‘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.
