The idea that historic events can shape generations is not new: historians such as Roy Foster or Michael Wildt have applied generation as an investigative paradigm to topics as diverse as the Irish decade of revolution of 1912-23 or to Nazi bureaucrats.1 Yet looking at how the First World War had a generational impact on British politics has been largely neglected. The life of Anthony Eden offers a clear case study as to how revealing such an approach might be, epitomising a whole generation of British politicians for whom the First World War was formative. Indeed, Anthony Eden’s biographer D. Richard Thorpe notes that “For Eden, the Great War was the Rome of the twentieth century. All roads led to it and all roads led from it.”2

Eden’s war experience was extensive and formative. In September 1915, Eden, who came from an aristocratic, privileged background, was a war volunteer, commissioned as a temporary Lieutenant, straight from school. He was just 18 years old. Within months, he saw service on the Western Front in France. In June 1917, he won the Military Cross for rescuing his wounded platoon sergeant Bert Harrop from No-Man’s-Land. Eden spent his twentieth birthday fighting for forty-eight hours at Messines in a push in which hundreds of men were killed.3 The First World War was the absolutely foundational experience of the man who would go on to be British Foreign Secretary three times and later Prime Minister from 1955-57. Eden famously resigned as Foreign Secretary in opposition to appeasement in 1938, before returning to the office in the Second World War: he would spend five years as Winston Churchill’s Foreign Secretary during that conflict. Eden would ultimately see his career as Prime Minister end in ignominy when he supported using military force as a response to the Suez Crisis in 1956. This article explores how the First World War proved a lifelong influence on Eden, looking at its effects on his emotional identity, his political generation and his views of international and domestic politics.

The 1914-1918 conflict defined Anthony Eden’s emotional instincts for the rest of his life. Eden suffered a series of terrible personal losses in the First World War. His eldest brother, Jack, was killed at the front in October 1914. His younger brother Nicholas, who he adored, was killed, aged just 16, when his ship, The Indefatigable, sank at the battle of Jutland in May 1916. The death came as an immense shock to Eden, destroying his wartime emotional coping strategy of denial of personal risk and his sense of individual security: “Of course I knew that Nicholas ran some risks, but I never doubted for a moment that he would come through all right.”4 As historian Alexander Watson has shown, overestimating one’s own personal survival chances in the First World War was a key coping strategy for soldiers; Nicholas’s death destroyed this for Eden.5 Eden would write in later life of how “as the two youngest Nicholas and I were very close” and of how “for as long as I could remember we had shared everything […] we preferred each other’s company to any other in the world.”6 Eden also felt guilt in the wake of Nicholas’s death. Nicholas had asked Eden, during what would turn out to be their last meeting while on leave, to take a later train back to re-join his unit so that they could spend more time together.7 Eden, however, had felt he owed it to his colonel not to “break” his leave pass and wrote of how “forever afterwards Nicholas was a memory,” suggesting a constant underlying sense of regret at this decision.8 Eden also hinted in his memoirs of a sense that Nicholas’s death was a waste: “At the battle of Jutland he was just sixteen. It was considered in those days a suitable age for a midshipman, not only to go into battle, but to be in command of able seamen. In charge of his gun turret at the Battle of Jutland, Nicholas had no chance to prove his worth.”9 There is a sense here of criticism of the practices of “those days” in sending such young boys into battle and of the waste of Nicholas’s talents – the fact that he did not stand a chance when his ship went down. Poignantly Eden would name his youngest son Nicholas when he was born in 1930, although he agonised over the decision. He had rejected the name for his firstborn in 1924, lest the name bring “bad luck,” an indication of his ongoing emotional turmoil over Nicholas’s death.10

Eden’s only surviving brother, Tim, was an internee at Ruhleben camp in Germany during the First World War. His brother-in-law was wounded at the front. His uncle, in the RAF, was shot down and spent the rest of the war as a German POW. Eden also witnessed the battlefield death of friends: his commander and friend, the Earl of Feversham, was killed in battle and Eden went out to find his body, a highly risky act. He retrieved it and took Feversham’s ring and locket off the body and sent them to the Earl’s wife, who was the sister of Eden’s brother-in-law. Reg Park, Eden’s sergeant and friend, was killed in a direct hit in 1916 just weeks after Nicholas had died.11 Eden, who retrieved and buried Reg Park’s body, described his death as a moment when “I lost a friend I have never forgotten.”12 In total, 72 of Eden’s prep school contemporaries died in the war. 30% of his age cohort at Eton were also killed in it.13 His home at Windlestone became a war convalescent hospital. His sister became a war nurse. Eden never took life for granted again after the 1914-1918 conflict. For all his later political charm, insouciance and daring, after the First World War he lived with a constant underlying sense of the insecurity and jeopardy of human life and the proximity of death. He was also known in his later political career for having a volatile temperament and to be highly strung, perhaps linked to the intense stress of his wartime combat roles and the emotional effort that it took to repress the traumatic events he had seen and lived through, in order to present to the world his carefully constructed, self-contained, insouciant demeanour of the brave, always emotionally self-controlled, Great War veteran.

Among other combat experiences, Eden fought at the battle of the Somme and at the battle of Messines (Passchendaele), and in several actions he took part in, in both battles, his companies suffered very heavy losses. He described how on 16^th September 1916, after terrible losses for his C Company on the Somme “it fell to me to call the roll” and how “after each silence, and there were so many, I had to ask who had last seen Sergeant Carmichael, or Rifleman Hunter, or whoever it might be, and enter what scraps of information we might gather.”14 The experience was deeply upsetting: “it would not have been so bad if we had not known each other so well, but after anything up to a year of living and training together, we were friends.”15 Recounting an experience of being on leave in England and looking at his family’s lands with his father, Eden wrote of how, despite his “joy at being home again, when I stood at the ha-ha and looked across to the elm tree my father had painted so often, and beyond to the rolling countryside, I wondered if ever again I could see them free from the memory of those other, shell-torn trees, twisted wire and heaped and silent bodies.”16 A letter to his mother in 1916 after the battle of Flers-Courcelette described how he had “seen things lately that I am not likely to forget.”17 The scale of death Eden witnessed was such that he wrote of how “To be killed did not seem all that bad. After Jack and Nicholas […] and so many young friends, perhaps it was that death in battle seemed if not normal at least acceptable . . . but at least many had gone that way before and it did not seem a business to make such a fuss about, especially if it was quick and with little suffering.”18 In contrast Eden felt an intense fear of being mutilated, having a “dread of the loss of limbs or other mutilation for life.”19 As the sociologist Michael Roper has found, such fears of physical evisceration, in particular of lost limbs or stomach wounds, were commonplace among soldiers in the trenches as was fatalism.20 One of Eden’s coping mechanisms before battle was to pray “Please God if I am to be hit let me be slightly wounded or killed, but not mutilated.”21 By 1917 he wrote to his sister Marjorie on hearing “another burst of shell” that “I shall be glad when I never hear another of their beastly shrieks or see another burst.”22

Eden’s personal efforts to work through the emotional burden of his war experience were life-long. In the Great War’s immediate aftermath Eden wrote fictional short stories for “cathartic relief,” including one entirely on the war itself.23 According to his biographer Richard Thorpe “one of the events he remembered most about his first Oxford University Michaelmas Term of 1919 was the inaugural Armistice Day on 11 November and the two-minute silence.”24 A year before Eden died, in 1976, he published a volume of memoirs largely on his First World War experiences, Another World, 1897-1917; this volume was separate from the three volumes of memoirs of his political career that he had published in the early 1960s and was much more personal.25 Eden’s mother wrote after the war of how the war had “deprived” Eden “of all youthful ideas & thoughts & made him prematurely old & and given him a narrow staff-office aspect of Life.”26 She felt he now needed help to “learn to un-bend.”27 Her comments suggest a young man who had deeply repressed his emotions and who buried his war fears in an earnest mission to improve the world through politics, similar to other war veterans such as René Cassin in France.28 A history of emotions approach to Eden here opens up new ways of interpreting the war’s impact – his ongoing sense of survivor’s guilt and of constant need to live up to the sacrifice of those who died is evident throughout his life and his political beliefs.29

In this Eden was not alone. Eden also shared difficult memories of the First World War with many of his political contemporaries in Britain and he typifies a wider generation of war-scarred British political figures. The First World War shaped an entire political cohort. Harold Macmillan, who would replace Eden as Conservative Prime Minister after the Suez Crisis, was wounded on three occasions in the Great War, including being badly injured at the battle of Flers-Courcelette, in which Eden also fought. Macmillan endured constant pain and partial disability for the rest of his life as a result. Macmillan refused to return to Oxford University after the war to complete his studies because so many of his Oxford cohort had fallen in the conflict. Clement Attlee, the first Labour Prime Minister after the Second World War, had fought as an officer at Gallipoli and in 1918 on the Western Front and had been badly wounded in the campaign in Mesopotamia in 1916. Attlee’s brother was a conscientious objector, who spent much of the First World War in prison for his refusal to serve, leading to a deep rift between the two siblings. Winston Churchill, British Second World War Prime Minister, had briefly held a First World War infantry command position on the Western Front. Moreover, the war’s impact was not only on the generation of combatants who later became politicians but also on the generation of politician fathers who were bereaved by the conflict. Andrew Bonar Law, who became Conservative Prime Minister in autumn 1922, lost two sons in the war: in its aftermath he visited an airfield and wept for two hours while sitting in a plane cockpit similar to the one his son had died in.30 British Prime Minister in 1916, Herbert Asquith, was unable to make political decisions after the death of his beloved son Raymond on the Western Front in September 1916; Asquith was rapidly ousted by the end of the year as his grief impaired his work.

Indeed, the war’s impact on British politicians was profound. For each of the 23 years between 1940 and 1963, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was a man who had seen active service in the First World War. The war left many of these men with a sense of, as Macmillan put it, “an obligation to make some decent use of life that had been spared to us.”31 It also left them with a belief that it was important to maintain a sense of national unity and to avoid political radicalisation and polarisation of the kind that might lead to war on both the domestic and international fronts. Yet were the British politicians, who had been Great War combatants, all conformists, as Simon Ball argues – men who would have become politicians anyway and whose life choices and trajectories were not really dramatically changed by the conflict?32 Ball contends that these politicians had all been war volunteers and he describes them as:

“the ‘regulars’ who emerged from the War with their faith in British society, British institutions, British people, not only intact but also strengthened. […] who deliberately pushed solidarity into the foreground. […] exactly the ambitious, hard-working, pragmatic, types who were always attracted to politics. For them the War was the ‘good war’ that confirmed them in their course.”33

It is true that the war advanced some of these men’s careers. Yet Ball’s judgement neglects the huge emotional cost that they carried in its aftermath, the stress of traumatic memories and war fears that burdened and drove them and that determined their politics towards making and sustaining peace and international order.

Indeed, the wider question that arises is why, in British politics, the future political leaders that the war produced were to prove so wedded to the idea of diligent, self-sacrificing public service and to an obligation to pay back society in return for their survival, men with an intense fear of radical politics and abhorrence of violence, including both war and domestic political violence, and a devotion to democratic ideals. This contrasts dramatically with the rise of the war veteran leader on the continent, men like Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini or Miklos Horthy. We still know too little about why the war created such a different outcome in the British political environment; victory was surely a factor but so too, it seems, was the fact that so many of these later British veteran leaders had chosen to fight – they already valued British democracy enough to volunteer to go to the Western Front to defend it before Britain introduced conscription in 1916. Is it any surprise then, that in the war’s aftermath, they sought to protect democratic values further? In this regard, Ball is correct, that this generation’s positive belief in democracy was long fixed before their Great War experiences. However, there is an element of contingent process here too which must be considered. The interwar United Kingdom proved very politically stable (with the exclusion of Ireland where significant violence broke out) in comparison with its continental peers.34 With the exception of the 1926 General Strike, the island of Britain largely avoided the drama of continental interwar political volatility. Yet was it this environmental stability that created war veterans who were politically centrist and dedicated to public service rather than aspirational authoritarians? Or, did the fact that so many young veterans, like Eden, Attlee and Macmillan, sharing common beliefs about what the war had meant and the lessons it had taught them about valuing social solidarity and democracy, entered politics, itself actually contribute to establishing and sustaining this post-war stability? Their individual choices and impact should not be neglected in the fact that a stable British interwar political environment ever developed at all.

The First World War left a lifelong legacy both personal and political for Eden that impacted all his political decisions. In a 1918 letter to his sister immediately recounting his experience of the Armistice, Eden wrote that he was thinking of standing for parliament – the first time he revealed this, an unexpected decision as he had been thinking of being a diplomat or a career officer.35 It was the war that had inspired him to change direction and become a political leader. The war also helped him to get elected: he ran as Captain Eden initially in the postwar era.36 The war determined Eden in his early political career to work constantly for a peaceful international order. In the 1920s Eden supported the League of Nations, and later he would help found the United Nations. Eden was Minister for the League of Nations and Lord Privy Seal from December 1933 to June 1935, a position that involved supporting the importance of the League and its aspirations for avoiding future war in Europe. He strongly believed in the League’s values and mission.37 In the 1930s, he opposed intervention in the Spanish Civil War.38 After 1918, Eden was always outward looking, constantly watching foreign affairs for the next potential war danger or threat to peace. He was fluent in French and German and chose to study Arabic and Persian at Christ Church Oxford after the First World War.39 He frequently viewed aspects of the Second World War through the prism of the First: when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain invited him back into the cabinet at the outbreak of the Second World War as Secretary of State for the Dominions, (a lesser role than Foreign Secretary – the office Eden had previously held before resigning in protest at appeasement), Eden accepted, as he wrote in a letter that:

“I have accepted Dominions with many doubts and regrets […]. I am not officially in War Cabinet but in fact I am because I can attend & take part in discussions whenever I wish, on the analogy of Balfour in War Cabinet when For. Sec. in first war.”40

At the 1945 San Francisco Conference which aimed to draft the charter for a new international security organisation – the United Nations – Eden was haunted by what he described as “the lost opportunity at the end of the last World War.”41 Upon Eden’s death in 1977, the then British Prime Minister James Callaghan told the House of Commons that:

“There is little doubt that his personal experience and knowledge of the horrors of the First World War influenced him very considerably. He had lost two of his brothers during the First World War, one in the Army, the other in the Navy. […] He became a resolute believer in the need for collective security to face and deter aggression and a strong supporter of the covenant of the League of Nations. It was his work at the League of Nations which first brought him to public notice, and his stand captured the imagination of the public. He seemed to be a voice speaking out for truth, decency and honour. He was young, he spoke up clearly, he stood for the principles of the League of Nations and the covenant, and he opposed the growing menace of Mussolini and Hitler.”42

The First World War was not just a biographical footnote for Eden: it shaped his entire political outlook on international and domestic politics for the rest of his life.

Eden’s biographer, Thorpe, even suggests that the modern British version of “one nation Conservatism” came directly from Eden and his Conservative contemporary Harold Macmillan’s First World War experiences and encounters with working-class men.43 Eden formed close, lifelong friendships with working-class men he served with. As Prime Minister, when visiting Queen Elizabeth at Balmoral, Eden always also visited a veteran survivor of Passchendaele living nearby. In 1938, just before Eden resigned in protest at the British policy of appeasement of Germany, he exchanged letters with his friend, sergeant Harrop, whose life he had saved on the battlefield in August 1916, when Harrop was wounded during a raid and Eden got a stretcher bearer for him and helped stretcher him back – in considerable danger – to his trench. Eden always kept a golden pen knife Harrop later gave him, on his desk and regularly wrote to him.44 The war experience from 1914-1918 clearly was a continuous backdrop to Eden’s later political decision-making, including in 1938 on appeasement. The relationship between Eden and his former working-class comrades was also reciprocal. After the war, when the aristocrat and patrician Eden was running for parliament in Spennymoor, an industrial, impoverished, volatile town in county Durham, a working-class rifleman who had served with him at the front turned up unexpectedly to an eve of poll meeting, having travelled some distance to be there, because “the truth is I heard things might be a bit rough tonight and I thought I’d better come along.”45 Eden recalled this moment in his memoirs; it fitted with his long-term belief that the 1914-1918 war had been a unifying experience that had transcended and dismantled class divisions. In this Eden reflected a broader view among Great War combatants turned postwar politicians: Macmillan too had, during the war, “learnt for the first time to understand, talk with, and feel at home with a whole class of men.”46

For Eden the war left him with the sense that “executive responsibility was best fulfilled through practical attention to detail,” pragmatism, competence and getting things done in other words were one mark of good politics.47 It also left him feeling responsible to create a better world – an idealist. He also took away the belief that to hold peace it is sometimes necessary to fight for peace, a view he had held at the outset of the Great War and throughout it and which resurfaced in his opposition to appeasement in 1938 as he saw Germany trample the international order. In 1914, Eden wrote in a letter that England could not stand by and see Belgium violated without “losing all her prestige as a first-class power.”48 He saw the 1925 Locarno Treaty as a positive step. In 1927, he declared in a speech to the House of Commons that:

“We might further the cause of peace in Europe […] by a number of small Locarnos. It is pointless to say that we must have disarmament without telling us how we are to have security. You can have any number of agreements to disarm but there will be no real confidence and security. Obviously it is our task to remove suspicion so that confidence may grow and armaments diminish.”49

After Eden’s death in 1977, Margaret Thatcher would speak in the House of Commons of how:

“He fought in the battle of the Somme […]. Like many of his contemporaries, the lessons of those early experiences were etched on his mind, and he always remembered those who had served with him and who had sacrificed so much. His great ideal was of a new international order between nations founded on mutual respect, mutual undertakings and mutually honoured. Signatures on treaties would offer hope for a new era, but an enduring peace could be achieved only by carrying out the obligations assumed.”50

This attitude helps explain his 1938 resignation due to his opposition to continuing appeasement of Germany, a decision that meant that Eden was spared the calumny later directed at his 1930s political peers who were described as “guilty men,” for their failed policies towards Germany and for Britain’s military unpreparedness for war, in the eponymous, bestselling, anonymous 1940 publication written by “Cato,” a group of three journalists.51 Eden saw the two world wars as part of the same battle for a humanitarian liberal world order, stating in a radio broadcast to the British Empire on 11 September 1939 at the start of the Second World War that:

“For some of us, the challenge has come a second time in our generation. There must be no second mistake. Out of the welter of suffering to be endured, we must fashion something better than a stale reflection of the old, bled white.”52

Eden’s 1955 cabinet, which would later take decisions on Suez, was the last in British history “to be dominated by men whose seminal experience had been the Great War.”53 The culture of resisting with military force anything perceived as tyranny, of fighting in order to create a stable peace, that these men, including Eden, had learned so painfully during the First World War, is key to understanding why they turned so readily to force in response to the Suez Crisis and read it less as the moment of decolonisation that it actually was and more as a repeat of 1914 and 1938.

The Great War also determined Eden’s long-term view of Germany. When Eden met Hitler in 1935, he mentioned that it was the anniversary of Ludendorff’s 1918 Spring Offensive and it emerged that they “must have been opposite each other round about la Fère on the River Oise.”54 After dinner the French Ambassador in Berlin, André François-Poncet, asked Eden why he had missed hitting Hitler.55 Eden, who later lost a son, Simon, in the Second World War, may well have asked himself the same question after 1945. The need to act early, intervene against a perceived international aggressor, before they became too powerful, to avoid the errors of the 1910s and 1930s, must have weighed upon him in 1956 with disastrous consequences. But this need to intervene early also came from his ideals, that the new peaceful world order, built up so painfully through the League in the 1920s and its successor the UN, and through victory in the two world wars, at such personal cost in grief to Eden himself, must be preserved at all costs. Ultimately the lessons from the Great War proved the wrong ones in 1956.