Of General Allenby, commanding the Third Army before he was succeeded by
Gen. Sir Julian Byng and went to his triumph in Palestine, I knew very
little except by hearsay. He went by the name of “The Bull,” because
of his burly size and deep voice. The costly fighting that followed
the battle of Arras on April 9th along the glacis of the Scarpe did
not reveal high generalship. There were many young officers--and some
divisional generals who complained bitterly of attacks ordered without
sufficient forethought, and the stream of casualties which poured back,
day by day, with tales of tragic happenings did not inspire one with a
sense of some high purpose behind it all, or some presiding genius.
General Byng, “Bungo Byng,” as he was called by his troops, won the
admiration of the Canadian Corps which he commanded, and afterward, in
the Cambrai advance of November, '17, he showed daring of conception
and gained the first striking surprise in the war by novel methods of
attack--spoiled by the quick come-back of the enemy under Von Marwitz
and our withdrawal from Bourlon Wood, Masnieres, and Marcoing, and other
places, after desperate fighting.
His chief of staff, Gen. Louis Vaughan, was a charming, gentle-mannered
man, with a scientific outlook on the problems of war, and so kind in
his expression and character that it seemed impossible that he could
devise methods of killing Germans in a wholesale way. He was like an
Oxford professor of history discoursing on the Marlborough wars, though
when I saw him many times outside the Third Army headquarters, in
a railway carriage, somewhere near Villers Carbonnel on the Somme
battlefields, he was explaining his preparations and strategy for
actions to be fought next day which would be of bloody consequence to
our men and the enemy.
General Birdwood, commanding the Australian Corps, and afterward the
Fifth Army in succession to General Gough, was always known as “Birdie”
by high and low, and this dapper man, so neat, so bright, so brisk, had
a human touch with him which won him the affection of all his troops.
Gen. Hunter Weston, of the 8th Corps, was another man of character in
high command. He spoke of himself in the House of Commons one day as
“a plain, blunt soldier,” and the army roared with laughter from end to
end. There was nothing plain or blunt about him. He was a man of airy
imagination and a wide range of knowledge, and theories on life and war
which he put forward with dramatic eloquence.
It was of Gen. Hunter Weston that the story was told about the drunken
soldier put onto a stretcher and covered with a blanket, to get him out
of the way when the army commander made a visit to the lines.
“What's this?” said the general.
“Casualty, sir,” said the quaking platoon commander.
“Not bad, I hope?”
“Dead, sir,” said the subaltern. He meant dead drunk.
The general drew himself up, and said, in his dramatic way, “The army
commander salutes the honored dead!”
And the drunken private put his head from under the blanket and asked,
“What's the old geezer a-sayin' of?”
That story may have been invented in a battalion mess, but it went
through the army affixed to the name of Hunter Weston, and seemed to fit
him.
The 8th Corps was on the left in the first attack on the Somme, when
many of our divisions were cut to pieces in the attempt to break the
German line at Gommecourt. It was a ghastly tragedy, which spoiled the
success on the right at Fricourt and Montauban. But Gen. Hunter Weston
was not degomme, as the French would say, and continued to air his
theories on life and warfare until the day of Victory, when once again
we had “muddled through,” not by great generalship, but by the courage
of common men.
Among the divisional generals with whom I came in contact--I met most
of them at one time or another--were General Hull of the 56th (London)
Division, General Hickey of the 16th (Irish) Division, General Harper
of the 51st (Highland) Division, General Nugent of the 36th (Ulster)
Division, and General Pinnie of the 35th (Bantams) Division, afterward
of the 33d.
General Hull was a handsome, straight-speaking, straight-thinking man,
and I should say an able general. “Ruthless,” his men said, but this was
a war of ruthlessness, because life was cheap. Bitter he was at times,
because he had to order his men to do things which he knew were folly.
I remember sitting on the window-sill of his bedroom, in an old house of
Arras, while he gave me an account of “the battle in the dark,” in which
the Londoners and other English troops lost their direction and found
themselves at dawn with the enemy behind them. General Hull made no
secret of the tragedy or the stupidity... On another day I met him
somewhere on the other side of Peronne, before March 21st, when he was
commanding the 16th (Irish) Division in the absence of General Hickey,
who was ill. He talked a good deal about the belief in a great German
offensive, and gave many reasons for thinking it was all “bluff.” A
few days later the enemy had rolled over his lines... Out of thirteen
generals I met at that time, there were only three who believed that the
enemy would make his great assault in a final effort to gain decisive
victory, though our Intelligence had amassed innumerable proofs and were
utterly convinced of the approaching menace.
“They will never risk it!” said General Gorringe of the 47th (London)
Division. “Our lines are too strong. We should mow them down.”
I was standing with him on a wagon, watching the sports of the London
men. We could see the German lines, south of St.-Quentin, very quiet
over there, without any sign of coming trouble. A few days later the
place where we were standing was under waves of German storm-troops.
I liked the love of General Hickey for his Irish division. An Irishman
himself, with a touch of the old Irish soldier as drawn by Charles
Lever, gay-hearted, proud of his boys, he was always pleased to see me
because he knew I had a warm spot in my heart for the Irish troops. He
had a good story to tell every time, and passed me on to “the boys” to
get at the heart of them. It was long before he lost hope of keeping the
division together, though it was hard to get recruits and losses were
high at Guillemont and Ginchy. For the first time he lost heart and was
very sad when the division was cut to pieces in a Flanders battle.
It lost 2,000 men and 162 officers before the battle began--they were
shelled to death in the trenches--and 2,000 men and 170 officers more
during the progress of the battle. It was murderous and ghastly.
General Harper of the 51st (Highland) Division, afterward commanding the
4th Corps, had the respect of his troops, though they called him “Uncle”
because of his shock of white hair. The Highland division, under his
command, fought many battles and gained great honor, even from the
enemy, who feared them and called the kilted men “the ladies from hell.”
It was to them the Germans sent their message in a small balloon
during the retreat from the Somme: “Poor old 51st. Still sticking it!
Cheery-oh!”
“Uncle” Harper invited me to lunch in his mess, and was ironical
with war correspondents, and censors, and the British public, and new
theories of training, and many things in which he saw no sense. There
was a smoldering passion in him which glowed in his dark eyes.
He was against bayonet-training, which took the field against rifle-fire
for a time.
“No man in this war,” he said, with a sweeping assertion, “has ever been
killed by the bayonet unless he had his hands up first.” And, broadly
speaking, I think he was right, in spite of the Director of Training,
who was extremely annoyed with me when I quoted this authority.