Макс Хейстингс – The General (страница 4)

But if 1914–18’s generals deserve sympathy for the intractability of the military challenges they faced, to modern eyes they still seem repugnant for their indifference to the massacres over which they presided. A vivid insight into their emotional processes, or lack of them, was provided by the 1952 publication of Sir Douglas Haig’s diaries. For instance, the BEF’s C-in-C wrote on 2 July 1916, amid the Battle of the Somme: ‘A day of ups and downs! … I visited two Casualty Clearing Stations … They were very pleased at my visit. The wounded were in wonderful spirits … The A[djutant]-G[eneral] reported today that the total casualties are estimated at over 40,000 to date. This cannot be considered severe in view of the numbers engaged, and the length of front attacked. By nightfall, the situation is much more favourable than we started today.’ Next day, Haig added: ‘Weather continued all that could be desired.’ Winston Churchill, who knew the senior officers of the war intimately both as a cabinet minister and, for some months, as a battalion commander on the Western Front, penned a vivid portrait of the wartime C-in-C, soon after Haig’s death in 1928:

He presents to me in those red years the same mental picture as a great surgeon before the days of anaesthetics, versed in every detail of such science as was known to him; sure of himself, steady of poise, knife in hand, intent upon the operation; entirely removed in his professional capacity from the agony of the patient, the anguish of relations, or the doctrines of rival schools, the devices of quacks, or the first-fruits of new learning. He would operate without excitement, or he would depart without being affronted; and if the patient died, he would not reproach himself.

Forester’s Herbert Curzon was a subordinate officer rather than a warlord, but in this respect he exemplified his real-life superiors as well as his peers. His own diary, had he kept one, would have resembled Haig’s. He was a Roman, schooled since childhood to regard fortitude in the face of difficulties and losses as an indispensable virtue for every right-thinking soldier, a view shared by the senior officers of Russia, France, Germany, Austria, Italy. What seems to a twenty-first-century society to have been harsh insensitivity was, to those who led armies throughout earlier ages, an essential element of manhood and even more so of warriorhood. Some of Napoleon’s greatest victories were purchased at appalling human cost, but even today few French people think the less of him because of this. The first Duke of Wellington wept when confronted by the ‘butcher’s bills’ for his triumphs, but he never hesitated to sacrifice men to battlefield imperatives. Consider those British squares at Waterloo, which finished the battle where they had started it, but with almost every man dead in his place. Almost one in four of Wellington’s soldiers were killed or wounded on 18 June 1815, about the same proportion of those engaged as fell on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Somme. Great captains have 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: