One
Return to Ballymoyer
Swift and faithful
· Hart family armorial motto,
Celer atque fidelis, granted
1883 ·
When Captain Arthur
Hart-Synnot came back to Ireland on a bright summer morning in July 1906,
and walked down the gangplank of the overnight boat from Holyhead, he had
not seen his father for two and a half years. The major general had received
his telegram and was there to meet his eldest son and accompany him on the
train for the last stage of his five-thousand-mile journey back from the Far
East. A family of soldiers who had spent years in India and the farthest
outposts of the British Empire, the Hart-Synnots were accustomed to the long
sea journeys, extended personal separations, and occasional periods of great
loneliness that military service required of them. As the train steamed
close to the shore, passing the oyster beds along the ten-mile fjord that
cut deep into the coast and divided County Down from Louth, and the sun
caught the wooded slopes of the Mourne Mountains on the other side of the
water, they began to catch up on family news.
At Newry Station the
coachman was waiting with the old black landau. Once the luggage was
transferred, the captain and the general were driven up the narrow country
road, past the low stone walls and scrubby hedges that divided the small
fields of South Armagh, gradually gaining height on the two-hour journey to
Ballymoyer. When they reached the lodge and turned into the gates, a crowd
of estate workers and staff from the house were waiting for them, with a
banner strung across the drive welcoming Captain Hart-Synnot home.
Arthur knew many of the
faces from his childhood, and some had served under his father in the Irish
Brigade in South Africa. They cheered and waved, grabbed the shafts beside
the two horses, pushed the carriage from behind, and helped turn the wheels
up the long gravel avenue that ran through the parkland towards the house.
This was not a family used to displays of affection in public, but Arthur
stepped down and embraced his mother and his sisters on the porch. A brass
band played, and a little later the family and guests sat down to a noisy
lunch with many toasts. The captain made a speech in which he said how happy
he was to be back home with friends and family.
Only four years before,
his father had been given a similar hero's return when he came back to
Ballymoyer from the Boer War. Since then he had retired from the army and
devoted his energies to the estate that his wife, Mary, had inherited, and
which he had known since their marriage. With seven thousand acres of low
hills, moorland, and small tenant farms, seventy miles north of Dublin, the
property was one of the largest in the county of Armagh. The Synnots had
made their money in the linen trade and mining and, unlike many other Irish
landowners, had always been resident landlords. General Hart added his
wife's surname to his own to become General Hart-Synnot, confirming his
place among the Anglo-Irish gentry. The general was eager to show Arthur the
improvements he had begun to make on the estate demesne, the home farm that
was not rented out to tenants, knowing his son shared the same love for the
place he would one day inherit.
The original stone manor
had been built in the eighteenth century in a gentle valley at a point where
three brooks, after racing down from their own glens, reached flatter land
and joined together to continue as one fast-running trout stream. In the
early nineteenth century a more imposing house in the classical style, with
a stucco façade of three stories and a colonnaded porch, had been added onto
the earlier, rougher building, and the two were linked with creaking
corridors and staircases. The library, the smaller bedrooms, and the
servants' hall were in the old section at the back, but the principal
bedrooms, drawing room, and dining room were in the grander addition,
looking across the lawns and parkland to stands of beech on the hillside.
Over the years the gardens had been landscaped and replanted, and the
streams channeled and directed over weirs, but the sound of rushing water
could still be heard all round the house, and gave a calming, almost drowsy
background noise. For Arthur's return, both parts of the house were full,
with relatives who had come to greet him and would stay until the following
day. The celebrations did not end till after dinner, when the general
directed a fireworks display on the lawn. That night Arthur must have
wondered how he was going to tell his family what had happened to his
personal and emotional life on the other side of the world, and how he
wanted nothing more than to put Ireland behind him as fast as possible and
get back to Tokyo.
Two and a half years
earlier, before he left for the East, Arthur had known almost nothing about
Japan, and his ambitions were centered on the army. The military connection
was hard to ignore at Ballymoyer. Portraits of mustachioed ancestors in full
uniform were hung all over the house, along with their swords and honors.
Military biographies and campaign histories filled the library shelves.
Arthur's grandfather General Henry Hart had edited
Hart's Army List, the annual
compendium setting out names, rankings, and organization that was
indispensable to army messes and clubs around the British Empire. His father
was a major general who had fought Ashanti tribesmen in West Africa, the
Zulus in Natal, the Egyptians at Tel el Kebir, and a whole range of
recalcitrant natives in India and Afghanistan. His father's brother Reginald
was another major general, the better known because while still a young
officer he had won the Victoria Cross, for crawling up a dry ravine in
Afghanistan to rescue a wounded soldier, under withering fire from Afridi
tribesmen shooting at him from behind rocks. Uncle Reginald's book,
Reflections on the Art of War,
laying out his forthright approach to "push-on" soldiering, was an
inspiration to young officers. His father's other brother, Uncle Horatio,
was a colonel with the Royal Engineers. In 1883, the three Hart brothers had
jointly revived a coat of arms once used in the family, with a stag's head
and rampant antlers over the motto "Celer
atque fidelis," meaning "Swift and faithful."
The soldiering tradition
conditioned Arthur's outlook and made him the sort of man he was. No one
ever thought he would do anything else but become an officer. Family custom
put him into the army, and family connections assisted his career through
it. When Arthur left Sandhurst in 1890, he went out to India as a subaltern.
He joined the 1st Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment at DumDum, near
Calcutta, where his father was the colonel, and saw his first fighting in
the mountains along the India-Afghanistan border, on a march to relieve a
British force besieged by Pathan tribesmen in Chitral. When his Uncle
Reginald, also serving in India, was sent to quell yet another rising by the
Afridis around the Khyber Pass, he asked to have his nephew attached to the
expedition.
After eight years in
India, Arthur returned to England to go to Staff College, coached for the
examination by his father. By this time his younger brother Ronald had, in
his turn, just joined the East Surrey Regiment, and his father had come home
to be a general. The British Empire was at its apogee. When Queen Victoria
came to review her troops on the Aldershot parade ground in the summer of
1899, General Fitzroy Hart was able to ride past his sovereign at the head
of his brigade, in plumed helmet, immaculate uniform, and highly polished
boots, on a magnificent seventeen-hand Waler horse that belonged to Arthur,
with his two sons jogging along beside him as members of his staff. At
moments like this, when the pomp was at its most splendid and the military
bands at their most stirring, it was not surprising that British rule over
much of the world seemed so natural, or that families like the Harts could
derive so much of their identity from it. A few months later, when that
mastery came under challenge in southern Africa, and the Boer War broke out,
professional soldiers like the Harts welcomed the chance for some sustained
action against a more challenging enemy than the primitive tribesmen they
usually found themselves up against. The war could bring honors and
promotion. Arthur, his brother Ronald, his father, Fitzroy, and the
seventeen-hand Waler all sailed for Cape Town in 1899 as part of the first
Expeditionary Force, impatient to get there lest the fighting end too
quickly. The only regret in the family was that Uncle Reginald, now in
India, could not be released to come along, too.
Published by the Penguin
Group; May 2007;$16.00US; 978-0-14-311214-3
Copyright © 2007 Peter Pagnamenta and Momoko Williams
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