It was somewhat difficult for the caller to comprehend the full extent of the power and responsibility of this self-made leader at his desk in a great room overlooking Whitehall Place, for he had so simplified an organization that had been brought into being in two years that it seemed to run without any apparent effort on his part. The methods of men who have great authority interest us all. I had first seen Sir William at a desk in a little room of a house in a French town when his business was that of transport and supply for the British Expeditionary Force. Then he moved to a larger room in the same town, as Chief of Staff of the army in France. Now he had a still larger one and in London.
I had heard much of his power of application, which had enabled him to master languages while he was gaining promotion step by step; but I found that the new Chief of Staff of the British Army was not "such a fool as ever to overwork," as one of his subordinates said, and no slave to long hours of drudgery at his desk.
"Besides his routine," said another subordinate, speaking of Sir William's method, "he has to do a great deal of thinking." This passing remark was most illuminating. Sir William had to think for the whole. He had trained others to carry out his plans, and as former head of the Staff College who had had experience in every branch, he was supposed to know how each branch should be run.
When I returned to the front, my first motor trip which took me along the lines of communication revealed the transformation, the more appreciable because of my absence, which the winter had wrought. The New Army had come into its own. And I had seen this New Army in the making. I had seen Kitchener's first hundred thousand at work on Salisbury Plain under old, retired drillmasters who, however eager, were hazy about modern tactics. The men under them had the spirit which will endure the drudgery of training. With time they must learn to be soldiers. More raw material, month after month, went into the hopper. The urgent call of the recruiting posters and the press had, in the earlier stages of the war, supplied all the volunteers which could be utilized. It took much longer to prepare equipment and facilities than to get men to enlist. New Army battalions which reached the front in August, 1915, had had their rifles only for a month. Before rifles could be manufactured rifle plants had to be constructed. As late as December, 1915, the United States were shipping only five thousand rifles a week to the British. Soldiers fully drilled in the manual of arms were waiting for the arms with which to fight; but once the supply of munitions from the new plants was started it soon became a flood.
All winter the New Army battalions had been arriving in France. With them had come the complicated machinery which modern war requires. The staggering quantity of it was better proof than figures on the shipping list of the immense tonnage which goes to sea under the British flag. The old life at the front, as we knew it, was no more. When I first saw the British Army in France it held seventeen miles of line. Only seventeen, but seventeen in the mire of Flanders, including the bulge of the Ypres salient.
By the first of January, 1915, a large proportion of the officers and men of the original Expeditionary Force had perished. Reservists had come to take the vacant places. Officers and non-commissioned officers who survived had to direct a fighting army in the field and to train a new army at home. An offensive was out of the question. All that the force in the trenches could do was to hold. When the world wondered why it could not do more, those who knew the true state of affairs wondered how it could do so much. With flesh and blood infantry held against double its own numbers supported by guns firing five times the number of British shells. The British could not confess their situation without giving encouragement to the Germans to press harder such attacks as those of the first and second battle of Ypres, which came perilously near succeeding.
This little army would not admit the truth even in its own mind. With that casualness by which the Englishman conceals his emotions the surviving officers of battalions which had been battered for months in the trenches would speak of being "top dog, now." While the world was thinking that the New Army would soon arrive to their assistance, they knew as only trained soldiers can know how long it takes to make an army out of raw material. So persistent was their pose of winning that it hypnotized them into conviction. As it had never occurred to them that they could be beaten, so they were not.
If sometimes the logic of fact got the better of simulation, they would speak of the handicap of fighting an enemy who could deliver blows with the long reach of his guns to which they could not respond. But this did not happen often. It was a part of the game for the German to marshal more guns than they if he could. They accepted the situation and fought on. They, too, looked forward to "the day," as the Germans had before the war; and their day was the one when the New Army should be ready to strike its first blow.
There was also a new leader in France, king of the British world there. Sir William sent him the new battalions and the guns and the food for men and guns and his business was to make them into an army. They arrived thinking that they were already one, as they were against any ordinary foe, though not yet in homogeneity of organization against a foe that had prepared for war for forty years and on top of this had had two years' experience in actual battle.
On a quiet byroad near headquarters town, where all the staff business of General Headquarters was conducted, a wisp of a flag hung at the entrance to the grounds of a small modern chateau. There seemed no place in all France more isolated and tranquil, its size forbidding many guests. It was such a house as some quiet, studious man might have chosen to rest in during his summer holiday. The sound of the guns never reached it; the rumble of army transport was unheard.
Should you go there to luncheon you would be received by a young aide who, in army jargon, was known as a "crock"; that is, he had been invalided as the result of wounds or exposure in the trenches and, though unfit for active service, could still serve as aide to the Commander-in-Chief. At the appointed minute of the hour, in keeping with military punctuality, whether of generals or of curtains of fire, a man with iron-gray hair, clear, kindly eyes, and an unmistakably strong chin, came out of his office and welcomed the guests with simple informality. He seemed to have left business entirely behind when he left his desk. You knew him at once for the type of well-preserved British officer who never neglects to keep himself physically fit. It amounts to a talent with British officers to have gone through campaigns in India and South Africa and yet always to appear as fresh as if they had never known anything more strenuous than the leisurely life of an English country gentleman.
I had always heard how hard Sir Douglas Haig worked, just as I had heard how hard Sir William Robertson worked. Sir Douglas, too, showed no signs of pressure, and naturally the masterful control of surroundings without any seeming effort is a part of the equipment of military leaders. The power of the modern general is not evident in any of the old symbols.
It was really the army that chose Sir Douglas to be Commander-in-Chief. Whenever the possibility of the retirement of Sir John French was mentioned and you asked an officer who should take his place, the answer was always either Robertson or Haig. In any profession the members should be the best judges of excellence in that profession, and through eighteen months of organizing and fighting these two men had earned the universal praise of their comrades in arms. Robertson went to London and Haig remained in France. England looked to them for victory.
Birth was kind to Sir Douglas. He came of an old Scotch family with fine traditions. Oxford followed almost as a matter of course for him and afterward he went into the army. From that day there is something in common between his career and Sir William's, simple professional zeal and industry. They set out to master their chosen calling. Long before the public had ever heard of either one their ability was known to their fellow soldiers. No two officers were more averse to any form of public advertisement, which was contrary to their instincts no less than to the ethics of soldiering. In South Africa, which was the practical school where the commanders of the British Army of to-day first learned how to command, their efficient staff work singled them out as coming men. Both had vision. They studied the continental systems of war and when the great war came they had the records which were the undeniable recommendation that singled