Now It Can Be Told

by Philip Gibbs

I found a general opinion among officers and men, not only of the Irish Division, under the command of the Fifth Army, that they had been the victims of atrocious staff-work, tragic in its consequences. From what I saw of some of the Fifth Army staff-officers I was of the same opinion. Some of these young gentlemen, and some of the elderly officers, were arrogant and supercilious without revealing any symptoms of intelligence. If they had wisdom it was deeply camouflaged by an air of inefficiency. If they had knowledge they hid it as a secret of their own. General Gough, commanding the Fifth Army in Flanders, and afterward north and south of St.-Quentin, where the enemy broke through, was extremely courteous, of most amiable character, with a high sense of duty. But in Flanders, if not personally responsible for many tragic happenings, he was badly served by some of his subordinates; and battalion officers and divisional staffs raged against the whole of the Fifth Army organization, or lack of organization, with an extreme passion of speech.

“You must be glad to leave Flanders,” I said to a group of officers trekking toward the Cambrai salient.

One of them answered, violently: “God be thanked we are leaving the Fifth Army area!”

In an earlier chapter of this book I have already paid a tribute to the Second Army, and especially to Sir John Harington, its chief of staff. There was a thoroughness of method, a minute attention to detail, a care for the comfort and spirit of the men throughout the Second Army staff which did at least inspire the troops with the belief that whatever they did in the fighting-lines had been prepared, and would be supported, with every possible help that organization could provide. That belief was founded not upon fine words spoken on parade, but by strenuous work, a driving zeal, and the fine intelligence of a chief of staff whose brain was like a high-power engine.

I remember a historic little scene in the Second Army headquarters at Cassel, in a room where many of the great battles had been planned, when Sir John Harington made the dramatic announcement that Sir Herbert Plumer, and he, as General Plumer's chief of staff, had been ordered to Italy—in the middle of a battle—to report on the situation which had become so grave there. He expressed his regret that he should have to leave Flanders without completing all his plans, but was glad that Passchendaele had been captured before his going.

In front of him was the map of the great range from Wytschaete to Staden, and he laid his hand upon it and smiled and said: “I often used to think how much of that range we should get this year. Now it is nearly all ours.” He thanked the war correspondents for all their articles, which had been very helpful to the army, and said how glad he had been to have our co-operation.

“It was my ambition,” he said, speaking with some emotion, “to make cordial relations between battalion officers and the staff, and to get rid of that criticism (sometimes just) which has been directed against the staff. The Second Army has been able to show the fighting soldiers that the success of a battle depends greatly on efficient staff work, and has inspired them with confidence in the preparations and organization behind the lines.”

Yet it seemed to me, in my pessimism, and seems to me still, in my memory of all that ghastly fighting, that the fine mechanism of the Second Army applied to those battles in Flanders was utterly misspent, that after the first heavy rains had fallen the offensive ought to have been abandoned, and that it was a frightful error of judgment to ask masses of men to attack in conditions where they had not a dog's chance of victory, except at a cost which made it of Pyrrhic irony.

Nevertheless, it was wearing the enemy out, as well as our own strength in man-power. He could less afford to lose his one man than we could our three, now that the United States had entered the war. Ludendorff has described the German agony, and days of battle which he calls “terrific,” inflicting “enormous loss” upon his armies and increasing his anxiety at the “reduction of our fighting strength.”

“Enormous masses of ammunition, the like of which no mortal mind before the war had conceived, were hurled against human beings who lay, eking out but a bare existence, scattered in shell-holes that were deep in slime. The terror of it surpassed even that of the shell-pitted field before Verdun. This was not life; it was agony unspeakable. And out of the universe of slime the attacker wallowed forward, slowly but continually, and in dense masses. Time and again the enemy, struck by the hail of our projectiles in the fore field, collapsed, and our lonely men in the shell-holes breathed again. Then the mass came on. Rifle and machine-gun were beslimed. The struggle was man to man, and—only too often—it was the mass that won.