REAL PRINCE OF WALES.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 285, 2 December 1925, Page 9

REAL PRINCE OF WALES.

HIS ZEST FOR LIFE. WOULD GO TO THE FRONT. QUESTION OF MARRIAGE. (By SIDNEY BROODS.) The Prince of Wales' return hrings him to a decisive phase of his life. The war absorbed him from 1914 to 191 S. For the past six years he has been almost incessantly on the move, and the Empire and foreign lands have really seen more of him than his own country. The phase he enters upon now is one of settling down in his own land, among his own people. But what experiences, what a multitudinous panorama of scenes, what an incredible variety of life, has he not known and witnessed and imbibed in the past ten years! Since he kicked over the traces at the beginning of the war and insisted—there is no other word for it—against Kitchener, against Buckingham Palace, and against Whitehall, on going to the front and being attached to a fighting division, he has seen life and death, the world and the Empire, peril and pleasure, under every guise and at the shortest range.

No Chocolate Soldier Oddly enough, only recently, when I was meditating on this article, an officer friend recalled those old days at Loos and on the Somme—how the Prince refused to be caged up at headquarters, how he took his turns of duty in the trenches, and how coolly < and competently, without a touch of bravado, he carried on at more than one hot corner. But that would be like him. He could not be a Chocolate Soldier any more than he could be a prig or a milksop. But still less could he swagger or advertise himself. I suppose, in a sense, the Prince -is still, as he was then, at waT with his position. Here is a man with a great appetite for life. He likes to mingle with the enticing world around him at every . wholesome point of sport and pleasure. But, being the Prince of Wales, he is not a free agent. • He cannot always' indulge his hearty human inclinations. His life has in it far more prohibitions than privileges, and far ' more duties than relaxations.

Pride in the Empire. What enormously has helped the Prince to accept and observe the restrictions, the boredom, (tl<e .monotonous routine grind of his position is his discovery of' the Empire and of his own power to serve it. That is a cause which enlists every capacity, every emotion, every aspiration he possesses. There came to him during the war, and there has been confirmed in him since by his tours in India, Australasia, South Africa and Canada, a firm and fervent pride in the British stock and the British mission. And to that has been added the realisation, first, that for multitudes of.people fate has made him the chief representative of the British name, the man by whom his country and his people are to be judged, and that it is for him to conduct himself accordingly; and secondly, that there have heen entrusted to him some gifts of personality, some powers of winning interest and affection, that wherever he displays them strengthen the Empire, strengthen the Crown, and make for a fully unity between Great and- Greater Britain.

Opportunity for Service. In what these gifts and powers consist the Prince is probably the last man in the Empire either to know or to care. But an outsider has not much difficulty in resolving the reasons for the Prince's universal popularity. ' They are to be found in that frank and steady gaze of his. the honest open face in which a natural shyness still struggles with maturity and experience, his whole buoyant air of freshness and vitality, the unforced, irresistible smile, the impossibility, felt at first glance and never afterwards questioned of associating him with anything mean or pretentious or crooked.

For the Prince himself the acclaim that everywhere greets him probably constitutes one vast bewildering factbewildering, but bracing. He cannot but be aware that it makes him an Imperial asset of the very first order, and that these tours of his, exhausting as they are, represent the best service that he or any man can render to the Empire. I should say that by now it has not only reconciled him to his position as Heir-Apparent, but has invested that position with a meaning and with openings for usefulness that in his early youth he hardly suspected. After all, it is not hard for a Prince to be popular. In the case of the Prince of Wales I should not set so much store by it, but for two things. The first is that on the few occasions when I have met him I have instinctively liked and trusted him. He struck mc as ringing true. He looked fit, he spoke sense, there was a plentiful play of honour about him, and no man could be more free from airs or starchiness, But I have another reason, apart from my personal impressions, for regarding the Prince's popularity with the public, and all sorts of public, as being just, fully earned, inevitable. It is that he is equally popular with his staff, with the men who sea him in undress, who serve under him, and know him in all the revealing intimacies uf daily life. They fairly worship him. And now he is home again.

But he returns, I fear, a rather tired man, if over a man had earned the right to be let alone for a few months, it is tho Prince, A period of quiet hunting, quiet shooting, and quiet visits to country houses, with a minimum of public functions and speeches, would lie the best, of all gifts that tlie nation could offer him. ■ I take it the Prince himself is quite aware of what the nation would most like him to do. It would like him to fall in love and marry. It does not in the least desire him to "contract an alliance" for reasons of Stato,' Cut for his own happiness it cannot help hoping that he will soon hav£ a wife by his side and, barring actresses, divorcees, and Americans, it sets no limitations on his choice, So long as it was a love-match, the country would be well content.

But such things do not come to order or by volition, and the Prince has sufficiently indicated that he means in this matter to take his own line and choose his own time. So much the better, and so much the more interesting does his first prolonged stay in these islands during the p£st ten years promise to be.