Charmed Life: The Phenomenal World of Philip Sassoon. Damian Collins

house.’¹⁰ But other men of similar status had opted to serve at the front, and twenty-four MPs would be killed in action during the war. Raymond Asquith, the son of the Prime Minister, had refused a transfer to a position on the staff, and would later die leading his men in battle. Philip had simply obeyed his orders; he was mobilized at the start of the war, and until February 1915 was preparing to fight at the front. He had never sought to avoid combat, and it was his skill as an accomplished staff officer that kept him at GHQ. Nonetheless, some would later question his war record, with the Conservative politician Lord Winterton wondering in his diary after dining with Philip, ‘which is more disgraceful, to have no medals like [the Earl of] Jersey^fn3 who has shirked fighting in two wars, or to have them like Philip Sassoon without having earned them’.¹¹

      After his initial placement on Sir John French’s staff, Philip was promoted to serve as aide-de-camp (ADC) to General Rawlinson, the commander of IV Army Corps. The IVth was part of the British Expeditionary Force and had seen heavy fighting in Belgium at the first Battle of Ypres, and in early 1915 would take the lead at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle. Philip had Eton in common with Rawlinson, but otherwise their lives had been completely different; the general was a professional soldier who had passed out from Sandhurst before Sassoon was born, and he had served in Lord Kitchener’s campaign in the Sudan in 1898–9. In August 1914 optimists had predicted that the war might be over by Christmas, but as the stalemate of trench warfare became established on the Western Front, the generals had to plan for a long campaign. Rawlinson believed that the war would be won only by attrition, and by early 1915 Philip agreed that the Germans would have to be driven back trench by trench until the Allies reached their border, rather than by some great breakthrough that would deliver a knock-out blow. He was also concerned that any eagerness for an early peace settlement before Germany had been clearly defeated would leave it strong enough to start another war in fifteen or twenty years.¹²

      The day-to-day reality of this strategy of attrition was found in the death toll at the front. Philip would anxiously look for the names of his friends, as each morning he went through the lists of the dead and missing. In May 1915 Julian Grenfell received a head injury from a shell fragment at Railway Hill near Ypres. The initial prognosis was positive, but his condition deteriorated and he died on 26 May at the military hospital at Boulogne. When the notice of his death was placed, The Times printed a poem he had recently completed and sent to his mother in the hope she might be able to get it published. Entitled ‘Into Battle’, it extolled the honour and glory of the fighting, with Mother Nature urging on the soldiers with the words, ‘If this be the last song you shall sing, / Sing well, for you may not sing another.’

      Philip was greatly affected by the loss of Julian, but it was nearly a month before he wrote to Lady Desborough. ‘I have tried to write to you every day since Julian died, but have been fumbling for words … ever since I had known him in the old Eton days I had the most tremendous admiration for him and always regretted that circumstances and difference of age had prevented our becoming more intimate.’ Julian had been only a few months older than Philip, although he was a more senior figure in the hierarchy at Eton, and almost the epitome of the heroic Edwardian English schoolboy. Philip’s choice of words reflected the distance in their relationship, but underlined how he looked up to Julian and desired his approval. It was as if for Philip that personal acceptance by Julian represented the broader appreciation of English society of his character and ability. Philip continued his letter to Lady Desborough by quoting from the war poet Rupert Brooke, who had himself died just the month before, telling her that Julian had left a ‘white unbroken glory, a gathered radiance, a width, a shining peace, under the night’.¹³ Julian had seemed so indestructible, it was barely credible to Philip that he could be gone. ‘Such deaths as his’, he told Lady Desborough, ‘strengthen our faith – it is not possible that such spirits go out. We know that they must always be near us and that we shall meet them again.’¹⁴

      There was a curious epitaph to Julian’s death a few weeks later, during the Battle of Loos. One of the reservist cavalry regiments was saddled up, night and day, in the grounds of General Rawlinson’s chateau, ready in case a breakthrough in the line was achieved and the cavalrymen would be called on to gallop through the gap. Lawrence Jones, who was among their number, recalled:

      After a sleepless night spent attempting to get some shelter under juniper bushes from the incessant rain, we were gazing, chilled and red-eyed, at the noble entrance of the chateau from which we expected our orders to come forth, when a very slim, very dapper young officer, with red tabs in his collar and shining boots, began to descend the steps. It was Philip Sassoon, ‘Rawly’s’ ADC. I have never been one of those to think that Staff Officers are unduly coddled, or that they should share the discomforts of the troops. Far from it. But there are moments when the most entirely proper inequality, suddenly exhibited, can be riling. Tommy Lascelles, not yet His or Her Majesty’s Private Secretary, but a very damp young lieutenant who had not breakfasted, felt that this was one of those moments. Concealed by a juniper bush he called out, ‘Pheeleep! Pheeleep! I see you!’ in a perfect mimicry of Julian’s warning cry from his window when he spied Sassoon, who belonged to another College, treading delicately through Balliol Quad. The beauteous ADC stopped, lifted his head like a hind sniffing the wind, then turned and went rapidly up the steps and into the doorway. Did he hear Julian’s voice from the grave? … We shall never know.¹⁵

      Julian’s younger brother Billy was killed in action on 30 July leading a charge at Hooge, less than a mile from where Julian had been wounded. Billy’s body was never found, and without a known grave he was remembered after the war on the Menin Gate memorial at Ypres. Philip had grown up with Billy at Eton and at numerous weekend parties at Taplow, and he sat down in his quarters once again to write the most painful of letters to Lady Desborough:

      It was only about a fortnight ago that I had a letter from him saying that he was so bored at being out of the line and aching to get back into the salient – I rushed up to Poperinge – but he had left that morning for the trenches – now I shan’t ever see him. This has taught me not to look ahead – but I had allowed myself somehow to look forward to Billy’s friendship as something very precious for the future – and he has left a blank that can never be filled. I look back on all the pleasant hours we spent together. I have that possession at any rate. How I shall miss him.¹⁶

      Philip’s words reflect the more conventional friendship he had enjoyed with Billy, compared to that with Julian, one that was not marked by the need for acceptance.

      In late August 1915, Charles Lister, a lieutenant in the Royal Marines, died in the military hospital at Mudros from wounds sustained in the fighting at Gallipoli. Lister had sailed out to the eastern Mediterranean with Rupert Brooke and Patrick Shaw Stewart, and while Shaw Stewart survived this doomed campaign he would later succumb at the Battle of Cambrai in 1917 along with Edward Horner. ‘Would one ever have believed before the war’, Philip wrote to a friend, ‘that one could have stood for one single instant the load of pain and anxiety which is now one’s daily breath. I find that, although I can study the casualty list without ever seeing a name I know – for all my friends have been killed – yet nevertheless one feels as much for others as for oneself – just a blur of grief: and one wakes every morning feeling one can hardly bear to live through the day.’¹⁷

      The deaths of these young men led to a series of publications to commemorate their short, heroic lives. Ronald Knox quickly produced a biography of Patrick Shaw Stewart, and another book, E. B. Osborn’s The New Elizabethans, included essays on the Grenfell boys, Charles Lister and others. The title was inspired by Sir Rennell Rodd’s vision of Lister as belonging to the ‘large-horizoned Elizabethan days, and he would have been in the company of Sidney and Raleigh and the Gilberts and boisterously welcomed at the Mermaid Tavern’.^fn4, ¹⁸

      Not all of their contemporaries recognized these romantic portraits of their friends. Lawrence Jones recalled:

      A legend has somehow grown up, that Julian was one of a little band of Balliol brothers knightly as they were brilliant who might, had they survived, have flavoured society with an essence shared by them all. As far as [Charles Lister, Patrick Shaw Stewart and Edward Horner] and Julian are concerned, the legend is very