To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [27]
"This is certainly a great piece of luck for me," French wrote to a friend. "I think it ensures my participating in the next war."
4. HOLY WARRIORS
NO ONE KNEW when Britain's next war would come, but everyone knew with whom it would be. The mercurial Kaiser Wilhelm II was both expansion-minded and resentful that Germany had gotten into the race for African and Asian colonies so much later than Britain. All his life he looked back fondly at his youth as an officer in an elite regiment, and he loved all things military, seldom wearing civilian clothes except when hunting. His keen, anxious ambition echoed that of many other Germans, whose country had the largest population in Western Europe, but not yet, it seemed, proportional prestige in the world. Since the end of the 1890s, Germany had been engaged in a polite but determined naval arms race with Britain, while the British worked to maintain their strong advantage in the heavily armored battleships and faster battle cruisers that had allowed the Royal Navy to so long dominate the world's oceans. The contest between the two nations to mobilize shipyards, foundries, and machine tools to build these fearsome vessels gave a hint of something new in the military trade: warfare that might be decided not by bravery, dash, and generalship, but by industrial might.
Not everyone saw it that way, however. Moving up the career ladder in 1907 to the influential army post of inspector general, Sir John French had no doubt what one of his top priorities was: the cavalry. He found much sympathy from King Edward VII, whom he met frequently at dinners, receptions, and military ceremonies, and with whom he corresponded about cavalry matters. Disturbing anti-cavalry voices, he soon discovered, were to be heard all around him, such as that of a British military observer at the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, who reported that the only thing cavalrymen could do when faced with entrenched machine guns was to cook for the infantry. French fought back against such heretics, who ignored the example of his glorious charge at Kimberley. The most outrageous move of the naysayers was to persuade the army high command to abandon the lance as a cavalry weapon. If the lance went, could the next casualty, heaven forbid, be the sword? For several years French fought a fierce bureaucratic battle, through memos, whispers in the King's ear, articles in the press, and the recruitment of Boer War heroes as behind-the-scenes lobbyists. Finally, in 1909, he won, and the lance was officially restored to the cavalry's arsenal.
In his leisure time, the diminutive general could be seen furtively squiring around London various elegant women married to other men. He frequently crossed the English Channel on military business; when sent to observe German army maneuvers, he got on well with the Kaiser, who awarded him the Order of the Red Eagle. To French, however, peacetime felt like waiting. "In the campaigns I've been in during my life," he once wrote, "I've never felt satisfied at the end of any and have looked forward to the next."
At the Cavalry Club on Piccadilly, he often dined with his old friend Douglas Haig. Both men lived in a world of comfortable certainties: of ranks of cavalry trotting smartly on parade with boots polished to a high gloss, of the nobility of Britain's imperial mission, of their own guaranteed steady rise through the army's senior ranks. Haig, naturally, was a comrade-in-arms in the great battle to restore the lance, testifying before a high-level commission,