From ‘The King and the National Reserve’, The Spectator, 13 March 1915:
The King has made it his business not only to see every corps in the kingdom, old and new, and to share as it were in every new military development, but he has taken upon himself the duty of saying words of farewell and encouragement to the various units of the Army before they leave the country for foreign service. Hence if the King’s movements had been chronicled the enemy would have become cognisant of military facts which it is essential to conceal from them.
Secrecy, then, was inevitable, although from many points of view it was a great pity, and has to a very considerable extent prevented the British people from realizing how readily and how generously the King has spent himself in encouraging his troops, and how cheerfully he has been content to work for his country and his subjects, not in that atmosphere of public applause which so many Sovereigns regard as their rightful prerogative, but in almost complete silence. Happily King George is not, and never will be, a popularity-hunter, a self-advertiser, or a limelight monarch. We are sure that the obligation of self-effacement during the war has not troubled him for an instant. He has seen quite clearly from the beginning where his duty lay, and he has done it without the slightest thought as to whether the country would or would not understand in the end that, though people have heard so little about him, he has been one of the hardest-worked of men in a hard-worked epoch.
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