The General: The Classic WWI Tale of Leadership. Max Hastings

The Donkeys, for which the author belatedly admitted that he had invented the quotation attributed to the Kaiser, describing British troops as ‘lions led by donkeys’. Clark’s book inspired Charles Chilton and Joan Littlewood to create the 1963 satirical musical Oh, What A Lovely War!. In 1989 BBC TV’s Blackadder Goes Forth imprinted on a new generation of viewers a vision of 1914–18’s commanders personified by General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett, played by Stephen Fry. Here was the mass murderer as comic turn – or, if you prefer, the comic turn as mass murderer.

      Yet this was not how most survivors of 1914–18 viewed their leaders in the war’s aftermath, despite gaping emotional wounds left by the slaughters at Neuve Chapelle, Loos, the Somme, Ypres, Passchendaele and elsewhere. Among veterans returning from France, there was anger about the muddle attending demobilisation of Britain’s huge army, which prompted strikes and mutinies; about the lack of a domestic social, moral or economic regeneration such as might offer some visible rewards to justify the war’s sacrifice; about the absence of the ‘homes fit for heroes’ promised by politicians. But until the end of the 1920s, senior officers such as Haig, French, Plumer, Byng and Rawlinson received respect and even homage. The belated victors of the campaign on the Western Front were loaded with titles and honours; painted by Sir William Orpen; granted places of honour at the unveiling of countless memorials, of which the Cenotaph in Whitehall was only the foremost. A million people turned out for Haig’s 1928 London funeral procession, and almost as many for the subsequent ceremonies in Edinburgh.

      The public mood began to shift about the time the Depression began. Such accounts of the war as Frederick Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929), Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928), Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), Robert Graves’s Good-bye to All That (1929) and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) depicted a protracted agony in pursuit of rival national purposes which allegedly meant little to those who perished in their names, compounded by the brutalism of those who directed the armies.

      Even if most veterans – unlike Maynard Keynes and Siegfried Sassoon – retained a belief that the allied cause had been just, people could see for themselves the political chaos and economic wretchedness prevailing across much of the world at the end of the decade following the armistice. The Great War, it seemed, had not merely yielded battlefield horrors of unprecedented scale and intensity; it had also failed to secure any discernible benefit for mankind or even for the victors. In the absence of evidence of Germanic evil remotely matching the 1945 revelation of the Holocaust, by the 1930s a diminishing number of people in the allied nations acknowledged the Kaiser’s empire as a malign and aggressive force, the frustration of whose purposes had been critical for European civilisation. Britain became host to a Peace Movement unrivalled in any other country for its numbers and fervour. Following the Oxford Union’s February 1933 debate, in which a motion was carried by 275 votes to 153 ‘that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’, many people believed that a new generation of British men had become irredeemably committed to pacifism. In 1934 Madame Tussaud’s waxwork gallery responded to the changed public mood by removing from exhibition its galaxy of allied generals, catalogued as ‘The Men Who Won the War’.

      It was in this climate that C.S. Forester, then emergent as one of the most popular novelists of his generation, wrote The General. The author, whose real name was Cecil Louis Troughton Smith, was born in Cairo in 1899, son of a minor government official. Educated at Dulwich College, he was rejected for military service in 1917 on grounds of poor eyesight and general physical frailty. He spent three years as a medical student before abandoning this path in 1921 to pursue a writing career. Success came relatively slowly; only in 1926, after publishing several deservedly unnoticed pieces, did Forester win attention for Payment Deferred, a novel about a man who murders his rich nephew and escapes consequences until his wife exacts an ironic but appropriate penalty. The book caught the eye of Charles Laughton, who embraced it as a star vehicle for himself in highly successful stage (1931) and film (1932) versions, which also propelled its author towards fame and prosperity.

      Forester thereafter displayed versatility as well as high gifts as a storyteller, penning histories and historical novels which achieved a worldwide audience, while also serving as a Hollywood scriptwriter. His books focused upon the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a special emphasis on naval yarns, of which the first was Brown on Resolution (1929), a superbly accomplished, wry tale about Albert Brown, a sailor whose short life climaxes on a barren Pacific islet in 1914 after he has become sole survivor of his old British warship’s encounter with a German raiding cruiser. The African Queen (1935), which later became a movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, wove a quirky love story around one of the lesser-known episodes of World War I, the Royal Navy’s December 1915 sinking of a German gunboat on Lake Tanganyika. Other early novels were set in the Napoleonic Wars, to which the author would return for the 1937 creation of Captain Horatio Hornblower, the character with whom his memory remains most famously associated, favoured leisure reading of Winston Churchill in World War II.

      But Hornblower still lay in the future when Forester wrote The General, which more than a few admirers, myself and the author among them, believe to have been his best work. In all his writing he displayed a fascination with awkward human beings, unglamorous figures who nonetheless achieved notable deeds, some base, others heroic. By 1936, when the book was first published, a growing minority of British people feared that it would prove necessary once more to fight Germany, this time under Hitler, making mock of the post-1918 slogan ‘Never again.’ For a season, however, the Peace Movement and its collateral branch, the appeasers, still held sway. Abomination of the Western Front’s generals had not reached the peak it would achieve thirty years later, and has since retained, but there was assuredly revulsion towards the bloodbaths which the ‘brass hats’ had directed.

      Captain Basil Liddell Hart, who served briefly and without attracting much notice on the Western Front, had transformed himself into a widely read pundit on military affairs. In this role he did much to advance the legend of British command idiocy, initially through his 1930 study The Real War, later extended and republished as A History of the World War (1914–1918). Sir Hew Strachan has written that the book ‘posed as an objective analysis of military operations. In truth it is a sustained critique of the British high command, and its purpose is more didactic than historical.’

      Liddell Hart was prejudiced, if not embittered, by the unwillingness of the British Army’s senior officers to treat himself as seriously as he believed his gifts as a strategic thinker merited. He was a fluent writer who sustained a prodigious output of journalism, books and correspondence. He developed some good and even important ideas which, like most theoreticians, he habitually overstated. Foremost among them was the claim that exploitation of manoeuvre and technology – most conspicuously, the tank – could have played a game-changing role earlier in the First World War, and would certainly do so in future conflicts, without the necessity for murderous headlong collisions.

      Liddell Hart’s denunciations of 1914–18 commanders’ myopia, and assertions of their culpability, won favour with some important people, including Lloyd George, Winston Churchill – and C.S. Forester. The strategic guru’s vision pervades the novelist’s tale about an officer who rises to high rank in the First World War. Forester was encouraged to write it by Michael Joseph, a flamboyant and gifted publisher. Joseph, born in 1897, had served on the Western Front as an officer in the Machine-Gun Corps, being badly gassed before coming home to marry – briefly – the actress Hermione Gingold. In 1936 he had just started his own publishing house, which thereafter midwifed all Forester’s work. The author inscribed The General to him ‘not as the “onlie begetter”, but nearly so’. On 2 January, Joseph wrote to Basil Liddell Hart, asking him to read and comment upon Forester’s proofs. The pundit responded that he was immensely busy, but could not resist a book by an author whom he did not know personally, but much admired.

      On 8 January he wrote at length, saying that having finished The General he was impressed, and would make no proposals for major changes: ‘It is so true a picture, with so telling a message, that I feel nothing ought to be risked that might dim it.’ He