Lives of the First World War

Among the ‘lost generation’ of the First World War, few shine as bright as Raymond Asquith, the Prime Minister’s eldest son. He had been president of the Oxford Union, and along with Lady Diana Manners and Duff Cooper, was part of the pre-war ‘coterie’ set of English socialites and intellectuals John Buchan even based one of his literary heroes on him, while Winston Churchill was to call him “my brilliant hero-friend”. Called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1904, Raymond chaffed against the boredom of much legal work and in 1913 was adopted as the Liberal candidate for Derby. When war was declared, however, everything was to change for him. Writing to Diana Manners in August 1914: “I went to a most amusing place call the National Service League Offices, where a vast swarm of well meaning and inefficient patriots are employed for 14 hours a day in first classifying and then rejecting the applications of a still vaster swarm of still more well meaning and inefficient patriots for posts which they are utterly and obviously incapable of filling” As with other young and not so young men – he was 36 when he enlisted in January 1915 – he tussled with his sense of duty. But unlike most other young men, he had access to the inner workings of the British war effort. On 18th August 1914, he wrote about Lord Kitchener: “K. of Chaos, as they call him, seems to be a sad mixture of gloom, ignorance and loquacity; says the war will last three years, had never heard of the Special Reserve, and can’t be persuaded in the Cabinet to give his mind to anything but Welsh Disestablishment on which he descants at inordinate length” In July 1915, Raymond transferred to the Grenadier Guards and in autumn of that year, was in France at the Front. While he would maintain a light-hearted and humorous tone in many of his letters home to his wife, the facts of trench warfare are never far from the surface. Towards the end of November 1915, he wrote: “I am, by the way, in what are called the trenches and have been for three or four days now . . . They are more uncomfortable and less dangerous that I had been led to expect. Waders are essential as the mud and water are well about the knee and the cold intense . . . An unpleasant feature is the vast number of rats which gnaw the dead bodies and then run about on one’s face . . . Bullets, as long as they don’t come in great numbers, are rather exciting than alarming; shells, I believe, can be terrifying, but so far only rather ill-aimed ones have come my way” As the Prime Minister’s son, he had other fights on his hands as well, with his father trying to pull him off the frontline in January 1916: “Summoned to GHQ whither I may proceed at any moment to do a little something – God knows what – among the bottle-washers and boot-boys of the staff. The PM, in disregard of a perfectly explicit order from me to take no steps in that direction, without my express permission, has tipped the wink to Haig, and here I am . . . “ His spell in the general staff was to last until May, but he was able to get back to his battalion in time for the Somme offensive. Not much had changed, with one exception, noted in a letter of 23rd May 1916: “One fearful addition to the honours of War since I have been away is the steel helmet which we all have to wear now when in the shell area. They are monstrously tiresome and heavy and I suppose if idiots . . . had not asked questions in parliament about them we should have been allowed to go on with our comfortable caps” Parliament would visit him at the Front as well – in early September in the shape of his father: “Two handsome motors from GHQ arrived, the PM in one of them with two staff officers, and in the other Bongie, Hankey [the Cabinet Secretary], and one or two of those moth-eaten nondescripts who hang about the corridors of Downing Street in the twilight region between the civil and domestic service. We went up to see some of the captured German dug-outs and just as we were arriving at our first objective, the Boches began putting over a few 4.2 shells from their field howitzer. The PM was not discomposed by this but the GHQ chauffeur . . . flung . . . himself flat on his belly in the mud. It was funny enough” Despite his father, despite the humour, Raymond’s story does not end happily. He wrote in his last letter to his wife on 12th September: “I am getting terribly tired of not being at home . . . But I must see out the fighting season. Tomorrow we shall move forward again, probably into the line. Angel, I send you all my love” Three days later, on 15th September, as his division advanced during the battle of Flers–Courcelette (an engagement remembered for the first use of the tank in warfare), Raymond was shot in the chest and died being carried back to British lines. Of the 22 officers from his battalion who participated in the attack, 17 would be killed or wounded.

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