Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey by The Countess of Carnarvon

Author:The Countess of Carnarvon [Carnarvon, The Countess of]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3563-9
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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