The General

by C. S. Forester

  Wayland-Leigh’s voice on the telephone carried a hint of anxiety with it. General Headquarters, dealing with the conflicting reports sent in by two Armies and an Army Corps, had changed its mood from one of wild optimism to one of equally wild despair. They had begun to fear that where they had planned a break-through the enemy instead would effect a breach, and they were dealing out threats on all sides in search of a possible scapegoat.

  ‘Somebody’s going to be for it,’ said Wayland-Leigh. ‘You’ve got to hold on.’

  Curzon was not in need of that spur. He would hold on without being told. He held on through that day and the next, while the bloody confusion of the battle gradually sorted itself out. General Headquarters had found one last belated division with which to reinforce the weak line, and its arrival enabled Curzon at last to bring Daunt’s brigade into line with Challis’s and have his division a little more concentrated – although, as Miller grimly pointed out, the two brigades together did not contain as many men as either of them before the battle. The front was growing stabilized now, as parapets were being built in the new trenches, and carrying parties toiled through the night to bring up the barbed wire which meant security.

  Curzon could actually sleep now, and he was not specially perturbed when a new increase in the din of the bombardment presaged a fresh flood of reports from the trenches to the effect that the German attacks were being renewed. But once more the situation grew serious. The German command was throwing away lives now as freely as the British in a last effort to recover important strategic points. Fosse 8 and the quarries were lost again; the British line was bending, even if it would not break. Webb’s 300th Brigade, in the very process of transfer to the side of its two fellows, was caught up by imperative orders from Wayland-Leigh and flung back into the battle – Curzon had to disregard a wail of protest from Webb regarding the fatigue of his men. Later in the same day Curzon, coming into the headquarters’ office, found Miller speaking urgently on the telephone.

  ‘Here’s the General come back,’ he said, breaking off the conversation. ‘You’d better speak to him personally.’

  He handed over the instrument.

  ‘It’s Webb,’ he explained, sotto voce. ‘Usual sort of grouse.’

  Curzon frowned as he took the receiver. Webb had been making difficulties all through the battle.

  ‘Curzon speaking.’

  ‘Oh, this is Webb here, sir. I want to withdraw my line a bit. P.3–8. It’s a nasty bit of salient –’

  Webb went on with voluble explanations of the difficulty of his position and the losses the retention of the line would involve. Curzon looked at the map which Miller held out to him while Webb’s voice went on droning in the receiver. As far as he could see by the map Webb’s brigade was undoubtedly in an awkward salient. But that was no argument in favour of withdrawal. The line as at present constituted had been reported to Corps Headquarters, and the alteration would have to be explained to Wayland-Leigh – not that Curzon would flinch from daring the Buffalo’s wrath if he thought it necessary. But he did not think so; it never once crossed his mind to authorize Webb to withdraw from the salient. Retreat was un-English, an admission of failure, something not to be thought of. There had never been any suggestion of retreat at First Ypres, and retreat there would indubitably have spelt disaster. Curzon did not stop to debate the pros and cons in this way – he dismissed the suggestion as impossible the moment he heard it.

  ‘You must hold on where you are,’ he said harshly, breaking into Webb’s voluble explanations.

  ‘But that’s absurd,’ said Webb. ‘The other line would be far safer. Why should –’

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’ asked Curzon.

  ‘Yes, but – but –’ Webb had sufficient sense to hesitate before taking the plunge, but not enough to refrain from doing so altogether. ‘I’m on the spot, and you’re not. I’m within my rights if I make the withdrawal without your permission!’

  ‘You think you are?’ said Curzon. He was tired of Webb and his complaints, and he certainly was not going to have his express orders questioned in this way. After that last speech of Webb’s he could not trust him, however definitely he laid down his orders. ‘Well, you’re not going to have the chance. You will terminate your command of your brigade from this moment. You will leave your headquarters and report here on your way down the line at once. No, I’m not going to argue about it. Call your brigade-major and have him speak to me. At once, please. Is that Captain Home? General Webb has ceased to command the brigade. You will be in charge of your headquarters until Colonel Meredith can be informed and arrives to take command. Understand? Right. Send the message to Colonel Meredith immediately, and ask him to report to me on his arrival.’

  So Brigadier-General Webb was unstuck and sent home, and lost his chance of ever commanding a division. The last Curzon saw of him was when he left Divisional Headquarters. There was actually a tear – a ridiculous tear – on one cheek just below his blue eye as he went away, but Curzon felt neither pity for him nor dislike. He had been found wanting, as men of that type were bound to be sooner or later. Curzon would have no man in the Ninety-first Division whom he could not trust.

  And as Webb left the headquarters the divisional mail arrived. There were letters for each unit in the division, sorted with the efficiency the Army Postal Service always managed to display. They would go up with the rations that night, but the letters for the headquarters personnel could be delivered at once. For the General, besides bills and circulars, and the half-dozen obviously unimportant official ones, there was one letter in a heavy cream envelope addressed to him in a sprawling handwriting which he recognized as the Duke’s. He hesitated a moment when Greven gave it to him, but he could not refrain from opening it there and then. He read the letter through, and the big sprawling writing became suddenly vague and ill defined as he did so. The wording of the letter escaped him completely; it was only its import which was borne in upon him.

  That vomiting of Emily’s, about which he had always felt a premonition, had actually been a serious symptom. There had been a disaster. Young Herbert Winter Greven Curzon (Curzon had determined on those names long ago) would never open his eyes to the wonder of the day. He was dead – he had never lived; and Emily had nearly followed him. She was out of the wood now, the Duke wrote, doing his best to soften the blow, but Sir Trevor Choape had laid it down very definitely that she must never again try to have a child. If she did, Sir Trevor could not answer for the consequences.

  Curzon turned a little pale as he stood holding the letter, and he sat down rather heavily in the chair beside his telephone.

  ‘Not bad news, sir, I hope?’ said Greven.

  ‘Nothing that matters,’ answered Curzon stoically, stuffing the letter into his pocket.

  ‘Colonel Runcorn would like to speak to you, sir,’ said Follett, appearing at the door.

  ‘Send him in,’ said Curzon. He had no time to weep for Herbert Winter Greven Curzon, just as Napoleon at Marengo had no time to weep for Desaix.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Battle of Loos had come to an end, and at last the Ninety-first Division was relieved and could march out to its billets. It was not the division which had gone into action. Curzon stood by the road to see them march by, as he had so often done in Hampshire and France, and they took far less time to pass him. Each brigade bulked no larger on the road than a battalion had done before the battle; each battalion was no larger than a company. The artillery had suffered as badly; there were woefully few men with the guns, and to many of the guns there were only four horses, and to many of the wagons there were only two mules. Curzon’s heart sank a little as he returned the salute of the skeleton units. Even with the drafts which were awaiting them they would not be up to establishment; it would be a long time before the Ninety-first Division would be built up again into the fine fighting unit it had been a fortnight ago.

  He did not attempt to conceal from himself that Loos had been
a disaster for the British Army; he could only comfort himself with the thought that it had been a disaster for the German Army as well. The next attack to be made would have to be planned very differently. The bombardment had been insufficient. Then they must have a bombardment which would make certain of it – fifty days, instead of fifty hours, if the ammunition supply could be built up to bear the strain. There must be reserves at hand, instead of seventeen miles back, to exploit the success. The Flying Corps must intensify its operations so that maps of the German second line could be ready in the utmost detail, to enable the artillery to register on fresh targets from new positions without delay. Equally important, there must be none of the muddle and confusion behind the line which had caused so much harm at Loos.

  Curzon, despite his red tabs and oak leaves on his cap peak, could still feel the fighting man’s wrath against the staffs that were responsible for that muddle. It was their business to prevent muddle, and they had failed. Curzon was quite well aware of his own incapacity to do that sort of staff officer’s work. He was not too reliable in the matter of addition and multiplication and division; the mathematical problems involved in the arrangement of supply and transport and of march time-tables would certainly be too much for him. But it was not his job to solve them; it was the responsibility of the men at Army Headquarters and G.H.Q., and they had not been equal to it. Curzon felt that if he were in chief command he would make a clean sweep of the gilded young men who had made such a hash of the time-tables and replace them by efficient mathematicians. Hang it, he would put civilians on the Staff for that matter, if they could do the job better – and for Curzon to permit himself even for a moment to be guilty of a heresy of that sort showed how strongly he felt about it.

  There were others of the same opinion, as Curzon discovered when he reported himself at Corps Headquarters. Over the whole personnel there lay a brooding sense of disaster both past and to come. Someone would have to bear the responsibility of failure. It would not be long before heads began to fly. Some were gone already – Bewly had been sent home by Wayland-Leigh just as Webb had been sent back by Curzon. Hope of the Seventy-ninth was in hospital, dying of his wounds – rumour said he had gone up to the line to seek death, and death was not so hard to find in the front-line trenches. No one in that gloomy assembly dared to think of the brave words at the last Headquarters dinner, and the brave anticipations of an immediate advance to the Rhine.

  Wayland-Leigh, bulky yet restless, sat at the head of the conference table and looked round with his sidelong green eyes. Everyone knew that it would be touch and go with him. He might be selected as the scapegoat, and deprived of his command and packed off at any moment, if G.H.Q. should decide that such a sacrifice would be acceptable to the strange gods of Downing Street. He was conscious of the trembling of his throne even while he presided at this meeting to discuss what suggestions should be put forward regarding future operations.

  Curzon was inevitably called upon for his opinion. He spoke hesitatingly, as might be expected of him; as he told himself, he was no hand at these infernal board-meetings, and speech-making was the bane of his life. He was conscious of the eyes upon him, and he kept his own on the table, and fumbled with pen and pencil as he spoke. Yet he had something very definite to say, and no man with that advantage can speak without point. He briefly described what he thought must be considered essentials for the new battle. More men. More guns. More ammunition. More artillery preparation. More energy. He fumbled with his pencil more wildly than ever when he had to pass on from these, to his mind the obvious things, to the other less tangible desiderata. The arrangements behind the lines had been disgraceful. There must be an efficient staff created which would handle them properly. Someone must work out an effective method of bringing fresh troops into the front line at the decisive moments. Someone must see to it that reserves should be ready in the right place at the right time.

  Curzon was surprised by the little murmur of applause which went round the table when he had finished. More than one of the subsequent speakers alluded in complimentary terms to General Curzon’s suggestions. The whole opinion of the assembly was with him. The attack at Loos had been correct enough in theory. There had only been a failure in practical details and an insufficiency of men and materials. It could all be made good. A staff that could handle half a million men in action could be found. So could the half-million men. So could the guns and ammunition for a really adequate artillery preparation.

  Quite noticeably the spirits of the gathering rose; within a very few minutes they were discussing the ideal battle, with forty divisions to draw upon, and elaborate time-tables, and a preliminary bombardment which would transcend anything the most vaulting imagination could depict, and a steady methodical advance which nothing could stop – in a word, they were drawing up designs to put forward before higher authority for the Battle of the Somme. With visions like this before them, they could hardly be blamed for ignoring the minor details of machine-guns and barbed wire. Minor details vanished into insignificance when compared with the enormous power they pictured at their disposal.

  Wayland-Leigh sat in his chair and writhed his bulk about, grinning like an ogre as the suggestions assumed more and more concrete form, while Norton beside him took industrious notes to form the skeleton of the long reports he would have to send in to Army Headquarters and to G.H.Q. In some ways 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.

  The generals round the table were not men who were easily discouraged – men of that sort did not last long in command in France. Now that the first shock of disappointment had been faced they were prepared to make a fresh effort, and to go on making those efforts as long as their strength lasted. Wayland-Leigh was pleased with their attitude; indeed, so apparent was his pleasure that Curzon had no hesitation in asking him, after the conference, for special leave to England for urgent private affairs. Curzon was able to point out (if it had not been the case he would never have dreamed of making the application, despite the urgency of his desire to see Emily) that the division would not be fit to go into the line for some time, and that the knocking into shape of the new drafts could safely be left to the regimental officers.

  ‘Oh, yes, you can go all right,’ said Wayland-Leigh. ‘You’ve earned it, anyway. We can spare you for a bit.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Curzon.

  ‘But whether you’ll find me here when you come back is quite another matter.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Curzon. He had heard rumours, of course, but he judged it to be tactless to admit it.

  ‘I’ve got half an idea I’m going to be unstuck. Sent home because those bloody poops at G.H.Q. have got to find someone to blame besides themselves.’

  ‘I hope not, sir,’ said Curzon.

  Wayland-Leigh’s huge face writhed into an expression of resignation.

  ‘Can’t be helped if I am,’ he said. ‘I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of, and people will know it some time, even if they don’t now. I’m sorry for your sake, though.’

  ‘For me, sir?’

  ‘Yes. I was hoping they’d give you one of the new corps which are being formed. I’ve written recommending it in the strongest terms. I wanted Hope to have one too, but he’ll never be fit for active service again even if he lives. But what my recommendation’s good for is more than I can say. Probably do you more harm than good, as things are.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. But I don’t care about myself.
It’s you that matters.’

  Curzon meant what he said.

  ‘Very good of you to say so, Curzon. We’ll see what happens. G.H.Q. have got their eye on you anyway, one way or the other. I’ve had a hell of a lot of bother with ’em about your unsticking that beggar Webb, you know.’

  ‘Sorry about that, sir.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mind. I backed you up, of course. And I sent your report on him in to G.H.Q. with ‘concur’ written on it as big as I could make it. Push off now. Tell Norton you’ve got my permission. If you drive like hell to Boulogne you’ll catch the leave boat all right.’

  In reply to Curzon’s telegram the Duke’s big motor car was at Victoria Station to meet the train, and in it was Emily, very wan and pale. She was thinner than usual, and in the front of her neck the sterno-mastoid muscles had assumed the prominence they were permanently to retain. She smiled at Curzon and waved through the window to attract his attention although she did not stand up.

  ‘It was splendid to have your telegram, Bertie,’ she said as the car slid through the sombre streets of war-time London. ‘Mother’s been wanting to move me off to Somerset ever since the air raids started to get so bad. But I wouldn’t go, not after your letter saying you might be home any minute. We want every hour together we can possibly have, don’t we, Bertie?’

  They squeezed hands, and went on squeezing them all the short time it took the car to reach Bude House.

  The Duke and Duchess welcomed Curzon hospitably, the latter almost effusively. Yet to Curzon’s mind there was something incongruous about the Duchess’s volubility about the hardships civilians were going through. If it were not for the supplies they could draw from the model farm and dairy in Somerset, the family and servants might almost be going short of food, and if it were not for the Duke’s official position petrol and tyres for the motor cars would be nearly unobtainable. That ducal servants should be given margarine instead of butter seemed to the Duchess to be far more unthinkable than it did to Curzon, although he had the wit not to say so; and it gave the Duchess an uneasy sense of outraged convention that aeroplane bombs should slay those in high places as readily as those in low. She described the horrors of air raids to Curzon as though he had never seen a bombardment.