Philip Sassoon shared the growing disillusion over the reliability of Charteris, and after being told by Esher about his meeting with the Prime Minister wrote back that he had ‘never agreed with these foolish optimistic statements which Charteris has been putting in DH’s mouth all year but what they [the war cabinet] ought to know is that morale is a fluctuating entity and there is no doubt that events in Russia and Italy have greatly raised the enemy’s spirits’.fn17, 64
Lord Derby told Haig that the war cabinet had no confidence in Charteris and wanted him to be removed from his position. He added that in his opinion practically the whole army considered Charteris to be ‘a public danger’.65 The following day Lord Northcliffe weighed in against him as well. He warned Philip Sassoon, ‘I ought to tell you frankly and plainly, as a friend of the Commander in Chief, that dissatisfaction, which easily produced a national outburst of indignation, exists in regard to the Generalship in France … Outside of the War Office I doubt whether the High Command has any supporters whatever. Sir Douglas is regarded with affection in the army, but everywhere people remark that he is surrounded by incompetents.’66 The message was duly delivered to Haig, who acknowledged that it was impossible to continue to support Charteris when he had ‘put those who ought to work in friendliness with him against him’.67 Charteris was gone the same day. Philip had little sympathy for him, telling Lord Esher that ‘rightly or wrongly he was an object of odium and his name had become a byword even at home. I hear that he has been heading a faction against me for developing the position of private secretary too much. I am diverted. I went to see DH but you know the length of my material ambitions and I would not stay on a second longer than I was wanted.’68
Haig survived the crisis, but in February 1918 Robertson was replaced as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and the following month Lloyd George achieved his aim with the creation of a supreme Allied command for the armed forces on the Western Front under the French general Ferdinand Foch.
The various Anglo-French conferences during the war also gave Philip an opportunity to broaden his own circle of contacts in Paris, and one such opportunity presented itself at the Hôtel Claridge. He was attracted to successful people from a wide range of backgrounds, although the sporting, media and cultural worlds were firm favourites. One morning during a break in the conference proceedings Philip spotted across the lobby the handsome French flying ace Georges Carpentier. As Carpentier recalled:
A slim distinguished-looking gentleman with fine features came up to me and chatted to me in excellent French though with a slight English accent … Realising that he was a member of the British delegation I took out my cigarette case and said, ‘Do you know what I’d like very much? To get the autographs of Admiral Beatty, Winston Churchill and the other gentlemen on this case.’
‘That is a perfectly simple matter,’ he replied with a smile. ‘Let me have the case and I’ll give it back to you here tomorrow. Unless you would like me to leave it at your place?’
I left it with him and arranged that I should come back to Claridge’s the next day to pick it up. My unknown friend was as good as his word and when he returned my cigarette case it bore the signatures of Admiral Beatty, Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, Lord Birkenhead and Lord Montagu – and a sixth signature Philip Sassoon. ‘I took the liberty of adding my own,’ he said with a smile.69
Their chance meeting was the start of another great friendship. Like Julian Grenfell, Carpentier was a boxer, and he would go on to have considerable success as a heavyweight champion after the war. He and Philip shared a passion for flying, an activity that was exhilarating, increasingly effective as a weapon of war, but also extremely dangerous. Carpentier had won the Croix de Guerre for his war exploits as a pilot, a decoration that Sassoon, along with other members of Haig’s staff, had also received from the French commander Joseph Joffre during a visit to GHQ in 1916. Philip had not flown in combat, but used aeroplanes to travel between meetings, and marvelled that he could get from GHQ in Montreuil back to his home in Kent in just forty minutes.
It was as recently as 1909 that Louis Blériot had made the first Channel crossing in an aeroplane, and there were frequent crashes even for experienced pilots. Winston Churchill was also a great enthusiast; he would often fly out to the front from London and return to Westminster that same evening to give an update to the House of Commons based on what he had seen. He considered the air to be a ‘dangerous mistress. Once under its spell, most lovers are faithful to the end, which is not always old age.’70 In 1918, after his third plane crash, and the death of airmen in aircraft that he had previously piloted himself, Churchill gave in to the pressure from his family and friends to abandon his mistress. Philip, free from such domestic pressures, remained faithful to the air throughout his life, and not just because of its speed and convenience, but because in the skies he didn’t suffer from the motion sickness that made journeys by sea such an ordeal for him. Air travel also demonstrated just how close normal life was to the horrors of the Western Front. Folkestone was less than 100 miles from Ypres, and from his house at Lympne Philip could hear the guns during heavy artillery bombardments at the front.
Working alongside the high command gave Philip the opportunity to bring forward ideas of his own. One of these was encouraging famous artists to come and use their creative perspective to capture aspects of life at the front. He shared the idea with Northcliffe, who was excited by the prospect of these works capturing the everyday nobility and heroics of the men. Northcliffe credited himself with having conceived of it but praised Philip for making it happen. For Philip it was the perfect marriage of his military duties and his artistic instincts. He obtained permits for friends like John Singer Sargent and William Orpen to spend time in Belgium and France, with the freedom to paint whatever they chose. Sargent evoked a haunting beauty in his depiction of the ruins of the cathedral at Arras and great dignity in his tableau Gassed, which showed a line of men supporting each other after suffering the temporary blindness caused by a mustard-gas attack. In bad weather Philip fixed it for Sargent to tour the trenches in a tank, ‘looping the loop generally’.71 He also arranged for him to meet with Douglas Haig to show him some of his work, and was greatly entertained by the juxtaposition of these two strong if mildly eccentric personalities. Philip would recall that ‘Sargent cannot begin his sentences and starts them in the middle with a wave of his hand for the beginning, while Haig cannot finish his and often concludes with hand work instead of words. In consequence, the meeting between the two was quite amusing – a series of little pantomimes.’ He also remembered taking Haig to see a remarkable picture by Sargent showing a train full of men going up to the front at twilight. Haig looked at it intently for some time and then, turning to Sargent, remarked, ‘I see – one of our light railways,’ to which the artist just smiled back in response.72
William Orpen was one of the greatest portrait painters of the day; his 1916 painting of a haunted Winston Churchill after the failure of Gallipoli was Clementine’s favourite portrayal of her husband. He had also previously painted Philip Sassoon and his sister Sybil. Philip arranged for him to paint a number of the generals; in May 1917 he telephoned to invite him to paint the Chief and to come and meet him at an informal lunch at advanced HQ. Haig made a positive impression on Orpen. In the artist’s view:
Sir Douglas was a strong man, a true Northerner, well inside himself – no pose. It seemed it would be impossible to upset him, impossible to make him show any strong feeling and yet one felt he understood, knew all, and felt for all his men, and that he truly loved them; and I knew they loved him … when I started painting him he said ‘why waste your time painting me? Go and paint the men. They’re the fellows who are saving the world, and they’re getting killed every day.’73
Although Philip was increasingly confident in using his position to develop his personal networks, there was one man