The Story of the B.E.F.
The Story of the B.E.F. is an article written by A. F. Pollard published in The Daily Chronicle on 8 december 1916.
The Story of the B.E.F.
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE AS MILITARY HISTORIAN.
By A. F. POLLARD, Litt. D.
(Professor of English History in the University of London.)
It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that within a century the books published on the Great War its origins, its history, and its consequences in belligerent and neutral lands, will have exceeded in number the books published on all other subjects put together; and already the critic is like one who watches the acorns fall from an oak and tries to select the fittest to survive. There is, however, greater variety in books on the war than in acorns, and those that come first will have the largest circulation, while those that tarry will be better worth reading; when we get the final and official history of the war only students will want to read it.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle* has waited nearly two years and a half before publishing the first instalment of his history of the British Expeditionary Force in France and Flanders, and he has some other advantages over those writers whose volumes, some of them excellent in their way, have forestalled his. He refers in his preface to the alleged impossibility of bringing out at the present time any accurate history of the war, but contends that "so far as the actual early events of our own campaign upon the Continent are concerned there is no reason why the approximate truth should not now be collected and set forth."
The Campaign in France and Flanders.
There is every reason why it should, but in justice to Sir Arthur readers must realise clearly what it is that he sets out to do. He has not attempted to write a history of the war; he is only concerned with the Empire's part in the campaign in France and Flanders; and within this scope his object has been to compile a narrative rather than form a judgment. These limitations give the book its completeness; by setting bounds to his design he has made it practicable, and by restricting himself to a portion of the field he has been able to cultivate it with greater care and intensity than the writers who have skimmed the surface of the whole. Sir Arthur is preclude from giving his authorities, but it is clear to the careful student that, in addition to the sources open to the public, he has had at command a mass of private diaries and correspondence, and the advice and correction of not a few of the prominent actors in the events he describes. We may be sure that his volume would not be dedicated to Sir William Robertson if it were not a record upon which the public could rely; and as a painstaking and detailed account of the operations of the British Expeditionary Force the book is likely to justify Sir Arthur's confidence and stand the test of time.
It is pre-eminently a book for the student, and the butterfly reader, attracted to it by the fame of Sherlock Holmes, will find it strenuous reading. The more serious reader will be well advised, when he gets into the heart of the story, to master the details here (p. 52) provided for the first time we think, of the composition of the First and Second Army Corps when they landed in France; similar information is given later on with regard to the Third and Fourth Army Corps, including the famous Seventh Division. He will also find extremely useful the chronological table of the history of the first two corps given on pp. 136-7; and we wish we could give the same praise to the maps provided. As it is, the reader will require others, more detailed and finished, to enable him to follow intelligently this wonderful story of Mons and Le Cateau, the Marne and the Aisne, and the crowning mercy of Ypres. For Ypres crowned that defence of France, the Channel ports, and Great Britain, which was and will always remain the glory of the original B.E.F.; its work was complete and decisive in the sense that it defeated, beyond recovery, the original German plan of campaign, and the only plan which could have given the German Government the fruits it had plotted to seize. It remained for the new armies to hold the line during the equilibrium of 1915 and turn the tide in 1916 and 1917, but new armies would have found no line to hold in France and Flanders at all, had it not been for those original hundred thousand "contemptibles."
In telling the tale of their deeds Sir Arthur's main difficulty has been to avoid the odium of comparisons between corps and corps, division and division, brigade and brigade, when all did more than anyone could expect. Occasionally we think he uses expressions which might lend themselves to misinterpretation. Surely French did not learn from Joffre's telegram at Mons that "all his work had been in vain." Doubtless, no commander would knowingly have kept the Second Corps at Mons, after it had been outflanked on the left, exposed on the right, and attacked in front by four instead of two army corps. But its work was not in vain, it saved others, and it was not lost itself; and the retreat from Mons will live in history like the retreat of the Ten Thousand, the retreat of Cortes from Mexico, and of Sir John Moore to Corunna.
Forces that Turned the Scale.
So too Sir Arthur's picturesque and sporting simile of "the huge winning-post of the Eiffel Tower" looming up before the racing armies suggests that Paris rather than the French field force was the Germans' objective. Better founded is his interesting suggestion that von Kluck wheeled to his left and made for the French centre across the Marne, thus exposing his own right flank, because, firstly, he thought the British had been knocked out, and, secondly, was ignorant of the formation of Maunoury's Sixth French Army on the British left; clearly it was the impact of these forces on his flank that turned the scale at the Battle of the Marne.
From the Marne Sir Arthur carries on the story to the less familiar stubborn fighting on the Aisne. With the dramatic extension of the line of battle, northwards to the sea, each side striving to outflank the other by flinging in fresh corps, he is not concerned until Joffre assented to French's proposal that the British Army should be transferred north-westward in this process in order to give it shorter lines of communication. That led up to the attempt to join hands with the Belgian and British forces in Antwerp and the momentous victory at Ypres. Nothing in the war, except the defence of Verdun, is likely to outshine the glory of that achievement or of such incidents in it as the fight at Gheluvelt, when five thousand British soldiers drove back a German army corps; and a remark, quoted by Sir Arthur from a German historian in another connection, sums up the story of the whole campaign. "It was not to forts of steel and concrete that the Allies owed their strength, but to the magnificent qualities of the British Army."
In his prefatory chapters Sir Arthur is giving the Germans a handle when he says that "by wise foresight the Grand Fleet had been assembled for Royal inspection" at Spithead; for that review had been arranged before the Archduke's murder, and was held on July 18, five days before the thunderclap of Austria's Note to Serbia. And when Sir Arthur discusses Mr. Churchill's and Prince Louis's claim to credit for it, he is confusing it with two subsequent orders, first the countermanding of its dispersal from Portland on July 26, and secondly its dispatch into the North Sea at some unknown date later in the week. So, too, we had not "sworn to protect Belgian," otherwise there would have been less scope for the Cabinet discussions on August 24. The Treaty of 1839 pledges each of the five Great Powers to respect Belgian neutrality, and gives each the right to intervene if others break their pledge; but it does not bind them to intervene, and the German Chancellor's "scrap of paper" was a breach of Prussian honour which would have been just as complete had England stood aloof.
Strange, too, is the contrast between Sir Arthur's quotation — apparently with approval — of Mr. Cramb's Prussian sentiment that "the high gods of virility would smile as they looked down upon the chosen children of Odin, the English and Germans, locked in the joy of battle" (p. 30), and his own remark (p. 48) that the Germans "brought the world of Christ back to the days of Odin, and changed a civilised campaign to an inroad of Pagan Danes." But these are trifles in a book which should appeal to every Briton, and should shame those who wish to make of none effect the deeds and sacrifices recounted in its pages.
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"The British Campaign in France and Flanders, 1914." By Arthur Conan Doyle. Hodder and Stoughton, 6s. net.
