King Edward VIII. Philip Ziegler

but his misery was too acute to conceal from his friends. Indeed, he was anxious to advertise it; he would have been less than human if he had not wanted everyone to know that he was eager to share the dangers of war and stayed behind against his will. How real those dangers were became rapidly apparent; by 2 November only six officers of his beloved 1st Battalion remained unwounded.

      He appealed to the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, and called on him with his father’s assistant private secretary, Clive Wigram. ‘He is now a gt fat bloated man,’ he wrote vengefully in his diary, who put forward what seemed to the Prince most unconvincing reasons for refusing him leave to return to the 1st Battalion, but held out vague hopes of his joining the staff of the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir John French, in a few months when the line had been stabilized. ‘A pretty rotten contrast to my gt wish,’ commented the Prince, adding grudgingly: ‘He is a rough customer but mighty strong, and is just the man to boss these politicians at such a time!!’¹⁴ The King told Esher that his son had argued that he was expendable; if he were killed there were four brothers to take his place. ‘What if you were not killed, but taken prisoner?’ Kitchener asked drily.¹⁵

      While eating his heart out in London with the 3rd Battalion of the Grenadiers – ‘strictly entre nous,’ he told Lady Glenusk, ‘there are not many really nice people in the 3rd Batt … The junior ensigns are a poor lot!!’¹⁶ – he made himself useful in other ways. Shortly before the outbreak of war he had become President of a National Fund for providing food for the poor, and had published an appeal in the daily papers. A quarter of a million pounds came in on the first day and within a week the total was more than £1 million. Most of the work was done by a Liberal member of parliament, Ernest Benn – future Lord Stansgate – whom the Prince judged ‘a nice, capable little man’.¹⁷ Public relations were entrusted to a Mr Pearson, who wanted the Prince to be painted by the military artist Caton Woodville at the head of his regiment, and the resultant poster to be exhibited on every available hoarding. This idea was quashed (as also was a still more eccentric suggestion that a certain celebrated music hall artist should be drawn in a cart to Trafalgar Square where he would delight the populace by playing patriotic airs on a piano with his nose).¹⁸ The King approved the principle of the Fund, but insisted that whatever publicity there was should stress that his son had nothing to do with its administration. Otherwise he foresaw the disgruntled poor blaming the Prince if their applications for relief were rejected.¹⁹ The Prince took the point and fully shared his father’s apprehension. All his life he disliked the role of patron, lending his name to some enterprise over which he had no real control. At the end of 1915 he became Chairman of the Statutory Committee of the Patriotic Fund, a body set up to concern itself with the care of sailors and soldiers who had suffered during the war. ‘Its work will, alas!, be carried into long years to come …’ explained Lord Stamfordham. ‘It will indeed be a vast machine of National Relief.’²⁰ Few projects could have appealed more strongly to the Prince, but after the inaugural meeting he still wrote gloomily: ‘It’s such a rotten show for me; just a mere figurehead with the name of P of Wales as usual!!’²¹

      Major Cadogan had rejoined his regiment when war broke out, and to help him with the Fund and his other duties the Prince persuaded Godfrey Thomas to take time off from the Foreign Office and join him as part-time equerry. His chief function, in Stamfordham’s eyes at any rate, was to persuade his master to eat more and take less exercise. Thomas tried dutifully but soon admitted defeat. He won the King’s confidence, however, and was held to be a healthy influence on his employer. Towards the end of 1914 he spent a weekend with the royal family at York Cottage. After dinner everyone sat around while the King, in big tortoiseshell spectacles, read extracts from the newspapers, ‘generally adding explosive comments about the Germans’. When the Queen and Princess Mary had gone to bed, the party adjourned to the billiard room, where the Prince of Wales and Prince Albert played while the King read his telegrams. Next day they went for a long walk. On the way back they met the epileptic Prince John and his nurse. ‘The Prince of Wales took him for a run in a kind of push-cart he had, and they both disappeared from view.’²²

      The Prince’s initial distaste for the idea of a job on French’s staff lessened as other possibilities faded, and when the King finally told him the time had come he was ecstatic: ‘This seems almost too good to be true, for once across the Channel lots of things are possible.’²³ Stamfordham told French that the King wanted his son ‘to gain practical experience of the vast machinery employed in the conduct of a Campaign’. He was to be attached to the various sections of the headquarters and to attend talks with the Chief of Staff – ‘You will find him an attentive, silent listener, absolutely reticent and discreet.’²⁴ This was not at all how the Prince saw his future, and Thomas observed that he was in a notably bad temper when he had to put aside his normal regimental kit and don the staff uniform with red tabs and cap to match;²⁵ but he comforted himself with the thought that once in France it would surely be possible to get to the front. The most serious danger seemed to be that the fighting would be over before he could be in the thick of it. His comments on the progress of the war were resolutely optimistic. ‘Those bloody Germans are fairly getting it in the neck and no mistake,’ he told Jack Lawrence on 20 August,²⁶ and a month later assured his aunt Alice: ‘It really looks as if the allies were getting a proper grip of the situation and that the German downfall has commenced.’²⁷

      With the declaration of war the Germans had become unequivocally ‘bloody’, guilty of ‘savage barbarism’²⁸ and ‘infamous conduct’; ‘As for the Emperor’s conduct, words fail me!!’²⁹ When words did fail him, he filled the gap with obscenities. Writing after gas had just been used he told his friend Houston-Boswell: ‘One can’t be surprised at anything those German buggers do. One really can’t believe we are fighting European christians … I am a great advocate of the principle of taking no prisoners or as few as possible!!’³⁰ Godfrey Thomas commented on the Prince’s propensity at this time to use bad language and tell filthy stories: ‘It is a phase that most people go through at their public school and I hope that it has merely come a bit late in his case and that he’ll soon get out of it.’³¹ He did, but in the years that followed his escape from the Palace he felt bound to emphasize his independence by larding his diary and letters to his contemporaries with the more conventional expletives.^*3

      The Prince’s arrival in France, General Lambton told the King, had given universal pleasure: ‘I will try to keep him well occupied and as far from shells as possible.’³² In this sentence were encapsulated the Prince’s two principal causes for woe over the next eighteen months – indeed, for the duration of the war; he was kept far from shells, he was not well occupied. The latter was not the fault of French or Lambton. A stray and untrained second lieutenant in supreme headquarters will inevitably be at a loose end and overworked senior officers cannot always be inventing tasks for him. If he had not been the Prince of Wales he might have been of modest use at the most menial level; if he had possessed a forceful personality and administrative skills he might have worked himself into a position unjustified by his rank; but he was the Prince, he was far from forceful, his skills were limited. ‘It’s a pretty rotten life for me,’ he complained to Thomas. ‘I feel I’m the only man out here without a job, and it’s true; thus I am but an onlooker in uniform, and become less like an officer every day.’³³ To have been an orthodox ADC to French would at least have involved regular duties, but the King felt it was improper for the Prince of Wales to act in such a role.³⁴ Instead he was in attendance but with no real function: ‘I merely sloped along astern, looking a bloody fool and very much in the way.’³⁵

      Occasionally he was given some proper work to do. Once he was allowed to use his German in the interrogation of prisoners. The peasants were the most ready to talk, and, even if taciturn originally, could usually be persuaded to tell all they knew by a show of amazement at their ignorance. The more educated prisoners he found ‘all lie, and one can’t blame them’. In such a case the approved technique was to give the prisoner a good meal with plenty of wine. This loosened his tongue. ‘Rather a beastly idea, perhaps, but still it is necessary.’³⁶ He hoped that similar work would follow, but it