1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [321]
Signed: Capt. A. J. Agius
Senior officers were busily engaged in writing their reports and Brigadier-General Jelf, in command of the 73rd Brigade, took particular pains with his. He had taken over command of the Brigade on 26 September after its own Brigadier was killed. He was angry. And he was more than angry. He was incensed. It had come to his notice that the 24th Division, and his Brigade in particular, was being criticised by higher authority. He expressed himself frankly:
No communication of any kind had been established with my Battalions either by wire or orderly, and I attribute this to the fact that all battalions and the Brigade Staff were quite ignorant of the rudiments of what to do in the trenches, how communications were established, the method of drawing rations, etc. They never had been in trenches in their lives before. And I can confidently assert, after many months of trench warfare, that it would have taxed to the uttermost the resources of any Regular battalions with plenty of experience behind them, to have kept themselves supplied, under similar conditions.
The post-mortems and reappraisals had already begun and the thrusting of the two untried and imperfectly trained divisions into battle, even the very fact that they were employed as almost the only reserves, was already a sore point. Sir John French had recognised the value of bringing in fresh divisions whose attitudes had not yet been stultified by the stalemate of trench warfare, but it was for exactly this reason that he was reluctant to commit them until success was certain and a breakthrough assured. He had promised the Divisional Commanders as much, making it clear that all that would be required of them would be to pursue the advance, or more precisely, to pursue the enemy in his flight. It was not his intention that they should be thrown in to attempt to smash the enemy’s second line. It was his right and entitlement, indeed as Commander-in-Chief it was his duty to retain a proportion of troops as reserves, but under his own orders, and to release them only when, in his judgement and his judgement alone, it was the right moment to send them in. It had previously been arranged, with the concurrence of Sir Douglas Haig, that the reserves should be held a short distance behind the battle-front, for there was no certainty that they would be required. Everything hinged on success in the first stage of the battle, and as soon as news reached the Commander-in-Chief that the German line had been breached, that the troops were swarming forward and that they had captured Loos, he released his hold on the reserves and placed them at the disposal of Sir Douglas Haig. It was Haig’s orders that sent them into the attack, and he had issued them in good faith on the basis of the information he received and in the belief that British troops were already tackling the Germans’ second line. But the fortunes of war are fickle and the fog of war grows thicker as confused information travels along the chain of command and across the miles from the front, and, as often as not, by the time news reached Army Headquarters the situation had already changed.
After the relish of a glorious beginning, matters had gone downhill. The self-satisfaction of the First Army Staff had received a severe jolt and the laurels which they believed they had justly earned were beginning to look slightly wilted in the backlash.
The friction between the Commander-in-Chief and the ambitious commander of the First Army had been increasing over the months. Now Haig, affronted as much by the recent failure as he had been gratified by the initial success, settled in his own mind on whose shoulders the blame should be laid. In the course of a meeting on 28 September Sir John French informed him that