Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle by The Countess of Carnarvon

Author:The Countess of Carnarvon
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780770435639
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-27T05:00:00+00:00

13

Hospital on the Move

Christmas 1915 arrived and Almina had no spare energy to devote to festivities. The hospital was a success: she could see the good it was doing her patients; could read the gratitude in their letters. She was training a select band of nurses, engaging the most eminent doctors of the day to perform pioneering operations that saved countless lives. She had the means to enable her staff to treat all their charges with every possible care and attention. She was gaining the respect of the Southern Command of the military authorities, who came to trust her judgement completely – so that if she said a man was not yet well enough to attend the Medical Board, they believed her. By any account, Almina’s hospital at Highclere was thriving; she knew for certain that she had found her life’s work. Still, she was exhausted and frustrated that she couldn’t do more. And there was nothing but bad news, from all directions.

Reports of another Highclere death had filtered back. George Cox, a groom, had been killed at Ypres back in May but it had taken six months for the authorities to inform his mother. There had been no system in place for registering casualties when the war started, and the scale of the losses meant that it wasn’t until the end of 1915 that what became, two years later, the Imperial War Graves Commission managed to establish a workable system. Following the French government’s gift of land for war cemeteries for Allied soldiers on the Western Front, the task of logging graves began. Army chaplains had used bottles containing slips of paper with the soldier’s name scrawled on it to mark graves, and these could now be replaced by wooden crosses. George Cox’s body had lain in the fields of France for six months while his mother waited with dwindling hope for news, but none of that deterred two more Highclere men from joining up.

Maber and Absalon were both gamekeepers who elected to join the newly centralised Machine Gun Corps. They handled guns every day of their working lives, so were presumably regarded as an asset. Despite the strategic failures, the lack of progress and the morale-sapping casualty rate, the public mood at the end of 1915 was still determined. There was, as yet, no shortage of recruits.

But the last few months had been depressing for even the most vehement and positive patriot. On the Western Front the Allies had lost nearly 90,000 men compared to the Germans’ 25,000, and Sir John French, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, continued to dither and to fall out with both his own colleagues and the French command. In December he was recalled to Britain and replaced by Sir Douglas Haig.

It was the same story in the Dardanelles. Kitchener finally gave permission to evacuate; ironically, that part of the operation was the only success story, with relatively few casualties. But the ANZAC and the Mediterranean Expeditionary Forces lost nearly 35,000 men

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