The General

by C. S. Forester

  He did not think the letter inadequate (nor did Emily when she received it) but it was a relief to turn aside from these barren literary labours and to plunge once more into the living business of the Army. The Division arrived, and Curzon rode over to join it with all the thrill and anticipation of a lover – he had been separated from it for more than a week, and it was with delight that he sat his horse at the side of the road, watching the big bronzed battalions stream past him. He gave a meticulous salute in reply to each salute he received, and his eyes scanned the dusty ranks with penetrating keenness. He heard an ejaculation from the ranks: ‘Gawd, there’s old Bertie again,’ and he looked on with grim approval while a sergeant took the offender’s name – not because he objected to being called Bertie, but because the battalion was marching at attention and therefore to call out in that fashion was a grave breach of discipline.

  It was an indication, all the same, of the high spirits of the men, who were bubbling over with the excitement of the journey and with the prospect of action. They took a childlike interest in everything – in French farming methods, in the aeroplanes overhead with the white puffs of anti-aircraft shells about them, in the queer French words written over shop windows, in the uncanny ability of even the youngest children to talk French, in the distant nocturnal firework display that indicated the front line.

  They showed a decided tendency to let their high spirits grow too much for them, all the same. The arrival of the Division coincided with a large increase in the military crimes in which the British soldier never ceases to indulge. They stole fruit (horrible unripe apples) and poultry and eggs. Their inappeasable yearning for fuel led them to steal every bit of wood, from fence rails and doors to military stores, which they could lay their hands on. They drank far too much of the French wine and beer even while they expressed their contempt for them, and sometimes they conducted themselves familiarly towards Frenchwomen who were not ready to appreciate the compliment.

  Curzon read the statistics of regimental crime with growing indignation. All this gross indiscipline must be checked at once. He circulated a scathing divisional order, and strengthened the hands of the military police, and saw to it that a score of offenders received exemplary punishments. The effect was immediate and gratifying, because the amount of crime decreased abruptly – as soon as the men had grown accustomed to the new conditions and to the methods of those in authority, so that they could evade detection; for no disciplinary methods on earth could keep British soldiers from wine, women, and wood.

  The Ninety-first Division took its place in the line without any great flourish of trumpets. Norton chose a quiet section for them, and the ten days went by with nothing special to report. There were a hundred casualties – the steady drain of losses to be expected in trench warfare – and a general court martial on a man caught asleep while on sentry duty, from which the culprit was lucky enough to escape with his life.

  Curzon fretted a little at the conditions in which he had to command his men. It went against his conscience to a certain extent to spend his time, while his men were in the line, in a comfortable house. He could eat good dinners, he could ride as much as he wanted, he could sleep safely in a good bed; and it was not easy to reconcile all this with his memory of First Ypres. He chafed against the feeling of impotence which he experienced at having to command his Division by telephone. He was still imbued with the regimental ideal of sharing on active service the dangers and discomforts of his men.

  During the Division’s turns of duty in the trenches his anxiety drove him repeatedly up into the front line to see that all was well. He plodded about along the trenches trying to ignore fatigue – for a journey of a dozen miles through the mud, stooping and scrambling, was the most exhausting way of spending a day he had ever known. His aide-de-camp, Greven, bewailed his fate to unsympathetic audiences; the other one, Follett, was more hardy – but then Curzon had selected him with care and without regard to family connexions, on the recommendation that Follett had once ridden in the Grand National and completed the course. Follett endured the mud and the weariness and the danger without complaint.

  There was inconvenience in making these trench tours. Miller had to be left in charge at headquarters, and however capable Miller might be the ultimate responsibility – as Curzon well appreciated – was Curzon’s own. During the dozen hours of Curzon’s absence orders calling for instant decision might come by telephone or by motor-cycle dispatch rider. While Curzon was in the trenches he found himself to be just as anxious about what was happening at headquarters as he was about the front line when he was at headquarters. It took all the soothing blandishments which Greven could devise with the aid of Curzon’s personal servants to keep him from making an unbearable nuisance of himself, and quite a little while elapsed before he was able to reconcile himself to this business of leading by telephone.

  On the Division’s third turn in the front line Curzon was allowed by Wayland-Leigh to put into practice some of the principles he had been forming. Curzon came to believe, in the event, that it was more harassing to sit by a telephone looking at his watch waiting for news, than to take part in the operations which he had ordered. The first one was the merest trifle, a matter of a raid made by no more than a company, but two o’clock in the morning – the hour fixed – found Curzon and all his staff fully dressed in the office and consumed with anxiety. It was a battalion of a Minden regiment which was making the raid – the colonel had begged the honour for his unit because it was Minden day without realizing that this was a tactless argument to employ to a cavalryman – and Curzon spent an anxious half-hour wondering whether he had been wise in his selection. The buzz of the telephone made them all start when at last it came. Frobisher answered it while Curzon tugged at his moustache.

  ‘Yes,’ said Frobisher. ‘Yes. Right you are. Yes.’

  The studied neutrality of his tone enabled Curzon to guess nothing of the import of the message until Frobisher looked up from the telephone.

  ‘It’s all right, sir,’ he said. ‘They rushed the post quite easily. Seven prisoners. Bombed the other bit of trench and heard a lot of groans. The party’s back now, sir. We won’t get their casualty return until the morning.’

  ‘All right,’ said Curzon. His first independent operation had been crowned with success.

  He got up from the table and walked out to the front door, and stood in the porch looking towards the line, his staff following. There was far more commotion there than usually. The sky was lighted by the coloured lights which were being sent up, and the ground shook with the fire of the guns, whose flashes made a dancing line of pin points of light on the horizon. The raid had put the line on the alert, and expectancy had led to the inevitable ‘wind-up’ until ten thousand rifles and two hundred guns were all blazing away together – and killing a man or two here and there, while wiring parties and patrols, caught in no-man’s-land by the unexpected activity, crouched in shell holes and cursed the unknown fool who had started the trouble.

  The glare in the sky which indicated unusual nocturnal activity was to be seen frequently after that over the sector occupied by the Ninety-first Division. There were all sorts of little local operations awaiting their attention – small salients to be pinched out and exposed listening posts to be raided – and the Ninety-first Division engaged in them whole-heartedly.

  Moreover, as Curzon had suspected, a certain amount of a live-and-let-live convention had grown up in the line. Each side had inclined to refrain from inflicting casualties on the other side at moments when retaliation would cause casualties to themselves – ration parties were being mutually spared, and certain dangerous localities received reciprocal consideration. Curzon would have none of this. It seemed to him to be a most dangerous and unsoldierly state of affairs; if a soldier whose duty it was to kill the enemy refrained from doing so he was clearly not doing his duty and it might lead to untold damage to discipline. Drastic Divisional orders put a stop to this. The keenness of t
he new troops and the energy of their commander brought renewed activity into the line; the number of snipers was increased, and places where the enemy had been inclined to be careless were regularly sprayed with machine-gun fire, with, as far as headquarters could tell, a most gratifying increase in German casualties.

  Naturally the enemy retaliated. British divisions accustomed to a peaceful turn of duty were annoyed and surprised, when they relieved the Ninety-first, to find that localities hitherto regarded as safe were now highly dangerous, and that sniping had vastly increased, and that the Germans had developed a system of sudden bombing raids which made life in the trenches a continual strain on the nerves. This was especially noticeable because, as the Germans had the advantage of direct observation from the low heights which they occupied, and did not trouble themselves nearly as much as the British about holding on to dangerous salients, and worked far harder at making their trenches safe and habitable, they could make things far more uncomfortable for the British than the British could for them.

  Both officers and men of the other divisions complained of the new state of affairs to their fellows of the Ninety-first, but they found small satisfaction in doing so. The Ninety-first Division pleaded the direct orders of their commander. ‘Bertie’s the boy,’ they said, half-proud and half-rueful, and the daily drain of casualties increased – Curzon was already making application for drafts and new officers for his battalions.

  The new system met with one protest from an unexpected quarter. Young Captain Frobisher, the General Staff Officer, third grade, found an opportunity while he and Miller and Curzon, sitting at the table littered with trench maps, were drafting the orders for fresh activity. The weak points of the German line in their sector had by now been blotted out, and Curzon casually admitted in conversation that it was not easy now to find suitable objects for attention.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Frobisher, ‘it might be wise to quiet down for a bit, sir?’

  ‘No, it’s not good for the men,’ replied Curzon.

  ‘Casualties are getting a bit high,’ said Frobisher.

  ‘You can’t make war without casualties,’ said Curzon. He had been a casualty himself, once, and he had freely exposed himself to the chance of its occurring again.

  ‘Wellington tried to keep ’em down, sir,’ said Frobisher, suddenly bold.

  ‘What on earth do you mean, boy?’ asked Curzon.

  ‘Wellington always discouraged sniping and outpost fighting and that sort of thing.’

  ‘Good God!’ said Curzon. ‘Wellington lived a hundred years ago.’

  ‘Human nature’s the same now, though, sir.’

  ‘Human nature? What in hell are you talking about? Anyone would think you were a poet or one of these beastly intellectuals. I don’t like this, Frobisher.’

  Curzon was definitely angry. There was a frosty gleam in his eyes and a deep line between his brows. It was not so much because a captain was venturing to argue with him, a major-general, as that the captain was putting forward suggestions of a suspicious theoretical nature in direct opposition to the creed of the Army, that the side which does not attack is bound to lose.

  ‘Frobisher’s had too much history and not enough practical experience, yet, sir,’ said Miller. He put his word in hastily, because he did not want to lose the services of the best G.S.O.3 he could hope to get hold of.

  ‘So I should think,’ said Curzon, still staring indignantly at the delinquent, but somewhat appeased. He had grown fond of young Frobisher after six months of work with him, and had been pained as well as shocked at his heresy, just as if his son (supposing he had one) had announced his intention of marrying a tobacconist’s daughter. His fondness for Frobisher even led him into defending his own actions by argument.

  ‘We’re giving the Germans hell, aren’t we?’ said Curzon.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Frobisher, with dropped eyes. A word from Curzon would take him from his staff position, where he could think even though his mouth remained shut, and put him into an infantry battalion where he would not be able to think at all.

  ‘Well, don’t let me hear any more of this nonsense. Pass me that map and let’s get down to business.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  The next time that the Ninety-first Division came out of the line Curzon was summoned to attend a conference at Corps Headquarters. Wayland-Leigh and Norton were jubilant. The Big Push was being planned at last – the great offensive which was to bring with it the decisive victory and the march to Berlin. There were nine divisions available, about three times as many Englishmen – as Curzon jovially pointed out to Frobisher on his return – as Wellington had commanded at Waterloo. There were more field-guns ready for use in the preliminary bombardment than the entire British Army had owned in 1914, and there was a stock of ammunition accumulated for them sufficient for fifty hours of continuous steady firing – a longer bombardment than had ever been known in the field before. Besides all this, they were going to take a leaf out of the Germans’ book and employ poison gas, but on a far larger scale than the Germans’ timorous attempt at Ypres. There were mountainous dumps already formed of cylinders of chlorine, and every ship that crossed the Channel was bringing further supplies.

  But the great cause for rejoicing was that the Forty-second Corps had been selected to take part in the attack – the Buffalo was to be turned loose to crash through the gap made by the leading divisions. The maps were brought out – not the finicking little trench maps on which Curzon had planned his little petty offensives, but big maps, covering all North-eastern France. The French were to attack at Vimy, storm the ridge, and push forward; the British were to strike at Loos, break the German line, and join hands with the French behind Lens, which was to fall as the first ripe fruit of victory into the Allies’ hands unassailed. At this stage of the battle the Forty-second Corps would be in the van, with open country before them, and nothing to stop them.

  ‘It’s a pity in a way,’ said Norton, ‘that we’ve had to wait until autumn for this attack. It makes it just possible that the Huns will be able to hold us up for a winter campaign on the Rhine.’

  Before this campaign on the Rhine could be begun, there was more work to be done. The Ninety-first Division had to take another turn of duty in the front-line trenches, working like beavers over the preparations for the great attack. One morning Frobisher brought the Divisional orders for Curzon to sign, and Curzon, as ever, read them carefully through before assuming responsibility for them.

  ‘Here, what’s this, boy?’ he said suddenly. ‘Two men to carry up each gas cylinder? We’ve only been using one for the empty ones.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Frobisher. ‘These are full, and they’re heavier in consequence.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Curzon. He was glad to be able to find something he was quite certain he was right about while Frobisher was wrong even though he bore him no ill will. ‘Everyone knows that gas makes things lighter. They put it in balloons and things.’

  ‘That’s coal gas, sir,’ said Frobisher, with deference. ‘This is chlorine, and highly compressed.’

  ‘You mean I’m talking nonsense?’ demanded Curzon.

  ‘No, sir,’ said Frobisher, treading warily as he could over this dangerous ground, ‘but we’ve never had to deal with full cylinders before.’

  Curzon glared at this persistent young captain, and decided that his victory would be more crushing still if he gained it without recourse to his hierarchical authority.

  ‘Well, if you don’t believe me,’ he said, with all the dignity he could summon, ‘you’d better ring up the gas officer at Corps Headquarters and see what he says. You may believe him, if he’s had the advantage of an education at Camberley, too, as well as you.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Frobisher.

  It took Frobisher ten minutes to make his call and get his answer, and he was decidedly nervous on his return.

  ‘Well?’ said Curzon.

  ‘The gas officer says that the full cyli
nders are fifty pounds heavier than the empty ones, sir,’ said Frobisher.

  Curzon looked very sharply at him, but Frobisher’s face was immobile. Without a word Curzon drew the orders to him, dashed off his signature, and handed them back. It must be recorded to Curzon’s credit that he never afterwards allowed that incident to prejudice him against Frobisher – and it is significant of his reputation for fairness that Frobisher had no real fear that he would.

  By the time the Ninety-first Division came out of the line the preparations for the attack were nearly complete. The ammunition dumps were gorged. There were drafts to fill the ranks of the waiting divisions up to their full establishment, and further drafts ready at the base to make up for the inevitable casualties of the initial fighting. There were hospitals, and prisoners’ cages, and three divisions of cavalry ready to pursue the flying enemy.

  Curzon’s heart went out to these latter when he saw them. For a moment he regretted his infantry command. He felt he would gladly give up his general officer’s rank just to hear the roar of the hoofs behind him as he led the Lancers in the charge again. He rode over to their billets, and visited the Twenty-second, to be rapturously received by those men in the ranks who had survived First Ypres. Browning, in command, was not quite so delighted to see him – he had unhappy memories of their previous contacts, when Curzon had been to no trouble to conceal his contempt for his indecision and loss of nerve in the climax of the battle. The officers’ mess was full of strange faces, and familiar ones were missing – Borthwick, for instance, when he had recovered from his wounds, had been transferred to the staff and was organizing some piratical new formation of machine-gunners with the rank of Colonel. The fact that Borthwick should ever be a colonel when he had never properly learned to ride a horse was sufficient proof of what a topsy-turvy war this was, as Curzon and his contemporaries agreed over a drink in the mess.