Books

The heroic Aubrey Herbert

Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Man Who Was Greenmantle: A Biography of Aubrey Herbert Margaret Fitzherbert (John Murray £15)

Wide acres, rank, distinguished looks, many talents, an excellent brain, in- dependence of outlook and humour — for- tune showered all her gifts round Aubrey Herbert's cradle except one: he was nearly blind. He was born in 1880, and his learned and much travelled father, the fourth Earl of Carnarvon, twice Colonial Secretary and a benevolent Viceroy of Ireland, doted on him and brought him up by hand; but he died when Aubrey was nine and the equally devoted Lady Carnarvon battled on alone. When he was 13, relations overcame her reluctance and he was sent to Eton, but with a private tutor. He was occasionally bullied and his topper was regularly bashed in: it was 'general oddity' that provoked this; but natural resilience and a saving comic gift foiled persecution. Letters home were intelligent and funny and there was sorrow when he left at 17; and now, sud- denly, the missing gift was made good. An operation by the last of a string of con- sulted experts changed his whole life. 'He could see distances, though indistinctly; he could shoot, and distinguish figures across a room, though not well enough to recognise them. He was no longer blind'. (Later on, Desmond Macarthy recorded his characteristic gesture of seizing a bottle by the neck and peering in like an admiral with a spyglass to see if anything were left).

It is a story of the greatest interest, with an extraordinary leading figure. The late Victorian, Edwardian and pre-war Georgian scene, the landed interest, country-house life, politics, cliques and feuds and the scores of participants are most skilfully brought in to play. It was a time when diaries and memoirs and par- ticularly letter-writing were brilliant and prolific, and as Margaret Fitzherbert is the protagonist's granddaughter, she had ac- cess to them all. Selection must have been an ordeal; and her use of the material is ad- mirably detached; being Evelyn Waugh's daughter as well, she may have been helped in her task by his triune discipline of clarity, euphony and concision. Clear-eyed percep- tion, firm grasp of the problems and the stresses and the humour, and a vigorous, uncluttered style make this book, which is her first, a dazzling achievement.

Groping lightheartedly through a penum- bra, then, tall, with an aristocratic cast of feature, an amusing and open expression, short untidy hair which was later speckled with white patches like an ocelot's, he was invariably worse dressed than a tramp. Absent-minded and alert he was at the same time an inveterate train-loser and, at Balliol, a roof-climber whose ascents defied gravity. He learned to delight in cham- pagne, spoke up for unpopular causes in the Union, reluctantly parted with 16 of his dogs of various breeds; and he was usually penniless from giving all his cash to whoever seemed in need. Urquart ('Sligger') thought highly of him, Belloc, out of fascination, coached him for nothing, Ray- mond Asquith was his closest friend; and verse proliferated. His efforts to enlist at the outbreak of the Boer War were frus- trated, to his fury; he was rusticated for in- discipline and his final sending down co- incided with a First in history. There were two country estates to fall back on — Pix- ton in the West Country was the favourite — and a large villa of Portland stone his father had ordered on his honeymoon, at Portofino.

His earliest venture into diplomacy, as an honorary attaché at Tokyo, left no deeper mark than an exotic bird tattoo on his arm; but the second, with the admirable Sir Nicholas O'Conor at Constantinople, was momentous. His passion for near-eastern affairs began with his engagement of a whiskered and kilted Albanian servant on the run for a tribal killing, and much of his time went in keeping him out of the soup; for Kiazim, half buffoon and half affec- tionate henchman, was closer to Leporello and Sancho Panza than to Jeeves. Oriental leanings were fostered by the glamour of the Levant and the rigours of deserts. It was a brand new Loti, Flecker and Doughty world involving far wanderings by sam- bouk, dhow, horse, camel and on foot. The Gulf, the Red Sea, Asia Minor, the Caucasus, the classic 700 miles from Baghdad to Damascus, stinking harbours, remote emirates, outposts in the wilderness peopled by the skeletons of dead Turks; antres vast and deserts idle. In these thousands of wandering miles countless abstruse place names are listed and the cry for a map goes up every few lines like the booming of a bittern.

He disliked the Turks at first and the cor- rupt and tyrannical regime of Abdul Hamid. He would have agreed with the Arab saying — 'Where the Ottoman hoof strikes, the grass never grows again' — and with the reflection, too, that Turkey had stunted eastern Europe for half a millenium. But these feelings changed. He knew the Turks were prone to massacres (the Armenian massacres, when they came,

filled him with horror), but his attitude t,e Turkey reminds one a little of Thurber; giant: 'everyone has their little failings, and, mine happens to be wickedness'. He ehe mired their courage and their faith to t',: given word, their stubborn dignity and the fine manners of the old Turks. AnYvvaY,,10 don't love people for their virtues and coeur a ses raisons. His position had a Ord of gallant perversity about it. He followe their plots and upheavals and was in toril attracted and repelled by the young Tut The Balkan Wars, when they came, seem a vicious banding together of underdog'', not nemesis long overdue. Saki's Puri** the Balkan Kings, at this juncture, was no for him. Not yet. Apart from all this, which covered.,: decade of wandering and soaking "s knowledge of places and people and languages, two western landmarks stall, out. In Florence he fell in love with rvieu Vesey, the daughter of Lady de Vesei',„as0 exquisite An to-Irish ornament of Lonuvo and a Soul. Mary herself 'was six foot tall severe and splendid beauty with flashed eyes and regal carriage, proud, clever Ow unconventional'. Poetry burst out ailed and the meeting ended in a marvellous aer, adoring partnership. Mary Herbert's are some of the most brilliant of the 0, Meanwhile, her first anxiety was persuadel; Aubrey to get a new suit before being takeat to meet her grandfather WemYss Gosford, a formidable buck born in 1),rs Victorian times whom turned up trolls'

reduced to speechless rage. for

The other landmark was standing his parliament, as a Conservative like all hj.:01 family. Raymond Asquith pleaded with 7i; je not to be led by 'a fluent and Plaehs„t's bounder' like F. E. Smith. His own fatil;s5 party was the only possible one— `131/2,01 you join Labour! The young aristocrat "^s, ideals and sympathies that carry hint 11, s sionately out of his class — a tribune 011 it people — Gracchus, Rienzi, TolstoY • as would explain your clothes too'. He ",,ch elected for Yeovil and his maiden sPe`:00 (on Turkey) was early, eloquent and received. (On a similar occasion a Pee Opt fellow MP observed something odd 8'1'4 the notes he held an inch from his nose, 11;0 no wonder; they were jotted do phonetically in Arabic script). , set It was his servant Kiazim who firs,' „o him on the Albanian track. He picket' „rt- the language as fast as a cold and took Ter in affrays with the Albanian bandit leti„e. Issa Boletin (who later used to sit in tong on tied colloquy with Mary Herbert in Brei,°he Street till Aubrey got back from the House); wandered among the Kossovarstici the Lost Sanjak, feasted with the beYs 9„'d pashas, hobnobbed with Mirdites a"d Ghegs and Tosks in remote canyons.,,all„a sheilings. (Though he was dressed in`h'aci tramp as usual, no doubt Kiazim, Who "-let cut a dash in the servants' hall at Pixtc'n't,ey the tribesmen know that he was a great v in Somerset.) He became devoted to thereand his love was returned. Shattered bY,!;.st, mangled state of the country after the Balkan War had been fought all over it, he look their cause up passionately in Parlia- ment and lobbied tirelessly behind the , ',encs, and it was mostly he who brought about Albania's emergence as an indepen- dent state. (Little they know of this today.) ,1-11,e had done the state some service and they knew it. strove Meanwhile, inside Albania, he to heal the endemic tribal discord. Would that there were space to follow him r r.ain glen to glen, to recapture the echo of acclamation at the Feast of the Seven Banners when the feu de joie knocked all [Ihe leaves off the trees. (One detects nchan's raw material beginning to take 'hope, and the emergence of Sandy Ar- buthnot). In May 1913, during the Balkan 2;nnference in London, the Albania Delega- ,ti„°nra a Moslems, Catholics and Orthodox -'13ached Aubrey with the formal offer tof the Crown of Albania. It was made wiee, and a third time after the war, and to trii°hoY else. For reasons of high interna- e.h, al Policy it went to his friend Prince "'Ilion of Wied, who held it for six ,x,tlionths. One can't help feeling that Aubrey

have done better, It must have been

off first time a private Englishman had been rered European throne since his ump- ieenth great-uncle Sir Philip Sidney had, it the been offered the crown of Poland in "e slimmer of 1574.

When war broke out in 1914 his eye- .

' sight ruled out all chance of his being eeePted for service. Not to be foiled

eagnin, he ordered a uniform with the right h,,oapv.ebreaddge and buttons and, on 12 August, otiarraeL._. on the kerb outside Wellington l„ Barracks When the Irish Guards marched 4)3, bound for overseas, he slipped into the tvilltrin and abetted by three officers Castle n's cousin Tom Vesey, with ecrosse, and Innes-Ker — was smuggl- s Into the train, then on to the troopship at Woau,,thrnPton; when they were safely under frj1 they took him to Colonel Morris, a thiend too, but not in the plot. He accepted see ,fait accompli and on the 23rd, beyond turnips Aubrey was charging over a field of singing and rising partridges with `bullets Valentine round us like a swarm of bees... anxious [Castlerosse] was so passionately ev.°Iis to get there, he discarded his erYthing and for days walked about with

naked sword as a walking stick' They

awrere outflanked by a wing of v. Kluck's atril. An unruly racehorse bought for £40

a elAteau carried Aubrey through the

wart eat from Mons. On 2 September a stand Ali'b Made at the wood of Villers-Cotteret. ninkr,eY was the Colonel's galloper and by debuttall there was hardly an officer not tht!d Or wounded. Aubrey himself was shot ,,_°11gh the stomach and came to in a Ger- e'",iinn field hospital beside two of his ac- Lord Unwisely,L d Castlerosse and Lord Or their Robin Innes-Ker had made use of Z_ titles hoping to impress the Germans, sld Aubrey had emphasised his importance loot.an MP. But when a French advance th.4ed like overrunning the position and these " Germans thought they ought to take

“ VIPs with them 'Aubrey said "I've only just been elected and have no in- fluence". "Mine's a very new creation, I am a nobody" said Castlerosse, while Innes-Ker earnestly explained "Mine's only a courtesy-title, I don't count at all" ', and they were left behind. Meanwhile, the Colonel was dead and all seventy guards- men who made the last charge.

Shifted to Cairo, he found himself with old friends, Mark Sykes and George Lloyd, also Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence. Disagreeing with Newcombe of the Arab Office, he was soon in the inferno of the Dardanelles, made still more distressing, in his case, by his feeling for the Turks. The only one speaking the language, he wooed them by megaphone to desert. Not one came over, perhaps to his joy. When the stench of the dead became beyond bearing he was allowed to organise a truce for burial and he was hailed as an old friend by Turks and Albanians as long as the truce lasted. His rescue under fire of a badly wounded soldier in no-man's-land would have got him the V.C. if the soldier had not been a Turk. He was invaluable as a mediator, later on, at the end of the horrible cam- paign of Kut-el-Amara (his book Mons- Anzac-Kui, little known now because it was anonymous, gives an astonishing picture of all these campaigns). Like Lawrence, he was utterly downcast at the impending carve-up of the Arab lands among the Western powers, foreshadowed by his old friend in the Sykes-Picot agree- ment, instead of the promised freedom. In Albania, meanwhile, Italian intrigue and in- ternal discord prevented him taking com- mand of 4,000 Albanian volunteers, as they wished; and towards the war's end his defence of Lansdowne's peace proposal before the whole world was wrecked turned him, for professional patriots, into a tem- porary villain with slander and poison to follow. In Constantinople, when it was all over, M.I. had his footsteps dogged, choos- ing his nephew Porchester as a tail, who of course blew the gaff. But it didn't last long. He was re-elected at the Khaki Election with a still bigger majority. Battling for his causes in the wings of the Peace Con- ference, he got Albania into the League of Nations, and toyed with their renewed of- fer. `But we want a king, not a League committee-man'. Mary Herbert was game; so was he. But there was internal trouble again, with Essad Pasha striving for a tribal Moslem nucleus in central Albania. Then Ahmed Zogu's wavering star began to rise.

As a rest from all this, there was the Tyrrhene sea, at Portofino, blue as a peacock's neck, and Pixton's feudal haven, where he could talk all night to Feisal and Lawrence and a galaxy of old friends. (He was told to retrench; but there were 40 names in the visitor's book for the last month of his life).

Then after the long reprieve, his sight suddenly vanished again. He lay in the dark at Pixton calmly dictating his early travels in Arabia, which came out with the title Ben Kendim — (`Myself Alone' in Turkish long overdue for reprinting). A Master of Balliol, it seems, told him that tooth- extraction was sovereign against impaired

sight. Pre-antibiotic blood-poisoning followed this havoc, then septicaemia, a rush to hospital and an operation, and on 25 September, 1923, at the age of 43, death. He left three remarkable daughters and a son, Auberon, born the year before, who turned out in many ways as unexpected and strange and quixotic as he, with Poles and Byelorussians instead of Albanians and Turks.

At the end of the war, Mary Herbert and Violet Asquith realised that they knew many more people who had been killed than people who were alive. Aubrey was a survivor from a galaxy of dead paragons and his lustre would shine still brighter to- day if all those bullets had not missed; if he had signed his books and his poems with his own name instead of a Turkish pseudonym; and if Mary, half-eagle and half Hiawatha and surviving him till a few years ago, had not thought publication showy. We must be glad that his heirs rescinded this verdict. What was it that won all hearts and bound everybody who knew him with such a lasting garland? From London's most gifted and brilliant to all that was wildest from the Yemen mountains to the Acroceraunian? A review can't hope to capture it, but a book can, and this one does, hands down.