The Great War: Recommended Reading

C.S. Forester's fictional tale of British generalship on the Western Front

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To supplement my ongoing Great War series, I’ll be assembling a bibliography of works, fictional and nonfictional, covering the subject. By and large, my nonfiction recommendations will be books intended for the general reader, along with memoirs such as Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel and Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That. The works of the War Poets—Wilfred Owen, Siegfreid Sassoon, et al— will naturally be included.

To begin, however, I commend to your attention The General, a novel by the English writer C.S. Forester. He is well known, of course, as the author The African Queen and especially of the Hornblower Saga: eleven novels following the naval career of one Horatio Hornblower during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But with The General, originally published in 1936, Forester turned his attention to the British Army and specifically to the men who commanded it during the Great War, as personified by the fictional Lieutenant-General Sir Herbert Curzon, K.C.M.G., C.B., D.S.O.

Forester presents Curzon as a typical product of the prewar British Army: a cavalryman of great courage and resolution but little imagination. He is not clever, nor eloquent, nor given to theorizing about war. Indeed, he’s profoundly distrustful of men who do possess such qualities. When we first meet him in South Africa, Curzon has just succeeded to the command of a squadron of his regiment, the 22nd Lancers—his commanding officer having been shot dead by a Boer sniper. A fortunate combination of circumstances enables him and his men to deliver a charge that turns the tide of battle and earns him the Distinguished Service Order. Ever afterwards, Curzon is remembered as “that Volkslaagte fellow,” after the battle he helped to win.

There follows a brisk summary of Curzon’s career from the end of the Boer War to the outbreak of the Great War—Forester’s purpose being to show that his protagonist is an utterly ordinary regimental officer, conventional in every way, his life ordered by the daily routine of the peacetime Army. On the eve of war in August 1914 Curzon is a senior major, and when the 22nd's commanding officer is promoted out, he is given command of the regiment.

In France and Flanders, Lieutenant-Colonel Curzon distinguishes himself, particularly during the First Battle of Ypres. In a desperate attempt to stop the advancing German Army, the 22nd Lancers are dismounted and flung into the line. Squatting in waterlogged ditches and shell holes, Curzon and his men repel attack after attack. His brigade commander is killed by a German shell; Curzon takes his place. Now commanding three dismounted cavalry regiments, frequently leading from the front, contemptuous of danger, he plays a key role in the defensive battle that prevents the Germans from scoring a breakthrough.

In all this, Forester is touching up his portrait of the General: Curzon as an exemplar of the men who came to command the British Army on the Western Front. He writes:

It might have been—though it would be a bold man who would say so—more advantageous for England if the British Army had not been quite so full of men of high rank who were so ready for responsibility, so unflinchingly devoted to their duty, so unmoved in the face of difficulties, of such unfaltering courage.

In the latter half of The General, the author shows us what he means by this.

It has been suggested that Forester intended Curzon to be an amalgam of two actual Great War commanders: Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, who began the war as a corps commander and rose eventually to the command of the British Expeditionary Force; and General Sir Hubert Gough, perhaps the most controversial senior British commander. Men like these, he implies, had not the imagination to grasp that the art of war had undergone a fundamental change; that the traditional military virtues, if not obsolete, were deadly if opposed without support to barbed wire, the machine gun, massed artillery, mustard gas, all the horrors of trench warfare. And this failure of vision, he further implies, explains the futile offensives, stubbornly repeated despite horrific casualties and nugatory gains.

Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig

Curzon eventually rises to the command of a corps of 100,000 men—more men than the Duke of Wellington ever commanded, as Forester remarks. He plays his part in the great bloodletting along the Somme. Finally, in the spring of 1918, his corps is demolished during the German Army’s last great offensive. Curzon himself is grievously wounded, losing a leg.

Forester’s portrayal of Curzon and by extension of the British Army’s senior commanders on the Western Front, while not unsympathetic, is nonetheless an indictment. But is it fair? After all, as his creator says of Curzon, those men were given a job of work to do, and they did it to the best of their ability. The fact that in 1914, no senior officer in the British Army had ever held wartime command of any formation larger than a brigade was a tragedy of circumstances, not a culpable fault. Besides, there had been no major European war since 1815, though admittedly the Russo-Japanese War and the Balkan wars had supplied some clues to the likely character of the next major war.

Nor is it really true that the British Army of 1914 was a hidebound, obsolescent institution, totally unfitted for modern war. Since the turn of the century, much had been done to modernize it. Indeed, Curzon’s arm of the service, the cavalry, was largely reequipped and retrained, such that in 1914 the British cavalry proved much more effective than that of the French and German armies.

Still, there’s a good deal of truth in C.S. Forester’s fictional analysis of Britain’s Great War commanders, such that The General provides a useful—and highly readable—supplement to the relevant works of military history. I highly recommend it.