Sir Frank Fox

First World War and WW2 Author, author of Breaker Morant

WW1 books review

The Times includes GHQ in its “Six of the best First World War reads”

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Buy the book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0992890128/
Allan Mallinson from The Times reviewed new books on the wider aspects of the Great War. We were delighted that G.H.Q. was selected as one of the 6 books.

Sir Frank Fox’s G.H.Q., first published in 1920 and now reissued in a limited edition by his great-grandson, Charles Goodson- Wickes (Beaumont Fox, £25), is an absorb­ing study of Haig’s chateau-HQ at Montreuil-sur-Mer. Fox — a journalist and tempo­rary soldier — paints a vivid picture of the comprehensive com­plexity of the British Ex­peditionary Force, with organisational dia­grams, statistics and vi­gnettes of day-to-day life.

The BEF, or more correctly in the later stages of the war the British Armies in France, was the largest organisa­tion the country has ever maintained abroad — more than two million men. Montreuil-sur-Mer began to look as much like a colonial administration as an operational headquarters, with di­rectors of agricultural production (Brigadier-General the Earl of Radnor) and forestry (Brigadier-General Lord Lovat), controllers of labour, of salvage and of canteens, subordinate directors of docks, of inland water transport, of roads, and of light railways. The list goes on, testimony to the industrialisa­tion of the war and the sheer scale of Haig’s purview. For these and other reasons, on taking over as C-in-C at the end of 1915 he had moved GHQ back from Saint-Omer to Montreuil, almost on the Channel coast, placing him 70 miles and more behind the front line.

Fox writes: “It was the job of General Headquarters to try to see the war as a whole.” In fact. Haig found it difficult to see strategically beyond the Western Front or the tactical reality of the war in the trenches. Fox’s fascinating book explains a lot.”

The scan of the article is below and the link to the website here (summary only available to non-subscribers of The Times):
Six of the best First World War reads

You can also download the PDF of the article here: Six of the best First World War reads

The Guards Magazine book reviews of The Agony of Belgium and GHQ

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In June the Guards Magazine, Journal of the Household Division, reviewed two Frank Fox books: The Agony of Belgium The Invasion of Belgium; August-December 1914 and G.H.Q. (Montreuil-sur-Mer) . We have copied the text from the reviews below and here is the link to see them on their website World War I books review The Guards Magazine.

THE AGONY OF BELGIUM
THE INVASION OF BELGIUM; AUGUST-DECEMBER 1914
by Major Frank Fox

Frank Fox was an Australian born in 1874. A journalist from the age of 18, he came to London in 1909, where he was soon warning of a European war. He covered the Balkan War as a war correspondent on the staff of the Morning Post, and in August 1914 was sent to Belgium to cover the German invasion. This remarkable little book, published in 1915, was the product: a contemporary account of the bravery and suffering of the Belgian population and the Belgian Army, and the stoicism of King Albert.

Although the newspapers at the time made much of the ghastliness and brutality of the Germans, to the extent that this was later regarded as shameless propaganda, there can be no doubt that the Germans were responsible for some terrible atrocities in Belgium. It is one of the tragic features of war that invading armies, however rapid and successful their advances are, tend to attack populations with unnecessary ferociousness. The Germans, with all their sense of discipline and order behaved this way in 1914, and did the same in 1940. Twice in the same century, Belgium suffered greatly before this small country was quietly forgotten as the battle moved on.

The Agony of Belgium is good reportage and written by one who was there. So much of the First World War was about the trenches, no man’s land, and the big offensives, so it is perhaps not surprising that later generations assume that this is how it was. This short book, written just over a century ago, proves that this was not the case. Dr Charles Goodson-Wickes, formerly The Life Guards and Frank Fox’s great grandson, has done today’s readers a great service by re-publishing this excellent account of an aspect of the First World War that could so easily be forgotten.

G.H.Q.
(Montreuil-sur-Mer)
by Sir Frank Fox
Following Frank Fox’s time in Belgium, witnessing the German invasion and writing The Agony of Belgium, he was keen to get into uniform with a combatant role. In those opening months of the war he had seen the German Army through a very different prism, and what he saw must have had a profound effect on him. Commissioned into the British Army at the age of 41, he was back in France by December 1914. He suffered severe injuries during the Battle of the Somme, and spent a year recovering in hospital back in England. Yet still, he wanted to be back to the front, and succeeded in getting himself a job at Haig’s HQ at Montreuil-sur-Mer. As Dr Goodson-Wickes describes in his foreword ‘he must have cut a curious figure on crutches having lost part of his right foot, and having a withered left arm. His profound deafness cannot have added to the overall impression’.

Montreuil-sur-Mer is a charming walled town that is not exactly ‘on the sea’ because its estuary silted up many years ago. GHQ moved to Montreuil in March 1916, and given its strategic role and important link to the War Office in London, there can be little doubt that its location made perfect sense, despite the occasional swipe delivered by polemic historians of another era. GHQ’s web of communications stretched out and along the Western Front, and the scope of its responsibilities were truly vast. Frank Fox’s account of GHQ provides a vivid picture of what it must have been like here, and it was certainly not an easy life. Staff officers routinely worked late into the night, weekends really did not exist, leave was intermittent, and those who worked here would have suffered from that additional sense of guilt about being away from the real action.

There are many stereotypes about Headquarters in the First World War, not helped by Oh What a Lovely War and Blackadder. For a considerably more balanced insight into GHQ and its workings, Frank Fox’s book has filled another important gap.

The Editor