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‘Good-morning, good morning!’ the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
These lines from Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘The General’ were written in 1917, and anticipate by some 44 years the central argument of Alan Clark’s The Donkeys – that the British generals of World War I were blind, unfeeling incompetents who wilfully squandered the lives of tens of thousands of the country’s best soldiers in fruitless military offensives.
His short book graphically chronicles the failures of the 1915 offensives at Neuve Chapelle, Aubers Ridge, and Loos. It also details another kind of war – the battle between Sir John French and Sir Douglas Haig for the supreme command of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). Published in 1961, The Donkeys was an instant success. It has been widely read ever since, and influenced the creation of the hit satirical musical Oh! What a Lovely War and, less directly, the 1989 television series Blackadder Goes Forth.
Modern historians frequently describe the book as bad history: an ill-tempered polemic corralling arguments drawn from just one side, which ignores the difficulties facing commanders unfamiliar with a whole new way of war. Even the title comes in for criticism: we have no evidence to suggest that German general Erich von Falkenhayn’s memoirs contain a quote about the English soldiers ‘fighting like lions’ but being ‘led by donkeys’. In fact, the saying has been used many times, most likely first occurring in the Crimean War.
Nevertheless, Clark’s views are powerfully expressed in the book, and came as a shock to a generation who venerated Sir Douglas Haig as Britain’s war-winning general, and for his undoubted commitment to the welfare of ex-servicemen. It is easy to forget that his funeral procession in 1928 drew crowds of more than 100,000 people, many of them former soldiers.
Mounting tragedy
Starting with Neuve Chapelle – the first large organised attack by the British during the war – Clark builds up a mounting sense of tragedy on an epic scale, as the commanders order large-scale offensives over narrow fronts, with woefully inadequate artillery support.
The problems they encountered will be all too familiar to students of the Western Front: first waves achieving some success, albeit with horrendous casualties; poor communications with artillery leading to lack of fire support and even friendly fire incidents; and masses of reserves blocked from advancing by trenches choked with the wounded.
Such was the situation at Aubers Ridge, a disastrous May 1915 attack on the German lines which cost the British more than 10,000 casualties:
And once again along the whole attack frontage there broke out the harsh rasping stutter of the machine-guns; once again whole lines of men withered away, reduced to straggling mounds of twitching, agonised humanity.
Clark sees this battle as the turning point in the ‘ossification of tactical thinking’. He writes: ‘After Aubers Ridge surprise was abandoned, “weight of metal” was regarded as all-important, and the “war of attrition” was held to be the answer.’
Clark would have had plenty of opportunities to interview war veterans had he chosen, but this was not how history was generally written in his day. Nevertheless, the quotes from war diaries, both British and German, can be very telling, such as this German account of the destruction of the 21st Division on the second day of Loos in September 1915:
Dense masses of the enemy, line after line, appeared over the ridge, some of their officers even mounted on horseback and advancing as if carrying out a field-day drill in peacetime. Our artillery and machine-guns riddled their ranks as they came on.
There had been 12 battalions in the attack that day, making a strength of just under 10,000. In three-and-a-half hours of fighting, the British lost 385 officers and nearly 8,000 men. And, of course, the Germans would go on to win the Battle of Loos.
Clark’s views shocked many who saw Haig as Britain’s war-winning general.
Bumbling incompetent
Clark portrays the Commander of the BEF, Sir John French, as a bumbling incompetent of limited intellect. Corps commander Douglas Haig (later French’s successor) is shown as made of better stuff, but unscrupulous both in his political manoeuvring to supplant French, and in his squandering of troops. An unexpectedly comedic element in the book occurs when Clark describes the king visiting the front to assess the command difficulties for himself. Haig lends the king his own horse, hoping for a private chat.
But the horse throws the king, incapacitating him for several days. Haig is not only denied his access, but has the additional problem of deciding whether to say that the horse had been properly exercised beforehand (and therefore that His Majesty is a poor rider), or that the horse had not been readied, revealing therefore that Haig had been negligent.
The most potent symbol of military incompetence is, of course, the Somme Offensive of July 1916. Clark’s book ends well before this, but he foreshadows it in his comment on Haig’s appointment to the top job:
Now, at last, Haig had reached the summit. His was the command of the greatest army that the Empire had ever put in the field… A body whose heroism and devotion was such that they could twice in successive years be ravaged in hopeless offensives, who were in a single day to lose more men than any other army in the history of the world, whom, after 27 months of slaughter and exhaustion, he was to leave so perilously exposed that they were nearly annihilated.
The debate about Haig has raged back and forth for more than a century now. I recall sitting near the late Professor Richard Holmes at a conference as he recounted taking a taxi journey where the cabbie immediately took issue with his appraisal of the general.
Clark’s book for a short period seemed to establish a consensus that the generals were chateau-dwelling cowards who shunned the front lines and threw a whole generation on the sacrificial altar. But the counter-offensive was not long in coming. In 1963, John Terraine published Douglas Haig: the educated soldier, which ushered in the ‘learning curve’ school, arguing that the British army under Haig’s leadership painfully but successfully incorporated the use of tanks, aircraft, light machine-guns, and infiltration tactics to revolutionise warfare and open the way to the successful offensives of 1918.
Gary Sheffield is another historian who takes this revisionist line. His book Forgotten Victory – the First World War: myths and realities was published in 2001, followed by a volume on Haig ten years later. The latter remains controversial. As one critic, the historian and MHM contributor Nigel Jones, vividly put it: ‘The nagging thought remains: what a terrible shame it was that Haig’s progress along his learning curve had to be greased by such deep floods of blood.’
The subject is so emotive that it is hard for any author to remain objective. Though that certainly wasn’t Clark’s aim, his book still deserves a place in the literature of this terrible conflict. When we shudder at the Russian ‘meat grinder’ offensives in Ukraine, we should remember that all sides were guilty of these appalling tactics in the First World War.
Alan Clark
Born: 13 April 1928
Died: 5 September 1999
Nationality: British
Alan Clark was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he read Modern History under Hugh Trevor-Roper. He qualified as a lawyer but chose instead to become a military historian, publishing The Donkeys to great acclaim, as well as books on Operation Barbarossa, the Fall of Crete, and the Vietnam War. Clark was first elected to parliament in 1974 and later served as a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government. Though married for 40 years, he had many affairs, and loved dogs, backgammon, and motor cars. An outspoken and often controversial figure, Clark achieved peak notoriety with the publication of the first volume of his personal and political diaries in 1993 – a source of acute embarrassment to many of his former colleagues.
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