CHAPTER VIIITHE CHIEF
“May the great God Whom I worship grant to my country, and for the benefit of Europe in general, a great and glorious victory; and may no misconduct in any way tarnish it; and may humanity after victory be the predominant feature of the British fleet. For myself, individually, I commit my life to Him Who made me, and may His blessing light upon my endeavours for serving my country faithfully. To Him I resign myself and the just cause which is entrusted to me to defend.“Amen, Amen, Amen.”(Nelson’s Prayer. A copy hangs in the workroom of the Commander-in-Chief at General Headquarters in France.)
“May the great God Whom I worship grant to my country, and for the benefit of Europe in general, a great and glorious victory; and may no misconduct in any way tarnish it; and may humanity after victory be the predominant feature of the British fleet. For myself, individually, I commit my life to Him Who made me, and may His blessing light upon my endeavours for serving my country faithfully. To Him I resign myself and the just cause which is entrusted to me to defend.
“Amen, Amen, Amen.”(Nelson’s Prayer. A copy hangs in the workroom of the Commander-in-Chief at General Headquarters in France.)
You might spend a couple of days in the little town where the headquarters of our army in the field is established without becoming aware of the presence of the Commander-in-Chief. The departmentalization of a modern army is so complete, the duties are so widely delegated, the responsibilities so extensively divided, that an officer, even of the higher grades, may serve for months with the army in the field and never come into personal contact with its supreme head.
This is a state of things which arises directly out of the conditions of modern war. The direct personal influence of military leaders on their troops isno longer possible owing to the vast scale on which modern wars are conducted. In former times the General directed the battle from a hill-top which afforded him a commanding view of the operations as they unfolded themselves beneath his eyes. To-day, the General also looks down on the battle from a height, but only metaphorically speaking.
Field-Marshal Oyama playing croquet during the Battle of Mukden, the General in “Ole Luke Oie’s” brilliant sketch who fought and worsted a trout in a pleasant garden whilst hundreds of men went to their death—these are but the symbols of a state of mental detachment which is essential in the modern General called upon to handle vast masses of troops operating on a gigantic scale. To keep his mind clear and unembarrassed by a host of details, to retain his mental freshness against the moment when a supreme decision, or maybe a series of supreme decisions, has to be taken, the modern Commander-in-Chief must delegate much more of his powers than formerly, must relinquish a great measure of his direct personal influence on his men.
The influence of the great modern General will always be indirect rather than direct. Comparatively few of the German troops fighting on the Western front had ever set eyes on Field-Marshal von Hindenburg, save in pictures, yet, when the rumour ran in the spring that he was coming to assume the supreme command in Flanders, the men in the trenches set up notices on the parapets announcing to theEngländerthat Hindenburg was coming, and that the Germans would be in Calais in a week.
The Chief.
“Daily Mail” phot.The Chief.
The influence of Sir John French on the British Army in France is as a strong leaven leavening the whole mass. The conditions of life of an army in the field, a great host of men working to the same end, the monotony of existence undisturbed by sex antagonism, united by the risk of death common to all, make men as sensitive to the transmission of influences as African tribes are to the transmission of news. In the field a strong character will make itself felt in a week. Imperceptibly, the men will begin to lean on qualities of determination, courage, intuition. All these are attributes of Sir John French, and they are, I believe, responsible, in quite an astonishing degree, for the splendid tenacity, the unshakable optimism, of the British Army in France.
Within his power, Sir John French has always sought to keep in personal contact with the men in the firing-line. More than once, on the retreat from Mons, the Commander-in-Chief might have been seen to leave his car and sit down beside the exhausted troops resting by the roadside, so tired that they did not care whether the whole German Army was in the next field. He would remain there on the dusty grass, and tell the men that it was only so many miles to the next halt for the night, and spur them on to fresh efforts by his generous praise of the splendid endurance they had shown up to then. In a little he would have them on their feet again, foot-sore and weary as they were, ready to face the world, if needs be, to win a pat on the shoulder, a word of appreciation, from “Sir John.”
But the British Army in France has grown immeasurablysince those days when four divisions was England’s entire contribution to the war on land. With the army of Mons, the Commander-in-Chief might yet hope to be the John French of South Africa, where the cavalry hailed the trim little man on the white horse as the harbinger of stern, swift blows against the Boer, as the incorporation of dash, decision, and resourcefulness. But with the great citizen army of to-day, in which he counts divisions where before he counted battalions, the British Generalissimo could not hope to keep in personal touch in the same degree as was possible with the cavalry in South Africa or with the little Expeditionary Force of August, 1914.
Nevertheless, Sir John French has never failed in this war to visit formations that have distinguished themselves, and to express to them personally his appreciation of their good work. I remember, after the second battle of Ypres, receiving word that the Commander-in-Chief would inspect some brigades of cavalry that had held our line round Ypres on May 13, when the Germans made their last and most violent attempt to burst through to the sea. It was a fine, warm morning in June, a regular Aldershot review day, though, Heaven knows! there was little enough of the red and gold of Cæsar’s Camp or Laffan’s Plain about the squadrons in their war-worn khaki drawn up in a square in a meadow by a country road. The Commander of the Cavalry Corps was there, and the Divisional General and the Brigadiers, and just in front, beside a fine, broad Union Jack fluttering from a flagstaff planted on a farm-cart, Sir John French,exquisitely neat, as usual, in his trim khaki, with four rows of medal-ribbons, and immaculate brown field-boots, and a cane that he swung as he talked.
The men stood easy, Lifeguards and Hussars and Dragoons, dismounted as they had been at Ypres, their eyes on the soldierly figure before them, their thoughts, I wager, away among the poppies and the cornflowers of the salient where in their graves dead comrades smiled in their last sleep at the recollection of the good fight well fought. The Commander-in-Chief indulged in no rhetorics. He, like the plain man he is, likes plain speaking. So he stood up there against the farm-cart, and talked to the men in a clear, soldierly voice, and as he spoke, lo! it was not the Commander-in-Chief addressing his troops, but just John French of the 19th talking to his cavalry, that cavalry he loved and made his life-work. There were no tears, no elegiacs, but heartening words of praise for good service stoutly rendered. There was, indeed, such perfect frankness in much of what the Field-Marshal said that I remember the blue pencil of the Censor cut furrows in the report of it I sent to my newspaper in London.
As soon as a new body of troops arrives in France, whether Territorials or Colonials or New Army, you may be sure that, before very long, the Rolls Royce, flying the Union Jack from the roof—the only car that may fly the old flag in France—will appear outside their billets, and the Commander-in-Chief will descend to see for himself what the new material is like. One has only to glance at his despatches to see that he never fails to pay a tribute to good qualitiesin new troops out from home. Real soldier that he is, he always has a keen eye to the general appearance of the men, knowing that the best soldiers are the men who, even in the rigour of winter in the trenches, managed to preserve a cleanly appearance, and who, right up in the firing-line, are as punctilious about saluting as they would be in barracks at home. The Brigade of Guards, who always pride themselves upon their personal neatness, set a fine example to the army in this respect, and earned the approval of every good soldier.
Sir John French has had many residences since he came to France in August. Châteaux, farms, colleges, or other public buildings, and the villas or town-houses of such local notabilities as the Mayor, the lawyer, or the doctor, have afforded him hospitality from the battle of Mons and the subsequent retreat down to the stalemate of the war of positions which brought our General Headquarters to anchor for a spell. But no matter where the Commander-in-Chief has lived, though his house were French, its atmosphere has always been wholly and essentially English. Thus, at G.H.Q. in the little town of which I wrote in my last chapter, though the large and stately rooms and rather florid furniture, the pictures and statuary of the house in which he lives arebourgeoisof thebourgeois, they are powerless to dissipate the pleasant family air of the place, the atmosphere of an English country seat in the shires.
It is a restful place. Though it shelters the brain of the army, there is no rush or flurry, even when heavy fighting is toward. Deep thinking and hard work aregoing on day and night between the four walls of this plain, unpretentious house; but, save for the whirr of a telephone now and then, or the arrival of a Staff car or a cyclist, only the sentries at the gateway betoken the presence of the Commander-in-Chief.
You enter from the street under one of those arched entries, known as aporte cochère, found in all French towns. A small door, with panels of frosted glass on the left of the entrance, gives access to the hall, where the first thing to meet the eye is a pyramid of parcels, gifts from home for the Field-Marshal and his troops, mostly from unknown admirers. By every post these presents pour in, vivid testimony of the loving solicitude wherewith the folks at home hang on the life of the army in the field. Every imaginable kind of gift is there—Bibles, Books of Common Prayer, blessed medals and rosaries, charms of all sorts, “woollies” galore, socks and waistcoats and comforters and mitts.
One day even Russia sent her tribute of admiration in the shape of a little ikon of the far-famed Madonna of Kazan, before whose bejewelled image in the Kazan Cathedral at Petrograd thousands of suppliants kneel daily in silent prayer for the safe return of their loved ones from the war. Truly there is a great sameness about certain aspects of the war on both sides. I remember reading an amusing appeal by Field-Marshal von Hindenburg to the correspondent of theNeue Freie Presse, my old friend,Dr.Paul Goldmann, begging him to tell people he did not want any more mitts or remedies against rheumatism and chilblains.
A small room to the right of the hall is the A.D.C.’s (Aide-de-Camp’s) room, where one of the four A.D.C.’sto the Commander-in-Chief is always present. He is known as the A.D.C. on duty. He remains in this room all day in attendance on the Commander-in-Chief, receiving and transmitting messages, answering the telephone on the desk at his elbow, dealing with applications for interviews with “The Chief,” as he is called by his Staff, and receiving visitors. A huge map of the whole zone of the British Army in France hangs on the wall, and portraits of Sir John French and some of his Generals, cut from French and English illustrated papers, have been nailed up.
In the corner is a white door marked “PRIVATE”. When a bell whirrs the A.D.C. disappears through this door. It leads to the workroom of the Commander-in-Chief.
A perfectly plain room, spacious and lofty, with large windows, from its white walls and massive marble mantelpiece and large mirror obviously the drawing-room of the house in other days, the big maps hung all round the walls and spread over the very large plain deal table, lend it an essentially business-like air. On the mantelpiece a handsome Empire clock and some candelabra are the sole ornaments in the room.
There is also a little illuminated card, headed “Nelson’s Prayer,” that finely inspired supplication for victory which they found in the great Admiral’s cabin on board his famous flagship after he received his mortal wound. I have placed this beautiful prayer at the head of this chapter, because its plain, direct appeal, its confidence, and its dignity seem to me to be characteristic of the man on whom onceagain the hopes of the whole British race are fixed. That little English prayer is the only visible link between Sir John French and home in his workroom in France.
The Commander-in-Chief spends the greater part of the day in this room. It is a place of hard work, of deep concentration, of lightning decisions on which hang the lives of thousands of men. You will find him there at all hours, dapper, fresh, as young as the youngest of his Staff, eternally giving the lie to his white hair and moustache. It is in this room that most of his despatches are written, those models of precise English that, without rhodomontade, false pathos, or exaggeration, set forth their plain tale of glory to make the Empire ring.
Sir John French always writes his own despatches. His warm words of praise, his frank words of criticism, are absolutely the expression of his own thoughts. When he has a despatch to write he will shut himself up in this reposeful room for hours at a time, neglecting his meals, working far into the night, until the last word is written and his name affixed:
“Your Lordship’s most obedient servant,“J. D. P. FRENCH,“Field Marshal, Commanding-in-Chief,British Army in the Field.”
“Your Lordship’s most obedient servant,
“J. D. P. FRENCH,“Field Marshal, Commanding-in-Chief,British Army in the Field.”
In an army of hard workers, in the centre of the hive of industry that is G.H.Q., no man works harder than “The Chief.” Breakfast at the Commander-in-Chief’s is from 7.45 to 8.30, but long before that time Sir John French is at his table studying thereports which have arrived from the different armies during the night, and are awaiting his perusal when he comes down in the morning. Half-past eight finds Sir John at his place at the head of the breakfast-table, with a cheery greeting for everyone there.
At a fixed hour there takes place the daily conference between the Commander-in-Chief and the different heads of the services at G.H.Q. The Generals arrive singly or in pairs from their offices, a portfolio under their arm—the Adjutant-General, the Quartermaster-General, the Chief of the General Staff, the Chief of Intelligence. For an hour or more they are closeted singly or together with “The Chief.” Operations past or future are discussed, the whole situation along our front reviewed, guns, men, supplies, the enemy’s situation, and his probable plans.
The distribution of the rest of the day depends largely on the situation at the front. Once a movement has started and is progressing favourably, a Commander-in-Chief’s work is done for the time. Broadly speaking, it is the Commander-in-Chief who conceives the strategy of an operation, it is the Chief of the General Staff who works it out, while its tactical execution lies in the hands of the General commanding the army to which the operation is confided. He in turn leaves the carrying out of more detailed operations to the Corps Commander, who delegates part of the yet more detailed execution to the Divisional General, and he in his turn relinquishes the details of the work of the battalions on the ground to the brigade and battalion commanders.
Visits to the different army commanders in thefield, the inspection of troops who have come out of action, of reinforcements, of new guns or appliances in the war of the trenches, interviews with visitors at G.H.Q., French Generals, Britishliaisonofficers with the French Army, or distinguished visitors from England, fill in the remainder of Sir John French’s day. The arrival in the afternoon of the King’s Messenger from London with despatches from the War Office and the morning newspapers absorbs the rest of the time until dinner, and often makes the Commander-in-Chief late for this meal, which, by his express orders, is never delayed for him.
Sir John French presides over his small household at G.H.Q. in a benevolent and paternal manner. All the members of his Personal Staff are old friends of his, and were with the Field-Marshal in South Africa. He calls them all by their Christian names, and each vies with the other in his devoted loyalty to “The Chief.”
The genial, courtly presence of the man pervades his whole environment. Is the situation ever so desperate, the fighting never so severe, there is no fuss or flurry at the Commander-in-Chief’s. Even during the retreat from Mons, when Headquarters was frequently moved, when for days at a time neither the Commander-in-Chief nor his Staff got even a few hours of unbroken rest, Sir John diffused about him the same calm atmosphere. He would not allow the overwhelming responsibility resting on his shoulders to overcloud the existence of the others. At meals he was cheery and debonair as usual, guiding the conversation into pleasant English channels, and illuminatingit with many anecdotes and witty sayings which his great and retentive memory has stored up from an exceptionally busy life and wide and varied reading.
More than once he astonished his Staff, at a critical moment, by announcing that he would go for a walk. Picking up his old riding-crop, he would stroll forth with one of the A.D.C.’s and walk for an hour through the country lanes, stopping to admire the view, or to criticize a horse, or to look at the crops. But on his return he would go straight to his maps again, and then like a flash he would announce his decision. “I will do this and that!” And they would realize that whilst he had strolled and chatted his mind had been wrestling with the military problem that had obsessed them all.
Dinner is a pleasant meal at the Commander-in-Chief’s. Often there is a distinguished visitor from London present, a member of the Cabinet who has come out to get a glimpse for himself of conditions at the front, a leading scientific authority despatched on some mission or other, distinguished ecclesiastics like the Bishop of London or the Archbishop of Westminster. For many months the Prince of Wales, as A.D.C. to the Commander-in-Chief, dined nightly at Sir John’s table, a very charming, extremely natural young officer, who was simply addressed as “Prince,” and who was best pleased when no notice whatsoever was taken of his exalted rank. There is never any formality about precedence at the Commander-in-Chief’s, save that the guest of the evening sits on the right of the Field-Marshal.
Under the eye of “The Chief.” Troops marching past Sir John French at the Front.
Under the eye of “The Chief.” Troops marching past Sir John French at the Front.
Sir John French presides at his dinner-table with delightful urbanity. Books and battlefields have been the study of his life. He has, I believe, read all the histories of the campaigns of the world’s great Generals, from Julius Cæsar’sCommentariesdown to Ropes’sHistory of the American Civil War, and the text-books on the Franco-Prussian War, especially the German. But he does not believe in reading alone. He is fond of quoting a saying of Lord Wolseley’s: “A soldier ought to read little and think much.” In accordance with this maxim, Sir John French has not only read but assimilated, and he has done a great deal of both.
But the military authors have not alone engaged his attention. He is a profound admirer of Dickens, and he can find suitable quotations and similes from Dickens for the most varied situations of life. He is not a great talker. He only speaks when he has something to say. But that is always to the point, and often refreshingly original.
The Commander-in-Chief is a profound student of humanity. That is why he admires Dickens. That is why he loves the British soldier, with his whimsicalities and his contradictory ways. He knows the British soldier as well as Lord Roberts knew him, and that is saying a great deal. He understands the British soldier’s pride in his work, and therefore he always gives credit where credit is due. When the Suffolks under his command in South Africa walked into a hornets’ nest at Grassy Hill, Sir John French took the first opportunity that presented itself—it was not until several months later that he met themagain—to tell them they were not to blame for what happened.
“It has come to my knowledge,” he said to them, “that there has been spread about an idea that that event cast discredit of some sort upon this gallant regiment. I want you to banish any such thoughts from your mind as utterly untrue.... You must remember that, if we always waited for an opportunity of certain success, we should do nothing at all, and in war, fighting a brave enemy, it is absolutely impossible to be sure of success. All we can do is to try our very best to secure success—and that you did on the occasion I am speaking of.” When the 2nd Worcesters saved the day at the first battle of Ypres by recapturing Gheluvelt at the bayonet-point, the Commander-in-Chief made every possible inquiry to find out the name of the officer who had ordered the charge. The name of the officer remained for a long time a regimental secret, but Sir John French gave the gallant Worcesters a very fine “mention” all to themselves in his despatch on the Ypres fighting. It was not until months later that it was definitely established that the author of the celebrated order was that most gallant soldier the late Brigadier-General C. Fitzclarence, V.C., who was afterwards killed in action.
Thus, though Sir John French must fain deprive himself of the privilege he would be the first to want to enjoy, of seeing his troops actually at grips with the Germans, he is not simply a distant name, a figure on an Olympic height, to the men in the trenches. He is a pillar of strength, a man that soldiers trust, whovoices to the great public beyond this little zone of war the deeds that have won a soldier’s approbation, or who gives vent in carefully chosen words to the soldier’s execration of the cynical treachery of the enemy. The bond uniting the Commander-in-Chief with the men in the field is not to be analyzed, for it is intangible. But it is nevertheless a very real tie of mutual esteem, trust, and affection.
Yet the army which in the fulness of time Sir John French has been called upon to command is no longer the army of South Africa, a small, highly trained band of professional soldiers whom the Germans, on first meeting with them at Mons, dubbed in despair “an army of non-commissioned officers.” Since the days of the Civil War it is the first national army that England has ever had, and the England that has put it in the field is the greater England of the twentieth century, the British Empire, whose pioneers sprang from that selfsame doughty stock that did not fear to lay hands on the Lord’s Anointed if thereby liberty might live.
The army has flung wide its portals to the civilian. All barriers of caste or wealth are broken down. The officer is no longer a member of a small military oligarchy, nor the soldier the tough old professional fighter of whom Kipling delighted to write. Mulvaney, Learoyd, and Ortheris have not vanished from the army. But they have vanished as average types. If they had escaped the destiny of so many of the magnificent fighters of our original Expeditionary Force, which was the quintessence of our standing army—six feet of earth in Flanders or a long visit toGermany—the three friends of Kipling’s tales would have passed out of their former sphere of action. The incorrigible Mulvaney, maybe, might yet be a sergeant, the backbone of his platoon, putting the new-comers, officers and men alike, up to all the dodges of the trenches. But the other two would surely be officers, with suspiciously new Sam Browne belts, a little uncertain of their social position, but treated with all the more deference for that by their fellow-officers.
Socially it is a topsy-turvy army. Learoyd is brigade machine-gun officer with the Military Cross, and has already learned the proper degree of nonchalance in returning the salutes of men who, in civilian life, maybe, themselves were wont to command, who perhaps even shared in that incomprehensible English prejudice against the military which refused the red-coat a seat in the stalls of a London theatre or a drink in the saloon bar of a public-house. “When I went to see the old people in Yorkshire in my uniform for the first time,” a fine old soldier of my acquaintance, a sergeant of the Coldstreams with twenty-two years’ service, told me once, “my father said: ‘I never thought boy of mine would disgrace the family by going for a soldier. Get out of here, and never darken my doors again until you have taken that red coat off!’”
Nous avons changé tout ça!The last shall be first and the first last in this citizen army of ours. I know of a peer of the realm, an Earl who is the head of one of the oldest families in the British Isles, who is serving as orderly in a clearing hospital at the front. When last seen he was whitewashing and whistling a littletune as he worked, the bearer of one of our greatest names at the beck and call of the humblest medical student with a commission in the R.A.M.C., but, like the latter, filling his niche in the service of the State.
Could one imagine a more difficult task, amongst all the manifold problems which have confronted us in this war, than the expansion of the framework of our little Expeditionary Force to embrace these hundreds of thousands of men, from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, from India and Canada, from South Africa and Australia, from Fiji and the West Indies, with their varying ideas of personal liberty and discipline? That this task has been successfully accomplished is due, for one thing, to the fact that every man in our army is an apostle, bearing within him a message of liberty to the world, ready to subordinate every personal feeling to the end of victory; for another, to the astonishing adaptability of our race, which has enabled Lord Kitchener to stamp an army from the earth, and Sir John French and his Generals to breathe into it the spirit of our great military past.
If you took a small haberdasher in a London suburb and suddenly increased his modest establishment until it reached the dimensions of William Whiteley’s or of Harrod’s, would you blame the man if, even with unlimited resources, he showed himself incapable of achieving the same relative measure of success as he had attained with his little shop? You know that you would not. You would rather blame the lack of organization that had suddenly thrust enormously increased responsibilities on a man who, had the process been gradual, might have adapted himself tothe growing dimensions of his business. Yet this is what the country has thrust upon Sir John French. He, a General, like all save the Balkan and Turkish Generals, without any experience of modern European war, has been called upon to meet in unequal combat the finest military brains that the application of forty years can produce, with a sword that has constantly changed its weight and balance and length and sharpness.
He has sustained the ordeal. His adaptability of temperament and breadth of outlook, for which all Britons may thank God, has enabled him to cope with an army ten times the size of the little force which he originally led out to France, and to surround himself with Generals who have shown themselves able to handle divisions where before they were dealing with battalions. Not only have the numbers of our army increased; the quality of our men has changed. The sturdy fighters of Mons and the Marne have been reinforced by Territorials who are, generally speaking, of a higher stamp of intelligence, and accordingly endowed with the good and bad fighting qualities which the more trained intellect bestows, and the men of the New Army, in which all types and classes of Briton are found side by side in the ranks. Not only has the question of the right leading of these new formations proved all-important, the problem of their assimilation into the existing organization was one requiring tact and a fine appreciation of theImponderabiliaof the situation. That it has been successfully solved History, when it comes to review the world-shaking events of our days, beside which manseems but the puniest of pygmies, cannot fail to count to the merit of Sir John French.
To our citizen army, then, Sir John French is more than a Commander-in-Chief. He is a national leader, the man to whom it is given to direct that fount of ardent patriotism which has inspired Britons, wherever the Union Jack flies, to lay down their work and follow the drum. No man is more conscious of the responsibility resting on his shoulders than Sir John French. No man is more profoundly convinced of the justice of our cause. No man could appreciate more gratefully the immense confidence which the nation has reposed in him by entrusting to his care the greatest army that the British Empire has ever put in the field.