Читать книгу G. H. Q. (Montreuil-Sur-Mer) by "G.S.O." - Frank Fox - Страница 5

It was the task of General Headquarters to try to see the War as a whole, to obtain a knowledge not only of the strictly military situation but, to an extent, also of the moral and the political situation of the enemy and of our own forces. In the later stages of the campaign that task was being done, pace all the critics, with an efficiency that was wonderful, seeing that before the Great War the British nation did not allow its Army any chance at all of war practice on a big scale. Our Generals, whatever skill they might have won in studying the theory of war, had had no opportunity to practise big movements. They were very much in the position of men trained in the running of a small provincial store who were asked suddenly to undertake the conduct of one of the mammoth "universal providers."

It is of G.H.Q. in the later stages of the war that I write, not G.H.Q. of the earlier stages, when our Army was finding its feet. But a slight generalisation regarding those earlier stages is necessary to an understanding of the subsequent growth of the Army organisation and of its Board of Directors at G.H.Q.

The small Army which crossed to France in 1914 was organised as an Expeditionary Force for a war of movement. It did gallant work in the first phase, as all have admitted. When the war of movement stopped and the struggle settled down to the War of the Trenches, though that gave a good opportunity of recruiting, it brought up an entirely new set of problems, for which our organisation had made no provision at all and in which British natural gifts did not have the best chance of display. Indeed our training system at home refused in 1914-15 to "recognise" Trench War. The New Armies were trained on the same lines as the old Regular Army, but of course more hurriedly, more intensively, less efficiently. They learned Trench Warfare—an almost entirely different game—when they got out to the Front. A reversal of the process—to have taught the much simpler Trench Warfare in the home camps and left the teaching of movement warfare to training intervals in France—was an obviously more economical system, and it was that adopted at a later stage.

When a considered history of the war comes to be written, probably it will give to the German High Command high praise for this period of "Trench War." It was the one conspicuously good invention of the enemy. It enabled him almost completely to stop the war in the one theatre where he had to meet troops superior to his own, whilst his forces ranged round Europe winning cheap victories and finally (though too late as it proved) vanquishing opposition elsewhere. There is no doubt that the Trench War device baffled our side for a time. I like the story of Marshal Joffre explaining the position to an American war correspondent and adding:

"You see there is nothing to be done."

"No. I suppose nobody could do anything?"

"Nobody."

"Not even Napoleon?"

But Marshal Joffre paused at that, and after a moment's reflection said:

"Yes, I suppose Napoleon could do something."

Finally the "something" came in the shape of the "Tank."

When Field Marshal Earl Haig took over the chief command he adopted the system of frequent "raids" to give to the Trench War some of the character of moving war, and that proved a highly useful step. Still, this Trench War was not of the genius of our people; and it was very dull. If I were seeking the fit adjective which could be applied to it in its superlative it would certainly not be "exciting" nor yet "dangerous." The life was exciting and it was dangerous—a little. It was, however, neither very exciting nor very dangerous. But it was very, very curious. Trench war had its moments, its hours of high emotion, of intense excitement, of crowding dangers. Its routine—on the Western front—was laborious, almost to the point of tediousness, demanding a sober and constant carefulness in detail, and—provided you watched the minutes and the winds, the twigs and the sky, had eyes, ears, and nerves always on the alert—it was reasonably safe.

Trench War exciting? No; you could not allow it to be. The moments were rare (to the majority of officers they never came) when the call was for a gallant shout and a forward rush in which leadership took its most obvious and its easiest form. The hours were always when, with cool, suspicious, deducting mind, you were watching a sector, awaiting the enemy's raiding attack or directing your own. Stalking and being stalked, it was interesting, absorbing, but you could not allow it to be exciting, or you would not do your work properly. War was robbed, in that phase of the struggle, of most of its fascinations by the spectacled Germans who had spent the previous half-century in the counting house, the laboratory, and the cellar, preparing to destroy the humanities of civilisation. Trench War was a grubbing kind of business.

Dangerous? Naturally, to an extent. But not nearly so dangerous as one might judge from the lurid accounts of imaginative writers. It had its hours of peril, of horror. But it was not all the time dangerous. For six days out of seven, on an average, a soldier, if he observed the strictest caution, was "following a dangerous trade," nothing more. On the seventh day—I speak in averages—he had his risk about doubled. On very rare occasions he had to take the risk of a fireman who goes into a blazing house to rescue a child, or a policeman who stops a madly bolting horse. Ordinarily one had to be careful "to watch the traffic;" that was all. If you wished to take a long lingering look at the enemy's trench you used a periscope. For a brief glance (to get a wide field of view) you looked over the parapet. There were differing estimates of the length of time it was safe to show your head over the parapet. Some said five seconds, others twenty-five.

"The German is slow in the up-take," remarked the officer who insisted that twenty-five seconds was quite a safe time to look over the parapet.

Behind the parapet it was almost as safe—and on dry days as pleasant—as on a marine parade. A solid fortification of sandbags, proof against any blow except that of a big high-explosive shell, enclosed on each side a walk, drained, paved, lined with dug-outs, in places adorned with little flower beds. I write, of course, of the Trench War in its "settled" stage—not of those grim struggles around Ypres in the Autumn of 1914.

Not exciting, not as dangerous as one would imagine, the Trench War was more curious, more "uncanny," than it is possible to describe. Try to imagine the huge ditch, some 300 miles long, from the North Sea to the Swiss lakes, which was our trench, facing another ditch which was their trench, all lined with Eyes, thousands, millions of Eyes. All day, all night, these Eyes stare and stare. At night the hands serving them break up the dark with star shells, and the brains behind them welcome the day, only because it makes the scrutiny of Death more easy. On the front edge of each ditch the Eyes are thick in line; farther back, in every possible post of observation, are groups of Eyes, and Eyes soar up into the air now and again to stare into the secrets concealed on the other side. There are Eyes of infantry, Eyes of artillery, Eyes of airmen. The scrutiny never pauses for an instant. Let an Eye blink a moment and it may mean catastrophe, a stealthy rush on a trench or a flood of poisoning gas. The great dark gutter stretching across Belgium and France was fringed with staring Eyes; and every Eye had to record its message to G.H.Q.

Carefulness, tedious, monotonous carefulness, absolute punctuality, and grave attention to every detail—these were the warrior qualities in the Trench War period. The minutes had to be watched, the grass watched lest you trod down a path and gave away some secret to the Eyes yonder. All the minute details of life were hedged in with precautions and penalties.

This tedious Trench War was not the game for British blood, though on the whole it was done well, especially after Loos when the raiding policy was instituted. But it was tedious; and very clearly it was impossible to win while it lasted. For victory the Germans had to be turned out of those trenches. So, during the tedium of the Trench War we would comfort ourselves with the thought that very soon the Big Push must come. Often the most definite news came that it was fixed for the next month. This very definite news was usually traced back to some signaller who had overheard something on the telephone. Perhaps Divisional H.Q. had a Member of Parliament (doing a "Cook's tour" of the Front) to dinner and peremptory messages were going down to the Coast asking for lobsters to be sent up. Now a guileless signaller would never imagine that Generals and the like were interested in lobster. If he thought of their diet at all he probably imagined they lived on trench maps—of which the consumption was certainly huge. Thus the signaller, hearing strange peremptory messages about lobsters, might conclude that this was some very secret code, and, the Big Push being in all our thoughts, that it would have reference to that most certainly. But for many months it was not the Big Push; it was only the lobster, which was the standard of gaiety and dissipation at a Mess Dinner.

At the time of the Loos attack it did really seem that the Big Push had come. But we were disappointed. Perhaps at the Front we were as impatient at the result as the people at home, but we could soothe our impatience with the thought of the greatness of the technical difficulties of arranging an advance with a battle-line hundreds of miles in length, all entrenched (difficulties which did not occur to those gentlemen who wrote weekly expert articles, to show how it should be done). It was clear that if we could push forward a little at certain vital points, a rich reward would be reaped. We knew that what would seem the obvious thing—to press along the whole line and break through in the weak parts—would have only landed us in a number of advanced salients which would be hard, or impossible, to defend when they came under enfilade fire. There were scores of places in which the German would willingly have let us through; to destroy the advanced party afterwards. We had to aim to push in wedges at our own selected points where the salient thus formed could be defended and could seriously threaten a German line of communication. It was not easy, for the number of those points was limited and the German knew them all.

Loos showed very plainly what we were "up against." There was a long pause for further preparation, a pause which seemed unendurably long at the time when the French were taking such a hammering at Verdun and we were going on with tedious Trench War and still more tedious preparations behind the lines.

Criticism of the British military effort at this stage of the war was fairly general and sometimes very hostile. Some assumed that we had tried our last blow at Loos and that we would never do more than hold a trench sector until the French could finish the war. At Home there were critics who argued that the British military effort would have been more wisely directed if, in the first stage of the war, the British Expeditionary Force had been kept at home and used as the nucleus for training a great continental army, ignoring the pressing circumstances of August, 1914.

Undoubtedly in that way a great British Army could have been far more quickly raised. Undoubtedly, too, the task of forming the new British Army was very seriously handicapped by the draining away to France of practically all the fully-trained men of military age in Great Britain. But with a choice of two courses Great Britain took the more daring and the more generous one; and that in human affairs is generally the better one. The material help which the Five Divisions of the British Army gave to the French was not negligible. The moral help was much greater. The lack of those Divisions might have lost Paris to the French and left the Germans in control of all France north and east of the Seine; and that event might have ended the war—it would certainly have prejudiced seriously the French recovery.

The risk taken by Great Britain in stripping her own territory of its only efficient army was not inconsiderable. Direct attack by Germany was seriously feared then. A bolder German naval policy, indeed, might have secured an invasion of England. Plans were drawn up in England at one time on the supposition of a German descent on our coasts being successful in its first stages, and it was proposed to meet this by converting a wide coastal section of England into a desert.

Criticism was to be silenced in time, for presently we were to open that giant battle which was not to finish until November, 1918, and which was then to finish with the British Army the most important force in the Field.

G.H.Q. moved to Montreuil on March 31st, 1916. On the same date, it may be said, the British Army in France came to man's estate. It had been up to this an "auxiliary army" holding a small section of the front, and a "training army" getting ready to take over—as ultimately it did take over—the main burden of the war; for, counting its captures of prisoners and guns from August, 1918, to November 11th, 1918, the British Army's share in the final victory was almost equal to that of the French, American and Belgian forces combined.

G.H.Q. came to Montreuil because St. Omer, the old G.H.Q. town, was no longer suitable as the centre for the vast operations pending. It had served well enough when we formed the left wing of the French battle line. Now we were to be the spear-head of the thrust against Germany.

Look back upon the little British Army of at first four and then five Divisions, which in 1914 took rank alongside the French by Mons, and fell back fighting until the rally of the Marne; and then upon the Army of 1916 of ten times the strength, which was directed from Montreuil. The growth shows as marvellous, and especially so to those who understand how an army in the field is comparable to an iceberg at sea, of which the greater part is unseen. For every rifleman in the trenches and gunner in the gun-pits there are at least three other people working to keep him supplied with food, clothing, ammunition, and on communications. So an Army's growth demands a growth behind the line three times as great as that in the line. And this growth is not merely a matter of the multiplication of riflemen and gunners and auxiliaries, a heaping up of men. It must be an organic growth to be effective at all; an adding one by one of highly complex and yet homogeneous units.

A "Division" is the integral unit of any Army, and a Division must have in the field its infantry battalions, cavalry or cyclist companies, field batteries, signallers (with "wireless," telephone and telegraph service), engineers, transport and supply services, medical and ambulance services. All told, it numbered about 17,000 officers and men at the close of the war, but in 1914 the strength of a Division was nearer to 20,000. And this body of 20,000 was not a mob, nor a crowd, nor yet even a simple organization such as a band of factory employees. It was a nation in microcosm, its constituent numbers covering almost the whole of the activities of life. It had to be organised to fight, to keep up communications, to manufacture and repair, to feed itself and its horses, to keep good health conditions in its camps and to succour its sick and wounded. Besides fighting men it had doctors, vets., sanitary engineers, mechanics of all kinds, chemists, electricians. Behind the line the Division's supports, its munition and clothing factories, its food providers, had to be organised just as carefully.

Nothing can be made without making mistakes, and in the carrying out of this giant task of making the Army of the British Empire there were many mistakes of detail. It is in the nature of the human mind to see such mistakes in high relief, as the human eye sees small patches of stone stand out from a vast field of snow. But, making the worst that can be made of the mistakes, if they are seen in proper perspective they cannot blur the dazzling brilliance of a marvellous achievement.

Most of the mistakes, moreover, were direct consequences of that innocence of warlike intention and that passion for human right and liberty which was common to Great Britain as to the rest of Western Europe, and on which, clearly, the German Powers had counted as sufficient to paralyse effective resistance to their deliberate and designed preparation. Hindering those good qualities of peacefulness proved to be, but not paralysing. After all, the task was done. That most dangerous first rush of German militarism was stayed. The powerful beast was kept within bounds whilst weapons were forged for his destruction. In vain were all his efforts, backed by the skill of half a century of preparation and Spartan discipline.

Montreuil was chosen as G.H.Q. for a wide variety of reasons. It was on a main road from London to Paris—the two chief centres of the campaign—though not on a main railway line, which would have been an inconvenience. It was not an industrial town and so avoided the complications alike of noise and of a possibly troublesome civil population.[1] It was from a telephone and motor transit point of view in a very central situation to serve the needs of a Force which was based on Dunkirk, Calais, Boulogne, Dieppe, and Havre, and had its front stretching from the Somme to beyond the Belgian frontier.

A great general, asked to define in a phrase what was wanted for a Headquarters, said "A central remoteness." It was urged that this seemed an oxymoron. "Well then, if you like, a remote centrality." The finality of that allowed of no further argument. Montreuil provided both a central position and a position remote from the disturbances and distractions of traffic, of a large population, of gay social interests. The great Ecole Militaire offered accommodation for the chief offices. There was sufficient billeting accommodation in the town houses and the neighbouring chateaux.