The Army was short of soldiers. It was even more short of officers and NCOs to lead them, for such men were at the forefront of the action and the casualties among officers and NCOs had been proportionately greater than casualties among the troops. In recent months the ranks had been combed through again and again, not only for skilled tradesmen, but for men of experience and education who might be worthy of being elevated to the status of ‘temporary gentleman’. In the 8th Duke of Wellington’s, as in many other disbanded battalions, the quartermaster and two company sergeant-majors were sent directly to officer-cadet battalions in England, where those who had begun officer training several months earlier were sweating over the final exam papers. For most infantrymen the practical side was a walkover. The paper on military law and military organization required more thought:
You are temporarily in command of a company on active service and the following cases are brought before you for investigation and disposal at your Company Orderly Room: –
(1.) Private A. Being half-an-hour late for company parade.
(2.) Private B. Dirty and improperly dressed on parade.
(3.) Corporal C. Neglect of duty when i/c of a ration party.
(4.) Private D. Using insubordinate language to company sergeant-major.
(a.) State which of the above offences you think you could dispose of yourself and which would be remanded for the Commanding Officer.
(b.) What entries would be made in the Minor Offence Report in each case?
(c.) Where would a record be made of the punishment awarded to each man?
(15 marks)
Even when an embryo officer had not studied so assiduously as he might have done, experience and common sense went a long way towards supplying the answers, but there was one apparently straightforward question which was not so easy as it looked:
As a 2nd Lieutenant you are in charge of a draft of 4 non-commissioned officers and 36 men under orders to proceed by train. On arriving at the station, half-an-hour before the train is due, you are informed that one first-class and five third-class compartments have been reserved for your party. The train will only stop for five minutes. What action do you take?
(15 marks)
This caused much furrowing of the brow among young men whose soldiering until now had been done in the democratic ranks. Should the officer choose to occupy the first-class carriage in solitary splendour and cram the men and NCOs into the rest? Should he invite the NCOs to join him? Should he allocate one NCO to each of four third-class compartments, or should they have a carriage to themselves? There were endless permutations, and it was not easy to guess which would most happily combine discipline and respect for the King’s Commission, as personified by the officer, with practical good sense and the comfort of the men. Given the choice, most of the would-be officers would have felt more at home deploying a platoon for action on the battlefield.
Reg Lloyd was terrified that he would not pass the examination, for his six months’ training had been blissful by comparison with the previous two years as a reluctant infantryman in the trenches. When the chance came to get out of them, he had seized it.
Second Lieutenant Reg Lloyd, A Bty., Royal Horse Artillery, 41st Division
I was in the trenches by Armentières, and I had to go to Divisional Headquarters at Bailleul to go before General Bainbridge, who was the GOC of the Division. He said to me, ‘You have been recommended by your colonel to be a commissioned officer,’ and he asked me a lot of questions.
I said, ‘If I’m lucky enough to go for my commission, Sir, could I go to the gunners, Sir?’
He said, ‘The gunners? You don’t know anything about the gunners. You’re an infantryman!’
I said, ‘Well, I know quite a bit about horses, Sir. I was in the Cheshire Yeomanry.’
‘Were you, by George!’ he said, just like that. ‘Who was your colonel?’
‘The Duke of Westminster, Sir.’
‘My God! How long were you trained as a cavalryman?’
‘About two years, Sir.’
He didn’t say any more to me. He just said to the sergeant-major, ‘See that this man gets some tea.’
So I had a drop of tea from the cookhouse next door, and then I got a wagon to take me back up the line. An order came through a few days after that: ‘You will report to Number 3 Royal Horse Artillery Equitation Training School at Weedon.’ Well! I’m a horseman again! Wearing spurs again! Six horses to a gun, six mules to a gun-wagon, so I’m right in my element. I loved it, because it was exactly what I wanted, and I worked damned hard, because I didn’t want to fail. If I failed it would be RTU – return to unit. Back in France again, or maybe a second chance at an Infantry Cadet School.
It was a long course. First of all there was a month in what they called the kindergarten, which was a sort of trial. Then you had to get up to three different grades – C, B and A – and, if you got through that, a final month at Larkhill, shooting on the range. Then at the end, when you’re waiting for the results of the exams to come through – in the cadets’ mess, you know – what an anxious time! We spent hours chewing over the papers, comparing what we’d written. We had to dress for dinner, wear a bow tie – it was always done properly. It was very pukka. Then a notice appeared one day: ‘The following cadets will be gazetted and will report to …’ I hardly dared look down the list, and when I came to ‘L’ and saw my name there I thought ‘Thank God for that!’ We’d just had weekend leave, and I’d been walking round Chester as an officer-cadet with a white band round my hat. Very smart. I thought, ‘My God, if I’d to go back to those trenches!’ But I didn’t, of course.
39181 Private W. Luff, 1st Bn., The Queen’s (Royal West Surrey Regt.), 33rd Division
There was an outcry about youngsters going to the front and, being under age, they put me on what they called A3, which was training for the officers. We were drilled with two men with toggles and ropes representing platoons and battalions, and in charge was our old regimental sergeant-major, Chokey Sullivan. He used to stand there with about half a dozen subalterns, and he would say, ‘Mister So-and-So!’ Mister So-and-So would come out, and he would say, ‘Back! Step off your left foot with your cane in your right arm, bring your cane up and slap it on your left arm and walk smartly.’ And he would make them do it again.
‘Now,’ he’d say, ‘you’ve got your battalion facing south in column of route. Now get them facing east in open order.’ Just like that. We knew all this battalion drill, but we had to do just as the officer ordered us, not what we knew was the right thing to do, and of course some of those young subalterns tied us up in knots! And Chokey would say, ‘Well, Mister So-and-So –’ he always addressed them as Mister So-and-So – ‘now what have you done?’ They got us in all sorts of knots.
It was the 3rd Training Battalion, and it included us recruits and two companies of old sweats who had been wounded and were there training before they were sent back again. Chokey used to drill in front of them with a pace-stick, and he’d stand there and he’d slap the old stick like that – Bang! And one of these old sweats was a cheeky old so-and-so – he thought he would get away with it – and he said, ‘You can do that with that stick, but can you do it with this rifle?’ Chokey said, ‘Stand at ease! Now that man, six paces forward, march!’ He said, ‘Give me the rifle!’ He gave him his rifle, and Chokey went through all of it. All the blasted drill there was – slope arms, present arms, the lot. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘let’s see if you can do it.’ And he put the poor blighter through it for half an hour, up and down, up and down the parade ground. Oh, he was tough old codger – and he was just as tough on these rookie subalterns as he was on us.
The Royal Military Academies at Sandhurst and at Woolwich were still turning out ‘permanent gentlemen’ who would be commissioned into the Regular Army. Even in wartime, even with the desperate shortage of officers, the standards of entry and training were as rigorous as they had always been. Young Lieutenant Baines had recently been commissioned from the RMA at Woolwich – known colloquially as ‘the Shop’ – where they trained the sappers and gunners who would serve with the Royal Engineers or the Royal Artillery. Michael Baines had worked extremely hard to get there, but it was not the glamour of wartime that attracted him to a career in the army.
Lieutenant Michael Baines, 55 Bty., Royal Field Artillery, 8th Division
There was a long Army tradition in our family. In fact I was born in India when my father was serving as a captain with the York and Lancasters. I’d been sent to school at Cheltenham, and it was a pretty high-level Army school. I was there until 1915, and then I went to Woolwich. All my mother’s family were sappers – in fact my mother’s great-grandfather was Lord Raglan, who made a bit of a muck of it at Balaclava – but I didn’t want to be a sapper, because you had to be jolly good at mathematics, and I couldn’t stand mathematics. I wanted to be with horses and guns. Fortunately in the entrance examination I didn’t get quite enough marks to be a sapper, so I was a gunner.
They fairly put us through the hoop! It was very good for you. It hardened you off to be a decent officer.
I had to mark time until I was nineteen, but eventually I did manage to get to France. This was engineered by a family friend called Bill Duncan, who happened to command a Regular battery. It was the 55th Battery, quite an illustrious one – started the war at Mons and finished at Mons. Anyway, Bill Duncan had heard I was coming over and I suppose a few strings had been pulled. He made one stipulation. He said, ‘If this young man joins us he’s got to get his riding breeches made at Huntsman’s.’ I ask you! In those days riding breeches cost eleven pounds at Huntsman’s in Bond Street. A huge sum! So I had to have a pair of riding breeches made by Huntsman, but I didn’t wear my Huntsman breeches – good gracious no! I got a pair from the quartermaster ordnance, which didn’t fit anywhere. Luckily, because I got a bullet through the seat! They were very baggy – lots of folds and creases – and I got a machine-gun bullet through the folds. Four to be exact.
Having enjoyed a period of sick leave, which he had contrived to stretch over Christmas and into the New Year, Michael Baines arrived back in Flanders as it began to thaw. The icy cold had bitten hard and driven deep, and the thaw began slowly. First the crackle of splintering ice beneath the heel of a heavy boot; opaque sheets of ice gradually turning translucent and floating in dimpled shards on the surface of flooded shell-holes; duckboards tilting and sinking a little as a shivering soldier stamped his chilly feet. The slow ooze of mud across the white landscape. The trickle of water as snow melted, swelling to a flood when it started to rain, turning every trench into a torrent, every track into a cascade, every camp into a seat of mud, and the Ypres salient into a waterlogged morass.
Further south, where the unfortunate Aussies of the 24th Battalion were in the line, the River Douve broke its banks. Trenches fell in, dugouts collapsed under the weight of water, and, since the German soldiers across the way were in the same plight, the fighting died down. Pumps chugged on both sides of No Man’s Land and, rather than wade through the flooded trenches, some daring souls took their chance in the open and ploughed through the mud on top. The risk was small, for, as Lieutenant Gordon Beith bitterly remarked as he contemplated their watery domain, they ran more risk of being attacked by the enemy’s U-boats than by the enemy’s infantry. The general verdict was that they would be better off with torpedoes than with the heavy boxes of small-arms ammunition that their brawniest efforts could hardly prevent from disappearing into the mud.
Since the capture of Passchendaele two months previously it had at least been possible to build a light railway track as far as the gun-line, to relieve the burden of the troops and ease the difficulty of hauling rations and supplies through the worst of the slough. Michael Baines’ first job on his return from leave was to deliver two guns to the battery at the top of the salient.
Lieutenant Michael Baines
We had to get them up by rail and then through the mud and stuff to the batteries about 150 yards away. So I went up with the two guns and we got them off-loaded, and I met another cheerful subaltern with a few chaps, and we had to drag these guns through the mud. Awful job! We had to get them along what they call gun skids – long wooden troughs. You wheel the guns along them and then move the troughs at the back to the front again until you get the guns about fifty yards away from the railway line on to platforms – rafts actually! – on the mud. And we got covered in mud. We were in the open on Passchendaele Ridge, and we had to try and get this finished before daylight, or we’d have been shot at. We flogged away, and I busted my braces buttons and the only way I could keep my trousers up was by bending down, so I bent down. And when I eventually stood up the Germans’ line was about 100 yards away and dawn was breaking, I might say.
Along came a very highly polished body of troops and a fellow with a flag. Well, that meant the divisional commander.1 However, we didn’t take any notice of him – we were just getting on with getting these ghastly guns into position – and a very highly polished staff officer came over covered in red tabs. He was only a subaltern, but he said, ‘Stand to attention when I speak to you!’ So I looked at this bloody man and said, ‘I can’t.’ And he said, ‘Why not?’ And I said, ‘Because my trousers will fall down.’ He then walked over to the other subaltern, and this man had turned his back on him and was going on camouflaging the guns! Well, we got the guns camouflaged, and over came the 5.9 shells, and needless to say all the staff pushed off as soon as they started. But we thought we’d better report it to Brigade. So we went down the line, and at Brigade HQ good old Colonel Wheeler said, ‘Yes, I heard about this. You two young men, you were flippant and frivolous, and you were insolent and insubordinate. What have you got to say?’ ‘Nothing, Sir.’ And he said, ‘Come in and have a drink, my boys.’ So we went into the pillbox and had a very good drink. Didn’t hear any more about it. You see, it was the attitude of some of the staff – only some of them. Mostly they were young ADCs who’d made it to the staff. And the Colonel didn’t like it any more than we did.
But appointment to the staff was no longer the prerogative of the exclusive few whose entries in the Army List were distinguished by the addition of the letters PSC.1 In these days of ultra-rapid promotion even temporary gentlemen, and even temporary gentlemen who had been commissioned from the ranks, might easily, with luck and application, be given a job on the staff of a brigade or a division. Such appointments were not to be sneezed at, for they were often accompanied by promotion, and since most wartime officers were without private means the extra pay was more than welcome. Although in Army terms an officer’s upward progress was as slow as it had been in peacetime, and substantive promotion arrived in due season and not before, in the exigencies of war, advancement in regimental terms could come at a dizzy rate. There were battalions commanded by twenty-five-year-old officers whose regimental rank was that of lieutenant-colonel but who were still captains or even mere lieutenants in the eyes of the Army. There were even brigadier-generals whose Army rank was only that of major.
A correspondence course, widely advertised in the newspapers and magazines which circulated at the front, had recently had a considerable vogue among men desirous of a commission and among officers ambitious for promotion. It was a method of training the memory and increasing mental power, and it arrived in weekly parts in a series of small grey books which fitted conveniently into a tunic pocket. It seemed that half the Army had taken it up. While many were embarrassed when found surreptitiously studying and claimed that they had merely found it ‘lying around’, others were loud in their praise of Pelmanism and perfectly willing to swear to its effectiveness. It was particularly popular in the 9th (Scottish) Division, and at one divisional dinner, when the subject came up in conversation, an illustrious brigadier-general, and holder of the Victoria Cross, modestly disclaiming any personal credit, admitted not only that he had been given command of a battalion shortly after beginning the course, but that before he completed it five months later he was given command of a brigade.2 One junior officer emboldened by a generous intake of wine and brandy presumed to cap the General’s story. ‘I did better than that, Sir,’ said Captain Will Darling. ‘I had no sooner written for a prospectus than I was given a job on the Staff!’
Will Darling was a colourful character who was not afraid to speak his mind, but he could get away with murder for he was excellent company and an accomplished storyteller. Darling had plenty of stories to tell, for he had knocked around Australia working as a journalist and dabbling in politics before returning home at the start of the war to join the 9th Black Watch as a private soldier. By the time he was wounded at Loos he had risen to the rank of company quartermaster sergeant. Darling was a good soldier, a born leader and a bit of a fire-eater. It was indifferent health rather than the power of Pelmanism which had caused him to be transferred to the staff from the 11th Royal Scots, where he had been in command of A Company. Each company was distinguished by a coloured shoulder flash, and since A Company’s was red it pleased Captain Darling’s ghoulish sense of humour to christen it ‘Blood Company’. By the time young Alex Jamieson joined the battalion in a draft of newly fledged soldiers Captain Darling had been gone for some time, but stories of his daring and prowess were still doing the rounds.
42821 Private Alex Jamieson, MM, 11th Bn., The Royal Scots (Lothian Regt.), 9th (Scottish) Division
He was transferred to Brigade as brigade-major, and when I was sent to Brigade HQ as a runner between there and the battalions in the line I met him for the first time at the rum issue. The sergeant was pouring out far more than I had ever seen! I held out my mug and he just poured it in, and I should think it might have been half-full. So I said, ‘Stop.’ Darling looked at me with a steely glare and said, ‘What! A man of Blood Company says stop? Carry on, sergeant.’ It must have been half a pint! Whether I took it all or not is another matter. This, of course, confirmed the view of the troops that the rum jars were well sampled on their way up the line and by the time they got to the line there was only a medicinal dose left.
Whether or not the Tommies’ suspicions were justified, it was a fact that the officers had access to greater supplies of alcohol, and there were certain advantages in undertaking duties which brought a soldier into close contact with the officers’ mess. Ted Organ was one such soldier. He had landed on his feet since arriving in France in 1914 with the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars. ‘Queer Objects On Horses’ they had been rudely called, but it was many moons since they had been required for cavalry duties. Ted did not regret the loss of his steed, for he had a mode of transport that suited him far better. It was a large Sunbeam motor, which he drove for Major Watson of the Tank Corps. By a strange coincidence he had driven Major Watson before the war, when Watson was an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, and long before he ever dreamed of being a major.
1745 Corporal Ted Organ, A Squadron, Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars and Tank Corps
I went to this nunnery to fetch an officer who’d just come out from England, and I picked him and his servant up and a load of his luggage and put it in his car. The servant sat on top of this luggage and the officer got in front with me. Directly I saw him I recognized him. He was nearly seven feet tall, this man, and thin as a lath. I saw him looking at me, and he said, ‘What’s your name, driver?’ He seemed a bit puzzled.
I said, ‘Organ, sir. And this isn’t the first time I’ve driven you. Do you remember when you were at Balliol College you used to hire my taxi off Broad Street rank?’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said – ‘you used to take my bicycle on the roof of your car.’
I said, ‘That’s right.’ I used to take him to the station with his bicycle and his luggage and bring him back again.
Major Watson was delighted enough to pull a number of strings and to commandeer the Sunbeam plus the services of Organ for his personal use. The vehicle appeared on the list of the company’s transport as ‘the reconnaissance car’. No one ever queried it, and Ted had now passed many enjoyable months in Major Watson’s service. But driving the staff car in winter was no sinecure. A soft hood sheltered the passengers, but the driver’s seat was open to the sky with no protection whatever from the weather. A driver could muffle himself in layers of clothing against the cold, but when the thaw came, and with it the rain, it was another matter. The night Ted was obliged to drive from Tank Corps HQ in Blangy to Boulogne it was teeming with rain, and Major Watson was genuinely sorry to have to send him out in it.
Corporal Ted Organ
I had to meet Colonel Kingdon coming back off leave on the old Victoria at midnight and bring him back to Blangy. Major Watson said, ‘Will you have a drink before you go?’ I said, ‘Thank you very much.’ So he poured me out a big lemonade tumbler, and it was half whisky and half champagne. Well, I was quite young, you know – just over twenty – and I wasn’t a drinker at all. I was only used to that very weak French beer, which was more like water, but I drank it down and off I went.
I got about six miles and came to a level crossing when the gates closed and there was a lot of flat, open trucks going up towards the line carrying tanks and I had to wait there until the road was clear and the gates opened. Well, this was about nine o’clock at night, I suppose – it was dark anyway. The next thing I remember was a military policeman shaking me on the shoulder. He said, ‘Hey, son, your headlights are on.’ I came to. I said, ‘What time is it?’ He said, ‘Eight o’clock.’ Eight o’clock the next morning, this was! I should have met the Colonel at midnight! So I thought, ‘My God! I’m in for it now.’ All the way to Boulogne – about sixty-odd miles – I thought, ‘Now how can I fake an accident so I can prove that I was delayed and have a reason for being late?’ And I thought, ‘Well, if I run into the bank and I bend the steering a bit, get it a bit wobbly, that’ll be a good excuse.’ But every time I came to a quiet place something came round the corner and I couldn’t do it. So I eventually got to Boulogne about midday, I suppose.
I went along to the quayside and stopped at the hotel and went in and reported that I’d arrived, and I said, ‘Is Colonel Kingdon here?’ So the sergeant there said, ‘Nobody of that name came over on the Victoria last night and all officers have to report at this hotel.’ So I thought to myself, ‘Thank God!’ So I passed a few hours in Boulogne and went back to the quayside, knowing I’d have about six hours to wait. The Victoria came in at midnight, and the first man down the gangway was Colonel Kingdon, and I was the first car. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’m glad you’re here, Organ. I was delayed last night. There was an air raid at Folkestone and the train was delayed. Go straight along to the Louvre Hotel. I won’t keep you long.’
It was pouring with rain again. It was absolutely teeming down. The drivers in a limousine had no shelter like they’ve got in cars now. It was open. There was a car screen for the people in the back, and a windscreen, but the driver’s sides had no doors and nothing to stop the wind and rain coming in. So I pulled up at the Louvre Hotel, coat collar up right round over my neck, waterproof cape over, and cap comforter down over my ears. There was a canopy over the pavement and several steps up to the entrance of this big hotel. So he went up there, and after a few minutes he came down and opened the door and I heard the door slam and off I went back the sixty miles to Blangy.
When I got back there I was frozen stiff and absolutely soaked to the skin. I got out. Opened the passenger door. No Colonel! His briefcase was there, and his stick, but there was no sign of him. Well, I couldn’t think what the devil had happened. I hadn’t stopped on the way – I knew that. So I went round to the orderly room – it was then about four o’clock in the morning – and knocked the sergeant-major up. He wondered what the hell I was up to at that time in the morning. I told him, ‘I picked the Colonel up,’ I said, ‘I’ve come home and he’s not in the car. His briefcase is there and his stick, but he’s not in there.’ The sergeant-major wasn’t best pleased. He said, ‘You’d better report it in the morning.’ But in the morning when I went round, there was the Colonel sitting behind his desk! ‘I’d forgotten something,’ he said. ‘I went back for my gloves after I put my briefcase and other belongings into the car. It’s a good job Major Haskett-Smith had a car,’ he said, ‘or I don’t know what I’d have done. He drove me home.’ He took it in good part, luckily.
Staff cars were not for the likes of Reg Lloyd, returning to France as the proud possessor of the King’s commission, clad a touch self-consciously in a new uniform of fine barathea and whipcord breeches which, although they had not been tailor-made at Huntsman of Bond Street, were a considerable improvement on the coarse khaki of a private soldier. Setting off to board the train that would take him to join his unit, Reg was happy in the knowledge that his newly acquired status would entitle him to travel in a carriage rather than on the floor of a cattle truck.
His complacency was short-lived. The train took fifteen interminable hours to complete a journey that should have lasted seven at most. It was bitterly cold. A penetrating wind whistled through the broken windows of the dilapidated carriages, and there was neither light nor heat in the train. If the authorities had set out to devise a system calculated to make the troops almost glad to reach the firing line they could hardly have improved on it. The train finally crawled into the station at La Gorgue, but it was by no means the end of the journey. Passes and travel warrants were stamped with the time of arrival, but after that it was up to the officers and men who had alighted to find their units as best they could. Sometimes it took them days.
Second Lieutenant Reg Lloyd
I had to link up with the 41st Divisional Artillery somewhere on the Arras front. It was quite a job tracking it down. Eventually I got to a certain point where a guide took me up the line to the battery in the gun-pits, and I went in to report and Major Harrigan was there. I said, ‘My name’s Lloyd, Sir, and I have to report to you for duty.’ (They’d already got my papers.) He said, ‘By George! We’re pleased to see you. We’re having a hell of a lot of casualties here.’ I thought, ‘That’s a bloody nice start!’ They were short of officers like everybody else was. I shall never forget standing there in that dugout. There was a packing-case with a candle or two on it, and Major Harrigan was sitting on the other side of it and he said, ‘Have a drink.’ He pushed a bottle of Scotch towards me and he said, ‘Have a big one. You’ll find you’ll want it here!’ There was a barrage going on at the time and the whole place was shaking and these candles flickering. They’d lost a lot of men. Even in quiet times there were a lot of casualties.
Despite the lack of manpower, and despite Sir Douglas Haig’s reluctance, a bargain was a bargain and the British front had to be extended as far as the River Oise to relieve the French Sixth Army. It was far short of French demands, and it was understood that, at a later date, the British would take over the French line as far as Reims. But that was in the future. The immediate situation to be faced was how best to defend a longer front with too few troops, many with no experience of battle. There was no question of a continuous system of trenches, revetted, sandbagged, thickly wired, well manned and well organized for defence, for even if there had been sufficient manpower the Germans could hardly be expected to sit back and wait until it was built. They were already drawing up plans for an offensive against the British in the west, and Colonel Wetzell of the German General Staff had made an interesting assessment of their adversary. It was not entirely without foundation. ‘We have in front of us’, he said, ‘a strategically clumsy, tactically rigid, but tough enemy.’
This time, against the full weight of Germany’s resources, it was doubtful if toughness would be enough.
The British Army had last stood on the defensive in November 1914, and generations of soldiers had lived and died since then. To the few originals who remembered, aeons seemed to have passed since those long-gone days of mobile warfare, before men went to ground in the burrows of the trenches, and before the ‘trench mentality’ took hold. The Germans were more experienced in the tactics of defence. Of the forty-four months since they had invaded France, forty had been spent defending their positions on the Western Front against a series of Allied offensives. They had developed a system of defence in depth, relying on an outpost line, on redoubts skilfully sited to command and protect their main line of defence, with a third system of redoubts and defences beyond that. It was highly effective, and had proved so costly to the British at the Somme and at Ypres that it had added significantly to the length of the campaigns and had led, in both cases, to stalemate.
Now, if the positions were reversed, with the Germans poised to attack, it was high time to take a leaf out of their book.