A GENERAL OF THE 1914-18 WAR

Press, Volume C, Issue 29638, 7 October 1961, Page 3

A GENERAL OF THE 1914-18 WAR

Brasshat. By Basil Collier. Seeker and Warburg. 335 p.p. and Index.

“There is no day so dead as the day before yesterday.” In the light of this aphorism it is astonishing how much the events and personalities of the first world war have, in the last few years, engaged the attention of contemporary writers. The subject of this biography, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff at the end of that war, has always been something of a controversial figure. At the time of his death by the hand of an Irish gunman in 1922 he was 58, and the more spectacular part of his career was behind him. Moreover he had quarrelled with IJoyd George on a matter of basic principle and must have remained in the eyes of that volatile statesman ever after under a cloud.

The authorised biography of the late Field-Marshal by Major-General Sir C. E. Callwell, which was published in 1927, and for which the biographer had unrestricted access to the private diaries of his subject, gave prominence to so many caustic comments on so many sacred cows that the dead man entered a phase of posthumous unpopularity from which thy present chronicler has painstakingly sought to lift him. Wilson was first and foremost a career-soldier. Born in 1864, the younger son of an Irish country gentleman with an estate in County Longford, he was destined by his father for the army, but started unpromisingly enough by being ploughed in exams, twice for Woolwich and three tunes for Sandhurst, eventually obtaining a commission in the Rifle Brigade by way of the militia. In his first years of service he was nearly killed by a blow from an axe wielded by a bandit in Burma, and this injury was to plague him all his life. This early set-back to his service-career was not, how. ever, to affect an ambition to rise to the heights of his profession, and his early fluency in French was to prove invaluable in even, tually attaining it. A paucity of private means was an added spur to the desire for promotion and when on two occasions his regiment was ordered abroad, he adroitly arranged an exchange with another officer on each in order to remain in England and study to enter the Staff College. Thereafter he was to do no more regimental soldiering. As a junior staff officer he went through the South African war, maintaining throughout a persona] affection for his seniors notwithstanding a shrewd appreciation of their disastrous blunders, the lessons from which he noted for future guidance. In 1907 he became Commandant of the Staff College, and gave a great deal of time and forethought to training his officers to prepare for the war which he was convinced would soon overwhelm Europe.

The Home Rule crisis which nearly resulted in a mutiny oy British forces called upon by the government to coerce Ulstermen into accepting Roman Catholic dominance found Wilson, now Director of Military Operations, staunchly on the side of his Ulster compatriots. But. in the complications resulting from political manoeuvres and intrigues he was to arouse mistrust among some of his closer friends, and in the maelstrom of the European conflict which followed he was to add to the number of his enemies by the diplomatic agility with which he handled liaison work with the French. The infallible hindsight granted to the public after a great war has shown up the miscalculations and blunders of all the nations concerned, and the biographer who is* obviously concerned to present his subject in the best possible light avers that if Wilson’s early suggested plan of campaign for the British forces in France had been followed the allies would have gained a swift victory. This is hardly a matter on which the reader is qualified to judge. What does

emerge from a tremendously complicated exposition of the campaign is that as a go. between in the unseemly wrangles which constantly took place among the High Command of the French and British armies Henry Wilson proved to be a diplomatic force of no mean ability. His loyalty to Haig, of whose military capacity he was no admirer, must also be accounted to him for righteousness, though it stemmed partly from bis fear of seeing the Commander. in-Chief superseded by an unknown quantity, during successive crises in the later stages of the war. He. himself, never aspired to that uncomfortable eminence, and, indeed, only commanded a Corps in the field for a short time between his delicate diplomatic assignments. In 1918 he was appointed C.1.G.5.. an office which since an office which since Kitchener’s death had been bereft of a good deal of its powers, and when the war ended was given a baronetcy and the sum of £ 10,000 the first substantial bit of capital he had ever owned. From then until his death he was to disagree profoundly with every aspect of the peace treaty especially the calculated humiliation of the Germans and of most of the men who formulated it. When Woodrow Wilson whom he particularly disliked claimed him as a distant cousin and said “Ours is a good name’’ Henry Wilson replied tartly “I used to think so.”' Those last years can hardly have been happy ones for a man with a foresight ahead of his time.

The book is admirably written, if lacking in bibliography other than the diaries on which the 1927 biography was also based. If Mr Collier has given a too favourable interpretation of some of, his subject’s actions it only redresses the balance of the earlier work, and leaves any intelligent reader with enough data to form a personal judgment on one of the most enigmatic personalities of the day before yesterday.