As war correspondents we were supposed to have honorary rank as captains, by custom and tradition—but it amounted to nothing, here or there. We were civilians in khaki, with green bands round our right arms, and uncertain status. It was better so, because we were in the peculiar and privileged position of being able to speak to Tommies and sergeants as human beings, to be on terms of comradeship with junior subalterns and battalion commanders, and to sit at the right hand of generals without embarrassment to them or to ourselves.
Physically, many of our generals were curiously alike. They were men turned fifty, with square jaws, tanned, ruddy faces, searching and rather stern gray eyes, closely cropped hair growing white, with a little white mustache, neatly trimmed, on the upper lip.
Mentally they had similar qualities. They had unfailing physical courage—though courage is not put to the test much in modern generalship, which, above the rank of brigadier, works far from the actual line of battle, unless it “slips” in the wrong direction. They were stern disciplinarians, and tested the quality of troops by their smartness in saluting and on parade, which did not account for the fighting merit of the Australians. Most of them were conservative by political tradition and hereditary instinct, and conservative also in military ideas and methods. They distrusted the “brilliant” fellow, and were inclined to think him unsafe; and they were not quick to allow young men to gain high command at the expense of their gray hair and experience. They were industrious, able, conscientious men, never sparing themselves long hours of work for a life of ease, and because they were willing to sacrifice their own lives, if need be, for their country's sake, they demanded equal willingness of sacrifice from every officer and man under their authority, having no mercy whatever for the slacker or the weakling.
Among them there was not one whose personality had that mysterious but essential quality of great generalship—inspiring large bodies of men with exalted enthusiasm, devotion, and faith. It did not matter to the men whether an army commander, a corps commander, or a divisional commander stood in the roadside to watch them march past on their way to battle or on their way back. They saw one of these sturdy men in his brass hat, with his ruddy face and white mustache, but no thrill passed down their ranks, no hoarse cheers broke from them because he was there, as when Wellington sat on his white horse in the Peninsular War, or as when Napoleon saluted his Old Guard, or even as when Lord Roberts, “Our Bob,” came perched like a little old falcon on his big charger.
Nine men out of ten in the ranks did not even know the name of their army general or of the corps commander. It meant nothing to them. They did not face death with more passionate courage to win the approval of a military idol. That was due partly to the conditions of modern warfare, which make it difficult for generals of high rank to get into direct personal touch with their troops, and to the masses of men engaged. But those difficulties could have been overcome by a general of impressive personality, able to stir the imaginations of men by words of fire spoken at the right time, by deep, human sympathy, and by the luck of victory seized by daring adventure against great odds.
No such man appeared on the western front until Foch obtained the supreme command. On the British front there was no general with the gift of speech—a gift too much despised by our British men of action—or with a character and prestige which could raise him to the highest rank in popular imagination. During the retreat from Mona, Sir John French had a touch of that personal power—his presence meant something to the men because of his reputation in South Africa; but afterward, when trench warfare began, and the daily routine of slaughter under German gun-fire, when our artillery was weak, and when our infantry was ordered to attack fixed positions of terrible strength without adequate support, and not a dog's chance of luck against such odds, the prestige of the Commander-in-Chief faded from men's minds and he lost place in their admiration. It was washed out in blood and mud.
Sir Douglas Haig, who followed Sir John French, inherited the disillusionment of armies who saw now that war on the western front was to be a long struggle, with enormous slaughter, and no visible sign of the end beyond a vista of dreadful years. Sir Douglas Haig, in his general headquarters at St.-Omer, and afterward at Montreuil, near the coast, had the affection and loyalty of the staff—officers. A man of remarkably good looks, with fine, delicate features, strengthened by the firm line of his jaw, and of singular sweetness, courtesy, and simplicity in his manner toward all who approached him, he had qualities which might have raised him to the supreme height of personal influence among his armies but for lack of the magic touch and the tragic condition of his command.
He was intensely shy and reserved, shrinking from publicity and holding himself aloof from the human side of war. He was constitutionally unable to make a dramatic gesture before a multitude, or to say easy, stirring things to officers and men whom he reviewed. His shyness and reserve prevented him also from knowing as much as he ought to have known about the opinions of officers and men, and getting direct information from them. He held the supreme command of the British armies on the western front when, in the battlefields of the Somme and Flanders, of Picardy and Artois, there was not much chance for daring strategy, but only for hammer-strokes by the flesh and blood of men against fortress positions—the German trench systems, twenty-five miles deep in tunneled earthworks and machine-gun dugouts—when the immensity of casualties among British troops was out of all proportion to their gains of ground, so that our men's spirits revolted against these massacres of their youth and they were embittered against the generalship and staff-work which directed these sacrificial actions.
This sense of bitterness became intense, to the point of fury, so that a young staff officer, in his red tabs, with a jaunty manner, was like a red rag to a bull among battalion officers and men, and they desired his death exceedingly, exalting his little personality, dressed in a well-cut tunic and fawn-colored riding-breeches and highly polished top-boots, into the supreme folly of “the Staff” which made men attack impossible positions, send down conflicting orders, issued a litter of documents—called by an ugly name—containing impracticable instructions, to the torment of the adjutants and to the scorn of the troops. This hatred of the Staff was stoked high by the fires of passion and despair. Some of it was unjust, and even the jaunty young staff-officer—a G. S. O. 3, with red tabs and polished boots—was often not quite such a fool as he looked, but a fellow who had proved his pluck in the early days of the war and was now doing his duty—about equal to the work of a boy clerk—with real industry and an exaggerated sense of its importance.
Personally I can pay high tribute to some of our staff—officers at divisional, corps, and army headquarters, because of their industry, efficiency, and devotion to duty. And during the progress of battle I have seen them, hundreds of times, working desperately for long hours without much rest or sleep, so that the fighting-men should get their food and munitions, so that the artillery should support their actions, and the troops in reserve move up to their relief at the proper time and place.
Owing largely to new army brains the administrative side of our war became efficient in its method and organization, and the armies were worked like clockwork machines. The transport was good beyond all words of praise, and there was one thing which seldom failed to reach poor old Tommy Atkins, unless he was cut off by shell-fire, and that was his food. The motor-supply columns and ammunition-dumps were organized to the last item. Our map department was magnificent, and the admiration of the French. Our Intelligence branch became valuable (apart from a frequent insanity of optimism) and was sometimes uncanny in the accuracy of its information about the enemy's disposition and plans. So that the Staff was not altogether hopeless in its effect, as the young battalion officers, with sharp tongues and a sense of injustice in their hearts, made out, with pardonable blasphemy, in their dugouts.
Nevertheless the system was bad and British generalship made many mistakes, some of them, no doubt, unavoidable, because it is human to err, and some of them due to sheer, simple, impregnable stupidity.
In the early days the outstanding fault of our generals was their desire to gain ground which was utterly worthless when gained. They organized small attacks against strong positions, dreadfully costly to take, and after the desperate valor of men had seized a few yards of mangled earth, found that they had made another small salient, jutting out from their front in a V-shaped wedge, so that it was a death-trap for the men who had to hold it. This was done again and again, and I remember one distinguished officer saying, with bitter irony, remembering how many of his men had died, “Our generals must have their little V's at any price, to justify themselves at G. H. Q.”
In the battles of the Somme they attacked isolated objectives on narrow fronts, so that the enemy swept our men with fire by artillery concentrated from all points, instead of having to disperse his fire during a general attack on a wide front. In the days of trench warfare, when the enemy artillery was much stronger than ours, and when his infantry strength was enormously greater, our generals insisted upon the British troops maintaining an “aggressive” attitude, with the result that they were shot to pieces, instead of adopting, like the French, a quiet and waiting attitude until the time came for a sharp and terrible blow. The battles of Neuve Chapelle, Fertubert, and Loos, in 1915, cost us thousands of dead and gave us no gain of any account; and both generalship and staff-work were, in the opinion of most officers who know anything of those battles, ghastly.
After all, our generals had to learn their lesson, like the private soldier, and the young battalion officer, in conditions of warfare which had never been seen before—and it was bad for the private soldier and the young battalion officer, who died so they might learn. As time went on staff-work improved, and British generalship was less rash in optimism and less rigid in ideas.
General Haldane was friendly to the war correspondents—he had been something of the kind himself in earlier days—and we were welcomed at his headquarters, both when he commanded the 3d Division and afterward when he became commander of the 6th Corps. I thought during the war, and I think now, that he had more intellect and “quality” than many of our other generals. A tall, strongly built man, with a distinction of movement and gesture, not “stocky” or rigid, but nervous and restless, he gave one a sense of power and intensity of purpose. There was a kind of slow-burning fire in him—a hatred of the enemy which was not weakened in him by any mercy, and a consuming rage, as it appeared to me, against inefficiency in high places, injustice of which he may have felt himself to be the victim, and restrictions upon his liberty of command. A bitter irony was often in his laughter when discussing politicians at home, and the wider strategy of war apart from that on his own front. He was intolerant of stupidity, which he found widespread, and there was no tenderness or emotion in his attitude toward life. The officers and men under his command accused him of ruthlessness. But they admitted that he took more personal risk than he need have done as a divisional general, and was constantly in the trenches examining his line. They also acknowledged that he was generous in his praise of their good service, though merciless if he found fault with them. He held himself aloof—too much, I am sure—from his battalion officers, and had an extreme haughtiness of bearing which was partly due to reserve and that shyness which is in many Englishmen and a few Scots.
In the old salient warfare he often demanded service in the way of raids and the holding of death-traps, and the execution of minor attacks which caused many casualties, and filled men with rage and horror at what they believed to be unnecessary waste of life—their life, and their comrades'—that did not make for popularity in the ranks of the battalion messes. Privately, in his own mess, he was gracious to visitors, and revealed not only a wide range of knowledge outside as well as inside his profession, but a curious, unexpected sympathy for ideas, not belonging as a rule to generals of the old caste. I liked him, though I was always conscious of that flame and steel in his nature which made his psychology a world away from mine. He was hit hard—in what I think was the softest spot in his heart—by the death of one of his A. D. C.'s—young Congreve, who was the beau ideal of knighthood, wonderfully handsome, elegant even when covered from head to foot in wet mud (as I saw him one day), fearless, or at least scornful of danger, to the verge of recklessness. General Haldane had marked him out as the most promising young soldier in the whole army. A bit of shell, a senseless bit of steel, spoiled that promise—as it spoiled the promise of a million boys—and the general was saddened more than by the death of other gallant officers.
I have one memory of General Haldane which shows him in a different light. It was during the great German offensive in the north, when Arras was hard beset and the enemy had come back over Monchy Hill and was shelling villages on the western side of Arras, which until then had been undamaged. It was in one of these villages—near Avesnes-le-Compte—to which the general had come back with his corps headquarters, established there for many months in earlier days, so that the peasants and their children knew him well by sight and had talked with him, because he liked to speak French with them. When I went to see him one day during that bad time in April of '18, he was surrounded by a group of children who were asking anxiously whether Arras would be taken. He drew a map for them in the dust of the roadway, and showed them where the enemy was attacking and the general strategy. He spoke simply and gravely, as though to a group of staff-officers, and the children followed his diagram in the dust and understood him perfectly.
“They will not take Arras if I can help it,” he said. “You will be all right here.”
Gen. Sir Neville Macready was adjutant-general in the days of Sir John French, and I dined at his mess once or twice, and he came to ours on return visits. The son of Macready, the actor, he had a subtlety of mind not common among British generals, to whom “subtlety” in any form is repulsive. His sense of humor was developed upon lines of irony and he had a sly twinkle in his eyes before telling one of his innumerable anecdotes. They were good stories, and I remember one of them, which had to do with the retreat from Mons. It was not, to tell the truth, that “orderly” retreat which is described in second-hand accounts. There were times when it was a wild stampede from the tightening loop of a German advance, with lorries and motor-cycles and transport wagons going helter-skelter among civilian refugees and mixed battalions and stragglers from every unit walking, footsore, in small groups. Even General Headquarters was flurried at times, far in advance of this procession backward. One night Sir Neville Macready, with the judge advocate and an officer named Colonel Childs (a hot-headed fellow!), took up their quarters in a French chateau somewhere, I think, in the neighborhood of Creil. The Commander-in-Chief was in another chateau some distance away. Other branches of G. H. Q. were billeted in private houses, widely scattered about a straggling village.
Colonel Childs was writing opposite the adjutant-general, who was working silently. Presently Childs looked up, listened, and said:
“It's rather quiet, sir, outside.”
“So much the better,” growled General Macready. “Get on with your job.”
A quarter of an hour passed. No rumble of traffic passed by the windows. No gun-wagons were jolting over French pave.
Colonel Childs looked up again and listened.
“It's damned quiet outside, sir.”
“Well, don't go making a noise,” said the general, “Can't you see I'm busy?”
“I think I'll just take a turn round,” said Colonel Childs.
He felt uneasy. Something in the silence of the village scared him. He went out into the roadway and walked toward Sir John French's quarters. There was no challenge from a sentry. The British Expeditionary Force seemed to be sleeping. They needed sleep—poor beggars!—but the Germans did not let them take much.
Colonel Childs went into the Commander-in-Chief's chateau and found a soldier in the front hall, licking out a jam-pot.
“Where's the Commander-in-Chief?” asked the officer.
“Gone hours ago, sir,” said the soldier. “I was left behind for lack of transport. From what I hear the Germans ought to be here by now. I rather fancy I heard some shots pretty close awhile ago.”
Colonel Childs walked back to his own quarters quickly. He made no apology for interrupting the work of the adjutant-general.
“General, the whole box of tricks has gone. We've been left behind. Forgotten!”
“The dirty dogs!” said General Macready.
There was not much time for packing up, and only one motor-car, and only one rifle. The general said he would look after the rifle, but Colonel Childs said if that were so he would rather stay behind and take his chance of being captured. It would be safer for him. So the adjutant-general, the judge advocate, the deputy assistant judge advocate (Colonel Childs), and an orderly or two packed into the car and set out to find G.H.Q. Before they found it they had to run the gantlet of Germans, and were sniped all the way through a wood, and took flying shots at moving figures. Then, miles away, they found G.H.Q.
“And weren't they sorry to see me again!” said General Macready, who told me the tale. “They thought they had lost me forever.”
The day's casualty list was brought into the adjutant—general one evening when I was dining in his mess. The orderly put it down by the side of his plate, and he interrupted a funny story to glance down the columns of names.
“Du Maurier has been killed... I'm sorry.”
He put down the paper beside his plate again and continued his story, and we all laughed heartily at the end of the anecdote. It was the only way, and the soldier's way. There was no hugging of grief when our best friend fell. A sigh, another ghost in one's life, and then, “Carry on!”
Scores of times, hundreds of times, during the battles of the Somme, I passed the headquarters of Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson, commanding the Fourth Army, and several times I met the army commander there and elsewhere. One of my first meetings with him was extraordinarily embarrassing to me for a moment or two. While he was organizing his army, which was to be called, with unconscious irony, “The Army of Pursuit”—the battles of the Somme were a siege rather than a pursuit—he desired to take over the chateau at Tilques, in which the war correspondents were then quartered. As we were paying for it and liked it, we put up an opposition which was most annoying to his A.D.C.'s, especially to one young gentleman of enormous wealth, haughty manners, and a boyish intolerance of other people's interests, who had looked over our rooms without troubling to knock at the doors, and then said, “This will suit us down to the ground.” On my way back from the salient one evening I walked up the drive in the flickering light of summer eve, and saw two officers coming in my direction, one of whom I thought I recognized as an old friend.
“Hullo!” I said, cheerily. “You here again?”
Then I saw that I was face to face with Sir Henry Rawlinson. He must have been surprised, but dug me in the ribs in a genial way, and said, “Hullo, young feller!”
He made no further attempt to “pinch” our quarters, but my familiar method of address could not have produced that result.
His headquarters at Querrieux were in another old chateau on the Amiens-Albert road, surrounded by pleasant fields through which a stream wound its way. Everywhere the sign-boards were red, and a military policeman, authorized to secure obedience to the rules thereon, slowed down every motor-car on its way through the village, as though Sir Henry Rawlinson lay sick of a fever, so anxious were his gestures and his expression of “Hush! do be careful!”
The army commander seemed to me to have a roguish eye. He seemed to be thinking to himself, “This war is a rare old joke!” He spoke habitually of the enemy as “the old Hun” or “old Fritz,” in an affectionate, contemptuous way, as a fellow who was trying his best but getting the worst of it every time. Before the battles of the Somme I had a talk with him among his maps, and found that I had been to many places in his line which he did not seem to know. He could not find there very quickly on his large-sized maps, or pretended not to, though I concluded that this was “camouflage,” in case I might tell “old Fritz” that such places existed. Like most of our generals, he had amazing, overweening optimism. He had always got the enemy “nearly beat,” and he arranged attacks during the Somme fighting with the jovial sense of striking another blow which would lead this time to stupendous results. In the early days, in command of the 7th Division, he had done well, and he was a gallant soldier, with initiative and courage of decision and a quick intelligence in open warfare. His trouble on the Somme was that the enemy did not permit open warfare, but made a siege of it, with defensive lines all the way back to Bapaume, and every hillock a machine-gun fortress and every wood a death-trap. We were always preparing for a “break-through” for cavalry pursuit, and the cavalry were always being massed behind the lines and then turned back again, after futile waiting, encumbering the roads. “The bloodbath of the Somme,” as the Germans called it, was ours as well as theirs, and scores of times when I saw the dead bodies of our men lying strewn over those dreadful fields, after desperate and, in the end, successful attacks through the woods of death—Mametz Wood, Delville Wood, Trones Wood, Bernafay Wood, High Wood, and over the Pozieres ridge to Courcellette and Martinpuich—I thought of Rawlinson in his chateau in Querrieux, scheming out the battles and ordering up new masses of troops to the great assault over the bodies of their dead... Well, it is not for generals to sit down with their heads in their hands, bemoaning slaughter, or to shed tears over their maps when directing battle. It is their job to be cheerful, to harden their hearts against the casualty lists, to keep out of the danger-zone unless their presence is strictly necessary. But it is inevitable that the men who risk death daily, the fighting-men who carry out the plans of the High Command and see no sense in them, should be savage in their irony when they pass a peaceful house where their doom is being planned, and green-eyed when they see an army general taking a stroll in buttercup fields, with a jaunty young A.D.C. slashing the flowers with his cane and telling the latest joke from London to his laughing chief. As onlookers of sacrifice some of us—I, for one—adopted the point of view of the men who were to die, finding some reason in their hatred of the staffs, though they were doing their job with a sense of duty, and with as much intelligence as God had given them. Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson was one of our best generals, as may be seen by the ribbons on his breast, and in the last phase commanded a real “Army of Pursuit,” which had the enemy on the run, and broke through to Victory. It was in that last phase of open warfare that Rawlinson showed his qualities of generalship and once again that driving purpose which was his in the Somme battles, but achieved only by prodigious cost of life.
Of General Allenby, commanding the Third Army before he was succeeded by Gen. Sir Julian Byng and went to his triumph in Palestine, I knew very little except by hearsay. He went by the name of “The Bull,” because of his burly size and deep voice. The costly fighting that followed the battle of Arras on April 9th along the glacis of the Scarpe did not reveal high generalship. There were many young officers—and some divisional generals who complained bitterly of attacks ordered without sufficient forethought, and the stream of casualties which poured back, day by day, with tales of tragic happenings did not inspire one with a sense of some high purpose behind it all, or some presiding genius.
General Byng, “Bungo Byng,” as he was called by his troops, won the admiration of the Canadian Corps which he commanded, and afterward, in the Cambrai advance of November, '17, he showed daring of conception and gained the first striking surprise in the war by novel methods of attack—spoiled by the quick come-back of the enemy under Von Marwitz and our withdrawal from Bourlon Wood, Masnieres, and Marcoing, and other places, after desperate fighting.
His chief of staff, Gen. Louis Vaughan, was a charming, gentle-mannered man, with a scientific outlook on the problems of war, and so kind in his expression and character that it seemed impossible that he could devise methods of killing Germans in a wholesale way. He was like an Oxford professor of history discoursing on the Marlborough wars, though when I saw him many times outside the Third Army headquarters, in a railway carriage, somewhere near Villers Carbonnel on the Somme battlefields, he was explaining his preparations and strategy for actions to be fought next day which would be of bloody consequence to our men and the enemy.
General Birdwood, commanding the Australian Corps, and afterward the Fifth Army in succession to General Gough, was always known as “Birdie” by high and low, and this dapper man, so neat, so bright, so brisk, had a human touch with him which won him the affection of all his troops.
Gen. Hunter Weston, of the 8th Corps, was another man of character in high command. He spoke of himself in the House of Commons one day as “a plain, blunt soldier,” and the army roared with laughter from end to end. There was nothing plain or blunt about him. He was a man of airy imagination and a wide range of knowledge, and theories on life and war which he put forward with dramatic eloquence.
It was of Gen. Hunter Weston that the story was told about the drunken soldier put onto a stretcher and covered with a blanket, to get him out of the way when the army commander made a visit to the lines.
“What's this?” said the general.
“Casualty, sir,” said the quaking platoon commander.
“Not bad, I hope?”
“Dead, sir,” said the subaltern. He meant dead drunk.
The general drew himself up, and said, in his dramatic way, “The army commander salutes the honored dead!”
And the drunken private put his head from under the blanket and asked, “What's the old geezer a-sayin' of?”
That story may have been invented in a battalion mess, but it went through the army affixed to the name of Hunter Weston, and seemed to fit him.
The 8th Corps was on the left in the first attack on the Somme, when many of our divisions were cut to pieces in the attempt to break the German line at Gommecourt. It was a ghastly tragedy, which spoiled the success on the right at Fricourt and Montauban. But Gen. Hunter Weston was not degomme, as the French would say, and continued to air his theories on life and warfare until the day of Victory, when once again we had “muddled through,” not by great generalship, but by the courage of common men.
Among the divisional generals with whom I came in contact—I met most of them at one time or another—were General Hull of the 56th (London) Division, General Hickey of the 16th (Irish) Division, General Harper of the 51st (Highland) Division, General Nugent of the 36th (Ulster) Division, and General Pinnie of the 35th (Bantams) Division, afterward of the 33d.
General Hull was a handsome, straight-speaking, straight-thinking man, and I should say an able general. “Ruthless,” his men said, but this was a war of ruthlessness, because life was cheap. Bitter he was at times, because he had to order his men to do things which he knew were folly. I remember sitting on the window-sill of his bedroom, in an old house of Arras, while he gave me an account of “the battle in the dark,” in which the Londoners and other English troops lost their direction and found themselves at dawn with the enemy behind them. General Hull made no secret of the tragedy or the stupidity... On another day I met him somewhere on the other side of Peronne, before March 21st, when he was commanding the 16th (Irish) Division in the absence of General Hickey, who was ill. He talked a good deal about the belief in a great German offensive, and gave many reasons for thinking it was all “bluff.” A few days later the enemy had rolled over his lines... Out of thirteen generals I met at that time, there were only three who believed that the enemy would make his great assault in a final effort to gain decisive victory, though our Intelligence had amassed innumerable proofs and were utterly convinced of the approaching menace.
“They will never risk it!” said General Gorringe of the 47th (London) Division. “Our lines are too strong. We should mow them down.”
I was standing with him on a wagon, watching the sports of the London men. We could see the German lines, south of St.-Quentin, very quiet over there, without any sign of coming trouble. A few days later the place where we were standing was under waves of German storm-troops.
I liked the love of General Hickey for his Irish division. An Irishman himself, with a touch of the old Irish soldier as drawn by Charles Lever, gay-hearted, proud of his boys, he was always pleased to see me because he knew I had a warm spot in my heart for the Irish troops. He had a good story to tell every time, and passed me on to “the boys” to get at the heart of them. It was long before he lost hope of keeping the division together, though it was hard to get recruits and losses were high at Guillemont and Ginchy. For the first time he lost heart and was very sad when the division was cut to pieces in a Flanders battle. It lost 2,000 men and 162 officers before the battle began—they were shelled to death in the trenches—and 2,000 men and 170 officers more during the progress of the battle. It was murderous and ghastly.
General Harper of the 51st (Highland) Division, afterward commanding the 4th Corps, had the respect of his troops, though they called him “Uncle” because of his shock of white hair. The Highland division, under his command, fought many battles and gained great honor, even from the enemy, who feared them and called the kilted men “the ladies from hell.” It was to them the Germans sent their message in a small balloon during the retreat from the Somme: “Poor old 51st. Still sticking it! Cheery-oh!”
“Uncle” Harper invited me to lunch in his mess, and was ironical with war correspondents, and censors, and the British public, and new theories of training, and many things in which he saw no sense. There was a smoldering passion in him which glowed in his dark eyes.
He was against bayonet-training, which took the field against rifle-fire for a time.
“No man in this war,” he said, with a sweeping assertion, “has ever been killed by the bayonet unless he had his hands up first.” And, broadly speaking, I think he was right, in spite of the Director of Training, who was extremely annoyed with me when I quoted this authority.
I met many other generals who were men of ability, energy, high sense of duty, and strong personality. I found them intellectually, with few exceptions, narrowly molded to the same type, strangely limited in their range of ideas and qualities of character.
“One has to leave many gaps in one's conversation with generals,” said a friend of mine, after lunching with an army commander.
That was true. One had to talk to them on the lines of leading articles in The Morning Post. Their patriotism, their knowledge of human nature, their idealism, and their imagination were restricted to the traditional views of English country gentlemen of the Tory school. Anything outside that range of thought was to them heresy, treason, or wishy-washy sentiment.
What mainly was wrong with our generalship was the system which put the High Command into the hands of a group of men belonging to the old school of war, unable, by reason of their age and traditions, to get away from rigid methods and to become elastic in face of new conditions.
Our Staff College had been hopelessly inefficient in its system of training, if I am justified in forming such an opinion from specimens produced by it, who had the brains of canaries and the manners of Potsdam. There was also a close corporation among the officers of the Regular Army, so that they took the lion's share of staff appointments, thus keeping out brilliant young men of the new armies, whose brain-power, to say the least of it, was on a higher level than that of the Sandhurst standard. Here and there, where the unprofessional soldier obtained a chance of high command or staff authority, he proved the value of the business mind applied to war, and this was seen very clearly—blindingly—in the able generalship of the Australian Corps, in which most of the commanders, like Generals Hobbs, Monash, and others, were men in civil life before the war. The same thing was observed in the Canadian Corps, General Currie, the corps commander, having been an estate agent, and many of his high officers having had no military training of any scientific importance before they handled their own men in France and Flanders.
As there are exceptions to every rule, so harsh criticism must be modified in favor of the generalship and organization of the Second Army-of rare efficiency under the restrictions and authority of the General Staff. I often used to wonder what qualities belonged to Sir Herbert Plumer, the army commander. In appearance he was almost a caricature of an old-time British general, with his ruddy, pippin-cheeked face, with white hair, and a fierce little white mustache, and blue, watery eyes, and a little pot-belly and short legs. He puffed and panted when he walked, and after two minutes in his company Cyril Maude would have played him to perfection. The staff-work of his army was as good in detail as any machinery of war may be, and the tactical direction of the Second Army battles was not slipshod nor haphazard, as so many others, but prepared with minute attention to detail and after thoughtful planning of the general scheme. The battle of Wytschaete and Messines was a model in organization and method, and worked in its frightful destructiveness like the clockwork of a death machine. Even the battles of Flanders in the autumn of '17, ghastly as they were in the losses of our men in the state of the ground through which they had to fight, and in futile results, were well organized by the Second Army headquarters, compared with the abominable mismanagement of other troops, the contrast being visible to every battalion officer and even to the private soldier. How much share of this was due to Sir Herbert Plumer it is impossible for me to tell, though it is fair to give him credit for soundness of judgment in general ideas and in the choice of men.
He had for his chief of staff Sir John Harington, and beyond all doubt this general was the organizing brain of to Second Army, though with punctilious chivalry he gave, always, the credit of all his work to the army commander. A thin, nervous, highly strung man, with extreme simplicity of manner and clarity of intelligence, he impressed me as a brain of the highest temper and quality in staff-work. His memory for detail was like a card-index system, yet his mind was not clogged with detail, but saw the wood as well as the trees, and the whole broad sweep of the problem which confronted him. There was something fascinating as well as terrible in his exposition of a battle that he was planning. For the first time in his presence and over his maps, I saw that after all there was such a thing as the science of war, and that it was not always a fetish of elementary ideas raised to the nth degree of pomposity, as I had been led to believe by contact with other generals and staff-officers. Here at least was a man who dealt with it as a scientific business, according to the methods of science—calculating the weight and effect of gun-fire, the strength of the enemy's defenses and man-power, the psychology of German generalship and of German units, the pressure which could be put on British troops before the breaking-point of courage, the relative or cumulative effects of poison-gas, mines, heavy and light artillery, tanks, the disposition of German guns and the probability of their movement in this direction or that, the amount of their wastage under our counter-battery work, the advantages of attacks in depth—one body of troops “leap-frogging,” another in an advance to further objectives—the time-table of transport, the supply of food and water and ammunition, the comfort of troops before action, and a thousand other factors of success.
Before every battle fought by the Second Army, and of the eve of it, Sir John Harington sent for the war correspondents and devoted an hour or more to a detailed explanation of his plans. He put down all his cards on the table with perfect candor, hiding nothing, neither minimizing nor exaggerating the difficulties and dangers of the attack, pointing out the tactical obstacles which must be overcome before any chance of success, and exposing the general strategy in the simplest and clearest speech.
I used to study him at those times, and marveled at him. After intense and prolonged work at all this detail involving the lives of thousands of men, he was highly wrought, with every nerve in his body and brain at full tension, but he was never flurried, never irritable, never depressed or elated by false pessimism or false optimism. He was a chemist explaining the factors of a great experiment of which the result was still uncertain. He could only hope for certain results after careful analysis and synthesis. Yet he was not dehumanized. He laughed sometimes at surprises he had caused the enemy, or was likely to cause them—surprises which would lead to a massacre of their men. He warmed to the glory of the courage of the troops who were carrying out his plans.
“It depends on these fellows,” he would say. “I am setting them a difficult job. If they can do it, as I hope and believe, it will be a fine achievement. They have been very much tried, poor fellows, but their spirit is still high, as I know from their commanding officers.”
One of his ambitions was to break down the prejudice between the fighting units and the Staff. “We want them to know that we are all working together, for the same purpose and with the same zeal. They cannot do without us, as we cannot do without them, and I want them to feel that the work done here is to help them to do theirs more easily, with lighter losses, in better physical conditions, with organization behind them at every stage.”
Many times the Second Army would not order an attack or decide the time of it before consulting the divisional generals and brigadiers, and obtaining their consensus of opinion. The officers and men in the Second Army did actually come to acknowledge the value of the staff-work behind them, and felt a confidence in its devotion to their interests which was rare on the western front.
At the end of one of his expositions Sir John Harington would rise and gather up his maps and papers, and say:
“Well, there you are, gentlemen. You know as much as I do about the plans for to-morrow's battle. At the end of the day you will be able to see the result of all our work and tell me things I do not know.”
Those conferences took place in the Second Army headquarters on Cassel Hill, in a big building which was a casino before the war, with a far-reaching view across Flanders, so that one could see in the distance the whole sweep of the Ypres salient, and southward the country below Notre Dame de Lorette, with Merville and Hazebrouck in the foreground. Often we assembled in a glass house, furnished with trestle tables on which maps were spread, and, thinking back to these scenes, I remember now, as I write, the noise of rain beating on that glass roof, and the clammy touch of fog on the window-panes stealing through the cracks and creeping into the room. The meteorologist of the Second Army was often a gloomy prophet, and his prophecies were right. How it rained on nights when hundreds of thousands of British soldiers were waiting in their trenches to attack in a murky dawn!... We said good night to General Harington, each one of us, I think, excited by the thought of the drama of human life and death which we had heard in advance in that glass house on the hill; to be played out by flesh and blood before many hours had passed. A kind of sickness took possession of my soul when I stumbled down the rock path from those headquarters in pitch darkness, over slabs of stones designed by a casino architect to break one's neck, with the rain dribbling down one's collar, and, far away, watery lights in the sky, of gun-flashes and ammunition-dumps afire, and the noise of artillery thudding in dull, crumbling shocks. We were starting early to see the opening of the battle and its backwash. There would be more streams of bloody, muddy men, more crowds of miserable prisoners, more dead bodies lying in the muck of captured ground, more shells plunging into the wet earth and throwing up columns of smoke and mud, more dead horses, disemboweled, and another victory at fearful cost, over one of the Flanders ridges.
Curses and prayers surged up in my heart. How long was this to go on—this massacre of youth, this agony of men? Was there no sanity left in the world that could settle the argument by other means than this? When we had taken that ridge to-morrow there would be another to take, and another. And what then? Had we such endless reserves of men that we could go on gaining ground at such a price? Was it to be extermination on both sides? The end of civilization itself? General Harington had said: “The enemy is still very strong. He has plenty of reserves on hand and he is fighting hard. It won't be a walk-over to-morrow.”
As an onlooker I was overwhelmed by the full measure of all this tragic drama. The vastness and the duration of its horror appalled me. I went to my billet in an old monastery, and sat there in the darkness, my window glimmering with the faint glow of distant shell-flashes, and said, “O God, give us victory to-morrow, if that may help us to the end.” Then to bed, without undressing. There was an early start before the dawn. Major Lytton would be with me. He had a gallant look along the duckboards... Or Montague—white-haired Montague, who liked to gain a far objective, whatever the risk, and gave one a little courage by his apparent fearlessness. I had no courage on those early mornings of battle. All that I had, which was little, oozed out of me when we came to the first dead horses and the first dead men, and passed the tumult of our guns firing out of the mud, and heard the scream of shells. I hated it all with a cold hatred; and I went on hating it for years that seem a lifetime. I was not alone in that hatred, and other men had greater cause, though it was for their sake that I suffered most, as an observer of their drama of death... As observers we saw most of the grisly game.