Макс Хейстингс – The General: The Classic WWI Tale of Leadership (страница 1)
The General
C. S. Forester
With an introduction by Max Hastings
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollins
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2014
Copyright © C. S. Forester 1936
Introduction © Max Hastings 2014
C. S. Forester asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
‘The General’ and ‘Base Details’ copyright Siegfried Sassoon, reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of George Sassoon.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780007580057
Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007580064
Version: 2017-09-08
Table of Contents
No warrior tribe in history has received such mockery and contempt from posterity as have been heaped upon Britain’s commanders of the First World War. They are deemed to have presided over unparalleled carnage with a callousness matched only by their incompetence. They are perceived as the high priests who dispatched a generation to death, their dreadful achievement memorialised for eternity by such bards as Siegfried Sassoon:
Two generations later, Sir John French, C-in-C of the wartime British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front, together with his successor Sir Douglas Haig, were caricatured by Alan Clark in his influential though wildly unscholarly 1961 polemic
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