The Battle of Loos had come to an end, and at last the Ninety-first Division was relieved and could march out to its billets. It was not the division which had gone into action. Curzon stood by the road to see them march by, as he had so often done in Hampshire and France, and they took far less time to pass him. Each brigade bulked no larger on the road than a battalion had done before the battle; each battalion was no larger than a company. The artillery had suffered as badly; there were woefully few men with the guns, and to many of the guns there were only four horses, and to many of the wagons there were only two mules. Curzon’s heart sank a little as he returned the salute of the skeleton units. Even with the drafts which were awaiting them they would not be up to establishment; it would be a long time before the Ninety-first Division would be built up again into the fine fighting unit it had been a fortnight ago.
He did not attempt to conceal from himself that Loos had been a disaster for the British Army; he could only comfort himself with the thought that it had been a disaster for the German Army as well. The next attack to be made would have to be planned very differently. The bombardment had been insufficient. Then they must have a bombardment which would make certain of it – fifty days, instead of fifty hours, if the ammunition supply could be built up to bear the strain. There must be reserves at hand, instead of seventeen miles back, to exploit the success. The Flying Corps must intensify its operations so that maps of the German second line could be ready in the utmost detail, to enable the artillery to register on fresh targets from new positions without delay. Equally important, there must be none of the muddle and confusion behind the line which had caused so much harm at Loos.
Curzon, despite his red tabs and oak leaves on his cap peak, could still feel the fighting man’s wrath against the staffs that were responsible for that muddle. It was their business to prevent muddle, and they had failed. Curzon was quite well aware of his own incapacity to do that sort of staff officer’s work. He was not too reliable in the matter of addition and multiplication and division; the mathematical problems involved in the arrangement of supply and transport and of march time-tables would certainly be too much for him. But it was not his job to solve them; it was the responsibility of the men at Army Headquarters and G.H.Q., and they had not been equal to it. Curzon felt that if he were in chief command he would make a clean sweep of the gilded young men who had made such a hash of the time-tables and replace them by efficient mathematicians. Hang it, he would put civilians on the Staff for that matter, if they could do the job better – and for Curzon to permit himself even for a moment to be guilty of a heresy of that sort showed how strongly he felt about it.
There were others of the same opinion, as Curzon discovered when he reported himself at Corps Headquarters. Over the whole personnel there lay a brooding sense of disaster both past and to come. Someone would have to bear the responsibility of failure. It would not be long before heads began to fly. Some were gone already – Bewly had been sent home by Wayland-Leigh just as Webb had been sent back by Curzon. Hope of the Seventy-ninth was in hospital, dying of his wounds – rumour said he had gone up to the line to seek death, and death was not so hard to find in the front-line trenches. No one in that gloomy assembly dared to think of the brave words at the last Headquarters dinner, and the brave anticipations of an immediate advance to the Rhine.
Wayland-Leigh, bulky yet restless, sat at the head of the conference table and looked round with his sidelong green eyes. Everyone knew that it would be touch and go with him. He might be selected as the scapegoat, and deprived of his command and packed off at any moment, if G.H.Q. should decide that such a sacrifice would be acceptable to the strange gods of Downing Street. He was conscious of the trembling of his throne even while he presided at this meeting to discuss what suggestions should be put forward regarding future operations.
Curzon was inevitably called upon for his opinion. He spoke hesitatingly, as might be expected of him; as he told himself, he was no hand at these infernal board-meetings, and speech-making was the bane of his life. He was conscious of the eyes upon him, and he kept his own on the table, and fumbled with pen and pencil as he spoke. Yet he had something very definite to say, and no man with that advantage can speak without point. He briefly described what he thought must be considered essentials for the new battle. More men. More guns. More ammunition. More artillery preparation. More energy. He fumbled with his pencil more wildly than ever when he had to pass on from these, to his mind the obvious things, to the other less tangible desiderata. The arrangements behind the lines had been disgraceful. There must be an efficient staff created which would handle them properly. Someone must work out an effective method of bringing fresh troops into the front line at the decisive moments. Someone must see to it that reserves should be ready in the right place at the right time.
Curzon was surprised by the little murmur of applause which went round the table when he had finished. More than one of the subsequent speakers alluded in complimentary terms to General Curzon’s suggestions. The whole opinion of the assembly was with him. The attack at Loos had been correct enough in theory. There had only been a failure in practical details and an insufficiency of men and materials. It could all be made good. A staff that could handle half a million men in action could be found. So could the half-million men. So could the guns and ammunition for a really adequate artillery preparation.
Quite noticeably the spirits of the gathering rose; within a very few minutes they were discussing the ideal battle, with forty divisions to draw upon, and elaborate time-tables, and a preliminary bombardment which would transcend anything the most vaulting imagination could depict, and a steady methodical advance which nothing could stop – in a word, they were drawing up designs to put forward before higher authority for the Battle of the Somme. With visions like this before them, they could hardly be blamed for ignoring the minor details of machine-guns and barbed wire. Minor details vanished into insignificance when compared with the enormous power they pictured at their disposal.
Wayland-Leigh sat in his chair and writhed his bulk about, grinning like an ogre as the suggestions assumed more and more concrete form, while Norton beside him took industrious notes to form the skeleton of the long reports he would have to send in to Army Headquarters and to G.H.Q. In some ways it was like the debate of a group of savages as to how to extract a screw from a piece of wood. Accustomed only to nails, they had made one effort to pull out the screw by main force, and now that it had failed they were devising methods of applying more force still, of obtaining more efficient pincers, of using levers and fulcrums so that more men could bring their strength to bear. They could hardly be blamed for not guessing that by rotating the screw it would come out after the exertion of far less effort; it would be a notion so different from anything they had ever encountered that they would laugh at the man who suggested it.
The generals round the table were not men who were easily discouraged – men of that sort did not last long in command in France. Now that the first shock of disappointment had been faced they were prepared to make a fresh effort, and to go on making those efforts as long as their strength lasted. Wayland-Leigh was pleased with their attitude; indeed, so apparent was his pleasure that Curzon had no hesitation in asking him, after the conference, for special leave to England for urgent private affairs. Curzon was able to point out (if it had not been the case he would never have dreamed of making the application, despite the urgency of his desire to see Emily) that the division would not be fit to go into the line for some time, and that the knocking into shape of the new drafts could safely be left to the regimental officers.
‘Oh, yes, you can go all right,’ said Wayland-Leigh. ‘You’ve earned it, anyway. We can spare you for a bit.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Curzon.
‘But whether you’ll find me here when you come back is quite another matter.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Curzon. He had heard rumours, of course, but he judged it to be tactless to admit it.
‘I’ve got half an idea I’m going to be unstuck. Sent home because those bloody poops at G.H.Q. have got to find someone to blame besides themselves.’
‘I hope not, sir,’ said Curzon.
Wayland-Leigh’s huge face writhed into an expression of resignation.
‘Can’t be helped if I am,’ he said. ‘I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of, and people will know it some time, even if they don’t now. I’m sorry for your sake, though.’
‘For me, sir?’
‘Yes. I was hoping they’d give you one of the new corps which are being formed. I’ve written recommending it in the strongest terms. I wanted Hope to have one too, but he’ll never be fit for active service again even if he lives. But what my recommendation’s good for is more than I can say. Probably do you more harm than good, as things are.’
‘Thank you, sir. But I don’t care about myself. It’s you that matters.’
Curzon meant what he said.
‘Very good of you to say so, Curzon. We’ll see what happens. G.H.Q. have got their eye on you anyway, one way or the other. I’ve had a hell of a lot of bother with ’em about your unsticking that beggar Webb, you know.’
‘Sorry about that, sir.’
‘Oh, I didn’t mind. I backed you up, of course. And I sent your report on him in to G.H.Q. with ‘concur’ written on it as big as I could make it. Push off now. Tell Norton you’ve got my permission. If you drive like hell to Boulogne you’ll catch the leave boat all right.’
In reply to Curzon’s telegram the Duke’s big motor car was at Victoria Station to meet the train, and in it was Emily, very wan and pale. She was thinner than usual, and in the front of her neck the sterno-mastoid muscles had assumed the prominence they were permanently to retain. She smiled at Curzon and waved through the window to attract his attention although she did not stand up.
‘It was splendid to have your telegram, Bertie,’ she said as the car slid through the sombre streets of war-time London. ‘Mother’s been wanting to move me off to Somerset ever since the air raids started to get so bad. But I wouldn’t go, not after your letter saying you might be home any minute. We want every hour together we can possibly have, don’t we, Bertie?’
They squeezed hands, and went on squeezing them all the short time it took the car to reach Bude House.
The Duke and Duchess welcomed Curzon hospitably, the latter almost effusively. Yet to Curzon’s mind there was something incongruous about the Duchess’s volubility about the hardships civilians were going through. If it were not for the supplies they could draw from the model farm and dairy in Somerset, the family and servants might almost be going short of food, and if it were not for the Duke’s official position petrol and tyres for the motor cars would be nearly unobtainable. That ducal servants should be given margarine instead of butter seemed to the Duchess to be far more unthinkable than it did to Curzon, although he had the wit not to say so; and it gave the Duchess an uneasy sense of outraged convention that aeroplane bombs should slay those in high places as readily as those in low. She described the horrors of air raids to Curzon as though he had never seen a bombardment.
The Duke’s sense of proportion was less warped than his wife’s, although naturally he was inclined to attribute undue importance to his activities under the new Government. Between Curzon’s anxiety for Emily, and the Duchess’s desire to tell him much and to hear a little from him, it was some time before Curzon and the Duke were able to converse privately and at leisure, but when they did the conversation was a momentous one. The Duke was as anxious as all his other colleagues in the Government to receive an unbiased account of what was really happening on the Western Front, freed from official verbiage and told by someone without a cause to plead. Out of Curzon’s brief sentences – for the conversation was of the fashion of small talk, in which the state of military affairs usurped the time-honoured pre-eminence of the weather as a topic of conversation – the Duke was able to form a clearer picture than ever before of the bloody confusion which had been the Battle of Loos. He stroked his chin and said, ‘H’m’ a great many times, but he was able to keep the conversational ball rolling by the aid of a few conjunctive phrases.
‘You say it wasn’t this chap Wayland-Leigh’s fault?’ he asked.
‘Good God, no. He wouldn’t stand anything like that for a moment. It’ll be a crime if they unstick him.’
‘Why, is there any talk about it?’
‘Yes. You see, someone’s got to go, after all that was said beforehand.’
‘I see. H’m.’
The Duke was aware that anxiety in the Cabinet was reaching a maximum. The decline of Russian power, the alliance of Bulgaria with the Central Powers, the crushing of Serbia, the failure at Gallipoli, Townshend’s difficulties in Mesopotamia, and now the fiasco at Loos had been a succession of blows which might well shake anyone’s nerve. Yet there were three million Allied troops in France opposed to only two million Germans. That superiority at the decisive point about which the military were so insistent seemed to be attained, and yet nothing was being done. The Duke knew as well as any soldier that a crushing victory in France would make all troubles and difficulties vanish like ghosts, and he yearned and hungered for that victory.
‘H’m,’ he said again, rousing himself from his reverie. ‘Then there’s this business about conscription too.’
Curzon’s views on the matter of conscription were easily ascertained. When forty divisions began their great attack in France the need for drafts would become insistent. However decisive the victory they won, the volunteer divisions would need to be brought promptly up to strength. Not all the recruiting songs and propaganda – not even the shooting of Nurse Cavell – would ensure an inflow of recruits as reliable as a drastic conscription law like the French. In Curzon’s opinion, too, this was a golden opportunity for bringing in a measure which he had always favoured, even before the war.
‘It is every man’s duty to serve his country,’ said Curzon, remembering fragments of what Lord Roberts had said in peace-time.
‘It won’t be easy to do,’ said the Duke, visualizing a harassed Cabinet striving to avoid disruption while being dragged in every direction by conflicting forces.
‘Drafts have got to be found, all the same,’ said Curzon. He thought of the effect it would have on his own attitude if he were warned that the supply of recruits was uncertain and dwindling. It would mean caution; it would mean an encroachment upon his liberty to attack; it would mean thinking twice about every offensive movement, and an inevitable inclination towards a defensive attitude; it might conceivably come to mean the breaking up of some of the units which had been built up with such care – the Ninety-first Division even.
He was filled with genuine horror at such a prospect – a horror that made him almost voluble. He laid down as stiffly and as definitely as he possibly could the extreme urgency of a lavish supply of recruits. He thumped his knee with his hand to make himself quite clear on the subject. The Duke could not help but be impressed by Curzon’s animation and obvious sincerity – they were bound to be impressive to a man who had had experience of Curzon’s usual tongue-tied formality of manner.