Turkish commanding officers to negotiate armistices to bury the dead. One month after he landed at Gallipoli, Aubrey negotiated with Mustafa Kemal, who later found fame as Atatürk, the first President of the Republic of Turkey; Aubrey offered himself as hostage while the Turkish Army collected 3,000 bodies from Kabe Tepe. Aubrey wrote in his letters to Elsie in Alexandria that the thyme-filled gullies in the hills behind the beach stank of nothing but death.
The battle dragged on for months, despite the desperate loss of life and the fact that no headway had been made. Aubrey survived summer on the cliffs but became very sick in early September. It was hardly surprising: conditions in Gallipoli were notorious. The summer was blistering hot, causing the corpses littering the area to decompose even faster and cause even more disease. The winter was cold, sleety and prone to storms that washed away the shallow graves and sent bloated corpses flooding into trenches.
Aubrey was shipped to Alexandria, where he was received by his mother in her capacity as co-ordinator of hospital ships. Elsie was delighted to see him but, once having established that he was not in any immediate danger, dispatched him to Cairo for a rest and got on with the job. Aubrey spent a few days in Shepheard’s Hotel, now almost totally closed up and full of ghosts from happier days. Mary joined him and the couple had a few days’ rest. His fever cleared up but he was restless and guilt-ridden at being ensconced in the last shreds of luxury to be had in Egypt. As soon as he was well enough, he returned to Gallipoli, but he fell sick again almost immediately and was shipped out for good in mid-October, worn out and low in spirit. The Dardanelles had nearly destroyed Aubrey’s peace of mind.
By then the Allies were having to face the fact that the campaign had failed. There had been calls for evacuation from October onwards, but only after one last, disastrous push. Back in August, the lack of progress had already been beginning to cause political problems for the commanding officers, but there was an insistence that reinforcements should be brought in. One of them was a man called David Campbell, who made his way to the slaughterhouse of Gallipoli from his home in Ireland.
Campbell had volunteered for the 6th Royal Irish Rifles, answering Kitchener’s call for men to join up. Following training in Dublin and then at Basingstoke near Highclere, the battalion embarked for Alexandria and the Dardanelles. They had no idea what they were sailing to: press reports in Britain at that point were still dominated by propaganda. The men arrived at Gallipoli on 5 August, in the intense heat of high summer. They could smell the decaying bodies on the beach from half a mile away. Two days later they moved out, rattled by shells landing around them and tense with nerves, up Dead Man’s Gully. Occasionally, breaks in the cliffs framed stunning views of the dazzling sea, whilst inland, tongues of fire showed them where the shells were coming from.
During a mission to take a summit at Suvla, Campbell was shot in the calf. As a fellow soldier helped him to dress the wound, the man was shot in the foot. David now helped in turn to dress the man’s wound, but gunshot was still raining down all around them, and up ahead they could see a wheat field full of the bodies of dead soldiers. Sure enough, David was hit again, by a bullet that drilled through his foot. Unable to move, losing blood from his two gunshot wounds, David passed out. Coming to, he saw that the man who had helped him was dead.
He decided to try to crawl back the way he had come. He fell in with a stream of other bloodied soldiers, but before long he collapsed, too weak from loss of blood to carry on. Then David felt himself being lifted up and realised that a Gurkha was manhandling him over his shoulder and carrying him, dodging from cover to cover, back towards the first-aid post. It took them two hours to get there, and David was shot again in the leg, but they made it. The Gurkha deposited him and melted away into the crowd, even as David was thanking him for saving his life.
The orderlies on duty dressed his wounds but there were no stretchers left, so David hopped between two other men until he had no energy left to do anything but crawl. Exhausted from the effort, he and his helpers finally made it to the field ambulance station and David was placed on a stretcher and left overnight to try to get some sleep between the shouts of the other wounded and dying men.
In the morning, stretcher-bearers began to transport those who had survived to the evacuation point. They had to cross the beach to get there, and once again the snipers picked them off, until there were not enough stretcher-bearers left alive to carry the wounded, who could only lie there, helpless, wondering whether each shot would be the final sound they heard. The sun burned down on them and they had no water to drink. David came to the conclusion that the only way he would survive was by dragging himself to the evacuation point. When he finally got there he was treated immediately. There was no pressure on the medical staff because hardly any patients made it to them alive. The hospital ships were full but an officer managed to commandeer a fishing trawler and David was one of the men loaded onto it and, the next day, onto a British Army hospital ship. He was assigned a cabin with three other officers. All three died in the night and were replaced with three more.
David Campbell couldn’t have known it, but the harbour master overseeing the arrival of his ship at Alexandria was Elsie Carnarvon. Sir John Maxwell, Commander in Chief of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, commented to his staff that she was doing really good work and she was given a motor launch to meet the incoming ships, which made her job easier.
Even by the beginning of May it was obvious to everyone out there that the casualties in the Dardanelles were catastrophic, far exceeding what had been expected. Sir John’s confident prediction that the Turks wouldn’t be able to do much damage had proved to be laughably ill informed. Once Elsie got a sense of how bad things were, she took matters into her own hands. She contacted Almina and between them the two women arranged for twenty-seven nurses to travel out to Alexandria. The nurses left Tilbury on 15 May 1915 on board the P&O steamer Mongolia.
Aubrey’s wife Mary helped Elsie to sort things out in Egypt. The bureaucracy proved difficult since the nurses had no permits to work or visas to stay, and the military authorities were initially more concerned with the rule book and the budget than anything else. Mary and Elsie argued that they were prepared to pay the wage bill of £2 2s per week per nurse, which removed one obstacle; they also suggested that, given that the nurses were here now and they were certainly desperately needed, perhaps it was time to change the rules on visas and permits. It was a persuasive argument, and eventually Elsie got her nurses. It probably helped that Sir John Maxwell was a great friend of hers.
Elsie, now in her sixtieth year, was one of those formidable women with an enormous capacity for getting things done. The intense heat never seemed to bother her and she never ever complained. When there was a shortage of stretchers she went out and scoured the city for sewing machine and fabrics, organising work teams to make up the equipment that was so desperately needed. She started a canteen for the ANZAC forces and provided all the cutlery and crockery. One day the men got so rowdy that plates and cups were smashed, and Elsie took it upon herself to march in there and demand what they thought they were doing. What would their mothers say? Something in her manner brought the fracas to a halt, and when the men realised who she was and what she had done for them, they lined up to apologise to her.
Meanwhile, David Campbell had struck lucky. He was assessed as suitable for return to Britain and, having avoided the Egyptian military hospitals, he sailed out of Alexandria on the Aquitania. Conditions aboard could most generously be described as basic. Everyone got dysentery, including David. He had splinters of lead removed from his gunshot wounds without any anaesthetic. Unsurprisingly, his foot became gangrenous, and was marked for amputation, but then the surgeon fell sick and was too ill to car
ry out the operation, so David arrived back in Britain still in possession of both feet. In Southampton his luck held and he was tagged for Highclere. So, in mid-September, he bumped up from the south coast in an ambulance with three other patients, all of them groaning every time they were jolted over a pothole. The trailer rumbled up to the front of the house and David was helped out and into a wheelchair by a footman, who pushed him carefully across the gravel drive and in through the front door of Highclere.
As always, Almina was there to welcome the new arrivals, accompanied by two nurses. It took two footmen to help David make his way up the ornate carpeted stairs, past the Italian marble statue of the 4th Earl and his sister Eveline at the bottom landing, up past the seventeenth-century Flemish tapestry and into his bedroom. There the nurses helped him to wash. He was still caked in the filth of the battlefields and all his clothes had to be taken away and burned. Pyjamas and a dressing gown were provided and then, once he was clean and comfortable, Almina and Dr Johnnie visited him to make their assessment.
The foot looked ghastly. It was swollen and dark and almost too painful to touch. But Almina had decided something. She wanted to avoid amputations wherever possible, believing that they were too frequently performed, sometimes for the doctors’ convenience rather than the good of the patient. In the field it might be a matter of life or death, but here at Highclere where the risk of infection was so much lower, she took the view that they could be ambitious about reducing the number of amputations.
Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle Page 13