Philip Ziegler - King Edward VIII

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.’ 60Shortly 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.’ 61His 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.’ 62For 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’ 64became more splenetic and the Minister was categorized as an ‘interfering politician’, bothering the overworked naval and military authorities. 65By 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.’ 67On the whole he thought it a good thing that politicians should come out to France ‘to see a few realities’, 68but 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 …’ 70The 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!!’ 71Best 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.’ 72His 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.’ 76His 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.’ 78The 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’. 79He 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. 80Stamfordham 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.’ 81The 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!!’ 82Troops 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’. 83He 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