On August 3, 1914, when The Times of London reported that Field Marshal Sir John French had been chosen to lead the British Expeditionary Force to France and the war, it was eager to make its readers understand that this was the best of all possible appointments in the best of all possible armies.
"There wasn't a moment's hesitation," the newspaper said of French's selection. "No painful canvassing of candidates, no acrimonious discussion, no odious comparison of the merits of respective generals, no hint of favoritism, of Party intrigue."
This happy state of affairs was possible, it explained, because French "surrounds himself with capable leaders and staff officers, and not only bring his troops to a high degree of efficiency, but also makes his officers a band of brothers, and establishes a good comradeship between all arm and all ranks."
As an early exercise in wartime propaganda, in helping the public take pride in its armed forces and the men chosen to lead them, this report was exemplary, As a reflection of the truth, it didn't fall far short of absurd. In the art of generalship, French was rarely better than ordinary. An ability to identify and make use of the best available men wasn't among his talents, and no knowledgeable observer would credit him with displaying, or raising the forces under his command to, impressive levels of efficiency. As for the officers corps being free of acrimony or favoritism or "party intrigue," The Times could hardly departed more shamelessly from the truth.
The British army of 1914 was a considerably more effective military instrument than it had been at the start of the century, when it experienced great difficulty(and had to resort to savagely brutal methods) in defeating a ragtag collection of guerrilla-farmers in South Africa's Boer War. Since it had improved its training, started at least to modernize its equipment, and established a general staff on the Prussian model. But in many ways-in its leadership above all-it remained stubbornly in the past. It was the army of a predemocratic culture in which a majority of the population was poor and powerless, the benefits of empire were reserved for a tiny elite, and people at every level of society were expected to accept the status quo as the natural order of things.
Britain was changing, however, and slowly the army, heels dug in, was being pulled along. At the start of the 1870's the government had ended the time-honored system by which officers bought their commissions and promotions, often paying fortunes to rise to the senior ranks. Even after this reform, however, only gentlemen were regarded as suitable candidates for the officer corps. The term "gentlemen" applied only to individuals with the right family antecedents, and not even gentlemen found it possible to survive as junior officers without private sources of income. Late in the 19th century, when an outstanding young sergeant named
was offered the rare opportunity to accept a commission, he was unable to do so because his expenses as junior lieutenant(everything from uniforms to mess fees to a share in supporting the regimental band) would have been at least 4x his salary of 100 pounds. When they did somehow manage to become officers, "rankers" were commonly shunned and even viciously hazed by gentlemen unwilling to accept them.
This was the system that had produced
and the other generals at the head of the BEF. They were gentlemen almost to a man, the only exception being the aforementioned William Robertson, who by then had risen, almost miraculously, to a major general.(He had taken a commission in the Army of India, where expenses were lower, and his tailor father made his uniforms.) As gentlemen they adhered to a code that elevated amateurism in all things to a supreme virtue. Hunting, shooting, polo, and weekend gatherings at county estates were proper activities. Too much seriousness-for example, to much reading even about military history and strategy-definitely wasn't. The kinds of disputes over theory that racked the French officer corps were unimaginable north of the Channel, where nobody in uniform care about theories. The right connections, and proper degree of aristocratic insouciance, were highways to advancement. They made the army an especially attractive career for the less intelligent sons of the very best families.
French himself, 61 years old in August 1914, was the son of a naval officer and had begun by entering the Royal Navy at age 14, At 22 he had switched to the cavalry, the most elite(and expensive) branch of the army, and thereafter he advanced with the help of impressive social skills and his dash as a horseman. In 1899, freshly promoted to major general, he went to South Africa as commander of a cavalry division, and there he won fame for his boldness while learning to hate, and coming to be hated by, the famous and powerful
In 1912 he reached the summit, becoming chief of the imperial general staff, and though he resigned at the time of the Curragh Mutiny, this was such a respectable, gentlemanly act of disloyalty that it proved no obstacle to is later selection as head of the BEF. By the time he went to France he was a stocky, almost dumpy-looking man in late middle age, stolid, unimaginative, and sour. Kitchener still regarded him as reckless, and so ordered him in writing to do nothing that would put his army at risk.
"My confidence in the ability of the leaders of the French Army...is fast waning."
French's chief of staff in the Boer War had been a young colonel named
who as lieutenant general became commanding officer of one of the BEF's 2 corps. A member of the whiskey-making Haig family of the Scottish borderlands, regarded by the true aristocrats as unworthy of admission to one of the elite cavalry regiments at the start of his career, Haig was not noticeably more intelligent than French but was gifted at acquiring influential patrons. He entered the military academy at Sandhurst at an unusually late age, having 1st attended Oxford, where he spent the standard 3 years but failed to earn a degree. Early in his career he failed the examination for entry to the army staff college but was rescued by his connections. His sister, married to a member of the Jameson whiskey dynasty who held the honorary position of the keeper of the Prince of Wales's racing yachts, got the Duke of Cambridge(an aged member of the royal family) to have the entry requirements waived on Haig's behalf.
In the Boer War he attracted the favorable attention of Lord Kitchener while building a friendship with French. Haig was handsome and unmarried and outspoken about his disdain for women, and the lifelong bachelor Kitchener always approved of officers of this type. Haig won French's gratitude by lending him the immense sum of $2,000, which French needed to extract himself from woman trouble.
After South Africa Haig was made aide-de-camp to King Edward VII, a position that provided visibility in the loftiest circles. In 1905 he married the Honorable Dorothy Vivian, favorite maid of honor to the queen. The Haigs were the 1st non-royal couple ever to be married in the chapel at Buckingham Palace; he had proposed 72 hours after meeting the lady, and one wonders what his bride thought when he wrote the "I have often made up my mind on more important problems than that of my own marriage in much less time." Within a year of his marriage, when the British army entered the modern world by creating a general staff for the 1st time, Haig's friends in government and at court campaigned to have him made chief. This proved impossible, the candidate being only 44 and never having held a major, command, but afterward he never stopped angling for the job. He was still angling even as the BEF prepared for deployment, whispering his doubts about French's abilities to everyone who would listen from his friend King George down, rarely failing to add that of course he was prepared to serve wherever needed. He always go a respectful hearing despite being wrong on a wide range of subjects: before the war he had pontificated that "the role of cavalry on the battlefield will always go on increasing" and "artillery only seems likely to be effective against raw troops." It was typical of Haig that he was able to maintain a good relationship with French while despising him. Haig despised almost every one of his brother officers except his own subordinates-so long as those subordinates were sufficiently submissive. Almost paranoid in his belief that he was constantly being conspired against, he responded with endless intrigues of his own.
The other 2 corps with which the BEF began the war was supposed to be headed by
but he dropped dead of a heart attack upon arriving in France. This was a stroke of luck for Haig. Grierson was a gifted infantry commander who, in the summer war games of 1912, had defeated Haig so completely, so humiliatingly, that the whole operation was brought to a stop ahead of schedule. Sir John French asked for
as replacement for Grierson, but Kitchener sent
Instead. Again Haig was lucky. Plumer, like Grierson, was not only a very senior lieutenant general but an extremely capable one. He would have been formidable rival, not only because Kitchener liked him but because years earlier, as an examiner at the staff college, he had expressed a scaldingly negative opinion of his student Haig. But he arrived in France under a tremendous handicap: French's intense dislike. He was under a microscope from the start, his every decision questioned.
French's deputy chief of staff was the BEF's archschemer, the wily Henry Wilson, who as director of military operations during the Curragh Mutiny had served as the Unionists' spy inside the general staff and was described by Haig as "such a terrrible intriguer, and sure to make mischief." As Britain's primary liaison to the French general staff before the war, Wilson had made important friends in Paris, and almost from the start of the war he was trying to use them to get himself promoted to chief of staff. He and French were united by their hatred of Kitchener, whom Wilson called "as much an enemy of England as Moltke."
When French's chief of staff was replaced, the went not to Wilson but to "Wully Robertson, who had performed brilliantly as the BEF's quartermaster general in the opening weeks of the war. He was not French's choice-Kitchener had blocked Wilson's appointment-and not for the 1st time he paid the price of being up from the ranks. French regularly dined with Wilson while excluding Robertson. Haig was more careful in showing his disdain. "He means well and will succeed, I feel sure," he wrote of Robertson. "How much easier though it is to work with a gentlemen."
At the top of this dysfunctional brotherhood stood the stern and iron-will Kitchener. Like Joffre and Gallieni, he had spent most of his life in far-flung colonial outposts. At age 20 he had interrupted his training to serve as a volunteer on the French side in the Franco-Prussian War, and soon thereafter he was sent to the Middle East with Royal Engineers. From then on his career was the stuff of legend. By 1886, when he was 36, he was governor of Britain's Red Sea territories. He became commander of the Egyptian army in 1892, a baron after putting down a rebellion in the Sudan in 1898, and Viscount Kitchener of Khartoum after leading the British forces to victory in the South African War(Burning the farms of the Boers and herding their wives and children into concentration camps, where they died by the 1,000's). He was commander in chief in India from 1902 to 1909, battling endlessly with viceroy, and from 1911 he ruled Egypt and the Sudan as British proconsul. By 1914 he had little knowledge of English society or politics and was so accustomed to being in charge of everyone and everything around him that he had virtually lost the ability to cooperate of delegate.
He happened to be in England during the crisis of August 1914.(He had been invited to come home to be made an earl.) When the war began, he was on a ship preparing to return to Egypt. Asquith called him back to London, asking him to join the cabinet as secretary of state for war. He agreed but without enthusiasm; his sole remaining ambition was to become Viceroy of India, and until that became possible, he preferred to remain in Cairo. In his new post(he did not relinquish his commission as the army's senior field marshal, or the salary that went with it) he was 1st serving officer to hold a British cabinet post since the 1600's. He was a shrewd man and a living legend, as familiar a symbol of the empire as the King. Other members of the government and the army were skeptical when he predicted that the main German invasion force would cross Belgium before entering France, incredulous when he warned that the war was going to last 3 years at least and that Britain would have to build an army of a 1,000,000 men. He was right on all points. In the end not a 1,000,000 but 51/2 million men would serve in His Majesty's armed forces.
