To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [84]
In one letter he mentions a curious episode that reflected his assumption, and that of his era, that marriage was permanent and love sacred, but that the two would never coincide. Of a couple he knew, he wrote:
They've been married some 17 or 18 years. A few years ago they found out the same old story that they weren't meant to be in love with one another—so each went his and her way but they remained together and are the best of friends. The wife found what she thought was her "alter ego" in a Guardsman who is serving out here. About a year or two ago he gave her up and married. The husband then wrote to him and told him he had behaved like a cad to his wife and that he should always cut him in future and he has always done so.
Now I call that husband a real good fellow. Don't you? He saw no reason why his wife shouldn't be made happy simply because she happened to be his wife.
No doubt French hoped for the same generosity of spirit from his long-suffering Eleanora, and from "Pompous Percy." But that may have been no less wishful thinking than his expectation of a quick end to the war.
Haig had long since ceased to have any use for French as a commander. "He is so hot tempered and excitable," he wrote to his friend Leopold de Rothschild, "—like a bottle of soda water in suddenness of explosion." And again: "French seems to have that scoundrel Repington staying with him as his guest!" It was "most unsoldierlike," Haig fumed, "...to keep one's own advertising agent." After a private visit with George V in July to receive a medal, Haig happily noted in his diary that the King "had lost confidence in French."
The field marshal's position only weakened. Cabinet ministers were disturbed by his mood swings and his promises of victories that looked ever more improbable as, month after month, millions of men faced each other across a front line that barely moved. Worse yet, in technology, if not miles gained, the Germans seemed to be making breakthroughs, for on July 30 they made the first major use of another frightening new weapon, devised by a reserve army captain who in civilian life had been the fire chief of Leipzig: the flamethrower, which shot a jet of burning gasoline like a fire hose spraying water. Although its range was only about 75 feet, it thoroughly panicked British soldiers.
All French and Haig now shared was a relentless optimism that, somehow, the war would end quickly. "The enemy ... can't go on after January," Haig wrote to his wife on August 10, 1915, "and I would not be surprised to see him give in by November." Which, of course, made the goal of supplanting French as commander all the more urgent. Otherwise, who would be honored for the victory? Meanwhile, French, sensing his stock falling, began planning a decisive blow at the Germans to prove his critics wrong.
11. IN THE THICK OF IT
JUST AS WARFARE on an industrial scale required the mass production of new weapons like poison gas, so this new kind of conflict required the mass production of public support. In earlier British wars this had not been a problem. Despite some opposition to the Boer War, dramatic victories had come along swiftly enough to keep people cheering and to keep jingoist poets and magazine illustrators busy. Not so this time. Nor was there good news to celebrate from Britain's allies: the badly bloodied army of France, like its British counterpart, was hunkered down in trenches; in its early invasion of eastern Germany, Russia's army had suffered the war's largest