After attending Ludgrove School and Eton (where he was captain of cricket and president of Pop), he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, but left after a year in 1909 to become a soldier with the Life Guards.
He returned to his regiment when the First World War broke out and served in France in the battles of Aisne, Ypres and Messines; for his conduct in the latter, he was awarded the Military Cross.
When he had sufficiently recovered, he was appointed as liaison officer to the French Minister of Marine, but he was unofficially a representative of the head of the British secret service.
After serving in Ireland during the Easter Rising (1916), he returned to France as liaison officer firstly with General Franchet D'Esperay and then with Marshal Petain; the French government awarded him the Croix de Guerre and appointed him a member of the Légion d'honneur.
His career was interrupted by the Second World War, when he served as liaison officer to the French First Army until the evacuation from Dunkirk, and then as chairman of the Inter-Allied Timber Commission in 1940, and then from 1941 as Military Attaché at the British Embassy in Washington.