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.