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

before any Boer had noticed them. Then, forgetting to draw his sword, he set his spurs into his horse and rode steadily, three lengths in front of his charging line, straight at the guns. The trumpeters pealed the charge as the pace quickened.

      No undisciplined militia force could withstand the shock of an unexpected attack from the flank, however small the force which delivered it. The Boer defence which had all day held up the English attack collapsed like a pricked balloon. The whole space was black with men running for their ponies. Out on the open plain where the sweltering English infantry had barely been maintaining their firing-lines the officers sensed what was happening. Some noticed the slackening of the Boer fire. Some saw the Boers rise out of their invisible trenches and run. One officer heard the cavalry trumpets faint and sweet through the heated air. He yelled to his bugler to sound the charge. The skirmishing line rose up from flank to flank as bugler after bugler took up the call. Curzon had brought them the last necessary impetus for the attack. They poured over the Boer lines to where Curzon, his sword still in its sheath, was sitting dazed upon his horse amid the captured guns.

      The Battle of Volkslaagte – a very great battle in the eyes of the British public of 1899, wherein nearly five thousand men had been engaged a side – was won, and Curzon was marked for his captaincy and the D.S.O. He was not a man of dreams, but even if he had been, his wildest dreams would not have envisaged the future command of a hundred thousand British soldiers – nor the bathchair on Bournemouth promenade.

       Chapter Two

      To Curzon the rest of the South African War was a time of tedium and weariness. His wound kept him in hospital during the Black Week, while England mourned three coincident defeats inflicted by an enemy whom she had begun to regard as already at her mercy. He was only convalescent during Roberts’ triumphant advance to Pretoria. He found himself second-in-command of a detail of recruits and reservists on the long and vulnerable line of communications when the period of great battles had come to an end.

      There were months of tedium, of army biscuit and tough beef, of scant water and no tobacco. There were sometimes weeks of desperate marching, when the horses died and the men grumbled and the elusive enemy escaped by some new device from the net which had been drawn round him. There were days of scorching sun and nights of bitter cold. There was water discipline to be enforced so as to prevent the men from drinking from the polluted supplies which crammed the hospitals with cases of enteric fever. There was the continuous nagging difficulty of obtaining fodder so as to keep horses in a condition to satisfy the exacting demands of column commanders. There were six occasions in eighteen months during which Curzon heard once more the sizzle and crack of bullets overhead, but he did not set eyes on an enemy – except prisoners – during that period. Altogether it was a time of inconceivable dreariness and monotony.

      But it could not be said that Curzon was actively unhappy. He was not of the type to chafe at monotony. The dreariness of an officers’ mess of only two or three members did not react seriously upon him – he was not a man who needed mental diversion. His chill reserve and ingrained frigid good manners kept him out of mess-room squabbles when nerves were fraying and tempers were on edge; besides, a good many of the officers who came out towards the end of the war were not gentlemen and were not worth troubling one’s mind about. Yet all the same, it was pleasant when the war ended at last, and Curzon could say good-bye to the mixed rabble of mounted infantry who had made up the column to which he was second-in-command.

      He rejoined the Twenty-second Lancers at Cape Town – all the squadrons together again for the first time for two years – and sailed for home. The new king himself reviewed them after their arrival, having granted them time enough to discard their khaki and put on again the glories of blue and gold, schapska and plume, lance pennons and embroidered saddle-cloths. Then they settled down in their barracks with the fixed determination (as the Colonel expressed it, setting his lips firmly) of ‘teaching the men to be soldiers again’.

      The pleasure of that return to England was intense enough, even to a man as self-contained as Curzon. There were green fields to see, and hedgerows, and there was the imminent prospect of hunting. And there were musical comedies to go to, and good food to eat, and pretty women to be seen in every street, and the Leicester Lounge to visit, with a thrill reminiscent of old Sandhurst days. And there was the homage of society to the returned warriors to be received – although that was not quite as fulsome as it might have been, because public enthusiasm had begun to decline slowly since the relief of Mafeking, and there was actually a fair proportion of people who had forgotten the reported details of the Battle of Volkslaagte.

      There was naturally one man who knew all about it – a portly, kindly gentleman with a keen blue eye and a deep guttural voice who had been known as H.R.H. at the time when the Lancers had been ordered to South Africa, but who was now King of England. He said several kindly words to Curzon at the investiture to which Curzon was summoned by the Lord Chamberlain. And Curzon bowed and stammered as he received his D.S.O. – he was not a man made for courts and palaces. In the intimacy of his hotel bedroom he had felt thrilled and pleased with himself in his Lancer full dress, with his plastron and his schapska, his gold lace and glittering boots and sword, and he had even found a sneaking pleasure in the stir among the people on the pavement as he walked out to get into the waiting cab, but his knees knocked and his throat dried up in Buckingham Palace.

      On the same leave Curzon had in duty-bound to go and visit Aunt Kate, who lived in Brixton. The late Mr Curzon, Captain Herbert Curzon’s father, had married a trifle beneath him, and his wife’s sister had married a trifle beneath her, and the Mr Cole whom she had married had not met with much success in life, and after marriage Mr Curzon had met with much, so that the gap between Curzon and his only surviving relatives – between the Captain in the Duke of Suffolk’s Own and the hard-up city clerk with his swarm of shrieking children – was wide and far too deep to plumb. Curzon drove to Brixton in a cab, and the appearance of the cab caused as much excitement in that street as did his full-dress uniform in the West End. Aunt Kate opened the door to him – a paint-blistered door at the end of a tile path three yards long, leading from a gate in the iron railings past a few depressed laurels in the tiny ‘front garden’. Aunt Kate was momentarily disconcerted at the sight of the well-dressed gentleman who had rat-tat-tatted on her door, but she recovered herself.

      ‘Why, it’s Bertie,’ she said. ‘Come in, dear. Uncle Stanley ought to be home soon. Come in here and sit down. Maud! Dick! Gertie! Here’s your cousin Bertie home from South Africa!’

      The shabby children came clustering into the shabby parlour; at first they were shy and constrained, and when the constraint wore off they grew riotous, making conversation difficult and hindering Aunt Kate in her effort to extract from her nephew details of his visit to Buckingham Palace.

      ‘What’s it like in there?’ she asked. ‘Is it all gold? I suppose there’s cut-glass chandeliers?’

      Curzon had not the least idea. And –

      ‘Did the king really speak to you? What was he wearing?’

      ‘Field-Marshal’s uniform,’ said Curzon briefly.

      ‘Of course, you’ve been presented to him before, when you went into the Army,’ said Aunt Kate enviously. ‘That was in the dear queen’s time.’

      ‘Yes,’ said Curzon.

      ‘It must be lovely to know all these people,’ said Aunt Kate. ‘Are there any lords in your regiment now?’

      ‘Yes,’ said Curzon. ‘One or two.’

      It was irritating, because he himself found secret pleasure in serving in the same regiments as lords, and in addressing them without their titles, but the pleasure was all spoilt now at finding that Aunt Kate was of the same mind.

      More irritating still was the arrival of Stanley Cole, Aunt Kate’s husband, whom Curzon felt he could not possibly address now as ‘Uncle Stanley’, although he had done so as a boy. Mr Cole was an uncompromising Radical, and no respecter of persons,