King Edward VIII. Philip Ziegler

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ