WAR MEMOIRS OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE 1917

CAMPAIGN OF THE MUD: PASSCHENDAELE 423
and in doing so, several fell. But the rule was that generals
no longer led but sent their troops into action. This transformation
may have been inevitable, owing to the magnitude
and the character of the operations and also owing to the
increased power and range of the weapons used. But the increase
in the danger factor cannot be pleaded in defence of
so revolutionary a change. Admirals share risks with their
sailors in a sea fight. The departure from time-honoured ideas
as to the duty of personal observation is due either to an exaggerated
estimate of the importance of the individual general,
or to an underestimate of the qualities of the officers
available to take the places of superiors in rank who have
fallen. The price paid in this War for immunity to generals
was prodigious. No one suggests that it is the duty of generals
to lead their men up to the barbed wire, through the
mud, whilst machine guns are playing upon them. But, had
men high up in military rank, ordering or continuing an
offensive, been obliged by the exigencies of duty to view for
themselves something of the character of the terrain of attack
and the nature of the operation they were ordering their
officers and men to undertake, the fatuous assaults of the
Somme, Monchy, Bullecourt, the Chemin des Dames and
Passchendaele would never have occurred; or at any rate
one such experience would have been enough.
It is not for me to express an opinion as to whether the
change which has taken place in the duties and dangers of
generals is justified. This comment, however, I am entitled
to make. If generals are no longer under any necessity to
join their men in an attack or even to go within the zone of
fire, it is more incumbent upon them than ever to exercise the
greatest care in ascertaining the kind of task they call upon
their officers and men to carry through. Apart from good
generalship, the obligations of comradeship and of common
decency demand it. The men who persisted in the Pas-