The General: The Classic WWI Tale of Leadership

‘’Ave to do somethink now, sir,’ said Sergeant-Major Brown as the trooper crawled away.

‘Shut up and be quiet,’ snapped Curzon.

He was perfectly well aware that he must do something. As long as his men had cartridges to fire they would remain in good heart, but once ammunition failed he might expect any ugly incident to occur. There might be panic, or someone might show a white flag.

‘Trumpeter!’ called Curzon, and the trumpeter leaped up to attention to receive his orders.

The squadron came trailing back to the gully where the horses were waiting. The wounded were being assisted by their friends, but they were all depressed and ominously quiet. A few were swearing, using words of meaningless filth, under their breath.

‘What about the dead, sir?’ asked Sergeant Hancock, saluting. ‘The captain, sir?’

The regiment was still so unversed in war as to feel anxiety in the heat of action about the disposal of the dead – a reminiscence of the warfare against savage enemies which constituted the British Army’s sole recent experience. This new worry on top of all the others nearly broke Curzon down. He was on the point of blazing out with ‘Blast the dead,’ but he managed to check himself. Such a violation of the Army’s recent etiquette would mean trouble with the men.

‘I’ll see about that later. Get back into your place,’ he said. ‘Prepare to mount!’

The squadron followed him down the ravine, the useless lances cocked up at each man’s elbow, amid a squeaking of leather and a clashing of iron hoofs on the rocks. Curzon’s head was beginning to swim, what with the loss of blood, and the pain of his wound, and the strain he had undergone, and the heat of this gully. He had small enough idea of what he wanted to do – or at least he would not admit to himself that what he wanted was to make his way back to some area where the squadron would not be under fire and he might receive orders. The sense of isolation in the presence of an enemy of diabolical cunning and strength was overwhelming. He knew that he must not expose the squadron to fire while in retreat. The men would begin to quicken their horses’ pace in that event – the walk would become a trot, the trot a gallop, and his professional reputation would be blasted. The gully they were in constituted at least a shelter from the deadly hail of bullets.

The gully changed direction more than once. Soon Curzon had no idea where he was, nor whither he was going, but he was too tired and in too much pain to think clearly. The distant gun-fire seemed to roll about inside his skull. He drooped in his saddle and with difficulty straightened himself up. The fortunate gully continued a long way instead of coming to a rapid indefinite end as most gullies did in that parched plain, and the men – and Sergeant-Major Brown – were content to follow him without question. The sun was by now well down towards the horizon, and they were in the shade.

It was in fact the sight of the blaze of light which was reflected from the level plain in front which roused Curzon to the realization that the gully was about to end beyond the tangle of rocks just in front. He turned in his saddle and held up his hand to the column of men behind; they came sleepily to a halt, the horses cannoning into the hind-quarters of the horses in front, and then Curzon urged his horse cautiously forward, his trumpeter close behind.

Peering from the shelter of the rocks, Curzon beheld the finest spectacle which could gladden the eyes of a cavalry officer. The gully had led him, all unaware, actually behind the flank of the Boer position. Half a mile in front of him, sited with Boer cunning on the reverse slope of a fold in the ground, was a battery of field guns sunk in shallow pits, the guns’ crews clearly visible round them. There were groups of tethered ponies. There was a hint of rifle trenches far in front of the guns, and behind the guns were wagons and mounted staffs. There was all the vulnerable exposed confusion always to be found behind a firing-line, and he and his squadron was within easy charging distance of it all, their presence unsuspected.

Curzon fought down the nightmare feeling of unreality which was stealing over him. He filed the squadron out of the gully and brought it up into line before any Boer had noticed them. Then, forgetting to draw his sword, he set his spurs into his horse and rode steadily, three lengths in front of his charging line, straight at the guns. The trumpeters pealed the charge as the pace quickened.

No undisciplined militia force could withstand the shock of an unexpected attack from the flank, however small the force which delivered it. The Boer defence which had all day held up the English attack collapsed like a pricked balloon. The whole space was black with men running for their ponies. Out on the open plain where the sweltering English infantry had barely been maintaining their firing-lines the officers sensed what was happening. Some noticed the slackening of the Boer fire. Some saw the Boers rise out of their invisible trenches and run. One officer heard the cavalry trumpets faint and sweet through the heated air. He yelled to his bugler to sound the charge. The skirmishing line rose up from flank to flank as bugler after bugler took up the call. Curzon had brought them the last necessary impetus for the attack. They poured over the Boer lines to where Curzon, his sword still in its sheath, was sitting dazed upon his horse amid the captured guns.

The Battle of Volkslaagte – a very great battle in the eyes of the British public of 1899, wherein nearly five thousand men had been engaged a side – was won, and Curzon was marked for his captaincy and the D.S.O. He was not a man of dreams, but even if he had been, his wildest dreams would not have envisaged the future command of a hundred thousand British soldiers – nor the bathchair on Bournemouth promenade.

Chapter Two (#ulink_069c7a01-1c32-581b-b1f4-0dbd3f8417d1)

To Curzon the rest of the South African War was a time of tedium and weariness. His wound kept him in hospital during the Black Week, while England mourned three coincident defeats inflicted by an enemy whom she had begun to regard as already at her mercy. He was only convalescent during Roberts’ triumphant advance to Pretoria. He found himself second-in-command of a detail of recruits and reservists on the long and vulnerable line of communications when the period of great battles had come to an end.

There were months of tedium, of army biscuit and tough beef, of scant water and no tobacco. There were sometimes weeks of desperate marching, when the horses died and the men grumbled and the elusive enemy escaped by some new device from the net which had been drawn round him. There were days of scorching sun and nights of bitter cold. There was water discipline to be enforced so as to prevent the men from drinking from the polluted supplies which crammed the hospitals with cases of enteric fever. There was the continuous nagging difficulty of obtaining fodder so as to keep horses in a condition to satisfy the exacting demands of column commanders. There were six occasions in eighteen months during which Curzon heard once more the sizzle and crack of bullets overhead, but he did not set eyes on an enemy – except prisoners – during that period. Altogether it was a time of inconceivable dreariness and monotony.

But it could not be said that Curzon was actively unhappy. He was not of the type to chafe at monotony. The dreariness of an officers’ mess of only two or three members did not react seriously upon him – he was not a man who needed mental diversion. His chill reserve and ingrained frigid good manners kept him out of mess-room squabbles when nerves were fraying and tempers were on edge; besides, a good many of the officers who came out towards the end of the war were not gentlemen and were not worth troubling one’s mind about. Yet all the same, it was pleasant when the war ended at last, and Curzon could say good-bye to the mixed rabble of mounted infantry who had made up the column to which he was second-in-command.

He rejoined the Twenty-second Lancers at Cape Town – all the squadrons together again for the first time for two years – and sailed for home. The new king himself reviewed them after their arrival, having granted them time enough to discard their khaki and put on again the glories of blue and gold, schapska and plume, lance pennons and embroidered saddle-cloths. Then they settled down in their barracks with the fixed determination (as the Colonel expressed it, setting his lips firmly) of ‘teaching the men to be soldiers again’.

The pleasure of that return to England was intense enough, even to a man as self-contained as Curzon. There were green fields to see, and hedgerows, and there was the imminent prospect of hunting. And there were musical comedies to go to, and good food to eat, and pretty women to be seen in every street, and the Leicester Lounge to visit, with a thrill reminiscent of old Sandhurst days. And there was the homage of society to the returned warriors to be received – although that was not quite as fulsome as it might have been, because public enthusiasm had begun to decline slowly since the relief of Mafeking, and there was actually a fair proportion of people who had forgotten the reported details of the Battle of Volkslaagte.

There was naturally one man who knew all about it – a portly, kindly gentleman with a keen blue eye and a deep guttural voice who had been known as H.R.H. at the time when the Lancers had been ordered to South Africa, but who was now King of England. He said several kindly words to Curzon at the investiture to which Curzon was summoned by the Lord Chamberlain. And Curzon bowed and stammered as he received his D.S.O. – he was not a man made for courts and palaces. In the intimacy of his hotel bedroom he had felt thrilled and pleased with himself in his Lancer full dress, with his plastron and his schapska, his gold lace and glittering boots and sword, and he had even found a sneaking pleasure in the stir among the people on the pavement as he walked out to get into the waiting cab, but his knees knocked and his throat dried up in Buckingham Palace.

On the same leave Curzon had in duty-bound to go and visit Aunt Kate, who lived in Brixton. The late Mr Curzon, Captain Herbert Curzon’s father, had married a trifle beneath him, and his wife’s sister had married a trifle beneath her, and the Mr Cole whom she had married had not met with much success in life, and after marriage Mr Curzon had met with much, so that the gap between Curzon and his only surviving relatives – between the Captain in the Duke of Suffolk’s Own and the hard-up city clerk with his swarm of shrieking children – was wide and far too deep to plumb. Curzon drove to Brixton in a cab, and the appearance of the cab caused as much excitement in that street as did his full-dress uniform in the West End. Aunt Kate opened the door to him – a paint-blistered door at the end of a tile path three yards long, leading from a gate in the iron railings past a few depressed laurels in the tiny ‘front garden’. Aunt Kate was momentarily disconcerted at the sight of the well-dressed gentleman who had rat-tat-tatted on her door, but she recovered herself.

‘Why, it’s Bertie,’ she said. ‘Come in, dear. Uncle Stanley ought to be home soon. Come in here and sit down. Maud! Dick! Gertie! Here’s your cousin Bertie home from South Africa!’

The shabby children came clustering into the shabby parlour; at first they were shy and constrained, and when the constraint wore off they grew riotous, making conversation difficult and hindering Aunt Kate in her effort to extract from her nephew details of his visit to Buckingham Palace.

‘What’s it like in there?’ she asked. ‘Is it all gold? I suppose there’s cut-glass chandeliers?’

Curzon had not the least idea. And –

‘Did the king really speak to you? What was he wearing?’

‘Field-Marshal’s uniform,’ said Curzon briefly.

‘Of course, you’ve been presented to him before, when you went into the Army,’ said Aunt Kate enviously. ‘That was in the dear queen’s time.’

‘Yes,’ said Curzon.

‘It must be lovely to know all these people,’ said Aunt Kate. ‘Are there any lords in your regiment now?’

‘Yes,’ said Curzon. ‘One or two.’

It was irritating, because he himself found secret pleasure in serving in the same regiments as lords, and in addressing them without their titles, but the pleasure was all spoilt now at finding that Aunt Kate was of the same mind.

More irritating still was the arrival of Stanley Cole, Aunt Kate’s husband, whom Curzon felt he could not possibly address now as ‘Uncle Stanley’, although he had done so as a boy. Mr Cole was an uncompromising Radical, and no respecter of persons, as he was ready to inform anyone.

‘I didn’t ’old with your doings in South Africa,’ he announced, almost before he was seated. ‘I didn’t ’old with them at all, and I said so all along. We didn’t ought to ’ave fought with the Boers in the first place. And burning farms, and those concentration camps. Sheer wickedness, that was. You shouldn’t have done it, you know, Bertie.’

Curzon, with an effort, maintained an appearance of mild good manners, and pointed out that all he had done was to obey orders.

‘Orders! Yes! It’s all a system. That’s what it is.’

Mr Cole seemed to think that in this case the word ‘system’ was deeply condemnatory – to Curzon, of course, the word was, if anything, of the opposite implication. He was roused far enough to suggest to his uncle that if he had undergone the discomforts of two years of guerrilla warfare he might not be so particular as to the methods employed to suppress it.

‘I wouldn’t have gone,’ said Mr Cole. ‘Not if they had tried to make me. Lord Roberts, now. ’E’s trying to introduce conscription. Ought to ’ave more sense. And now there’s all this talk about a big Navy. Big fiddlestick!’

There was clearly no ground at all which was common to Mr Cole and his nephew by marriage.

‘Look at the rise in the income tax!’ said Mr Cole. ‘Two shillings in the pound! Peace, retrenchment, and reform. That’s what we want. And a sane Government, and no protection.’

Curzon might have replied that Mr Cole had nothing to complain about in the matter of income tax, seeing that his income was clearly below the taxable limit, but his good manners would not permit him to say so while he was conscious of his own seven hundred a year from his private means. Instead, he rose to go, apologizing for the briefness of his visit and pleading further urgent matters demanding his attention. He declined the tea which Aunt Kate belatedly remembered to offer him; he said truthfully enough, that he never had tea, and the children goggled up in surprise at a man who could so lightly decline tea, and Aunt Kate said, ‘You’ll be going to have late dinner, I suppose.’

She accompanied him to the door.

‘Good-bye, then, Bertie,’ she said. ‘It was nice of you to come. We’ll be seeing you again soon, I suppose?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Curzon, and he knew it was a lie as he said it, that he would never be able to bring himself again to penetrate into Brixton. He thought the lie had succeeded, if he thought about it at all, but Aunt Kate dabbed furtively at her eyes before she went back into the parlour to talk over the visitor with her family. She knew perfectly well that she would never see ‘Lily’s boy’ again.

Meanwhile Curzon, out in the cabless suburban street, had to make his way on foot to the main road to some means of conveyance to take him back to his hotel. Before he took a cab he was constrained to go into a saloon bar and order himself a large whisky-and-soda, and while he drank it he had to mop his forehead and run his fingers round underneath his collar as recollections of his visit surged up within him. He thanked God fervently that he was an orphan, that he was an only child, and that his father was an only child, and that his mother had had only one sister. He thanked God that his father’s speculations in Mincing Lane had been early successful, so that preparatory school and Haileybury and Sandhurst had come naturally to his son.

In a moment of shuddering self-revelation he realized that in other circumstances it might have been just possible that he should have breathed naturally in the air of Brixton. Worse still he felt for a nauseating moment that in that environment he too might have been uncertain with his aitches and spoken about late dinner in a respectful tone of voice. It was bad enough to remember that as a child he had lived in Bayswater – although he could only just remember it, as they had early moved to Lancaster Gate. He had ridden in the Park then, and his father had already decided that he should go into the Army and, if possible, into the cavalry among the real swells.

He could remember his father using that very expression, and he could remember his father’s innocent pride in him at Sandhurst and when he had received his commission in the Duke of Suffolk’s Own. Curzon struggled for a moment – so black was his mood – with the realization that the Twenty-second Lancers was not really a crack regiment. He could condescend to infantrymen and native Indian army – poor devils – of course, but he knew perfectly well when he came to admit it to himself, as on this black occasion, that the Households and Horse Gunners and people like the Second Dragoons could condescend to him in their turn.

His father, of course, could not appreciate these distinctions and could have no realization that it was impossible for a son of a Mincing Lane merchant to obtain a nomination to one of these exclusive regiments.