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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.

XX

I met many other generals who were men of ability, energy, high sense
of duty, and strong personality. I found them intellectually, with few
exceptions, narrowly molded to the same type, strangely limited in
their range of ideas and qualities of character.

"One has to leave many gaps in one's conversation with generals," said
a friend of mine, after lunching with an army commander.

That was true. One had to talk to them on the lines of leading
articles in The Morning Post. Their patriotism, their knowledge of
human nature, their idealism, and their imagination were restricted to
the traditional views of English country gentlemen of the Tory school.
Anything outside that range of thought was to them heresy, treason, or
wishy-washy sentiment.

What mainly was wrong with our generalship was the system which put
the High Command into the hands of a group of men belonging to the old
school of war, unable, by reason of their age and traditions, to get
away from rigid methods and to become elastic in face of new
conditions.

Our Staff College had been hopelessly inefficient in its system of
training, if I am justified in forming such an opinion from specimens
produced by it, who had the brains of canaries and the manners of
Potsdam. There was also a close corporation among the officers of the
Regular Army, so that they took the lion's share of staff
appointments, thus keeping out brilliant young men of the new armies,
whose brain-power, to say the least of it, was on a higher level than
that of the Sandhurst standard. Here and there, where the
unprofessional soldier obtained a chance of high command or staff
authority, he proved the value of the business mind applied to war,
and this was seen very clearly--blindingly--in the able generalship of
the Australian Corps, in which most of the commanders, like Generals
Hobbs, Monash, and others, were men in civil life before the war. The
same thing was observed in the Canadian Corps, General Currie, the
corps commander, having been an estate agent, and many of his high
officers having had no military training of any scientific importance
before they handled their own men in France and Flanders.

XXI

As there are exceptions to every rule, so harsh criticism must be
modified in favor of the generalship and organization of the Second
Army-of rare efficiency under the restrictions and authority of the
General Staff. I often used to wonder what qualities belonged to Sir
Herbert Plumer, the army commander. In appearance he was almost a
caricature of an old-time British general, with his ruddy, pippin-
cheeked face, with white hair, and a fierce little white mustache, and
blue, watery eyes, and a little pot-belly and short legs. He puffed
and panted when he walked, and after two minutes in his company Cyril
Maude would have played him to perfection. The staff-work of his army
was as good in detail as any machinery of war may be, and the tactical
direction of the Second Army battles was not slipshod nor haphazard,
as so many others, but prepared with minute attention to detail and
after thoughtful planning of the general scheme. The battle of
Wytschaete and Messines was a model in organization and method, and
worked in its frightful destructiveness like the clockwork of a death
machine. Even the battles of Flanders in the autumn of '17, ghastly as
they were in the losses of our men in the state of the ground through
which they had to fight, and in futile results, were well organized by
the Second Army headquarters, compared with the abominable
mismanagement of other troops, the contrast being visible to every
battalion officer and even to the private soldier. How much share of
this was due to Sir Herbert Plumer it is impossible for me to tell,
though it is fair to give him credit for soundness of judgment in
general ideas and in the choice of men.

He had for his chief of staff Sir John Harington, and beyond all doubt
this general was the organizing brain of to Second Army, though with
punctilious chivalry he gave, always, the credit of all his work to
the army commander. A thin, nervous, highly strung man, with extreme
simplicity of manner and clarity of intelligence, he impressed me as a
brain of the highest temper and quality in staff-work. His memory for
detail was like a card-index system, yet his mind was not clogged with
detail, but saw the wood as well as the trees, and the whole broad
sweep of the problem which confronted him. There was something
fascinating as well as terrible in his exposition of a battle that he
was planning. For the first time in his presence and over his maps, I
saw that after all there was such a thing as the science of war, and
that it was not always a fetish of elementary ideas raised to the nth
degree of pomposity, as I had been led to believe by contact with
other generals and staff-officers. Here at least was a man who dealt
with it as a scientific business, according to the methods of science-
-calculating the weight and effect of gun-fire, the strength of the
enemy's defenses and man-power, the psychology of German generalship
and of German units, the pressure which could be put on British troops
before the breaking-point of courage, the relative or cumulative
effects of poison-gas, mines, heavy and light artillery, tanks, the
disposition of German guns and the probability of their movement in
this direction or that, the amount of their wastage under our counter-
battery work, the advantages of attacks in depth--one body of troops
"leap-frogging," another in an advance to further objectives--the
time-table of transport, the supply of food and water and ammunition,
the comfort of troops before action, and a thousand other factors of
success.

Before every battle fought by the Second Army, and of the eve of it,
Sir John Harington sent for the war correspondents and devoted an hour
or more to a detailed explanation of his plans. He put down all his
cards on the table with perfect candor, hiding nothing, neither
minimizing nor exaggerating the difficulties and dangers of the
attack, pointing out the tactical obstacles which must be overcome
before any chance of success, and exposing the general strategy in the
simplest and clearest speech.

I used to study him at those times, and marveled at him. After intense
and prolonged work at all this detail involving the lives of thousands
of men, he was highly wrought, with every nerve in his body and brain
at full tension, but he was never flurried, never irritable, never
depressed or elated by false pessimism or false optimism. He was a
chemist explaining the factors of a great experiment of which the
result was still uncertain. He could only hope for certain results
after careful analysis and synthesis. Yet he was not dehumanized. He
laughed sometimes at surprises he had caused the enemy, or was likely
to cause them--surprises which would lead to a massacre of their men.
He warmed to the glory of the courage of the troops who were carrying
out his plans.

"It depends on these fellows," he would say. "I am setting them a
difficult job. If they can do it, as I hope and believe, it will be a
fine achievement. They have been very much tried, poor fellows, but
their spirit is still high, as I know from their commanding officers."

One of his ambitions was to break down the prejudice between the
fighting units and the Staff. "We want them to know that we are all
working together, for the same purpose and with the same zeal. They
cannot do without us, as we cannot do without them, and I want them to
feel that the work done here is to help them to do theirs more easily,
with lighter losses, in better physical conditions, with organization
behind them at every stage."

Many times the Second Army would not order an attack or decide the
time of it before consulting the divisional generals and brigadiers,
and obtaining their consensus of opinion. The officers and men in the
Second Army did actually come to acknowledge the value of the staff-
work behind them, and felt a confidence in its devotion to their
interests which was rare on the western front.

At the end of one of his expositions Sir John Harington would rise and
gather up his maps and papers, and say:

"Well, there you are, gentlemen. You know as much as I do about the
plans for to-morrow's battle. At the end of the day you will be able
to see the result of all our work and tell me things I do not know."

Those conferences took place in the Second Army headquarters on Cassel
Hill, in a big building which was a casino before the war, with a far-
reaching view across Flanders, so that one could see in the distance
the whole sweep of the Ypres salient, and southward the country below
Notre Dame de Lorette, with Merville and Hazebrouck in the foreground.
Often we assembled in a glass house, furnished with trestle tables on
which maps were spread, and, thinking back to these scenes, I remember
now, as I write, the noise of rain beating on that glass roof, and the
clammy touch of fog on the window-panes stealing through the cracks
and creeping into the room. The meteorologist of the Second Army was
often a gloomy prophet, and his prophecies were right. How it rained
on nights when hundreds of thousands of British soldiers were waiting
in their trenches to attack in a murky dawn!. . . We said good night
to General Harington, each one of us, I think, excited by the thought
of the drama of human life and death which we had heard in advance in
that glass house on the hill; to be played out by flesh and blood
before many hours had passed. A kind of sickness took possession of my
soul when I stumbled down the rock path from those headquarters in
pitch darkness, over slabs of stones designed by a casino architect to
break one's neck, with the rain dribbling down one's collar, and, far
away, watery lights in the sky, of gun-flashes and ammunition-dumps
afire, and the noise of artillery thudding in dull, crumbling shocks.
We were starting early to see the opening of the battle and its
backwash. There would be more streams of bloody, muddy men, more
crowds of miserable prisoners, more dead bodies lying in the muck of
captured ground, more shells plunging into the wet earth and throwing
up columns of smoke and mud, more dead horses, disemboweled, and
another victory at fearful cost, over one of the Flanders ridges.

Curses and prayers surged up in my heart. How long was this to go on--
this massacre of youth, this agony of men? Was there no sanity left in
the world that could settle the argument by other means than this?
When we had taken that ridge to-morrow there would be another to take,
and another. And what then? Had we such endless reserves of men that
we could go on gaining ground at such a price? Was it to be
extermination on both sides? The end of civilization itself? General
Harington had said: "The enemy is still very strong. He has plenty of
reserves on hand and he is fighting hard. It won't be a walk-over to-
morrow."

As an onlooker I was overwhelmed by the full measure of all this
tragic drama. The vastness and the duration of its horror appalled me.
I went to my billet in an old monastery, and sat there in the
darkness, my window glimmering with the faint glow of distant shell-
flashes, and said, "O God, give us victory to-morrow, if that may help
us to the end." Then to bed, without undressing. There was an early
start before the dawn. Major Lytton would be with me. He had a gallant
look along the duckboards. . . Or Montague--white-haired Montague, who
liked to gain a far objective, whatever the risk, and gave one a
little courage by his apparent fearlessness. I had no courage on those
early mornings of battle. All that I had, which was little, oozed out
of me when we came to the first dead horses and the first dead men,
and passed the tumult of our guns firing out of the mud, and heard the
scream of shells. I hated it all with a cold hatred; and I went on
hating it for years that seem a lifetime. I was not alone in that
hatred, and other men had greater cause, though it was for their sake
that I suffered most, as an observer of their drama of death. . . As
observers we saw most of the grisly game.

Part Two

THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE

EARLY DAYS WITH THE NEW ARMY

I

By the time stationary warfare had been established on the western
front in trench lines from the sea to Switzerland, the British Regular
Army had withered away. That was after the retreat from Mons, the
victory of the Marne, the early battles round Ypres, and the slaughter
at Neuve Chapelle. The "Old Contemptibles" were an army of ghosts
whose dead clay was under earth in many fields of France, but whose
spirit still "carried on" as an heroic tradition to those who came
after them into those same fields, to the same fate. The only
survivors were Regular officers taken out of the fighting-lines to
form the staffs of new divisions and to train the army of volunteers
now being raised at home, and men who were recovering from wounds or
serving behind the lines: those, and non-commissioned officers who
were the best schoolmasters of the new boys, the best friends and
guides of the new officers, stubborn in their courage, hard and
ruthless in their discipline, foul-mouthed according to their own
traditions, until they, too, fell in the shambles. It was in March of
1915 that a lieutenant-colonel in the trenches said to me: "I am one
out of 150 Regular officers still serving with their battalions. That
is to say, there are 150 of us left in the fighting-lines out of
1,500."

That little Regular Army of ours had justified its pride in a long
history of fighting courage. It had helped to save England and France
by its own death. Those boys of ours whom I had seen in the first
August of the war, landing at Boulogne and marching, as though to a
festival, toward the enemy, with French girls kissing them and loading
them with fruit and flowers, had proved the quality of their spirit
and training. As riflemen they had stupefied the enemy, brought to a
sudden check by forces they had despised. They held their fire until
the German ranks were within eight hundred yards of them, and then
mowed them down as though by machine-gun fire--before we had machine-
guns, except as rare specimens, here and there. Our horse artillery
was beyond any doubt the best in the world at that time. Even before
peace came German generals paid ungrudging tributes to the efficiency
of our Regular Army, writing down in their histories of war that this
was the model of all armies, the most perfectly trained. . . It was
spent by the spring of '15. Its memory remains as the last epic of
those professional soldiers who, through centuries of English history,
took "the King's shilling" and fought when they were told to fight,
and left their bones in far places of the world and in many fields in
Europe, and won for the British soldier universal fame as a terrible
warrior. There will never be a Regular Army like that. Modern warfare
has opened the arena to the multitude. They may no longer sit in the
Coliseum watching the paid gladiators. If there be war they must take
their share of its sacrifice. They must be victims as well as victors.
They must pay for the luxury of conquest, hatred, and revenge by their
own bodies, and for their safety against aggression by national
service.

After the first quick phases of the war this need of national soldiers
to replace the professional forces became clear to the military
leaders. The Territorials who had been raised for home defense were
sent out to fill up the gaps, and their elementary training was shown
to be good enough, as a beginning, in the fighting-lines. The courage
of those Territorial divisions who came out first to France was
quickly proved, and soon put to the supreme test, in which they did
not fail. From the beginning to the end these men, who had made a game
of soldiering in days of peace, yet a serious game to which they had
devoted much of their spare time after working-hours, were splendid
beyond all words of praise, and from the beginning to the end the
Territorial officers--men of good standing in their counties, men of
brain and business training--were handicapped by lack of promotion and
treated with contempt by the High Command, who gave preference always
to the Regular officers in every staff appointment.

This was natural and inevitable in armies controlled by the old
Regular school of service and tradition. As a close corporation in
command of the machine, it was not within their nature or philosophy
to make way for the new type. The Staff College was jealous of its
own. Sandhurst and Woolwich were still the only schools of soldiering
recognized as giving the right "tone" to officers and gentlemen fit
for high appointment. The cavalry, above all, held the power of
supreme command in a war of machines and chemistry and national
psychology. . . .

I should hate to attack the Regular officer. His caste belonged to the
best of our blood. He was the heir to fine old traditions of courage
and leadership in battle. He was a gentleman whose touch of arrogance
was subject to a rigid code of honor which made him look to the
comfort of his men first, to the health of his horse second, to his
own physical needs last. He had the stern sense of justice of a Roman
Centurian, and his men knew that though he would not spare them
punishment if guilty, he would give them always a fair hearing, with a
point in their favor, if possible. It was in their code to take the
greatest risk in time of danger, to be scornful of death in the face
of their men whatever secret fear they had, and to be proud and
jealous of the honor of the regiment. In action men found them good to
follow--better than some of the young officers of the New Army, who
had not the same traditional pride nor the same instinct for command
nor the same consideration for their men, though more easy-going and
human in sympathy.

So I salute in spirit those battalion officers of the Old Army who
fulfilled their heritage until it was overwhelmed by new forces, and I
find extenuating circumstances even in remembrance of the high
stupidities, the narrow imagination, the deep, impregnable, intolerant
ignorance of Staff College men who with their red tape and their
general orders were the inquisitors and torturers of the new armies.
Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner. They were molded in an old
system, and could not change their cliche.

II

The New Army was called into being by Lord Kitchener and his advisers,
who adopted modern advertising methods to stir the sluggish
imagination of the masses, so that every wall in London and great
cities, every fence in rural places, was placarded with picture-
posters.

. . . "What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?". . . "What will your
best girl say if you're not in khaki?"

Those were vulgar appeals which, no doubt, stirred many simple souls,
and so were good enough. It would have been better to let the people
know more of the truth of what was happening in France and Flanders--
the truth of tragedy, instead of carefully camouflaged communiques,
hiding the losses, ignoring the deeds of famous regiments, veiling all
the drama of that early fighting by a deliberate screen of mystery,
though all was known to the enemy. It was fear of their own people,
not of the enemy, which guided the rules of censorship then and later.

For some little time the British people did not understand what was
happening. How could they know? It appeared that all was going well.
Then why worry? Soon there would be the joy-bells of peace, and the
boys would come marching home again, as in earlier wars. It was only
very slowly--because of the conspiracy of silence--that there crept
into the consciousness of our people the dim realization of a
desperate struggle ahead, in which all their young manhood would be
needed to save France and Belgium, and--dear God!--England herself. It
was as that thought touched one mind and another that the recruiting
offices were crowded with young men. Some of them offered their bodies
because of the promise of a great adventure--and life had been rather
dull in office and factory and on the farm. Something stirred in their
blood--an old call to youth. Some instinct of a primitive, savage
kind, for open-air life, fighting, killing, the comradeship of
hunters, violent emotions, the chance of death, surged up into the
brains of quiet boys, clerks, mechanics, miners, factory hands. It was
the call of the wild--the hark-back of the mind to the old barbarities
of the world's dawn, which is in the embryo of modern man. The shock
of anger at frightful tales from Belgium--little children with their
hands cut off (no evidence for that one); women foully outraged;
civilians shot in cold blood--sent many men at a quick pace to the
recruiting agents. Others were sent there by the taunt of a girl, or
the sneer of a comrade in khaki, or the straight, steady look in the
eyes of a father who said, "What about it, Dick? . . . The old
country is up against it." It was that last thought which worked in
the brain of England's manhood. That was his real call, which
whispered to men at the plow--quiet, ruminating lads, the peasant
type, the yeoman--and excited undergraduates in their rooms at Oxford
and Cambridge, and the masters of public schools, and all manner of
young men, and some, as I know, old in years but young in heart. "The
old country is in danger!" The shadow of a menace was creeping over
some little patch of England--or of Scotland.