With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

Under the eye of “The Chief.” Troops marching past Sir John French at the Front.

Sir John French presides at his dinner-table with delightful urbanity. Books and battlefields have been the study of his life. He has, I believe, read all the histories of the campaigns of the world’s great Generals, from Julius Cæsar’s Commentaries down to Ropes’s History of the American Civil War, and the text-books on the Franco-Prussian War, especially the German. But he does not believe in reading alone. He is fond of quoting a saying of Lord Wolseley’s: “A soldier ought to read little and think much.” In accordance with this maxim, Sir John French has not only read but assimilated, and he has done a great deal of both.

But the military authors have not alone engaged his attention. He is a profound admirer of Dickens, and he can find suitable quotations and similes from Dickens for the most varied situations of life. He is not a great talker. He only speaks when he has something to say. But that is always to the point, and often refreshingly original.

The Commander-in-Chief is a profound student of humanity. That is why he admires Dickens. That is why he loves the British soldier, with his whimsicalities and his contradictory ways. He knows the British soldier as well as Lord Roberts knew him, and that is saying a great deal. He understands the British soldier’s pride in his work, and therefore he always gives credit where credit is due. When the Suffolks under his command in South Africa walked into a hornets’ nest at Grassy Hill, Sir John French took the first opportunity that presented itself—it was not until several months later that he met them again—to tell them they were not to blame for what happened.

“It has come to my knowledge,” he said to them, “that there has been spread about an idea that that event cast discredit of some sort upon this gallant regiment. I want you to banish any such thoughts from your mind as utterly untrue.... You must remember that, if we always waited for an opportunity of certain success, we should do nothing at all, and in war, fighting a brave enemy, it is absolutely impossible to be sure of success. All we can do is to try our very best to secure success—and that you did on the occasion I am speaking of.” When the 2nd Worcesters saved the day at the first battle of Ypres by recapturing Gheluvelt at the bayonet-point, the Commander-in-Chief made every possible inquiry to find out the name of the officer who had ordered the charge. The name of the officer remained for a long time a regimental secret, but Sir John French gave the gallant Worcesters a very fine “mention” all to themselves in his despatch on the Ypres fighting. It was not until months later that it was definitely established that the author of the celebrated order was that most gallant soldier the late Brigadier-General C. Fitzclarence, V.C., who was afterwards killed in action.

Thus, though Sir John French must fain deprive himself of the privilege he would be the first to want to enjoy, of seeing his troops actually at grips with the Germans, he is not simply a distant name, a figure on an Olympic height, to the men in the trenches. He is a pillar of strength, a man that soldiers trust, who voices to the great public beyond this little zone of war the deeds that have won a soldier’s approbation, or who gives vent in carefully chosen words to the soldier’s execration of the cynical treachery of the enemy. The bond uniting the Commander-in-Chief with the men in the field is not to be analyzed, for it is intangible. But it is nevertheless a very real tie of mutual esteem, trust, and affection.

Yet the army which in the fulness of time Sir John French has been called upon to command is no longer the army of South Africa, a small, highly trained band of professional soldiers whom the Germans, on first meeting with them at Mons, dubbed in despair “an army of non-commissioned officers.” Since the days of the Civil War it is the first national army that England has ever had, and the England that has put it in the field is the greater England of the twentieth century, the British Empire, whose pioneers sprang from that selfsame doughty stock that did not fear to lay hands on the Lord’s Anointed if thereby liberty might live.

The army has flung wide its portals to the civilian. All barriers of caste or wealth are broken down. The officer is no longer a member of a small military oligarchy, nor the soldier the tough old professional fighter of whom Kipling delighted to write. Mulvaney, Learoyd, and Ortheris have not vanished from the army. But they have vanished as average types. If they had escaped the destiny of so many of the magnificent fighters of our original Expeditionary Force, which was the quintessence of our standing army—six feet of earth in Flanders or a long visit to Germany—the three friends of Kipling’s tales would have passed out of their former sphere of action. The incorrigible Mulvaney, maybe, might yet be a sergeant, the backbone of his platoon, putting the new-comers, officers and men alike, up to all the dodges of the trenches. But the other two would surely be officers, with suspiciously new Sam Browne belts, a little uncertain of their social position, but treated with all the more deference for that by their fellow-officers.

Socially it is a topsy-turvy army. Learoyd is brigade machine-gun officer with the Military Cross, and has already learned the proper degree of nonchalance in returning the salutes of men who, in civilian life, maybe, themselves were wont to command, who perhaps even shared in that incomprehensible English prejudice against the military which refused the red-coat a seat in the stalls of a London theatre or a drink in the saloon bar of a public-house. “When I went to see the old people in Yorkshire in my uniform for the first time,” a fine old soldier of my acquaintance, a sergeant of the Coldstreams with twenty-two years’ service, told me once, “my father said: ‘I never thought boy of mine would disgrace the family by going for a soldier. Get out of here, and never darken my doors again until you have taken that red coat off!’”

Nous avons changé tout ça! The last shall be first and the first last in this citizen army of ours. I know of a peer of the realm, an Earl who is the head of one of the oldest families in the British Isles, who is serving as orderly in a clearing hospital at the front. When last seen he was whitewashing and whistling a little tune as he worked, the bearer of one of our greatest names at the beck and call of the humblest medical student with a commission in the R.A.M.C., but, like the latter, filling his niche in the service of the State.