Tommy (29 page)

The fixing process was not, however, infallible. In August 1916 Walter Guinness was posted to 11/Cheshire as its second in command. Given his origin as a Suffolk Yeoman he found it rather a puzzle, made all the worse by the fact that the battalion had been badly mauled on the Somme and was in a sorry state. It was only later he discovered that he had been posted in mistake for another W. E. Guinness, a major in the Manchesters, who would have been a much better choice as second in command of a Cheshire battalion. He blamed ‘the AG's department, which is constantly making mistakes in this way'.
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General headquarters moved frequently in the first two months of the war, but settled in the little town of St-Omer in October 1914. The commander in chief, Sir John French, lived in a lawyer's modest house in the Rue St-Bertin, and the branches of the general staff were scattered about the town. It was already common for a commander in chief to split his headquarters when battle was afoot, moving up with a small tactical headquarters and leaving the main apparatus back with his chief of staff. French used this procedure during the battle of Loos, when he took a small headquarters forward to a small château near Lillers, less than 20 miles behind the lines. Although he was connected to Robertson's room at GHQ, he had no telephone connection with 1st Army headquarters, and part of what went wrong in the battle can be attributed to his attempt to fight it in the old style. He visited headquarters to brief commanders personally and, as one officer reported, was seen ‘riding quite alone through the shattered villages behind the line and thanking all he met … wearing his familiar khaki stock around his neck and his soft gor'blimey general's hat'.
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In the spring of 1916 GHQ moved south to the delightful town of Montreuil-sur-Mer, on the little River Canche, inland from Etaples. The sea had long since receded, and Montreuil sat on a steep hill, with its castle embedded in a citadel built by the great engineer Jean Errard de Bar le Duc and modified by Vauban. GHQ, by now boasting sufficient staff officers and clerks to fill a small town, housed its main branches in the old
Ecole Militaire,
but spread more widely, with both telephone exchange and pigeon-loft, in perfect encapsulation of the war's ancient and modern features, in the castle. The town was surrounded by defensive walls whose ramparts enabled staff officers to step out for lunchtime exercise.

The commander in chief, now General Sir Douglas Haig, lived in the Château de Beaurepaire, about 3 miles south-west of the town. Haig was never a man for luxurious living, and the Château de Querrieu, Rawlinson's headquarters during the Somme fighting, was actually larger and more opulent. Moving to Montreuil made good sense, for Haig was now in the centre of the British front, perhaps two hours by car from Ypres, in the north, and a little less from Amiens in the south. When the war became more mobile in 1918 he split his headquarters, just as French had done in 1915 but with infinitely better results, and commanded from forward GHQ in a train behind his advancing armies.

But nowhere were the effects of the army's rapid wartime explosion in size more evident than in the case of generals and their staffs. Newly-raised formations required not only experienced commanders but trained staff officers, and because expansion was unplanned there were no significant reserves of either available. The deficit was made good in two ways. Firstly, officers were brought back from retirement. These ‘dug-outs', as they were known, were a mixed bunch. Some proved very good. Herbert Lawrence, who became Haig's CGS in 1917, had left the army after the Boer War when passed over for command of his regiment, the 17th Lancers – which went instead to Haig. Within a year of returning to the army in 1914 he commanded first a brigade and then a division in Gallipoli, and in 1916 he beat the Turks at Romani, securing Sinai for the British. Resigning command shortly afterwards on a point of principle, in 1917 he headed 66th Division on the Western Front.

The trim, chain-smoking Sir Bryan Mahon, called out of retirement at the early age of fifty-two, first raised 10th (Irish) Division and was then promoted to be general officer commanding Ireland. J. M. Babington, who had previously led the New Zealand Defence Force, was sixty-one when called back, and commanded 23rd Division with conspicuous success. John Gelliband, a bright Staff College graduate, had retired to Tasmania after being placed on half-pay as a major in the South Lancashires, but commanded an Australian battalion, brigade and division during the war. His outspokenness and informality (he always wore the same uniform as a private soldier) endeared him to his men and to the Australian official historian, Charles Bean. ‘He was a direct speaker of the truth,' affirmed Bean,

Trevor Ternon had retired in 1907, but came back to serve on a divisional staff and then to command the 102nd (Tyneside Scottish) Brigade of 34th Division. Another brigade in the same division, 103rd (Tyneside Irish), was commanded by W. A. Collings, who had retired in 1908 after thirty-six years' service, but was remembered by one subordinate as ‘a robust, breezy Brigadier'.
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The performance of some other dug-outs was ambivalent. R. G. Broadwood retired as a lieutenant general in 1913, but came back to command a division, usually commanded by an officer of the more junior rank of major general. Deeply upset to have been accused by his corps commander of lacking fighting spirit, he was mortally wounded while crossing a railway bridge over the Lys at Houplines in 1917. A German field gun sniped the bridge whenever men were seen crossing: Broadwood knew that his trip was tantamount to suicide but he crossed anyway, though he asked his staff not to follow him. The gun fired as he began to walk across, and his arrival at the far end coincided with that of the shell: ‘Both his legs were blown to bits and he died that afternoon in the ambulance.' He asked to be buried between a subaltern and a private soldier, and lies at Sailly-sur-la-Lys between Second Lieutenant Herbert Gittins, 5/Loyal North Lancashire, and Gunner Robert Bannick, Australian Field Artillery.

But there were also some complete failures. The behaviour of an officer brought back to command a brigade in 55th (West Lancashire) Division led Lord Derby to warn General Sir Henry Mackinnon of Western Command that:

Robert Graves allegedly overheard a conversation between his adjutant and the chief of staff of a New Army division (21st or 24th, though we cannot be sure which) on the eve of Loos.

While some officers were brought back from retirement, others were rapidly promoted to fill gaps. Brigade commanders who had proved themselves in 1914 were natural choices for commands of New Army divisions. Ivor Maxse stepped up from 1st Guards Brigade to command 18th Division; R. H. Davies moved from 6th Infantry Brigade to 20th Division; and E. C. Ingorville-Williams from 16th Infantry Brigade to 34th Division. In the same way successful infantry battalion and cavalry regimental commanders of 1914 moved on to command brigades in 1915 and then divisions in 1916. There is no better example than the flamboyant David ‘Soarer' Campbell. His nickname came, not from his own rapid rise, but from the horse he had ridden to victory in the 1896 Grand National, the Irish National Hunt Cup and the Grand Military Steeplechase. He commanded the 9th Lancers in 1914 and took part in two cavalry charges, one at Elouges on 24 August and the other at Moncel on 6 September. Captain Arthur Osburn, medical officer of the 4th Dragoon Guards, was going round the battlefield tending the wounded when he spotted movement.

Campbell was promoted to command 6th Cavalry Brigade that November, and took over the unlucky 21st Division after its commander (possibly the general we heard being vilified earlier) was sacked in the wake of Loos. He restored its battered morale and commanded it with distinction for the rest of the war, combining frequent visits to the front with personal aerial reconnaissance. It was entirely characteristic of this tough-minded officer that he protested vigorously to his French commander about the poor position allocated his division when it was sent to ‘rest' on the Chemin des Dames in 1918. It did no good, and when the Germans attacked on 27 May he recorded ‘the worst day I have spent in this war, which is saying a lot'.
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In the British army the regulars kept a tight grip on divisional commands, and no non-regular commanded a division, except as a temporary stand-in, during the whole war. This is in sharp contrast to the Australian and Canadian practice, based as it was on a tradition of a tiny regular force and a bigger citizen army. Both the ANZAC and Canadian Corps (not to mention several of their component divisions) were commanded by men who had begun the war as amateurs. John Monash was a civilian engineer with pre-war service in the Australian equivalent of the Territorial Force, who commanded a brigade at Gallipoli and then a division and corps on the Western Front. Although his career was by no means free of mistakes, his great capacity to learn helped to make him an outstanding success. The huge and profane Arthur Currie was an insurance broker, estate agent and militia officer in British Columbia, whose questionable business practices nearly ruined him just before the war. He commanded 2nd Canadian Brigade at Second Ypres and 1st Canadian Division the following year. When his corps commander, Sir Julian Byng, was promoted to command 3rd Army after the disappointing results of Arras in April 1917, Currie was a natural successor. Neither Monash nor Currie was a heroic leader in the old style, and both favoured a managerial style of command, in part a product of their civilian background.

Although we must guard against the easy ‘British bad – Dominion good' assumption, which encouraged Lloyd George to opine that Monash might have succeeded Haig, it is clear that the old army has a case to answer. Indeed, the way that it retained control of the levers of power delighted Brigadier General John Charteris, senior intelligence officer at GHQ, who wrote in 1917 that: ‘The amazing thing is that with the exception of the transportation and the postal service, every particular part of the organisation is controlled by regular soldiers.'
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When a brigade commander asked his commanding officers whether any of their officers should be short-listed for battalion command, one remarked that since all his officers were territorials the question did not arise. He meant it as a joke, but the regulars around him nodded gravely and went on to consider more suitable
regular
candidates.

But if the old army kept a tight grip on the appointment of divisional commanders and, scarcely less important, of their chiefs of staff, the sheer scale of the requirement for brigadiers encouraged a far wider field of selection. Here it is worth sketching out the way officer promotion operated during the war, for this, linked with our knowledge of the way the military secretary's department worked, helps explain how generals were appointed. Formal notification of an officer's promotion, reversion, resignation or dismissal was promulgated in a periodic supplement to
The London Gazette,
the origin of the term ‘gazetted'. It was repeated in the GHQ's routine orders, and finished up being recorded in the orders of the unit concerned.

The officers' nominal roll of 3/3
^rd
Queen's, for instance, notes that Second Lieutenant R. R. B. Bannerman was allowed to retain the acting rank of lieutenant on arrival in France by virtue of GHQ 0/9218 dated 11 August 1917 and was promoted substantive lieutenant with effect from 1 July 1917 by authority of General Routine Orders Nos 2572 and 2600 of 1917, a blanket promotion of officers of specified seniority. Captain H. C. Cannon was appointed second in command by virtue of Third Army's A/A/9024 dated 6 September 1917. The same book records tragedies with equal dry formality. Lieutenant Colonel U. L. Hooke, killed in action on 21 June 1916 (he had been in France less than a month), was buried in the field, at map reference ‘H.23.bb.75. Ref 1/40,000 518. Cross erected'. The battalion's heartbeat was scarcely allowed to pause: Major K. A. Oswald, the second in command, took over and was gazetted temporary lieutenant colonel on 23 August. He reverted to major with effect from 5 October 1917, the day when he is recorded as receiving a shell wound to his left arm and knee. The subsequent announcement of a DSO for gallantry in the field on 4 October may have given him some consolation.
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