N o .124
T he T rusty S ervant
Wavell in Russia
as probably the shortest speech he
ever made, and ‘certainly the most
effective.’
Owen Humphrys (A, 59-64),
Wavell’s grandson, recounts:
AP Wavell (Coll, 1896-1900)
spent 42 years in the Army before
he became Viceroy of India
(New Delhi, 1943-47). One of
those years was spent in pre-
revolutionary Russia, learning
the language as a newly- qualified
staff officer. Later, he attended
Russian army manoeuvres four
times and spent eight months in
1917 as our Military Attaché in
the Caucasus, a total of two years
in Russia.
At his death in 1950, Wavell was
still in the Army List as a Russian
linguist. He used this skill to good
effect on his last visit to Moscow,
in 1942. Sitting beside the CIGS
Sir Alan Brooke at a conference
with the Russian Marshals,
Wavell was able to write some
quick notes about what was being
said and pass them over before
the official translator gave his
version. This gave Brooke a few
extra seconds of thinking time
before he had to reply. This was
the conference at which Stalin’s
Marshals, Voroshilov and Shaposhnikov,
were demanding of their Allies a ‘Second
Front Now’. On the plane back to
Tehran, Wavell composed that tricky
form of verse, a ballade, which has only
two rhymes in 28 lines. The verses, often
printed since, end with the refrain:
(Prime Minister loquitur)
‘Prince of the Kremlin,
here’s a fond farewell,
I’ve had to deal with many worse
than you.
You took it though you hated it like hell,
No Second Front in 1942.’
Wavell’s year in Moscow began
in February 1911, shortly after
passing out from the Staff College.
He stayed with a family of
liberal intellectuals to learn the
language and only wore uniform
when he had gained permission
to attend the Tsarist army’s
autumn manoeuvres. He was once
asked by a Tsarist officer how
British officers could hope to be
respected by civilians, and more
importantly feared, if they did
not wear uniform all the time in
public. In his hitherto unpublished
Recollections, Wavell commented
on this fundamental difference
between the characters of the two
armies, saying that the British
officer was not out to be feared by
England’s peaceful citizens.
Lieutenant AP Wavell,
42nd Royal Highlanders (The Black Watch)
(London, before 1914)
It was to be nearly two years before
D-Day in Normandy. The key meanwhile
was for the Allies to keep open, and
enlarge, the supply routes through Persia.
This August 1942 visit was also the
occasion when the supposedly ever-silent
Wavell made an impromptu speech in
Russian to Stalin in the Kremlin, during
the endless rounds of vodka toasts.
He had previously made another such
speech in Russia, to rapturous applause,
in November 1917: he was about to
leave the Caucasus, eventually for
Palestine, and was suddenly forced to
speak to hundreds of mutinous troops
from a platform, immediately following a
Bolshevik agitator. He described it later
7
Wavell did, however, once
astonish an assembly of Tsarist
officers by his Regimental finery,
wearing his Black Watch kilt and
all accoutrements. This created ‘a
veritable sensation.’
While in Moscow that year, aged 28,
Wavell played football for a combined
Russian and British team against
a German team from Berlin. In a
rematch, an all-English team, largely
of Lancashire-born mill-hands, were
outplayed in the first half. The second
half of this game was about the roughest
and toughest game he had ever played.
He also went ice-hilling, a very artificial
form of tobogganing, and perhaps one of
the origins of bob-sleighing, which took
place at night.
On his return to the War Office in 1912,
Wavell wrote, or revised, a handbook on
the Tsarist army. He twice returned to
Russia, in 1912 and 1913, for the autumn