hat Rawlinson showed his qualities of generalship and once
again that driving purpose which was his in the Somme battles, but
achieved only by prodigious cost of life.

XIX

Of General Allenby, commanding the Third Army before he was succeeded by
Gen. Sir Julian Byng and went to his triumph in Palestine, I knew very
little except by hearsay. He went by the name of "The Bull," because
of his burly size and deep voice. The costly fighting that followed
the battle of Arras on April 9th along the glacis of the Scarpe did
not reveal high generalship. There were many young officers--and some
divisional generals who complained bitterly of attacks ordered without
sufficient forethought, and the stream of casualties which poured back,
day by day, with tales of tragic happenings did not inspire one with a
sense of some high purpose behind it all, or some presiding genius.

General Byng, "Bungo Byng," as he was called by his troops, won the
admiration of the Canadian Corps which he commanded, and afterward, in
the Cambrai advance of November, '17, he showed daring of conception
and gained the first striking surprise in the war by novel methods of
attack--spoiled by the quick come-back of the enemy under Von Marwitz
and our withdrawal from Bourlon Wood, Masnieres, and Marcoing, and other
places, after desperate fighting.

His chief of staff, Gen. Louis Vaughan, was a charming, gentle-mannered
man, with a scientific outlook on the problems of war, and so kind in
his expression and character that it seemed impossible that he could
devise methods of killing Germans in a wholesale way. He was like an
Oxford professor of history discoursing on the Marlborough wars, though
when I saw him many times outside the Third Army headquarters, in
a railway carriage, somewhere near Villers Carbonnel on the Somme
battlefields, he was explaining his preparations and strategy for
actions to be fought next day which would be of bloody consequence to
our men and the enemy.

General Birdwood, commanding the Australian Corps, and afterward the
Fifth Army in succession to General Gough, was always known as "Birdie"
by high and low, and this dapper man, so neat, so bright, so brisk, had
a human touch with him which won him the affection of all his troops.

Gen. Hunter Weston, of the 8th Corps, was another man of character in
high command. He spoke of himself in the House of Commons one day as
"a plain, blunt soldier," and the army roared with