seldom flinched from accepting heavy casualties when circumstances seemed to demand this; their fitness for command would have been questioned had they done so.
In the First World War, the vastness of the struggle imposed an unprecedented scale of loss. But what choice was there before the military leaders, save to stiffen their backs and carry on, unless they chose to resign their posts or concede defeat to the enemy? The literary culture which dominates twenty-first-century perceptions burdens the generals with overwhelming blame for the struggle’s horrors. Yet, on the allied side at least, soldiers bore little or no responsibility for having unleashed Europe’s catastrophe. It is almost impossible to make such officers as led Britain’s forces between 1914 and 1918 appear sympathetic human beings to a twenty-first-century audience, but they were men of their time, and it is thus that they should be judged.
All societies view history through nationalistic prisms, and the British indulge this as much as any, cherishing another persistent myth – that the First World War was much bloodier than the Second. Many people like to believe that in the 1939–45 conflict, Britain suffered much smaller losses because the army had more gifted and humane generals, who declined to sacrifice their men as they had been sacrificed on the Somme and at Passchendaele by such commanders as Sir Herbert Curzon. Yet Paul Fussell, an influential modern writer, was profoundly mistaken when he wrote in The Great War and Modern Memory that the conflict was uniquely awful, and thus lay ‘outside history’, fit matter for literary rather than historical examination. In reality all wars inflict horrors on those who fight them, as well as upon bystanders who find themselves in the path of armies and fall victim to their excesses.
Life and death in Western Europe in the fourteenth century, era of the Hundred Years War and many other struggles, were dreadful indeed, as they were also during the seventeenth-century Thirty Years War, which killed a higher proportion of Europe’s population than perished between 1939 and 1945. It is a childish delusion to suppose that 1914–18’s fighting men experienced worse things than their forebears had known. They did not. For centuries past, soldiers had fought battles in which they were often obliged to stand and face each other’s fire, sometimes at ranges of fifty yards and less, hour upon hour. The hardships they suffered from hunger, weather and disease were quite as severe as those faced by combatants on the Western Front. Survivors of – for instance – Napoleon’s 1812 Russian campaign would have mocked the notion that what men did to each other at Ypres or the Chemin des Dames represented a qualitatively worse experience than their own.
What changed in the First World War was simply that cultured citizen soldiers, disdaining the stoicism displayed since time immemorial by warriors, most of whom were anyway illiterate, chronicled the conflict into which they were plunged with an unprecedented lyricism. Moreover, the absence of significant strategic movement on the Western Front generated a sense of military futility which afterwards extended, understandably but irrationally, and especially among later generations rather than among contemporary participants, to the merits of the allied cause.
Neither the poetic achievement nor the sense of futility were repeated between 1939 and 1945. This is strange, because the second of the twentieth century’s great clashes was much more costly for mankind. Far bloodier attritional clashes were required to accomplish the destruction of Nazism than those on the Western Front in the struggle to defeat the Kaiser. But 1941–45’s principal killing fields, its Sommes and Verduns, lay in the East, and the losses were borne by the Russians, who suffered twenty-seven million dead and inflicted 92 per cent of the German army’s total casualties. The Western allies accepted only a small fraction of the material and human price for destroying Hitler. For four years – between June 1940 and June 1944 – most of the British and later American armies marched and trained at home, while a handful of divisions fought in North Africa, later Italy and the Far East, and a titanic contest in arms took place on the Eastern Front. Only in Normandy, during June and July 1944, did the Western allies go head to head with the Germans in battles during which some units’ losses matched those of 1916.
In the second half of World War II, assisted by a superiority of resources such as Foch and Haig had never enjoyed, together with the fact that the global tide had shifted decisively against the Axis, Britain won some victories under the leadership of competent, if not inspired, generals who were indeed cautious about casualties, to the disgust of their American allies. But it is difficult to argue convincingly that the British commanders of the early war years displayed higher skills than those of French, Haig – and Forester’s Curzon. It is a matter of personal taste whether such generals as Percival at Singapore and Klopper at Tobruk – who surrendered their commands to the enemy in 1942 rather than conduct the sort of sacrificial stands Churchill wanted and Herbert Curzon would have been happy to lead – deserve the applause of posterity for their humanity, or castigation for their ignominious battlefield failure. But the dominant reality of World War II was that Alanbrooke and Marshall, Montgomery and Eisenhower were spared the odium of presiding over bloodbaths comparable with those of 1914–18 not by their own genius, but because the Russians did most of the killing and dying undertaken by British Tommies and French poilus a generation earlier.
It is sometimes suggested that allied generals in Hitler’s war eschewed the sybaritic lifestyle of commanders in the Kaiser’s conflict, who created the legend of ‘château generalship’, champagne-swigging ‘brass hats’ living it up in the rear areas. This view, too, is factually hard to justify. Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten’s South-East Asia Command headquarters in Ceylon was notoriously self-indulgent. Field-Marshal Sir Harold Alexander and his staff in Italy were thought to do themselves remarkably well, as did many of the US Army’s commanders. When champagne was available, most British, American and German generals drank it as enthusiastically between 1939 and 1945 as they did between 1914 and 1918. Soldiers serving in headquarters inevitably live far more comfortably than infantrymen. Once again, modern perceptions have been distorted by the literary culture of 1914–18, which fostered a delusion of the First World War’s exceptionality in this respect, as in many others. Sassoon wrote in one of his most famous poems:
If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You’d see me with my puffy petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honour. ‘Poor young chap,’
I’d say – ‘I used to know his father well;
Yes, we’ve lost heavily in this last scrap.’
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I’d toddle safely home and die – in bed.
Fed by such brilliant derision, the delusion persists that the First World War was unique in its chasm between innocent youth sacrificed in the trenches, and slothful cowards skulking at the rear. In reality, in all wars since 1914, for each rifleman confronting the enemy, at least ten and sometimes twenty officers and men have fulfilled support functions. Every surviving veteran of World War II is today absurdly dubbed a ‘hero’, yet only a small fraction performed any role which put them at greater risk of mortality than they faced in civilian life. Throughout the 1939–45 conflict, Churchill deplored the high proportion of the British Army which never heard a shot fired. It fell to army chief Gen. Sir Alan Brooke repeatedly to rehearse to the prime minister the argument that modern conflict demands a long administrative ‘tail’ for the ‘teeth’ arms. Fighting soldiers of the 1939–45 era liked their brethren who manned office desks and ate hot lunches no more than did Sassoon his ‘scarlet Majors’.
In
