There was little trust between Lloyd George and Northcliffe, and the War Secretary regarded the press baron as ‘the mere kettledrum’ of Haig.55 Northcliffe would remain firmly in the camp of the generals, and the day after Lloyd George took up office as Prime Minister, he informed Philip Sassoon that he had ‘told the Daily Mail to telephone you every night at 8pm, whether I am in London or not’.fn15, 56
Philip was in London on a week’s leave during the political crisis and wrote to Haig with updates as Lloyd George’s new government took shape: ‘I think by now all the appointments and disappointments have been arranged … I think Derby’s is a very good appointment. Northcliffe said, “That great jellyfish is at the War Office. One good thing is that he will do everything Sir Douglas Haig tells him to do”! I think the whole week has been satisfactory.’fn16, 57
Philip also made good use of his London leave by arranging to meet the leading novelist Alice Dudeney, whose books he had long admired, having been introduced to her works by his friend Marie Belloc Lowndes. Alice Dudeney was well known for her romantic and dramatic fiction, often based on life near to her home in East Sussex, and would publish fifty novels in the course of her writing career. Philip managed to get her address from Marie, and wrote out of the blue to her: ‘I am such a great admirer of your books that I know it would be the greatest pleasure to me to talk to you. Would you not think it impertinent of me to introduce myself in this manner and to say how much I hope you may be able to come to lunch [at Park Lane].’58 Alice duly came to lunch with Philip and Sybil the following week, and it was the start of a great friendship between them that would last the rest of his life.
Throughout the war, in what spare time he had, Philip read contemporary novels, taking up suggestions from Marie Belloc Lowndes, and getting his London secretary, Mrs Beresford, to send them out to him at GHQ. The one book that he kept constantly by his side, reading it again and again, was Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann, the first volume of À la recherché du temps perdu, which had been published in 1913. The novel’s narrator opens the story by recounting how as a boy he missed out one evening on his mother’s goodnight kiss, because his parents were entertaining Mr Swann, an elegant man of Jewish origin with strong ties to society. In the absence of this kiss he gets his mother to spend the night reading to him. The narrator says that this was his only recollection of living with his family in that house, until other sensations, like the taste of a madeleine, brought back further memories of that time. For Philip, alone in his hut at GHQ, the world before the war had become a distant memory. Perhaps as he read Proust’s lines he was trying to remember his mother’s kiss, or a weekend party at Taplow with friends who now lay dead in Flanders. Even a loud cracking noise outside, like the sound of a stock whip, might be enough to bring Julian Grenfell vividly back to life.
The British entered the new year of 1917 with little confidence that the end of the war was in sight. Philip Sassoon remained steadfast in his support for Haig (who was now a field marshal) and in a well-reported public speech during a visit back to Folkestone in January he told his audience:
They could trust their army and trust their generals. For them [the generals] the days of inexperience and over-confidence were gone. They knew their task, and they knew they could do it … the Battle of the Somme had opened the eyes of Germany, and she saw defeat in front of her. We must not be trapped by any peace snare. We had the finest army our race had produced, a Commander in Chief the army trusted, and a government they believed capable of giving vigour and decided action.59
The new Prime Minister, however, had the generals in his sights. Lloyd George had formed a new government in response to growing concerns about the direction of the war, and he wanted to have some influence on the conduct of operations on the Western Front. In this regard he was determined to sideline or remove Robertson as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Haig as Commander in Chief in France.
Philip would accompany Haig to a series of conferences in Calais, London and Paris, where Lloyd George’s plan unfolded: to create a new supreme command for the Western Front that would remove power from Haig and transfer it to the French generals above him, as well as give more autonomy to the divisional commanders in the field. Lloyd George also brought Lord Northcliffe inside his tent by appointing him to represent the government in the United States of America, on a special tour to promote the war effort. Northcliffe was delighted with his new role, and the Prime Minister then felt emboldened to perform a further coup de main by bringing Churchill back into the cabinet as Minister for Munitions.
The War Secretary, Lord Derby, wrote to Philip to complain that he ‘never knew a word about [Churchill’s appointment] until I saw it in the paper and was furious at being kept in ignorance, but you can judge my surprise when I found that the war cabinet had never been told … Churchill is the great danger, because I cannot believe in his being content to simply run his own show and I am sure he will have a try to have a finger in the Admiralty and War Office pies.’60
Philip could all too clearly see the dangers of Lloyd George’s initiatives for Haig and GHQ. After the Calais conference where the Prime Minister had first set out the idea of a combined French and British supreme command, Philip warned Esher that despite the personal warmth of the politicians towards Haig, his position remained vulnerable. He wrote, ‘Everyone – the King, LG, Curzon etc. – all patted DH on the back and told him what a fine fellow he was – but with that exception, matters remained very much as Calais had left them and the future may be full of difficulties.’61
It was not just the continued heavy casualties being sustained at the front; now German bombing raids on England from aerodromes in Belgium were inflicting terrible loss of life at home as well. On 25 May 1917, on a warm, clear late afternoon, German Gotha aeroplanes dropped bombs without any warning on the civilian population in Folkestone, in Philip’s parliamentary constituency. One fell outside Stokes’s greengrocer’s in Tontine Street, killing sixty-one people, including a young mother, Florence Norris, along with her two-year-old daughter and ten-month-old son. Hundreds more were injured, and other bombs fell on the Shorncliffe military camp to the west of the town, killing eighteen soldiers. The raid shocked the nation and led to calls for proper air-raid warning systems to be put in place in towns at risk of attack.
There was further controversy over Douglas Haig’s brutal offensive in the late summer and autumn of 1917 at Passchendaele in Flanders. In June GHQ had suggested to the cabinet that 130,000 men would cover the British losses that would be sustained during the course of the battle. Instead, the total number of British casualties across the whole of the front by December was 399,000. When it became clear that no significant breakthrough had been achieved, Lloyd George resumed his agitation for Haig’s removal, but a victory at the Battle of Cambrai in late November initially seemed to secure the Commander in Chief’s position. Cambrai was the first successful use of tanks on a large scale, but there was criticism that the level of success had been exaggerated by the military intelligence staff at GHQ, and then more seriously that they had tried to cover up failings on their part which had allowed the Germans to counter-attack successfully, retaking most of the territory they had lost. Two of Philip Sassoon’s Eton and Oxford friends, Patrick Shaw Stewart and Edward Horner, lost their lives in the battle.
The outrage at the missed opportunity of Cambrai, and the further unnecessary loss of life that seemed to be a direct result of poor planning on the part of the generals, shook even Northcliffe’s belief in the military leadership. The Times reported that ‘The merest breath of criticism on any military operation is far too often dismissed as an “intrigue” against the Commander-in-chief.’ It demanded a ‘prompt, searching and complete’ inquiry into the fiasco of Cambrai.62
Lord Esher discreetly briefed Lloyd George at the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris on the full extent of what had happened at Cambrai, which produced a furious reaction from the Prime Minister. Esher recalled in his diary that Lloyd George
launched out against ‘intrigues’ against him. Philip Sassoon was the delinquent conspiring with Asquith and the press. I expressed doubt and said that Haig had no knowledge of such things if