1914

By FIELD-MARSHAL VISCOUNT FRENCH of Ypres. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1919. Royal 8vo, x + 372 pages. Portrait and Maps. $6.00.

ADMIRAL JELLICOE’S story of the Grand Fleet was the answer to a challenge. The present volume by the commander-in-chief of the British army in France from the outbreak of war to midDecember of 1915 is itself a challenge. Unlike Lord Jellicoe, Field-Marshal French, so far as the narrative of the first five months of the war is concerned, has no defeats to palliate, no disappointed hopes to explain. The record is one of success: the heroic retreat from Mons, the victory of the Marne, and the epic battles around Ypres, which rang down the curtain on the first act of the drama of German Niedergang. When he takes up the story of 1915, as he promises to do, Viscount French will have a harder task. He will then have to explain why Neuve Chapelle turned out a disappointment, and why Loos ended in a grisly tragedy. But for the moment it is his more agreeable mission to point out, not how he failed because of certain things, but how he succeeded splendidly in spite of things.

Bitter controversy is sure to follow upon the reopening of the famous French-Kitchener feud; for that is what ‘1914’ amounts to. The differences between the two companions-in-arms of the Boer War apparently date from the first arrival of the Expeditionary Force in France. When Sir John French heard, on August 17, of the death of ‘my dear old friend and comrade Jimmie Grierson,’ who was on his way to the front, he asked the War Office to send out Sir Herbert Plumer in Grierson’s place. Instead, Kitchener sent Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien; and it is impossible to read the commander-in-chief’s harsh arraignment of Smith-Dorrien’s generalship during the retreat from Mons, and later at Ypres, without recognizing that the ultimate responsibility is placed at the door of Lord Kitchener, who refused to give Lord French the services of the man who was later to prove himself perhaps the best of the British army commanders.

The direct issue with Kitchener is brought up in connection with the critical events preceding the battle of the Marne, At no time does Lord French write with diffidence. He is at his boldest and frankest when he virtually claims for himself the credit of the strategy which led to the victory of the Marne. In the last days of August, we are told, it was Joffre’s intention to turn and accept battle between the Oise and the Aisne. The British commander-in-chief emphatically rejected a plan which he considered highly dangerous, because of the condition of his own army and of the situation along the front of the French armies. ‘I strongly represented to Joffre the advantage of drawing the German armies still farther from their base, even though we had to move south of the Marne.’ Lord Kitchener came to Paris for the purpose of imposing Joffre’s plan on the British commander-in-chief, who countered with an appeal to the French Government, and successfully. Had he failed, it is Lord French’s belief that the Allied army would have been thrown back over the Marne and Paris would have been lost.

This was the first chapter in the record of antagonism between French and Kitchener, of which the second was written in the rejection of Lord French’s proposal for an advance in force against Zeebrugge after the battles of Ypres, and of which the best-known chapter is, of course, the famous controversy over munitions, in which Lord French finally saw himself compelled to enlist the services of Lord Northcliffe. Obviously, little time will be lost by the Kitchener partisans in bringing forward their side of the story. Nor is it likely that France will silently accept Lord French’s bold claim for the laurels of Joffre. While the Germans are disputing among themselves over who lost the war, we may now expect a lively battle on the Allied side for the credit of winning the war.

The book is written in the style of an easy pleasant talker, and will be read with wide interest. S. S.