Trundling down to church in the sunshine was an unusual experience today. I found my tinted glasses and looking like someone from Hollywood I ventured forth. Surprisingly nobody noticed me. This was a bit awkward, at least while using the zebra crossing and indeed on the way home where I failed to look properly crossing the road and almost went under the police car. The fear of thirty pages of paperwork meant he said nothing and moved on.
Soon people will begin to hate the heat that never ends, water companies are already threatening hosepipe bans and crops are failing in the fields, so Tesco can increase the price. The red backs will soon have folks grumbling at the doctors and the incompetent government will be given the blame.
Living on this island allows great scope for grumbling.
Another book moves from the reading pile to the read shelf. Very good it is too!
Far too many grumble about British generals and their apparent failings, this book, written by people who know as opposed to those with an axe to grind, offers us men in high positions with great responsibilities and carrying the same ambitions and failures we all have. It shows these men to be human and far from willing to waste men's lives.
Haig himself is not mentioned, these are the army commanders, men who rose up the ranks to the top, some during the war and others in the field. All had some sort of war experience, Sudan, India and the Boer War among them, all served at home and abroad.
The charge of uncaring generals wasting men's lives is often thrown around in the UK, never elsewhere for some reason, and these men were ordered to remove the enemy from France, therefore they had to deal with what was in front of them in the only way possible. Tactics changed constantly over the period, weapons improved, yet the chief strategy was the same, siege warfare.
There was no other choice. The nonsensical waste of time and effort in Gallipoli and Salonika, ordered by London not the army, cost many lives but orders are orders. The war could only be fought in France and Flanders nowhere else!
For all the grumbles re generals, something that did not happen elsewhere and probably began with Lloyd George the one time Prime Minister trying to pass the buck onto the generals who followed his orders, it must be remembered that 70 or so generals died during the war, several of the leading army commanders suffered wounds and not only did they participate in holding the line with meagre resources against a vast German army in 1914 these were the men who finally pushed that army out of France and Flanders.
A good book, well written and worth reading.
