to stupendous results. In the
early days, in command of the 7th Division, he had done well, and he was
a gallant soldier, with initiative and courage of decision and a quick
intelligence in open warfare. His trouble on the Somme was that
the enemy did not permit open warfare, but made a siege of it, with
defensive lines all the way back to Bapaume, and every hillock a
machine-gun fortress and every wood a death-trap. We were always
preparing for a "break-through" for cavalry pursuit, and the cavalry
were always being massed behind the lines and then turned back again,
after futile waiting, encumbering the roads. "The bloodbath of the
Somme," as the Germans called it, was ours as well as theirs, and scores
of times when I saw the dead bodies of our men lying strewn over those
dreadful fields, after desperate and, in the end, successful attacks
through the woods of death--Mametz Wood, Delville Wood, Trones Wood,
Bernafay Wood, High Wood, and over the Pozieres ridge to Courcellette
and Martinpuich--I thought of Rawlinson in his chateau in Querrieux,
scheming out the battles and ordering up new masses of troops to the
great assault over the bodies of their dead... Well, it is not for
generals to sit down with their heads in their hands, bemoaning
slaughter, or to shed tears over their maps when directing battle. It
is their job to be cheerful, to harden their hearts against the casualty
lists, to keep out of the danger-zone unless their presence is strictly
necessary. But it is inevitable that the men who risk death daily, the
fighting-men who carry out the plans of the High Command and see no
sense in them, should be savage in their irony when they pass a peaceful
house where their doom is being planned, and green-eyed when they see
an army general taking a stroll in buttercup fields, with a jaunty young
A.D.C. slashing the flowers with his cane and telling the latest joke
from London to his laughing chief. As onlookers of sacrifice some of
us--I, for one--adopted the point of view of the men who were to die,
finding some reason in their hatred of the staffs, though they were
doing their job with a sense of duty, and with as much intelligence
as God had given them. Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson was one of our best
generals, as may be seen by the ribbons on his breast, and in the last
phase commanded a real "Army of Pursuit," which had the enemy on the
run, and broke through to Victory. It was in that last phase of open
warfare t