When he reached England, Emily was inclined to agree; she was glad for Curzon’s sake even though she herself was sorry because the investiture would take him from her side for a day and would compel them to stay in war-time November London, where the Duchess insisted on claiming (or, rather, assumed as a natural right) too much of his attention. The Duchess was full of gossip as usual – the Duke told Curzon that it beat him where she got it from – and although the Navy in its life-and-death struggle with German submarines was occupying more of her attention than the Army nowadays, she found time to try and pump Curzon about the new offensive, regarding which she had heard rumours.
Curzon was relieved to find that it was only rumours which she had heard – many of the leaks of information must have been stopped – and that the main reason for her curiosity was this very vagueness. Offensives of the ordinary sort had no more charm of novelty for London society by now than they had for the men in the trenches, but there was a quality about the new rumours which stimulated her interest. Curzon was tactfully reticent. He knew little enough about this Cambrai stunt as it was, and neither he nor his corps was to be employed. Moreover, it was to be a tank affair, and, frankly, he was not interested in tanks after they had disappointed him at Arras and Paschendaele. His unconcern actually deluded the Duchess into believing that the rumours had been exaggerated, and she went back to her new interest of trying to find out the latest about the new American Expeditionary Force.
However, she called upon Curzon and Emily at their hotel on the evening of the investiture – naturally she wanted to hear about that. So it came about that she was present when a servant came in with the information that the Duke of Bude would like to speak to Sir Herbert Curzon on the telephone.
‘I wonder what your father wants, dear,’ said the Duchess to Emily during Curzon’s absence.
‘I can’t imagine, mother,’ said Emily.
Meanwhile Curzon was standing in the little glass box (which was the home of the telephone at even luxurious hotels in 1917) listening in amazement to the Duke’s voice and to the news it was conveying to him with excited volubility.
‘There’s good news, Curzon,’ said the Duke. ‘Best since the war began. There’s no harm in my telling you – it’s being made public as quickly as possible. We’ve won a big victory.’
‘Where?’
‘On the Western front, of course. Cambrai.’
‘My God!’
‘There’s no doubt about it. Five miles advance up to now. Five thousand prisoners. Two hundred guns. The cavalry are being brought into action. The war’s as good as won. It’s the tanks that have done it.’
‘God bless my soul.’
Three months of agony at Third Ypres had won no greater result.
‘I’ll come in later, if you’re going to be in, and discuss it with you.’
‘Very good.’
Emily and the Duchess thought that Curzon’s expression on his return portended bad news; they were relieved when in reply to their startled ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ Curzon told them that England had won a victory. It was irritating in the extreme to Curzon to have to recount that in his absence from France a battle had been won in which his corps had played no part, and that the principal instrument of victory had been a weapon he despised – he remembered his cutting rudeness to his Tank staff officer when the latter had ventured to make suggestions. He could have swallowed the affront of the success of the tank if he and his men had shared in it. As it was he was exceedingly angry; apprehensive, as well, because the Duke’s preposterous optimism over the telephone had almost infected him with doubt lest the war should be won before his leave expired. He would be a fool in his own eyes then.
He was hardly as angry as the Duchess, all the same.
‘I’ll never forgive you, Bertie,’ she said bitterly. ‘And as for young Gordon, he’s finished as far as I’m concerned. Here have I been going round, and whenever anyone’s said that there was going to be a big push soon I’ve said: “Oh, no, I’m quite sure you’re wrong. There’s not going to be anything of the kind. I know for certain.” I shan’t be able to hold up my head again.’
Fortunately the Duke on his arrival was able to suggest a very satisfactory way out of the difficulty, presumably by the aid of his political experience.
‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ he said. ‘You’ll be able to say that you knew about it all the time, but denied the rumours so that the Germans would be lulled into insecurity. You can say that you were acting in obedience to a Royal command, because it was well known that whatever you said was given great attention in Berlin.’
The Duchess thought that a brilliant suggestion.
Chapter Twenty-Three
In the morning the newspapers proclaimed England’s victory in flaming headlines. There could be no doubt about it. Curzon’s appetite for his war-time breakfast (not nearly as appetizing as the ones served him at his headquarters in France) quite failed him as he read. Envy and apprehension between them stirred up strange passions within him, to such an extent that after breakfast he made an excuse to Emily and slipped away to telephone to General Mackenzie at the War Office. He did not dare tell Emily that he was going to suggest that he sacrificed the remainder of his leave in order to make sure of missing no more of the glory which was to be found in France.
But Mackenzie seemed to be in an odd mood.
‘I shouldn’t worry, if I were you, Curzon,’ he said.
‘But I don’t want to miss anything,’ persisted Curzon.
‘Well – no, look here, Curzon, take my advice and don’t worry.’
‘I don’t understand I’m afraid.’
‘Don’t you? Perhaps that’s my fault. But on the other hand perhaps it isn’t. Now ring off, because I’m busy.’
There was a small grain of comfort in the conversation, Curzon supposed, but it was woefully small. Out in the streets as he went for his walk with Emily, the church bells were ringing a peal of victory, such as London had not heard for three dark years. Emily’s happy chatter at his side received small attention from him. He brought tears into her eyes by declining flatly to go to Somerset for the rest of his leave – he felt that he did not dare to quit the centre of affairs and put himself six hours farther away from France. He could picture in his mind’s eye the rolling downland on which the victory had been won, and his mind dwelt on the armies pouring forward to victory at that very moment while he was left behind here in England and ignominy.
The evening papers told the same tale of a continued advance and of further captures. The whole Press was jubilant, and Curzon remembered bitterly the cautious half-praise which had been grudgingly dealt out to him in the Press (not by name, of course, but by implication) for his greatest efforts at Third Ypres. He began to lose confidence in himself, and when a soldier of Curzon’s type loses confidence in himself there is little else for him to lose. He told himself repeatedly, and with truth, that he was not jealous of the success of others. It was not that which was troubling him, but the thought that there were still six days of his leave left.
Then in the morning there was a change. Curzon was no literary critic, but he sensed, even although he would not have been able to label it, the note of caution in the newspaper comments on the progress of the Battle of Cambrai. There was a decided tendency to warn the public not to expect too much. Curzon could imagine the sort of reports which would be coming in to Corps Commanders from Divisional Headquarters – he had received them often enough. Reports of a stiffening resistance, of the arrival of new German divisions at the front, of the establishment of a fresh defensive line which only a prolonged bombardment could reduce. He could read the symptoms with certainty, and he knew now that General Mackenzie had been right when he told him not to worry – enough details must already have trickled through to the Imperial General Staff at that early stage of the battle for Mackenzie to have formed his judgement.
So Curzon was fully reconciled to spending the rest of his le
ave in England, and he brought a new pleasure into Emily’s heart by consenting to go down into Somersetshire with her for his last four days. Emily was more anxious and worried about him than she had previously been. Perhaps the revelation of Curzon’s attitude during the Battle of Cambrai had shown her an aspect of his character with which she had not been previously familiar, or perhaps with her woman’s intuition she could guess at the changing state of affairs on the Western Front more accurately than Curzon could. In either case she had a premonition of danger. She clung to Bertie during those four idyllic days in Somerset.
There was just enough petrol in the Duke’s reserves to supply the motor car which bore them across the loveliest and most typical stretches of the English countryside – lovely even in a war-time December – from Somerset to Folkestone at the end of Curzon’s leave. Emily found it hard to keep her lips steady as she said good-bye to her husband at Folkestone Harbour, where the stream of khaki flowed steadily by on its way to the ships and to France; and Emily’s cheeks were unashamedly wet with tears. Curzon actually had to swallow hard as he kissed her good-bye; he was moved inexpressibly by the renewal of the discovery that there was actually a woman on earth who could weep for him. His voice was gruff, and he patted her brusquely on the back before he turned away, spurs clinking, past the barriers where the red-hatted military police sprang to stiff attention, to where the steamer waited against the jetty, crammed nearly solid with pack-laden soldiers.
At the headquarters of the Forty-fourth Corps Curzon found a new atmosphere. The revelation of the efficacy of tanks to break the trench line had come too late. The alterations of plan forced on the Tank Corps Staff by G.H.Q. had reduced material results to a minimum, and occasioned such losses in tanks that it would be some time before a tank force sufficient to launch a new offensive could be accumulated. Meanwhile the collapse of Russia meant that Germany could transfer a million troops from East to West. Miller had ready for Curzon a long list of new German divisions already identified, and more were to be added to it every day. Where for three years three Allied soldiers confronted two Germans, there was now an equality, and there seemed to be every prospect that before long the balance would alter farther yet until the Germans would possess a numerical superiority, which they had not been able to boast since First Ypres. The staff maps which showed the order of battle of the contending armies indicated an ominous clustering of the black squares of German divisions in front of the British line.
Curzon pored over them for long, scratching his cropped head, and turning repeatedly to the detailed trench maps as he forced himself to concentrate on this unusual problem of defence, with the help of the appreciations to which Miller and Frobisher devoted long hours in drawing up. He presided at long weary conferences with his divisional generals and their staffs, when defensive tactics were discussed. Universally the schemes laid before him took it for granted that ground would be lost in the first stages of the battle should the enemy attack, and he was puzzled at this. He tugged at his whitened moustache as he listened or read. This almost voluntary cession of soil was quite opposed to the traditions inherited from Wayland-Leigh, and the prospect irked him sorely. There had been a few occasions when the Forty-fourth Corps had yielded up blood-soaked fragments of trench in the height of a battle, but they had been very few. He would have preferred to have issued a few stringent orders to hold on to the front line to the last gasp, and threatening with a court-martial any officer who retreated. That was the kind of order which he understood and would have been ready to execute.
But Miller was able to back up his suggestions with a huge mass of orders from Sixth Army, bearing Hudson’s signature, in which the greatest urgency was laid upon the need for the economy of life. Two-thirds of a million casualties, incurred at Arras and Paschendaele, had forced the British Army, for the first time in two years, to worry about losses. Curzon found the restriction irksome and unnatural. He had grown used to handling unlimited supplies of men and material, and in the Forty-fourth Corps a convention had grown up under which the prowess of a division was measured by the number of its men who were killed.
‘Confound it, Miller,’ he said angrily. ‘You’re surely not proposing that we should give up Saint-Victor like this?’
A hundred thousand men had died so that the ruins of Saint-Victor should be included in the British line.
‘I think we’d better, sir,’ said Miller. ‘You see, it’s like this. There’s a weak flank here. We can’t be sure of holding the sector along here to here. That’ll mean a salient if we hang on to Saint-Victor. It would be all right if we could afford the men, but –’
‘Oh, all right, have it your own way,’ said Curzon testily. He could not withstand arguments about possible losses.
Into this atmosphere of nervous preparation there came a fresh bombshell from Sixth Army headquarters. The Forty-fourth Corps were being taken out of the line they were preparing to hold and transferred to take over a sector held up to that time by the French.
‘Yes, I’m sorry about it,’ said Hudson, when Curzon hotly denounced the scheme over the telephone to him. ‘You don’t think I want it, do you? My own idea is that G.H.Q. have been weak. We oughtn’t to stretch our line any farther. But we’ve got to, old man, and there’s an end of it. You’ll find your new sector a bit weak. Buckle to, old man, and get it strengthened while you’ve got time.’
Weak it certainly was. Divisional generals and brigadiers, when the transfer was effected, inundated Corps headquarters with complaints regarding the inadequacy of the wiring, the absence of support trenches, and so on. Curzon passed on the complaints to Hudson.
‘What do you expect from the French?’ said Hudson. ‘They can’t fight and they can’t work, and they expect us to do both for them. I can’t help it. We’ve picked the Forty-fourth Corps for this sector for that special reason. If anyone can hold it, you can, Curzon, old chap. We’re relying on you.’
Under this stimulus Curzon threw himself into the work of strengthening his line, while Miller and Frobisher and the others slaved at drawing up new orders to cover the changed conditions. Gone were the days when the front of the Forty-fourth Corps was marked out from all others by nightly fire-works and exceptional activity. Curzon’s major-generals had no desire to attract hostile attention to themselves. The waste of a night of labour in consequence of a barrage put down by the enemy was a disaster. They sought to extract as much labour from their men as they could – as much as the sacrifices of Paschendaele had left spirit in the men to give.
Curzon studied the new orders which Miller drew up. There were three divisions in front line and one in support – the attenuated divisions which the recent reduction in establishments had left to him. It was a woefully weak force, and as far as he could gather from a study of Sixth Army orders, and those issued by Fifth and Second Armies, there was precious little reinforcement to expect. At first sight the prospect was gloomy. There could be no doubting the menace of the accumulation of German forces in front of him, and the reports which Intelligence kept sending in of the piling up of German artillery and transport. Curzon actually experienced a quailing in his stomach as he envisaged a future of ruin and defeat. The inconceivable was at hand.
Largely because it was inconceivable to him Curzon later took heart. He forced himself to remember the offensives he himself had commanded and directed. Once he had looked upon them as tremendous victories, but, now, in a fresh light, he did not value them so highly. After all, what had they brought? A few square miles of ground, a few tens of thousands of casualties, and then stagnation. Why should he fear that the Germans would achieve more? They had no tanks worth mentioning with which to bring off a surprise like Cambrai. They had no new weapon, and would be compelled to fight with the old ones. When their bombardment commenced there would be ample time to move fresh divisions up to meet the assault – he remembered the number of times when he had imagined himself to be on the verge of victory, and had been held back by the arrival
of German reserves; he remembered his exasperation on hearing of the identification of new divisions in his front. He forced himself to realize that he had launched attacks with a four-fold, five-fold superiority of numbers, and that not upon a settled piece of front, but on one hastily built up in the midst of a bombardment, and he had never broken through yet. He could rely upon his men to oppose a sturdier resistance than the Germans, and upon his own will to hold them together during the crisis – he set his mouth hard when he thought of that.
Moreover, the tactical arrangements of which he was approving would cost the Germans dear. There were a whole series of strong points against which the German waves would break in red ruin – how often had he not flung whole divisions unavailingly upon strong points in the enemy’s line? He felt that he could await the attack with confidence, whatever might be the boastings of Ludendorff and his men.
‘Intelligence,’ said Miller, shuffling through a sheaf of reports, ‘keep on insisting that the push is coming on March 21st. They say they’ve confirmed it a dozen different ways. Cavendish would bet his life on it. Sixth Army says so, too.’
‘They may be right,’ said Curzon. ‘It doesn’t matter to a day or two, except that the later they leave it the stronger we can make our line. I should have liked another week or two, myself. But beggars can’t be choosers – I mean when you’re on the defensive you can’t expect to choose the day to be attacked on.’
‘No, sir,’ said Miller.