‘Another World: 1897-1917’ by Anthony Eden

Fifty years ago this month in May 1976 the former Prime Minister Anthony Eden (Lord Avon) published this little book of memoirs. He was at this time gravely ill with a range of conditions, and would die a few months later in January 1977. The book seems to me to have an unfinished quality. He had by this time already published three substantial volumes of autobiography:

· ‘Full Circle’ (1960), which covers his time as Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister in the 1950s

· ‘Facing the Dictators’ (1962) which focuses on his early career in government and first spell as Foreign Secretary in the 1930s

· ‘The Reckoning’ (1965) which deals with the second world war when he was, again Foreign Secretary.

I think possibly that this late and much briefer addition was originally intended to be a much fuller and more extensive account of his early years, but that he became to weary and sick to see it through to completion. The detailed account finishes very abruptly in 1917 well before his First World War experience had ended, with just a few further paragraphs tacked on right at the end explaining that he was demobbed in 1919 and that he ‘emerged tempered by my experience, but with my illusions intact, neither shattered nor cynical, to face a changed world.’

In fact the whole book feels like it is something of a draft, particularly in respect of his childhood, where we get shortish chapters of impressions and specific memories rather than a full, clear account.

The first half is, in truth, a touch tedious to read at times, being a rather familiar kind of tale of a privileged upbringing in a large family with a country house and a second London home, followed by boarding schools (including Eton inevitably). The literary connections that Anthony Eden’s parents fostered with the likes of G.E. Moore, Max Beerbohm and Walter Sickert are of some interest, but he holds back from giving much by way of an appraisal. The account is entirely descriptive, containing extracts from letters - no full portrait of either parent is attempted – and he says little about his achievements at school which were in fact significant. He was an outstanding linguist.

The suddenly, half way through, the book explodes into life, turning into a fascinating and valuable personal memoir of its author’s time as an adjutant in the First World War. He was thrust into the middle of the fighting very quickly after leaving school, joining a ‘hastily recruited battalion’ mainly made up of young men from his home county of Durham which headed off to the Somme in 1916. This appalling experience is described in some detail as is the later Battle of Ypres. The book ends before he is able to give an account of the Spring Offensive in 1918 when famously he and Adolf Hitler were assigned to trenches just a short distance from one another.

The whole experience is recounted in a pretty matter of fact manner, and is I think all the more powerful as a result. There is no political agenda. He neither laments the fact that he had to fight in this dreadful and largely unnecessary war, nor does he in any way celebrate anything about it, including ultimate victory. There is no analysis at all. He just sets out what he remembers about it coolly and unsentimentally:

In March 1916 Nicholas came home to Windlestone, already a hospital, for his final leave before going to sea and I was given a pass for forty-eight hours to join him for part of it. Though outwardly as gay and cheerful as ever, I had no doubt that Nicholas had found war-time Dartmouth hard going. Though he was without fear about the war or the enemy, I suspect he was not so confident about his immediate superiors in his new life. As the two youngest, Nicholas and I were very close. It was impossible not to love the boy…… He was a favourite with all about at Windlestone and I was devoted to him….. He asked when I had to be on parade; I replied Monday at 7.30 am …. Why then could I not take a later train, reach London about midnight and catch the milk train to Aldershot? …. I longed to say yes and to spend a few more hours with him …. but something held me back. I told Nicholas that the colonel had been good to me in giving me this pass. We knew that we were soon going to France and leave was hard to get. I just could not break my pass. Nicholas at once accepted this and we had our last talk together. Frever afterwards, Nicholas was a memory.

In fact, both Anthony Eden’s brothers were killed in the war, while his brother-in-law was seriously wounded. He was himself very lucky to survive as he makes clear by detailing several occasions in which he literally dodged bullets (and worse) by a few feet or because he was simply posted somewhere else at just the right time.

In this book simply describes his own actual experience of fighting in the war without providing any comment or wider analysis. He explains the pivotal role that horses played, as well as the arrival of primitive tanks, and the endless pointless inspections of kit and uniform. There were, of course, days when he and his men experienced appalling hardship and danger, but many more taken up with tedious training exercises and others filled with extraordinary boredom associated with spending long winter months holed up in trenches achieving nothing. He writes about the rats that made their lives even worse than it might otherwise have been, the revolting gas masks they had to wear, the mud, the shortage of sleep and a myriad of communication problems:

There was so much waiting in the trenches. Waiting through the hour before dawn for stand-down, waiting for the battalion which was to relieve us, witing for rations and for letters, waiting for leave, or the blighty wound, or …..

There are many passages praising the character and bravery of his fellow soldiers, and particularly those senior officers who he came to admire and learn from. He prefers to write about to brass who he admired and enjoyed working for - notably Gerald Foljambe (who would later somewhat unexpectedly become Earl of Liverpool) - but while he avoids mentioning their names, it is clear that others were held in general contempt and for good reasons.

About his own achievements, he says little. While he describes an incident in which a fellow soldier’s life was saved when he helped to recover his badly injured body from no-man’s land during the Battle of the Somme, he says nothing at all about the fact that he won an MC for immense bravery as a result of this episode.

I don’t think this is false modesty. Instead, from the perspective of sixty years, it just seemed to him trivial in the scheme of things. He felt no pride about the Somme, just immense sadness:

What added personally to this numbing sense of shock was that several victims of this shambles had been working with me for two years since we had joined up together. Almost all of them had been my daily companions and associates for the nine months since I had been appointed adjutant. I had grown to know them well and to respect them enormously. It is not enough to write that they had never failed in what they had been asked to do; they had so often done more than I could have expected of them. We had become so much a pattern, dovetailed into each other’s work, that the survivors felt deeply sad and bereft as if they had lost a limb. War promoted working together into something true and rare, the like of which was never to be met in civil life. It was our compensation, but this time it was not enough.

For me the most poignant passage was where he describes an attack that was successful, in that his brigade managed to achieve their objectives and seize some ground, albeit suffering many casualties in the process, only to find at the end of the day that they were just back in the same trenches they had vacated several months previously.

This may be an unfinished fragment of a much longer book that never got written, but I am very glad that Anthony Eden published it and even more glad to have read it.