Garden path to war – An Irishman’s Diary about Robert Armstrong

Born in a place called Newbliss, and by vocation a gardener, Robert Armstrong might have seemed fated for an easy life. The reality, alas, to be anything but. He had the melancholic distinction, by the end, of having been badly wounded in one world war and then dying as a prisoner in another. But most of that life was along a path he chose himself. And even its ultimate destination was to some extent foreshadowed. Between the wars, his profession had led him to work in the military cemeteries of France. Now his memorial is among the ones he long and lovingly tended.

Armstrong's extraordinary story gets a full chapter in Ronan McGreevy's new book, Wherever the Firing Line Extends: Ireland and the Western Front, and well deserves the tribute.

It began in the aforementioned Monaghan village in 1894, where his father James was an estate manager. Thereafter, James’s itinerant lifestyle took the family around Ireland, until they settled in Longford, on another estate, soon notorious, that of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson.

That the Armstrongs were an unusual family is illustrated by one incident there. As Protestants, working for a militant unionist, they might have been presumed loyal to the crown. That’s certainly what the Black and Tans thought one day when they came looking for Seán MacEoin, the local IRA leader, and were easily persuaded to move on. But they should have looked harder, because James Armstrong was indeed sheltering him at the time. And although Robert’s British army service completed the cover story, it was said by family members that, at home after the war, he too sometimes helped MacEoin. Defiance of authority was in his DNA. As one family member put it, he was a “natural rebel”.

Even so, and despite the shelling that had ended his soldiering in 1917, Robert Armstrong was a perfect fit for a job with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission as, during the 1920s and 1930s, it went about the task of honouring the conflict’s countless dead. So it was that he helped create and maintain some of those bleakly beautiful cemeteries of northern France, with their identical white headstones. And he was still doing this, as head gardener in Valenciennes, when another war began, adding new graves to the collection.

Not for the first time, Armstrong was in an ambivalent position. He could have gone home. Had he been British, he would have had little choice. But being officially neutral, he stayed in France – happily tolerated at first by the Germans, although himself not made for diplomacy. In practice, he was no neutral. Soon, as well as tending the new war’s dead (Valenciennes was beneath the flight paths of many doomed British airmen), he was looking after the living, helping shot-down pilots escape capture.

It was an incident in a cemetery, however, that sealed his destiny. On Remembrance Day 1943, he saw a German soldier kick away flowers from Allied graves. Furious, he attacked the man and was arrested. Upon release he wisely fled for a while, but less wisely returned, was identified as a Resistance member and, in May 1944, sentenced to death.

At this point in his story, an old friend from Ireland intervened. Post-independence, Seán MacEoin had become a politician. As the family’s TD, he made representations. Whether they helped or not, Armstrong’s sentence was commuted to imprisonment.

With the Normandy landings, his prospects of freedom must have looked good. Events decided otherwise. During his remaining few months, he was moved from one prison camp to another, to stay ahead of the invasion. He was beaten and starved, while forced to work.

When he died, in December 1944, the Germans blamed TB. But noting that his physique (once likened to the boxer Jack Doyle’s) had been reduced to “a mere skeleton”, with “multiple leg wounds”, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission considered treating his death as a war crime. Instead, it was at least treated as a military event. Under the commission’s rules, only soldiers killed in action are commemorated in war cemeteries. An exception was easily made in his case.

As McGreevy writes, Armstrong could have “seen out the war tending to his shrubs, trees and flowers on some English country estate”. Instead, “at every turn [...] this proud, stubborn and courageous man had chosen a path which led to his premature death”. So in 1948, a plaque was unveiled in his honour at Valenciennes. It looked down on a border of red roses he had planted himself and beside them, in memory of his country, a bunch of shamrock.