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