It has to be said that Sir John French had certain temperamental weaknesses that militated against him in a coalition war. He distrusted his French allies and did not speak their language. He had a mistress, Mrs Winifred Bennet, and this liaison offended his more censorious colleagues, quite apart from the fact that she was considerably taller than he, so that the pair cut a faintly ridiculous figure. He had a quite unnecessary disagreement with one of his two corps commanders, Lieutenant General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, which he allowed to drag on long after the initial cause – the Battle of Le Cateau – was over. Certainly by late 1915 he had lost the confidence of one of his (by now) two army commanders, Sir Douglas Haig, who would eventually replace him. Nevertheless French was not incompetent, and his removal in late 1915 was due more to his failure to win the war that year than to any perceived military failings. That no one else could have won the war in 1915 was irrelevant – politicians require scapegoats and French had to go.
French’s place in British military history would be a lot more secure than it is had he kept his pen in his pocket, but on removal to England and appointment as Commander-in-Chief Home Forces he wrote 1914, severely criticising the political direction of the war. Politicians inevitably felt bound to rebut; much censure of French ensued, which was not mollified by a subsequent and somewhat carping book by his son that denigrated Haig.3 French also behaved quite disgracefully in his manipulation of the press. Frustrated (understandably) by the failure of British industry to supply him with the quantity and quality of shells that he needed, he used his personal friendship with the journalist Charles Repington to plant stories in The Times attacking the government and its direction of the war. Repington had a personal axe to grind. He had been a lieutenant colonel in the army, but in 1902 had been forced to resign for failing to keep his willy in his trousers.4 He had an antipathy to the War Office, disliked Haig, distrusted Kitchener and was delighted to act as French’s stooge. His reports precipitated the ‘Shells Scandal’ of May 1915, led to the appointment of Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions, and eventually helped to bring about the fall of Asquith’s government.
There can be no excuse for French’s behaviour in using the press to pursue his ends, right though those ends were. Serving officers in the British army are the servants of the state, and while they may lobby, protest, complain and badger in private, and ultimately resign if need be, they should not carry a professional disagreement with their masters into the public arena, and certainly not in time of war.
Of the corps commanders of 1914, Haig (I Corps) and Pulteney (III Corps, formed on 31 August) were fifty-three years old, and Smith-Dorrien (II Corps) was fifty-six. Grierson, who was originally appointed to commanded II Corps but who died of a heart attack on 17 August, was fifty-five. Rawlinson, who commanded IV Corps from its inception on 10 October, was fifty while Allenby, the cavalry commander, was fifty-three. Of the six divisional commanders on the Western Front in 1914, Lomax (1 Division) was fifty-nine, Keir (6 Division) fifty-eight, Snow (4 Division) fifty-six, Monro (2 Division) fifty-four, and Hamilton (3 Division) fifty-three. The boy of the bunch was Fergusson (5 Division) at a mere forty-eight. Apart from Fergusson, the senior generals would now be considered to be old – but not excessively so – for a field command.5 A small army in peacetime, particularly a small professional army, cannot offer the speedy promotion that is found today in, for example, Israel, where the bulk of the army is made up of conscripts or part-timers, there is only one (third-class) threat, and generals retire at forty to take up a lucrative career in politics or business. Professional armies have to offer a full career, and this inevitably means that in peacetime promotion is slow. All the senior officers of 1914 were vastly experienced. All had seen active service, nearly all had commanded a battalion or its equivalent and all had commanded at least a brigade. Contrary to popular received opinion, of all the commanders down to and including divisions, only French, Haig and the cavalry commander Allenby were cavalrymen. Keir was an officer of the Royal Artillery and all the rest were infantrymen.
By the end of 1914 there were eighteen infantry brigades in the BEF, each commanded by a brigadier general. All were from the infantry except for Hunter-Weston who was a Royal Engineer. The youngest (Count Gleichen, commanding 15 Infantry Brigade in 5 Division of II Corps) was fifty-one, and the three oldest (Landon, McCracken and Wilson) were fifty-five, again all getting on a bit by modern standards. The four cavalry brigade commanders ranged from Bingham at fifty-three to Gough who was a stripling of forty-four. Of the infantry brigade commanders of 1914, six would become major-generals and no fewer than eight lieutenant generals and corps commanders. Three became corps commanders within a year, Hunter-Weston having the fastest rise, taking over VIII Corps in May 1915. All four cavalry brigadiers became corps commanders, and one – Gough – an army commander.
There is a huge difference between commanding a brigade of around 4,000 men, which might hold 1,000 yards of front, and a corps with up to 100,000 men, responsible for perhaps ten miles. Command of a brigade, with its four battalions, was personal. The commander would know all the officers and a good number of the men in his brigade. Command of a corps required a far wider perspective and a completely different style of command. The command of a brigade in operations was detailed; the command of a corps could only be by directive to the divisional commanders. In peace an officer might command a brigade for four years and a division for another four before being entrusted with the command of a corps (not that the tiny British army had many corps). In August 1914 the BEF consisted of four divisions of infantry and one of cavalry – a total of eighteen infantry and four cavalry brigades – organised into two corps. By 1918, with the enormous expansion necessitated by all-out war, this had grown to nineteen corps – sixteen British, one Australian, one Canadian and one Portuguese – organised into five armies. There were fifty-one British, five Australian, four Canadian, one New Zealand and two Portuguese infantry divisions and three cavalry divisions – a total of 188 brigades. This is to say nothing of commands like the Tank Corps and the Machine Gun Corps, unthought of in 1914, and a hugely expanded air force. Progress up the ladder of command during the war was thus very rapid indeed. If the junior officers and the soldiers were learning on the job, far more so were the generals. This was not anybody’s fault, but an inevitable consequence of having a small professional army in peace that had to be converted into a mass continental army in war. The wonder is not that mistakes were made – and there were plenty – but that they were relatively few and rarely repeated.
There was no need for the army level of command in the first few months of the war, but at Christmas 1914 the BEF was reorganised into two armies – First and Second. In 1918 the five army commanders (generals) were aged from sixty-one (Plumer, Second Army) to fifty-three (Birdwood, Fifth Army), and the average age of the sixteen British corps commanders was fifty-four, ranging from Watts (XXX Corps) at sixty to Butler (III Corps) who was forty-eight. Three of these (Fergusson, Godley and Morland) had entered the war in 1914 as major-generals, twelve were brigadier generals in 1914 and one (Butler) had been but a lieutenant colonel when the war started, so that his span of command increased by a factor of fifty in four years.
At divisional level in 1918 few of the major-generals were over fifty, most were in their late forties and Jackson (50 Division) was thirty-nine. Most had started the war as lieutenant colonels, although Jackson was a captain in 1914 while Gorringe (47 Division) seems to have made no progress at all, entering and leaving the war as a major-general.
At brigade level there was a wide range: most brigadiers were in their late forties, and hardly any were over fifty in 1918. Jack (28 Brigade, 9 Division) and Brand (25 Brigade, 8 Division) were thirty-eight and had started the war as captains in 1914, as had Grogan (aged forty-three and commanding 23 Brigade, 8 Division in 1918). Most had started the war as majors.
Further down the chain of command, lieutenant colonels commanding battalions we
re often in their thirties – or even twenties – by 1918; in peace such an appointment would rarely be held by an officer under the age of forty-five.
Altogether four British lieutenant generals, twelve major-generals and eighty-one brigadier generals died or were killed between 1914 and 1918. A further 146 were wounded or taken prisoner.6 Whatever else the generals were doing, they were certainly not sitting in comfortable chateaux.
The war was only six weeks old when it claimed its first British general. Brigadier General N. D. Findlay was Commander Royal Artillery of 1 Division during the advance from the Marne to the Aisne in September 1914. On 10 September Findlay was selecting a gun position when he was killed by German shelling.
In some cases the attrition rate amongst senior officers was very high indeed. The Battle of Loos, which began on 21 September 1915 and went on until 8 October, involved nine British divisions, six in the initial attack and three in reserve. Each division was commanded by a major-general, and three of the nine were killed in action during the course of the battle, or died of wounds received in it.
Major-General Sir Thompson Capper was fifty-one in 1915 and commanded 7 Division at Loos. He had already been injured by flying grenade fragments during a demonstration of the jam-tin bomb in April 1915. On 26 September, five days into the Loos battle, the division was held up in its attempt to capture German-occupied quarries near Hulluch. Capper left his headquarters and went up to get the attack going again. He left his horse in the rear and went on foot to the forward positions of the 2nd Battalion the Worcestershire Regiment, the lead battalion of the division. While (successfully) encouraging the men to attack once more, Capper was shot through the lungs and died the next day. It was said that he even took part in the charge, waving his parade cane.
The commander of 9 Division at Loos was the forty-seven-year-old Major-General G. H. Thesiger. He had been a major-general for four months and in command of the division for two weeks. On 27 September he went forward to find out why his lead brigade was held up near the Hohenzollern Redoubt. Thesiger, one of his staff officers and his aide-de-camp (ADC) were all killed. Thesiger’s body was never found, or if found was never identified, and he has no known grave.
Major-General F. D. V. Wing, aged fifty-five in 1915, recovered from a German shrapnel bullet in his leg in September 1914, and at Loos commanded 12 Division. On 2 October 1915 he was on his way back from visiting the front-line positions of his division when he and his ADC were killed by German shelling.
It can be argued that generals should not be anywhere near the front line. It is not the business of a general to kill the enemy, but to control the battle so that units under his command can do the killing. Here was one of the great quandaries of the war. The general had to be close enough to the fighting to know what was going on, but far enough from it to be able to exercise control. Exercising control meant being able to communicate: with the artillery, with his own subordinate formations, with flanking units and with his own superiors. Today a general, at whatever level of command, can operate from a relatively small and mobile headquarters, using radio and satellite communications. None of this was available to a commander of 1914–18, and while static headquarters (corps level and above) did have some primitive radio communication, it would be a very long time before a radio that was sufficiently reliable and portable to be used in battle was available. Communication in the Great War was by telephone, flares, runner and galloper, with even pigeons and the heliograph being used on occasion. In defence the brigade and divisional headquarters was usually set up in the cellar of a French or Belgian house, where telephone lines could be installed and run up to the units manning the firing line. These lines could be dug in and were generally secure. Once units started to move, however, communication became difficult: while advancing troops would run out a telephone line behind them as they proceeded, these lines were susceptible to shellfire and were often severed. Runners got lost, got shot, or took time to bring their information back, by which time the situation had changed and the information was out of date.
A commander with no reserve cannot influence the battle. In order to deploy reserves to exploit a local advantage the commander must have information, and must be able to communicate with his reserve. In this war reserves could not be held too far forward, or they would be caught up in the enemy’s defensive fire and pinned down; if, on the other hand, they were held far enough back to be safe during the opening phases, they would arrive too late when needed. It was a problem that would not be solved until the advent of battlefield radio during the next war.
Generals who went too far forward could not be in touch with their own headquarters, with its communications and access to reserves, and were thus not suitably placed to exercise control of the battle. At the same time, these were men who had been brought up in a professional army where personal bravery was highly prized. They had themselves been junior officers in a firing line and they naturally felt the need to get forward and see for themselves, quite apart from the morale factor of the general being seen to share the dangers of his men. One of the criticisms that can be directed against Sir John French is that he was too often away from his headquarters, visiting the troops at the front, when he should have been with his communications and his staff, and thus in a position to apply some direction to the course of the battle.
After a hit rate of one-third of the divisional commanders at Loos, it was realised that the British army simply could not afford the loss of such highly trained men. You can train an infantry private soldier in a few weeks, but you have to grow leaders, particularly senior commanders, and that takes time. Warning memoranda came from General Headquarters, advising senior officers not to become personally involved in the fighting; but it was a difficult order to enforce, and even more difficult to obey.
Whether or not generals should have visited the front lines, the fact is that they did, regularly and frequently, as a glance at any unit war diary shows. Battalions in the line would see their brigade commander at least once a week, usually more often, with rather rarer visits from divisional, corps and army commanders. As a divisional commander would have under him twelve infantry battalions (from 1917, nine) – to say nothing of his artillery, engineer, machine-gun, medical, signals, transport, pioneer, cavalry and supply units – it would be difficult for the major-general to see every unit more often than once a fortnight, even if he made one visit a day. Corps commanders would be even rarer – hardly surprising with up to sixty battalions to worry about – and an army commander could not possibly visit a battalion more than once or twice in a year, even if he spent all his time on the road, which he clearly could not. Much so-called anecdotal history complains that the generals were rarely seen. Rarely seen by the writer perhaps, but most brigade and divisional commanders were somewhere in the front lines at least once a day, even if an individual in the visited unit might not personally meet him. The purpose of a visit by the general is not only to pat backs and hand out praise and encouragement. Visiting senior officers went to the front to check, supervise, brief, cajole, inspect and evaluate, and not everyone wanted their superior to visit too often, any more than they do today. It was a matter of getting the balance right, and by and large British generals did.
Most generals slept in a bed with a roof over them – they could not possibly have done their job in a dugout in the firing line – but they were very busy men. A typical divisional commander’s day might begin at 0700 hours with reports of the previous night’s activities and returns of casualties and ammunition states. After breakfast there would be a conference with the artillery, engineer and supply and transport commanders, followed by visits to units, usually on horseback until close up to the front, but increasingly by car as the war went on. Lunch would be taken on the hoof or with the unit being visited, and the afternoon would be devoted to paperwork, the inevitable reports and returns associated with modern warfare. There would be a further staff conference in the evening and after dinner t
he general would be working in his office until well into the night. Many of the senior commanders of 1918 had been at the front since 1914, with very little leave or time off, and the strain was considerable. Some – a few – could not take the pace and were removed or sent home sick, but they were a robust breed and the vast majority discharged their awesome responsibilities to the best of their considerable abilities.
Generals, and indeed officers of any rank, may seem uncaring to the civilian mind. A commander cannot allow the death of one, or a hundred, or a thousand of the men placed under him to affect his performance. If it does, that commander cannot properly discharge his responsibilities to the others who are still alive. Life has to go on, and while any commander will miss a fallen comrade, and regret his passing, he must move on: there is little time to mourn. Any general will make his plans with the possibility of casualties well to the forefront of his thinking, but war is a nasty business, and killing and being killed is a part of it. British generals were not uncaring – as the number of British troops was finite, they could not afford to be – but they accepted, as they had to, that the very nature of this war, particularly on the Western Front, would lead to many deaths however hard they tried to avoid them.
Many British generals are known to history only by a sobriquet attached to them at some time. ‘Hunter Bunter’ was Lieutenant General Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston. Born in 1864, he attended the Royal Military Academy Woolwich and was commissioned into the Royal Engineers. He had extensive active-service experience on the North-West Frontier of India, attended the Staff College and was on Kitchener’s staff for the Nile Expedition of 1896. He served as a staff officer and as a mounted-column commander in South Africa, where his activities as a raider behind the Boer lines led to him being described as having ‘reckless courage combined with technical skill and great coolness in emergency…’7 Prior to the outbreak of war he was Assistant Director of Military Training at the War Office. He commanded 11 Brigade in 4 Division in 1914, and handled it well at Le Cateau and during the advance from the Marne to the Aisne, where he travelled around the battlefield on the back of a motorbike, often appearing in the most surprising places. As a result of his skilful handling of 11 Brigade he was promoted to major-general in the field, and took 29 Division to Gallipoli.
Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military) Page 22