Tommy (33 page)
Authors: Richard Holmes
At about 4.30 pm [Lt] Col. Simons, GSO 1. of the 33rd Division, arrived in a motor car in search of me. This officer, who appeared to be in a state of excitement and some hurry, asked me to enter his motor car. He immediately produced a map, and said: âWe want you to make an attack with your brigade tonight.' He then explained that the objective I was required to take was a portion of the Switch Trench of Bazentin le Petit Wood [running north of the wood, just beyond the ground gained in the night attack of the 14th] and that it must be carried out by 7.30 pm After a glance at the map, I turned in great surprise to this Officer and I said, âDo you know the distance from here to the point from which you asked me to make the attack?' Col. Simons replied, âNo, I have not measured it.' I laid off the distance on the map in front of this Officer, making it about 10,000 yards in a straight line. I then said âAn attack under such conditions as you suggest is out of the question. The roads are congested with traffic, the ground is entirely unknown, I should have to have my orders to give and convey to the whole brigade before the attack could be made, and there could be no possibility of arriving at the position in the stated time.' Col. Simons proceeded to contest the point that the attack could be made. I then turned to him and said, âSimons, you were at Staff College with me and you know as well as I do that what you are asking is an impossibility. It is now 4.30, and if I could now move off the head of my brigade it would be 5.30 before the tail of it would be leaving the ground. How can you possibly, under such circumstances, expect me to carry out such instructions?
He said that he could not attack before 8.30 pm at the earliest, and with that Simons departed, saying that it was no use, and giving Carleton âthe impression that I had wilfully obstructed him'. Once his brigade entered the line it was dogged by misfortune. German shelling destroyed the tapes laid to guide working parties forward, and: âIn the case of the 20th Fusiliers, although this battalion had previously occupied the line, they appeared to have been unable to find their way, and did not put in any appearance at all.' Finally, Landon interviewed him and made it clear that corps was pressing for completion of the work and that: âNo excuse for failure to comply with this order will be accepted.' He received notice of dismissal the following day.
Carleton's dossier, submitted to GHQ on 12 September, was so effective that Haig's military secretary, at the time Major General W. G. Peyton, replied on the 16th that âthe Commander-in-Chief is prepared to consider your re-appointment to command of an Infantry Brigade in the field when your services are again placed at his disposal'. In a classic instance of the subtle workings of the military secretary's department he added a personal note:
My dear Carleton,
No report has gone home about you, so as soon as you have been passed fit you will be returned to us and reappointed to a brigade, but give yourself a sufficiently long rest or you will probably break down again. Yours as ever etc
He was indeed reappointed to a brigade, but in Salonika, where his health quickly broke down and he was invalided home. He died after a heart attack in 1922, having declared that his experiences on the Somme had taken ten years off his life.
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The process of losing a superior's confidence might be little more than a matter of personality. On 1 May 1916 Brigadier General Charles Gosling, of 7th Infantry Brigade, was hit by shrapnel â a bullet in each leg and another in the head, though he was not very badly hurt â on his way out of the line to get a bath. The senior battalion commander stood in until a replacement, Brigadier General Charles Heathcote, arrived a week later. Heathcote was sent home on 30 August by Major General Bainbridge, who had assumed command of 25th Division that July, as âunfit for command'. Alexander Johnson, his brigade major, was very angry. âIt is the most unjust thing I've ever heard,' he wrote, âand the whole Brigade is simply furious â¦Â the Brigadier is sent home simply because he does not get on with the Divisional Commander.'
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Heathcote came back out as a lieutenant colonel, commanded a battalion, was invalided home, returned to command a battalion again, and got a brigade back in May 1917, retaining it for the rest of the war.
As a general lost his commander's confidence he was often presented with make-or-break tasks. In 1916 Walter Nicholson, then a senior staff officer in 17th Division, heard that one of the brigadiers was âfor the high jump' if he did not succeed in the next attack. He failed, and was duly sacked. âIt was a change of command which could not have been worse staged,' he wrote. âThe brigadier was popular in his brigade, and the brigade took his dismissal as a drastic reflection on their action in the battle. They had a right and proper hatred of the authorities.' Nicholson privately agreed that the brigadier was not, in fact, up to his job, but thought that the timing was disastrous. âIt is scarcely an exaggeration to say that nine out of ten commanders who were relieved of their command had a justifiable grievance as regards the particular occasion,' he added, âbut would have none if they had been
dégommé
at least half a dozen times previously.'
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Rawlinson was painfully slow in dispensing with Lieutenant General Sir Richard Butler, demonstrably the weakest of his corps commanders in 1918. He was already unhappy with Butler before the Amiens attack of 8 August, and three days later the over-strained officer was placed on sick leave. When he returned the following month Rawlinson went up to III Corps headquarters and wrote on his return:
I am pretty sure the Aust and IX Corps will do their jobs but am not so confident about the III Corps â¦Â They do not seem to fix up their plans with the same precision as the other Corps & I think Butler does not keep his Div Cmdrs in enough order. I suppose he has not the practical experience to make decisions and to shut them up when they begin talking rot. If they make a mess of this show I shall have to talk seriously to Butler for it will be his fault.
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Butler duly failed his trade test, and Rawlinson agreed with Haig to have him relieved. He was, though, still formally in command of III Corps when the war ended. There was good reason for Rawlinson's hesitancy, for Butler was a Haig protégé. He had served under Haig before the war, and had then been his chief of staff in 1st Army and deputy chief of the general staff at GHQ: he was actually Haig's preferred choice for CGS when Lawrence was appointed. If Rawlinson was to shift him without risking personal damage then he needed abundant evidence.
Subordinates had mixed views about the replacement of their superiors. In November 1917 Rowland Feilding was very sorry to lose his brigadier, George Pereira, who was simply worn out. âHe is about fifty-three,' thought Feilding, âbut has got to look like an old man. He is, I think, the most loyal and faithful and brave and unselfish man I have ever met, and I feel a great personal loss in his departure.'
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Lord Stanhope saw Haig arrive in early 1916 to sack his corps commander, Lieutenant General G. D. H. Fanshawe, who knew at once that the game was up. âWell, sir,' he declared, âyou obviously do not want to hear what I have to say, and I had better go.' He was replaced by his gunner brother E. A. Fanshawe, regarded by Stanhope as âa less good soldier'. In contrast, Stanhope thought that 32nd Division was poor largely because its commander, Major General Ryecroft, âdid not act happily with either his staff or his brigadiers'.
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He was eventually dismissed.
The issue of the dismissal of generals goes straight to the heart of the war's mythology. Some historians seem unaware of the ease with which incompetent commanders were in fact replaced, while others fasten on the removal of the likes of Phillips as evidence that GHQ knew exactly what it was doing. The truth reflects the theme expounded at the beginning of this book: this was an army of extraordinary diversity, and resists any attempt to superimpose easy generalisations upon it. So for the moment let us leave our red tabs vulnerable both to the enemy's fire and the military secretary's pen, and consider now what they did, and what their subordinates made of them.
I
t was one of the most popular jokes in that most British of all popular entertainments, the music hall. The stand-up comedian, cheeks rouged and hair gelled, eased forward to the hissing footlights and asked the audience, with the finely-timed rhetoric of his craft: âIf bread is the staff of life, what is the life of the staff? One long loaf.' His listeners would have bayed with almost as much delight in 1966 as they had in 1916, and even today it is very hard to separate the real performance of formation headquarters from what people thought of their occupants.
The general staff was a recent arrival in the British army, instituted only in the wake of the Boer War. There was a strong case for making it what was termed a âblue ribbon' staff, loosely modelled on the German general staff, and open only to officers who had passed through the army's staff college at Camberley. They would then alternate between staff and regimental appointments to ensure that they blended theoretical knowledge with practical understanding. The blue ribbon campaign foundered in 1906 after Sir John French managed to get Algy Lawson, not a staff college graduate, appointed to the post of brigade major of the 1st Cavalry Brigade. Thereafter it was possible to go onto the staff without having been to staff college. And when he became chief of the imperial general staff in 1912 French made it clear that: âIt is the duty of the Staff to present all the facts of the situation to a commander and then to take the necessary measures for carrying his decisions into effect.'
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British chiefs of staff were always to lack the wide authority enjoyed by their German opposite numbers. And the fact that the British army's cultural centre of gravity remained the regiment can be gauged from the fact that in 1914 there was a scramble for staff officers to get back to their battalions, although by doing so they lost the staff pay which they earned in addition to the pay of their regimental rank. About half the army's staff college graduates were killed or crippled in the first nine months of the war, often falling gallantly at a place where they should not have been. Even Maurice Hankey, mainstay of the Committee of Imperial Defence and then of the War Cabinet, made several attempts to go on active service, but neither Asquith nor Lloyd George would let him. His deputy returned joyfully to regimental duty and was promptly killed.
However, if the reformers had lost the argument over the blue ribbon general staff, the staff retained the tribal markings invented when it seemed likely that it would indeed be an exclusive and expert group. German general staff officers wore distinctive carmine double trouser-stripes. The British army decided to distinguish its general staff officers by modifying the red and gold collar-tab already worn by generals to produce a red tab with a thin line of red cord running from a button at its apex. General staff officers were also, like generals, to wear a red band round their caps. Officers on special staffs had their own distinguishing tabs and hat bands, like the purple of medical staff and the green of intelligence.
In addition, staff officers and commanders wore armbands which identified their level of command and function. Thus we could identify an approaching lieutenant colonel with red tabs on his collar and a red band on his right arm as the chief of staff of an infantry division, shortly before he asked us what the devil our general service wagons were doing blocking his road. Were he on a corps staff the band would have been red, white and red; it would have been red, black and red for army staff and red and blue (red uppermost) for GHQ. There were elaborate prescriptions for all, down to Inland Water Transport staff officers, who gave the game away by wearing a white brassard with a blue anchor, and servants to military attachés who (partly as a means of self-protection, for a Romanian general's groom might find it hard to justify himself to a Scots sentry in Montreuil) wore yellow armbands.
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Though there was functional logic to all this, its effects were wholly baneful. Staff officers looked strikingly different, and the fact that red tabs and brassards were worn by all general staff officers, even the subalterns and captains acting as aides de camp to generals, increased the apparent size of the staff. These trappings were certainly not universally welcome to those who had to wear them. Major Arthur Smith of the Coldstream Guards, then on the staff of 38th Division, found himself sheltering from shellfire in a trench full of troops. âI admit that I was frightened,' he wrote, âbut what bothered me most was that that I should show I was frightened, or that the men lining the trench should see I was a staff officer.'
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Maurice Hankey always wore uniform in Whitehall, âbut some instinct warned me that it would be better to stick to my regimental uniform than to obtain authority to wear the red tabs of a General Staff Officer'.
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Indeed, it is no surprise that the postwar abolition of the rank of brigadier general (it was briefly replaced by the hybrid colonel commandant and then by brigadier) was accompanied by the removal of red tabs from all staff officers below full colonel.
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Commanders and their staff at GHQ and army level worked in headquarters which moved infrequently and (save for GHQ itself) were usually located in medium-sized châteaux. They lived in nearby private houses, the châteaux themselves, or purpose-built âgarden suburbs' like that in the grounds of 1st Army's headquarters at Hinges Château in 1915. Corps were more mobile, with frequent moves up and down the front in 1915â17 and then some substantial shifts in 1918. They too favoured a château if one was handy, but for major offensives the corps commander would usually move up with a small staff and signallers to try to remain in contact with his divisional commanders. Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Morland of X Corps had, for instance, a forward command post in a wooden gantry up a tree in the western edge of Aveluy Wood, in the centre of his sector, on 1 July 1916.
Day-to-day business at corps level and above was done by telephone, letter and at conferences. The radio grew in importance as the war went on, but although it made a real difference in some areas (such as the control of counter-battery fire from the air) it had little real impact on upper level of command in any of the combatant armies on the Western Front. The distinguished military historian Martin van Creveld has poured scorn on the use of the telephone in the First World War. During the Somme, Haig, he maintains, was âpositioned at his headquarters where he hoped to have all the facts at the end of a telephone wire â¦', but instead he âended up by having none at all, and â¦Â was one of the worst informed men on the Somme'.
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But on 1 July Haig did not have âno information at all'. He had a good deal, for 4th Army told him what it thought was happening. The fact that 4th Army was often wrong reflected the fact that communication between attacking divisions and their corps had often broken down completely, leaving Rawlinson himself in the dark. Well aware of the limitations of the telephone, Haig went forward to see Rawlinson on the second morning of the battle, and directed him to press his attack where he had been successful the previous day, south of the Albert-Bapaume road. There was indeed a serious communication problem. But it was not at the upper end of the chain of command, between GHQ, army and corps, but down below corps level.
If corps headquarters moved occasionally, then divisional headquarters moved frequently â 51st Highland no less than eighteen times between July and December 1916 â and there were wide variations in their accommodation. Where possible they would spread themselves around a farm or two in Flanders, where big farmhouses, with their buildings on three sides of a square, were so characteristic of the landscape. Walter Nicholson described a Flanders farm occupied by the headquarters of 51st Highland Division in 1915.
It is built four-square and round a great âmidden'. One side, a single-storeyed building on a raised brick foundation, is the dwelling of the farmer and his family; above the living room runs a long loft. Barns form the other three sides; one for pigs, poultry and cattle. The other two filled with straw or empty according to the season. In the âmidden' manure is piled high, and as may be imagined the whole surroundings are in summer black with flies and in winter a swamp. But the farm, impoverished in appearance, frugally furnished, provided in fact the best of all billets. The officers who had experience chose its kitchen in winter to any room in the château; while the barns, after we had repaired them, were far better than bare boards.
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Further south, in Artois and Picardy, the pattern of land use was different, and villages and modest châteaux were more common than the âSpanish farms' of Flanders. When 51st Highland Division moved into the Picardy village of Senlis, with fifty or sixty houses, its headquarters was established in the best house in the village (known to the Jocks as the âchotoo'), but sadly it was:
designed for show and not for comfort, with two or even three stairs to overtake the great one-storey farms. Built of brick, with a great dignity of iron railings and of florid decoration within, the floors are highly polished and the windows tightly shut, dust sheets are over all the carpets. They look and feel as dead as mutton â¦
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A proper château in Hermaville turned out to be little better, for although it was âelegant in design', the big reception rooms âcaught all the winds of France through the badly constructed great French windows; the many smaller rooms were scruffy and unventilated'. To make matters worse the baron who owned it, an irascible former cavalry officer, shouted
âPas des chiens dans la maison' as
the enormous dog Rip strolled in on the heels of his master, âUncle' Harper, the divisional commander. The beast âmay have had endearing qualities, but no sense of humour', and the baron was right to watch his step.
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Staff officers lived and ate in a number of messes, depending on the accommodation available. Divisional practice varied, but usually the commander, his chief of staff and aide de camp would constitute No.1 Mess, with other senior staff officers in No. 2 Mess and separate messes for the artillery and engineer staff. When divisions moved up onto the abomination of desolation that constituted the old Somme battlefield they were forced to improvise amongst the âdolls' houses' cobbled together in the ruins, with names like
The Palace, Evergreen House
and
Windy Corner.
Engineers soon brought a degree of comfort to such surroundings, and in early 1918 Hanway Cumming found 21st Division in âa series of the usual wooden huts on the sheltered side of a low ridge and provided with mined dugouts as a protection against aerial bombing, which at the time was common in this part of the line'.
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Improvisation and resource improved stark surroundings. âTheft,' thought Nicholson, âis an individual affair, not communal,' and therefore useful items were simply âborrowed'. A small house in the village of Daours was soon turned into a very acceptable mess. âWe no longer ate off bare boards,' he confessed,
pictures from the illustrated papers decorated our walls, and we had thrown away our enamel ware. Tastes had been developed in local wines and liqueurs, which were purchased from neighbouring towns whenever conditions such as the loan of a car permitted and officers returning from leave came laden. âLong' Perry â¦Â [brought] two hares and a grouse, Weston returned with pheasants and hares. But my gift of a salmon, the last of the season from Harrods, was marred by three days fog in the channel.
However, the commander Royal Artillery's mess was unaccountably spartan: âThey had stew for lunch and cold bully beef for supper; tea, bread and jam at all meals.'
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Nicholson declared that staff messes were always empty except at mealtimes: there was simply too much work to do.
The central figure in all this was the divisional commander, a major general aged anywhere between thirty-five (for the precocious Keppel Bethell) and his late fifties (for Bannatyne Allason, the first commander of 51st Highland, who wore the ribbon of the Kabul-Kandahar Star from Lord Roberts' 1880 campaign). Many officers agreed with Nicholson that it was good for generals to be exposed to the gentle banter of the young, but when he joined 17th Division he found that different rules applied.
I joined a mess at which the divisional commander sat at one end of a long table and an uncouth spotty second-lieutenant at the other extremity â¦Â There was no general conversation, no laughter among the eighteen officers present. One meal in such a mess would have convinced a visitor that the division âHadn't a hope'.
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Major General Pilcher, the divisional commander, already had a reputation for unhandy relations with his subordinates. Stanhope was delighted to recall an incident when Pilcher was out and about, upbraiding officers and men who were not carrying respirators. He had borrowed one himself just before the trip, and when he took it out to show a harassed subaltern how it should be put on, he discovered that the case contained only âan old and dirty pair of socks'. He was replaced by Major General Philip Robertson: soon the food in the mess improved, the place was spotless and laughter was the rule. âWe treated him as an older equal,' wrote Nicholson, âwhich is the best sedative you can give any commander.'
The division's chief of staff (General Staff Officer Grade 1) was, almost without exception, a regular officer and staff college graduate. His relationship with the commander was crucial, as Brigadier General Archibald âSally' Home admitted when he went to be GSO 1 of 46th North Midland Division on the Somme front in April 1916. Home had already been chief of staff to the cavalry corps, and this apparent step down was intended to give him the familiarity with infantry work which he would need if he was to go further on the staff. Indeed, he was âwondering what an infantry division is like, luckily a sahib commands it â¦Â Luckily I know him as he is Cis Bingham's brother-in-law.' âI don't think I know very much about infantry,' he confessed, âso I have to look wise.' This wisdom included being surprised by the life led by the infantry. âA man has a pack weighing 56lbs on his back,' he wrote, âand how he gets along at all is a marvel to me.'
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Home had moved north to become brigadier general, general staff to the testy Lieutenant General Hamilton-Gordon of IX Corps (whose temper was ruined, it was said, by the fact that he could not taste anything), probably following the career pattern sketched out by the military secretary's department, by the time 46th Division attacked on 1 July, meeting total failure in its diversionary attack on Gommecourt. The next division south, 56th London, advanced much further, though at greater cost, and accusations of stickiness were not slow in coming.