The General: The Classic WWI Tale of Leadership

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 shot 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.

The contrast is explained, if not justified, in part by the fact that it proved necessary to fight and overcome German expansionism a second time in the course of the twentieth century. This caused many people to conclude that the earlier struggle had been a failure, the achievement of victory in 1918 annulled by subsequent events. In some measure, this was true. But a balanced perspective, such as should be attainable a century after the event, suggests that if the Kaiser’s Germany had won the First World War, Europe would have paid a terrible forfeit. It is much too simplistic to look back on the 1939–45 conflict as Britain’s ‘good’ war, and 1914–18 as its ‘bad’ one. The war poets are so often misinterpreted by modern readers, that it is necessary to remind ourselves that Wilfred Owen – to name only the foremost – went to his grave in November 1918 overwhelmed by the horror of his generation’s experience, but unwavering in his conviction that the allied cause was just, and had to be upheld in arms, a view in which some of us remain assured that Owen was right.

A twenty-first-century reader who takes up The General will discover no cause to love Curzon’s kind. But C.S. Forester recognised that his fumbling half-hero was as much a tragic figure as the men whom he led, often to their deaths. The author ends his tale as he began it, with a drollery: ‘And now Lieutenant-General Sir Herbert Curzon and his wife, Lady Emily, are frequently to be seen on the promenade at Bournemouth, he in his bathchair with a plaid rug, she in tweeds striding behind. He smiles his old-maidish smile and his friends are pleased with that distinction, although he plays such bad bridge and is a little inclined to irascibility when the east wind blows.’ A modern reader who wishes to understand something about the nature of the men who directed Britain’s Great War will learn more from the pages of Forester than from those of many modern pundits and novelists, marching doggedly through the centenary of 1914 bearing knapsacks still laden with myths and clichés.

Max Hastings

January 2014

Chapter One (#ulink_296388b7-b6ed-53ce-8150-b755a11021e6)

Nowadays Lieutenant-General Sir Herbert Curzon, K.C.M.G., C.B., D.S.O., 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. He is usually to be seen in his bath chair with Lady Emily, tall, raw-boned, tweed-skirted, striding behind. He has a large face, which looks as if it had been rough-carved from a block of wood and his white hair and moustache stuck on afterwards, but there is a kindly gleam in his prominent blue eyes when he greets his acquaintances, and he purses up his lips in the queerest old-maidish smile. He clings to the habit of the old-fashioned bathchair largely for the reason that it is easier from a bathchair to acknowledge one’s friends; he has never taught himself to walk with ease with any of the half-dozen artificial limbs he has acquired since the war, and the stump of his amputated thigh still troubles him occasionally. Besides, now that he is growing old he is a tiny bit nervous in a motor car.

Everybody is glad to have him smile to them on Bournemouth promenade, because his smile is a patent of social eminence in Bournemouth. And he wears his position with dignity, and is generous with his smiles, so that his popularity is great although he plays very bad bridge. He goes his way through the town a plaid rug over his knees, the steering-handle in his gloved hands, and on his approach newcomers are hurriedly informed by residents about his brilliant career and his life of achievement. Nowadays, when the memory of the war is fading, these verbal accounts are growing like folk legends, and public opinion in Bournemouth is inclined to give Sir Herbert Curzon more credit than he has really earned, although perhaps not more than he deserves.

The day on which Curzon first stepped over the threshold of history, the day which was to start him towards the command of a hundred thousand men, towards knighthood – and towards the bathchair on Bournemouth promenade – found him as a worried subaltern in an early South African battle. The landscape all about him was of a dull reddish brown; even the scanty grass and the scrubby bushes were brown. The arid plain was seamed with a tangle of ravines and gullies, but its monotony was relieved by the elevation in the distance of half a dozen flat-topped rocky hills, each of them like the others, and all of them like nearly every other kopje in South Africa.

Curzon was in command of his squadron of the Twenty-second Lancers, the Duke of Suffolk’s Own, an eminence to which he had been raised by the chances of war. Three officers senior to him were sick, left behind at various points on the lines of communication, and Captain the Honourable Charles Manningtree-Field, who had been in command when the squadron went into action, was lying dead at Curzon’s feet with a Mauser bullet through his head. Curzon was not thinking about Manningtree-Field. His anxiety was such that immediately after the shock of his death, and of the realization that men really can be killed by bullets, his first thought had been that now he could use the captain’s Zeiss binoculars and try and find out what was happening. He stood on the lip of the shallow depression wherein lay Manningtree-Field’s body, the two squadron trumpeters, and two or three wounded men, and he stared round him across the featureless landscape.

In a long straggling line to his right and left lay the troopers of the squadron, their forage caps fastened under their chins, firing away industriously at nothing at all, as far as Curzon could see. In a gully to the rear, he knew, were the horses and the horseholders, but beyond that Curzon began to realize that he knew extraordinarily little about the battle which was going on. The squadron was supposed to be out on the right flank of an advancing British firing line, but when they had come galloping up to this position Curzon had not been in command, and he had been so preoccupied with keeping his troop properly closed up that he had not paid sufficient attention to what Manningtree-Field had been doing.

Probably Manningtree-Field had not been too sure himself, because the battle had begun in a muddle amid a cascade of vague orders from the Staff, and since then no orders had reached them – and certainly no orders had envisaged their coming under heavy fire at this particular point. As an accompaniment to the sharp rattle of musketry about him Curzon could hear the deeper sound of artillery in the distance, echoing over the plain with a peculiar discordant quality, and against the intense blue of the sky he could see the white puffs of the shrapnel bursts far out to the left, but it was impossible to judge the position of their target at that distance, and there was just enough fold in the flat surface of the plain to conceal from him any sight of troops on the ground.

Meanwhile an invisible enemy was scourging them with a vicious and well-directed fire. The air was full of the sound of rifle bullets spitting and crackling past Curzon’s ears as he stood staring through the binoculars. Curzon had an uneasy feeling that they were coming from the flank as well as from the front, and in the absence of certain knowledge he was rapidly falling a prey to the fear that the wily Boers were creeping round to encircle him. A fortnight ago a whole squadron of Lancers – not of his regiment, thank God – had been cut off in that way and forced to surrender, with the result that that regiment was now known throughout South Africa as ‘Kruger’s Own’. Curzon sweated with fear at the thought of such a fate overtaking him. He would die rather than surrender, but – would his men? He looked anxiously along the straggling skirmishing line.

Troop Sergeant-Major Brown came crawling to him on his hands and knees. Brown was a man of full body, and his face was normally brick-red, but this unwonted exertion under a scorching sun coloured his cheeks like a beetroot.

‘Ain’t no orders come for us, sir?’ asked Brown, peering up at him.

‘No,’ said Curzon sharply. ‘And stand up if you want to speak to me.’

Brown stood up reluctantly amid the crackle of the bullets. After twenty years’ service, without having had a shot fired at him, and with his pension in sight, it went against his grain to make a target of himself for a lot of farmers whose idea of war was to lay ambushes behind rocks.

‘Come down ’ere, sir, please, sir,’ pleaded Brown in a fever of distress. ‘We don’t want to lose you, sir, too, sir.’

The loss of the only officer the squadron had left would place Sergeant-Major Brown in command, and Brown was not at all desirous of such a responsibility. It was that consideration which caused Curzon to yield to his solicitations, and to step down into the comparative safety of the depression.

‘D’you fink we’re cut orf, sir?’ asked Brown, dropping his voice so as to be unheard by the trumpeters squatting on the rocks at the bottom of the dip.

‘No, of course not,’ said Curzon. ‘The infantry will be up in line with us soon.’

‘Ain’t no sign of them, is there, sir?’ complained Brown. ‘Expect the beggars are ’eld up somewhere, or lorst their way, or something.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Curzon. All his training, both military and social, had been directed against his showing any loss of composure before his inferiors in rank, even if those inferiors should actually be voicing his own fears. He stepped once more to the side of the hollow and stared out over the rolling plain. There was nothing to be seen except the white shrapnel bursts.

‘Our orders was to find their flank,’ said Brown, fidgeting with his sword hilt. ‘Looks to me more like as if they’ve found ours.’

‘Nonsense,’ repeated Curzon. But just exactly where the Boer firing-line was to be found was more than he could say. Those infernal kopjes all looked alike to him. He looked once more along the line of skirmishers crouching among the rocks, and as he looked he saw, here and there faces turned towards him. That was a bad sign, for men to be looking over their shoulders in the heat of action. The men must be getting anxious. He could hardly blame them, seeing that they had been trained for years to look upon a battle as a series of charges knee to knee and lance in hand against a serried enemy. This lying down to be shot at by hidden enemies a mile off was foreign to their nature. It was his duty to steady them.

‘Stay here, sergeant-major,’ he said. ‘You will take command if I’m hit.’

He stepped out from the hollow, his sword at his side, his uniform spick and span, and walked in leisurely fashion along the firing-line. He spoke to the men by name, steadily and unemotionally, as he reached each in turn. He felt vaguely as he walked that a joke or two, something to raise a laugh, would be the most effective method of address, but he never was able to joke, and as it was his mere presence and unruffled demeanour acted as a tonic on the men. Twice he spoke harshly. Once was when he found Trooper Haynes cowering behind rocks without making any attempt to return the fire, and once was when he found Trooper Maguire drinking from his water-bottle. Water out here in the veldt was a most precious possession, to be hoarded like a miser’s gold, for when there was no more water there would be no fight left in the men.

He walked down the line to one end; he walked back to the other. Sergeant-Major Brown, peeping out from his hollow, watched his officer’s fearless passage, and, with the contrariness of human nature, found himself wishing he was with him. Then, when Curzon was nearly back in safety again, Brown saw him suddenly swing right round. But next instant he was walking steadily down to the hollow, and only when he was out of sight of the men did he sit down sharply.

‘Are you hit, sir?’ asked Brown, all anxiety.

‘Yes. Don’t let the men know. I’m still in command.’

Brown hastily called the squadron first-aid corporal with his haversack of dressings. They ripped open Curzon’s coat and bound up the entrance and exit wounds. The destiny which directs the course of bullets had sent this one clean through the fleshy part of the shoulder without touching bone or artery or nerve.

‘I’m all right,’ said Curzon manfully, getting to his feet and pulling his torn coat about him. The arrival of a crawling trooper interrupted Sergeant-Major Brown’s protests.

‘Message from Sergeant Hancock, sir,’ said the trooper. ‘Ammunition’s running short.’

‘Um,’ said Curzon thoughtfully, and a pause ensued while he digested the information.

‘There ain’t fifty rounds left in our troop, sir,’ supplemented the trooper, with the insistence of his class upon harrowing detail.

‘All right,’ blazed Curzon irritably. ‘All right. Get back to the line.’