mate and severely bitten in the leg. The wound was quickly cleaned and dressed but after two days a fever set in. Three weeks after that the king died from blood poisoning, aged twenty-six, leaving a young and beautiful widow, Aspasia, who was five months pregnant with their daughter Alexandra, Philip’s cousin, childhood friend and future biographer.
Winston Churchill later remarked that it was perhaps no exaggeration to say that ‘a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey’s bite’ – an allusion to Greece’s subsequent military campaign in Turkey, which was led by Alexander’s father Constantine, who returned to the throne after his son’s death. In the lead-up to this latest adventure, fearing Italian encroachment in the region, the Allies had agreed to the landing of Greek troops in Smyrna (now Izmir, on the west coast of Turkey), the wealthiest of Ottoman cities and the embodiment of that empire’s reputation for cosmopolitanism and religious tolerance. Smyrna had more Greek inhabitants than Athens and had been a long-cherished objective of Greek nationalists. In June 1920 the Greeks had advanced further into Turkish territory and in August, under the Treaty of Sèvres, they had gained Thrace while their administration of Smyrna and its hinterland had been extended for a further five years – after which the region was to be annexed if the local parliament so decided. Venizelos’s supporters boasted of having created a Greece of ‘the two continents and of the five seas’.
After King Alexander’s death, his younger brother Paul was invited by Venizelos to assume the throne, but he refused on the grounds that his father and elder brother had never renounced their prior rights. Venizelos then called a general election in November 1920 in which he offered the Greek people the freedom to vote for the restoration to the throne of Alexander’s father, the exiled King Constantine. To the amazement and dismay of virtually all foreign observers they did so, decisively removing Venizelos and his government from office in the process.
Andrea, by now balding and wearing a monocle, was at last able to return to Greece from Rome with his family. On arrival at Phaleron Bay he and his brother Christopher were ‘borne on the shoulders of the populace, frenzied with joy’ all the way to Athens, so Alice recorded, and he was then required to make a speech from the balcony of the royal palace ‘to the vast crowds gathered below’.49 A month later, on 19 December, King Constantine returned from exile to the throne amid much Greek rejoicing – although the Allies refused to recognize him.
Having previously criticized the campaign in Turkey, once in power it soon became clear that the new royalist government now planned to continue it with a spectacular offensive eastwards from occupied Smyrna towards the towns of Kutahya and Eski Shehir in the heart of Anatolia. ‘The morale of the army, its spirit and its certainty of success are high,’ wrote King Constantine. ‘God grant that we may not suffer disappointment! It will be a very hard struggle, which will cost us enormous sacrifices; but what a triumph if we win!’50 Andrea returned to the Greek army in the rank of major general and after years of depressing inactivity he was raring to go.
THREE
Boy’s Own Story
Alice had by this time just become pregnant again. When she told her parents the news three months later, in February, she was reposing at Mon Repos, the Regency villa on the island of Corfu that Andrea had inherited from his father. Originally built for the British high commissioner, the house stood in grounds scented with eucalyptus and cypress, looking out across the Ionian Sea towards Albania and northern Greece.
Unoccupied during their three years away from Greece, it was sparsely furnished and almost entirely lacking in modern comforts – there was still no electricity or gas or running hot water or central heating – however, after the traumas of the past few years, its seclusion made it the ideal place for Alice to await the birth of her fifth child. Andrea had remained in Athens, imploring the military authorities to give him a command in Turkey, but Alice had their four daughters with her, along with a Greek cook and cleaner, an English couple who acted as housekeeper and handyman, and an elderly English nanny, Miss Roose, who had once nursed Alice herself and now ordered in stocks of baby foods and clothes from London1 in anticipation of the new arrival, which everyone was hoping would be the longed-for boy.2
Alice went into labour on 10 June 1921 and was taken by the Corfiot doctor to the dining-room table, which he deemed the most suitable place in the house for this thirty-six-year-old princess to give birth. At 10 a.m., a baby boy was delivered. Registered in nearby Corfu Town under the name of Philippos, he was sixth in line to the Greek throne.
‘He is a splendid, healthy child, thank God,’ Alice wrote three weeks later to her aunt Onor3 at Darmstadt. ‘I am very well too. It was an easy delivery & I am now enjoying the pleasant fresh sea air on the chaise-longue on the terrace.’ In Andrea’s absence, she had to answer the ‘piles of telegrams’ herself, dictating three to four letters a day.4 The housekeeper Agnes Blower later recalled Philip as ‘the sweetest prettiest baby’ with a healthy appetite. When he was a little older, she prudently ‘put a stop to his being fed on those messy foreign dishes which the Greek cook concocted’ and instead made him ‘nourishing rice and tapioca puddings and good wholesome Scots porridge’.5
Andrea would have to wait several months before he saw his son. Having at last been given the command of a division, he had left Athens for Smyrna the day before Philip’s birth, accompanying his brother, King Constantine, who had placed himself at the head of his troops.6 Cut off from Greece, the once great city of Smyrna had fallen into decline and their 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.