For many months the Prince lived at G.H.Q. He shared quarters with Lieutenant-Colonel S. L. Barry and Lord Claud Hamilton, and was a member of the Commander-in-Chief’s mess. Colonel Barry, a distinguished cavalry officer and a delightful companion, arranges the details of the Prince’s plans at the front, and his visits to different parts of our lines and to the French and Belgian Armies; while in Lord Claud Hamilton, the youngest brother of the Duke of Abercorn, who won the D.S.O. for gallantry while serving with his regiment, the Grenadier Guards, in the trenches, the Prince has a comrade of his own age.
With that gift of easy self-effacement which our Public Schools and ’Varsity inculcate, the Prince slipped without any apparent difficulty into his place in Sir John French’s small and intimate household at G.H.Q. All ceremonial was waived as far as the Prince was concerned, to his own great relief, and he was treated like any other officer of the personal Staff. Perfectly natural as he is, the Prince has small liking for the elaborations of Court etiquette in private life. He has shown that, at State functions, he can acquit himself with dignity, but excessive demonstrations of respect in private life embarrass him, for, first and last, he is English, as English in mind and manner as he is in appearance.
The Prince is English in his love of fresh air and hard exercise and bodily fitness. Anything gross and unwieldy and fat and slothful is repugnant to him. He takes a tremendous amount of exercise at the front. He is always in training. He eats and drinks very little. He thinks nothing of going for a run before breakfast, riding until luncheon, then walking ten miles or so, with a three-mile run home to finish up with. No doubt his intense mental alertness and energy, a positively Celtic quickness of temperament, have something to do with this love of physical exercise; but I believe it mainly springs from pride of body, the clean and sane and English desire to be perfectly healthy.
But the Prince of Wales is nothing of a prig or a faddist. He has arranged his life in this healthful way of his own initiative entirely, with a quiet decision that is rather surprising in a young man who has the world at his feet. But then the Prince of Wales knows his own mind, and acts, as far as he can, according to his own ideas. His manners are charming, he is quite unaffected and absolutely unspoilt, and he talks freely in a manner that betrays a strongly marked sense of humour.
Of fear, I think, he knows nothing. If he had had his way, he would be permanently in the firing-line. He has been with his Grenadiers in the trenches. He has been under shell-fire. But the experience did not suffice him. He wants to savour in person the perils and hardships which so many of his friends in the army (whom he regards with unconcealed and frankly expressed envy) are experiencing day after day. “I want to see a shell burst really close,” he said on one occasion. “I want to see what it is like.” Someone pointed out that a shell had burst over the headquarters in which he had been lunching that day. “I know,” he exclaimed quite wrathfully, “but I didn’t see it!”
When an engagement is on, as he cannot obviously be allowed to go to the firing-line (in the Flanders flats there is no chance of a close view of a battle with even a reasonable chance of safety from shell-fire), he sometimes visits a casualty clearing-station, where the wounded are being brought in. He goes round the stretchers while the doctors are examining the wounds, and talks freely with the men about their experiences. Many a wounded man sent down from the front has been taken to hospital in the Prince’s own car, with the Prince himself at the steering-wheel. Infinitely good-natured as he is, he is always doing good turns like this to casual people he meets on the road as he motors about between the armies in the execution of his duties.
The Prince is no shirker. Nor is he content with being given merely nominal tasks which he could scramble through anyhow if he pleased. Everything he does he does with all his heart, for he wants to play his part in this war, not from ostentation or personal ambition, but a sheer sense of duty. He follows the operations of the armies, both the French and the British, and makes his own maps. He keeps a diary of all he sees. If he cannot be present in person with the men in the front line, he is with them in spirit night and day, and follows their movements, their successes, and their mishaps, as closely as any officer of the General Staff.
His thoughts are often with the Fleet, in which he began his career. I believe the Prince had once hoped that he might have put to sea with Sir John Jellicoe, as his younger brother was privileged to do. His friends in the navy send him long letters full of the most amusing gossip about the “shows” they have been in, about their life at sea, about the adventures of old shipmates of the Prince. The Prince, who, like all real naval men, will talk naval “shop” for hours without ever being bored, devours these letters, and sometimes reads out extracts to his friends at G.H.Q.
When he was at G.H.Q. the Prince of Wales learnt all there was to know about the organization of the army. He visited in person all the different services at G.H.Q., the bathing-stations behind the front, the railheads, the ammunition-parks, the R.E. stores. He went down the lines of communication, and saw for himself the unloading and distribution of supplies. He inspected the hospitals at the base. He has been to see the French Army at work. He has paid many visits to the Belgian lines. In everything he has seen he has displayed the same intense interest, the same absorbing thirst for information.
He has done service with his own regiment, the Grenadier Guards, has lived with them in the trenches and in billets. If there is an officer with the British in the field to-day who knows what the army has accomplished, not only in the way of organized efficiency, but of uncomplaining endurance of hardships and danger, it is the Prince of Wales.