Forester created quite a sympathetic character in The General. Can you sympathize with someone who gets a lot of people killed?Herbert Curzon is a Major in the British army when WWI breaks out. He is very average. I mean, there's nothing special about him to the point that it makes him special. You want him to succeed, because jesus christ, get it together man! However, that may never happen, because as sad as it sounds, the fact of the matter is, Curzon is unaware he's surpassed his sell-by date. I've enjoyed reading Forester's work. The African Queen was great and his Hornblower series is good Britishy fun. An element of that enjoyment stems from the man writing historical fiction in a way that brought you there, wherever "there" is. In this case, "there" was a time and place when a new kind of warfare met the old school. Going into WWI, Curzon ends up in a calvary regiment. Calvary, as in horses. Most of you knew that. But did you also know that WWI was the stage that really introduced the machine gun on a grand scale upon the battlefield? Do you see what I'm getting at here? I'm talking about men on horses charging into machine gun fire. That shit happened. By the death of superiors and an advantageous marriage, Curzon advances through the ranks until he becomes a General with a massive army. Someone had to do the job and Curzon was at the right place at the right time. The problem is, he's not a brilliant military mind. He believes that what once worked should continue to work, and when it isn't working, he doesn't understand why. To his credit, he is brave. Some would also say he is stupid. I prefer to call such as a person uninformed, uncreative or stuck in his ways. Curzon's stubbornness might annoy some, but I couldn't help but feel for him. There's something inherently sad about a "great man" who's past it.Unfortunately there were a lot of real life Curzons in WWI and their ignorance got a lot of men killed. I think, above all else, that may have been Forester's real reason for writing The General. This is a book filled with that typical, starchy British sort of the era, old soldiers in unfamiliar territory and unwilling to get with the times. These were the men in charge and it was a real problem, one the brass were reticent to admit. This book came out in 1937. Did Forester want to remind everyone of the past war as his country hurtled towards the next?
* * * 1/2 (rounded up)I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. Of course I was favourably disposed to it from the outset because it was recommended to me by a co-worker who has often given me good recommendations, but I was certainly not expecting to love the dry-witted narration so much. The only reason it took me so long to read was that I had to keep stopping to write down amusing quotes, such as:"A complete record in detail of those twelve years would need twelve years in the telling to do it justice, so as to make it perfectly plain that nothing whatever happened during those twelve years."and:"Men who stopped to think about their chances of being killed were a nuisance to their superior officers."and this dialogue, which made me actually laugh out loud:"Two men to carry up each gas cylinder? We've only been using one for the empty ones.""Yes, sir. These are full and they're heavier in consequence.""Nonsense. Everyone knows that gas makes things lighter. They put it in balloons and things.""That's coal gas, sir. This is chlorine, and heavily compressed."As to what this novel is actually about, it chronicles the career of one Herbert Curzon as he rises through the ranks during the Boer War and the first few years of the First World War. It's an excellent portrayal of the typical commander during the Great War, the ones who were not necessarily bad men per se but sincerely believed they were doing their duty and that there was no need to change their strategy -- just send in more young men to die (needlessly) at Ypres, the Somme and Passchendaele. Forester really puts us in Curzon's boots and we can see how easy it was for Curzon to believe that what he was doing was right.My only criticism of this book is that the ending was rather too abrupt for my liking. It did come full circle, which was nice, but I just felt like there should have been a few more pages. As I was coming to the end, I thought "Jeez, we're running out of book." But the rest of it was very good, and I would definitely recommend it to WW1 history enthusiasts in particular.
What do You think about The General (1988)?
In some respects this is a very unusual novel. It's form and writing is very much of its time. Indeed the way in which The main protagonist is described is typical of books of the period. The book's novelty is in its subject matter, a war story that features a staff officer. Not a daring-do staff officer, but an ordinary man with fairly ordinary talents in unusual circumstances. Curzon is human, he is no donkey. This is subtle and supple writing.The edition I read had an excellent introduction by Max Hastings.
—Gareth Evans
You may like the Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraiser. The main character Harry Flahsmn is a Victorian era British army officer, who is pretty much a coward and a womanizer, but he keeps finding himself in the center of major historic events (inadvertently leading the Charge of the Light brigade--his horse is startled by Flahsman having a severe bought of gas, to the raid at Harper's Ferry, to the Boxer Rebellion. The books are really funny, but also very well researched and give interesting descriptions of the British colonial wars, especially his adventures in India and China.
—Nick
Originally published on my blog here in February 1999.Forester's early novel is a succinctly told story of a fiction First World War general, Sir Herbert Curzon, from his days as a young officer in the Boer War to an ageing, bathchair-bound figure on Bournemouth Promenade.Forester does not allow himself a great deal of space to develop his story, under two hundred pages in fact, so we are left with a fairly sketchy view of Curzon's life and character. His story concentrates on the Great War, and what he is mainly concerned to portray are the background and motivation of the men whose actions led to the death of millions.Curzon is in no way a monster; the worst that can be said of him is that he is not terribly bright, that he's stubborn, unimaginative and conservative. These are in fact attributes which make him do rather well in the British Army of the 1900s, but they lead straight to the dreadful events of the War.Our understanding of how generals like Curzon managed to act in the way they did is the major fascination of this book, and the way that Forester has written it keeps this aspect in mind in a fairly subtle kind of way. He is not out to depict the brutal horrors experienced by the front-line soldiers but to catalogue why and how men who were not evil made these things happen to them.
—Simon Mcleish
