Scores of times, hundreds of times, during the battles of the Somme,
I passed the headquarters of Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson, commanding
the Fourth Army, and several times I met the army commander there
and elsewhere. One of my first meetings with him was extraordinarily
embarrassing to me for a moment or two. While he was organizing his
army, which was to be called, with unconscious irony, “The Army
of Pursuit”--the battles of the Somme were a siege rather than a
pursuit--he desired to take over the chateau at Tilques, in which the
war correspondents were then quartered. As we were paying for it
and liked it, we put up an opposition which was most annoying to his
A.D.C.'s, especially to one young gentleman of enormous wealth, haughty
manners, and a boyish intolerance of other people's interests, who had
looked over our rooms without troubling to knock at the doors, and then
said, “This will suit us down to the ground.” On my way back from the
salient one evening I walked up the drive in the flickering light of
summer eve, and saw two officers coming in my direction, one of whom I
thought I recognized as an old friend.
“Hullo!” I said, cheerily. “You here again?”
Then I saw that I was face to face with Sir Henry Rawlinson. He must
have been surprised, but dug me in the ribs in a genial way, and said,
“Hullo, young feller!”
He made no further attempt to “pinch” our quarters, but my familiar
method of address could not have produced that result.
His headquarters at Querrieux were in another old chateau on the
Amiens-Albert road, surrounded by pleasant fields through which a stream
wound its way. Everywhere the sign-boards were red, and a military
policeman, authorized to secure obedience to the rules thereon, slowed
down every motor-car on its way through the village, as though Sir Henry
Rawlinson lay sick of a fever, so anxious were his gestures and his
expression of “Hush! do be careful!”
The army commander seemed to me to have a roguish eye. He seemed to be
thinking to himself, “This war is a rare old joke!” He spoke habitually
of the enemy as “the old Hun” or “old Fritz,” in an affectionate,
contemptuous way, as a fellow who was trying his best but getting the
worst of it every time. Before the battles of the Somme I had a talk
with him among his maps, and found that I had been to many places in his
line which he did not seem to know. He could not find there very quickly
on his large-sized maps, or pretended not to, though I concluded that
this was “camouflage,” in case I might tell “old Fritz” that such
places existed. Like most of our generals, he had amazing, overweening
optimism. He had always got the enemy “nearly beat,” and he arranged
attacks during the Somme fighting with the jovial sense of striking
another blow which would lead this time to stupendous results. In the
early days, in command of the 7th Division, he had done well, and he was
a gallant soldier, with initiative and courage of decision and a quick
intelligence in open warfare. His trouble on the Somme was that
the enemy did not permit open warfare, but made a siege of it, with
defensive lines all the way back to Bapaume, and every hillock a
machine-gun fortress and every wood a death-trap. We were always
preparing for a “break-through” for cavalry pursuit, and the cavalry
were always being massed behind the lines and then turned back again,
after futile waiting, encumbering the roads. “The bloodbath of the
Somme,” as the Germans called it, was ours as well as theirs, and scores
of times when I saw the dead bodies of our men lying strewn over those
dreadful fields, after desperate and, in the end, successful attacks
through the woods of death--Mametz Wood, Delville Wood, Trones Wood,
Bernafay Wood, High Wood, and over the Pozieres ridge to Courcellette
and Martinpuich--I thought of Rawlinson in his chateau in Querrieux,
scheming out the battles and ordering up new masses of troops to the
great assault over the bodies of their dead... Well, it is not for
generals to sit down with their heads in their hands, bemoaning
slaughter, or to shed tears over their maps when directing battle. It
is their job to be cheerful, to harden their hearts against the casualty
lists, to keep out of the danger-zone unless their presence is strictly
necessary. But it is inevitable that the men who risk death daily, the
fighting-men who carry out the plans of the High Command and see no
sense in them, should be savage in their irony when they pass a peaceful
house where their doom is being planned, and green-eyed when they see
an army general taking a stroll in buttercup fields, with a jaunty young
A.D.C. slashing the flowers with his cane and telling the latest joke
from London to his laughing chief. As onlookers of sacrifice some of
us--I, for one--adopted the point of view of the men who were to die,
finding some reason in their hatred of the staffs, though they were
doing their job with a sense of duty, and with as much intelligence
as God had given them. Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson was one of our best
generals, as may be seen by the ribbons on his breast, and in the last
phase commanded a real “Army of Pursuit,” which had the enemy on the
run, and broke through to Victory. It was in that last phase of open
warfare that Rawlinson showed his qualities of generalship and once
again that driving purpose which was his in the Somme battles, but
achieved only by prodigious cost of life.