We do not know much about our generals-It is an odd thing but of the three men who hold our fate in their hands—Sir Alan Brooke, the Commander-in-Chief at home; Sir John Dill, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff; and Sir Archibald Wavell, the Commander-in-Chief in the Middle East—the average man knows far less than he does of Clark Gable, Jack Warner and Gracie Fields, writes a military correspondent in the "Newcastle Journal" Yet make no mistake, it is generals who win wars. The army, specially a British Army, will always do its job properly if it has been well trained, but leadership is everything. As Napoleon so aptly remarked, it was not the Roman legions who conquered Britain but Cæsar. It was not the Carthaginians who made Rome tremble but Hannibal. He could have added it was not the French Army which held Europe in fear, it was Napoleon.
Behind the generals come an important class of whom the public knows even less—the General Staff. We joke about the brass hats and the red tabs, and the man in the front line says half-seriously, half-jestingly, that it must be a grand life sitting in some country mansion sticking pins in a map while he is wading through mud and blood. But the General Staff is the vital nerve system through which the commander communicates his ideas and energy to his army. Administration is not a showy quality but it matters. The General Staff are then unknown specialists who arrange the details for the big attack—which railway lines can be used and for what, how the ammunition is to be brought up and how much will be needed, which units are to use which roads, where the reserves are to be placed; they have to collect and tabulate the information about the enemy's movements, and they have to try and deceive the enemy about our own movements.
When the staff does its job well the army and the commander fight with a single mind and purpose, but when staff work is bungled or bad the casualties mount up unnecessaril} For mistakes in battle are always paid in the same coin—blood. An error of ten minutes in time or half a mile in distance may make all the difference between triumph and disaster.
The corps of General Staff officers in the British Army is a fine body but it is very small-'They all know each other well, which is an immense advantage, for personal sympathies mean much in war. If, however, Governments had been wise and less parsimonious in the years of peace far more men would have been sent through the staff college-It might be said that the qualities of a commander-in-chief are a resolute personality and imagination, a capacity to take decisions and stand by them, while the essential qualities of the staff are ability to organize and get down to detail accurately, whether it be ordering a bus to meet a draft of reinforcements or describing the best way to employ the artillery in a bombardment. They draw their inspiration from the commander-in-chief—it all hinges on him.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.