Curzon wrote to Emily that there was no chance at all of his taking leave this summer. He realized with a little regret that an officer at the head of an Army Corps would be far less easily spared for a few days than any regimental officer or divisional general. The troops of the line had their periods of rest, but he had none. His responsibility was always at full tension. He was signing plans for the future at the same time as he was executing those of the present. He was responsible for the discipline and movement and maintenance and activity of a force which sometimes exceeded a hundred thousand men.
And he was lonely in his responsibility too, although loneliness meant little to him. Save for Emily he had gone friendless through the world among his innumerable acquaintances. He would sometimes, during that summer of 1917, have been desperately unhappy if he had stopped to think about happiness. But according to his simple code a man who had attained the rank of Lieutenant-General, was the son-in-law of a duke, and had a loving wife, could not possibly be unhappy. There could be no reason for it. Unreasonable unhappiness was the weakness of poets and others with long hair, not of soldiers, and so he believed himself to be happy as the British Army plunged forward into the slaughter of Paschendaele.
For fifteen days – half as long again as at the Somme – twice the number of guns as at the Somme had pounded the German lines. Curzon’s staff, Hobday’s staff on his right, the staffs of six other army corps and of three Armies had elaborated the most careful orders governing the targets to be searched for, the barrages to be laid, the tactics to be employed. The Tank Corps had early pointed out that this sort of bombardment would make the ground impassable for tanks, but after the success at Messines Curzon and all the other generals had decided that the tank was a weapon whose importance had been overrated, and it stood to reason that fortifications should not be attacked without preliminary bombardment.
Once more the reports came in describing the opening of the battle – large sections of the German line overrun, the advance once more held up, the usual heavy fighting in the German second line. Once more the weather broke, and the country, its drainage system battered to pieces, reverted under the unceasing rain to the condition of primeval swamp from which diligent Flemish peasants had reclaimed it in preceding centuries. Already intelligent privates in the ranks were discussing whether the Germans had a secret method of bringing rain whenever they wanted it for tactical purposes.
Curzon in his headquarters, as the days went on and the rain roared on the roof, began almost to feel a sinking of heart. The toll of casualties was mounting, and, significantly, the number of the sick, while progress was inordinately slow. Those optimistic early plans had envisaged an advance a mile deep, and here they were creeping forward only a hundred yards at a time. Tanks had proved utterly useless in the swamp. The Germans with their usual ingenuity and foresight had studded the country with concrete fortresses to hold the line where trenches were impossible to dig, and attacks were horribly costly. There were moments when Curzon hesitated before forcing himself to read the casualty figures of the divisions he had sent into action.
His determination was maintained by the information which Army Headquarters supplied to him. The German losses were heavier than the British; the German morale was on the point of giving way; any moment might see a general collapse of the enemy’s army. When Curzon rode out to inspect his long-suffering divisions in their rest billets he could see for himself that they were as reliable as ever, and that if they were not as high-spirited and hopeful as the early divisions of Kitchener’s Army they were still ready, as he knew British soldiers always would be, to pour out their blood at the command of their leaders – and three years of elimination had given the British Army leaders like Curzon, who could not be turned back by any difficulties, nor frightened by any responsibilities.
Cheered on by the encouragement of the highest command, Curzon threw himself into the work of maintaining the pressure upon the Germans, flinging his divisions, each time they had been filled up with drafts, once more in assaults upon the enemy’s line, battering away with the fiercest determination to win through in the end. Under his direction and those of his colleagues the British Army used up its strength in wild struggles like those of a buffalo caught in a net, or a madman in a strait-jacket, rather than submit to what seemed the sole alternative, which was to do nothing.
A week or two more – no longer than that – of these nightmare losses and thwarted attacks would see the end of the war, a complete disintegration of the whole German front in the north-east; that was what the Army command deduced from their Intelligence reports. Victory was in sight. Then suddenly Hudson, the Army Chief of Staff, dropped in with a bombshell. The Civilian Government at home had grown frightened at the casualty lists, and were losing their nerve, as might be expected of civilians. There was a suggestion that the Government – the ‘frocks’ as one famous staff officer significantly and humorously called them – were actually proposing to interfere with the military conduct of the war and to force some scheme of their own upon the command.
No self-respecting general could put up with that, of course. There would be wholesale resignations, and, if the Government persisted and could withstand the effect of these resignations upon public opinion, there would be more than resignations. There would be dismissals, until the Army was under the command of the pliant and subservient boot-licking type of general who always wins promotion under civilian command. It was not idle talk, but an imminent, urgent possibility; in fact, to such lengths were the civilians going that the politicians were actually coming out to France to see for themselves, not on the customary sight-seeing trip, but because they were pleased to doubt the word of the soldiers as to the present state of affairs. Something must be done to impress them immediately.
Curzon was in the heartiest agreement. He was genuinely horrified by what Hudson told him. Civilian interference in military affairs spelt ruin – all his teaching and experience told him that. If the present order of generals was swept away and their places taken by others (Bewly was an example of the type Curzon had in mind) there could be nothing but shame and disaster awaiting the British Army. Curzon did not tell himself that the present state of affairs must be the best possible because it was the present state of affairs, but that was a pointer to his line of thought. Innovations and charlatanry were indissolubly linked in his mind. He called upon his staff to make haste with their plans for the renewed attack upon Paschendaele. The surest reply to these busy-bodies would be a resounding success and thousands of prisoners.
Curzon was shaving early one morning, before the night’s reports could arrive, on the third day of that last tragic offensive, when young Follett came into his room.
‘G.H.Q. on the telephone, sir,’ he said – and the tone of his voice indicated the momentous nature of the occasion. ‘They want to speak to you personally.’
Curzon hurried out with the lather drying on his cheeks. In the inmost room of his headquarters Miller was at the telephone, and handed the receiver over to him.
‘Curzon speaking,’ he said.
‘Right. You know who this is?’ said the receiver.
‘Yes,’ said Curzon.
‘Is anyone else present in the room in which you are?’
‘My B.G.G.S.’
‘Send him out.’
Curzon dismissed Miller with a gesture, and, when the door had closed he addressed himself again to the telephone.
‘I’m alone now, sir,’ he said.
‘Then listen, Curzon. You know about the visitors we’re entertaining at present?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘They’re coming to poke their noses about in your sector this morning.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘They think we’re asking too much of the troops by continuing the attack at Paschendaele. They as good as told me to my face last night that I was lying.’
‘Good God!’
‘You’ve got to show ’em they’re wrong. What do you think of your corps at the present?’
Curzon reflected for a moment. All his divisions had been through the mill lately except for the good old Ninety-first under Challis.
‘I’ve got nothing that would impress politicians, I’m afraid, at the moment,’ said Curzon despondently.
‘Well, you must. I don’t care what you do. Who’s that young A.D.C. that you’ve got? Greven, isn’t it? He ought to be some use in this comic-opera business. Call him in and talk it over with him, and for God’s sake remember that something’s got to be done.’
Something was done and, as G.H.Q. advised, it was the result of Greven’s inspiration.
There is no need to describe the telephone calls and the hurried motor-car journeys which were made in preparation for the politicians’ visit. Preparations were hardly completed and Curzon had hardly strolled into the headquarters when an awed young staff officer looked up from his telephone and said: ‘They’re coming!’
In ten minutes a little fleet of motor cars came rolling up and stopped outside the house. From the radiators flew the pennons of G.H.Q. A motley crowd climbed out of the cars – the khaki and red of the General Staff, the new horizon blue of the French Army, officers in the ‘maternity jackets’ of the Royal Flying Corps; and among the crowd of uniforms were half a dozen figures in ludicrous civilian clothes. Curzon noted their long hair and shapeless garments with contempt. They gawked about them like yokels at a fair. They were stoop-shouldered and slack. He came forward reluctantly to be introduced.
‘This is Lieutenant-General Curzon, sir, commanding the Forty-fourth Corps,’ said the senior staff officer present. At the moment of making the introduction the staff officer, his face turned from the civilian, raised his eyebrows in inquiry, and Curzon nodded in return.
‘We want to show these gentlemen, General,’ said the staff officer, ‘something of the troops that have been engaged at Paschendaele. Have you got any specimens on view?’
‘Why, yes,’ replied Curzon. ‘There’s the Ninety-first Division coming out of the line now. If we drive over to the cross-roads we ought to meet them.’
‘They’ve had a pretty bad time,’ put in Greven, with all the deference expected of a junior staff officer venturing to demur from a suggestion of his chief.
‘That’s just what we want to see,’ put in the leader of the visitors. Yet the stilted artificiality of the conversation could hardly have escaped his attention – his mind was one of the keenest in Europe – had not the circumstances been so entirely natural.
The fleet of motor cars, augmented now by those of the Corps, continued their dreary way through the rain over the jolting pavé. Curzon found himself beside a sharp-featured little man whose manner reminded him of Sir Henry’s on the first occasion on which he dined at the Duchess’s. Curzon was plied with questions throughout the short journey, but none of the answers he gave was particularly revealing. For one thing Curzon had partly acquired the art by now of being uncommunicative without being rude; and for another he was so excited about the outcome of this very doubtful affair that he had hardly any words to spare for a civilian in a suit whose trousers bagged at the knees.
Suddenly the whole cortège slowed down and drew up at the side of the road. Everybody got out and splashed about in the slush.
‘Here comes the Ninety-first,’ said Miller, pointing. Greven pushed himself forward. ‘Their numbers seem a little low,’ he said, ‘but that’s only to be expected when they’ve had ten days in the line.’
The staff officers from G.H.Q. played up nobly. They shielded Curzon, who was the least accomplished actor of them all, by grouping themselves round him and surrounding him with a protective barrage of professional explanation.
The Ninety-first came trailing down the long, straight road. They had believed that the War held no new surprise for them until to-day. They had been turned out of their comfortable rest billets at a moment’s notice, formed up into column without explanation and sent marching post haste up the road towards the front. Everybody had naturally assumed that they were being sent in to make a new attack or to fill up some gap caused by a German counter-attack, and everybody’s spirits had fallen accordingly. Then suddenly at a cross-roads their march had been diverted and they were being marched back post haste away from the line again. The explanation of the manoeuvre entirely escaped them, even when they saw the string of motor cars with fluttering pennons and the group of visitors watching them march by. They had had a fortnight’s rest and they were extraordinarily cheered by their reprieve from front-line duty. Naturally they were wet and muddy and weary with their long march through the mud, but their spirits were high. They marched with all the spring and swing of men ready for anything – and this was carefully pointed out to the politicians by the staff officers from G.H.Q. Their muddiness and their wetness were nothing compared with the condition of the troops marching from the line at Paschendaele. Troops after that ordeal hardly had anything human about them; they were generally so sheeted in mud that only the whites of their eyes showed up uncannily out of uniform greyish-brown mask.
‘There doesn’t seem to be much the matter with these men,’ said the sharp-nosed little politician who sat beside Curzon. He sounded disappointed as he said it.
‘Of course not,’ said Miller breezily.
Reeves, commanding the Rifle Battalion in the division’s second brigade, had his men most in hand and was the officer upon whose histrionic ability Curzon’s staff had placed most reliance. The Rifles were marching past the group just when Miller had made his last remark and at a signal from Reeves they broke into a wild burst of cheering. They did not know whom they were cheering nor why, but a British battalion after a fortnight’s rest can generally be relied upon to cheer lustily at the call of a popular commanding officer.
‘There,’ said Miller. ‘You’d never hear broken-spirited men cheering like that.’
And soon after that the drenched politicians and staff officers climbed back into their motor cars and returned to G.H.Q. Curzon had done his best for the Army. It would not be his fault if he and his brother soldiers were held back at the moment of victory.
But the rain which had poured down upon prisoners and politicians alike extinguished the last chance of victory. Paschendaele was taken – a statistician might have calculated that the miserable village cost, in the shells hurled against it and in pensions paid to the dependants of the dead, about three hundred times as much as a similar area in the most valuable part of New York covered with intact skyscrapers. The ridge was crowned, but the higher command had decided that there was nothing to be gained by trying to push on. The high hopes of capturing Bruges and Zeebrugge had vanished; even if further efforts could be asked of the troops (as Curzon maintained) there was no chance of keeping the troops in the front line supplied well enough to maintain an offensive across the three miles of shell-torn swamp which they had conquered.
Curzon was informed of this decision in the course of a visit to Sixth Army Headquarters; he was closeted alone with Hudson for a long time. Yet during that interview Hudson was disinclined to discuss the future of the War. His own efforts had ended in failure, and now the Third Army was planning a tank offensive in the Cambrai sector regarding which his opinion was not even being asked. Hudson skirted round controversial subjects with a good deal of tact. He was full of appreciation for Curzon’s recent work, and as well as Curzon’s relentlessness in command he was pleased to approve of Curzon’s handling of the matter of the troops back from the front.
‘That was first rate,’ said Hudson, grinning. ‘It was absolutely convincing – took ’em in completely. Serve ’em right.’
Curzon grinned back. There was joy in the thought that soldiers could outwit politicians in other things as well as military affairs.
‘Oh, yes, by the way,’ said Hudson. ‘You’d better take your leave now while things are quiet.’
‘Thank you very much,’ said Curzon. ‘I was intending to ask you.’
‘There’ll be a special reason for it, though,’ said Hudson.
‘Indeed?’
‘Yes.’ Hudson’s expression was one of ungainly whimsicality. He fumbled with the papers on his desk to prolong the dramatic moment. ‘You will have to be present at an investiture.’
Curzon’s heart leaped; he guessed now what Hudson was going to say – he had been modestly hoping for this ever since the Somme.
‘The future Sir Herbert Curzon, K.C.M.G.,’ said Hudson. ‘Greven gets the D.S.O., of course. Yes, I’m glad I’m the first to congratulate you. The very strongest recommendations have gone through both from here and from G.H.Q., and I’m glad that someone in London’s got sense enough to act on them. You’d better take your leave from the day after to-morrow.’
Curzon was genuinely delighted with the news. He was glad to be a knight. Socially it was a distinction, and professionally too – only a minority of corps commanders received knighthood. There would be a ribbon and star to wear with full-dress uniform, and it would be pleasant to be addressed by servants as ‘Sir Herbert’. Incidentally he had never really liked being announced with his wife as ‘General and Lady Emily Curzon’. ‘Sir Herbert and Lady Emily Curzon’, on the other hand, sounded much better.
When he reached England, Emily was inclined to agree; she was glad for Curzon’s sake even though she herself was sorry because the investiture would take him from her side for a day and would compel them to stay in war-time November London, where the Duchess insisted on claiming (or, rather, assumed as a natural right) too much of his attention. The Duchess was full of gossip as usual – the Duke told Curzon that it beat him where she got it from – and although the Navy in its life-and-death struggle with German submarines was occupying more of her attention than the Army nowadays, she found time to try and pump Curzon about the new offensive, regarding which she had heard rumours.
Curzon was relieved to find that it was only rumours which she had heard – many of the leaks of information must have been stopped – and that the main reason for her curiosity was this very vagueness. Offensives of the ordinary sort had no more charm of novelty for London society by now than they had for the men in the trenches, but there was a quality about the new rumours which stimulated her interest. Curzon was tactfully reticent. He knew little enough about this Cambrai stunt as it was, and neither he nor his corps was to be employed. Moreover, it was to be a tank affair, and, frankly, he was not interested in tanks after they had disappointed him at Arras and Paschendaele. His unconcern actually deluded the Duchess into believing that the rumours had been exaggerated, and she went back to her new interest of trying to find out the latest about the new American Expeditionary Force.
However, she called upon Curzon and Emily at their hotel on the evening of the investiture – naturally she wanted to hear about that. So it came about that she was present when a servant came in with the information that the Duke of Bude would like to speak to Sir Herbert Curzon on the telephone.
‘I wonder what your father wants, dear,’ said the Duchess to Emily during Curzon’s absence.
‘I can’t imagine, mother,’ said Emily.
Meanwhile Curzon was standing in the little glass box (which was the home of the telephone at even luxurious hotels in 1917) listening in amazement to the Duke’s voice and to the news it was conveying to him with excited volubility.
‘There’s good news, Curzon,’ said the Duke. ‘Best since the war began. There’s no harm in my telling you – it’s being made public as quickly as possible. We’ve won a big victory.’
‘Where?’
‘On the Western front, of course. Cambrai.’
‘My God!’
‘There’s no doubt about it. Five miles advance up to now. Five thousand prisoners. Two hundred guns. The cavalry are being brought into action. The war’s as good as won. It’s the tanks that have done it.’
‘God bless my soul.’
Three months of agony at Third Ypres had won no greater result.
‘I’ll come in later, if you’re going to be in, and discuss it with you.’
‘Very good.’
Emily and the Duchess thought that Curzon’s expression on his return portended bad news; they were relieved when in reply to their startled ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ Curzon told them that England had won a victory. It was irritating in the extreme to Curzon to have to recount that in his absence from France a battle had been won in which his corps had played no part, and that the principal instrument of victory had been a weapon he despised – he remembered his cutting rudeness to his Tank staff officer when the latter had ventured to make suggestions. He could have swallowed the affront of the success of the tank if he and his men had shared in it. As it was he was exceedingly angry; apprehensive, as well, because the Duke’s preposterous optimism over the telephone had almost infected him with doubt lest the war should be won before his leave expired. He would be a fool in his own eyes then.
He was hardly as angry as the Duchess, all the same.
‘I’ll never forgive you, Bertie,’ she said bitterly. ‘And as for young Gordon, he’s finished as far as I’m concerned. Here have I been going round, and whenever anyone’s said that there was going to be a big push soon I’ve said: “Oh, no, I’m quite sure you’re wrong. There’s not going to be anything of the kind. I know for certain.” I shan’t be able to hold up my head again.’
Fortunately the Duke on his arrival was able to suggest a very satisfactory way out of the difficulty, presumably by the aid of his political experience.
‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ he said. ‘You’ll be able to say that you knew about it all the time, but denied the rumours so that the Germans would be lulled into insecurity. You can say that you were acting in obedience to a Royal command, because it was well known that whatever you said was given great attention in Berlin.’
The Duchess thought that a brilliant suggestion.