The General

This novel, published in 1936, is largely set on the Western Front. The central character, Herbert Curzon, is an English army officer who receives promotion after promotion, these due more to circumstances than to his own talent or success. To an extent his preferment and his own self-belief depends on his rigidity in keeping to well-established military practice and discipline. In several places, he’s portrayed as being callously uncaring towards members of his family due to his insistence on upholding military order.

The author, C.S. Forester (né Cecil Smith, born 27 August 1899), grew up in London. On finishing school in 1917, he tried to enlist in the army but was deemed physically unfit for service. He spent three years studying medicine but did not graduate. Instead in 1921 he committed himself to pursuing a career as a writer. His first novel was published in 1924. He went on to write more than 40 novels, including the First World War novel, The African Queen, as well as short stories, plays (including one concerning the First World War martyr Edith Cavell) and several works of non-fiction. Perhaps best known for his Horatio Hornblower series, he was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1938 for the second and third books in the series.

Probably the most acerbic depiction of the generals at the Western Front is this analogous summary of a strategy meeting in late 1915:
“In some ways it was like the debate of a group of savages as to how to extract a screw from a piece of wood. Accustomed only to nails, they had made one effort to pull out the screw by main force, and now that it had failed they were devising methods of applying more force still, of obtaining more efficient pincers, of using levers and fulcrums so that more men could bring their strength to bear. They could hardly be blamed for not guessing that by rotating the screw it would come out after the exertion of far less effort; it would be a notion so different from anything they had ever encountered that they would laugh at the man who suggested it.”