The 1981 WFA AGM: The Presidential Address delivered by the Honorary President John Terraine

The speech made by our President, Mr John Terraine, at the Annual General Meeting, 31st, October 1981, in the National Army Museum.

Mr Chairman, Mrs Giles and fellow-members. I am sure that I am speaking for all of us when I say that I am quite delighted by the progress that the WFA has made during its first year`, and by the sense that we get today of it being a going concern. The acid test - and I need hardly add, John - the most important activity of an association at this stage in its existence, apart from not going broke (and we clearly haven't done that), is the expansion of membership and I must say that I think that the figure Margery Giles has given us of well over 700 is very good going indeed. I hope we shall soon see twice the figure we have got now, but I know full well that what we have got is in very large measure due to your enthusiasm and energy in promoting the Association - despite some bad bouts of illness - and I would like to thank you and Margery on behalf of us all and sincerely wish you more power to your elbow.

I cannot let this occasion go by without making a reference to the Journal, 'Stand To', which I think is absolutely excellent and I would like to say to the Editor for that, I think that the decision taken to pitch it at a high level from the word go was absolutely correct, nothing could have done us more harm than to start off with a tatty looking object and it is anything but that. Well done indeed.

Well, fellow-members, last year I suggested to you that one of the main purposes of the Association should be to remind people of the great endeavour of the Western Front of 1914-18, and to do this certainly in a spirit of reverence for the courage and sacrifice that was shown there, certainly also with compassion for the great protracted agony that was endured there, but always with admiration for the continuing endeavour of all arms and all ranks, and always with pride at what was achieved.

As regards our own part in it, I quoted my last book, 'The Smoke and the Fire', in which I said that I am absolutely sure that if Churchill was right - and I believe he was -in calling 1940 the 'finest hour' of the British people, the great defensive and offensive victories of 1918 on the Western Front were the 'finest hour' of the British Army. And this is a conviction that grows in me, rather than otherwise.

Today I think we may spare a few minutes for reflection on what the Western Front was all about, how and why it came into existence.

It gave employment, from first to last, to no fewer than 5,399,563 men of the British Empire - a remarkable figure, I think you will agree, and, of course, the overwhelming majority of the casualties suffered by the Empire in the war were incurred there. Not only that, but the image of the Western Front remained so strong and so daunting in the post-war years that Britain prepared, if you can say it prepared, for and entered the next war under very serious handicap, so the long term effects have to be taken into account too. To this day there are few people who do not believe that a victory was won there, do not, indeed, believe that a victory could have been won there. (And yet very few would question that a victory was won in the bloodbath of Stalingrad! Such are the curiosities of mass emotion!) And there are those who think that the Western Front only came into being because of the folly and blindness of the generals, in particular' Allied Generals and particularly British Generals. For all these reasons the 'whys and wherefores' of the Western Front seem to me to deserve a little thought.

The first 'wherefore' is, of course very simple: the Western Front was created by the German General Staff and the German Army. I have constantly pointed out, that, the German Army was the 'motor' - the power-plant of the First World War; it was what the German Army did at any moment that gave the war its shape and its texture. And it was the great German advance in the West according to the dictates of the Schlieffen Plan in 1914 that gave to history the Western Front.

As that great (and too much neglected) soldier, Field Marshal Sir William Robertson (CIGS 1915-18) wrote in his splendid book 'Soldiers and Statesmen', "In the Great War. the decisive front was fixed for us by the deployment of the enemy's masses in France and Belgium, which compelled us to go to the direct assistance of those countries". It is a very simple statement but I find that many of the most profound statements about that war (and other wars too I may say) are simple. Of course we were compelled: what so many people forget, when talking about the First World War, is that the First World War was a coalition war.

The essence of a coalition war is to help your allies, otherwise the whole thing falls to pieces. People often ask, 'Why didn't Britain do this or that instead of pouring all her strength into the Western Front?' 'Why didn't GHQ do this or that - or refuse to do this or that - instead of fighting in the manner that it did on the Western Front?' The answer invariably is that the discipline of the Coalition did not permit it.

If we had poured a huge army - 50 or 60 divisions, say - into France in 1914 we could have demanded a greater say in strategic direction. I am not sure what we would have done with it but we could have demanded it, but we could only send 4 - and the French had 61. There was never much doubt about who would have the strategic direction - and the German Army had made sure what form that direction would take. General Joffre, the French Commander-in-Chief, is quite explicit about it, he wrote: "The best and largest portion of the German Army was on our soil, with its line of battle jutting out a mere five days' march from the heart of France. This situation made it clear to every Frenchman that our task consisted of defeating this enemy, and driving him out of our country." The Germans you see were as close to Paris as Canterbury is to London. If the boot had been on the other foot, and the Germans had been at Canterbury, I don't think any Englishman would have had much doubt about what the task was.

So that was it; that was the reason for the Western Front - that the German Army had placed its main body there and, as long as it remained there it would have to be fought there. It was Field Marshal Lord Haig, who had a gift for going to the roots of matters, who uttered another very simple, but absolutely fundamental statement in 1915; he said: 'We cannot hope to win until we have defeated the German Army. The easiest place to do this is in France, because our lines of communication are shortest to this theatre of war'. And this establishes the other fundamental: the German Army of 1914 was a mass army, over, 4 million men with its reserves, the vast majority of them heading west; the French moved no fewer' than 3,781,000 men on their railway system between August 2 and August 18 1914. By the time of the Armistice ln November 1918, there were some 10,000,000 men, Germans, and Allies, deployed on the Western Front. Where else, one may ask, could such armies have been deployed? Only the ports, the roads and the railways of Western Europe could maintain modern armies of that size with the ever-increasing mountains of sophisticated war material that they required. That, then, is the 'wherefore' of the Western Front - a perfectly sound, logical reason for its existence, and its continuance until the Allies at last wrested the initiative back from the Germans, and defeated them there. Tt was the only place where it could be done; all other strategies seem to me to be unreal. But of course, it spelt terrible losses and terrible hardships -for none more than the British in the early years. I must say that it always seems to me that, for the British Army, if 1918 was the year of its glory, 1915 was the year of its tragedy. I know that the tragic concept of the war is generally associated with the great attrition battles, the Somme in 1916, Arras and 'Third Ypres' in 1917. After all that has been written, we could hardly be unaware of the tragedies that they do in fact contain. But I think there was another side to it. It is wrong, you know, to look at the War, or any part of it - as so many people do - statically. The Western Front was indeed for a long time virtually static - on the map, but nowhere else. All the time - and this applies to the British above all, because they were having to create their army on the battlefield - change was taking place.

New weapons were coming in all the time; new techniques, new tactics - some successful, some not- experience was being built up.

1916 was not the same as 1917; 1918 was unlike all the rest. Even in 1916, the year associated with the Army's most tragic day, July 1, change was taking place all the time. The casualty figures themselves display it clearly: on July 1 there were 57,000 casualties - a most appalling total - appalling and unique. Never forget that it was unique: the battle continued for another 141 days after July 1, and the final daily average of casualties was 2,950. The difference between 57,000 and Just under 3,000 spells a very big difference in the manner of making war - a difference perhaps summed up by Charles Carrington (the Charles Edmonds who wrote that classic, 'A Subaltern's War' and who is still very much with us, I am glad to say): "enthusiastic amateurs when the fighting began, the British were soldiers at the end." That is his verdict of the Battle of the Somme. So I see the great attrition battles as murderous indeed, but also as times of change and times of hope. Churchill called the battlefields of the Somme 'the graveyards of Kitchener's Army' - but a German officer called the Somme the 'muddy grave of the German field army'. The German Army was never the same after the Somme - and therein lies Britain's first, hard-won victory.

There was no victory in 1915. There was, in fact, no hope of one - only the need to fight and be seen to fight in order to keep the coalition alive. By the end of 1915, French casualties - almost entirely incurred, remember, on the Western Front, amounted to just under 2 million. British casualties at that stage amounted to about half a million - and that includes Gallipoli. Such comparisons are very bad for the coalition. That was why the British Army had to be seen to fight in 1915, although it was unprepared - weak in numbers in relation to its task, weaker still in all necessities - artillery, ammunition, mortars, grenades, trench stores of all descriptions. Tt was a low ebb, a bad time, sprinkled with names of dismal memory - Aubers, Festubert, Loos. Few people, looking at that under-equipped, under-trained force could have foreseen that it would become the war winner of 3 years later. One who did, and was determined that it should, was Haig, who became its Commander-in-Chief at the end of that gloomy year.

Well, I think that's about enough military history for this afternoon. But before I end I want to do a bit of advertising - I make no apologies, because I am not doing it on my own behalf. I just want to draw your attention to 3 books in this year's list which I think are very good value for the likes of us. I have said a fair amount in the last few minutes about the German Army. If you want to know it better, you can't do better than to read Herbert Sulzbach's 'With the German Guns', sub-headed '50 months on the Western Front 1914-18'. It was first published in Germany in 1935; an English translation was due in 1938, but the publisher decided not to. Now at last Leo Cooper has filled the gap. Bearing only a caption reading 'One of the first British tanks to be knocked out in action, 1917' under a photograph of what looks to me to be unmistakably a French Schneider, this is a first-class, first-hand statement about the German Army in the West.

Also from Leo Cooper is Edwin Campion Vaughan's 'Some Desperate Glory', the diary of a young officer in 1917. A young officer of the Warwickshire Regiment in the 48th Division. I read the manuscript two or three years ago, and was so impressed that I have written a Foreword to the book. It has a very rare quality: Edwin Vaughan makes no bones about how useless he was at first, so we have the opportunity of seeing him grow up in the war. At the end he gives us a close-up of one of the worst of the 'Third Ypres' sub-battles - Langemarck, in August 1917: it is one of the most harrowing accounts of' battle that I have ever come across.

Finally, due out just before Armistice Day (November 8 1981), Jonathan Cape are publishing 'The Little Field Marshal', a biography of Lord French of Ypres by Richard Holmes, who is Senior Lecturer in War Studies at Sandhurst. I'm about a third of the way into it for review, and I must say I think it is a very fair, balanced account, and very well-written too.

And with that I will now simply say 'Thank you for listening' and let other business proceed.

For more about John Terraine, see here.