By 1 January 1918 the Great War had been grinding on for 1,245 days. In the vigorous early years of dash and determination they had called it ‘the War to end Wars’, but the dash and the vigour were long gone, the determination was grimmer, and the only thing that seemed to be endless was the war itself. Punch’s parody of the old schoolboy riddle summed up the mood and raised an occasional wry smile:
Absolute evidence have I none,
But my Aunt’s charwoman’s sister’s son
Heard a policeman on his beat
Say to a housemaid in Downing Street
That he had an uncle who had a friend
Who knew for a fact when the war would end.
Europe was caught in the grip of a cruel winter. In Paris, where the Seine was frozen over for the first time in 120 years, people crowded into bars and cafés in search of light and warmth. Wood (when it could be found) fetched astronomical prices and, with much of the country in the industrial north overrun by the Germans, coal supplies in this fourth winter of the war were more meagre than ever and there was precious little fuel to spare for civilians. A quarter of France was in enemy hands, locked behind the wasteland where the big guns thundered and the armies of the Kaiser and the armies of the Allies lived a troglodyte existence in trenches and dugouts gouged from the freezing earth.
The snow did nothing to improve the lot of a soldier shivering in the trenches, sleeping in a ramshackle barn, or on the march, splashing through slush or hunched against a blizzard on the roads behind the lines. But it laid a gentle hand on the battlefield, where the snow drifted into fire-blackened shell-holes, softened the tortuous outlines of splintered trees, buried the clumsy hulks of abandoned tanks, glistened delicately on the barbs of the deadly wire, shrouded the bodies of the quiet, unburied dead.
At Passchendaele in low-lying Belgium, where the ground had turned to a soupy morass under the weight of 10 million shells and months of heavy fighting, the bitter weather came as a relief. The ground hardened underfoot, the fetid water froze in the labyrinth of shell-holes, and the troops slithering on their way to the line were obliged to pull sandbags over their boots to keep their footing on the icy duckboards. But it was better than floundering in a sea of mud.
In front of a trace of rubble that had once been Passchendaele village the line was little more than linked up shell-holes. Here at the tip of the infamous Ypres salient, won at the cost of many lives, a few dugouts and pillboxes captured from the enemy provided the only shelter. It had taken the Army more than three months to slog through the slough and up the ridges to capture Passchendaele in the teeth of the November wind and rains. Many of the 100,000 men who died had simply disappeared in the mud. The long lists of dead and missing soldiers had cast a blight over the closing months of a miserable year.
In the British Isles, food supplies were running seriously low. Basic commodities had all but disappeared from the shops, and the Government was putting the finishing touches to a general rationing scheme that would come into force before the end of the month. They had already issued ration cards that would entitle each person to half a pound of sugar a week. At least it would ensure fair shares for all.
The well-to-do, who were able to pay high prices and buy large quantities, had suffered least from the shortages, and it was painfully obvious that the long queues outside food shops were confined to the poorer areas. The excuse that middle-class people were queuing inside the spacious stores where they shopped was a lame one. It was offered at a public meeting by Sir Arthur Yapp, director of the food economy campaign, but it failed to pacify angry hecklers. The scandal of the moment was the case of Miss Marie Corelli, a popular author of sensational romances. She appeared in court on 2 January accused of obtaining no less than 183 pounds of sugar and forty-three pounds of tea from various suppliers. The goods were confiscated and she was fined fifty pounds.
There was a move to start communal kitchens to provide wholesome, if unexciting, meals – pease pudding and gravy for a penny, and sausage pudding or lentil savoury for twopence. Even the serious newspapers turned their august attention to the food problem, and obliged their readers with recipes for vegetable mousse in the guise of galantine, for cutlets concocted from nuts and macaroni, and for cakes baked with potato flour. From 1 January the manufacture of ice cream was banned, and in many parts of the country there was neither butter nor margarine to be had. Butchers were forced to close for several days a week because they had no meat to sell, and fish-and-chip shops were closed for lack of fat. The shortage of meat early in the New Year was said to be due to heavy demand over the Christmas season, when large numbers of soldiers had been home on leave. Now, until fresh supplies arrived from across the Atlantic, beleaguered by marauding U-boats, there was little or no meat to be had.
It was immeasurably worse in German towns, where townspeople queued for hours for carp – the traditional centrepiece of the New Year’s feast. They queued ankle-deep in slush – for there was no manpower to clear the streets – and they queued in shoes with soles of wood and uppers of thick paper – for leather was scarce and the soldiers must be shod. And often they queued in vain – for the Army had swallowed up so many men that there were few left in the countryside who knew how to crack the ice on the frozen ponds and entice the sleeping carp from the mud below. The few fish that did reach the towns fetched such enormous prices that they were beyond the means of all but the wealthiest households.
There was not much else to sustain life, let alone to cook a celebration meal. The British naval blockade of the seaways prevented supplies of essentials reaching Germany’s ports and cut her off from her African colonies and from the world markets. Traditional sources of supply had dried up. Before the war the average daily consumption of calories had been 2,280 for every German citizen. By 1917 he could count on less than 1,000. Chestnut flour and clover meal were standing in for traditional foods, and acorns, even pine kernels, were added as a matter of course to ‘stews’. There was no fat, no milk, no eggs, no sugar. Such vast quantities of meat were required to feed the Army that little more than bone and gristle fell to the share of the civilians, and horsemeat was a rare, luxurious treat. The bread was coarse and unpalatable, the ingredients were suspect, and potatoes – which were the staple diet that winter – rotted in the frozen ground and collapsed when they were cooked to a foul-tasting greenish pulp which could be made palatable only by dousing it with ersatz sauce. The sauce was tasty enough, but it contained quantities of sand that crunched unpleasantly between the teeth and left a gritty deposit on the plate. It had not been much of a Christmas on any of the home fronts.
Even Uncle Sam had been forced to tighten his belt and, although the United States was richly nourished by comparison with her European allies, the Government had decreed one ‘wheatless’ and two meatless days a week.
At the battlefront in Flanders, where Christmas was a movable feast to be celebrated when convenient regardless of the date, it was not until the evening of 2 January that the officers of the 13th Rifle Brigade were free to enjoy their Christmas dinner. It was the first time for many months that they had all sat down together, and in the battered village of Locre it had not been easy to find an undamaged venue large enough to accommodate them. Three days previously they had hauled themselves out of the glutinous trenches at Klein Zillebeke and marched back through the snow to thaw out, to rest and clean up, to count their casualties – thirty-one on that last stint up the line. The previous evening the riflemen and the corporals had feasted on turkeys paid for from Battalion funds, with enough beer and wine to float a battleship and enough plum pudding to sink one. There were fruit and nuts and sweets paid for by the officers, and a packet of cigarettes per man sent out by the officers’ wives. Now it was the turn of the officers themselves, and it promised to be worth waiting for.
The mess cart had made no less than three journeys to Bailleul, where trade still thrived and some delicacies were occasionally on sale. Captain Nothard, as mess president, was delighted with his haul, the mess cooks had risen nobly to the occasion, and the dinner was sumptuous. Bill Nothard drew up the menu, Sergeant Rowlands in the orderly room typed it on stiff card, and a copy was propped against the battery of glasses that flanked each officer’s place.
Hors d’Oeuvres Variés Hannescamps
Bouillon d’Ovillers
Truites à l’Ancre
Ris de Porc Hulluch
Dindon Roti Monchy-le-Preux
Pommes de Terre et Petits Pois Verts
Plum Pudding au Rhum Gavrelle
Champignons Route de Menin
Glaces Basseville Beek
Dessert
Coffee
Nothard had taken the trouble to name the dishes in a style appropriate to the Battalion. Hulluch – where they had held the line after Battle of Loos. Hannescamps – the so-called quiet sector where they had spent Christmas 1915, their first in France. Ovillers in 1916, in the aftermath of the first day of the Somme, and the long slog through to the Battle of the Ancre at the close of the Campaign in November. By the end of that year, of 1,100 original members the Battalion had lost 815, killed, wounded and missing. They had lost many more in the Battle of Arras, attacking through a snowstorm on Easter Monday against the bastion of Monchy-le-Preux. Gavrelle came later – and then the Menin Road.
The succession of dishes added up to a fairly accurate record of their progress in the war. By the time the officers reached Champignons Route de Menin a large quantity of wine had been consumed, and the idea of anyone picking mushrooms anywhere along the Menin Road struck them as not only unlikely, but hilarious. Not even a blade of grass was growing within miles of it.
The 13th Rifle Brigade had been at the front for two and a half years. Of the officers who had brought the Battalion to France, only Captain Pughe, the transport officer, remained.
The 149th Field Artillery Brigade of the United States Army had been in France for less than two months. They had arrived at St Nazaire on 31 October, so full of vigour and enthusiasm that they had fully expected to be eating Christmas dinner in Berlin. The fact that they were still in a training camp in the wintry wilds of Brittany had not dampened their enjoyment of the Christmas season. Their chilly tarpaulin huts gave little protection from biting winds, but holly and misletoe scoured from the Forest of Merlin provided a homely touch, the cooks had succeeded in making the turkey edible, and there was an ample supply of beer and French wine. There were doughnuts and there was pie, and after weeks of subsisting on Army rations of ‘hard tack and corned willie’ the Doughboys considered it to be a feast.
A mountain of mail and parcels from the USA arrived on Christmas Eve, and they were welcome, although in some cases the homefolks’ idea of appropriate gifts for their boys overseas was rather wide of the mark. Scores of letters home pointed out that electric toasters could not be powered by candles, that cuff-links and necktie racks were redundant on active service, and that in future ‘smokes’ would be more welcome than hymn books. One soldier, whose admiring family sent him an officers’ Sam Browne belt, made the best of it and traded it with his lieutenant for a safety razor and a pass into Rennes. George Daugherty was not so lucky. His loving relatives sent him six large cans of the same corned beef which had been his outfit’s unvarying diet for more than a month. George was livid, and the ribbing of his comrades did nothing to assuage his feelings.
That Christmas, London was full of troops from overseas – Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians on leave from France, and America’s Doughboys on Christmas leave from training camps in England. Thousands of Londoners took part in a hospitality scheme to give the boys a good time, entertaining them in their own homes or escorting them on tours of the sights. Even the King cut short the traditional New Year shoot at Sandringham and returned to London on 2 January to confer with his ministers and to hold the first investiture of 1918. Sergeant Arnold Loosemore of the 8th Battalion, the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, was one of over 350 soldiers, many straight from the trenches, who went to Buckingham Palace to be decorated by the King. Sinking into the deep carpets, treading gingerly up the grand staircase in their army boots, listening bemused to the strains of the string orchestra as they waited their turn to march up to the King, it was hard to believe that they had not been transported to some celestial sphere. It seemed a million miles from the mud and stench of Flanders and the roaring of the guns. Loosemore was one of eight to receive the Victoria Cross.1
Later, in a private interview, the King had another duty to perform. He presented Sir Douglas Haig with his field-marshal’s baton, chatted at some length on the progress of the war, and enquired solicitously about the health of the Field-Marshal’s wife, who was expecting her third child. Before her marriage Lady Haig had been maid-of-honour to the King’s mother, Queen Alexandra, and she was still on intimate terms with the Royal Family. ‘Give our love to Doris,’ said the King as Sir Douglas took his leave. This evidence of the monarch’s affection and friendship was balm to the Field-Marshal’s soul, for he was beset by difficulties. Like several thousands of his men, the Commander-in-Chief was at home over the festive season, but even during his leave there were many weighty matters on his mind, and many meetings to attend. But he did set aside one afternoon to take his wife and children to the pantomime at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
‘If ever there was a time when we wanted to laugh and to forget all about the trials and tribulations of the present day,’ remarked the theatre critic of the Daily Telegraph, ‘it is surely now!’ But, it was the topical wartime jokes that were relished most, and they were worked into the most unlikely fairy tales. At the Kennington Theatre, Dick Whittington, falling asleep on Highgate Hill, as tradition demanded, dreamed the legendary dream of being Lord Mayor of London – but a Lord Mayor on a great white horse, reciting couplets in praise of the Mother Country while reviewing a procession of the Empire’s gallant allies bearing flags of all the nations. In a hilarious production of The Babes in the Wood the jokes leaned heavily on the new food regulations, and at the King’s Theatre, Hammersmith, in a fairly free adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf sported a German helmet and the enchantment of the witch’s castle was broken by – a tank! It brought the house down.
At Drury Lane, where Sir Douglas Haig and his family were in the audience, the pantomime was Aladdin, and it was sheer magic from the moment the curtains swept aside to reveal a flowery lawn, where two mandarins, magnificently robed and bearded, began the prologue, to the final moment when true love triumphed. Madge Titheradge, as Aladdin, cut a splendid figure in tights and naturally won the heart of the Princess (‘Aladdin a lad in a thousand!’ she trilled). Stanley Lupino was hilarious as the washerwoman Widow Twankey, and if ‘she’ occasionally forgot to wash the clothes before ironing them it only added to the fun. Abanazar was as evil and spine-chilling as a good panto demanded, and Caleb, the slave of the lamp, as magnificent as a pantomime audience could desire.
Haig might have given a good deal for a magic lamp and the power to summon up a genie to resolve the many difficulties that faced him both in London and across the Channel in France. He was still smarting from the row that had erupted three weeks ago and forced him (much against his will) to part with his Director of Military Intelligence and right-hand man, Brigadier-General John Charteris.
In certain political and military circles, the names of the great offensives had become a litany of failures smoothed over as setbacks, of partial successes bruited as great victories, of minuscule advances hailed as breakthroughs, and of small victories gained at a price which the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, feared would be too much for the nation to stomach for much longer. Lloyd George was inclined to agree with the opinion of King Pyrrhus after the ancient battle of Asculum: ‘One more such victory and we are lost.’ But if the Commander-in-Chief had had any such feeling after Arras or Passchendaele or Cambrai, the complacent bulletins emanating from his headquarters had given no hint of it. The official communiqués published daily in the press, as well as informal disclosures from GHQ passed on in good faith by war correspondents, were so complacent, so optimistic and, as it now seemed, so far from the truth that they were seriously misleading. It had become glaringly obvious that sneering assessments of the enemy’s prowess and morale, exuberant predictions of easy success and airy dismissal of obstacles were seldom vindicated by results. Information had recently come to light that laid the blame on the shoulders of Brigadier-General Charteris.
Charteris was not only Sir Douglas Haig’s right-hand man, he was also a close friend, and Haig had implicit trust in his judgement. Charteris was an urbane man – as loquacious as Haig was taciturn, as cordial in his relations as Haig was reserved, a bon vivant where Haig was a puritan. He ran the Intelligence Department with breezy aplomb; he was solicitous of his Chief’s interests, ever ready with advice and ever anxious to smooth his path and ease the burden of his manifold responsibilities. It was not surprising that his influence on the Commander-in-Chief was considerable. If his old friend General Charteris had a fault it was not apparent to Sir Douglas Haig, but, as time went on, it became all too apparent to his Staff. Charteris was a clever man, but he was so sure of his opinions that he was seldom swayed by anything so mundane as facts. The world seen through General Charteris’ eyes existed as he supposed it to exist, despite any evidence to the contrary. He was a delightful companion, an accomplished raconteur, and the most amusing member of the mess.
There were worse places to be on the Western Front than on the Staff at General Headquarters in the picturesque hilltop town of Montreuil-sur-Mer. The whole town had been taken over by the British Army, and no more suitable place for a headquarters could have been found in the whole of France. It could be entered only by easily guarded gateways in the ramparts, communications were excellent, there were frequent boats to England from Boulogne less than twenty miles away, and the railway line to Paris was at the foot of the hill. A dispatch rider setting off from a divisional headquarters anywhere between Arras and Amiens could scorch to GHQ in less than an hour, and a complex network of telephone lines linked GHQ with London, with Paris and with every part of the long front.
The intelligence branch was installed in the École Militaire, and the Department of Military Operations in the Hôtel Dieu. Churches, schools, every possible building was commandeered by the Army, for in the web of narrow streets within the ramparts there was no room for expansion. But a Church of Scotland hut had been erected on a patch of grass in front of the Citadel, and in the dry moat below there had been just sufficient room to build a tennis court – much appreciated in summer by officers off duty. Otherwise, situated as Montreuil was, it was difficult to take exercise, other than a brisk twenty-minute walk round the ramparts or an occasional ride in the surrounding country. But the town had other charms. It had more than its share of cafés, inns and restaurants (some with excellent cellars) where a civilized evening could be passed in good company. In a private room in one such estaminet four majors of the intelligence staff were in the habit of meeting once a week, with the object not only of partaking of an excellent dinner but of relaxing away from their own official mess presided over by Brigadier-General Charteris. He was an entertaining companion, and occasionally he let slip a titbit of interesting gossip, but he dominated the conversation and it was not easy to have an informed discussion or for another officer to venture an opinion which did not coincide with the General’s views without being genially pooh-poohed for his pains.
Edward Jack, Jimmy Marshall-Cornwall, John Dunnington-Jefferson and Stuart Menzies were excellent friends, although in Army terms they came from widely differing backgrounds. Jack, an officer of the Royal Engineers, was head of the Field Survey and Map Department, Dunnington-Jefferson, of the Intelligence Department, was a Royal Fusilier, Menzies was a Guards officer, and Marshall-Cornwall was a gunner.
It was not surprising that Marshall-Cornwall had been co-opted into the intelligence staff early in the war, for he was a sharp young man with a flair for languages and, as an amateur of military history, for exploring the battlefields of Europe. In the seven peacetime years after he had been commissioned he had indulged both hobbies during his two-month annual leave and, assisted by language grants from the War Office, had travelled extensively in Europe. In 1913 he had passed the examinations to qualify as First Class Interpreter in German, French, Norwegian, Dutch and Italian. In 1914 three weeks’ Easter leave had not been quite long enough to give him a similar qualification in Spanish, but, although he only managed the Second Class Certificate with a 60 per cent pass, he had fully intended to spend the summer vacation in Spain and Portugal perfecting his Spanish and exploring the battlefields of the Peninsular War. He had got as far as Oporto when the outbreak of the present war had claimed more immediate attention.
For the past two years Marshall-Cornwall had been at GHQ, where his knowledge of Europe and European languages was invaluable. It was his task to collect and collate the intelligence information from a multitude of sources and, working closely with his counterpart at the headquarters of the French, to compute as accurately as possible the strength and disposition of the enemy forces. It was an arduous job, and even with the help of several junior staff officers it took a good twelve hours a day to get through the avalanche of papers that descended on GHQ. There were reports of interrogations of captured prisoners (a job which Marshall-Cornwall himself had done earlier in the war), there were reports of information gleaned on raids and patrols, and there was the ‘pigeon post’, Marshall-Cornwall’s own brainchild. The pigeons were dropped behind the German lines in baskets which also contained a polite invitation to any patriotic Frenchman who found them to report on the movements of the German Army in his area. Many did so, at considerable risk, but information which arrived in this way was particularly tricky to assess: while much of it was genuine, the Germans themselves occasionally took advantage of the ‘pigeon post’ to send misleading information. But, in the main, the pigeons that flew across the lines and intermittently fluttered into the GHQ lofts brought news which, at the very least, confirmed intelligence gathered from other sources.
And, of course, there was the Dame Blanche – the organization of agents that grew from a single cell in Liège in Belgium to cover occupied France from Metz to the sea. It had over 1,000 members, of whom fifty-one were signalmen on the railways. Others were priests, monks, even nuns; 140 were university lecturers, 278 were women, and some were even men from Alsace or Poland who were reluctant conscripts in the German Army. The Dame Blanche was organized like a military operation, with a second line of reserve ‘troops’ in case the first line was wiped out.1
The organization had been started by Walthère Dewé, director of telephone and telegraphic communications in the Liège area. The information on German troop movements, construction of fortifications and many other matters of importance travelled with astonishing speed across the formidable border to neutral Holland and on via Paris and London to the headquarters of the British and French armies. Wallowing in an avalanche of paper in the long watches of the night, it occurred to Jimmy Marshall-Cornwall that he knew a great deal more about the German Army than he did about his own. It was his job to report the result of his work to his immediate chief, General Charteris, and it was Charteris’ job to report to the Commander-in-Chief and to put him in possession of the information.
In April 1917, during the Battle of Arras, Marshall-Cornwall began to suspect that all was not well. General Charteris had succumbed to a bout of pneumonia, and during his illness and convalescent leave Marshall-Cornwall reported direct to Sir Douglas Haig with the daily intelligence summary. He was astonished to find that the Commander-in-Chief appeared to take an extraordinarily roseate view of the situation and of the fighting capacity of the German Army. In the course of their brief discussions, Haig’s comments, given with courteous reserve, were so much at odds with the situation as Marshall-Cornwall knew it, and bore so little relation to the intelligence which had been so conscientiously gathered and punctiliously analysed, as to make Marshall-Cornwall wonder if they were discussing the same war. Not that it could be described as a discussion: the Commander-in-Chief merely expressed his view. Marshall-Cornwall was left with the uneasy feeling that Haig, on whose shoulders lay the responsibility for the conduct of the war in France, was being misled. If he were, it could only be by General Charteris, in whom, as Sir Douglas had made it quite clear, he had complete trust.
It was an awkward situation. It was no more than a suspicion. There was no proof – or at least none sufficient on which to take action. All that Jimmy Marshall-Cornwall could do was to keep his mouth shut and his eyes open, and if he ventured to hint at his suspicions – perhaps in the relaxed atmosphere and privacy of the Friday-night sessions with the ‘Dining Club’ – it was with the utmost discretion.
The summer passed. In June the Army swept over the Messines Ridge and, advancing over a mile, captured it from the enemy. On 31 July the Passchendaele offensive was launched. Of course the original objective was not merely Passchendaele – that was part of a greater plan to wrest the Belgian ports from the enemy’s hands. But it had not worked like that. The Ypres salient was a tough nut to crack, the bad weather set in, the ground turned to mud, the troops inched up the salient, the summer died into the autumn, and, as autumn turned to winter in the gales of November, the troops ground to a halt on the topmost ridge. It had cost more than 100,000 lives to get there. The advantage gained was small.
Even before the campaign was over they were planning the attack on Cambrai to breach the formidable Hindenburg Line beyond. It did make sense to hit at another part of the line where the Germans least expected it and while they were still reeling from the losses sustained at Ypres, for they had suffered as much as the British. They would hardly expect an offensive so late in the season, and would certainly not expect it at Cambrai. The British Army would be able to attack with 500 tanks, not piecemeal as on the Somme a year before, but in force, with the infantry following triumphantly behind. It would be the Army’s last throw of 1917 – the vindication of all that had gone before, and a heartening conclusion to a disappointing year. It was true that the Army was short of troops, for, even apart from the Passchendaele losses and the sparsity of reinforcements, Haig had been reluctantly forced by the Government to send five of his divisions to assist the Italians. But the Germans too had suffered great losses, although Russia was on the point of collapse and the Germans would soon be able to move their troops from the disintegrating Eastern Front to Flanders. Haig believed, on the basis of Charteris’ information, that it was all the more important to strike soon, before these reinforcements arrived.
Many of them were there already, and Jimmy Marshall-Cornwall knew it. But it was another matter to convince his boss.
General Sir James Marshall-Cornwall, KCB, CBE, DSO, MC, Royal Artillery
It really let the side down, because Charteris had told the Chief that there were no German reserves behind, and I gave him proof that three new divisions had arrived from the Russian front, just before the battle. He said, ‘I don’t believe it. It’s a bluff on the part of the German General Staff to frighten us off the attack, and I’m not going to spoil the morale of my Commander-in-Chief by giving him false information.’ It was wicked! He got this fixed idea in his mind that the German casualties were greater than they had actually been, and that if he could only keep Douglas Haig’s determination going we would sweep through. He built that up in his own mind, and I suppose he felt it was his mission to put his view across. But it was fatal. It nearly wrecked Douglas Haig’s reputation, and it cost us a great many casualties.
He even went so far as to take the Commander-in-Chief up to a German prisoner-of-war cage, having removed the best-looking men, the men with the best physique, and showed him the runts that were left and said, ‘These are the sort of people we’ve got to fight against now. Nothing compared with our own troops.’ And of course he had removed the sturdy ones beforehand! Completely misleading! I was horrified at the way Haig had been misled about the morale and condition of the German troops. Charteris had been staff captain to Douglas Haig out in India when Haig was Chief of the General Staff, and he had got a sort of almost hypnotic influence on Haig. And Haig wouldn’t listen, even to his own Chief of Staff, General Kiggell, and he took all the advice from Charteris. Unfortunately!
When it came to a head in the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917, when I couldn’t stand it any more, I went to the Director of Operations, ‘Tavish’ Davidson, and told him the position. I told him I didn’t want to go on working here any more. I wanted to go back to my battery. He said, ‘No! Stay where you are. But let me know the truth.’ And very soon afterwards Charteris was sacked.
The Commander-in-Chief had no choice but to sack Charteris, for not only the War Office but also the Cabinet was arraigned against him. ‘A Case for Inquiry’, thundered The Times:
… the truth is slowly leaking through the correspondents’ tales of heroism. We have said little by way of comment on the tremendous struggle which broke out to the south of the new Cambrai salient on the morning of November 30th and raged during the two successive days. The official communiqués were more than usually laconic. The correspondents have so far been limited almost entirely to details of amazing individual gallantry … we can no longer rest satisfied with the fatuous estimates, e.g. of German losses in men and morale, which have inspired too many of the published messages from France … the published and censored version is being amplified every day by innumerable and most disquieting first-hand accounts from officers and men who took part in the actual fighting. It is high time … that the charges of blundering should be sifted and that the blame, if and where it is due, should take shape in the prompt removal of every blunderer … The merest breath of criticism on any military operation is far too often dismissed as an ‘intrigue’ against the Commander-in-Chief … but Sir Douglas Haig’s position cannot but depend in large measure on his choice of subordinates. His weakness, if it be a weakness, is his inveterate devotion to those who have served him longest – some of them perhaps too long, or at least too long without a rest.
Hitherto the columns of The Times had, if anything, been unctuously supportive of the Commander-in-Chief, and it came as a bitter blow that his one-time ally Lord Northcliffe had now turned against him. The polemic burst on the public on 12 December. It was aimed at Haig’s Chief of Staff, General Kiggell, as well as at Charteris, and it had clearly been inspired by a leak in high places. The source was not far to seek, for the Prime Minister and Haig were at loggerheads. In Haig’s opinion Lloyd George was a vulgar upstart, and Lloyd George regarded the Commander-in-Chief as a disdainful snob.
The stolid Scot and the volatile Welshman had little in common. The Prime Minister was deeply suspicious of Haig’s obduracy and his unshakeable view that the war could be won only by battering away on the Western Front. Even more infuriating, in Lloyd’s George’s view, was the fact that all the senior generals up to Sir William Robertson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, backed Haig. It was therefore impossible, it seemed to him, to get objective advice from any other quarter, and any proposal or suggestion that the war could be won other than by continuing the battering-ram strategy in the west met with short shrift at the hands of the powerful military lobby. The unanimity of this Sandhurst-trained élite was, in Sir Maurice Hankey’s opinion, ‘remarkable’.
Desperate for views and advice from other quarters, Lloyd George had mooted and pushed through the creation of a Supreme War Council, on which all the Allies would be represented. General Sir Henry Wilson was the military representative for Great Britain, with General Foch for the French, General Cadorna for the Italians and General Bliss for the USA. Although the brief of the Supreme War Council was ‘to watch over the general conduct of the war’, there was now a forum to which fresh ideas and suggestions could be submitted for consideration. The first official session of the Council after its inauguration took place at Versailles on 1 December.
It had not been a good month for the Commander-in-Chief. Before it was out he had been forced to part with both his Chief of Staff and his Director of Intelligence. Kiggell was removed on the grounds of ill health. Charteris was not really removed at all, for Haig was determined that his old friend should not be humiliated; he was found another post at GHQ, and he continued to have the ear of the Commander-in-Chief. Before the end of January Brigadier-General Edgar Cox had been sent to Montreuil as Director of Military Intelligence and Jimmy Marshall-Cornwall returned to London to replace General Cox as head of MI3. It was a considerable promotion, for MI3 cast a wide international net in its task of evaluating the strength and the movements of the enemy.
The changes in the topmost echelons of the Army, the political machinations and the creation of the Supreme War Council were of little interest to the soldier at the front, whose main concern in the bleak winter days and nights was keeping warm in the bitter chill.