Duff Cooper, another Eton and Oxford contemporary, wrote to Knox to protest about his biography of Shaw Stewart. In his diary he complained, ‘He never consulted me … nor asked either me or Diana for letters. This irritates me. The book as it stands is bad and dull.’fn5, 20
Yet one of these testaments to the doomed youth of the war would remain beyond reproach – Lady Desborough’s tribute to her sons, Pages from a Family Journal. This great book, running to over six hundred pages, published in 1916, was an intimate portrait of their lives from early childhood. It was, in the words of Lord Desborough, ‘intended for Julian and Billy’s brothers and sisters and for their most intimate friends’. Upon receiving his copy, Philip Sassoon told Lady Desborough that ‘it will be a tribute for all time to those two splendid joyous boys whose loss becomes more unbearable every day. One would like to have included every letter they ever wrote … I keep rereading their letters and your accounts of them until I cannot believe that they are gone.’21
For many people, this belief that their loved ones could not really be gone took them in search of the intervention of spiritualist mediums. The number of registered mediums in England would more than double by the early 1920s, compared with pre-war figures.22 Shortly after the end of the war, following the death of a pilot friend in a plane crash, Philip Sassoon approached an old family friend, Marie Belloc Lowndes,fn6 and begged her ‘to write to Sir Oliver Lodge … to ask for the address of a medium’.23 Lodge was a Christian spiritualist who had come to particular prominence following the publication in 1916 of his sensational book Raymond, or Life and Death.fn7 The book detailed his belief that his son Raymond, who had been killed in action in Flanders in 1915, had communicated with him through séances that he and his wife had attended with the medium Gladys Osborne Leonard. Marie Belloc Lowndes secured the details from Sir Oliver of a medium in London and she accompanied Philip on the visit. She recalled that they
drove to a road beyond Notting Hill Gate, and stopped in front of a detached villa. We were admitted by a middle-aged woman, who led us into a room which contained some shabby garden furniture … after a few moments, the medium went into a trance, and from her lips there issued a man’s voice, describing a fall from a plane, and the instant death of the speaker. The same voice then made a strong plea concerning the future of a group of children he called the ‘kiddies’, and who, he was painfully anxious, should not be parted from their mother. Meanwhile Philip remained silent, staring at the medium. After a pause the same man’s voice as before issued from the sleeping woman’s lips. Again the accident was decried and there then followed an allusion to a pair of flying boots, which the speaker hoped Philip would find useful. When we were back in his car, Philip Sassoon turned to me and exclaimed, ‘The voice which spoke to me was the voice of the man who was killed flying in Egypt.’ Did you understand the allusion to his flying boots? He said, ‘Of course I did. I bought his flying boots after his death.’24
On 29 October 1915 Philip was in Folkestone harbour, ready to return to France after a brief period of home leave. He waited to board his ship at the simple café on the harbour arm, which catered for service personnel. It was run by two sisters, Margaret and Florence Jeffery, and Mrs Napier Sturt, who dispensed free refreshments and kept visitors’ books which they asked all their guests, servicemen and statesmen of all ranks, to sign. Philip was happy to oblige along with the group of staff officers with whom he was travelling.25 Looking around, he could see how Folkestone had been transformed by the war. It had been an elegant resort town from where the wealthy had journeyed to the continent on the Orient Express, which had descended with its passengers into the harbour station. Now it was the major embarkation point for servicemen to France, and over ten million soldiers would pass through the town on their way to and from the trenches of the Western Front. In addition to this the town was home to tens of thousands of Canadian servicemen stationed at Shorncliffe Barracks, and thousands of refugees from Belgium who had fled from the advancing Germans in August 1914.
The pre-war world was gone for ever and in October 1915 it wasn’t clear when peace would return, or if Britain and its allies would be victorious. The Germans were winning against the Russians in the east, and in the west they were fighting in French and Belgian territory, not on their own soil. The British attempt to open up the war in the east at Gallipoli had failed and in November 1915 brought about the resignation from the cabinet of Winston Churchill, whose idea it had been. A further setback on the Western Front at the Battle of Loos created pressure for a change in the direction of the war effort, and on 3 December General Sir Douglas Haig replaced Sir John French as commander of the British forces in France. This change of leadership would have a sudden and profound impact on Philip Sassoon. Haig, upon taking up his new post, invited Philip to work for him as his private secretary at GHQ. The war had now given Philip something he had sought in peacetime – a chance to perform a meaningful role at the centre of great events.
On 31 March 1916 Haig established his personal headquarters at the Château de Beaurepaire, in the hamlet of Saint Nicolas, a short distance from the beautiful town of Montreuil-sur-Mer, and about 20 miles south of Boulogne. The communications nerve centre of GHQ was based in the historic Citadel at Montreuil, but the whole town became an English colony for the remainder of the war. The Officers’ Club in the Rue du Paon was believed to have one of the best wine cellars in Europe,26 and tennis courts were constructed between the ramparts that surrounded the Citadel.
Montreuil was chosen because it was centrally placed to serve as the communications centre for forces across a front stretching from the Somme to beyond the Belgian frontier. It was also a small town of only a few thousand inhabitants, and no great distractions for the officers and men stationed there.
Montreuil and the Château de Beaurepaire would be Philip’s principal base for the rest of the war, although for the launch of new battle offensives GHQ could move to an advanced position, often in a house closer to the front line, or in some railway carriages parked in a nearby siding. Philip would also accompany Haig to conferences of the British and French leaders and represent him at meetings in London and Paris. There was a dynamism to working for Haig that suited Philip’s energetic personality: cars and drivers on standby to rush between meetings, special trains and steamships ready to convey the ‘Chief’ at any hour, the King’s messenger service available for the express delivery of important messages or specially requested luxury items for an important dinner.
Philip’s working routine was set around Haig’s. He would be at his desk before 9 a.m. each morning, breaking at 1 p.m. for lunch, which lasted for half an hour. In the afternoon, Philip would typically accompany Haig to meetings at GHQ or to visit ‘some army or corps or division’ in the line.27 After returning to Beaurepaire they worked up to dinner at 8 p.m., then went back to the office at 9, until about 10.45 p.m. Brigadier-General John Charteris, who was Haig’s Chief Intelligence Officer, remembered that ‘At this hour [Haig] rang the bell for his Private Secretary, and invariably greeted him with the same remark: “Philip – not in bed yet?” He never changed this formula, and if, as did occasionally happen, Philip was in bed, he always used to say to him next morning: “I hope you have had enough sleep?” There were only rare occasions when this routine of the Commander-in-Chief’s day was broken by even a minute.’28
Sassoon and the general developed a good working relationship, and Haig came to regard Philip as a ‘very useful private secretary’.29 Robert Blake, who would later edit Douglas Haig’s private papers, noted that ‘Haig did not talk much himself but he enjoyed gaiety and wit in others, and he appreciated conversational brilliance. This partly explains his paradoxical choice of Philip Sassoon as his private secretary.’30 There was criticism from some of the other staff officers of Haig’s decision. Philip was in their eyes a politician who had not been trained at Sandhurst like the rest of them, or seen any military service, yet he was now to have privileged access to the Commander in Chief at all hours. According to Blake, they saw Philip as a ‘semi-oriental figure [who] flitted like some exotic bird of paradise against the sober background of GHQ’.31 Some also felt he had been preferred because his uncle Leopold Rothschild was a friend of Haig’s. Leopold,