The General

"The General is about the experience of high command, what it is like having to take appallingly tough decisions in which the lives of hundreds of thousands of people are going to be risked. It also shows the experience of somebody who starts off with high ideals about the way a war should be fought and is then exposed to the full storm of industrial war. An officer in the British army wins his spurs in the Boer War, who therefore regards war with all the idealistic belief and heroism that had hitherto been appropriate to the conduct of war, though even in 1900 things had begun to look a little more complicated. He then finds himself in command of a battalion in 1914 at the very, very beginning of the First World War, thrown into the full holocaust of the Western Front. He shows all the qualities of courage, initiative, self-reliance and good leadership and he is promoted rapidly and ends up commanding an army corps in 1917 with hundreds of thousands of men under him. He is engaged in a kind of war for which there had been no precedent at all, a war in which casualties numbered not in hundreds or thousands but tens of thousands, where the kinds of tactics that had been useful for hundreds of years were no longer valid and were suicidal. Where everything which he’d learnt as a soldier and brought up to believe in as a gentleman ceased to make any kind of sense, and this describes the manner in which he adjusts himself to this, not very successfully. It does explain why the war on the Western Front was fought in the way that it was. I have never read a book which describes the thing so clearly. Not the drama, tragedy and squalor of the trenches, which has been agonisingly well described, but what it was like having to put these people into action and put them through it all. This is a book that has been largely forgotten but which I very strongly recommend to anybody who wants to understand the First World War. It’s very short. C S Forester was a very considerable novelist, the author of the Hornblower series about the Napoleonic Wars and all those qualities of courage, heroism and patriotism, which a century later caused disaster. The thing is, what matters at the time is – you’ve got to win. What really matters in the front line is courage, what really matters in high command is skill, wisdom and cunning, and the pins in a map you try to move around in such a way as to achieve a result with the least possible damage to your own people. The people in the war rooms in Whitehall…remember those people there were being bombarded almost every night from the air. They are not miles behind the lines. They are in the thick of it. What they are looking at, much more than troops on the ground, was moving ships around, to keep the supply lines open and safe from submarines. That was the way in which the war could be lost, very nearly was lost. The agonising emotions they must have felt as they saw these convoys being launched across the Atlantic and falling into the grip of the submarines and getting sunk – not simply losing the lives of the men but the goods, food, ammunition that made it possible to conduct the war at all. There was the sense that this is a war that could be lost, is being lost, and are the things that we’re doing going to save us? It is not simply a game, it is existential. It’s about survival. It’s that kind of devastating responsibility on the shoulders of individuals, which one has got to bear in mind."