A serious tactical error, real or reported, could end a general’s career, but he might survive it if he retained the confidence of his superiors. Lieutenant General Sir Edwin Alderson was an infantry officer of horsey disposition: he wrote Pink and Scarlet, or Hunting as a School for Soldiering, and he gave a wonderful series of Lionel Edwards paintings – ‘dedicated to the young soldier-sportsman, for whom he wrote’ – to Sandhurst. After commanding 1st Canadian Division at Second Ypres he was promoted to command the newly-formed Canadian Corps, but was replaced in March 1916 after a setback at St-Eloi, on the southern edge of the Ypres salient. So much for the official version. In practice, though, Alderson had clashed with the ferociously energetic Sam Hughes, Canadian Minister of Militia. Hughes was a great advocate of the Canadian Ross rifle, whose virtues did not include handiness in trench warfare, and Alderson sensibly favoured the more practical Lee-Enfield. Alderson might have survived St-Eloi, but he was finished without the top cover which Hughes would not dream of providing.
Another example of the vital importance of ‘top cover’ is the case of Major General Joseph Davies, who commanded 8th Division in Rawlinson’s IV Corps in early 1915. Rawlinson blamed him for failure to exploit success at Neuve Chapelle, and agreed with Haig, then commanding 1st Army, that Davies should go home. But Davies had no intention of going quietly. He collected evidence which suggested that Rawlinson himself had been involved in the handling of 8th Division’s reserves. Rawlinson very creditably forwarded the information to Haig, who had just told French that Davies should be replaced. Haig was furious, and French considered sacking Rawlinson instead. He seems to have been dissuaded from doing so by Haig, but Rawlinson was formally warned that further attempts to shift blame onto his subordinates would result in his immediate removal. Rawlinson knew that he had Haig to thank for his survival, a sense of inferiority which did not enhance his disposition to argue with Haig over the planning or execution of the Somme.
A general did not have to be wrong to be sacked, as the case of Smith-Dorrien shows. In 1916 Major General Sir Charles Barter commanded 47th London Division, part of Lieutenant General Sir William Pulteney’s III Corps. Although Pulteney had been a corps commander since September 1914 his continued survival was a source of surprise to his subordinates, not least to his chief of staff Brigadier General Charles Bonham-Carter, who called him ‘the most completely ignorant general I served under during the war and that is saying a lot’. Barter’s division had been allocated four tanks for its attack on High Wood on 15 September. Barter spoke to the tank officers, who suggested that they should skirt the wood and fire into it, but Pulteney thought that they were being ‘sticky’ and ordered them straight in.
Although the attack on the wood was eventually successful, the division lost over 4,500 men during the battle. One tank was destroyed by shellfire but the others all became bogged in unsuitable ground, just as their crews had predicted. There was an added note of tragedy, because the crew of one tank, disorientated by the stumps and craters in the wood, machine-gunned some of its supporting infantry. The tank commander was so upset by this that some brother officers attributed his subsequent death to suicide. A few days later Barter was sent home ‘at an hour’s notice’. He demanded an official inquiry, but never received one. However, the divisional association always invited him to its annual dinner as an honoured guest. Pulteney’s corps was roughly handled in the German counterattack at Cambrai, though it was not until early 1918 that he was at last replaced. It is hard to see how he managed to survive for so long, though his old army connections probably helped: he was a Scots Guards officer, ‘Putty’ to his many well-placed friends. It was also suggested that he was so incompetent that his corps staff was specially selected to make up for his many deficiencies, and this, paradoxically, may have contributed to his longevity.90
Yet another Somme wood cost a major general his job. Ivor Phillips was relieved of command of 38th Division after his 115th Brigade failed to attack Mametz Wood on 7 July. The division’s war diary maintained that the undergrowth made the timescale laid down impossible, and, as we have seen, the Welshmen fought bravely, but the situation in the wood became chaotic. Wyn Griffith, sent up to replace a wounded staff captain, soon found that the brigade major had been hit too, and he was therefore a one-man brigade staff. He saw the brigade commander, already hit in the arm, in utter despair, unable to communicate with his division yet still under orders to press his attack, when a British barrage crashed down on his own troops. There was an artillery observer in a shell hole but, as another officer acidly pointed out, ‘he can’t see twenty yards in front of him, and all his [telephone] lines are gone. He might as well be in Cardiff.’ ‘This is the end of everything,’ the brigadier told Griffith.
… sheer stupidity. I wonder if there is an order that never reached me … but that Staff Officer should have known the artillery programme for the day. And if there is another order, they ought not to have put down that barrage until they got my acknowledgement. How can we attack after our own barrage has ploughed its way through us? What good can a barrage do in a wood like this?
The brigadier, at fifty-seven very old for this sort of thing, was given immediate leave of absence and then relieved of his command on 28 August. He had already prophesied what would happen. ‘You mark my words,’ he told Griffith, ‘they’ll send me home for this. They want butchers, not brigadiers. They’ll remember now what I told them, before we began, that the attack could not succeed unless the machine guns were masked. I shall be in England in a month.’91 Phillips was sacked too. He had not planned the difficult task of attacking the wood with much skill, and the fact that he was Lloyd George’s protégé was, under the circumstances, more hindrance than help.
Brigadiers came and went easily: Sir James Edmonds claimed that Haig had told him that he had sacked over a hundred. Often the pretext, as it was with divisional commanders such as Phillips, was ‘stickiness’, that is a reluctance to push attacks home. On 28 August 1916 Brigadier General Frederick Carleton wrote to tell his wife that he had been Stellenbosched from command of 98th Infantry Brigade. He was a dug-out who had returned to the army in 1914, commanding 1/4th King’s Own from December 1915 to June 1916, when he was promoted. His divisional commander, Major General H. J. S. Landon, tersely reported on his dissatisfaction with the progress of the sector under his command and asked Home, the corps commander, to replace him. Pending Horne’s formal action, added Landon, another brigadier had already been ordered to take over Carleton’s sector. Carleton was shocked, depressed and ill: ‘I want no sympathy nor do I want to see anyone, for at the moment I am almost done to all the world.’
However, he prepared a length dossier in his own defence, and it is so useful in explaining the relationship between brigadiers and divisional headquarters that I quote it at length. His conflict with divisional headquarters began in July, not long after he had assumed command. On a date he fails to specify, but which must have been on or just after 14 July, he was with his brigade in the Somme village of Bécordel.
At about 4.30 pm [Lt] Col. Simons, GSO 1. of the 33rd Division, arrived in a motor car in search of me. This officer, who appeared to be in a state of excitement and some hurry, asked me to enter his motor car. He immediately produced a map, and said: ‘We want you to make an attack with your brigade tonight.’ He then explained that the objective I was required to take was a portion of the Switch Trench of Bazentin le Petit Wood [running north of the wood, just beyond the ground gained in the night attack of the 14th] and that it must be carried out by 7.30 pm After a glance at the map, I turned in great surprise to this Officer and I said, ‘Do you know the distance from here to the point from which you asked me to make the attack?’ Col. Simons replied, ‘No, I have not measured it.’ I laid off the distance on the map in front of this Officer, making it about 10,000 yards in a straight line. I then said ‘An attack under such conditions as you suggest is out of the question. The roads are congested with traffic, the
ground is entirely unknown, I should have to have my orders to give and convey to the whole brigade before the attack could be made, and there could be no possibility of arriving at the position in the stated time.’ Col. Simons proceeded to contest the point that the attack could be made. I then turned to him and said, ‘Simons, you were at Staff College with me and you know as well as I do that what you are asking is an impossibility. It is now 4.30, and if I could now move off the head of my brigade it would be 5.30 before the tail of it would be leaving the ground. How can you possibly, under such circumstances, expect me to carry out such instructions?
He said that he could not attack before 8.30 pm at the earliest, and with that Simons departed, saying that it was no use, and giving Carleton ‘the impression that I had wilfully obstructed him’. Once his brigade entered the line it was dogged by misfortune. German shelling destroyed the tapes laid to guide working parties forward, and: ‘In the case of the 20th Fusiliers, although this battalion had previously occupied the line, they appeared to have been unable to find their way, and did not put in any appearance at all.’ Finally, Landon interviewed him and made it clear that corps was pressing for completion of the work and that: ‘No excuse for failure to comply with this order will be accepted.’ He received notice of dismissal the following day.
Carleton’s dossier, submitted to GHQ on 12 September, was so effective that Haig’s military secretary, at the time Major General W. G. Peyton, replied on the 16th that ‘the Commander-in-Chief is prepared to consider your re-appointment to command of an Infantry Brigade in the field when your services are again placed at his disposal’. In a classic instance of the subtle workings of the military secretary’s department he added a personal note:
My dear Carleton,
No report has gone home about you, so as soon as you have been passed fit you will be returned to us and reappointed to a brigade, but give yourself a sufficiently long rest or you will probably break down again. Yours as ever etc
He was indeed reappointed to a brigade, but in Salonika, where his health quickly broke down and he was invalided home. He died after a heart attack in 1922, having declared that his experiences on the Somme had taken ten years off his life.92
The process of losing a superior’s confidence might be little more than a matter of personality. On 1 May 1916 Brigadier General Charles Gosling, of 7th Infantry Brigade, was hit by shrapnel – a bullet in each leg and another in the head, though he was not very badly hurt – on his way out of the line to get a bath. The senior battalion commander stood in until a replacement, Brigadier General Charles Heathcote, arrived a week later. Heathcote was sent home on 30 August by Major General Bainbridge, who had assumed command of 25th Division that July, as ‘unfit for command’. Alexander Johnson, his brigade major, was very angry. ‘It is the most unjust thing I’ve ever heard,’ he wrote, ‘and the whole Brigade is simply furious … the Brigadier is sent home simply because he does not get on with the Divisional Commander.’93 Heathcote came back out as a lieutenant colonel, commanded a battalion, was invalided home, returned to command a battalion again, and got a brigade back in May 1917, retaining it for the rest of the war.
As a general lost his commander’s confidence he was often presented with make-or-break tasks. In 1916 Walter Nicholson, then a senior staff officer in 17th Division, heard that one of the brigadiers was ‘for the high jump’ if he did not succeed in the next attack. He failed, and was duly sacked. ‘It was a change of command which could not have been worse staged,’ he wrote. ‘The brigadier was popular in his brigade, and the brigade took his dismissal as a drastic reflection on their action in the battle. They had a right and proper hatred of the authorities.’ Nicholson privately agreed that the brigadier was not, in fact, up to his job, but thought that the timing was disastrous. ‘It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that nine out of ten commanders who were relieved of their command had a justifiable grievance as regards the particular occasion,’ he added, ‘but would have none if they had been dégommé at least half a dozen times previously.’94
Rawlinson was painfully slow in dispensing with Lieutenant General Sir Richard Butler, demonstrably the weakest of his corps commanders in 1918. He was already unhappy with Butler before the Amiens attack of 8 August, and three days later the over-strained officer was placed on sick leave. When he returned the following month Rawlinson went up to III Corps headquarters and wrote on his return:
I am pretty sure the Aust and IX Corps will do their jobs but am not so confident about the III Corps … They do not seem to fix up their plans with the same precision as the other Corps & I think Butler does not keep his Div Cmdrs in enough order. I suppose he has not the practical experience to make decisions and to shut them up when they begin talking rot. If they make a mess of this show I shall have to talk seriously to Butler for it will be his fault.95
Butler duly failed his trade test, and Rawlinson agreed with Haig to have him relieved. He was, though, still formally in command of III Corps when the war ended. There was good reason for Rawlinson’s hesitancy, for Butler was a Haig protégé. He had served under Haig before the war, and had then been his chief of staff in 1st Army and deputy chief of the general staff at GHQ: he was actually Haig’s preferred choice for CGS when Lawrence was appointed. If Rawlinson was to shift him without risking personal damage then he needed abundant evidence.
Subordinates had mixed views about the replacement of their superiors. In November 1917 Rowland Feilding was very sorry to lose his brigadier, George Pereira, who was simply worn out. ‘He is about fifty-three,’ thought Feilding, ‘but has got to look like an old man. He is, I think, the most loyal and faithful and brave and unselfish man I have ever met, and I feel a great personal loss in his departure.’96 Lord Stanhope saw Haig arrive in early 1916 to sack his corps commander, Lieutenant General G. D. H. Fanshawe, who knew at once that the game was up. ‘Well, sir,’ he declared, ‘you obviously do not want to hear what I have to say, and I had better go.’ He was replaced by his gunner brother E. A. Fanshawe, regarded by Stanhope as ‘a less good soldier’. In contrast, Stanhope thought that 32nd Division was poor largely because its commander, Major General Ryecroft, ‘did not act happily with either his staff or his brigadiers’.97 He was eventually dismissed.
The issue of the dismissal of generals goes straight to the heart of the war’s mythology. Some historians seem unaware of the ease with which incompetent commanders were in fact replaced, while others fasten on the removal of the likes of Phillips as evidence that GHQ knew exactly what it was doing. The truth reflects the theme expounded at the beginning of this book: this was an army of extraordinary diversity, and resists any attempt to superimpose easy generalisations upon it. So for the moment let us leave our red tabs vulnerable both to the enemy’s fire and the military secretary’s pen, and consider now what they did, and what their subordinates made of them.
ONE LONG LOAF?
It was one of the most popular jokes in that most British of all popular entertainments, the music hall. The stand-up comedian, cheeks rouged and hair gelled, eased forward to the hissing footlights and asked the audience, with the finely-timed rhetoric of his craft: ‘If bread is the staff of life, what is the life of the staff? One long loaf.’ His listeners would have bayed with almost as much delight in 1966 as they had in 1916, and even today it is very hard to separate the real performance of formation headquarters from what people thought of their occupants.
The general staff was a recent arrival in the British army, instituted only in the wake of the Boer War. There was a strong case for making it what was termed a ‘blue ribbon’ staff, loosely modelled on the German general staff, and open only to officers who had passed through the army’s staff college at Camberley. They would then alternate between staff and regimental appointments to ensure that they blended theoretical knowledge with practical understanding. The blue ribbon campaign foundered in 1906 after Sir John French managed to get Algy Lawson, not a staff college graduate, appointed to
the post of brigade major of the 1st Cavalry Brigade. Thereafter it was possible to go onto the staff without having been to staff college. And when he became chief of the imperial general staff in 1912 French made it clear that: ‘It is the duty of the Staff to present all the facts of the situation to a commander and then to take the necessary measures for carrying his decisions into effect.’98
British chiefs of staff were always to lack the wide authority enjoyed by their German opposite numbers. And the fact that the British army’s cultural centre of gravity remained the regiment can be gauged from the fact that in 1914 there was a scramble for staff officers to get back to their battalions, although by doing so they lost the staff pay which they earned in addition to the pay of their regimental rank. About half the army’s staff college graduates were killed or crippled in the first nine months of the war, often falling gallantly at a place where they should not have been. Even Maurice Hankey, mainstay of the Committee of Imperial Defence and then of the War Cabinet, made several attempts to go on active service, but neither Asquith nor Lloyd George would let him. His deputy returned joyfully to regimental duty and was promptly killed.
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