Not everyone reciprocated his enthusiasm. Among the many men he spoke to when he visited the Anzac troops at Tel-el-Kebir, was John Monash, a Brigadier General who had been one of the heroes of Gallipoli and was to become the most prominent Australian soldier of the First World War. ‘What he said to me was “M-m-m-m”,’ wrote Monash. ‘The fact was the youngster was completely bewildered, and most evidently ill at ease.’6 His was a minority voice, however; every other account of the visit was lyrical in tone. Birdwood maintained that the men took him to their hearts; the Prince’s equerry, Malcolm Murray, spoke of the warmth of their reception – ‘They would rush across to wherever the Prince was coming up, make a line for him and cheer time after time.’7 One eye-witness account was passed on at third hand to Queen Mary: ‘… the enthusiasm knew no bounds, and the cheering was perfectly overwhelming. Our friend said that men looked at him so intently that they forgot to salute! and added “I’m not exaggerating when I say that some of them gazed at him with tears rolling down their cheeks.”’8
The Prince of Wales had been in crowds many times before, but this was the first time that he had experienced the adulation that was so often to be his lot over the next twenty years. It could be argued that any young, personable and smiling prince would have had the same effect. The contrary can hardly be proved, but so many reports by men and women who prided themselves on being not easily impressed testify to the extraordinary potency of his personality that it is impossible to dismiss them all. To the seasoned veterans of Gallipoli his youth, charm, simplicity and friendliness, his patent sincerity and concern for their wellbeing, proved irresistible. Many millions were to find the same combination as effective in the future.
For the Prince it was exhilarating, disconcerting and slightly alarming. He for his part had no doubt that it was his royal blood and not his personal qualities which won him such applause. The idea displeased him. ‘Oh!! to be out here privately and not as the P of W,’ he moaned to Godfrey Thomas. ‘That’s what ruins my life and ever will!!!!’ This particular complaint was provoked by a projected visit to Khartoum. He had pleaded to be allowed to go there but typically at once began to have doubts once permission had been conceded. If he could have gone as a common tourist he would have been delighted, but he was travelling officially as heir to the throne: ‘You know how I hate all those bulls at any time, so think how odious it is to me in wartime!!’9 In the Governor – the Sirdar – Reginald Wingate, he found a man determined to milk the situation to the last drop: ‘A little snob,’ he called him in his diary; ‘He is HRHing the whole time and never relaxes a moment.’10 Yet he had to admit that Wingate knew his job superlatively well and that the pomp was well deployed to make the greatest possible impression on the Sudanese. ‘I am throwing my heart and soul into it all to make it a success, though it goes against the grain,’ he told his father.11 To Malcolm Murray it sometimes seemed that heart and soul were not as energetically deployed as might have been hoped for. The Prince, he complained to Stamfordham, ‘always wanted to efface himself, and hates any kind of formal thing. This is exactly what he wants practice in – he is rather naughty about going up to speak to people etc.’12
The Prince’s always weak stomach for sightseeing was quickly over-taxed. Even before he reached Luxor on his return journey down the Nile he was confessing in his diary: ‘I’m utterly fed up with visiting temples and never want to see another one again.’ He found an itinerant snake-charmer decidedly more interesting than Karnak by moonlight. The ancient and eminent Egyptologist Professor Le Grain lavished his learning on the young visitor but gained little gratitude for his pains. ‘I wasn’t sorry to see him go, for he … nearly killed me with his detailed descriptions.’13 It is unlikely, however, that the professor guessed how little pleasure he had given; the Prince’s manners rarely fell below excellence and he would have gone to great pains to put a good face on his sufferings. When Ronald Storrs conducted the Prince round Cairo a few days later, he wrote that he had never met a visitor ‘who entered more swiftly into the spirit of the place … I have met none with equal vitality or with more appreciation of Eastern life’.14 Perhaps Storrs was a more congenial cicerone than the professor, certainly the Prince found Cairo much jollier than the Upper Nile and agitated to be allowed to pay it a second visit. The King for some reason objected and the Prince wrote in injured innocence: ‘I don’t want to go galivanting about in Cairo, far from it. I’m not even going to ask you for a night there … just a few hours so that I may go to the bazaars and do some shopping for you and Mama.’15
In Cairo he met Lord Edward Cecil, a fellow Grenadier, shrewd judge of character and author of the exquisitely witty The Leisure of an Egyptian Official. ‘He is a nice boy of fifteen, rather immature for that age,’ Lord Edward wrote to his wife. ‘He cannot get in or out of a room except sideways and he has the nervous smile of one accustomed to float. I hope he will grow up, but he is leaving it till late. He is curiously decided, even obstinate, and happily there is no sign of weakness of character. His main terror is getting fat. He adores the Regiment and would talk all day about it, but beyond love of all military matters, an outspoken hatred of politicians and a very fine English accent when he speaks French, he has no apparent special characteristics. I think one day he will fall in love and then he will suddenly grow up.’16
He never got back to Cairo nor was he allowed to stay on in the Middle East after the onset of the hot season. Malcolm Murray direly prophesied sunstroke and probably enteric fever if he lingered on, and the King ordered his return: ‘You have had a nice change and have enjoyed some nice warm weather; think of the many thousands of poor fellows who are obliged to remain in France without a break …’17 The Prince might justifiably have retorted that he thought constantly about them, that he had done all he could to be treated like them, and that his return to a job on the staff would not improve their lot by an iota. Instead, he accepted his recall with moderately good grace. On the way back, in May 1916, he called on King Victor Emmanuel at his headquarters near the Italian front at Udine. He found the King a ‘dear and charming little man’ but it was the same story as in France; as soon as the royal party got anywhere near any scene of possible action, the cars would turn round and speed back to a safer section of the line.18
On his return he submitted a report on the supply and transport arrangements in the Canal Zone which Kitchener forwarded to the King; it did the Prince great credit, commented Kitchener, ‘and shows his grasp of details, and military knowledge’.19 ‘A really excellent report,’ George Arthur, then an official in the War Office, described it.20 The praise seems high for a somewhat cursory statement of the existing position, in twelve hundred words, with little detail and no recommendations, but it showed at least that he had kept his eyes open and not treated the expedition as a joy ride. The King had good reason to be pleased with his son’s performance. Wingate had written that the Prince’s visit had done enormous good in the Sudan; the GOC reported that the morale of the troops in the Canal Zone had been notably improved; it was not the sort of war the Prince wanted to wage, but this time even he had to admit that he had been of use.
Back in France the Prince rejoined Lord Cavan’s staff with the 14th Army Corps. He was no nearer having a proper job. ‘He holds a very junior appointment of course,’ commented the future Field Marshal Montgomery loftily, ‘and I can’t imagine that he does much real work.’21 Lord Newton, then a junior minister at the Foreign Office, found him ‘an undeveloped youth with pleasant and unassuming manners’ and ascribed his lack of any important staff job to the fact that he could not be induced to read.22 The charge of immaturity was certainly justified, but when the Prince was given something to do, he did it conscientiously. His complaint was that he was left in idleness or burdened with unnecessary and clearly improvised duties. After less than a week back in headquarters he was exclaiming bitterly that he was ‘thoroughly fed up’. ‘God knows how long the Lord Claud and I will be stuck here,’ he wrote to Captain Bailey; ‘it