Forester starts the portrait of his hero, or anti-hero, with one of the more droll first sentences in fiction: ‘Nowadays Lieutenant-General Sir Herbert Curzon, KCMG, CB, DSO, is just one of Bournemouth’s seven generals, but with the distinction of his record and his social position as a Duke’s son-in-law, he is really far more eminent than those bare words would imply.’ The author set himself to understand and explain what manner of man could have done as the commanders of 1914–18 did: launch repeated doomed assaults that killed their own troops in tens of thousands, some before they reached the British front line, never mind the German one.
Before I took my wife on a first visit to the battlefields of the Western Front, I recommended The General as background reading ahead of any work of history, and she devoured it eagerly. To appreciate Forester’s book, no grasp of strategic studies is necessary. This is pre-eminently a human story, enhanced by its bathetic romance between a tongue-tied, socially corseted cavalryman on the wrong side of forty and a duke’s unhappy and unlovely spinster daughter: ‘for a fleeting moment Curzon, as his eyes wandered over her face, was conscious of a likeness between her features and those of Bingo, the best polo pony he ever had’. The author writes sympathetically about the sexual problems which dogged so many marital relationships in those ignorant, if not innocent, days. Above all, he tells the story of a wartime officer’s rise from obscurity to arbitration of the destinies of 100,000 men – which, as the author remarks, were more than Marlborough or Wellington ever commanded.
The book received a warm critical reception. H.G. Wells described it as ‘a portrait for all time of an individual in his period’. An American reviewer wrote: ‘Here is a book in which fiction masquerades, with complete success, as biography … More than the story of a man, this is a revealing study of the military mind, the military caste and the military system … Herbert Curzon represented the finest flowering of the officer type that was shaped and bred and groomed for command by the Old British Army.’ The writer credited the novelist with presenting, ‘with superb clarity and ironic definition, a few notable scenes from an ancient and enduring farce’. The Times was tepid, but the Daily Mail dubbed the book ‘masterly’: ‘Mr. Forester is uniformly just to his general, with effects that are sometimes startling.’ In the Evening Standard, Howard Spring wrote: ‘Everything that Curzon had was fine: courage, endurance, impartiality, honour. But in this great and moving study Mr. Forester shows how little even these avail when man’s divine element, the imagination, has flickered out.’ Spring described Curzon as ‘a well-nigh flawless creation’.
The book was not a big seller: it addressed a theme for which the British public had scant appetite. But word of its excellence travelled swiftly through service messes. Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, soon to become Battle of Britain C-in-C of Fighter Command, told Liddell Hart he thought the novel ‘marvellous’, as did General Sir Tim Pile. One American reviewer, never before having heard of Forester, speculated that he must have served in France, to possess such insight into what had taken place there. In truth, of course, the author had never experienced a day of military service, nor heard a shot fired in anger. Some modern novelists who write about conflict in general and the First World War in particular sell well, but expose to knowledgeable readers a profound ignorance of military affairs. Forester, by contrast, displayed in The General a mastery of soldiers’ conversation and behaviour, as well as of the machinery of war, which few writers have matched.
Whether he described the thought processes of sergeants or the social conventions of officers’ messes, he seldom faltered or struck a false note. He recognised that in 1914’s cavalry units, the post of machine-gun officer was often given to the regiment’s least plausible horseman, rather than to its brightest spark. He perfectly grasped the respective functions of divisional, corps and army commanders – he knew what generals did. He astutely observed the politicisation of wartime senior soldiers, who discovered the importance to their careers of dinner-table intrigue; the novelist shows Curzon unwillingly joining this game. His account of his subject’s experience in the October–November 1914 First Battle of Ypres achieved a verisimilitude he can surely have achieved only by interrogating survivors.
Forester was also a perceptive observer of the British social system, and especially of the lower middle class. This enabled him to write wittily and well about the bourgeois origins of his general, the perils of his ascent into the world of unkind hearts and coronets. Curzon belongs in Forester’s extensive fictional gallery of awkward, limited human beings. In an early chapter, the author describes this prematurely middle-aged bachelor, with his DSO won in South Africa fighting the Boers, as he was on the eve of war in 1914, a picture which
seems to verge closely on the conventional caricature of the Army major, peppery, red-faced, liable under provocation to gobble like a turkey-cock, hide-bound in his ideas and conventional in his way of thought, and it is no more exact than any other caricature. It ignores all the good qualities which were present at the same time. He was the soul of honour; he could be guilty of no meannesses, even boggling at those which convention permits.
He would give his life for the ideals he stood for, and would be happy if the opportunity presented itself. His patriotism was a real and living force, even if its symbols were childish. His courage was unflinching. The necessity of assuming responsibility troubled him no more than the necessity of breathing. He could administer the regulations of his service with an impartiality and a practised leniency suited to the needs of the class of man for which those regulations were drawn up. He shirked no duty, however tedious or inconvenient; it did not even occur to him to try to do so … The man with a claim on his friendship could make any demand upon his generosity. And while the breath was in his body he would not falter in the face of difficulties.
Although a part of Forester disdained his principal character and the role his kind had played in the greatest human tragedy ever to befall Britain, the author’s sense of justice caused him also to recognise his general’s merits. Curzon commanded respect and indeed affection from his staff and subordinates as a tireless worker and dedicated professional, of the highest courage both physical and moral. As a corps commander, he displayed intelligence enough to recruit to his staff civilian experts in chemistry, railway scheduling, logistics and suchlike, and to make full use of their skills, such as he knew himself to lack. Forester concluded his portrait: ‘So much for an analysis of Curzon’s character at the time when he was to become one of the instruments of destiny. Yet there is something sinister in the coincidence that when destiny had so much to do she should find tools of such high quality ready to hand. It might have been – though it would be a bold man who said so – more advantageous for England if the British Army had not been quite so full of men of high rank who were so ready for responsibility, so unflinchingly devoted to their duty, so unmoved in the face of difficulties, of such unfaltering courage.’
This has seemed to me, since first I read Forester’s lines at the age of fourteen, one of the most vivid character sketches he ever made. Among much else, it showed his recognition that to brand the commanders of 1914–18 as cowards, who chose to lead from the back – one of the charges made by some war poets – was unjust: fifty-eight British general officers perished in the conflict. Moreover, it is no more sensible to view those men as clones of each other than to delineate any other group of professionals and contemporaries in such a way. But there was indeed a British military caste, which had its German, Russian and French equivalents, and Curzon seems a fair exemplar.
Among the more foolish of popular proverbs is that which claims ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man.’ Occasionally in the course of history, great challenges have brought forward great leaders – Pitt in the 1790s and Churchill in 1940 are obvious examples. More often, however, societies have been obliged to respond to threats to their security and even