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.
4
The Captain
THE PRINCE OF WALES’S EXPEDITION TO THE MIDDLE EAST proved a welcome break in the four black years that he spent on the Western Front. He would not have been the man he was if he had not striven to diminish his pleasure by endless doubts and self-accusations. ‘I feel such a swine having a soft comfortable time out here while the Guards Division is up at Ypres,’ he told Lady Coke;1 and he found little comfort in the knowledge that he would never have been allowed near the battle himself and that his presence with the allied forces in the Canal Zone was a badly needed boost to the morale of those who felt themselves to be members of a forgotten army.
His last days in London had been hectic. He called on Kitchener to get his instructions – ‘He talked a lot, quite interesting in a way, but I’m frightened of the man’2 – acquired the mountain of impedimenta thought necessary for such a journey, and spent the last night in mingled work and revelry. He, Prince Albert and Godfrey Thomas, recorded the latter, ‘played the gramophone till the small hours and when we thought it was time for some song that we hadn’t got among the records, we were obliged to sing it. After a lot of exercise dancing round and round the room, Prince Bertie proceeded to go to bed, but his brother got into his bed with all his clothes on, so by the time he’d been pulled out by us, there wasn’t much left of the bed … So we turned the gramophone on again. I got away just before two. HRH was starting at 9 the next morning, and had done practically no packing as usual, and also had about 20 letters to write. The result, as I heard afterwards, was that he had exactly 1¼ hours sleep that night and went off without any breakfast, which is entirely typical.’ Thomas got this last information in a letter from Prince Albert, who added: ‘A wonderful chap. I don’t know how he does it, do you?’3
