The General

by C. S. Forester

  But Cromwell had not been a regular soldier, nor – save for the presence of an occasional veteran of the Thirty Years’ War – was there any framework of a regular army, any procrustean bed of tradition, to which the Ironside army was compelled to adapt itself as in 1914. Kitchener’s army was organized by a War Office which had already forgotten the Boer War and clung to the ideals of the Peninsula; but that statement is only correct in a very limited degree, because most of the great body of rules and precedents dealt not with the training of an army for war, but with keeping it inexpensive and out of the way in time of peace. The system was, moreover, adapted to the needs of an army recruited from the very young and the very stupid, officered by men of uniform ideas and training; what the system did for the new armies has been told over and over again.

  Besides all this, the War Office was found wanting (perhaps not through its own fault) even in the very elementary duties it might have been expected to perform efficiently. The new armies were left unclothed, unhoused, and unarmed. Units rotted through the winter of 1914–15 under canvas on the bleak exposed hills and plains which had been passed as suitable for a summer camp. They shivered in tents pitched in seas of mud; they ate food prepared by inefficient cooks on inefficient apparatus; they were practised in the evolutions of 1870 by sexagenarian non-commissioned officers, and they used make-believe rifles and make-believe guns under the coordination of make-believe staffs.

  Of such good stuff, nevertheless, were the new armies that they came through the ordeal successfully, their spirits unimpaired by what had been done to them, and made of themselves, despite the efforts of their commanders, the finest fighting force ever seen, and able to carry that reputation through years of slaughter and mismanagement, despite the constant filling up with drafts whose quality steadily and persistently declined as the war continued.

  By a fortunate combination of circumstances Curzon was able to prove himself during these months of training one of the best generals appointed to the new armies. He was full of energy, so that the curse of inertia was not allowed to settle down over the Ninety-first Division. He had no preconceived ideas about the employment of infantry in the field. His barrack traditions were confined to cavalry, and in young Frobisher, his third-grade General Staff Officer, he found an assistant whose desperate laziness had no play under his supervision, and who came of a family in which revolutionary ideas were traditional, so that he did not badger the infantrymen with peace-time regulations nearly as much as occurred in some units.

  That very first day at Narling, Curzon showed the stuff he was made of. He had no personal staff at all – no aides-de-camp, no servants, no grooms; until to-morrow he had no home, for that matter. It never occurred to him to attend to the very important business of settling himself in first. He sent his kit to the local hotel, and made Frobisher telephone to the nearest unit to find him a servant. Before this concession to his immediate needs was fulfilled he was calling for the regimental returns, reading the lists of sick and of those found guilty recently of military crime so as to form his first estimate of the quality of the troops under his command, and half-way through the afternoon, finding this office work unsatisfying, he borrowed a horse from Miller and set off, with Frobisher riding beside him in the rain, in his anxiety to see things for himself.

  He dropped like a bolt from the blue into the troops he had been given to command, trotting in over the rolling downs into the camps of the Three-hundred-and-first Brigade, the rain streaming from his cap brim and the hem of his cape. There was a moment of hesitation when he confronted his work face to face for the first time – when he realized how extraordinarily little he knew about infantry. But he knew something about men in uniform, at least. There were certain things he could inspect – six months ago he had been inspecting similar arrangements from a regimental aspect. There were the cookhouses; he went stalking into the battalion cooking-huts, to be appalled by their filth and squalor. Frightened cooking staffs stood shivering at attention while he blistered them with his tongue, and startled commanding officers, summoned by flying orderlies, stood scared at his shoulder while he peered into dixies and cauldrons and sampled the contents.

  General Coppinger-Brown had not been seen in a cookhouse since the weather broke six weeks ago; here was the new general inspecting them before even the rumour of his appointment had run round the regimental headquarters. Curzon plodded through the mud down the lines of tents with the icy wind blowing through his burberry – it was that walk which first gave him an insight into the quality of his men, for any regular unit before the war compelled to submit to such conditions would have shown its resentment by going sick in hundreds. Startled soldiers, huddled under blankets, turned out hastily to stare at him. That morning the bugles had blown ‘No parade’, for no soldiers’ work could have been done in those dreadful conditions, and they had settled down to another day of shivering idleness. The sight of a major-general come to see how they were getting on was a most welcome break in the day, reviving hope in breasts where hope of anything was fast dying altogether.

  Far more was this the case with the wretched Special Service battalion of Fusiliers who were farther out still – moved there when cerebrospinal meningitis had appeared in their ranks, to endure the life of outcasts during their period of quarantine. The sense of isolation and guilt had been bad for the Fusiliers, huddled in their tents waiting for the spotted fever. Frobisher had ventured to protest when Curzon announced his intention of visiting the Fusiliers, but Curzon was heedless.

  ‘There’s no quarantine for generals,’ said Curzon. He had no intention of being epigrammatic either.

  He got on his horse again and rode furiously along the slippery chalk track over the summit of the downs to where the Fusiliers languished. A spiritless guard, besodden with misery, turned out to present arms to this extraordinary spectacle of a brass hat in the icy rain, and Curzon, without waiting for the arrival of the commanding officer, began his inspection. Three weeks of quarantine, of isolation, of rain and spotted fever, had taken the heart nearly out of the Fusiliers, but it was the sight of Curzon which put it back. Someone raised a faint cheer, even, when he rode out of the entrance afterwards, in the gathering darkness.

  And the word passed round the division, from battalion to battalion, that the new general was crazy on the subject of military cookery. Generals, as the Army had long ago resigned itself to believe, are always crazy on some point or other. Coppinger-Brown’s particular weakness (as far as anyone had been able to guess from the little seen of him) had been bootlaces. Under Coppinger-Brown’s regime colonels had chivvied captains and captains had chivvied sergeants, into seeing that every man had two pairs at least of spare bootlaces, and had quoted Coppinger-Brown’s dictum that ‘a division might be held up any day on the march if a man’s bootlace broke.’ Nowadays it was cookery instead, and no one knew when the General’s big nose and moustache might not be seen coming round the cookhouse corner as he demanded to taste whatever indescribable mess was to be found in the dixies. It was a matter which the men in the ranks, after the food they had been enduring for the last two months, could thoroughly appreciate.

  There seemed to be no limit to Curzon’s abounding energy in those days when he took over the command of the Ninety-first Division. Mason, the soldier-servant whom Miller found for him in the infantry, was under orders always to call him at five – and usually found him awake at that time. Officers, sleepy-eyed and weary, crawling into the divisional headquarters at seven o’clock, found Curzon at his desk running through the pile of returns and ‘states’ which previously had been seen by no other eye than theirs. Isolated companies on the downs, practising the open-order advance in alternate rushes which none of them was to live to see employed in action, were surprised to find him riding up to watch them at their work.

  After ten days of it Curzon had himself whirled up to London in the divisional motor car and had his presence announced to General Mackenzie with an urgent request
for an interview. Mackenzie had him sent up, and blenched a little at the comprehensive sequence of demands which Curzon made on behalf of his division.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ said Mackenzie, ‘it’s not me whom you should ask for all this. It’s all the Q.M.G.’s department, most of it, except for this officer question, and I’ve promised already to see to that for you. Go round and look up the Q.M.G. – I’ll give you a chit to the right quarter, if you like.’

  Curzon shook his head. He knew a great deal about the Army method of passing on inconvenient requests to the next man.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘they don’t know me there. I wouldn’t be able to get anything done. I’d far rather you saw about it; unofficially, for that matter, if you like. You could get it done in no time, even though it’s not your department.’

  Mackenzie began to show some signs of irritation at this upstart young general’s behaviour. The fellow was certainly growing too big for his boots. He took a breath preparatory to administering a proper ‘telling off’.

  ‘You see,’ said Curzon, eyeing him attentively as he made his first essay in diplomatic converse. ‘I’ve got a lot to do, and I could only spare one day away from the Division. I’ve got an appointment to lunch with Lady Cross and one or two other people – newspaper editors or something, I think they are.’

  ‘H’m,’ said Mackenzie. The struggle behind the scenes for power was rising to a climax, and he knew it. ‘All right, I’ll see what I can do.’

  When Mackenzie said that, Curzon knew that he could expect immediate attention to be paid to the sweeping indents he had sent in – demands for duckboards and all the other things to make life bearable for the Ninety-first Division in the chalky downland mud, huts and stoves and so on, of which the War Office had such a meagre store. Curzon could leave the War Office now with a clear conscience. He was not lunching with Lady Cross, of course. That had been a blank lie just to apply pressure on Mackenzie. It was his Emily, naturally, with whom he had his next appointment. The big Vauxhall car rolled him smoothly round to Bude House, and the butler showed Curzon into Emily’s sitting-room.

  Curzon’s heart was beating fast, for it was ten days since he had last seen Emily, and she might have changed her mind in that long time. He came into the room stiffly and formally, ready to meet his fate if need be, but all doubts were instantly dispelled on his entrance, and it was as though they had never been separated, as Emily came to him with both hands out and a murmur of ‘My dear, my dear.’ She came into his arms as if she were no duke’s daughter. With her head on his shoulder she fingered his row of medal ribbons, and he caught her hand and raised it to his lips, pressing his cruel black moustache upon her fingers. Even if Curzon had taken care to give his affections to a suitable person, there was no doubt that he had given them thoroughly enough. He was head over ears in love with her, just as she was with him.

  When sanity came back to them, Curzon spoke straight to the point, as might be expected of him. To him, love was not a thing to be soiled by roundabout ways of approach, or delicate diplomacy.

  ‘Dear,’ he said, ‘can we be married on Christmas Eve?’

  ‘Christmas Eve?’ Emily’s eyes opened a little wider, for Christmas Eve was only five days off.

  ‘Yes,’ said Curzon. He made no attempt to mask his reasons. ‘I’ve had to take this morning away from the Division, which I didn’t want to. I can’t spare another one, except Christmas morning. There won’t be a lot to do on that day. I could come up the afternoon before, and we could get married and go down to Narling the same evening. I mustn’t be away from the Division.’

  ‘Of course not, dear,’ said Emily. She was rather dazed. She had not seen the house she would have to live in; she knew nothing about it in fact, except that Curzon’s brief notes had assured her that it was quite a nice one. She had made no preparations for housekeeping there – in fact she had made no preparations for being married at all. But she knew quite well that there was nobody and nothing in the world as important as the General and the Division he commanded.

  ‘We’ll do whatever you think we ought to do, dear,’ said Emily, and Curzon kissed her hard on the lips in a way he had never kissed her before. Her head swam and her knees went weak so that she leaned against him and clung to him trembling, and they kissed again until the trembling passed and her kind eyes were bright with a passion she had never known before. She found – what she had never expected – that when the world obtruded itself upon them again she was able to meet it boldly face to face, encountering her mother and father across the luncheon table as though a quarter of an hour before she had not been in a man’s arms and glad to be there.

  At lunch they had to discuss practical details regarding the servants Emily must find for Narling Priory, housekeeper and cook and parlourmaid and kitchenmaid. Curzon’s three soldier servants (the regulation number allotted to a Major-General) could be relied upon to do the other work. The Duchess was perturbed when she heard how hurried was the wedding they had decided upon, but she raised no objection. The Duke took on the responsibility of making the arrangements regarding the licence; the Duchess said she would see to it that St Margaret’s was available for the ceremony – it had to be St Margaret’s, of course. In return, Curzon was able to tell the Duke and Duchess that he had applied for the services of Captain Horatio Winter-Willoughby and Mr Bertram Greven as his aides-de-camp, and that his application had been approved and orders issued for the officers in question to join him. The Duke and Duchess were undoubtedly grateful to him. Horatio Winter-Willoughby was Lord George’s son and the ultimate heir to the title, while Greven was a nephew of the Duchess, and somehow no one had as yet made application for his services on the staff. Curzon felt remarkably pleased with himself when he received the thanks of the Duke and the Duchess. Even though they were about to become his parents-in-law it was gratifying to be able to do them favours.

  Then when lunch was finished there was only time for one last embrace before Curzon tore himself away to get into the Vauxhall and be driven away through Guildford and Petersfield back to the Division. There was this to be said in favour of war-time conditions, that there was no time for shilly-shallying argument.

  Chapter Twelve

  So that the next two or three days witnessed a whole sequence of arrivals at Narling Priory. There came the grim under-housekeeper from Bude Hall, Somersetshire – the Duchess had made a present of her to her daughter, and with her the trio of servants selected from the staff of the three ducal houses. It had rather frightened the Duchess to hear that her daughter would have to be lady’s-maided by the parlourmaid; it was not so easy for her to reconcile herself to that as one of the necessary sacrifices of war-time, but as the Priory was only a medium-sized house and half of it was occupied by the divisional headquarters there had to be a line drawn somewhere, and this was Emily’s own suggestion.

  Curzon’s soldier servants regarded the arrival of the women with unconcealed interest, but they were disappointed in the reception accorded their advances. Not even the kitchenmaid – at any rate, with the cook’s eye on her – would allow mere grooms and private soldiers any liberties with one who represented the fifth greatest house in all England. Curzon handed over house and keys to the housekeeper – he was living with the headquarters’ mess at the moment – and went on with his work for the Division.

  The two brigadiers for whom he had been clamouring turned up next. One was Challis, who as a battalion commander had lost half a hand at Mons and had miraculously escaped capture during the retreat; the other was Daunt, brought home from some South African colony, Nigeria or somewhere. Curzon looked them over and was pleased with them both, although he deferred final judgement. Men had to be good before he could be assured of their suitability for the Ninety-first Division. He was not nearly so satisfied with his two aides-de-camp, who turned up unfeignedly glad at having been released by this miracle from the rigours of service in the Guards’ depot at Caterham. Winter-Willoughby was nearly
as bald as his father, Lord George, and nearly as fat. Despite the fact that he was indebted to Curzon for this staff appointment he was inclined to be a little resentful and patronizing towards the bounder who was marrying his cousin. And Greven had no forehead and no chin and wore riding breeches whose khaki dye carried the particular admixture of pink which was growing fashionable among the younger officers and for which Curzon had a peculiar dislike. Curzon began to see that there were some special disadvantages about marrying into a ducal family.

  He disliked his two aides-de-camp at sight the afternoon on which they reported themselves, and the very next day they deepened his prejudice farther still, for they were both of them ten minutes late, on the very first morning on which they were on duty. Curzon had to sit fretting in his office while the horses were being walked up and down outside. Curzon told them off furiously as he got into the saddle, and they sulked as they cantered through the rain over the downs to where there was an artillery brigade to be inspected.

  Curzon was a little more at home inspecting artillery than infantry. An infantry battalion’s horse-lines were so small and insignificant that one could not in decency spend much time over them, but it was different with artillery. Horses were as important as gunners, and Curzon felt justified in devoting most of his attention to the horses, which he knew something about, rather than to the artillery technicalities, about which he knew nothing at all. The inspection was long and meticulous, and Curzon found fault with everything he saw. The battery commanders wilted under the lash of his tongue, the sergeant-majors flinched, the veterinary surgeons trembled.