Читать книгу King Edward VIII - Philip Ziegler - Страница 9

THAT IN 1914 THE YOUTH OF BRITAIN WENT EXULTANTLY to war is one of the stranger features of that agonizing conflict. The Prince of Wales had even less reason than most to share in this exultation. For one thing, many of his close relations, whom he had grown to know and like over the past few years, were now numbered among the enemy. For another, his position as heir to the throne set him apart from his contemporaries: they set off with armour shining to defeat the Huns and be home by Christmas, he knew that his armour was likely to be more ornamental than useful and that he had only a slim chance of wearing it in battle. Yet when he heard that he was to join the Army in France, he wrote to Sir George Arthur of this ‘wonderful and joyous surprise’. Twenty-five years later he was shown this letter and commented how terrifying he found it, coming as it did from an average boy of twenty. He had conceived war almost as a holiday, ‘a glorious adventure’. ‘How disillusioned we all were at the end of it,’ he commented ruefully. ‘One wonders if the generation of that age today feel as we did, or are they conscious of the appalling consequences of another World war and its futility? No! far worse than that how it would utterly destroy civilization.’¹

The run-up to war found the Prince incredulous and baffled. The murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo embroiled first Austria and Serbia, then Germany and Russia, finally France and Britain. The Prince was inclined to believe that Russia and Germany were behaving reasonably and that Austria was the prime offender, but admitted, ‘I must stop talking all this rot, for I know nothing about it.’² As war between France and Germany became inevitable, his chief fear was lest the government should stay neutral. ‘That will be the end of us; we shall never be trusted by any power again.’³ The decision to stand by our allies came as a great relief but ‘Oh!! God; the whole thing is too big to comprehend!! Oh!! That I had a job.’⁴ That last expostulation was to be his constant refrain for the next four years. He went on to the balcony with his parents at Buckingham Palace to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd. The King wrote in his diary that night that he prayed to God he would protect dear Bertie’s life.⁵ It never occurred to him that his eldest son might be exposed to danger. How could he be? He was the Prince of Wales.

The Prince poured out his woes to his closest confidant, his brother Bertie:

Well, this is just about the mightiest calamity that has ever or will ever befall mankind … To think that but 17 days ago we were together with everything working peacefully in Europe, and now we are at the commencement of a most hideous and appalling war, the duration or issue of which are impossible to predict … ‘England at war with Germany!!’ that seems a sentence which would appear nowhere but in a mad novel.

The Germans could never have chosen a worse moment, and serve them right too if they are absolutely crushed, as I can but think they will be. The way they have behaved will go down to history as about the worst and most infamous action of any govt!! Don’t you agree? I bet you do.

I am as good as heartbroken to think I am totally devoid of any job whatsoever and have not the faintest chance of being able to serve my country. I have to stay at home with the women and children, a passenger of the worst description!! Here I am in this bloody gt palace, doing absolutely nothing but attend meals … Surely a man of 20 has higher things to hope for? But I haven’t apparently! Oh God it is becoming unbearable to live this usual life of ease and comfort at home, when you my dear old boy, and all naval and army officers, are toiling under unpleasant conditions, suffering hardships and running gt risks with your lives, for the defence and honour of England … At such a time you will picture me here, depressed and miserable and taking no more part in this huge undertaking than Harry and George, 2 irresponsible kids who run about playing inane games in the passage. However, enough about my rotten self, for I am a most bum specimen of humanity, and so must not be considered.⁶

The self-disparagement in the last sentence is a constant feature of his letters and his diary; consciously overstated, yet nonetheless sincere. He knew that it was not his fault that he was not among the first of the volunteers to fight for King and country, but he still condemned himself for being left behind. In fact his period of misery hanging around ‘this awful palace where I have had the worst weeks of my life’⁷ was quickly over. On 6 August 1914, only the day after he had written in such anguish to his brother, he asked for and was given a commission in the Grenadier Guards. He was only 5 feet 7 inches tall instead of the regulation 6 feet, but recorded in triumph: ‘I am to go to the King’s Company but shall be treated just like an ordinary officer, thank goodness, and am to share a room in barracks.’⁸ In fact his treatment for the first fortnight was far worse than the ordinary officer, let alone the ordinary Guards officer, would have expected while serving at home. The 1st Battalion was training at Warley Barracks in Brentwood. The officers’ mess was a ‘filthy hole’, the rooms were garrets, there was no furniture and no carpet. ‘But what does one care when living under war conditions? I am so glad to have joined up and to have escaped from the palace!!’⁹

When the battalion moved back to London his euphoric mood persisted. He established that he was the first Prince of Wales ever to carry the colours on the King’s Guard at Buckingham Palace, and accepted with relish what in peacetime he would have dismissed as a piece of pompous ritual, as well as positively welcoming the long, boring route marches from Wellington Barracks through Kensington and Fulham returning down the King’s Road. ‘It is pretty rotten in London,’ he told Godfrey Thomas, ‘and we can’t do any training. But anyhow we are on the spot and feel that this is a stepping stone to getting out!! How we long for it.’¹⁰ He deluded himself that he would continue to be treated ‘just like an ordinary officer’ and would soon go to France and the front with his fellow officers. His delusion was quickly dispelled. On 8 September, a week before the 1st Battalion sailed, his father told him that he would not accompany it. Instead he would join the 3rd Battalion and remain in London. ‘This is a bitter disappointment,’ he wrote in his diary.¹¹ When the time came for him to watch the battalion march off from the barracks, his bitterness was still greater. ‘I am a broken man,’ he told his friend Jack Lawrence. ‘It is terrible being left behind!!’¹²

His closest friend in the Grenadiers, Lord Desmond Fitzgerald – one of the very few contemporaries who was invited to call him ‘Eddie’ – wrote to console him and tell him how much he had admired ‘the way you have borne your disappointment … However, it is not the fact of going to war, when thousands are doing so, that needs bravery; but to cheerfully accept the unpleasant things of life needs the greatest strength of character. And thus you have been able to set a wonderful example of how to do one’s duty.’¹³ The Prince was unconvinced. In public he put a good face on it, but his misery was too acute to conceal from his friends. Indeed, he was anxious to advertise it; he would have been less than human if he had not wanted everyone to know that he was eager to share the dangers of war and stayed behind against his will. How real those dangers were became rapidly apparent; by 2 November only six officers of his beloved 1st Battalion remained unwounded.

He appealed to the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, and called on him with his father’s assistant private secretary, Clive Wigram. ‘He is now a gt fat bloated man,’ he wrote vengefully in his diary, who put forward what seemed to the Prince most unconvincing reasons for refusing him leave to return to the 1st Battalion, but held out vague hopes of his joining the staff of the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir John French, in a few months when the line had been stabilized. ‘A pretty rotten contrast to my gt wish,’ commented the Prince, adding grudgingly: ‘He is a rough customer but mighty strong, and is just the man to boss these politicians at such a time!!’¹⁴ The King told Esher that his son had argued that he was expendable; if he were killed there were four brothers to take his place. ‘What if you were not killed, but taken prisoner?’ Kitchener asked drily.¹⁵

While eating his heart out in London with the 3rd Battalion of the Grenadiers – ‘strictly entre nous,’ he told Lady Glenusk, ‘there are not many really nice people in the 3rd Batt … The junior ensigns are a poor lot!!’¹⁶ – he made himself useful in other ways. Shortly before the outbreak of war he had become President of a National Fund for providing food for the poor, and had published an appeal in the daily papers. A quarter of a million pounds came in on the first day and within a week the total was more than £1 million. Most of the work was done by a Liberal member of parliament, Ernest Benn – future Lord Stansgate – whom the Prince judged ‘a nice, capable little man’.¹⁷ Public relations were entrusted to a Mr Pearson, who wanted the Prince to be painted by the military artist Caton Woodville at the head of his regiment, and the resultant poster to be exhibited on every available hoarding. This idea was quashed (as also was a still more eccentric suggestion that a certain celebrated music hall artist should be drawn in a cart to Trafalgar Square where he would delight the populace by playing patriotic airs on a piano with his nose).¹⁸ The King approved the principle of the Fund, but insisted that whatever publicity there was should stress that his son had nothing to do with its administration. Otherwise he foresaw the disgruntled poor blaming the Prince if their applications for relief were rejected.¹⁹ The Prince took the point and fully shared his father’s apprehension. All his life he disliked the role of patron, lending his name to some enterprise over which he had no real control. At the end of 1915 he became Chairman of the Statutory Committee of the Patriotic Fund, a body set up to concern itself with the care of sailors and soldiers who had suffered during the war. ‘Its work will, alas!, be carried into long years to come …’ explained Lord Stamfordham. ‘It will indeed be a vast machine of National Relief.’²⁰ Few projects could have appealed more strongly to the Prince, but after the inaugural meeting he still wrote gloomily: ‘It’s such a rotten show for me; just a mere figurehead with the name of P of Wales as usual!!’²¹

Major Cadogan had rejoined his regiment when war broke out, and to help him with the Fund and his other duties the Prince persuaded Godfrey Thomas to take time off from the Foreign Office and join him as part-time equerry. His chief function, in Stamfordham’s eyes at any rate, was to persuade his master to eat more and take less exercise. Thomas tried dutifully but soon admitted defeat. He won the King’s confidence, however, and was held to be a healthy influence on his employer. Towards the end of 1914 he spent a weekend with the royal family at York Cottage. After dinner everyone sat around while the King, in big tortoiseshell spectacles, read extracts from the newspapers, ‘generally adding explosive comments about the Germans’. When the Queen and Princess Mary had gone to bed, the party adjourned to the billiard room, where the Prince of Wales and Prince Albert played while the King read his telegrams. Next day they went for a long walk. On the way back they met the epileptic Prince John and his nurse. ‘The Prince of Wales took him for a run in a kind of push-cart he had, and they both disappeared from view.’²²

The Prince’s initial distaste for the idea of a job on French’s staff lessened as other possibilities faded, and when the King finally told him the time had come he was ecstatic: ‘This seems almost too good to be true, for once across the Channel lots of things are possible.’²³ Stamfordham told French that the King wanted his son ‘to gain practical experience of the vast machinery employed in the conduct of a Campaign’. He was to be attached to the various sections of the headquarters and to attend talks with the Chief of Staff – ‘You will find him an attentive, silent listener, absolutely reticent and discreet.’²⁴ This was not at all how the Prince saw his future, and Thomas observed that he was in a notably bad temper when he had to put aside his normal regimental kit and don the staff uniform with red tabs and cap to match;²⁵ but he comforted himself with the thought that once in France it would surely be possible to get to the front. The most serious danger seemed to be that the fighting would be over before he could be in the thick of it. His comments on the progress of the war were resolutely optimistic. ‘Those bloody Germans are fairly getting it in the neck and no mistake,’ he told Jack Lawrence on 20 August,²⁶ and a month later assured his aunt Alice: ‘It really looks as if the allies were getting a proper grip of the situation and that the German downfall has commenced.’²⁷

With the declaration of war the Germans had become unequivocally ‘bloody’, guilty of ‘savage barbarism’²⁸ and ‘infamous conduct’; ‘As for the Emperor’s conduct, words fail me!!’²⁹ When words did fail him, he filled the gap with obscenities. Writing after gas had just been used he told his friend Houston-Boswell: ‘One can’t be surprised at anything those German buggers do. One really can’t believe we are fighting European christians … I am a great advocate of the principle of taking no prisoners or as few as possible!!’³⁰ Godfrey Thomas commented on the Prince’s propensity at this time to use bad language and tell filthy stories: ‘It is a phase that most people go through at their public school and I hope that it has merely come a bit late in his case and that he’ll soon get out of it.’³¹ He did, but in the years that followed his escape from the Palace he felt bound to emphasize his independence by larding his diary and letters to his contemporaries with the more conventional expletives.^*3

The Prince’s arrival in France, General Lambton told the King, had given universal pleasure: ‘I will try to keep him well occupied and as far from shells as possible.’³² In this sentence were encapsulated the Prince’s two principal causes for woe over the next eighteen months – indeed, for the duration of the war; he was kept far from shells, he was not well occupied. The latter was not the fault of French or Lambton. A stray and untrained second lieutenant in supreme headquarters will inevitably be at a loose end and overworked senior officers cannot always be inventing tasks for him. If he had not been the Prince of Wales he might have been of modest use at the most menial level; if he had possessed a forceful personality and administrative skills he might have worked himself into a position unjustified by his rank; but he was the Prince, he was far from forceful, his skills were limited. ‘It’s a pretty rotten life for me,’ he complained to Thomas. ‘I feel I’m the only man out here without a job, and it’s true; thus I am but an onlooker in uniform, and become less like an officer every day.’³³ To have been an orthodox ADC to French would at least have involved regular duties, but the King felt it was improper for the Prince of Wales to act in such a role.³⁴ Instead he was in attendance but with no real function: ‘I merely sloped along astern, looking a bloody fool and very much in the way.’³⁵

Occasionally he was given some proper work to do. Once he was allowed to use his German in the interrogation of prisoners. The peasants were the most ready to talk, and, even if taciturn originally, could usually be persuaded to tell all they knew by a show of amazement at their ignorance. The more educated prisoners he found ‘all lie, and one can’t blame them’. In such a case the approved technique was to give the prisoner a good meal with plenty of wine. This loosened his tongue. ‘Rather a beastly idea, perhaps, but still it is necessary.’³⁶ He hoped that similar work would follow, but it never did. When, very occasionally, he found himself doing something useful, his gratification was obvious. In March 1915 he reconnoitred the defences around Le Quesnoy. ‘The work is really rather responsible,’ he told his father proudly, ‘as it is v. necessary that the staff should have detailed information …’³⁷

Stamfordham urged him not to admit to the King that he was bored and under-employed lest he found himself called back to England. ‘You are so terribly keen and full of “go” that you wish always to be doing something …’³⁸ More cheeringly, Desmond Fitzgerald insisted that he was always doing something: ‘You have little idea what an enormous amount of good you do and how much everyone admires and loves you.’³⁹ But it was not the sort of love and admiration the Prince wanted. Shortly after his arrival he was made to inspect some Indian troops. He accepted that his visit had done wonders for their morale but, ‘I hated this, as I haven’t come out for that sort of thing.’⁴⁰ French was restrained in his use of the Prince as popular figurehead, but he knew well that ‘that sort of thing’ was what the Army wanted.

Hospital visiting was another valuable service. ‘It pleases the men and shows you take a sympathetic interest in their welfare,’ George V told his son.⁴¹ The sympathy was real, and though the Prince felt he should be playing a more valiant role, the warmth and generosity of his nature ensured that the memory of his visits was cherished by all those who experienced them. There is a story, often recounted, of the occasion when the Prince noticed that one patient had been segregated behind curtains. He asked why, and was told that the man had been so fearfully mutilated that it was thought better to keep him out of the way. The Prince insisted on seeing him, stood by his bed, then leant over and kissed him. Lady Donaldson in her admirable biography, properly sceptical of such picturesque but unsubstantiated anecdotes, dismissed it as apocryphal.⁴² It does sound too good to be true. But many years later Gordon Selwyn, the chaplain of the hospital and later Dean of Winchester, told Shane Leslie how well he recalled the scene. ‘Remember,’ the Dean said, ‘men have gone to heaven for less. Never can we forget that action.’⁴³

Keeping on good terms with the French was another way the Prince could help significantly. He was frequently despatched on liaison visits to French headquarters. The reports which he drafted on his return were of slight value. The cavalry were ‘not bad riders … but they are about the worst horse masters in the world!!’; the officers were markedly inferior to their British counterparts: ‘They are brave enough and some of them very capable, but they don’t possess that personality or refineness [sic] which the British officer does, giving the latter complete control over his men, who will generally respect him and follow him anywhere!! How can this ideal state of affairs be reached when frequently the officer is of much lower birth than some of his men?’ In spite of this, he concluded in some surprise, ‘discipline in the French army is good one would say’.⁴⁴ But what mattered was not his somewhat jejune judgment of the French Army but the impression he left behind him. ‘I only hope I did some good,’ the Prince wrote to his father … ‘I went out of my way to be civil and always called on any general or senior officer at any place I passed.’⁴⁵ Staunch republicans usually make the most fervent royalists and the French military warmed to their shy, friendly and unassuming visitor. ‘Il a su ravir tout le monde par sa simplicité, sa bonne grace et sa belle jeunesse,’ wrote General Huguet. ‘Il sait par ses charmantes qualités gagner les coeurs autour de lui.’⁴⁶ Huguet was an anglophile; more remarkable was the notoriously rebarbative and anti-British general who, after a visit by the Prince, admitted reluctantly: ‘Il parait que parmi vous autres, il y a quand même des gens civilisés.’⁴⁷

But this was not why he had come to France. Endlessly he reproached himself for the comfort and ease of his existence, compared with the rigours of ‘the poor people in the trenches. I fear this is going to be a very soft life.’⁴⁸ His initial impression of Sir John French was good – ‘he seems a charming man, so human’ – but he could not say as much for the rest of the staff; ‘a d—d uninteresting crowd and no mistake’.⁴⁹ In a less atrabilious mood he would admit that it was not so much that the staff were boring as that they were twenty years older than him. At GHQ a colonel was small fry; young men of twenty were unheard of. Osbert Sitwell, who sometimes found himself similarly out of place at large gatherings of dignitaries, remembered ‘the very young, slight figure of the Prince of Wales … with his extreme charm, his melancholy smile and angry eyes, trying like myself, I expect, to pretend he was enjoying himself’.⁵⁰ The Prince was lonely, and the loneliness was only exacerbated by the constant presence of the officer charged with his day-to-day wellbeing, the middle-aged and portly Colonel Barry. Only when Barry was joined in January 1915 by a young Grenadier captain, Lord Claud Hamilton, was the Prince’s desolation mitigated: ‘He is such a good chap and has done very well in the 1st batt and got a DSO. It is very nice for me having him here.’⁵¹

The sharpest pain lay in the knowledge that his contemporaries, in particular in the Grenadiers, were dying in their tens of thousands while he sat safely behind the line. Thirty-five Grenadier officers were killed in the fighting at Neuve Chapelle in March 1915: ‘Isn’t it too ghastly to think of …’ he wrote to his closest confidante, Lady Coke. ‘But of course I never went near the fighting; kept right away as usual!!’⁵² Godfrey Thomas got the same complaint: ‘I do hate being a prince and not allowed to fight!!’⁵³ On his birthday Desmond Fitzgerald said that he could not think of any suitable present: ‘The only thing I know of that you would really like, I cannot give you, and that is that you would become an ordinary person.’⁵⁴

He strove endlessly to get permission to join his regiment, or to serve even for a few days in the front line. Briefly he was posted to General Charles Monro’s divisional headquarters near Bethune, only to be moved back promptly when an attack was imminent. But he did win at least half his point. In February 1915 the King agreed that he might visit the trenches ‘provided that you are with responsible people … I want you to do exactly what other young officers on the Staff do, but not to run unnecessary risks, no “joy-rides” or looking for adventure … I want you to gain an insight into the life they lead in the trenches. I hope now your mind will be at rest and that you will not be depressed any more. You can do anything within reason except actually fighting in the trenches.’⁵⁵ It was something, a great deal indeed, but opportunities for a young officer at GHQ to approach the front line were still few and far between. There are plenty of accounts which describe his hair-breadth ’scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach. The future Lord Lee wrote that ‘his main desire appeared to be to get either killed or wounded. At intervals he had to be retrieved from advanced trenches and dugouts, whither he had escaped by one subterfuge or another.’⁵⁶ A fellow officer described him complaining he had never seen a shell burst within a hundred yards of him. Claud Hamilton remarked that one had burst nearer than that. ‘Yes, but dash it, I never saw it!’ exclaimed the Prince.⁵⁷ ‘He loved danger,’ said the Rev. Tubby Clayton.⁵⁸

Clayton’s comment, at least, is nonsense. The Prince never courted danger, still less loved it. He found shelling terrifying and freely admitted as much. General Sir Ian Hamilton denied that he ever flouted his instructions or took unnecessary risks. ‘He did take risks, but they were always in the line of duty. We did worry about him … but not because of any insubordination on his part.’⁵⁹ Whenever he left the trenches to return to headquarters, he did so with relief. But he did so with shame as well. The ferocious battering to which he subjected his body, with a regime of endless walks and runs, a minimum of food and sleep, must have been in part a mortification of the flesh to assuage this conviction of his inadequacy. If he had been able to change places with a subaltern in the most exposed part of the line he would have done so with alacrity, though also with dismay and trepidation. The moans that fill his diary and letters to his friends about his unlucky lot are wearisome to read and seem sometimes overdone. Their constant refrain, however, was that he was being denied the chance to do as his friends and contemporaries were doing and risk his life for his country. He never stopped trying and it is impossible not to feel respect for his efforts.

His brief sojourn with Monro and the 2nd Division at Bethune included a visit to the Guards Brigade – ‘The best day I have had since I’ve been out, for it was a real treat to be with my brother officers and away from the staff.’ The treat was cut short when Monro decided he was too close to the line and sent him back: ‘It did bring it home to me how wretched it is to be the Prince of Wales!! I almost broke down.’⁶⁰ Shortly after his father’s new dispensation, he got within a hundred yards of the German lines, but heard only a few snipers’ shots. Then, at Givenchy in March 1915, he came under shellfire for the first time and saw the aftermath of a fierce battle: ‘It was a marvellous 2 hrs for me; in my wildest dreams I never thought I sh’d see so much. There are masses of corpses in the open swampy space; a terrible sight.’⁶¹ His excitement was tempered by the horror of the battle. Six officers of the 1st Battalion of the Grenadier Guards were killed in a single day and he felt only relief when a halt was called: ‘The operations of the last two days have seemed madness to me. Just sheer murder to attack now.’⁶² For him it was back to GHQ. ‘I am in the depths of depression, realizing at last that there is no job I can take on out here, so am really the only man who has nothing to do, or anything to work for.’⁶³

He was inevitably a prime exhibit for visitors to GHQ. Churchill was one of the more regular. Like most immature young men of twenty, the Prince tended to take his opinions from those around him. Regular Army officers viewed Churchill with mingled distrust and distaste. The Prince followed suit. His initially mild complaints at the frequency of Churchill’s visits when he had ‘other and more important work to perform’⁶⁴ became more splenetic and the Minister was categorized as an ‘interfering politician’, bothering the overworked naval and military authorities.⁶⁵ By the time the First Lord resigned in 1915 he had become an ‘intriguing swine’;⁶⁶ ‘Thank God both Winston and Fisher have gone;’ he exclaimed to Godfrey Thomas, ‘the former is nothing short of a national danger.’⁶⁷ On the whole he thought it a good thing that politicians should come out to France ‘to see a few realities’,⁶⁸ but the visits renewed his sense of grievance: ‘Mr Bonar Law arrived last night … and of course went out today with the express purpose of visiting a trench; he will have seen more of the actual fighting than I have in three months!!’⁶⁹

In May 1915 his ceaseless efforts to get closer to the front met with some success when he was transferred to the HQ of 1st Army Corps, to whose command Sir Charles Monro had been promoted. It was still staff work but, at least, he told Thomas, ‘now I am out a gt deal and never get into a car if I can possibly help it, doing all my work riding, biking or on foot. That keeps me fairly fit …’⁷⁰ The luxury was less oppressive than at GHQ: ‘No tap, no pump, the only source of [water] is from a v. deep open well and it takes 3 mins to draw a small tub!!’⁷¹ Best of all, the work was more satisfying. He was now on the administrative side, concerned mainly with the supply of ammunition. ‘I like this so much better than on the Intelligence branch where I was before as one is dealing with facts and not theories; I’m not a theorist and what I am doing now interests me.’⁷² His new job made him particularly resentful of the shortage of ammunition and other resources caused by the Dardanelles campaign. ‘It makes me sick to think of 10 ruddy DIVS killing old Turks instead of Boches!!’ he told Thomas. ‘That won’t help us.’ The campaign had been a mistake, he told the Marquis de Breteuil, though he reluctantly accepted that ‘une fois commencée, il faut la finir, et vaincre les Turcs.’⁷³

Oliver Lyttelton met the Prince at 1st Army Corps HQ. ‘He was,’ wrote Lyttelton, ‘the most charming and delightful being that I had ever known.’ The two men were invited by Desmond Fitzgerald to dine with the Irish Guards about four miles away. Lyttelton was relieved at the thought that the Prince’s car would be available but instead found he was expected to bicycle. Worse still: ‘“I never get off,” said HRH, as we faced a mile or two of hilly road. “It is one of the ways that I keep fit.” I was in good training, but after a mile I had sweated through my Sam Browne belt and had begun to entertain some republican inclinations. However, we had a gay and delightful evening: the Prince was happy and in the highest spirits; we replaced our lost tissue with some old brandy, and free-wheeled home to our cage like school-boys.’⁷⁴ ‘The prince eats little and walks much,’ Lyttelton told his mother. ‘We eat much and walk little.’⁷⁵

On 23 June 1915 the Prince of Wales came of age. The two trustees of his minority, Lord Balfour of Burleigh and Lord Revel-stoke, retired; so also did the Treasurer of the Duchy of Cornwall, Walter Peacock. Sydney Greville was appointed Treasurer and the Prince’s Comptroller. But no festivities marked what would normally have been an occasion for fastuous celebration. ‘It was a sad and depressing occasion,’ the Prince told Lady Coke, ‘with this ghastly war on and so many of one’s best friends killed. In fact I did my utmost to forget it altogether.’⁷⁶ His gloom was alleviated but far from dispelled by his new posting. He had barely arrived at Monro’s HQ before the 1st Army attacked and was repelled. ‘It is bloody when there is any fighting,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘as everyone is too busy to bother about a … useless ullage like myself and the result is that I’m the only man in N France who is unemployed and has no job!!’⁷⁷

In July 1915 he spent his first night in the trenches. ‘My impressions that night were of constant close proximity to death, repugnance from the stink of the unburied corpses … and general gloom and apprehension,’ he told his father. ‘It was all a real eye opener to me, now I have some slight conception of all that our officers and men have to go thro!! The whole life is horrible and ghastly beyond conception.’ And this was an uneventful summer night. ‘Think what it must have been like during a night of fighting in the winter? It does make one think.’⁷⁸ The King first heard of his son’s adventures at second hand and was indignant, then received a letter from the Prince himself and decided all was in order; ‘which shows,’ concluded Stamfordham, ‘that so long as the King hears of your doings direct from yourself it is all right’.⁷⁹ He rarely had cause to complain; the Prince wrote to his father regularly and at inordinate length, sometimes spending two or three hours a night over these compositions before moving on to the rest of his extensive correspondence. ‘Your letters are capital and everything very well described,’ the King complimented him, going on to complain about the number of words omitted or misspelt.⁸⁰ Stamfordham took up the point: ‘I know you will curse me as an interfering old ass,’ he told the Prince; ‘but realizing how devoted you are to the King, and how strongly these feelings are reciprocated … I want to put to rights a small matter which causes a slight, tho’ of course only temporary annoyance.’⁸¹ The Prince did take more care after this rebuke but his spelling remained disastrous; it improved gradually over the years but was shaky till the day he died.

Kitchener came out in the same month. ‘He is fatter than ever and as red as usual, but seemed pleased with everything,’ the Prince noted in his diary – adding rather cryptically, ‘Wow!! Wow!!’⁸² Troops lined the road for the visit, a mark of grandeur which the Prince felt should have been reserved for his father – ‘Unless you looked inside the car it might have been you driving round, which I thought absolutely wrong.’ Still, the troops did not cheer as vigorously as they had for the King, ‘and I happen to know that they were all v. bored at being turned out to line the roads’.⁸³ He thought both Kitchener and French were to be criticized for the embittered bickering between them which made so difficult the conduct of the war – ‘It does seem a disgrace that people in high positions can’t put away all thoughts for themselves at such a time!!’ – but put most of the blame on French: ‘an odd little man and far from clever’.⁸⁴

When the King visited France, the Prince of Wales was in attendance. He would have preferred to be with his battalion, but it was a welcome break from GHQ. George V was delighted with his son’s performance. ‘I am glad to say he is very popular with everyone and is tremendously keen to do anything he can,’ he told the Queen.⁸⁵ The Prince had told his father that one of the worst features of life in France was the ignorance of and hostility to the Navy shown by most senior officers. He was often asked whether the Navy was doing anything at all. ‘Although I am now serving in the army, I never forget that I was brought up in the Navy … So it grieves … me much to hear these things said of my beloved service.’⁸⁶ Every time he saw the King he pleaded that he should be allowed to visit the fleet at Scapa Flow. The King, for some reason that neither Stamfordham nor the Queen could understand, at first took strong exception to the idea. Queen Mary was stirred to unwonted activity on the subject: ‘There can be no possible objection to your going now … You may certainly count on my support.’⁸⁷ They won the day. In August 1915 the visit took place. Godfrey Thomas accompanied the Prince and recorded his delight and child-like enthusiasm for all he saw.

On the return journey they were cajoled into breaking their journey at Dunrobin, home of the Duke of Sutherland. They had insisted the visit should be informal, but when the train arrived, wrote Thomas, there were ‘rows and rows of people in kilts. I don’t wonder the Prince was rather annoyed. He couldn’t find his cap or his cigarettes or anything and eventually rushed down the corridor to the carriage door using such fearful language that I’m almost certain the Duke and Duchess … must have had the benefit of the end of it.’ The drive to the castle was lined with troops; the Prince travelled with the Duke ‘looking perfectly furious and hardly uttering’. This visit over, the Prince and Thomas spent a few days stalking at Abergeldie where Princes Harry and George were also staying. On the last day they all packed into a car to go to the railway station. ‘I can’t say we behaved very well en route, as any female passing us was waved and yelled at, and they sang loudly most of the way … By the time we reached Ballater, one of the strings of HRH’s deerstalker had broken, and the flap was hanging down in a drunken way. We were all dirty, sweaty and dishevelled, and must have looked like a lot of tramps.’⁸⁸ It had been a marvellous break from France, but it left the Prince dejected: ‘How I long to be back at sea again and infinitely prefer being a sailor to a soldier!!’⁸⁹

George V used his son as a source of information on the senior generals. ‘I want to know privately if the C in C has had a row with Genl Smith-Dorrien,’ he asked in March 1915. ‘You might find out and let me know.’⁹⁰ The Prince had little useful information on this point but he did not spare Sir John French in his correspondence and his testimony must have contributed to the strong support George V gave Kitchener against the Commander-in-Chief. When Monro was succeeded by Sir Hubert Gough, the Prince was cautiously enthusiastic. At first he was dismayed by the new Corps Commander’s reluctance to let him visit the front line, then he became more approving as the rules were relaxed. ‘There is no doubt he is an able tactician and a good “pushing” general,’ he wrote in July. ‘He talks too much; that is his gt fault to my mind.’⁹¹

His views on most matters were orthodox and strident. He was strongly in favour of conscription, feeling that the whole nation must be mobilized if the war was ever to be won.⁹² He welcomed as irresistible the call to arms which his father delivered in October 1915. Who would have the heart to ignore such an appeal? ‘But no doubt there are thousands of these foul unpatriotic brutes about!! One almost begins not to think so highly of one’s country as one did!!’⁹³ Conscientious objectors were ‘loathsome’; he had twelve hundred of them working in the Duchy, ‘Disgusting looking men with long hair and they never wear hats; they loaf about the place and look at one with a very contemptible air!!’⁹⁴ Miners who struck for higher pay were still more loathsome, they should be put ‘straight into the trenches and send the whole crowd out patrolling, the first night they go in!!’⁹⁵ As for Roger Casement, the Irishman who sought to lead a German-inspired rising, he deserved least sympathy of all: ‘He should be publicly hung in Hyde Park or some open space where there is room for a large crowd.’⁹⁶

His father and brothers would have echoed these views, as indeed would 90 per cent of the officers of the British Army. On most issues, though his parents might from time to time irritate him, he differed from his family very little. Increasingly it seemed to him that he had most in common with Prince Albert. The two had grown particularly close; ‘more so perhaps than most brothers, as our interests are the same,’ wrote the Prince of Wales early in 1915. ‘I am sure he will always do very well in the future; in fact I often feel that if I do as well as he does I shall be all right!!’⁹⁷ Prince Albert’s naval career was suffering from his ill health and he had been forced to work in the Admiralty, a dreary job which he performed uncomplainingly. ‘I must say I admire him tremendously for this and don’t hesitate to tell you he’s one of the best,’ the Prince wrote to Godfrey Thomas, knowing well that uncomplaining acceptance of ill fortune was not his own forte.⁹⁸ Prince Albert, however, was not so uncomplaining when it came to the conduct of his parents. The two Princes united in a chorus of criticism. Prince Albert wailed about the ‘awful prison’ of Buckingham Palace: ‘The parents have got funny ideas about us, thinking we are still boys at school or something of that sort, instead of what we are.’⁹⁹ The Prince of Wales was no more enthusiastic about life in the Palace, especially after the King imposed a teetotal regime for the duration of the war: ‘Awful balls the whole thing. I don’t think it will have much effect on the drinking community. Lloyd George forced it on Papa.’¹⁰⁰

As he grew older he became more adept at avoiding the sombre dignity of the family circle. By 1917 he was able to come and go more or less at pleasure. He was summoned for two weeks to Sandringham. ‘This little boy somehow says NO,’ he told Lady Coke. ‘He might possibly spend two or three days there, but not more, not for nobody, and he knows a bit too much for that!!!!’¹⁰¹ – a point so close to his heart as to demand even more than his usual allotment of two exclamation marks. In London he still stayed always at Buckingham Palace, but tried to time his periods of leave so that he had at least a few days there without his parents. This did not always work out. ‘I am sorry your style was rather cramped during your leave in London,’ Lord Burghersh wrote sympathetically. ‘It’s exactly the same with me. Family so inquisitive.’¹⁰² But it would be wrong to attach too much significance to such flights from the family nest. The Prince was far from rejecting his parents or demanding total independence. On his twenty-first birthday his father wrote to tell him: ‘You will have about £246,000 which … is a splendid sum of money which will go on increasing until you marry and set up house. Until then, I hope you will consider my home as your home.’ The Queen echoed her husband’s words: ‘I hope that for some years to come you, my darling Son, will continue to live under our roof, where you are and ever will be “le bienvenu”.’¹⁰³ The Prince in his reply told his mother how pleased he would be to remain with his parents ‘until the fateful day arrives when I shall have to think about finding me a wife, and I trust that day is as yet afar off!!’¹⁰⁴ Privately he had probably made up his mind that he must set up on his own once the war was over, but he had no wish to confront his parents on such an issue while the war was still raging and long-term plans seemed impossible to make.

In June 1915 the Prince had first speculated about the possibility that a Guards division might be formed under the command of Lord Cavan, ‘an ideal state of things’.¹⁰⁵ A month later the ideal became reality; ‘It ought to be the finest division in the world,’ the King wrote proudly.¹⁰⁶ The Prince had no doubt that this was where he belonged. In his eyes the Guards were as far above the other line regiments as the Navy was above the Army. He admitted to the King that he and the other Guards officers were apt to think that their men were the only ones of any use, ‘which is v. wrong and which one must avoid above all things, but it’s not an unnatural point of view to take really!!’¹⁰⁷ But though his transfer to this martial empyrean brought some relief and moved him a little closer to the fighting, it did not prove entirely satisfactory. Life at Cavan’s headquarters was no less sybaritic than in his previous postings; Raymond Asquith visited the headquarters in November 1915 and was given ‘a good dinner and an excellent bottle of champagne … the Prince of Wales was there and gave me a long and fragrant cigar’.¹⁰⁸ Nor was the work more enlivening; a typical day in December had him devoting the morning to pursuing a missing consignment of gum boots and the afternoon to bargaining for the use of a piece of land on which to build bathing huts: ‘Heavens, the unparalleled monotony of this life!! … I shall go mad soon!!’¹⁰⁹ Worst of all, though he liked and admired ‘Fatty’ Cavan, he deplored the General’s reluctance to let him get near the trenches: ‘I think Fatty is going to shut me up in my glasshouse more than ever.’¹¹⁰ Only a week after this entry he escaped from his glasshouse and visited the front line during a lull in the battle of Loos. The 1st Guards Brigade had charged three hundred yards across open ground towards the enemy line and had been massacred by machine-gun fire as they reached the final wire, ‘too cruel to be killed within a few yards of yr. objective … This was my first real sight of war and it moved and impressed me most enormously.’ On the way back the party had to jump into a trench to avoid a storm of shrapnel, fifty yards away the Prince’s car was damaged and his driver killed: ‘He was an exceptionally nice man, a beautiful driver and a 1st rate mechanic; it’s an absolute tragedy and I can’t yet realize that it has happened.’¹¹¹

The Commander-in-Chief, told that the Prince had been in the car beside his driver, promptly ordered that he should return to Corps headquarters. The Prince wrote in dismay to his father. ‘What did you have me appointed to Guards DIV for? That I should be removed as soon as there is any fighting? … I can assure you it is one of the biggest blows I have ever had … My dearest Papa, I implore of you to have this most unfortunate and deplorable order from GHQ cancelled as soon as possible.’¹¹² French reconsidered his decision and the Prince stayed with the Guards. The King ruled, however, that his son should only go up to the front if it was ‘absolutely necessary’, otherwise Cavan would be placed in an impossible position.¹¹³ It all depended on what was meant by ‘necessary’, and the Prince eventually saw his interpretation of the word accepted: if it was necessary for the General to go to the front line it must be necessary for his staff officers to accompany him. But he was not content with what he had gained. ‘If only I could spend 48 hours in the line;’ he told his father, ‘… I should get an idea of what trench life is like, which it is absolutely impossible to do otherwise … I suppose you wouldn’t like to make permission for me to do this a form of Xmas present to me?’¹¹⁴

It had not needed the sight of the mounds of dead in front of the German lines at Loos to make the Prince doubtful of the allied strategy. The endless, hideously costly attacks, achieving nothing except at the best the occupation of a few trenches, seemed to him futile. The commanders had promised great advances, the breaking of the German line: ‘When is all this? Ask of the winds, and I call it sheer murder!!’ He had lost all confidence in French. ‘The sooner we get a new C in C the better.’¹¹⁵ But when a new Commander-in-Chief was appointed it was Douglas Haig, a man as wedded to the policy of bloody attrition as ever French had been. ‘He is very unpopular,’ the Prince told Stamfordham. ‘I can’t stand the man myself, so hard and unsympathetic.’¹¹⁶ Towards the end of the war he was to revise his views, and even find Haig ‘human and sympathetic’,¹¹⁷ but at the end of 1915 it seemed to him that the new C.-in-C. treated men ‘as mere fighting tools’,¹¹⁸ and that, in the Prince’s eyes, was almost the ultimate accusation.

Shortly before French departed George V came to France for one of his periodic visits to his troops. Startled by the cheering of the men the King’s horse reared, threw its rider and fell heavily on top of him. The Prince rushed to his father’s side, to find him winded and unable to breathe. Doctors arrived and pronounced that there were no internal injuries, only shock and severe bruising. It had been a lucky escape; the ground where the King fell was soft, otherwise he would have been crushed beyond recognition.¹¹⁹ The Prince hurried back to London with Claud Hamilton to reassure the Queen. ‘Thank God Papa is all right,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and little did Claudie and I think in the morning that we shd be on our way home in less than 12 hrs.’¹²⁰

Before this episode the Prince had been in slightly bad odour at court because of his reluctance to wear some foreign medals which he had been awarded. He apologized to the King, ‘but you know how distasteful it is to me to wear these war decorations having never done any fighting and having always been kept well out of danger’.¹²¹ The sense of inferiority which he felt in the presence of fighting men was redoubled when he was flaunting honours which they had been denied. His discomfort was redoubled in mid-1916 when he was awarded the Military Cross. Lady Coke wrote to congratulate him. ‘I don’t feel I deserve it in the least,’ the Prince replied crossly. ‘There are so many gallant yet undecorated officers who should have MCs long before me.’¹²² He was promoted Captain at about the same time but got no pleasure from it ‘as I have no command’. ‘You’ll be saying to yourself “What a gloomy view of life he does take”,’ he admitted to Stamfordham. ‘Well, I fear that is the case …’¹²³

He was craving for change, and when it became clear that he could not expect to stay with the Guards division when it went into the line at Ypres, he concluded that he had much better leave France altogether. He conceived the idea of visiting the allied forces in the Middle East and Kitchener agreed that a report on the defences in the Canal Zone would be of use. The King initially opposed the idea on the grounds that the danger from submarines in the Mediterranean was too great. His reluctance made the Prince’s wish to go become almost overpowering. ‘D—n the risk of … torpedoes,’ he wrote to Stamfordham, ‘it is such rot, isn’t it? But all these family fears have to be considered!’¹²⁴ The King relented, and at once the Prince began to wonder whether he was doing the right thing. ‘I do feel such a miserable worm,’ he told his uncle. ‘Of course it will be very interesting and pleasant in Egypt, but I shan’t be able to enjoy it in the least, when I know where I ought to be and where my friends are.’¹²⁵

He suggested that Desmond Fitzgerald should accompany him as equerry. The proposal was rejected, Fitzgerald was too junior for such a role. A week before the Prince sailed, Fitzgerald was training with his regiment near Calais. The padre took a turn at throwing a hand grenade and somehow bungled it. Fitzgerald was fatally injured. It was the worst experience the Prince had suffered during the war. ‘It is a fearful blow to lose one’s greatest friend, and he was that to me.’¹²⁶ In wartime those whose friends are in daily danger must either learn to accept their loss with relative equanimity or themselves break under the strain. The Prince had built a carapace of resignation with which to confront the awful massacre of his contemporaries. Fitzgerald’s death, though, broke down his guard. He left for Egypt in a mood as depressed as he had ever known, and the tragedy was to cast a blight over what would otherwise have been a pleasant escapade.