The General: The Classic WWI Tale of Leadership

With an introduction by Max Hastings

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

No warrior tribe in history has received such mockery and contempt from posterity as have been heaped upon Britain’s commanders of the First World War. They are deemed to have presided over unparalleled carnage with a callousness matched only by their incompetence. They are perceived as the high priests who dispatched a generation to death, their dreadful achievement memorialised for eternity by such bards as Siegfried Sassoon:

‘Good morning; good morning!’ the General said

When we met him last week on our way to the line.

Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,

And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack,

As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Two generations later, Sir John French, C-in-C of the wartime British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front, together with his successor Sir Douglas Haig, were caricatured by Alan Clark in his influential though wildly unscholarly 1961 polemic The Donkeys, for which the author belatedly admitted that he had invented the quotation attributed to the Kaiser, describing British troops as ‘lions led by donkeys’. Clark’s book inspired Charles Chilton and Joan Littlewood to create the 1963 satirical musical Oh, What A Lovely War!. In 1989 BBC TV’s Blackadder Goes Forth imprinted on a new generation of viewers a vision of 1914–18’s commanders personified by General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett, played by Stephen Fry. Here was the mass murderer as comic turn – or, if you prefer, the comic turn as mass murderer.

Yet this was not how most survivors of 1914–18 viewed their leaders in the war’s aftermath, despite gaping emotional wounds left by the slaughters at Neuve Chapelle, Loos, the Somme, Ypres, Passchendaele and elsewhere. Among veterans returning from France, there was anger about the muddle attending demobilisation of Britain’s huge army, which prompted strikes and mutinies; about the lack of a domestic social, moral or economic regeneration such as might offer some visible rewards to justify the war’s sacrifice; about the absence of the ‘homes fit for heroes’ promised by politicians. But until the end of the 1920s, senior officers such as Haig, French, Plumer, Byng and Rawlinson received respect and even homage. The belated victors of the campaign on the Western Front were loaded with titles and honours; painted by Sir William Orpen; granted places of honour at the unveiling of countless memorials, of which the Cenotaph in Whitehall was only the foremost. A million people turned out for Haig’s 1928 London funeral procession, and almost as many for the subsequent ceremonies in Edinburgh.

The public mood began to shift about the time the Depression began. Such accounts of the war as Frederick Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929), Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928), Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), Robert Graves’s Good-bye to All That (1929) and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) depicted a protracted agony in pursuit of rival national purposes which allegedly meant little to those who perished in their names, compounded by the brutalism of those who directed the armies.

Even if most veterans – unlike Maynard Keynes and Siegfried Sassoon – retained a belief that the allied cause had been just, people could see for themselves the political chaos and economic wretchedness prevailing across much of the world at the end of the decade following the armistice. The Great War, it seemed, had not merely yielded battlefield horrors of unprecedented scale and intensity; it had also failed to secure any discernible benefit for mankind or even for the victors. In the absence of evidence of Germanic evil remotely matching the 1945 revelation of the Holocaust, by the 1930s a diminishing number of people in the allied nations acknowledged the Kaiser’s empire as a malign and aggressive force, the frustration of whose purposes had been critical for European civilisation. Britain became host to a Peace Movement unrivalled in any other country for its numbers and fervour. Following the Oxford Union’s February 1933 debate, in which a motion was carried by 275 votes to 153 ‘that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’, many people believed that a new generation of British men had become irredeemably committed to pacifism. In 1934 Madame Tussaud’s waxwork gallery responded to the changed public mood by removing from exhibition its galaxy of allied generals, catalogued as ‘The Men Who Won the War’.

It was in this climate that C.S. Forester, then emergent as one of the most popular novelists of his generation, wrote The General. The author, whose real name was Cecil Louis Troughton Smith, was born in Cairo in 1899, son of a minor government official. Educated at Dulwich College, he was rejected for military service in 1917 on grounds of poor eyesight and general physical frailty. He spent three years as a medical student before abandoning this path in 1921 to pursue a writing career. Success came relatively slowly; only in 1926, after publishing several deservedly unnoticed pieces, did Forester win attention for Payment Deferred, a novel about a man who murders his rich nephew and escapes consequences until his wife exacts an ironic but appropriate penalty. The book caught the eye of Charles Laughton, who embraced it as a star vehicle for himself in highly successful stage (1931) and film (1932) versions, which also propelled its author towards fame and prosperity.

Forester thereafter displayed versatility as well as high gifts as a storyteller, penning histories and historical novels which achieved a worldwide audience, while also serving as a Hollywood scriptwriter. His books focused upon the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a special emphasis on naval yarns, of which the first was Brown on Resolution (1929), a superbly accomplished, wry tale about Albert Brown, a sailor whose short life climaxes on a barren Pacific islet in 1914 after he has become sole survivor of his old British warship’s encounter with a German raiding cruiser. The African Queen (1935), which later became a movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, wove a quirky love story around one of the lesser-known episodes of World War I, the Royal Navy’s December 1915 sinking of a German gunboat on Lake Tanganyika. Other early novels were set in the Napoleonic Wars, to which the author would return for the 1937 creation of Captain Horatio Hornblower, the character with whom his memory remains most famously associated, favoured leisure reading of Winston Churchill in World War II.

But Hornblower still lay in the future when Forester wrote The General, which more than a few admirers, myself and the author among them, believe to have been his best work. In all his writing he displayed a fascination with awkward human beings, unglamorous figures who nonetheless achieved notable deeds, some base, others heroic. By 1936, when the book was first published, a growing minority of British people feared that it would prove necessary once more to fight Germany, this time under Hitler, making mock of the post-1918 slogan ‘Never again.’ For a season, however, the Peace Movement and its collateral branch, the appeasers, still held sway. Abomination of the Western Front’s generals had not reached the peak it would achieve thirty years later, and has since retained, but there was assuredly revulsion towards the bloodbaths which the ‘brass hats’ had directed.

Captain Basil Liddell Hart, who served briefly and without attracting much notice on the Western Front, had transformed himself into a widely read pundit on military affairs. In this role he did much to advance the legend of British command idiocy, initially through his 1930 study The Real War, later extended and republished as A History of the World War (1914–1918). Sir Hew Strachan has written that the book ‘posed as an objective analysis of military operations. In truth it is a sustained critique of the British high command, and its purpose is more didactic than historical.’

Liddell Hart was prejudiced, if not embittered, by the unwillingness of the British Army’s senior officers to treat himself as seriously as he believed his gifts as a strategic thinker merited. He was a fluent writer who sustained a prodigious output of journalism, books and correspondence. He developed some good and even important ideas which, like most theoreticians, he habitually overstated. Foremost among them was the claim that exploitation of manoeuvre and technology – most conspicuously, the tank – could have played a game-changing role earlier in the First World War, and would certainly do so in future conflicts, without the necessity for murderous headlong collisions.

Liddell Hart’s denunciations of 1914–18 commanders’ myopia, and assertions of their culpability, won favour with some important people, including Lloyd George, Winston Churchill – and C.S. Forester. The strategic guru’s vision pervades the novelist’s tale about an officer who rises to high rank in the First World War. Forester was encouraged to write it by Michael Joseph, a flamboyant and gifted publisher. Joseph, born in 1897, had served on the Western Front as an officer in the Machine-Gun Corps, being badly gassed before coming home to marry – briefly – the actress Hermione Gingold. In 1936 he had just started his own publishing house, which thereafter midwifed all Forester’s work. The author inscribed The General to him ‘not as the “onlie begetter”, but nearly so’. On 2 January, Joseph wrote to Basil Liddell Hart, asking him to read and comment upon Forester’s proofs. The pundit responded that he was immensely busy, but could not resist a book by an author whom he did not know personally, but much admired.

On 8 January he wrote at length, saying that having finished The General he was impressed, and would make no proposals for major changes: ‘It is so true a picture, with so telling a message, that I feel nothing ought to be risked that might dim it.’ He added a list of twenty detailed comments and corrections – a cavalry regiment had three sabre squadrons, not four; a corps never contained more than three divisions; Sir John French was sacked as C-in-C of the BEF in December, not October 1915, and suchlike. Cajoled by Michael Joseph, Liddell Hart also provided a pre-publication ‘puff’ for the book: ‘It is superb … in its combination of psychological exposure and balance.’ Forester and Liddell Hart met early in 1937, the first encounter of what became a close and mutually admiring friendship. On the novelist’s death in 1966 the military commentator was among those to whom he left legacies of $1,000 apiece as tokens of esteem.

Forester starts the portrait of his hero, or anti-hero, with one of the more droll first sentences in fiction: ‘Nowadays Lieutenant-General Sir Herbert Curzon, KCMG, CB, DSO, is just one of Bournemouth’s seven generals, but with the distinction of his record and his social position as a Duke’s son-in-law, he is really far more eminent than those bare words would imply.’ The author set himself to understand and explain what manner of man could have done as the commanders of 1914–18 did: launch repeated doomed assaults that killed their own troops in tens of thousands, some before they reached the British front line, never mind the German one.

Before I took my wife on a first visit to the battlefields of the Western Front, I recommended The General as background reading ahead of any work of history, and she devoured it eagerly. To appreciate Forester’s book, no grasp of strategic studies is necessary. This is pre-eminently a human story, enhanced by its bathetic romance between a tongue-tied, socially corseted cavalryman on the wrong side of forty and a duke’s unhappy and unlovely spinster daughter: ‘for a fleeting moment Curzon, as his eyes wandered over her face, was conscious of a likeness between her features and those of Bingo, the best polo pony he ever had’. The author writes sympathetically about the sexual problems which dogged so many marital relationships in those ignorant, if not innocent, days. Above all, he tells the story of a wartime officer’s rise from obscurity to arbitration of the destinies of 100,000 men – which, as the author remarks, were more than Marlborough or Wellington ever commanded.

The book received a warm critical reception. H.G. Wells described it as ‘a portrait for all time of an individual in his period’. An American reviewer wrote: ‘Here is a book in which fiction masquerades, with complete success, as biography … More than the story of a man, this is a revealing study of the military mind, the military caste and the military system … Herbert Curzon represented the finest flowering of the officer type that was shaped and bred and groomed for command by the Old British Army.’ The writer credited the novelist with presenting, ‘with superb clarity and ironic definition, a few notable scenes from an ancient and enduring farce’. The Times was tepid, but the Daily Mail dubbed the book ‘masterly’: ‘Mr. Forester is uniformly just to his general, with effects that are sometimes startling.’ In the Evening Standard, Howard Spring wrote: ‘Everything that Curzon had was fine: courage, endurance, impartiality, honour. But in this great and moving study Mr. Forester shows how little even these avail when man’s divine element, the imagination, has flickered out.’ Spring described Curzon as ‘a well-nigh flawless creation’.

The book was not a big seller: it addressed a theme for which the British public had scant appetite. But word of its excellence travelled swiftly through service messes. Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, soon to become Battle of Britain C-in-C of Fighter Command, told Liddell Hart he thought the novel ‘marvellous’, as did General Sir Tim Pile. One American reviewer, never before having heard of Forester, speculated that he must have served in France, to possess such insight into what had taken place there. In truth, of course, the author had never experienced a day of military service, nor heard a shot fired in anger. Some modern novelists who write about conflict in general and the First World War in particular sell well, but expose to knowledgeable readers a profound ignorance of military affairs. Forester, by contrast, displayed in The General a mastery of soldiers’ conversation and behaviour, as well as of the machinery of war, which few writers have matched.

Whether he described the thought processes of sergeants or the social conventions of officers’ messes, he seldom faltered or struck a false note. He recognised that in 1914’s cavalry units, the post of machine-gun officer was often given to the regiment’s least plausible horseman, rather than to its brightest spark. He perfectly grasped the respective functions of divisional, corps and army commanders – he knew what generals did. He astutely observed the politicisation of wartime senior soldiers, who discovered the importance to their careers of dinner-table intrigue; the novelist shows Curzon unwillingly joining this game. His account of his subject’s experience in the October–November 1914 First Battle of Ypres achieved a verisimilitude he can surely have achieved only by interrogating survivors.

Forester was also a perceptive observer of the British social system, and especially of the lower middle class. This enabled him to write wittily and well about the bourgeois origins of his general, the perils of his ascent into the world of unkind hearts and coronets. Curzon belongs in Forester’s extensive fictional gallery of awkward, limited human beings. In an early chapter, the author describes this prematurely middle-aged bachelor, with his DSO won in South Africa fighting the Boers, as he was on the eve of war in 1914, a picture which

seems to verge closely on the conventional caricature of the Army major, peppery, red-faced, liable under provocation to gobble like a turkey-cock, hide-bound in his ideas and conventional in his way of thought, and it is no more exact than any other caricature. It ignores all the good qualities which were present at the same time. He was the soul of honour; he could be guilty of no meannesses, even boggling at those which convention permits.

He would give his life for the ideals he stood for, and would be happy if the opportunity presented itself. His patriotism was a real and living force, even if its symbols were childish. His courage was unflinching. The necessity of assuming responsibility troubled him no more than the necessity of breathing. He could administer the regulations of his service with an impartiality and a practised leniency suited to the needs of the class of man for which those regulations were drawn up. He shirked no duty, however tedious or inconvenient; it did not even occur to him to try to do so … The man with a claim on his friendship could make any demand upon his generosity. And while the breath was in his body he would not falter in the face of difficulties.

Although a part of Forester disdained his principal character and the role his kind had played in the greatest human tragedy ever to befall Britain, the author’s sense of justice caused him also to recognise his general’s merits. Curzon commanded respect and indeed affection from his staff and subordinates as a tireless worker and dedicated professional, of the highest courage both physical and moral. As a corps commander, he displayed intelligence enough to recruit to his staff civilian experts in chemistry, railway scheduling, logistics and suchlike, and to make full use of their skills, such as he knew himself to lack. Forester concluded his portrait: ‘So much for an analysis of Curzon’s character at the time when he was to become one of the instruments of destiny. Yet there is something sinister in the coincidence that when destiny had so much to do she should find tools of such high quality ready to hand. It might have been – though it would be a bold man who said so – more advantageous for England if the British Army had not been quite so full of men of high rank who were so ready for responsibility, so unflinchingly devoted to their duty, so unmoved in the face of difficulties, of such unfaltering courage.’

This has seemed to me, since first I read Forester’s lines at the age of fourteen, one of the most vivid character sketches he ever made. Among much else, it showed his recognition that to brand the commanders of 1914–18 as cowards, who chose to lead from the back – one of the charges made by some war poets – was unjust: fifty-eight British general officers perished in the conflict. Moreover, it is no more sensible to view those men as clones of each other than to delineate any other group of professionals and contemporaries in such a way. But there was indeed a British military caste, which had its German, Russian and French equivalents, and Curzon seems a fair exemplar.

Among the more foolish of popular proverbs is that which claims ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man.’ Occasionally in the course of history, great challenges have brought forward great leaders – Pitt in the 1790s and Churchill in 1940 are obvious examples. More often, however, societies have been obliged to respond to threats to their security and even existence under the direction of unimpressive statesmen and bungling soldiers. In the Napoleonic Wars, with the possible exception of Sir John Moore who perished at Corunna, it was only with Wellington’s appointment as Peninsula commander-in-chief in 1809, after almost two decades of intermittent European strife, that Britain identified a commander of the highest gifts to lead its forces on the Continent. Few societies put their best brains in their armies, and clever people are usually more profitably employed elsewhere. Such a distribution of national talent becomes a handicap only when great wars break out, and in 1914 a century had elapsed since Britain’s last one. Forester portrays a calamity which dwarfed its military actors by its scale and intractability.

Although the novel’s claim to minor-classic stature seems hard to dispute, in one important respect it is flawed. It was informed by a belief, derived from Liddell Hart and his kind, that better allied generalship could have secured victory at lesser cost. This view suffuses the pages of The General: an assumption that Curzon, like his real-life counterparts, lacked the imagination to adopt methods which could have overcome the difficulties of confronting the German army in France and Flanders. In a seminal passage of the book Forester describes how, after the failure of the British attack at Loos in October 1915, the commanders of the British Expeditionary Force discussed preparations for a new offensive with more men, more guns, more shells, more gas: