arrival served as a symbolic boost to its inhabitants, who cheered as Andrea and Constantine, the first Christian king to set foot on Anatolian soil since the Crusades, marched through the streets. Like the crusading kings, Constantine expressed his desire to lead the Greek army into battle, although in reality he was to be no more than a figurehead.7
Andrea wrote despondent letters home about his own ill-equipped and inexperienced troops,8 although he insisted that the Greeks as a whole would triumph in the end.9 For a time his optimism seemed justified. With the Greek army sweeping all before it, the town of Kutahya, more than halfway towards Ankara, fell on 17 July. However, at this point the Turkish nationalist leader Mustapha Kemal (later better known as Atatürk) shrewdly withdrew his main army intact.10 Ankara now ‘beckoned like a mirage’ for the Greeks11 and their determination to capture it was to lure them into a treacherous wasteland and fatally overstretch their lines of communication. The consequences of their doomed venture dramatically changed the course of Andrea’s and his family’s life. But before Alice and the others on Corfu apprehended all this, they received sad news from England.
The summer of 1921 had been a happy one for Alice’s sixty-seven-year-old father, Louis, who had been delighted by the birth of his grandson, Philip. In July he had chaired a Royal Navy Club dinner and hundreds of his brother officers had flocked from all corners of the country to what was usually a sparsely attended event. When he stood up to answer the toast there was a roar of cheering that lasted nearly five minutes, which so affected him that he was barely able to murmur his thanks. A fortnight later he learned that the king had promoted him to the rank of Admiral of the Fleet on the retired list, an honour accorded only once before. In late August, Louis went up to Scotland, where his younger son Dickie, then twenty-one, was serving in the battle cruiser Repulse. The week he spent on board at the invitation of the captain was his longest spell at sea for many years and he thoroughly enjoyed it. However, during the last three days he suffered from a chill and when he returned to London, his wife Victoria sent him to bed and called a doctor. While she went off to a chemist’s to fetch the medicine that the doctor had prescribed, a maidservant came to collect Louis’ tea tray, and found him lying serenely back on his pillows with his eyes closed. Victoria returned to be tearfully told: ‘Oh dear, Ma’am, the Admiral is dead.’12
On hearing the news, Alice took Philip – who had thus been deprived of meeting the only one of his grandfathers still living at the time of his birth – over to England for the funeral. But they were still en route when Louis’ coffin was carried in a great military procession from the private chapel at Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey, with seven admirals and a major general of the Marines acting as pall-bearers. After the service he was taken by special train to Portsmouth and thence by destroyer to be buried on the Isle of Wight, where Alice and her son caught up with the rest of the family. Their first sight of three-month-old Philip was a welcome distraction for the mourners and Alice’s brothers took turns at cradling their future protégé in their arms. When they eventually got back to Corfu, Alice was surprised to find Andrea at home on leave, following an escalating series of disagreements with his commander-in-chief.
The auguries for Andrea had not been good ever since he had arrived at the front. In his account of the Greek campaign in Asia Minor, aptly entitled Towards Disaster, he later alleged that the deficiencies of his troops had been part of a republican ploy whereby his division ‘would suffer disasters, in which case I would have borne the responsibility’.13 To begin with his men had acquitted themselves surprisingly well, however, and in early August Andrea had been promoted to take command of the 2nd Army Corps. By this time, though, ‘all military prudence had vanished’, he wrote, and the ‘prevailing idea of GHQ was that the enemy no longer existed, and that an advance to Angora [Ankara] was only a military promenade’.14 Even after crossing the Anatolian Salt Desert and capturing the strategically important Kale Grotto range, Andrea felt that the victory had been Pyrrhic. They had very little ammunition left and still less food. The horses in his division were dying for lack of fodder and there was no firewood for his soldiers to cook with.15 Meanwhile the enemy had succeeded in withdrawing without any losses in prisoners or materiel.16
The Greek military plans, drawn up by one Major General Stratigos, seemed to Andrea to be wrongheaded and contradictory. On more than one occasion he had deemed it prudent to carry out an alternative manoeuvre to that prescribed by headquarters. Eventually, however, when, during the battle of Sakaria, he refused to obey an order to attack, fearing it would be disastrous, his commanding officer General Papoulas decided he had had enough: ‘The only person competent to judge and decide is myself as Commander-in-Chief,’ he barked.17 When Andrea then asked to be relieved of his command, the staunchly royalist general would not hear of it.18 However, as rumours about Andrea’s supposed ‘lack of fighting spirit’ began to spread through the Greek ranks, Papoulas eventually granted him three months’ leave, whereupon Andrea made his way straight to Corfu.
His spirits were temporarily lifted by seeing his son for the first time, but after two months he gloomily returned to Smyrna. From there, on New Year’s Day 1922, he wrote to his friend Ioannis Metaxas bemoaning the impossibility of the exhausted Greeks holding their defensive line. ‘Something must be done quickly to remove us from the nightmare of Asia Minor … we must stop bluffing and face the situation as it really is. Because finally which is better? – to fall into the sea or escape before we are ducked?’19
Andrea avoided the denouement he dreaded as he was posted in the spring to Janina in the province of Epirus in north-western Greece. On his way there, he spent Easter on Corfu, where Alice’s sister Louise and widowed mother Victoria had been helping to look after the children. The eldest, Margarita and Theodora, aged seventeen and sixteen, were ‘perfectly natural,’ wrote Victoria, ‘& Alice brings them up really well’.20 She thought that Cecile, nearly eleven, would ‘certainly be the prettiest of the lot’ while seven-year-old Tiny (Sophie) was ‘great fun’ and ‘the precious Philipp the image of Andrea’.21
Aged eleven months, Philip could ‘stand up alone now & sits with bare legs on the hard road & crawls on it without minding the stones. He is in fact as advanced & sturdy for his age as all the others were & has the same tow-coloured hair.’22 Aunt Louise reported that her little nephew ‘laughs all day long. I have never seen such a cheerful baby.’23
At the beginning of May, Alice accompanied Andrea to Janina and spent a couple of weeks there helping him to set up house.24 Shortly after returning to Mon Repos, she travelled with her children on to London for the wedding of her younger brother Dickie Mountbatten to Edwina Ashley, granddaughter and heiress of the fabulously wealthy Jewish financier Sir Ernest Cassel. Dickie and Edwina had met in October 1920 at a ball at Claridge’s, hosted by Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt, shortly after Dickie’s first love had broken off their engagement. Later that year they had been guests of the Sutherlands at Dunrobin Castle when Dickie received the news that his father had died. Within days Edwina’s grandfather was dead, too, and their shared bereavements brought them closer.
When, soon afterwards, Dickie travelled to India in the retinue of his cousin, the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII), Edwina joined him at the Viceregal Lodge in Delhi, where their courtship intensified beneath the disapproving gaze of the Viceroy’s wife, who, failing to foresee Dickie’s glittering future, hoped that Edwina would find someone ‘with more of a career before him’. At a St Valentine’s Day ball held by their hosts, Dickie asked Edwina to marry him and she said she would.25
The magnificent wedding took place on 18 July 1922 at St Margaret’s, Westminster, with the Prince of Wales as best man. The congregation included King George V and an assortment of royalty and nobility from across Europe. Philip’s sisters were all bridesmaids, although Philip himself was left behind in the nursery of Spencer House.
A month later, on 26 August, they were all still in London when, with a thunderous roar
