No commander in modern war can possibly direct all the multifarious activities of his command by himself. Even at the lowest level, the corporal commanding a section of ten men had and has a lance corporal to assist. As the technology available to commanders grew, so did the number of people needed to help a commander carry out his function. A divisional staff in Wellington’s army had up to six staff officers; in the intervening century this had trebled, and even so was barely sufficient. The general’s job is to direct and plan, and the task of the staff is to provide the general with the information he needs, and then to turn his ideas and plans into reality. To the staff is delegated responsibility for the details of operations of war, the administration, discipline and movement of the troops, provision of equipment, ammunition and stores, and health, welfare and career management – all this in addition to keeping the commander informed of what is going on. A good staff officer will take as much of the detail as possible onto himself, thus allowing the commander to get on with what that officer is trained and paid to do: command the troops. Unlike the German system, where the commander and the chief of staff shared joint responsibility, British staffs were subservient to their commander. A German chief of staff who disagreed with his commander’s decision had the right of appeal to the chief of staff of the next higher formation; in the British army a chief of staff owed his allegiance to his commander alone. There were good reasons for this. The German army was large enough to accommodate a specialist stream of staff officers, a luxury that the British army could not afford, and British officers were expected to be able to fill command and staff appointments, often alternating between the two. There had been a British staff college since the Napoleonic Wars, but it was not highly regarded before the late 1880s; then staff training began to be seen as important, largely because the lessons of the Franco-Prussian War had been absorbed. Even so, in 1914 there were only around 700 staff-trained officers in the whole of the British army. They were spread around the world and many were at a stage in their careers where they were not available for employment on the staff. Despite this, the majority of the key staff posts in the BEF of 1914 were filled either by staff-trained officers or by officers who, while not graduates of the college, had already satisfactorily filled staff appointments.
As has been explained, the staff was divided into three branches, G, A and Q. At divisional level, G Branch had a General Staff Officer Grade I, or GSO1, a lieutenant colonel who was in fact if not in name the chief of staff. Under him were a GSO2, a major, and a GSO3, a captain. A and Q Branches were headed by the Assistant Adjutant and Quartermaster General, or AAQMG, a lieutenant colonel, with a major as Deputy Assistant Adjutant and Quartermaster General (DAAQMG) and a captain as Deputy Assistant Quartermaster General (DAQMG). There was a Deputy Assistant Director of Ordnance Services, (DADOS), usually a captain but sometimes a major, a colonel of the Royal Army Medical Corps as Assistant Director of Medical Services (ADMS), with a major as his deputy (DADMS). A captain or major Deputy Assistant Director of Veterinary Services (DADVS) was responsible for the division’s animals, and a Deputy Assistant Provost Marshal (DAPM) looked after discipline, route signing and traffic control. Not technically a staff officer, but very much part of the headquarters, was the general’s aide-de-camp or ADC, in peacetime not much more than a social ornament and dog-walker, but in war an essential adjunct to command. The ADC looked after the general’s personal welfare, compiled his daily programme and often acted as his eyes and ears. With the divisional headquarters and responsible to it were the artillery and engineer staffs. The Brigadier General Royal Artillery (BGRA) with his Brigade Major Royal Artillery (BMRA) and Staff Captain Royal Artillery (SCRA) commanded the divisional artillery and coordinated the fire planning, while the Commanding Royal Engineer (a lieutenant colonel but often in practice a major) and the Adjutant Royal Engineers coordinated all engineering activity in support of the division.11 At corps level the staff system was duplicated, with rather more staff officers, while the Brigade Commander had but a Brigade Major and a Staff Captain to assist him.
In war and in peace, regimental officers and soldiers have always blamed everything not to their liking on the staff: the anonymous ‘they’, who are seen as the architects of all that is uncomfortable and unnecessary, and who are completely out of touch with what is happening on the ground.12 As an anonymous poet of the trenches warbled:
Good Gracious, Uncle, what is that?
With red and gold upon his hat?
Such lofty brow and haughty face,
Such easy condescending grace
Surely belong to no one save
The very, very, very brave!
They drive about in handsome cars,
And sit for simply hours and hours
In chateaux round by Saint-Omer
Evolving little ruses de guerre.
Now and again, if things are slack,
They organise a large attack,
And watch the battle from a hill
Some miles away, or farther still;
They see what fighting there has been,
Quite clearly – on the tape machine.
When a staff officer visited the forward trenches – and they did visit, frequently, as indeed they had to – he might on occasion be looked upon as a dilettante from some other world, with his clean boots, brassard and red collar patches. In general, however, the perfectly normal irritation vented on the visitor from a headquarters was rarely directed at brigade or divisional staffs. The composition of brigades did not change very much in the four and a quarter years of war, and brigades rarely moved to another division. Regimental officers got to know the brigade and divisional staff officers, and with personal knowledge antipathy – often artificial anyway – disappeared. It was much easier to be rude about the corps staff, as divisions did move around from corps to corps, or about the army or GHQ staff, whom regimental officers did not know at a personal level. While the BEF began the war with well-trained staff officers, the enormous expansion of the army that had to be undertaken meant that many staff officers had not been formally trained for the posts they had to fill. Like everyone else, generals to private soldiers, staff officers learned by doing it, and the great majority did a pretty good job under conditions for which they had not been trained and which they had not expected. As the war went on most officers appointed to the staff had already experienced life in the trenches, and knew perfectly well what the troops had to put up with.
The Staff College itself was closed on the outbreak of what many thought would be a short war. In hindsight this was a mistake, and officers with the coveted ‘psc’ (Passed Staff College) after their names were soon snapped up. The continuing need for more and more staff officers led to suitable regimental officers being attached to a headquarters as ‘staff learners’, and very soon it became necessary for GHQ and armies to set up their own staff schools in France to train potential staff officers. As uniformity in teaching was vital, a central staff school was set up at Hesdin in France, and by early 1916 there were staff schools in the UK as well, training officers for both junior and senior staff posts.
In April 1916 Army Council Instruction 786 laid down the criteria for staff employment, which were either to hold the qualification psc, or to have already held a staff appointment, or to have completed a staff course with an army in the field, or to have been recommended as a result of a staff-school course. These courses lasted for six weeks, and had to be preceded by an attachment of one month as a staff learner.13 As the shortage continued, Army Council Instruction 1128 of June 1916 exempted officers intended to fill staff posts at home from attending any courses, but retained the requirement to serve one month as a staff learner. By September 1917 a further instruction laid down that the qualification for a Grade 3 post was a satisfactory attachment to a headquarters as a learner, while for Grades 2 and 1 an officer had to have completed a junior or senior staff course.14 The Staff College premises at Camberley, when not being used as accomm
odation for officers of the New Armies undergoing their one-month commissioning course at Sandhurst, were used to run a tactics course for senior officers, and courses to prepare officers who had held Grade 2 staff appointments to fill posts at Grade 1.15
It was probably a mistake to take away some of the officers filling key posts in the War Office and in other commands in the United Kingdom to staff the headquarters of the BEF in August 1914, for this led to muddle and confusion at home just when steady and practised hands were needed. Wilson, Director of Military Operations at the War Office, left to become Major-General, General Staff BEF; Macready vacated the War Office post of Director of Personnel Services to take up that of Adjutant General of the BEF; Robertson had been Director of Military Training at the War Office when he was moved to France as Quartermaster General; Horne was Inspector of Horse and Field Artillery and now found himself as BGRA I Corps; while Forestier-Walker moved from being Brigadier General, General Staff Ireland, to the equivalent post in II Corps. All these men made good staff officers, and served the BEF well. Operational needs must take priority, but the removal of all these officers at once did leave holes that were not easy to fill, just as the army was gearing itself up for high-intensity warfare. That the gaps left at the War Office were initially largely filled by officers brought back from retirement meant that the War Office, which should have been directing the activities of the army, was greatly reduced in influence: the power was with GHQ in France and the Cabinet in Whitehall.
The Chief of the Imperial General Staff was the professional head of the army, and even with the appointment of a soldier – Field Marshal Lord Kitchener – as Secretary of State for War in August 1914, the army needed a steady and resolute figure to represent it and safeguard its interests, preferably one who had been in post long enough to have got to know and understand how power in Whitehall worked. Sir John French had felt it necessary to vacate the post in April 1914, and was replaced by Sir Charles Douglas who died in October of the same year. Douglas’s replacement was Sir James Wolfe Murray, whose long experience in intelligence and administration made him a master of detail, but also made it difficult for him to stand back and look at the war overall. He was far too inclined to defer to Kitchener and the politicians, and too soft-hearted to sack those around him who were not up to the job (not many, but there were some).
Wolfe Murray lasted for less than a year, and left the post in September 1915, probably to his own immense relief. The new CIGS was Sir Archibald Murray, who had been Wolfe Murray’s deputy, responsible for the training of the New Armies, since February 1915, and who had previously commanded 2 Division of the BEF. Murray too was not equal to the challenge of directing the army and dealing with the two sources of pressure – from GHQ in France and from Kitchener at home. Political scheming for the reduction of Kitchener’s powers at last led to a satisfactory appointment: Sir William ‘Wully’ Robertson, hitherto Quartermaster General and then Chief of the General Staff of the BEF. Robertson had a remarkable career, one that would not be possible today and was extraordinary then.16 Born in humble circumstances in 1860 he enlisted as a private in the ranks of the 16th Lancers at the age of seventeen.17 Eight years later he was a troop sergeant major (equivalent to a staff sergeant of today) when his commanding officer suggested that, as a bright young lad, he should try for a commission. He was coached for the entrance examination by regimental officers and passed through Sandhurst, being commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 3rd Dragoon Guards. His career thereafter was rapid and marked by dedication and professionalism. He narrowly failed to get a competitive vacancy for the Staff College and attended as a nominee. He later became its commandant. Robertson was shrewd, blunt, highly skilful at his profession and nobody’s poodle. He stood up to Kitchener and forged a strong bond of mutual respect and even friendship with him. After Kitchener’s death in HMS Hampshire in 1916, Robertson was able to resist all the blandishments and politicking of members of the government, and acted as a stout defender of the army and as an invaluable buffer between Haig and the manipulations of Lloyd George, until the latter eventually sacked him early in 1918.
Years after the war, when disillusionment set in and people saw that England had not been transformed into a ‘land fit for heroes’, the hunt for someone to blame began. It was exacerbated by authors with an axe to grind (like Basil Liddell Hart) and poets who wrote for money.18 ‘British generals did the best they could with what they had, and were by and large successful in a war that no one had expected or trained for’ makes a dull headline. ‘Butchers and bunglers’ sells books and newspapers, particularly when the objects of attack are dead or retired. Alan Clark was an amusing writer, a brilliant storyteller and a bon viveur. British political life is the poorer for his passing, but he cannot be described as a historian. When pressed to say just when and where General Hoffman described the British army as ‘lions led by donkeys’, Clark admitted that he had made it up!19
NOTES
1 The modern British army can be said to date from Cromwell’s New Model Army, the first British army to be recognisably regular and professional.
2 There was a possibility that the army might be asked to put down ‘loyalist’ unrest if Irish home rule was granted. Many officers were unhappy about the prospect of military action against those whom they saw as their own people, and there were threats of mass resignations should action be ordered. See Ian F. W. Beckett (ed.), The Army and the Curragh Incident, Bodley Head, London, 1986, for a detailed explanation of this affair.
3 Major the Hon. Gerald French, DSO, French Replies to Haig, Hutchinson & Co., London, 1936.
4 He was a known philanderer and, when cited as co-respondent in a divorce case, was alleged to have broken his previously given written word not to see the lady again.
5 In today’s British army major-generals retire at fifty-four in peacetime. Age is no bar to field success, however: Blücher was seventy-two when he (very successfully) commanded the Prussian army at Waterloo in 1815, and Sir Charles Napier was sixty-one when, musket in hand, he led the decisive infantry charge at Meanee in 1843.
6 For an exposition of general-officer casualties in the Great War see Frank Davies and Graham Maddocks, Bloody Red Tabs, London, 1995. While concentrating on dead, wounded and captured generals this book also does much to dispel the popular myth of uncaring and ignorant generals. It is meticulously sourced and should be compulsory reading for all those who question the competence of senior officers in the Great War.
7 Dictionary of National Biography.
8 Brigadier General R. C. B. Haking, CB, Company Training, Hugh Rees Ltd, London, 1914.
9 See Keith Grieves, ‘Haig and the Government 1916–1918’, in Brian Bond and Nigel Cave (eds.), Haig, a Reappraisal 70 Years On, Barnsley, 1999.
10 Variations of this system continued until 1969, since when there has been one pass-mark in the exam and students are all selected from those who pass.
11 All these titles had been in use for well over a century, and had the great advantage of indicating immediately the rank of the holder. They remained in use until the 1980s when the British army converted to the NATO system of staff nomenclature (effectively the American system). Thus the senior administrative staff officer is now the Chief G1/G4 and could be a major, lieutenant colonel, brigadier or major-general depending upon the level of the headquarters. This makes it very difficult for a regimental officer to know how rude he can be to a staff officer on the telephone.
12 Having been both, this author as a regimental officer frequently (and usually wrongly) considered that the staff had no grasp of reality, while as a staff officer he frequently (and usually wrongly) considered that the battalions had no idea of the imperatives of the big picture.
13 Pre-war courses at the Staff College lasted two years.
14 Since 1969 all officers, on reaching the rank of captain, are required to be trained for junior staff appointments. The Junior Command and Staff Course was first run at the School of
Infantry Warminster, then at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and now at the Joint Services Command and Staff College Shrivenham.
15 For a description of how the Staff College worked and how entry was achieved prior to 1914, see Major A. R. Godwin-Austen, OBE, MC, The Staff and the Staff College, Constable & Co. Ltd, London, 1927.
Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military) Page 24