Books: Now It Can Be Told

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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.

XVI

General Haldane was friendly to the war correspondents--he had been
something of the kind himself in earlier days--and we were welcomed at
his headquarters, both when he commanded the 3d Division and afterward
when he became commander of the 6th Corps. I thought during the war,
and I think now, that he had more intellect and "quality" than many of
our other generals. A tall, strongly built man, with a distinction of
movement and gesture, not "stocky" or rigid, but nervous and restless,
he gave one a sense of power and intensity of purpose. There was a
kind of slow-burning fire in him--a hatred of the enemy which was not
weakened in him by any mercy, and a consuming rage, as it appeared to
me, against inefficiency in high places, injustice of which he may
have felt himself to be the victim, and restrictions upon his liberty
of command. A bitter irony was often in his laughter when discussing
politicians at home, and the wider strategy of war apart from that on
his own front. He was intolerant of stupidity, which he found
widespread, and there was no tenderness or emotion in his attitude
toward life. The officers and men under his command accused him of
ruthlessness. But they admitted that he took more personal risk than
he need have done as a divisional general, and was constantly in the
trenches examining his line. They also acknowledged that he was
generous in his praise of their good service, though merciless if he
found fault with them. He held himself aloof--too much, I am sure--
from his battalion officers, and had an extreme haughtiness of bearing
which was partly due to reserve and that shyness which is in many
Englishmen and a few Scots.

In the old salient warfare he often demanded service in the way of
raids and the holding of death-traps, and the execution of minor
attacks which caused many casualties, and filled men with rage and
horror at what they believed to be unnecessary waste of life--their
life, and their comrades'--that did not make for popularity in the
ranks of the battalion messes. Privately, in his own mess, he was
gracious to visitors, and revealed not only a wide range of knowledge
outside as well as inside his profession, but a curious, unexpected
sympathy for ideas, not belonging as a rule to generals of the old
caste. I liked him, though I was always conscious of that flame and
steel in his nature which made his psychology a world away from mine.
He was hit hard--in what I think was the softest spot in his heart--by
the death of one of his A. D. C.'s--young Congreve, who was the beau
ideal of knighthood, wonderfully handsome, elegant even when covered
from head to foot in wet mud (as I saw him one day), fearless, or at
least scornful of danger, to the verge of recklessness. General
Haldane had marked him out as the most promising young soldier in the
whole army. A bit of shell, a senseless bit of steel, spoiled that
promise--as it spoiled the promise of a million boys--and the general
was saddened more than by the death of other gallant officers.

I have one memory of General Haldane which shows him in a different
light. It was during the great German offensive in the north, when
Arras was hard beset and the enemy had come back over Monchy Hill and
was shelling villages on the western side of Arras, which until then
had been undamaged. It was in one of these villages--near Avesnes-le-
Compte--to which the general had come back with his corps
headquarters, established there for many months in earlier days, so
that the peasants and their children knew him well by sight and had
talked with him, because he liked to speak French with them. When I
went to see him one day during that bad time in April of '18, he was
surrounded by a group of children who were asking anxiously whether
Arras would be taken. He drew a map for them in the dust of the
roadway, and showed them where the enemy was attacking and the general
strategy. He spoke simply and gravely, as though to a group of staff-
officers, and the children followed his diagram in the dust and
understood him perfectly.

"They will not take Arras if I can help it," he said. "You will be all
right here."

XVII

Gen. Sir Neville Macready was adjutant-general in the days of Sir John
French, and I dined at his mess once or twice, and he came to ours on
return visits. The son of Macready, the actor, he had a subtlety of
mind not common among British generals, to whom "subtlety" in any form
is repulsive. His sense of humor was developed upon lines of irony and
he had a sly twinkle in his eyes before telling one of his innumerable
anecdotes. They were good stories, and I remember one of them, which
had to do with the retreat from Mons. It was not, to tell the truth,
that "orderly" retreat which is described in second-hand accounts.
There were times when it was a wild stampede from the tightening loop
of a German advance, with lorries and motor-cycles and transport
wagons going helter-skelter among civilian refugees and mixed
battalions and stragglers from every unit walking, footsore, in small
groups. Even General Headquarters was flurried at times, far in
advance of this procession backward. One night Sir Neville Macready,
with the judge advocate and an officer named Colonel Childs (a hot-
headed fellow!), took up their quarters in a French chateau somewhere,
I think, in the neighborhood of Creil. The Commander-in-Chief was in
another chateau some distance away. Other branches of G. H. Q. were
billeted in private houses, widely scattered about a straggling
village.

Colonel Childs was writing opposite the adjutant-general, who was
working silently. Presently Childs looked up, listened, and said:

"It's rather quiet, sir, outside."

"So much the better," growled General Macready. "Get on with your
job."

A quarter of an hour passed. No rumble of traffic passed by the
windows. No gun-wagons were jolting over French pave.

Colonel Childs looked up again and listened.

"It's damned quiet outside, sir."

"Well, don't go making a noise," said the general, "Can't you see I'm
busy?"

"I think I'll just take a turn round," said Colonel Childs.

He felt uneasy. Something in the silence of the village scared him. He
went out into the roadway and walked toward Sir John French's
quarters. There was no challenge from a sentry. The British
Expeditionary Force seemed to be sleeping. They needed sleep--poor
beggars!--but the Germans did not let them take much.

Colonel Childs went into the Commander-in-Chief's chateau and found a
soldier in the front hall, licking out a jam-pot.

"Where's the Commander-in-Chief?" asked the officer.

"Gone hours ago, sir," said the soldier. "I was left behind for lack
of transport. From what I hear the Germans ought to be here by now. I
rather fancy I heard some shots pretty close awhile ago."

Colonel Childs walked back to his own quarters quickly. He made no
apology for interrupting the work of the adjutant-general.

"General, the whole box of tricks has gone. We've been left behind.
Forgotten!"

"The dirty dogs!" said General Macready.

There was not much time for packing up, and only one motor-car, and
only one rifle. The general said he would look after the rifle, but
Colonel Childs said if that were so he would rather stay behind and
take his chance of being captured. It would be safer for him. So the
adjutant-general, the judge advocate, the deputy assistant judge
advocate (Colonel Childs), and an orderly or two packed into the car
and set out to find G.H.Q. Before they found it they had to run the
gantlet of Germans, and were sniped all the way through a wood, and
took flying shots at moving figures. Then, miles away, they found
G.H.Q.

"And weren't they sorry to see me again!" said General Macready, who
told me the tale. "They thought they had lost me forever."

The day's casualty list was brought into the adjutant--general one
evening when I was dining in his mess. The orderly put it down by the
side of his plate, and he interrupted a funny story to glance down the
columns of names.

"Du Maurier has been killed. . . I'm sorry."

He put down the paper beside his plate again and continued his story,
and we all laughed heartily at the end of the anecdote. It was the
only way, and the soldier's way. There was no hugging of grief when
our best friend fell. A sigh, another ghost in one's life, and then,
"Carry on!"

XVIII

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.

XIX

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.