Excerpt from THE SOMME A CONTEST OF ENDURANCE, Review Essay by Jack Spence:

So much for context. Two of the authors under review — Frank Fox and Taylor Downing — provide specialised treatment of two subjects: the work of General Headquarters (GHQ) based at Montreuil-sur-Mer and the impact of shell shock on those who suffered and those in authority who had to deal with it.

Frank Fox, whose G.H.Q. (Montreuil-sur-Mer) was first published in 1920, was severely wounded on the Somme, but after a year’s convalescence returned to France as a staff officer at Montreuil.
The work was reissued in 2015 by Charles Goodson-Wickes, the author’s great-grandson and literary executor.
The reader is offered a meticulous and well—researched account of the vast bureaucratic structure and process required by Britain to prosecute the war successfully. This was, in many ways, a miracle of improvisation that governments of the past had never had to deal with on this scale, given the logistic requirements of modern war. In effect, the war, at one level of analysis, was a bureaucratic contest between states, all of which were seeking to mobilise and destroy the enemy’s ability to wage war most effectively. The author considers this in superb detail: for example, how munitions were supplied and despatched to the front; how medical facilities were organised; how horses and mules were cared for; and how a rudimentary educational system was devised. Fox is also illuminating on Secretary of State for War Horatio Kitchener’s New Army, providing an altogether fascinating account of the supporting role of the Dominions and the US. This argument is supported by a wealth of statistical information, photographs and a helpful chart detailing the various directorates and inspectorates controlled by the quartermaster general. Finally, there is a delicately phrased account of GHQ at play: ’monkish in its denial of some pleasures, rigid in discipline, exacting in work, but neither austere nor anxious’.7

This is an important text full of insight into how the British organised themselves for war.

7Frank Fox, G.H.Q. (Montreuil—sur-Mer)
(Beaumont Fox, 2015), p. 1.

(The RUSI Journal Dec 2016, Vol.161)

Sir Frank Fox is a largely forgotten figure whose life reads like a character from a John Buchan novel. A “strikingly handsome” Australian émigré to England, who became a doyen of Fleet Street, as a war correspondent he witnessed German atrocities against Belgian civilians in 1914 which so appalled him that he signed up – lying about his age – at 41.

Grievously injured at the Somme, he worked for a time at MI7, focused on bringing the USA into the war, before charming his way to a staff officer post at General Headquarters (GHQ) in Montreuil-sur-Mer, northern France.

GHQ was the ‘brain’ of the huge British expeditionary effort in France and Belgium, responsible for strategy, coordination with Allied governments, and administration.

This contemporary account, re-published to coincide with the centenary of GHQ’s move to Montreuil under Haig, is a fascinating reminder of the unsung but vital role of logistics in military success or failure – “for every rifleman in the trenches there are at least three people working to keep him supplied with food, clothing, ammunition, and on communication.”

The red-tabbed staff officers of GHQ, whose prior experience at best stretched to small colonial wars, suddenly found themselves as the “Board of Directors” of a vast wartime supermarket, transport (in charge of half a million horses, and a spider’s web of railways), laundry and health service which had to match the BEF’s tenfold growth 1914-16.

Fox compares the challenge to peacetime civilian administration: “Tell the manager of the London to Brighton line that next week he must carry 15 times the normal traffic for a number of days, and that it is extremely important that people observing his termini and his lines should not notice anything unusual”. During intense fighting, 1,934 tons of materiel had to be supplied to each mile of front, per day, to feed the war machine.

GHQ personnel led lives of monkish hard work, sealed tight inside Montreuil’s medieval ramparts against the dangers of espionage. Fox, who had experienced both, downplays the dangers of trench life, “not nearly so dangerous as one might judge from the lurid accounts of imaginative writers”, as set against the “fantastic” but punishing work at GHQ.

Work might continue through consecutive days and nights, and some men, tortured by their sometimes momentous effect on human lives, became unfit to work there. Hardly the image of cosy “chateau generalship” encouraged by some historians and “Blackadder”.

There are moments of high tension at GHQ when the Ludendorff Offensive of March 1918 smashed through British lines, threatening the Channel Ports, the conquest of which the author estimated could have extended the war by another ten years. GHQ worked then with the French on defensive preparations to destroy Calais, Boulogne and Dunkirk and flood the Pas de Calais from the sea, which would have made “this great province a desert for two generations”.

From March 1918 until the Armistice, GHQ was subsumed under the overall command of the French Généralissime Marshal Foch, but continued to play its crucial role in the complex strategic and logistic planning for the ultimate defeat of the German Army.

This charming account, sometimes disjointed and written in the manner and language of its time, which will not please all modern readers, gives rare perspective on GHQ’s wartime operations. Its example 1916-18 (the author also reminds us that Montreuil was a jump off point for the Roman invasion of Britain, and “lay almost in sight” of Agincourt and Crecy) demonstrates the need for a flexible, bilateral approach to meet changing circumstances – at least in military and security affairs – rather than the over-idealistic “ever closer union” required by some of Britain’s current allies.