“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] 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.”