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After all, our generals had to learn their lesson, like the private soldier, and the young battalion officer, in conditions of warfare which had never been seen before and it was bad for the private soldier and the young battalion officer, who died so they might learn. As time went on staff-work improved, and British generalship was less rash in optimism and less rigid in ideas.
Thank you, Eric." From the end of the table Lord Crawleigh's voice penetrated authoritatively. "Barbara! . . . Barbara! Are you coming with us by the 4.10?" She pressed Eric's hand before turning her head. "I can't come till the 5.40," she said. "But, my dear Barbara " "I can't, father." "Except the girl. "I did wonderful staff-work with Waterloo this morning," Barbara confided.
The remnants of the 16th Division, the poor, despairing remnants, were sent, without rest or baths, straight into the line again, down south. I found a general opinion among officers and men, not only of the Irish Division, under the command of the Fifth Army, that they had been the victims of atrocious staff-work, tragic in its consequences.
Finally, owing to defective staff-work and the confusion of the French retreat, they were left in utter ignorance of what had happened, and faced the German attack as if they were part of one unbroken front instead of being a fragment round which the tide of battle surged, and under the impression conveyed to them on their arrival at the scene of action that their opponents numbered little more than one or at most two army corps.
Now, for the first time, their staff-work showed signs of disorder and demoralization. When the Prussian Guards Reserves were brought up from Valenciennes to counter attack at Contalmaison they were sent on to the battlefield without maps or local guides, and walked straight into our barrage. A whole battalion was cut to pieces and many others suffered frightful things.
A thin, nervous, highly strung man, with extreme simplicity of manner and clarity of intelligence, he impressed me as a brain of the highest temper and quality in staff-work. His memory for detail was like a card-index system, yet his mind was not clogged with detail, but saw the wood as well as the trees, and the whole broad sweep of the problem which confronted him.
I loved to watch her, when the servants had gone, with her elbows on the table like a schoolboy, her crisp gold hair a little rumpled, cracking walnuts with gusto, like some child who has been allowed down from the nursery for dessert and means to make the most of it. With his first cigar Blenkiron got to business. 'You want to know about the staff-work we've been busy on at home.
The staff-work, too, was deplorable, and reserves were late or went astray, though it is doubtful whether anything could have retrieved the initial error which left the German defences intact, impeded the whole advance, and enabled the enemy to recover and bring up reserves before the attack was renewed on the two following days. Possibly our high-explosive had been exhausted.
Nevertheless, the criticisms that were levelled against the ineptitude and mental inelasticity of the generals and the staff of the old army overshot the mark. No one ventured to bring such a charge against the staff-work of the French, and yet the French had been no more successful in Champagne than we had been in Artois.
The battles of Neuve Chapelle, Fertubert, and Loos, in 1915, cost us thousands of dead and gave us no gain of any account; and both generalship and staff-work were, in the opinion of most officers who know anything of those battles, ghastly.
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