AFTER NUALA had left for the last day of rehearsal at the Point, I walked through the mists (a nice evening in Ireland does not predict a nice morning the next day) over to the Trinity College Library, where I had obtained a little clout, courtesy of George the Priest and his boss, the little bishop.
Herself had been tense and uncommunicative as she dressed for her “worry session” before the concert itself. When she was in her worry modality, I was wise enough to keep my own big mouth shut.
Nonetheless, her good-bye kiss was as affectionate as ever.
“Dermot Michael,” she said, turning towards me (still in bed) from the door. “I learned a new poem yesterday. It’s by Father Paddy Daly. Would you ever like to listen to it?”
“I would.”
“ ‘All day long
She has been arranging our welcome:
“ ‘Scouring down the house,
Sweeping under beds,
Pulling out the old crocheted counterpanes,
Shining glasses and tableware,
Dusting sideboards and picture frames.
“ ‘Now she sits in a deep chair
Till we come crunching under the beeches
To the door.’ ”
“It’s lovely,” I had said. “Sounds like your mother getting ready for our visit.”
“Doesn’t it now? … I was thinking of reciting it tonight.”
“Sounds like a good idea. … What’s the tide?”
“God,” she said as she went out the door and closed it as my Nuala Anne always closes the door—with a loud slam.
God?
The woman was reading too much Irish mysticism altogether. Still the poem would be a grand success at the concert. It would make everyone stop and think, which is why the clever witch (good witch of the West) would read it.
At the TCD library I found to my surprise two listings under “Downs, Lady Augusta, 1888-1922.”
The first had been published in 1917. It was titled simply Poems. The description on the computer page said: “Poems written by a woman whose husband was serving in Flanders.”
The second was The Life of Colonel the Lord Arthur Downs, V.C., K.C.B. Publication date was 1922. Perhaps it was a posthumously published book.
I shivered slightly as I looked at the computer screen. I was not sure that I wanted to get into the tragedy of those young lives. Nor did I want my good wife to read about either of them.
Well, there was no helping that, was there now?
The two books were delivered to me. I walked to a table in the reading room, as far away as I could get from the Book of Kells, by which passed a steady stream of American tourists. Both of the books were thin and poorly bound. Some of the pages of the biography had detached themselves from the spine, and the others barely clung to it. I turned the pages slowly, and carefully.
Augusta Downs’s poems were light and lovely, not deep, not great, but filled with affection and hope. She was serenely confident that just as spring had returned to Ireland, so, too, would the man who is “the springtime of my life.”
Her religious faith permeated all of the poems. She was not attempting to teach the reader faith, much less demand it, but neither did she hide the radiance of her belief “we will always be together no matter what may intervene.”
I wept for her. Why did some generations of young people have to suffer so terribly?
Reluctantly, I turned to her memoir.
The frontispiece was a picture of “Lord Arthur Thomas John Michael Downs, V.C., K.C.B. 1884-1918.” He was dressed in the British military uniform, dark jacket, light trousers, Sam Browne belt, but was not wearing a cap. He did not look like a striking figure. His hair was too thin, his face too narrow, his neck too long, his smile too weak. His eyes, however, were different. Eighty years after the picture had been taken, the eyes seemed to leap off the page at me—intelligent, humorous, determined.
For a minute or two I stared at the picture, unable to escape those eyes. This is not, I thought, your typical British military officer trained on the playing fields of Eton. This was a man without illusion, a man who would do his duty but not kid himself about the folly of war.
Again I wanted to weep for him and Lady Augusta. Yet they had happy years together. They had married in 1907, when she was nineteen and he twenty-three, not all that much different from Nuala Anne and myself. Eleven years together, the last four interrupted by war. Not long enough; it is never long enough.
I pictured them walking hand in hand along the estuary in that glorious summer of 1914, the most beautiful weather in a half a century according to those who lived through it. Gerald would predict, as did most English officers at the time, that the war would be a short one. It would be a good thing; it would stiffen the back of the nation and teach the Kaiser a lesson he needed.
Perhaps Lady Augusta—would he have called her Gus?—told him how hard she was praying that there would not be a war and that he would not have to leave Castle Garry.
Neither could have possibly imagined the horror of the Great War, the destruction of an entire generation in the mud and blood of northern France. Nor would they have believed that the optimism of the Victorian and Edwardian Ages would disappear, never to return.
No children. A great loss for both of them.
What would have happened if he had lived? Those eyes suggested that he was the kind of man that neither Ireland nor England could afford to lose. Would he and Lady Augusta have moved to England to escape the chaos? Or would they have stayed on? Might he eventually have come to serve in the Free State Government?
Foolish questions!
His wife’s memoir was restrained. Her grief was palpable, but it did not overwhelm her. She told the story simply and cleanly. Nonetheless, the man with the vibrant eyes leaped out of the pages.
I knew I would love him before we ever met. I was at a dull ball at Lord Mayo’s home in Dublin. I heard a man’s laugh in the next room. I told myself that was a laugh with which I could fall in love. I peeked around the corner and saw this handsome young man with a wonderful smile. He didn’t seem to have a young woman in attendance. He looked at me and smiled even more wonderfully. I smiled back. We both knew that instant that we were one another’s destiny, even though we didn’t yet know each other’s names.
Like herself and myself in O’Neill’s pub on College Green.1
As I look back on our fleeting years together, I realize that he made me laugh. I was a very serious young woman, deeply committed to the good of my people and my country—Ireland, not England, though I thought of myself as both English and Irish. I started to laugh at him that night and never stopped.
Arthur was pro-Irish and a strong supporter of Home Rule. There was Irish in his background, though his family lived out on the edge of Cornwall—“a place so desolate that it makes the Shannon Estuary look like the Bay of Naples.” The people of Garrytown were skeptical of an English lord, but he won them over by his first visits to the local pubs and by his athletic enthusiasm.
He rode passably well, not as well as I did, he would always say. He liked fishing but abhorred hunting. However, he excelled in soccer and became quite good at both Gaelic football and hurling. There was some opposition to him participating in either sport because English men were theoretically banned from them. However, Canon Muldoon, the darling P.P. who was also president of the local G.A.A., accepted his word about his Irish ancestors. Everyone in Garrytown celebrated the decision, some of them I fear a little too vigorously.
He and the priest became close friends.
I always thought that the Canon, a strong Republican, distrusted me because my family had become Protestant a couple of centuries ago. But he loved Arthur and eventually came to like and even admire me. He is a great consolation to me in these days of my widowhood.
Separated by war, the two young lovers missed each other deeply. Yet “his letters were wonderful, full of fun and joy and laughter, just like the rest of his life. I felt he was in the room with me when, with trembling fingers, I would open a letter. He said the same thing: When he read a letter from me, it was almost as though I were standing in the trench with him.”
Wow!
He made no attempt to hide the horror of the trenches from her.
He grieved at the good men under his command who had died. He described the mud and the danger of the trenches. He often feared that the war would go on forever. In some of the letters he seemed very discouraged and even spoke of the possibility of his own death. Yet his laughing spirit could not be suppressed. He found cause for laughter even in the most terrible circumstances.
She quoted many of his letters, cutting, I suspected, the most intimate love passages. Arthur Downs was as shrewd as he was witty.
We took some German prisoners yesterday, a patrol which had advanced too far into our lines. We trapped them so they could not retreat. They fought till their ammunition ran out and then climbed out of their dugout, hands in the air. They were frightened that we would shoot them. Some of my men wanted to kill them as reprisal for the murder of our troops by the Germans who had taken them as prisoners. Such things happen on both sides when nervous and exhausted men take out their rage on the defenseless. I forbade any executions. Even in the trenches we must strive to remain decent and moral human beings. Most of my men seemed glad that I had intervened.
The poor wretches, none of them over twenty, were shaking with fear. Change the uniforms and they would have been the same as us. Brave young men doing their duty in a foolish war into which old men have led us and do not know how to end. They have parents and wives or sweethearts at home praying for them, just as our fellows do. I tell you, Gussie, Haig and French and men like them on the other side have a lot to answer for. They saluted me and thanked me as they were marched off to prisoner stockades. The war is over for them. If they don’t come down with some terrible disease, they’ll go home eventually to those who are praying for them. They’re the lucky ones.
Do I sound cynical, Gussie my love? I suppose I am. I don’t believe in this war anymore. We are led by fools and incompetents. I hide my cynicism from my men. I wonder if they see through my enthusiasms.
I wondered how many British officers had felt that way in 1916. How many would have dared to have been so blunt in letters home?
And how many had wives who could absorb such sedition? Augusta included none of her own letters in the book. It was supposed to be about him, not about her. Yet she revealed a lot of herself in which segments of his letters she chose to put in the book.
Finally, General Tudor entered the picture. In a letter after a brief leave in Garrytown, Lord Downs wrote:
Still can’t get over how wonderful it was to be back in county Limerick with you. It seemed like the waking world and the trenches over here are nothing more than a bad dream. The Ninth Scottish has a new officer commanding. Man named Hugh Tudor, of all things. Everyone is afraid to ask him if he is a descendent. From India. Very much the pukka sahib. Stiff, aloof, doesn’t smile. Artillery bloke. He can’t be any worse than the fool he replaced.
A couple of weeks later, Gerry sent a much more favorable report on the new commander of the division:
Hugh Tudor is a military genius. He has developed a technique for laying down what he calls a “box barrage,” a combination of artillery shells and smoke which clears a segment of no-man’s-land before an attack. It works remarkably well. The people on the other side don’t know what to make of it and don’t like it one bit. They pull back very quickly when we start one of these things because they don’t relish us showing up in their trenches without warning. Marshal Haig was here the other day to watch a demostration. He seemed impressed, though mostly he is impressed only by himself. The man is a pompous, foppish fool. The blood of tens of thousands of Tommies is all over his effeminate little hands and he doesn’t even know it.
Still later he told his wife:
The General wants to make me his Chief of Staff. Colonel Downs, does that have a nice ring to it? He told me that I was one of the few intelligent officers in the division. I know that we both agree with that, but it was still a bit odd to hear it from one’s Officer Commanding. He’s not a bad bloke at all. Kind of man I could get to like. I told him that I didn’t much believe in the war. He was silent for a minute and then said softly, “Neither do I, Art, but we’ve got to end it somehow so we can send the men home—those who are still alive.”
So I accepted his offer. At least I’ll be out of the trenches and in much safer circumstances.
Later he added a brief P.S.:
Hugh Tudor’s first name is Henry and he does seem to be some descendent of the Royal Tudors, though, as he says with a laugh, on the wrong side of the sheet. He is a first-rate soldier and a firstrate human being. He cares about all of his men. He does everything he can to keep casualties down. His artillery tactics have been so successful that the generals above him leave him pretty much alone. He writes a letter every night to his wife back in Exeter, with whom he is almost as much in love as I am with you.
The last letter she received from him, in the spring of 1918, revealed no premonitions about death but only a renewed hope:
The other side seems to be getting ready for another big offensive, perhaps their last one. Russia is out of the war, but the United States, with its huge population and resources and its grim Protestant determination, is in it. For the Germans, it is a matter of winning now or giving up. There is nothing subtle about their plans. They intend to drive on Paris, just as they did in 1870 and 1914. They also intend to break our line, drive a wedge between us and the French, and then head for the sea to encircle us. If they lose, I think it will be their last offensive and they may pack it in. If they win their gamble, I think the French will pack it in. What we will do, I don’t know. British people—to say nothing of us Irish—can be very stubborn about surrendering. Every battle but the last sort of thing. I believe that we will hold them and then counterattack at the end of summer. No matter how stupid our generals, that should finally defeat the Germans. If that happens and with any luck I’ll be back with you in Garrytown by Christmas. And won’t we have a wonderful time celebrating!
Arthur Downs was correct in his analysis. The last desperate German offensive failed, though it was, as the Iron Duke said of Waterloo, a damn close thing. The final Allied offensive sent the German Army reeling. A new German government sued for peace. Arthur Downs’s body was home for Christmas.
Gussie contented herself with the printing from the citation for his Victoria Cross:
Colonel The Lord Arthur Thomas John Michael Downs, In action at Cambrai on 15 April 1918 this officer, chief of staff of the Ninth Scottish Division, carried a message from his Officer Commanding to the Third Battalion of that division, with which communication had been lost Arriving at the position of this unit, he discovered that the enemy had overrun the battalion, that its senior officers were dead or wounded, and that German soliders were occupying its trenches. Realizing that the position had to be held if the flank of his division were not to be turned, Colonel The Lord Downs assumed temporary command of the battalion on his own initiative, rallied the troops, and drove the enemy from its trenches. Though wounded three times he continued to lead the counterattack until our position was completely restored. He died from his wounds at the very end of the action. However, his initiative and courage undoubtedly saved his entire division from destruction.
Gussie added Hugh Tudor’s letter:
I was fond of your husband, one of the finest men I have ever known. I miss him greatly. I can only begin to comprehend how much you miss him. His bravery was both exemplary and typical. He did save the day for us. Our line held that day and perhaps changed the course of this terrible war. Gerry was the man responsible. I do not know how much consolation it will bring you, but most of us would have been dead at the end of the day if he had not acted far above and beyond the call of duty. I shall never forget his smile, his laugh, his good spirits, his courage. Never.
H. H. Tudor
General Officer Commanding
Ninth Scottish Division
Typical of the kind of letter an officer had to write many times during war. Yet also unique and special.
Gussie cited the sermons of both the Anglican vicar and Canon Muldoon. The latter, she tells us, broke into tears during his eulogy.
Naturally he spoke the highest Irish praise: “We’ll not see his like again.”
Her own final words were brief: “I have loved my husband since I first met him at Lord Mayo’s. I miss him. I will always love him. Often I feel him very close to me. I’m sure he is. I know I will be with him someday in a better world than this. Until then I must honor his memory by not feeling sorry for myself and not abandoning my responsibilities.”
At the end there is a drawing of a simple tombstone on the grounds of Castle Garry and of his Victoria Cross.
“Damn!” I muttered to myself.
A librarian at Trinity College was happy to make me a photocopy of the little book.
“Worth reading?” she asked.
“Yes indeed.”
“Victoria Cross? Brave man. English or Irish?”
“Both, I think.”
“Must have been hard in those days.”
“Not for him.”
Would I show the book to Nuala Anne?
Maybe. But she’d probably figure it all out anyway.
1 Irish Gold