Nothing surprised me more when I became intimate with the men than their attitude towards their commanding officers. I had read of the devotion of armies to their leaders. We are told how Napoleon’s soldiers idolised him; how Wellington’s men believed in him so that they were prepared to follow him anywhere, confident in his genius. Misled by newspaper correspondents, I supposed that I should find this sort of thing common in France. I had often read of this general and that as beloved or trusted by his men.
In fact no such spirit exists. Very often the men do not know the name of the commander of the particular army, or even the brigade, to which they belong; so little has the personality of the general impressed itself on the men. Very often I used to meet evidences of personal loyalty to a junior officer, a company commander, or a subaltern. Occasionally men have the same feeling about a colonel. They never seem to go beyond that. There was not a trace of admiration for or confidence in any one in high command. It was not that the men distrusted their generals or disliked them. Their attitude was generally neutral. They knew nothing and cared very little about generals.
Perhaps men never did idolise generals, and historians, like newspaper correspondents, are simply inventing pretty myths when they tell us about the hero worship paid to Napoleon, Wellington, and the rest.
Perhaps the fact is that the conditions of modern warfare tend to obscure the glory of a general. He can no longer prance about on a horse in front of lines of gaping men, proudly contemptuous of the cannon balls which come bounding across the field of battle from the enemy’s artillery. His men are inclined to forget his existence, usually do remain ignorant of his name because they do not see him. One is tempted to wonder whether the formal—and very wearisome—inspections which are held from time to time behind the lines, generally on cold and rainy days, are not really pathetic efforts of kings and generals to assert themselves, to get somehow into the line of vision of the fighting men.
Perhaps it may be that generals, through no fault of their own, have lost that “plaguy trick of winning victories” which bound the heart of Dugald Dalgetty to Gustavus Adolphus. Victories, so far as we can see, are things which do not occur in modern warfare, or, at all events, do not occur on the western front. If any one did win a victory of the old-fashioned kind it is quite possible that he might become the hero of the soldier.
It would be very interesting to know what the feelings of soldiers of other armies are towards their generals. The German people seem to idolise von Hindenburg. Have the German soldiers any kind of confidence in his star? Von Mackensen has some brilliant exploits to his credit. Does Fritz, drafted into a regiment commanded by him, march forward serenely confident of victory?
Our men do no such thing. They have unshaken confidence in themselves. They are sure that their company commanders will not fail them or their colonels let them down. But they have no kind of feeling, good or bad, about their generals.