Part 6 (1/2)

”What's this?” said the general.

”Casualty, sir,” said the quaking platoon commander.

”Not bad, I hope?”

”Dead, sir,” said the subaltern. He meant dead drunk.

The general drew himself up, and said, in his dramatic way, ”The army commander salutes the honored dead!”

And the drunken private put his head from under the blanket and asked, ”What's the old geezer a-sayin' of?”

That story may have been invented in a battalion mess, but it went through the army affixed to the name of Hunter Weston, and seemed to fit him.

The 8th Corps was on the left in the first attack on the Somme, when many of our divisions were cut to pieces in the attempt to break the German line at Gommecourt. It was a ghastly tragedy, which spoiled the success on the right at Fricourt and Montauban. But Gen. Hunter Weston was not degomme, as the French would say, and continued to air his theories on life and warfare until the day of Victory, when once again we had ”muddled through,” not by great generals.h.i.+p, but by the courage of common men.

Among the divisional generals with whom I came in contact-I met most of them at one time or another-were General Hull of the 56th (London) Division, General Hickey of the 16th (Irish) Division, General Harper of the 51st (Highland) Division, General Nugent of the 36th (Ulster) Division, and General Pinnie of the 35th (Bantams) Division, afterward of the 33d.

General Hull was a handsome, straight-speaking, straight-thinking man, and I should say an able general. ”Ruthless,” his men said, but this was a war of ruthlessness, because life was cheap. Bitter he was at times, because he had to order his men to do things which he knew were folly. I remember sitting on the window-sill of his bedroom, in an old house of Arras, while he gave me an account of ”the battle in the dark,” in which the Londoners and other English troops lost their direction and found themselves at dawn with the enemy behind them. General Hull made no secret of the tragedy or the stupidity... On another day I met him somewhere on the other side of Peronne, before March 21st, when he was commanding the 16th (Irish) Division in the absence of General Hickey, who was ill. He talked a good deal about the belief in a great German offensive, and gave many reasons for thinking it was all ”bluff.” A few days later the enemy had rolled over his lines... Out of thirteen generals I met at that time, there were only three who believed that the enemy would make his great a.s.sault in a final effort to gain decisive victory, though our Intelligence had ama.s.sed innumerable proofs and were utterly convinced of the approaching menace.

”They will never risk it!” said General Gorringe of the 47th (London) Division. ”Our lines are too strong. We should mow them down.”

I was standing with him on a wagon, watching the sports of the London men. We could see the German lines, south of St.-Quentin, very quiet over there, without any sign of coming trouble. A few days later the place where we were standing was under waves of German storm-troops.

I liked the love of General Hickey for his Irish division. An Irishman himself, with a touch of the old Irish soldier as drawn by Charles Lever, gay-hearted, proud of his boys, he was always pleased to see me because he knew I had a warm spot in my heart for the Irish troops. He had a good story to tell every time, and pa.s.sed me on to ”the boys” to get at the heart of them. It was long before he lost hope of keeping the division together, though it was hard to get recruits and losses were high at Guillemont and Ginchy. For the first time he lost heart and was very sad when the division was cut to pieces in a Flanders battle. It lost 2,000 men and 162 officers before the battle began-they were sh.e.l.led to death in the trenches-and 2,000 men and 170 officers more during the progress of the battle. It was murderous and ghastly.

General Harper of the 51st (Highland) Division, afterward commanding the 4th Corps, had the respect of his troops, though they called him ”Uncle” because of his shock of white hair. The Highland division, under his command, fought many battles and gained great honor, even from the enemy, who feared them and called the kilted men ”the ladies from h.e.l.l.” It was to them the Germans sent their message in a small balloon during the retreat from the Somme: ”Poor old 51st. Still sticking it! Cheery-oh!”

”Uncle” Harper invited me to lunch in his mess, and was ironical with war correspondents, and censors, and the British public, and new theories of training, and many things in which he saw no sense. There was a smoldering pa.s.sion in him which glowed in his dark eyes.

He was against bayonet-training, which took the field against rifle-fire for a time.

”No man in this war,” he said, with a sweeping a.s.sertion, ”has ever been killed by the bayonet unless he had his hands up first.” And, broadly speaking, I think he was right, in spite of the Director of Training, who was extremely annoyed with me when I quoted this authority.

XX

I met many other generals who were men of ability, energy, high sense of duty, and strong personality. I found them intellectually, with few exceptions, narrowly molded to the same type, strangely limited in their range of ideas and qualities of character.

”One has to leave many gaps in one's conversation with generals,” said a friend of mine, after lunching with an army commander.

That was true. One had to talk to them on the lines of leading articles in The Morning Post. Their patriotism, their knowledge of human nature, their idealism, and their imagination were restricted to the traditional views of English country gentlemen of the Tory school. Anything outside that range of thought was to them heresy, treason, or wishy-washy sentiment.

What mainly was wrong with our generals.h.i.+p was the system which put the High Command into the hands of a group of men belonging to the old school of war, unable, by reason of their age and traditions, to get away from rigid methods and to become elastic in face of new conditions.