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

decorated army officer and poet Siegfried Sassoon. Siegfried was the grandson of S. D. Sassoon, the half-brother of Philip’s grandfather. While Philip was the principal male descendant of their great-grandfather David Sassoon, and the holder of the family’s baronetcy, Siegfried’s branch had become somewhat estranged from the rest of the Sassoon clan.^fn18 At that time the two cousins had never met,^fn19 but they had mutual friends, including the writer Osbert Sitwell and the painter Glyn Philpot. Philip had been an early patron of Philpot’s and, as already noted, had had his portrait painted by the artist in 1914. Philpot then painted Siegfried in June 1917, after the publication of his first volume of war poems, The Old Huntsman, had brought him to public attention. This was just before his statement calling for an end to the war was read out in the House of Commons, an episode that gave him even greater notoriety. His declaration would have come to the particular attention of Philip at GHQ, as Siegfried was not just some pacifist poet, but an officer who had been awarded the Military Cross for his bravery in battle. Siegfried’s fame grew in June 1918 when a second volume of his poems, Counter-Attack, was published. Lord Esher asked Philip, ‘By the way, who is Siegfried Sassoon? Tell me, and do not forget. He is a powerful satirist. Winston knows his last volume of poems by heart, and rolls them out on every possible occasion.’⁷⁴ Philip initially ignored Esher’s question but, when he wrote asking again, confirmed that Siegfried was a distant relation. Philip would have found the war poet’s work embarrassing, with its constant references to the bravery of the men, the brutality of the military commanders and the incompetence of their staff officers. One poem in particular that Churchill had committed to memory was ‘Song-Books of the War’, with its lines:

      And then he’ll speak of Haig’s last drive,

      Marvelling that any came alive

      Out of the shambles that men built

      And smashed to cleanse the world of guilt.

      Yet Siegfried was just as damning of the politicians as he was of the generals, exclaiming in his poem ‘Great Men’:

      You Marshals, gilt and red,

      You Ministers and Princes, and Great Men,

      Why can’t you keep your mouthings for the dead?

      Go round the simple cemeteries; and then

      Talk of our noble sacrifice and losses

      To the wooden crosses.

      The sacrifices had been great and the losses terrible. There was no doubt by 1918 that the world had grown weary of the war, but there was still no obvious end in sight. In early 1918 the British were instead bracing themselves for a massive German assault on their lines. The Russian Revolution of 1917 had heralded victory for the Germans on the Eastern Front, which would allow them to move large numbers of men and munitions over to France and Belgium. The United States had entered the war in support of the western Allies, but its troops were only just starting to arrive at the front. On 4 a.m. on 21 March, Operation Michael, the first phase of the great German spring offensive, or Kaiserschlacht (Kaiser’s Battle), was launched. Its objective was simple: to smash the British, drive them back to the sea and then force the French to surrender.

      Philip and GHQ would be in the firing line of the German attack and its significance was clear to him. As he wrote to Lord Esher after the offensive had started:

      This is the biggest attack in the history of warfare I would imagine. On the whole we were very satisfied with the first day. There is no doubt that they lost very heavily and we had always expected to give ground and our front line was held very lightly. We have had bad luck with the mist, because we have got the supremacy in the air, fine weather wd. have been in our favour … The situation is a very simple one. The enemy has fog, the men, and we haven’t. For two years Sir DH has been warning our friends at home of the critical condition of our manpower; but they have preferred to talk about Aleppo and indulge in mythical dreams about the Americans … We are fighting for our existence.^fn20, ⁷⁵

      The British were being driven back, but the Germans were sustaining heavy losses. Nevertheless, when the King visited GHQ on 29 March, Philip reflected to Esher that ‘This is the ninth day of the attack. It feels like nine years. There have been times in every day when one might have thought the game was up.’⁷⁶ Haig told the King of his concern that, while the British army had held up well, its position had been compromised by decisions made by the politicians. They were fighting a German army vastly superior in size with 100,000 fewer of their own men than the year before, and over a longer section of front line. This was a result of Lloyd George’s agreement that Britain would take over some sectors that had previously been held by the French. The following day Philip wrote to Esher again: ‘We have been promised 170,000 men from home of which 80,000 are leave men. The remainder will not fill our losses and then basta [i.e. ‘enough’, from the Spanish]. Nothing to fall back on. It is serious.’ ⁷⁷

      On the morning of 11 April, Haig was at his desk early, writing out in his own hand a special order for the day, which he gave to Philip with the instruction that it should be sent to all ranks of the British forces serving at the front. Two days earlier, the Germans had launched Operation Georgette, the second phase of the Kaiserschlacht, and there was no doubting that this was the critical moment of the war. Haig wrote:

      Many amongst us now are tired. To those I would say that Victory will belong to the side which holds out the longest. The French Army is moving rapidly and in great force to our support.

      There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.

      The lines held, and on 24 April the great offensive was halted by British and Australian forces in defence of Amiens. The Germans would launch a final attack in July, but essentially their forces were spent, and with the arrival of growing numbers of fresh American reinforcements, it would just be a matter of time before victory would be delivered.

      Philip came down with a dose of Spanish flu in July while on leave in London, and after resting made it to his home at Lympne for the weekend, before returning to GHQ. He was fortunate to have contracted a milder form of the virus that spread across the globe in a more virulent form in the autumn and winter of 1918–19. Over 200,000 people in Britain alone would be killed by the flu that claimed the lives of 50 million around the world.

      Following the summer successes against the Germans he allowed himself to start to look forward to peace. He wrote to his friend Alice Dudeney about Lympne, ‘It was lovely there. I do want to show it to you. I am on the lip of the world and gaze over the wide Pontine marshes that reflect the passing clouds like a mirror. The sea is just far enough off to be always smooth and blue.’⁷⁸

      At 4.20 a.m. on 8 August, having withstood all that the Germans could throw at them over the previous months, the Allies launched their own offensive. This campaign, known as the Hundred Days Offensive, commenced with the Battle of Amiens, which pushed the Germans away from their positions to the east of the town. Philip Sassoon was with Douglas Haig at advanced HQ, a train parked in the station at Wiry-au-Mont, about 40 miles west of the front line at Albert. The British broke through the lines, advancing 8 miles on what the German commander Erich Ludendorff called ‘the black day of the German army’.⁷⁹ Haig told his wife, ‘Who would have believed this possible even 2 months ago? How much easier it is to attack, than to stand and await the enemy’s attack!’⁸⁰ The Allied advance continued through the rest of the summer and by late September the Oberste Heeresleitung, the supreme German army council consisting of both the Chief of the General Staff Paul von Hindenburg and his deputy Ludendorff, told the government that the position on the Western Front was close to collapse. On 4 October the new German Chancellor Max von Baden approached the Allies with a view to agreeing an armistice to end the war, appealing in particular for the intervention of the American President, Woodrow Wilson, to act as an honest broker. As talks between the Allies and Germany continued, Philip travelled to London with Douglas Haig later that