CHAPTER VIIG.H.Q.
In an army in which abbreviation by capital letter is carried to the pitch of mania, the hieroglyphics standing at the head of this chapter may be recognized, without undue difficulty, as signifyingGeneral Headquarters. This is a comparatively simple combination. It is not always thus. One requires a certain amount of practice to discern the different offices of the army in the field in a row of letters flashed out at one in conversation with soldier-men.
“Can you direct me to the D.A.D.O.S.?” a dusty motor-cyclist despatch-rider, one foot trailing on the ground beside his snorting machine, asks a quartermaster-sergeant in a village. “First on the right past the D.A.D.R.T.’s, the red house next to the A.P.M.” Quite unperturbed by this fearsome array of letters, the youth whirrs cheerily off, and finds his destination without difficulty. Question and answer, as interpreted to the layman, signify: “Can you direct me to the Deputy Assistant Director of Ordnance Services?” “First on the right past the Deputy Assistant Director of Railway Transport, the red house next to the Assistant Provost Marshal.”
In all this maze of abbreviation, G.H.Q. is the combination most often heard at the front. ForG.H.Q. is the head of the army, the brain and nerve centre which directs and governs the whole vast organism of our fighting force, from the most advanced stretch of sandbags which marks the firing-line back to the enormous office of a thousand clerks, where the regimental records are kept in a snug French town far to the rear. To the men in the firing-line G.H.Q. is the home of the “brass-hats” (as Staff officers are popularly styled), a mysterious and remote place from which unexpected and inexplicable edicts are issued forth, mostly leading to unwelcome changes in comfortable billets or cosy trenches, a snug spot of soft jobs and easy living.
In reality G.H.Q. is nothing of the kind. I wish some of the imaginative writers who, in the course of one or other of the political controversies which this war has brought forth, have described G.H.Q. as a centre of fashion, swarming with idle A.D.C.’s buzzing about beautiful ladies, could spend a day or two in the place. Luxury follows fashion as surely as trade follows the flag. One glance at the bedroom which would be reserved for our friend, the imaginative writer, at the local hotel would speedily disillusionize him as to G.H.Q. being fashionable, luxurious, or even comfortable. —— (the etiquette of our army in the field forbids me even now to lift the transparent veil enveloping the identity of the French town where Sir John French has installed his General Headquarters) is not Brussels of 1815. Nor is it Capua. It is a small town with historic associations, particularly with England, the greater part of any architectural and antiquarian beauty it may havepossessed, however, swept away by the growth of industry.
G.H.Q. is a place of hard work and of simple living. The men in the trenches who “grouse,” as all good soldiers “grouse,” about the “soft” and “safe” jobs at G.H.Q. have no conception of the strenuous life of the men in the offices there. I am personally acquainted, not with one or two, but with scores of officers who are at their desk at eight o’clock, or earlier, each morning, Sundays included, and are kept hard at it, with not more than two hours’ break in the day, until eleven o’clock at night. Rank makes no distinction. In fact, the heads of the different services set the example of “hustle” to their subordinates.
“Never in my life,” said an officer with a distinguished record of service in the field in South Africa, “have I worked so hard as I have done at G.H.Q. I have not heard a shot fired in this war; I have never seen a shell burst; I have not set eyes upon a German, not even a German prisoner. I never get any time for exercise. Sometimes I long to be up in the trenches, getting hard and fit in the fresh air, and winning clasps for the war medal.”
“It’s very strange to be back at the old game,” a General who had been moved from a high appointment at G.H.Q. to the command of a division in the field said to me one day. “Here I am following my natural vocation of commanding men in the field. I am getting sunburnt. I have an enormous appetite, and I sleep better than I ever did in my life. Of course, I miss my friends at G.H.Q., but this is a life of leisure compared to the grind there.”
All the threads of the army run back to G.H.Q.—the threads controlling its strategy, its supplies of men, of material, of food, of equipment; its relations with our Allies, the French. To do proper justice to the work of G.H.Q. would require a volume; but, as I have set myself in this book to write an impression and not a technical review of the work of our army in the field, I will content myself with setting forth as briefly as I can the services centred at G.H.Q. as a preface to glancing at the conditions of life prevailing at the hub of the army.
General Headquarters, then, consists of the Command-in-Chief, the General Staff, the Adjutant-General’s Staff, and the Quartermaster-General’s Staff. Here we have assembled the principal services of the army, the supreme direction of all centred in the person of the Commander-in-Chief assisted by the General Staff, the Adjutant-General’s Department responsible forpersonnel, and the Quartermaster-General’s Department responsible for supplies. General Staff, A.G. and Q.M.G. Departments (you see how easy it is to fall into army abbreviations!), are represented by General Staff officers and an officer representing together A.G. and Q.M.G. Departments (he is called Assistant Adjutant and Quartermaster-General) attached to each army, army corps, and division, thus insuring smooth departmentalization of the different branches right through the army. Each of the subdivisions of the three great services, General Staff, A.G., Q.M.G. Departments, also have their special representatives with armies, corps, and divisions in the field in the shape of Assistant and Deputy-AssistantDirectors of Medical Services, of Ordnance Services, and so on.
The General Staff is divided into two divisions—Operations, known as “O,” and Intelligence (“I”).
“O” occupies itself with strategy and tactics, the general brainwork of the army. It is also the centre to which all reports come.
“I” is the detective of the army. It is the business of this division to endeavour to discover by every possible means all about the enemy forces, their disposition and composition. One of the most important of the sections of “I” is the map department, where maps, not only of our own positions, but also, as far as possible, of the enemy, are prepared.
The A.G. Department likewise falls into two divisions—(a) Administration; (b) Military Law. The first attends to the all-important question of men, the wastage due to casualties and sickness, and the replenishment by fresh drafts out from home. At a stated hour every day telegrams begin pouring in from every part of the line with the day’s casualties which are sent home, and immediate measures taken to refill the gaps thus caused by fresh drafts out from home.
The Medical Services, presided over by a Director-General of Medical Services, and their immense ramifications, from the regimental aid-post, installed in a house or barn right behind the firing-line, down to the hospitals established in palatial hotels at one or other of our army bases, come under this division of the A.G. Department.
The Military Law division deals with discipline, nosmall matter in an army which has grown to the size of ours. Offences against military law, such as drunkenness, desertion, cowardice in face of the enemy, and so on, are matters with which this department deals. Trial is, of course, by court-martial, and the sentence is sent up to the Judge Advocate for confirmation by the Commander-in-Chief.
It was under the auspices of this division of the A.G. Department that the Suspension of Sentences Act, a measure which, though revolutionary in its bearing on military law, received next to no attention in England, was passed through Parliament. The effect of the Act is to empower the military authorities to suspend for the duration of the war the execution of a sentence passed on a British soldier on active service, and at the same time to offer him the opportunity to expunge the conviction by meritorious conduct in the field.
It is a sane, a merciful, but also a practical measure. Though it does not apply to death sentences in cases where the authorities are constrained to let justice take its course, in all ordinary circumstances a man need no longer feel that he has irretrievably ruined his career by a single unreflecting act. Absence from duty, for instance, is an offence that can find no condonement on active service. But a man with a clean record may shirk his duty under the influence of a fit of depression caused by passing indisposition or some other external circumstance. In these conditions a sentence of imprisonment may be passed, but its execution postponed until the end of the war. The man returns to his duty knowing that he can wipeout the black mark against him by gallant behaviour in face of the foe. The Act has the practical advantage of frustrating the attempts of shirkers to evade their duty in the firing-line by committing offences which, under the old system, would have sent them down for a spell of penal duty at one of the bases.
The measure has been completely successful. It has undoubtedly prevented injustice being done in more than one case. I was told of a sergeant, for instance, who was sentenced to death by court-martial for cowardice in face of the enemy. It was an inexplicable case, for the man had an excellent record, but the facts were incontrovertible. The man’s conduct had been disgraceful, and might have imperilled the position if his comrades had followed his example. According to custom, a report on the man was requested from his commanding officer. It was extremely favourable, and it stated, on the doctor’s evidence, that on the occasion in question the sergeant was suffering from a liver attack.
While the case was being debated, the sergeant, who was carrying on with his duties, performed a deed which in other circumstances would certainly have won for him the Military Cross. It seemed an ideal opportunity for applying the Act, though, in point of fact, it had not then been passed by the House of Commons. The sergeant, who had been degraded, was restored to his rank, and the conviction wiped off his record.
Another case of an even more remarkable nature in which the Act was applied was that of a man who escaped from custody after sentence of death passed onhim for desertion had been confirmed by the Commander-in-Chief. By some means or other the man contrived to get wounded after his escape, and was in this way passed through the hospitals to England, where he spent a delightful week posing as a wounded “hero” back from the front. When he was discharged from hospital he calmly returned to his regimental depot, and was in due course sent back to France with a draft to his old battalion. The sergeant who received the draft promptly recognized the offender, and, speechless with stupefaction, marched him off under guard to the lock-up while the case was sent up to the A.G. Department for a decision.
The case was unique in the annals of the Department. Fortunately for the scapegrace, the authorities handling it were men of the world, and the decision they reached was both wise and merciful. It was argued that a man who would not let even a sentence of death deter him from returning to the front is the kind of man we want in the firing-line—what the army in the field would call “a stout feller.” Accordingly the death sentence was commuted, and the scamp returned to the trenches with a long term of imprisonment suspended, like the sword of Damocles, over his head as an added inducement to valour.
The Provost Marshal, most feared of officers, with his acolytes, the Assistant Provost Marshals, commonly known as the A.P.M.’s, attached to the different armies and corps, is under this branch of the A.G. Department.
The A.P.M. is the instrument of military law. His mission is to look after discipline. Multifarious anddifficult are his duties. He must be drastic as Draco, tactful as Talleyrand, astute as Sherlock Holmes. He is the pass “wallah.” He is the authority who at all times and places has the indisputable right to demand your papers and to inquire all about you. If a private or two get drunk in a village, it is the A.P.M. who must find out where and how they get their liquor despite the stringent army prohibition, and place the offendingestaminetout of bounds. The A.P.M. must know the civilians who are respectable citizens in our zone of operations and those who are not.
Frequently his duties bring him into collision with the fair sex. Since immemorial times the courtesan has proved an invaluable instrument of espionage, and the advent of ladies of the roving eye in the towns of our zone is but one of the hundreds of topics which engage the attention of the A.P.M.
Pity the A.P.M.! Hemustbe rather truculent in manner in order to assert his authority, for it is his duty to scent the spy in everyone whose business in the war zone is not instantly apparent. But hear him when papers and passes have been produced in impeccable order: “You know I have to do this. It’s my job. You don’t mind my troubling you—what?” The presence of civilians in the zone of our army is a valuable shelter to spies, and one must therefore be grateful to the unremitting labours of the A.P.M.’s, however inconvenient their activity may be at times.
“During the march of the Allies to the Meuse,” writes Captain Maycock in his admirable treatise onMarlborough’s campaigns, “every possible provision had been made for the comfort of the men, while the discipline of the troops, and the fact that all supplies were scrupulously paid for, astonished the inhabitants of the countries through which they passed.”
This high standard, established by Cadogan, Marlborough’s famous Quartermaster-General, on the Danube and in Flanders, has been splendidly maintained—nay, surpassed—by his successors in this war. The supply services of the army have been above all praise. Whether the Q.M.G. was dealing with the four divisions of the original Expeditionary Force or with the great army into which that little body ultimately expanded, the supply service reached the same high level of efficiency. Whether in the summer heat of the retreat from Mons or in the icy chill of the winter in the trenches, the hardships of war have been consistently allayed for our troops by the abundance and regularity of their supplies.
The Quartermaster-General Department furnishes the army in the field with everything, including arms and ammunition, which are provided through the Ordnance Services, but are carried up to the front in the motor-lorries of the Mechanical Transport of the Army Service Corps, which is under the Q.M.G. Everything, from bully-beef and biscuits to fly-papers, from plum-and-apple jam to chloride of lime, is supplied by the Q.M.G.
Our troops and their daily bread. A scene at a base.
“Daily Mail” phot.Our troops and their daily bread. A scene at a base.
The Q.M.G. works in close co-operation with the Inspector-General of Communications (I.G.C.), who controls the Lines of Communication—familiarly known as L. of C.—supervises the unloading of supplies at the base and their transfer to trains bound for the railheads at the front, “railhead” being the railway station or siding allotted to the division as its collecting-point on the line. At the railhead the Q.M.G. steps in again and sees to the collection of the supplies by the motor-lorries attached to each division, which take the supplies to the refilling-points, where the horse-carts of the different battalions are waiting to carry them right into the firing-line.
The Q.M.G. has to look after the motor and horse transport of the army. Through his Director of Transport he has to find the army in motor-cars and motor-lorries, with spare parts and petrol and tyres and enormous garages, where the havoc wrought by the rough Flanders roads can be repaired by expert mechanics; in motor-cycles for the despatch-riders of the Signalling Corps; in carts for the horse-transport. Through his Director of Remounts he has to provide the army with its horses and mules.
He is the army postman, controlling, through his Director of Postal Services, an admirable organization which keeps the men in the trenches in touch with home, even though their home be Alberta or Fiji, by means of postal deliveries as regular as those in England. He looks after requisitioning and billeting. In short, his activities are innumerable, and after months spent with the army in the field, I still come across traces of his usefulness in new directions. In an army which is always “grousing”—for grumbling has ever been the habit of the soldier—the comparative immunity from criticism of the Army Service Corps, chief handmaiden to the Q.M.G., is probably thehighest compliment that can be paid to the efficiency of that hard-worked department.
The organization of our army in the field is so admirable, its departmentalization so fascinating, so simple, that the temptation lies very near me to devote this chapter to a survey in detail of the diverse services whose direction is centred at G.H.Q. Efficient organization has a strange fascination for the lay mind, as witness the transformation which a few months of soldiering effects in your young civilian. He will bombard you with technical terms; he will pepper you with alphabetical abbreviations; he will, in short, so demolish you with his salvoes of “shop” that your mind in the process is reduced to the state of a trench after the “artillery preparation” is over, and the guns are “lifting” to make way for the infantry attack.
But I want to tell you of the life, of the soul of the army in the field. Your sons and husbands and brothers and cousins will fill in the details of the vast network of services which I have sketched above. While I have been talking (and boring you doubtless) of A.G.’s and A.P.M.’s and Q.M.G.’s, there are the sentries standing at the entrances to the nameless little French town, where G.H.Q. is established, waiting to inspect the impeccable credentials with which I can furnish you, and then to pass you on, with a brisk salute, into as strange a scene as you will see in the world to-day.
For this sleepy little French town, with its inevitableGrand’ Place—a spacious cobbled square—its narrow streets mostly named after local politicians and othernotabilities, its neglected-looking cathedral and churches, its garish little shops, is a kind of museum of uniforms. Never was such a variety of military caps seen together before: many variations of the “brass-hat” of the Staff Officer, from a hideous kind of Sandford-and-Merton pattern with a swollen crown, which some of the arbiters of fashions have imported from Piccadilly, to the faded red and tarnished gold of the Brigade Major from the trenches; the forage-cap of the Royal Flying Corps, the Glengarry and Kilmarnock bonnet, theképiwith its khaki cover—badge of the French interpreter—the slouch hat of the Gurkha, the puggaree of the Indian Cavalry, the common or garden service-cap ofMr.Thomas Atkins.
Then the boots and leggings! What a multiple variety! Immaculate field-boots of the A.D.C., boned and blocked and polished daily by enthusiastic “batmen” until you can see yourself in their resplendent surface; “pig-dealers,” the grey, close-fitting, canvas leggings affected by the “horsy”; Stohwassers of every make and kind; puttees, brown, grey, and blue; ski boots; canvas field-boots; “ammunition boots,” clean or mud-caked and sodden according as the wearer’s duties take him near or away from the firing-line.
Thebureauxof notaries, of insurance agents, of exporters and importers, have been turned into offices for the army services. Officers with such alphabetical titles as I have mentioned above stride with a preoccupied air in and out of old houses whose dilapidated fronts and faded rooms breathe an atmosphereof fatigue that contrasts strangely with the bustle within.
Here in a room that might have come out of an illustration of Du Maurier inPunchof the seventies an officers’ mess is installed. Tins of cigarettes and tobacco stand on the mantelpiece, theSketchand theVie Parisiennelie about the tables, maps hang on the walls, in the depressing atmosphere created by an abundance of rubbed and dusty plush, of cheap brass ornaments, of soul-searing chromo-lithographs, of dyed grasses crammed into vases as big as drainpipes. Perhaps the wordmessconjures up for you a picture of regimental plate, of shaded lights, of red-and-gold uniforms. Banish it from your mind! “Cut it out!”
Meals at G.H.Q. have only one excuse—viz., that man must eat. They are short and business-like, and the fare is plain. In this stern, hard-working North of France they have none of the amenities of French life. The wine is imported, and bad and dear at that; the cooking is atrocious; and as for cleanliness, I have dined in my time at many a humble eating-house in London where the food was served in a far more appetizing manner than I have seen it in the hotels in this part of France. Soup produced from soup squares, fish (on Wednesdays and Fridays, fish-market days) or macaroni, then roast beef or mutton (ration meat, and mostly very tough), followed by tinned fruit and coffee, is the averagemenuof the messes at G.H.Q. Immediately after dinner everybody bolts back to his work.
During the greater part of the day everything is inmovement at G.H.Q. Except for the orderlies waiting for messages outside the offices, and officers here or there talking in the street, everyone seems to be moving. Cars come chug-chugging up the narrow streets, waved in and out by military policemen posted at the dangerous corners, with little coloured flags affixed to the bonnet signifying the formation to which they are attached. There are French cars, adventurous-looking cars, some of them, heavily coated with the mud of Arras or the Argonne, or maybe even the Vosges, bearing mysterious numbers and letters on their wind-screens. They stand there in the sunshine while their drivers, begoggled and leather-coated, chat with a French interpreter or two, with a friendly town policeman, or a uniformed messenger from the Banque de France. In the group there will surely be a British A.S.C. driver or two surveying the Allied car with that silent mien of unspoken criticism which is the attitude of the chauffeur the world over towards a car other than his own.
Clean, well-set-up fellows are the sentries in the town furnished by the famous Territorial regiment incorporated in the G.H.Q. troops. The trim General with the blue arm-band you will often see walking about the town commands the G.H.Q. troops, and, as far as the British Army is concerned, represents law and order in the town. The Territorial regiment concerned has a drum-and-fife band that gives concerts twice daily on theGrand’ Place, to the huge delight of the populace. It also organises smoking-concerts of its own, at which a fine array of talentis forthcoming. The pianist at entertainments of all sorts organized by our army in the field within a wide radius of G.H.Q. is a private of this battalion, a musician of no mean order.
If you want an idea of the medley of mankind that swarms at G.H.Q., come in here to the Fortnum and Mason’s of the place. At all hours of the day the shop is full of officers and men, mess presidents and orderlies, ordering biscuits and liqueur and wine and tinned fruits and cake and macaroni and sardines and Heaven knows what. The trim young ladies who serve know us all by our units, if not by our names. You may hear them rating the patient and ox-likegarçon, a stolid man of fifty or thereabouts. “Eh bien! le whisky pour l’Intelligence? Où est-ce? Vous ne voyez pas que le Capitaine attend les conserves pour les Indiens? Voyons, dépêchez-vous!”
One afternoon in the shop I met a Guardsman of my acquaintance,liaisonofficer with a French army. “The beggars won’t let me pay my mess-bill,” he protested, “so I am getting something in the way of a contribution to the mess. What do you think of asparagus?” And he went off presently to his car with a huge bundle ofasperges d’Argenteuilunder each arm.
There is no social life whatsoever at G.H.Q. For one thing, many of the leading inhabitants have left the war-zone, and gone to live in Paris or elsewhere; for another, the army in the field is far too busy for calling and dining. There are no amusements. There is a theatre, but it is empty. There is not even a cinematograph show. There are sing-songs arrangedby one or other of the different services from time to time, and one of the A.S.C. convoys has a “rag-time band,” with mouth-organs and combs and tin cans by way of instruments, which is said to be very successful. But the fact is that no one has the time to organize amusements for the army. For G.H.Q. is the hub of the army, the power-house that supplies the driving-force to our army in the field.
Our army has established the most cordial relations with the French inhabitants of G.H.Q. The town must be truly thankful for the British occupation, for, on the testimony of the Mayor, the towns-people have made more money since the English arrived than they ever made in their lives. The English influence is very clearly seen in the shops. There are no less than three shops, for instance, doing a thriving trade in all the appurtenances of English games—badminton sets, tennis rackets and balls, cricket bats and balls and stumps, and so on. Bass’s beer, Quaker Oats, all kinds of sauces and pickles, Perrier water, English cakes and biscuits, and, of course, English jam, are in the shop-windows, and are largely advertised through the town. Notices in English are displayed on all sides. “Watches Carefully Mended,” “Top-Hole Coffee and Chocolat” (sic), “Manufacturer of Brushes and Brooms,” “Washing Done for the Military,” are some of the notices I have remarked. At dinner-time hordes of ragamuffins invade the one or two hotels and cafés with the English newspapers which have just come up, having arrived by the morning boat. In parenthesis I might remark that, in addition to the copiesof the London dailies given to the troops free as part of their rations, enterprising newsagents have established themselves in all the principal towns in the zone of our army, and send out newsboys with the papers as soon as they arrive to all the troops billeted in the neighbourhood. In this way I have seen theDaily Mailsold on a road less than five miles from the firing-line, with the guns rumbling noisily in the distance.