G.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 signifying _General
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. For G.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 have possessed, 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 for _personnel_, 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-Assistant
Directors 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, no small 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 wipe out 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 on him 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 and difficult 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 offending _estaminet_
out 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.! He _must_ be 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 on Marlborough’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.
[Illustration:
_“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 the highest 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 inevitable _Grand’
Place_--a spacious cobbled square--its narrow streets mostly named
after local politicians and other notabilities, 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, the _képi_ with 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 of Mr. 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.
The _bureaux_ of 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 atmosphere of fatigue that contrasts
strangely with the bustle within.
Here in a room that might have come out of an illustration of Du
Maurier in _Punch_ of the seventies an officers’ mess is installed.
Tins of cigarettes and tobacco stand on the mantelpiece, the _Sketch_
and the _Vie Parisienne_ lie 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 word _mess_ conjures 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 average _menu_ of the messes at G.H.Q. Immediately after
dinner everybody bolts back to his work.
During the greater part of the day everything is in movement 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 the _Grand’ Place_, to the huge delight of the populace. It
also organises smoking-concerts of its own, at which a fine array of
talent is 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-like _garçon_, 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,
_liaison_ officer 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 of _asperges d’Argenteuil_
under 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
arranged by 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 copies of 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 the _Daily Mail_ sold on a road less than five miles from the
firing-line, with the guns rumbling noisily in the distance.