Tommy (34 page)

The commander of 46th Division, Major General the Hon. Edward Montagu-Stuart-Wortley, was speedily sacked following an unfavourable report from his corps commander, Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Snow.

Haig informed the military secretary at the War Office that he was not prepared to have him back in France as a divisional commander. The general at once protested, but although he was given an understrength division in Ireland he was never employed again on active service.
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Home admitted that ‘the failure has been a great blow to me as I helped in the preparations and was responsible for the preliminary work'.
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It is hard to resist the conclusion that Montagu-Stuart-Wortley, past his fighting best at fifty-eight, would have profited from experienced infantry advice in planning his attack, one of the most difficult on the first day of the Somme because its left flank was wide open.

It was helpful for a chief of staff and his commander to have different personalities: if one was a generalist, the other should be a man of detail; if one was taciturn, the other should be outgoing. ‘To get the best out of a combination of men,' suggested Nicholson, ‘you must have diversity; all high cards, but no pairs.' Allenby of 3rd Army had not earned the nickname ‘the Bull' for nothing, and when he left his headquarters the staff would warn subordinates with the Morse letters BBL for ‘Bloody Bull Loose'. Lord Stanhope, who grew to like him, thought that though ‘to some extent he consulted his subordinate commanders, they were nervous of expressing an opinion as he was liable to be severe of anything he thought foolish'. His chief of staff, Hugh Jeudwine, had what his obituarist called ‘a firm, uncompromising outlook' and Stanhope thought the combination altogether too tough. The only man who could bend Allenby seemed to be his pleasant aide de camp Captain Dalmeny – ‘the bull pup' – who ‘used to take him out for a walk and bring him back in a peaceful frame of mind'. Plumer and his chief of staff Major General Sir Charles ‘Tim' Harington worked together so well that Charteris thought it impossible to see where one ended and the other began. Sometimes Harington would rough out a plan and pass it to Plumer for comment, or sometimes the process would work in reverse, with Plumer initiating the scheme and passing it round for the view of his staff. Stanhope, with his extensive experience of headquarters, thought him ‘much the best of our higher commanders'.
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The ‘rule of differents' also applied at divisional level. Lieutenant Colonel Jack Collins, GSO1 of 17th Division, ‘had all the fire and enthusiasm the general lacked', and it was an index of the quality of his staff, which worked with broad direction but little detailed supervision, that an artillery brigade attached from another division ‘gave us the unstinted meed of praise that, of the nine divisions that had shot over, we were the only division who really looked after them'.
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But his successor was a man for detail and the mood changed at once.

In all headquarters it was important for the staff branches to pull together. They were usually in different rooms or huts, and it was easy for them to drift into the backwaters of specialisation. Some staffs maintained a rule of personal contact, which decreed that as much business as possible would be done face to face, and that even unexpected visitors would always be met by an officer with a clear view of the big picture. When Lord Stanhope went to XIII Corps he found a state of ‘armed neutrality' between the G and Q staffs.

His commander, Lieutenant General Sir Walter Congreve, was so involved with the troops that he made himself unpopular with his divisions and brigades, and was so worn out by this that he seemed unaware of what was wrong with his headquarters.

When Stanhope moved on to III Corps, under Lieutenant General Sir Claude Jacob, he found things altogether better. This was, he thought, because Jacob never went up the line, and ‘was thus better able to keep a wide view … While not a clever man he had sound common sense and good judgement. His staff advised him, and Divisional Staffs liked and trusted him, as did the troops.' Jacob was also not prepared to allow himself to be browbeaten by army commanders. When Gough criticised a plan of attack during Third Ypres, Jacob replied ‘that he must carry out his attacks in his own way or he had better resign and hand over command of III Corps to someone else. Sir Hubert Gough replied that this was the last thing he wanted and let him carry out the attack as he planned it. The attack was a wonderful success.'
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Walter Guinness, then serving on the staff of one of Jacob's brigades, thought him ‘a very good soldier, but there is little confidence in our Army Commander (Sir Hubert Gough)' whose staff, by comparison with those of Second Army, ‘struck one as haphazard in its methods'.
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There were functional differences between all these levels of command. Armies prepared large-scale plans of their own either within the context of a campaign plan laid down by GHQ, or on their own initiative. The scheme for Cambrai resulted from ideas put forward by the headquarters of the Tank Corps, with its laterally-thinking chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel J. F. C. Fuller, and the groundbreaking concepts of Brigadier General Hugh ‘Owen' Tudor, CRA of 9th Scottish Division. Byng backed the radicals, and persuaded Haig to let him try. It was arguably Haig's readiness to allow the battle to become attritional after its initial success, rather than to order Byng to cut his losses, that paved the way for the depressing setback which came with the German counterattack. The attack on Messines Ridge was contrived and executed by 2nd Army on the direction of, but with minimal interference from, GHQ.

The corps was the lowest level at which major plans could be formulated, largely because it boasted artillery assets which could reach deep into German defences and focus a real weight of firepower in support of its attacks. We have already seen that the British had no experience of this level of command before the war, and it is striking to see how little uniformity there was in the function of corps throughout the conflict. Some army commanders tended to use their corps simply to transmit orders to divisions, while others allowed corps commanders more latitude in planning to achieve a broadly-defined aim. Corps themselves treated their divisions in just the same way, and ‘the flexible style of command, where more authority was delegated to divisions (where possible) than had been the case since 1915, was crucial in the offensives of the Hundred Days'.
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But it is striking how contemporaries often perceived the corps as the rain cloud over their heads. Charles Carrington thought that:

Walter Nicholson believed that Lord Cavan of XIV Corps was ‘one of the rare corps commanders who was known by name to more than divisional commanders'. Carrington thought that while ‘my colonel, brigadier and divisional commander were men I could respect [and] every man in my company knew Brigadier Sladen and General Fanshawe by sight I doubt if one in ten knew the corps commander's name'.
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Occasionally a corps commander's attempt to be well known misfired. Lieutenant General Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston of VIII Corps always introduced himself by his full name and title, proudly adding ‘MP' after being elected to Parliament (for North Ayrshire) in October 1916. In the bitter winter of 1917–18 ‘Hunter-Bunter' decided to wish troops departing on leave trains a merry Christmas. An aide de camp would open the carriage door and the general would intone: ‘I am Lieutenant General Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston MP, your Corps Commander, and I wish you a Happy Christmas.' From the smoky fug of one carriage a disembodied voice declared: ‘And I'm the Prince of Wales, and wish you'd shut the bloody door.'

The brigade, at the very bottom of our pile, had a comparatively hands-on headquarters. When Frank Crozier took command of his brigade in 1916 his divisional commander advised him, as they parted, to: ‘Treat your new brigade like a big battalion.'
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However, experienced staff officers recognised that successful brigade commanders needed a wider grasp of military matters to command a brigade successfully. Walter Guinness described one recently-arrived brigadier as ‘a very nice person and a most dashing leader of men, but completely ignorant about all Staff Work and the detail of running a brigade'.
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However, his sheer good sense in arranging matters so that his staff were not frequently disturbed meant that the headquarters actually worked much better than it had under his more experienced predecessor. Brigade headquarters were birds of passage. A division holding a sector of front might rotate its brigades so as to have two in the line and one out, and brigades did much the same with their battalions. In the hard winter of 1916–17, for instance, Crozier's brigade did seven days in the line before being relieved.

In 1914 an infantry brigade would have had only three red-tabbed officers on its staff, the commander, his brigade major and a staff captain. However, it was impossible to control four battalions in a twenty-four-hour battle with such a tiny staff, and so as the war progressed brigade headquarters was fleshed out with more officers and clerks. Walter Guinness, flagged up for a brigade major's appointment, was sent on a six-week staff course at Hesdin in late 1916. Most of those attending were brigade majors, staff captains or GSO3s, and he:

In February 1917 he was appointed brigade major to 74th Infantry Brigade under Keppel Bethell. ‘Instead of the usual Brigade Mess of about ten,' he wrote, ‘we had only five – Bethell, M— (the Staff Captain), an Orderly Officer … a Signalling Officer … and I.'
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On the eve of the attack on Messines this brigade headquarters moved up into a newly-constructed dugout just 600 yards from the front line. It was all too obvious, and ‘Bowyer, the QM of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers had his head taken off [by a shell] just as he was coming into the door of our dugout.' The dugout itself was 30 feet below the surface, with ‘endless passages, five entries and eight rooms … also electric light. One only hears a very dull thud when a heavy shell lands on top.' Later that summer, after Plumer's 2nd Army had taken direction of attacks up the Menin Road, Bethell's brigade headquarters was in a deep dugout at Birr Cross-Roads, half a mile north of the site of Hooge Château. ‘The dugout was one of the most disgusting places I have ever lived in,' admitted Guinness.

Bethell was notoriously testy and impatient, and ‘became absolutely impossible' so that he had to eat his meals alone.

In March 1918 Hanway Cumming's brigade headquarters at Saul-court, just behind the line, was approached by a sunken road and ‘consisted of a series of “elephant shelters” dug into the bank of the road with a mined dugout below them, altogether very snug and comfortable quarters, as things went.'
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He commanded from the dugout, he and his staff wearing gas masks for much of the day, when the Germans attacked on 21 March. In the fluid battle that followed he spent much of his time on the move. He was riding back with his orderly from another brigade headquarters (staff cars were not issued below divisional level), which was in telephone communication with divisional headquarters, ‘when suddenly he was fired at comparatively short range, one bullet hitting the horse just in front of the saddle'. He galloped clear, though both horses died later: he acknowledged that he owed his life ‘to the gallant way in which, although badly wounded, the horses had kept up sufficiently to carry them out of danger'.
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