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
The King had been convinced that even in comparatively temperate March the Prince would find the heat in the Canal Zone intolerable, but his son relished hot weather and was inspired by it to undertake still more strenuous physical exercise. He enjoyed the life in Ismalia, ‘strafing up and down the Canal’, visiting the troops and preparing a report on the supply system. On his first day at GHQ he went to hear General Birdwood address the Australian and New Zealand Brigades. His presence was announced to the men, ‘at which they gave 3 cheers, bloody fools!!’4 At first he had been slightly deterred by their reputation for drunkenness and indiscipline but he was quickly overwhelmed by their exuberance; they had committed undreamt-of atrocities in the red-light districts of Cairo and Alexandria, but ‘they have fought so d—d hard and are so