With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

The influence of the great modern General will always be indirect rather than direct. Comparatively few of the German troops fighting on the Western front had ever set eyes on Field-Marshal von Hindenburg, save in pictures, yet, when the rumour ran in the spring that he was coming to assume the supreme command in Flanders, the men in the trenches set up notices on the parapets announcing to the Engländer that Hindenburg was coming, and that the Germans would be in Calais in a week.

“Daily Mail” phot.
The Chief.

The influence of Sir John French on the British Army in France is as a strong leaven leavening the whole mass. The conditions of life of an army in the field, a great host of men working to the same end, the monotony of existence undisturbed by sex antagonism, united by the risk of death common to all, make men as sensitive to the transmission of influences as African tribes are to the transmission of news. In the field a strong character will make itself felt in a week. Imperceptibly, the men will begin to lean on qualities of determination, courage, intuition. All these are attributes of Sir John French, and they are, I believe, responsible, in quite an astonishing degree, for the splendid tenacity, the unshakable optimism, of the British Army in France.

Within his power, Sir John French has always sought to keep in personal contact with the men in the firing-line. More than once, on the retreat from Mons, the Commander-in-Chief might have been seen to leave his car and sit down beside the exhausted troops resting by the roadside, so tired that they did not care whether the whole German Army was in the next field. He would remain there on the dusty grass, and tell the men that it was only so many miles to the next halt for the night, and spur them on to fresh efforts by his generous praise of the splendid endurance they had shown up to then. In a little he would have them on their feet again, foot-sore and weary as they were, ready to face the world, if needs be, to win a pat on the shoulder, a word of appreciation, from “Sir John.”

But the British Army in France has grown immeasurably since those days when four divisions was England’s entire contribution to the war on land. With the army of Mons, the Commander-in-Chief might yet hope to be the John French of South Africa, where the cavalry hailed the trim little man on the white horse as the harbinger of stern, swift blows against the Boer, as the incorporation of dash, decision, and resourcefulness. But with the great citizen army of to-day, in which he counts divisions where before he counted battalions, the British Generalissimo could not hope to keep in personal touch in the same degree as was possible with the cavalry in South Africa or with the little Expeditionary Force of August, 1914.

Nevertheless, Sir John French has never failed in this war to visit formations that have distinguished themselves, and to express to them personally his appreciation of their good work. I remember, after the second battle of Ypres, receiving word that the Commander-in-Chief would inspect some brigades of cavalry that had held our line round Ypres on May 13, when the Germans made their last and most violent attempt to burst through to the sea. It was a fine, warm morning in June, a regular Aldershot review day, though, Heaven knows! there was little enough of the red and gold of Cæsar’s Camp or Laffan’s Plain about the squadrons in their war-worn khaki drawn up in a square in a meadow by a country road. The Commander of the Cavalry Corps was there, and the Divisional General and the Brigadiers, and just in front, beside a fine, broad Union Jack fluttering from a flagstaff planted on a farm-cart, Sir John French, exquisitely neat, as usual, in his trim khaki, with four rows of medal-ribbons, and immaculate brown field-boots, and a cane that he swung as he talked.

The men stood easy, Lifeguards and Hussars and Dragoons, dismounted as they had been at Ypres, their eyes on the soldierly figure before them, their thoughts, I wager, away among the poppies and the cornflowers of the salient where in their graves dead comrades smiled in their last sleep at the recollection of the good fight well fought. The Commander-in-Chief indulged in no rhetorics. He, like the plain man he is, likes plain speaking. So he stood up there against the farm-cart, and talked to the men in a clear, soldierly voice, and as he spoke, lo! it was not the Commander-in-Chief addressing his troops, but just John French of the 19th talking to his cavalry, that cavalry he loved and made his life-work. There were no tears, no elegiacs, but heartening words of praise for good service stoutly rendered. There was, indeed, such perfect frankness in much of what the Field-Marshal said that I remember the blue pencil of the Censor cut furrows in the report of it I sent to my newspaper in London.

As soon as a new body of troops arrives in France, whether Territorials or Colonials or New Army, you may be sure that, before very long, the Rolls Royce, flying the Union Jack from the roof—the only car that may fly the old flag in France—will appear outside their billets, and the Commander-in-Chief will descend to see for himself what the new material is like. One has only to glance at his despatches to see that he never fails to pay a tribute to good qualities in new troops out from home. Real soldier that he is, he always has a keen eye to the general appearance of the men, knowing that the best soldiers are the men who, even in the rigour of winter in the trenches, managed to preserve a cleanly appearance, and who, right up in the firing-line, are as punctilious about saluting as they would be in barracks at home. The Brigade of Guards, who always pride themselves upon their personal neatness, set a fine example to the army in this respect, and earned the approval of every good soldier.

Sir John French has had many residences since he came to France in August. Châteaux, farms, colleges, or other public buildings, and the villas or town-houses of such local notabilities as the Mayor, the lawyer, or the doctor, have afforded him hospitality from the battle of Mons and the subsequent retreat down to the stalemate of the war of positions which brought our General Headquarters to anchor for a spell. But no matter where the Commander-in-Chief has lived, though his house were French, its atmosphere has always been wholly and essentially English. Thus, at G.H.Q. in the little town of which I wrote in my last chapter, though the large and stately rooms and rather florid furniture, the pictures and statuary of the house in which he lives are bourgeois of the bourgeois, they are powerless to dissipate the pleasant family air of the place, the atmosphere of an English country seat in the shires.