In a letter to mark their fifth wedding anniversary, Ego sent Letty his ‘greatest love’ and told her, ‘You are a perfect wife – there is no question about that.’53 He hoped they would see their diamond wedding anniversary together. However, it was not to be, after just one more brief leave, Letty saw Ego for the last time on 10 April, before his regiment was sent to Katia, about 40 miles east of the Suez Canal.
On the night of 22 April 1916, back home at Stanway, Mary had a strange dream. She wrote:
The atmosphere of the room seemed to quiver with excitement – I felt the stress and strain and saw, as if thrown on a magic-lantern sheet, a confused mass of black smoke splashed with crimson flame. The flames and smoke were high up to the right of the picture and to the left I saw Ego standing, straight and tall. I saw him in profile, his dark eyebrows and moustache made his face look very pale. I got the impression that he was exercising all his forces with all his might and main. Round his chest was wrapped a golden banner, its colour very beautiful, it swathed his body in spiral folds and seemed to protect him as he stood there with his face set and stern.54
At a subconscious level, Mary felt that something had happened, but she did not know what. She did not feel anxious, just stunned. At about the time of her vision Ego had been killed. At Katia, on the night of 22–23 April, Easter Sunday, Ego’s squadron was attacked by a large force of Turkish troops. The British were massively outnumbered and most of the men were killed or taken prisoner. Ego was wounded in the arm and leg but he insisted on going back to the firing line because he thought his presence might give courage to some of the younger men. After being wounded for the second time he picked himself up and put on a field dressing saying, ‘Don’t bother about me, go on fighting,’ then shouted, ‘No surrender boys, no surrender!’55 According to witnesses, he was looking happy and cheering on his men with his arm bound up when he was instantly killed by a shell.
For months, his family did not know what had happened, they lived in a torturous no man’s land where their emotions swung between hope and despair. Thousands of families faced similar uncertainty when their loved one was described as ‘missing’. Throughout the war, members of the Red Cross and the Order of St John interviewed soldiers travelling to and from the battlefields hoping to find news of the missing. ‘Watchers’ were introduced in all hospitals, they were given a list of names of missing men and they asked new patients if they knew anything of them. They noted down their answers and forwarded them to headquarters. A year after the final sighting of the missing soldier, the Red Cross told his family that he was now on the list of ‘presumed dead’.56
The Red Cross’ work was much appreciated, and one mother wrote, ‘We have heard nothing more from the War Office; only that he was wounded and missing, and but for your help and kindness we should still be waiting in suspense.’57 Describing what that waiting was like, Mary wrote, ‘Fate is playing with us (my heart) as a cat plays with a mouse.’58 At first the news was that Ego had been wounded and taken prisoner by the Turks. When Mary heard the news she felt paralysed, she wrote to Letty with relief that he was not dead, tinged with anxiety about the extent of his wounds. She distracted herself by taking David and Martin to pick primroses and daffodils in Stanway’s grounds. Letty was also suffering from mixed emotions, she hoped that if he was a prisoner he would be safe until the end of the war, but with Ego missing she felt cut off from her ‘life and heart and soul’.59
At the end of May, Letty returned to England. When Mary met her among the crowds at Victoria Station her daughter-in-law’s face looked totally white from the strain. Over the next few months there were contradictory reports. First there was news from the Red Cross that Ego was at Damascus, but there were no details. Almost insane with relief, Letty pictured Ego returning to Stanway with the church bells ringing and everyone crying for joy. At that moment, all she had suffered would be worthwhile as Ego’s little boys would have a live hero to worship. But the news was too good to be true. In June, the message about Damascus was countermanded. One night at a dinner party, Mary heard Mrs Keppel say that an Arab servant had sworn that after the battle he had watched over Ego’s body for hours. The Duchess of Rutland insisted that the bad news was kept from Letty but this deception was very difficult for Mary as it created an artificial atmosphere between them.
The uncertainty eventually ended on 1 July when an officer prisoner certified that Ego had been killed at Katia, and a few days later the news was confirmed in a telegram from the Red Crescent. When Letty’s father-in-law, Lord Wemyss, came to break the news he found her alone with her two young sons, David and Martin, playing the piano. When Letty heard, she clung to him, and her sister-in-law Cynthia described the scene:
It was just like somebody in a fearful, unimaginable, physical pain. The children were scared asking, ‘What has happened to you Mummie? What is the matter with you? Will you be better in the morning?’ Once the children were taken upstairs and Letty had been given some sal volatile she babbled away almost incoherently to her father-in-law, ‘Oh papa, it can’t be true! How could God be so cruel? There was no one else in the world in the least like him – no one – I have been so wonderfully happy […] Oh God! Oh God! It’s no use calling to God – nothing is any use – nothing in all the world can help him. I’m only twenty-eight – I’m so strong – I shan’t die!’60
Letty was then carried upstairs to her room and her two little boys were brought to her. As they were just 2 and 4 years old, one of her greatest fears was that her sons would not remember their father. She explained, ‘David, I want you to understand Poppa’s – you remember what he looked like – Poppa’s never coming back to us.’ David said at once, ‘But I want him to.’ However, he was too young to really understand and said, ‘I must go now, or I shall be late for bed.’
The Rutlands were annoyed that Lord Wemyss rather than one of their family had told Letty the news. Later that night Violet arrived to comfort her daughter, but when Letty woke the next morning she was inconsolable. She began moaning in her sleep, ‘Don’t let me wake up to this ghastly day – I don’t want to wake up.’ She had dreamt that Ego was still alive but then the full realisation of his death came back to her and she cried:
Oh God, make me mad – make me mad, if I can’t die! Come back to me just for one minute my sweet Ego, just to tell me how to bear it, I can’t bear it without you to help. You must come back and see David just once. Oh God, the pain of it! I’m so frightened – I can’t face the long years. What am I to do – I haven’t got the brains to cope with it? I don’t believe I’ve got any brains – only a heart, oh such a heart.61
Her younger sister, Diana, joined her to try to help her as the family feared her mind might crack under the crushing loss. Even Diana felt impotent, she said she would rather bear the despair herself than see Letty suffering. She believed that her sister was dreading that she would never know love again or have more children. Cynthia described her as ‘pathetic beyond words’ and like ‘someone cut in two’, she added, ‘it makes one physically ill to see her’.62
Ego’s mother, Mary, grieved in a very different way from Letty. She heard of her eldest son’s death at her parents’ home, Clouds. Mary’s brother Guy brought a telegram from her husband to her bedroom. Echoing Ego’s letter to Mary just months before, Lord Wemyss tried to comfort his wife by saying, ‘We must see him again in those darling boys.’63 When she returned to London, Mary’s daughter, Cynthia, described her mother as looking physically better than she had expected and ‘braced’, but she said that she hoped no one would say that she was ‘wonderful’. Diana kept phoning from Letty’s house to know when Mary would be coming round. However, Cynthia did not think it was good for her mother to be with Letty, she wrote:
For her, of course, it is a severe physical strain to be with Letty. She can help her but she cannot be helped by her. With Letty it takes the form more of a crisis, like an illness which in a sense can be ministered to. Mamma is so utterly different –
no one can help – each person she sees is, I think, an effort and a strain. She is best left alone.64
However, instead of focusing on her own needs, Mary thought of her daughter-in-law, and in her grief Letty turned not to her own mother but to her mother-in-law. It was Mary who helped Letty to survive. As she admitted to one of Ego’s friends, ‘His mother has saved me with her infinite sweetness and wonder – I should have been a raving lunatic but for her.’65
In the days after hearing the news, the two women went down to Stanway. Behind the golden stone and mullioned windows, they retreated from the world to grieve together. Stanway was more than just a house, Mary felt that their home had a soul and that its mellow walls were steeped in the joys and sorrows of her family. She wrote that her children had been lucky to grow up in such a beautiful place and they all loved it with ‘unreasoning ardour’.66 When she was there she felt as if Yvo or Ego might walk in at any minute and sit by the fireside in her drawing room. At Stanway, in the hot July days sitting on the lawn under the tulip tree, Letty and Mary shared memories of Ego. Letty read old letters about her husband as a child and Mary’s old diaries, fixing upon any mention of herself and Ego. When she felt overwhelmed with grief Mary tucked her up with a quilt and hot water bottle and left her to doze like a tired child.
The Duchess of Rutland had to accept that she now took second place to Mary in her daughter’s affections. She wrote to Letty, saying that she was missing her but she knew ‘in what tender loving – and beloved by you – hands you are in and how you are living his childhood over again with her’.67 The duchess told her daughter, ‘I never cease to think of your lovely crystal life – and its tragic smash.’68 However, she admitted that she did not know what to say to comfort Letty.
In contrast, Mary said just the right things. As she was so childlike, the younger woman was very open to suggestion. Mary told Letty that sorrow was a very lonely thing but love and sympathy could lighten the burden. They did not compete for whose loss was greatest, instead they acknowledged that they had both loved Ego with ‘body, heart and soul’. As Mary wrote, ‘You and I Darling had such a perfect time basking in Ego’s love we never were jealous of each other’s happiness – therefore we never could quarrel over each other’s woe!’69
Mary had emotional maturity and a strong Christian faith and she did everything she could to instil these values in her daughter-in-law. At first Letty was angry with God and found going to church difficult because she had prayed over and over again for Ego to come home safely and her prayers had not been answered. However, although her faith wavered, she believed that if she lived in a way which would make Ego proud she would see him again.
Both women knew that their duty now was to concentrate on bringing up Ego’s sons as he would have wanted. Mary described David and Martin as our ‘little bits of Ego’. At first, Letty felt that the children were no use to her because they were not her husband, but gradually she realised that they were all she had left of him. Mary asked Letty to let her help bring them up and she told her that Ego’s home was her home. The two women tried to fill the massive void left by Ego’s loss. Mary told Letty, ‘The great thing in my life now is our love and confidence in each other.’ She added, ‘You and I are one – not only sentimentally but really for Ego is he not my son? – am I not your “Mama” for you and he were one and so I will be “darling Mum”. And we will love him and one another “till all is blue”.’70
The Duchess of Rutland was redundant as Mary had taken her place in Letty’s life. When Ego’s memorial service was organised for Sunday, 16 July at Stanway, at first the duchess was not invited. Mary just wanted the people ‘who knew and cared and understood’ to be there.71 When Violet heard about it she wrote to Letty, saying she must be there, but only if it was no trouble. She said that she did not mind that she had not been asked, but she must have felt increasingly isolated from her daughter. Mary wrote to Violet reassuring her that both she and Letty would love her to be there. No doubt unintentionally increasing Violet’s sense of exclusion, Mary added that Letty’s ‘love and trust and confidence in me and her sweetness are beyond all words’.72
On the day of the memorial service it poured with rain all day as Letty rushed from the house to the church taking Ego’s sword and belt and arranging the flowers. The service was held at 6, it was an intimate occasion with only the people who loved Ego there. Letty was very brave but afterwards she looked ravaged and had to go to bed.
When the family went to Gosford in September the familiar estate made the new sorrow all the more acute. As the rain poured and the weather was unseasonably cold, Letty wrote, ‘I have been so happy here in the old days – it seems so strange that the same things one enjoyed should now break one’s heart.’73 Mary described Gosford as like a tomb and admitted she felt sapped by seeing Letty so listless and sad, but then her daughter-in-law’s mood would suddenly alter and she would smile and do something brave and sensible.
Letty still found it hard to believe that her husband was really dead. Like 528,104 other British and Empire dead, Ego had no grave as his body had never been found.74 Until the end of September, Letty was tortured by the mystery surrounding Ego’s death – there was still a lack of details, and her greatest fear was that it had not been instantaneous. She imagined that he might have crawled away wounded. She wanted to know exactly what had happened so that she could feel it with her senses.75 Her mind was finally put at rest by a telegram from his sergeant major stating that a shell blew out his chest, which meant he would have died immediately. His sergeant major added that Ego had ‘acted quite magnificently’.76 These words became a talisman for both Letty and Mary and they were widely quoted to friends as evidence of Ego’s heroism. Mary told her sister-in-law, ‘I love those words coming from the quiet sergeant!’77
In October Letty joined her mother Violet in their Arlington Street home. Even when she was with her own family she missed her mother-in-law and wrote to her that she was feeling ‘a dreadful coward about my new life – but I know I must face it […] It is wonderful for me to have you to help me to live it as you do – I dare not think what would become of me without you.’78 For months she had not been able to conjure up Ego, even in dreams, but now for the first time since his death she dreamt of him. He was lying in state in Arlington Street in what she thought was a coffin but then she realised that he was in bed. He opened his large twinkling eyes and looked at her and smiled. He was very thin and suntanned and he held both her hands. She knew she was only dreaming but it was a comfort to see him looking well and happy.
The first Christmas was particularly difficult. The family got together at Stanway but the absence of Ego left an enormous void. Letty put on a brave face for the children but she could not help quietly weeping as she bent over their beds in the nursery to leave their stockings crammed with presents. It was the first time she had done it with her sister-in-law Cynthia instead of Ego beside her to share the intimate family moment.79 Over the holiday period she had never felt so near to insanity and feared she would collapse under the strain. It was Ego’s birthday on 28 December, and to mark it Letty wrote to her mother-in-law, addressing her in terms worthy of the Virgin Mary, saying, ‘that day that made you blessed above all women’. She thanked Mary for shaping Ego and then for sharing him with her. She wrote, ‘Few men are so much “their Mother’s sons” as he was. Fewer men have had such a mother.’80 Mary found that day particularly poignant. As she watched the sun rise above the black tracery of the old elms she wondered what was the point of life as the light of her life had gone out.
In a letter to one of Ego’s oldest friends in January 1917, Letty explained her feelings. She wrote, ‘For us who are left behind it is unspeakable. He was everything in heaven and earth to me, he was my religion, I cannot say more than that, and yet he was a million times more than all that.’81 However, although she still found it inconceivable that she could exist without him, she had taken on board her mother-in-law’s sound philoso
phy. She explained that Ego had trusted her to do the right thing and she could not fail that trust now. No matter how hard she found it she had to carry on for his sake and his honour. She added, ‘I was his wife, his adored wife and therefore I am sanctified. I am the mother of his sons and they are a very sacred charge […] I am the proudest woman on this earth to have been thought worthy of his love and confidence.’82
Around the first anniversary of Ego’s death Letty had a relapse. As Mary was going to bed at Stanway she heard a sound like a child crying. She found her daughter-in-law ‘trembling like an aspen’, shrieking and howling in an agony of passionate longing and grief. She was relieved to have Mary with her, saying, ‘Oh! thank God you have come Mama, I think I should have gone mad if you had not come.’ Gradually she calmed down as they talked of Ego’s love and their happy memories. Letty then went to sleep, but the encounter had churned up Mary’s emotions and it took her a long time to go to sleep.83
As the months became years, Letty and Mary’s lives reverted more to their old routines. At times Mary still felt she was in a dream world, living in her memories, but then the voices of her grandsons charging around in their mackintoshes and sou’westers called her back to reality. Both women had a sense of pride that they had created something positive out of their tragedy. As Mary said, they had made the most of a bad job and by sharing their sorrow they had not become lonely or bitter. Instead, they had developed an unbreakable bond which sustained them both. They received peace, comfort and strength from each other but they also had real fun. Mary told Letty that ‘“Mum” would be quite a lame old dog without you!’84 Both knew that it would have pleased Ego that they had become so close.
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