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:
‘In some ways,’ wrote the author, ‘it was like the debate of a group of savages as to how to extract a screw from a piece of wood. Accustomed only to nails, they had made one effort to pull out the screw by main force, and now that it had failed they were devising methods of applying more force still, of obtaining more efficient pincers, of using levers and fulcrums so that more men could bring their strength to bear. They could hardly be blamed for not guessing that by rotating the screw it would come out after the exertion of far less effort; it would be a notion so different from anything they had ever encountered that they would laugh at the man who suggested it.’ Here the novelist displayed the mindset that caused Churchill to write at the same period: ‘Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre. The greater the general, the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he demands in slaughter.’
Where both Churchill’s dictum and Forester’s analogy were fundamentally mistaken, in the view of the best modern scholars of the First World War, was in their failure to acknowledge that no military means then existed to make possible a ready ‘rotation of the screw’, to open any cheap and ready path to victory. To pose such questions as are asked by some modern critics of Great War generalship, ‘Could they not have invented tanks sooner?’, is as meaningless as demanding, ‘Might the Schlieffen plan have worked if the Germans had Panzer divisions?’ The Western Front’s dominant reality was that the available means of defence proved more effectual than the means of attack. Even when, at terrible cost, one side or the other’s assaults achieved an initial breakthrough, the necessary mobility was lacking, together with appropriate command and control technologies, wirelesses then being cumbersome and primitive, rapidly to reinforce and exploit local success. This changed only in the summer of 1918, when the German army was much weakened by attrition, and the British had developed new tactics – above all through the sophisticated management of artillery – for which Haig deserves significant credit.
Even in the Second World War, Liddell Hart’s faith in an ‘indirect approach’, the possibility of attaining victory by manoeuvre rather than attrition, proved justified only where defenders suffered a moral collapse, as did the French in 1940, the Italians in 1941, the Russians in the first months of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the British in Malaya in 1942. When a defending army displayed staunchness and professional competence, like the Wehrmacht in almost all circumstances, and the Japanese in most of their 1944–45 island battles, Liddell Hart was shown to be quite mistaken in supposing that enlightened generals could readily cut keys to victory.
Between 1914 and 1918, British and French commanders were imprisoned by strategic realities, foremost among which was that if the allied armies remained supine in their trenches, they thus acquiesced in enemy occupation of a large swathe of France and Belgium, in which five million people lived under brutal subjection. Herein lay the answer to the oft-asked modern layman’s question: ‘Why did the allies keep attacking?’ Moreover, the Germans enjoyed another considerable advantage, that they could concede a few yards or even miles of occupied territory wherever it seemed tactically expedient to do so – to entrench on higher ground, for instance – while it was politically unacceptable for allied formations voluntarily to yield French or Belgian soil, even if doing so would save lives. Over all loomed the cruel truth that the only ready means of escape from the horrors of the Western Front was to concede victory to the Kaiser.
But if 1914–18’s generals deserve sympathy for the intractability of the military challenges they faced, to modern eyes they still seem repugnant for their indifference to the massacres over which they presided. A vivid insight into their emotional processes, or lack of them, was provided by the 1952 publication of Sir Douglas Haig’s diaries. For instance, the BEF’s C-in-C wrote on 2 July 1916, amid the Battle of the Somme: ‘A day of ups and downs! … I visited two Casualty Clearing Stations … They were very pleased at my visit. The wounded were in wonderful spirits … The A[djutant]-G[eneral] reported today that the total casualties are estimated at over 40,000 to date. This cannot be considered severe in view of the numbers engaged, and the length of front attacked. By nightfall, the situation is much more favourable than we started today.’ Next day, Haig added: ‘Weather continued all that could be desired.’ Winston Churchill, who knew the senior officers of the war intimately both as a cabinet minister and, for some months, as a battalion commander on the Western Front, penned a vivid portrait of the wartime C-in-C, soon after Haig’s death in 1928:
He presents to me in those red years the same mental picture as a great surgeon before the days of anaesthetics, versed in every detail of such science as was known to him; sure of himself, steady of poise, knife in hand, intent upon the operation; entirely removed in his professional capacity from the agony of the patient, the anguish of relations, or the doctrines of rival schools, the devices of quacks, or the first-fruits of new learning. He would operate without excitement, or he would depart without being affronted; and if the patient died, he would not reproach himself.
Forester’s Herbert Curzon was a subordinate officer rather than a warlord, but in this respect he exemplified his real-life superiors as well as his peers. His own diary, had he kept one, would have resembled Haig’s. He was a Roman, schooled since childhood to regard fortitude in the face of difficulties and losses as an indispensable virtue for every right-thinking soldier, a view shared by the senior officers of Russia, France, Germany, Austria, Italy. What seems to a twenty-first-century society to have been harsh insensitivity was, to those who led armies throughout earlier ages, an essential element of manhood and even more so of warriorhood. Some of
Napoleon’s greatest victories were purchased at appalling human cost, but even today few French people think the less of him because of this. The first Duke of Wellington wept when confronted by the ‘butcher’s bills’ for his triumphs, but he never hesitated to sacrifice men to battlefield imperatives. Consider those British squares at Waterloo, which finished the battle where they had started it, but with almost every man dead in his place. Almost one in four of Wellington’s soldiers were killed or wounded on 18 June 1815, about the same proportion of those engaged as fell on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Somme. Great captains have seldom flinched from accepting heavy casualties when circumstances seemed to demand this; their fitness for command would have been questioned had they done so.
In the First World War, the vastness of the struggle imposed an unprecedented scale of loss. But what choice was there before the military leaders, save to stiffen their backs and carry on, unless they chose to resign their posts or concede defeat to the enemy? The literary culture which dominates twenty-first-century perceptions burdens the generals with overwhelming blame for the struggle’s horrors. Yet, on the allied side at least, soldiers bore little or no responsibility for having unleashed Europe’s catastrophe. It is almost impossible to make such officers as led Britain’s forces between 1914 and 1918 appear sympathetic human beings to a twenty-first-century audience, but they were men of their time, and it is thus that they should be judged.
All societies view history through nationalistic prisms, and the British indulge this as much as any, cherishing another persistent myth – that the First World War was much bloodier than the Second. Many people like to believe that in the 1939–45 conflict, Britain suffered much smaller losses because the army had more gifted and humane generals, who declined to sacrifice their men as they had been sacrificed on the Somme and at Passchendaele by such commanders as Sir Herbert Curzon. Yet Paul Fussell, an influential modern writer, was profoundly mistaken when he wrote in The Great War and Modern Memory that the conflict was uniquely awful, and thus lay ‘outside history’, fit matter for literary rather than historical examination. In reality all wars inflict horrors on those who fight them, as well as upon bystanders who find themselves in the path of armies and fall victim to their excesses.
Life and death in Western Europe in the fourteenth century, era of the Hundred Years War and many other struggles, were dreadful indeed, as they were also during the seventeenth-century Thirty Years War, which killed a higher proportion of Europe’s population than perished between 1939 and 1945. It is a childish delusion to suppose that 1914–18’s fighting men experienced worse things than their forebears had known. They did not. For centuries past, soldiers had fought battles in which they were often obliged to stand and face each other’s fire, sometimes at ranges of fifty yards and less, hour upon hour. The hardships they suffered from hunger, weather and disease were quite as severe as those faced by combatants on the Western Front. Survivors of – for instance – Napoleon’s 1812 Russian campaign would have mocked the notion that what men did to each other at Ypres or the Chemin des Dames represented a qualitatively worse experience than their own.
What changed in the First World War was simply that cultured citizen soldiers, disdaining the stoicism displayed since time immemorial by warriors, most of whom were anyway illiterate, chronicled the conflict into which they were plunged with an unprecedented lyricism. Moreover, the absence of significant strategic movement on the Western Front generated a sense of military futility which afterwards extended, understandably but irrationally, and especially among later generations rather than among contemporary participants, to the merits of the allied cause.
Neither the poetic achievement nor the sense of futility were repeated between 1939 and 1945. This is strange, because the second of the twentieth century’s great clashes was much more costly for mankind. Far bloodier attritional clashes were required to accomplish the destruction of Nazism than those on the Western Front in the struggle to defeat the Kaiser. But 1941–45’s principal killing fields, its Sommes and Verduns, lay in the East, and the losses were borne by the Russians, who suffered twenty-seven million dead and inflicted 92 per cent of the German army’s total casualties. The Western allies accepted only a small fraction of the material and human price for destroying Hitler. For four years – between June 1940 and June 1944 – most of the British and later American armies marched and trained at home, while a handful of divisions fought in North Africa, later Italy and the Far East, and a titanic contest in arms took place on the Eastern Front. Only in Normandy, during June and July 1944, did the Western allies go head to head with the Germans in battles during which some units’ losses matched those of 1916.
In the second half of World War II, assisted by a superiority of resources such as Foch and Haig had never enjoyed, together with the fact that the global tide had shifted decisively against the Axis, Britain won some victories under the leadership of competent, if not inspired, generals who were indeed cautious about casualties, to the disgust of their American allies. But it is difficult to argue convincingly that the British commanders of the early war years displayed higher skills than those of French, Haig – and Forester’s Curzon. It is a matter of personal taste whether such generals as Percival at Singapore and Klopper at Tobruk – who surrendered their commands to the enemy in 1942 rather than conduct the sort of sacrificial stands Churchill wanted and Herbert Curzon would have been happy to lead – deserve the applause of posterity for their humanity, or castigation for their ignominious battlefield failure. But the dominant reality of World War II was that Alanbrooke and Marshall, Montgomery and Eisenhower were spared the odium of presiding over bloodbaths comparable with those of 1914–18 not by their own genius, but because the Russians did most of the killing and dying undertaken by British Tommies and French poilus a generation earlier.
It is sometimes suggested that allied generals in Hitler’s war eschewed the sybaritic lifestyle of commanders in the Kaiser’s conflict, who created the legend of ‘château generalship’, champagne-swigging ‘brass hats’ living it up in the rear areas. This view, too, is factually hard to justify. Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten’s South-East Asia Command headquarters in Ceylon was notoriously self-indulgent. Field-Marshal Sir Harold Alexander and his staff in Italy were thought to do themselves remarkably well, as did many of the US Army’s commanders. When champagne was available, most British, American and German generals drank it as enthusiastically between 1939 and 1945 as they did between 1914 and 1918. Soldiers serving in headquarters inevitably live far more comfortably than infantrymen. Once again, modern perceptions have been distorted by the literary culture of 1914–18, which fostered a delusion of the First World War’s exceptionality in this respect, as in many others. Sassoon wrote in one of his most famous poems:
If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You’d see me with my puffy petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honour. ‘Poor young chap,’
I’d say – ‘I used to know his father well;
Yes, we’ve lost heavily in this last scrap.’
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I’d toddle safely home and die – in bed.
Fed by such brilliant derision, the delusion persists that the First World War was unique in its chasm between innocent youth sacrificed in the trenches, and slothful cowards skulking at the rear. In reality, in all wars since 1914, for each rifleman confronting the enemy, at least ten and sometimes twenty officers and men have fulfilled support functions. Every surviving veteran of World War II is today absurdly dubbed a ‘hero’, yet only a small fraction performed any role which put them at greater risk of mortality than they faced in civilian life. Throughout the 1939–45 conflict, Churchill deplored the high proportion of the British Army which never heard a sho
t fired. It fell to army chief Gen. Sir Alan Brooke repeatedly to rehearse to the prime minister the argument that modern conflict demands a long administrative ‘tail’ for the ‘teeth’ arms. Fighting soldiers of the 1939–45 era liked their brethren who manned office desks and ate hot lunches no more than did Sassoon his ‘scarlet Majors’.
In the pages above, I have deliberately avoided tracing the career of C.S. Forester’s Curzon, because to do so would be to deny readers of this remarkable and compelling novel the pleasure of discovering his history for themselves. My objective has been to set in context the experiences both of the writer and of the character he depicted. Cecil Forester was a friend of my parents whom I met once or twice – a lean, bony, ascetic figure with a twinkling eye which caused him to reflect in everything he wrote his consciousness that the play of human affairs is always a comedy; that we all look equally ridiculous in the bath. It is interesting that Adolf Hitler – a man lacking both cultural judgement and a significant sense of humour – relished the 1937 German edition of The General, and presented specially bound copies to favourites, including Goering and Keitel. He urged them to read the novel, which, he said, offered a penetrating study of the British military caste they would soon meet – and defeat – in battle.
No more than Sir Douglas Haig was Curzon a wicked man, as Germany’s commanders in the Second World War were indeed wicked men, because they colluded in barbarous deeds unrelated to military imperatives. The British generals of 1914–18 did the best they could for their country. They possessed virtues and vices bred into the British military caste over many centuries, but in the unprecedented circumstances of France and Flanders these qualities were tested almost to destruction. It is understandable that today the British people decline to celebrate the 1918 victory of Foch and Haig, because its human cost is deemed to have been disproportionate; but it is irrational that meanwhile they untiringly recall and applaud the 1944–45 triumphs of Eisenhower and Montgomery.
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