Of meaner clay, who fight in clay) –
But on the Staff, the Upper Ten,fn1
Depends the issue of the day.
The Staff is working with its brains
While we are sitting in the trench;
The Staff the universe ordains
(Subject to Thee and General French).
God help the staff – especially
The young ones, many of them sprung
From our high aristocracy
Their task is hard, and they are young.
O Lord who mad’st all things to be
And madest some things very good
Please keep the extra ADC
From horrid scenes, and sights of blood.
See that his eggs are newly laid
Not tinged as some of them – with green
And let no nasty drafts invade
The windows of his limousine.
Julian Grenfell,
‘A Prayer for Those on the Staff’ (1915)1
The First World War thundered into the summer of 1914 from a clear blue sky. On the morning of 28 June the heir of the Emperor of Austria, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie, the Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated in Sarajevo by a young ‘Yugoslav nationalist’, Gavrilo Princip.fn2, 2 In thirty-seven days Europe went from peace to all-out war at 11 p.m. on 4 August. People at that hour had little comprehension of the magnitude of the decision that had been made, and how it would shatter the lives of millions of people.
Doom-mongers in the press and the authors of popular fiction had, however, been predicting war for years. The growing military rivalry between the powers and the ambition of Germany in particular, they believed, would inevitably lead to conflict. H. G. Wells, a friend and near neighbour of Philip Sassoon’s in Kent, had also made this prediction in his 1907 novel War in the Air.
As relations between the nations of Europe deteriorated in late July, people started to prepare for war. On 28 July, the day Austria declared war on Serbia, Philip Sassoon’s French Rothschild cousins sent a coded telegram to the London branch of their family asking them to sell ‘a vast quantity’ of bonds ‘for the French government and savings banks’. The London Rothschilds declined to act, claiming that the already nervous state of the financial markets would make this almost impossible, but they secretly shared the request with the Prime Minister, Asquith, who regarded it as an ‘ominous’ sign.3
On 3 August Philip Sassoon sat on the opposition benches of a packed House of Commons to listen to the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, update Parliament on the gravity of the situation in Europe. Britain stood ready to honour its commitments to the neutrality of Belgium, and to support France if it were to be the victim of an unprovoked attack. Sir Edward argued to cheers in the House that if a ‘foreign fleet came down the English Channel and bombarded and battered the undefended coasts of France, we could not stand aside and see this going on practically within sight of our eyes, with our arms folded, looking on dispassionately, doing nothing’. It was a scene that Philip could all too easily envisage, as it was one that might be observed standing on the terrace of his new house at Lympne. The prospect of a naval conflict near the Channel, and fighting on land, of the kind that the Foreign Secretary described would also place his own parliamentary constituency in south-east Kent almost exactly on the front line. For Britain to fight in defence of France, the home of his mother and where he had spent so much of his own life, would be for Philip a just cause.
His first thought following the outbreak of war was for the safety of his sister Sybil and her husband who were in Le Touquet, on the return journey from their honeymoon in India. They had stopped off there so that Rock could play in a polo match, but now there were reports of chaos at Channel ports like Boulogne, where people were trying desperately to get home. So Philip’s first act of the war was to dispatch his butler Frank Garton to France with a bag of gold sovereigns to ensure their safe passage home.
Conscription into the British army would not be introduced until 1916, but Philip was not faced with the dilemma of when or whether to volunteer for the armed forces. As an officer in the Royal East Kent Yeomanry reserve force, he received his mobilization orders the day following the declaration of war; Philip was one of seventy Members of Parliament who were called up in this way. There was no question of MPs who volunteered to fight being required to give up their seats. Philip believed that as a young man he was better placed to serve the interests of his constituents in wartime by joining up with the armed forces than by working in Westminster.
Philip’s Eton and Oxford friends, such as Patrick Shaw Stewart, Edward Horner and Charles Lister, volunteered. Julian Grenfell was already a professional soldier as a captain in the Royal Dragoons. Lawrence Jones, who also served as a cavalry officer, remembered that ‘whereas Julian went to war with high zest, thirsting for combat, and Charles with his habitual selflessness to a cause, Patrick had it all to lose … but knowing the risks, let go his hold of them and went cheerfully to war’.4
Philip also went cheerfully, and even as late as 1915 he wrote to Julian Grenfell’s mother Lady Desborough from France, telling her, ‘It is so splendid being out here. The weather is foul – the climate fouler and the country beyond words and nothing doing – but it is all rose coloured to me.’5 Philip did not have the swagger of a natural soldier. A fellow officer recalled walking into a French town with him when they met a young woman with bright-red hair. ‘Philip wishing to pay her a compliment said to her “vous avez de très jolies cheveux Mademoiselle”. But as he said it he tripped up over his silver spurs and fell on his face on the pavement.’6 Men like Julian Grenfell were, however, in their element at the front. Grenfell wrote to his mother, ‘I adore war. It is like a big picnic without the objectlessness of a picnic. I’ve never been so well or so happy. Nobody grumbles at one for being dirty. I’ve only had my boots off once in the last ten days; and only washed twice.’7
Philip did not join this band of brothers fighting at the front. He was held training with his regiment until February 1915, when he was transferred to St Omer to work as a staff officer at the headquarters of Field Marshal Sir John French, the Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force. The British were fighting in alliance with the forces of France along a united front, and so coordination and understanding between the commanders was a necessity. Philip Sassoon’s family and political connections in London and Paris, as well as his perfect command of the French language, made him an excellent choice to serve on the British staff.
The staff soon became the focus of resentment among the soldiers serving at the front. While the latter endured the mud, wet, cold and death in the trenches, the staff officers operated from headquarters based at French chateaux many miles behind the lines. In the Blackadder version of the history of the First World War, staff officers like Captain Darling are characterized as being rather arrogant and effete, leading a life of relative comfort and security. Similarly in the 1969 satire Oh! What a Lovely War the immaculately dressed staff officers play leapfrog at General Headquarters (GHQ) while the men die at the front. As the war went on the soldier poets came to curse the ‘incompetent swine’8 on the staff whom they blamed for the failures of military strategy, and Julian Grenfell in one of his poems went as far as to accuse some of the young officers of being too ‘green’ to fight.9
Yet many staff officers lost their lives during the war, and they were at risk from direct fire, particularly from enemy shells, both when they visited advanced positions closer to the front and on the occasions when they were targeted at GHQ itself. Philip worked long hours, but while the small wooden hut at GHQ that served as his personal quarters was not at all luxurious, it was not the trenches. It was a distinction he recognized, writing to Lady Desborough during a period of particularly bad weather, ‘I can’t imagine