An Autobiography

“September 26th.– Signs of pressure. They may now be off any hour. The ammunition has all arrived, and there wants but one battery of artillery to complete the division. General Capper won’t wait much longer and will be off without it if it delays and make up a battery en route somehow. It is sad to see so many mere boys arriving at the hotel fresh from Sandhurst. They are given companies to command, captains being killed, wounded or missing in such numbers. As to Patrick’s regiment, the old Royal Irish seem to have been so shattered that they are all hors de combat for the present.

“September 27th.– What a precious Sunday this has been! First, Patrick accompanied me to Mass, said by Father Bernard Vaughan, in a secluded part of the camp, where the heather had not been ploughed up by men, horses and guns, as elsewhere, and where the altar was erected in a wooded glen. The Grenadier and Scots Guards were all on their knees as we arrived, and the bright green and gold vestments of the priest were relieved very vividly in the sunshine against the darker green background of the forest beyond. Quite a little crowd of stalwart guardsmen received Holy Communion, and two of them were sheltering with their careful hands the candles from the soft warm breeze, one at each end of the altar. We sit out in the leafy garden of the hotel and have tea there, we parents and relatives, with our boys by us at all spare moments. To-day, being Sunday, there have been extra crowds of relatives and friends who have motored over from afar. There is pathos here, very real pathos. How many of these husbands and sons and brothers I see sitting close to their dear ones, for the last time, perhaps! Who knows? The voices are low and quiet – very quiet. Patrick and I were photographed together by M. E. These little snapshots will be precious. We were nearly all day together to-day as there was a rest. All this quiet time here our brave soldiers are being shattered on the banks of the Aisne. Just now must be a tremendously important period of the fighting. We may get great news to-morrow. Many names I know beginning to appear in the casualty lists.

“September 28th, 1914.– Had a good motor run with the R.’s right through the field of ‘battle’ in the midst of the great forest – a rolling height covered with heather and bracken. Our soldiers certainly have learnt, at last, how to take cover. One can easily realise how it is that the proportion of officers killed is so high. Kneeling or standing up to give directions they are very conspicuous, whereas of the men one catches only a glimpse of their presence now and then through a tell-tale knapsack or the round top of a cap in the bracken; yet the ground is packed with men – quite uncanny. The Gordons were a beautiful sight as they sprang up to reach a fresh position. I noticed how the breeze, as they ran, blew the khaki aprons aside and the revealed tartan kilts gave a welcome bit of colour and touched up the drab most effectively. One ‘gay Gordon’ sergeant told us, ‘We are a grand diveesion, all old warriors, and when we get out ‘twill make a deeference.’”

The most impressive episode to me of that well-remembered day was when Patrick took me up to the high ground at sunset and we looked down on the camp. The mellow, very red sun was setting and the white moon was already well up over the camp, which looked mysterious, lightly veiled by the thin grey wood-smoke of the fires. Thousands of troops were massed or moving, shadowy, far away; others in the middle distance received the blood-red glow on the men’s faces with an extraordinary effect. They showed as ruddy, vaporous lines of colour over the scarcely perceptible tones of the dusky uniforms. Horses stood up dark on the sky-line. The bugles sounded the “Retreat”; these doomed legions, shadow-like, moved to and fro. It was the prologue to a great tragedy.

“September 30th.– There was a field day of the whole of one brigade. The regiments in it are ‘The Queen’s,’ the Welsh Fusiliers, Staffords, and Warwicks, with the monstrous 4·7 guns drawn by my well-loved mighty mammoths. The guns are made impossible to the artist of modern war by being daubed in blue and red blotches which make them absolutely formless and, of course, no glint of light on the hidden metal is seen. Still, there is much that is very striking, though the colour, the sparkle, the gallant plumage, the glinting of gold and silver, have given way to universal grimness. After all, why dress up grim war in all that splendour? My idea of war subjects has always been anti-sparkle.

“As I sat in the motor in the centre of the far-flung ‘battle,’ in a hollow road, lo! the Headquarter Staff came along, a gallant group, à la Meissonier, Patrick, on his skittish brown mare ‘Dawn,’ riding behind the General, who rode a big black (very effective), with the chief of the Staff nearly alongside. The escort consisted of a strong detachment of the fine Northumberland Hussars, mounted on their own hunters. They are to be the bodyguard of the General at the Front. Several drivers of the artillery are men who were wounded at Mons and elsewhere, and, being well again, are returning with this division to the Front. All the horses here are superb. Poor beasts, poor beasts! One daily, hourly, reminds oneself that the very dittoes of these men and animals are suffering, fighting, dying over there in France. Kitchener tells our General that the 7th Division will ‘probably arrive after the first phase is over,’ which looks as though he fully expects the favourable and early end of the present one.

“October 2nd.– The whole division was out to-day. I was motored into the very thick of the operations on the high lands, and watched the men entrenching themselves, a thing I had never yet seen. Most picturesque and telling. And the murderous guns were being embedded in the yellow earth and covered with heather against aeroplanes, especially, and their wheels masked with horse blankets. There they lay, black, hump-backed objects, with just their mouths protruding, and as each gun section finished their work with the pick and shovel, they lay flat down to hide themselves. How war is waged now! Great news allowed to be published to-day in the papers. The Indian Army has arrived, and is now at the Front! It landed long ago at Marseilles, but how well the secret has been kept! How mighty are the events daily occurring. Late in the afternoon I saw the Northumberland Hussars, on a high ridge, practising the sword exercise! With the idea that the sword was obsolete (engendered by the Boer War experience), no yeomanry has, of late, been armed with sabres, but, seeing what use our Scots Greys, Lancers, Dragoon Guards and Hussars have lately been making of the steel, General Capper has insisted on these, his own yeomen, being thus armed. I felt stirred with the pathos of this sight – men learning how to use a new arm on the eve of battle. They were mounted and drawn up in a long, two-deep line on that brown heath, with a heavy bank of dark clouds like mine in ‘Scotland for Ever!’ behind their heads – a fine subject.

“Who will look at my ‘Waterloos’ now? I have but one more of that series to do. Then I shall stop and turn all my attention and energy to this stupendous war. I shall call up my Indian sowars again, but not at play this time.

“October 3rd. – Sketched Patrick’s three beautiful chargers’ heads in water colour. Still the word ‘Go!’ is suspended over our heads.

“October 4th. – The word ‘Go!’ has just sounded. In ten minutes Patrick had to run and get his handbag, great coat and sword and be off with his General to London. They pass through here to-morrow on their way to embark.

“October 5th, 1914. – I was down at seven, and as they did not finally leave till 8.15 I had a golden half-hour’s respite. Then came the parting…”

I left Lyndhurst at once. It will ever remain with me in a halo of physical and spiritual sunshine seen through a mist of sadness.

On November 2nd, 1914, my son Patrick was severely wounded during the terrible, prolonged first Battle of Ypres, and was sent home to be nursed back to health and fighting power at Guy’s Hospital, where I saw him. He told me that as he lay on the field his General and Staff passed by, and all the General said was, “Hullo, Butler! is that you? Good-bye!”[19 - In his little book, “A Galloper at Ypres” (Fisher Unwin), my son gives a clear account of his own experience of that battle.] General Capper was as brave a soldier as ever lived, but, I think, too fond for a General of being, as he said he wished to be, in the vanguard. Thus he met his death (riding on horseback, I understand) at Loos. Patrick’s brother A.D.C., Captain Isaac, whom I daily used to see at Lyndhurst, was killed early in the War. The poor fellow, to calm my apprehensions regarding my own son, had tried to assure me that, as A.D.C., he would be as safe as in Piccadilly.

Towards the end of 1914 London had become intensely interesting in its tragic aspect, and so very unlike itself. Soldiers of all ranks formed the majority of the male population. In fact, wherever I looked now there was some new sight of absorbing interest, telling me we were at war, and such a war! Bands were playing at recruiting stations; flags of all the Allies fluttered in the breeze in gaudy bunches; “pom-pom” guns began to appear, pointing skywards from their platforms in the parks, awaiting “Taubes” or “Zeppelins.” I went daily to watch the recruits drilling in the parks – such strangely varied types of men they were, and most of them appearing the veriest civilians, from top to toe. Yet these very shop-boys had come forward to offer their all for England, and the good fellows bowed to the terrible, shouting drill-sergeants as never they had bowed to any man before. What enraged me was the giggling of the shop-girls who looked on – a far harder ordeal for the boys even than the yells of the sergeants. One of the squads in the Green Park was supremely interesting to me one day, in (I am bound to say) a semi-comic way. These recruits were members and associates of the Royal Academy. They were mostly somewhat podgy, others somewhat bald. When resting, having piled arms, they played leap-frog, which was very funny, and showed how light-heartedly my brothers of the brush were going to meet the Boche. Of the maimed and blind men one met at every turn I can scarcely write. I find that when I am most deeply moved my pen lags too far behind my brush.

On getting home to Ireland I set to work upon a series of khaki water colours of the War for my next “one-man show,” which opened with most satisfactory éclat in May, 1917. One of the principal subjects was done under the impulse of a great indignation, for Nurse Cavell had been executed. I called the drawing “The Avengers.” Also I exhibited at the Academy, at the same time, “The Charge of the Dorset Yeomanry at Agagia, Egypt.” This was a large oil painting, commissioned by Colonel Goodden and presented by him to his county of Dorset. That charge of the British yeomen the year before had sealed the fate of the combined Turks and Senussi, who had contemplated an attack on Egypt. One of the most difficult things in painting a war subject is the having to introduce, as often happens, portraits of particular characters in the drama. Their own mothers would not know the men in the heat, dust, and excitement of a charge, or with the haggard pallor on them of a night watch. In the Dorset charge all the officers were portraits, and I brought as many in as possible without too much disobeying the “distance” regulation. The Enemy (of the Senussi tribe) wore flowing burnouses, which helped the movement, but at their machine guns I, rather reluctantly, had to place the necessary Turkish officers. I had studies for those figures and for the desert, which I had made long ago in the East. It is well to keep one’s sketches; they often come in very useful.

The previous year, 1916, had been a hard one. Our struggles in the War, the Sinn Fein rebellion in Dublin, and one dreadful day in that year when the first report of the Battle of Jutland was published – these were great trials. I certainly would not like to go through another phase like that. But I was hard at work in the studio at home in Tipperary, and this kept my mind in a healthy condition, as always, through trouble. Let all who have congenial work to do bless their stars!

On July 31st my second son, the chaplain, had a narrow escape. It was at the great Battle of Flanders, where we seem to have made a good beginning at last. Father Knapp and Dick were tending the wounded and dying under a rain of shells, when the old priest told Dick to go and get a few minutes’ rest. On returning to his sorrowful work Dick met the fine old Carmelite as he was borne on a stretcher, dying of a shell that had exploded just where my son had been standing a few minutes before.

I see in the Diary: “December 11th, 1917. – To-day our army is to make its formal entry into Jerusalem. I can scarcely write for excitement. How vividly I see it all, knowing every yard of that holy ground! Dick writes from before Cambrai that, if he had to go through another such day as that of the 30th November last, he would go mad with grief. He lost all his dearest friends in the Grenadier Guards, and he says England little knows how near she was to a great disaster when the enemy surprised us on that terrible Friday.”

Men who have gone through the horrors of war say little about them, but I have learnt many strange things from rare remarks here and there. To show how human life becomes of no account as the fighting grows, here is an instance. A soldier was executed at dawn one day for “cowardice.” An officer who had acted at the court-martial met a private of the same regiment as the dead man’s that day, who remarked to his officer that all he could say about his dead “pal” was that he had seen him perform an act of bravery three times which would have deserved the V.C. “My good man,” said the officer, “why didn’t you come forward at the trial and say this?” “Well, I didn’t think of it, sir.” After all, to die one way or another had become quite immaterial.

One of the most important of my water colours at the second khaki exhibition, held in London in May, 1919, was of the memorable charge of the Warwick and Worcester Yeomanry at Huj, near Jerusalem, which charge outshone the old Balaclava one we love to remember, and which differed from the Crimean exploit in that we not only captured all the enemy guns, but held them. I had had all details – ground plans, description of the weather on that memorable day, position of the sun, etc., etc. – supplied me by an eye-witness who had a singularly quick eye and precise perception.[20 - Colonel the Hon. Richard Preston, whose book, “The Desert Mounted Corps,” is a masterpiece.] I called it “Jerusalem delivered,” for that charge opened the gates of the Holy City to us. “The Canadian Bombers on Vimy Ridge” was another of the more conspicuous subjects, and this one went to Canada.

But I must look back a little: “Monday, November 11th, 1918. – Armistice Day! I have been fortunate in seeing London on this day of days. I arrived at Victoria into a London of laughter, flags, joy-rides on every conceivable and inconceivable vehicle. I had hints on the way to London by eruptions of Union Jacks growing thicker and thicker along the railway, but I could not let myself believe that it was the end of all our long-drawn-out trial that I would find on arrival. But so it was. I went alone for a good stroll through Oxford Street, Bond Street, and Piccadilly. People meeting, though strangers, were smiling at each other. I smiled to strange faces that were smiling at me. What a novel sensation! The streets were thronged with the true happiness in the people’s eyes, and there was no “mafficking” no horse-play, but such fun. The matter was too great for rowdyism and drunkenness. The crowd was allowed to do just as it pleased for once, yet I saw no accidents. The police just looked on, and would have beamed also, I am sure, if they had not been on duty. They had, apparently, thrown the reins on the public’s neck. I saw some sad faces, but, of course, such as these kept mostly away.”

In deepest gratitude I felt I could be amongst the smilers that day, for both my own sons, who faced death to the very end in so many of the theatres of war to which our armies were sent, had survived.

The boat that took me back to Ireland eventually had no protecting airship serpentining above us. We could breathe freely now!

notes

1

The cattle plague was raging in England.

2

William I., afterwards German Emperor.

3

The severe Lady Superintendent.

4

Whose son, Mr. Alfred Pollard, C.B., became the head of the British Museum Printed Book Department.

5

Manning.

6

Poor young Inman, who was killed at the fight of Laing’s Nek, S. Africa.

7

“From Sketch-Book and Diary,” A. & C. Black.

8

I have just been told by an Irishman that the Valentia breed are trained for racing!

9

“The Campaign of the Cataracts.”

10

The late Lord Kitchener.

11

Now King George V.

12

Our eldest daughter Elizabeth, now Mrs. Kingscote.

13

Some one has explained to me, with what authority I cannot tell, that “The Sailor King” gave this order to his officers with Royal tact, being well aware that they could no more stand, at that period of the dinner, than he could himself. So we sit.