Great War generals are lampooned as donkeys. Dan Snow's great-grandfather's story reveals they were victims too

Daily Mail: Great War generals are lampooned as donkeys. Dan Snow's great-grandfather's story reveals they were victims too

Like many children of my generation, I learnt my history from the BBC's Blackadder; when it came to the First World War, I thought Stephen Fry's portrayal of blustering, incompetent General Melchett was entirely accurate. Generals were aristocratic, callous and quite possibly bloodthirsty.

Even now, it is widely thought senior officers were 'donkeys' who sent 'lions', the brave young troops, to their slaughter. A more maligned group of men in British history it would be hard to find.

There was a portrait of one of these absurd generals hanging in our family home. He has the trademark Snow features: Roman nose, squinty eyes and a box-like skull. He sits in military khaki, red tabs on his collar, a chest packed with medals, glaring out as if staring down the Mahdi of Sudan, King Cetshwayo's elite Zulu warriors or the Kaiser's troops, all of whom he faced in a long Army career. This was my great-grandfather, Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas D'Oyly Snow, one of the commanders on the Western Front.

We knew he had been there on the first day of the Somme, the darkest day in British military history when 60,000 young men were killed or injured. But he was a distant figure to his own children and my father (the journalist Peter Snow) only met him as a baby. To me, he was just a face in a painting. We never really talked about 'the General'.

Then, at the age of 30, I took part in a BBC1 programme to mark the 90th anniversary of the Armistice and examine my great-grandfather's role in the First World War. It was time, I thought, to own up to my unfashionable relative.

Yet in the course of their work, the programme's researchers unearthed a wealth of material that has changed my view not just of General Snow, but of the war itself. In particular, they had uncovered a memoir and letters in which you can hear the old man's words and thoughts uninterrupted by time - a unique account from the top of the British Army stretching from the terrible retreat from Mons in the summer of 1914 to the mud-clogged horror of Ypres in 1915. It was not designed for publication and it contains no excuses or justifications for his actions.

Instead, it comes with a simple instruction: 'If, when that time arrives, my son, or grandson, or whoever is in possession of this story, thinks that its publication would be of interest, let him publish it by all means. The actors will be dead and no one's feelings will be hurt.'

I decided to take him at his word and, with the excellent historian Mark Pottle, edited the story of an Army's struggle to overcome obstacles that would have baffled even the Duke of Wellington. The First World War was a turning point: in one generation war had changed beyond recognition and it was the job of Snow and his fellow generals to come up with answers.

It was not as if he lacked experience. On the contrary, Snow had been a fine junior officer and fought in far-flung corners of the globe, wherever the British Empire had need of him. He had been a hardened enforcer for the Queen Empress Victoria, traversing desert, jungle and savannah.

He fought Zulus in South Africa and the Mahdi in Sudan, where he carried a bottle of champagne with him to Khartoum and drank it when his troops had avenged the death of General Gordon, who was killed fighting the Mahdi's warriors in 1885. By the time he was promoted to major general, he and fellow senior British commanders had seen more combat than their contemporaries in the French or German armies.

On the eve of war he was commanding the 4th Division in Britain, assimilating the lessons of the 1899-1902 Boer War for the possibility of war in Europe.

Around 100,000 British troops headed for the Continent in August and September 1914, but they were ill-prepared and most would be dead or wounded within months. They were short of heavy artillery, high-explosive shells, machine guns, and even helmets. There was not a single anti-aircraft gun with this British Expeditionary Force (BEF).

Too many of Snow's men were reservists who struggled with the marching and hot summer weather. They inflicted grave casualties on the Germans but were forced to retreat. My ancestor rode a horse around the battlefield of Le Cateau (near Cambrai in northern France), making him one of the last British generals to command in a major battle on horseback.

His criticism of the retreat that followed the battle is frank: 'The higher staffs had had no practice in command, and although they had been well trained in the theory of the writing and issue of orders, they failed in the practice...Added to this we all suffered from the fault common to all Englishmen, a fault we did not know we suffered from till war revealed it, a total lack of imagination.'

It is often supposed that he and other senior officers had been safe in their comfortable chateaux, well out of danger. The truth is somewhat different. British generals spent a surprising amount of time on the front line and 70 were killed or died of wounds on the Western Front. Five were killed in the first six months alone.

My great-grandfather was seriously injured. He was forced to return to Britain after his horse fell and he crashed to the ground, shattering his pelvis. He would never fully recover, yet his war was not over. With the onset of trench warfare - on a front stretching from the Channel to the Alps - the Army had to be expanded, and Snow, aged 56, was summoned to the War Office for a meeting with Lord Kitchener.
Soldiering on: General Sir Thomas D'Oyly Snow in France during the First World War
He was told he was heading back to France with a hastily cobbledtogether division. In Snow's own words: 'I told Lord Kitchener that I had not nearly recovered from my accident, and that I doubted whether I was yet in good enough health to carry out such an arduous task. He said that that had nothing to do with the matter.'

Worse still, the terrible losses on the Western Front meant Snow's men were needed before their training was complete. This time he found himself commanding a division in the hell that was Flanders. All these years later, the soil was still clinging like clown shoes to my boots when I went to visit, the flat fields merging with grey cloud.

In his memoirs, Snow was deeply critical of himself and others, from the inexperience of the British gunners to the shortage of ammunition.

Yet the circumstances he faced verged on the impossible. The revolution in firepower had given the defending side the ability to bring a wall of steel and explosives down on anyone brave enough to attack. Radio was in its infancy. Telephone cables were severed, messengers were picked off by snipers armed with rifles of hitherto undreamed of power and accuracy. Thousands of miles of newly invented barbed wire posed an intractable problem.

Then there was the mud. On one occasion, after moving to a new sector, he wrote: 'We lost several men on the first night, drowned or smothered. The men had either to stand in water, knee deep, with every prospect of sinking in deeper still, or hang on the side of the trench. Later in the war we should have overcome the difficulty but at this time the men were overworked in keeping the front trenches in order, and we were all inexperienced.

'On one occasion one of my staff said to a Corporal of the Engineers, "Now you are an engineer; cannot you devise some method of draining this trench?" to which he replied, "I am afraid, Sir, that I cannot; you see before the war I was a Christmas card maker by trade."

'The wet trenches soon began to tell on the men's feet...Very soon an average of three hundred men a day were being evacuated, and there was little chance of any of these men returning for months. We did all we could, but the Division rapidly became a skeleton of what it had been.'

Generals in the First World War were confronted with problems that would have stretched the greatest of commandersYet nothing was done to help: 'We were not provided with wood wherewith to make trench-boards, and no extra socks or waterproof boots were forthcoming. We were only censured for having so many sick.'

This war was unlike anything any of them had prepared for or imagined. This was never truer than on April 22, 1915 as Snow watched the Germans unleash their first full-scale chemical attack on the Western Front.

My great-grandfather describes the moment vividly: 'I noticed a whitish blue mist to the north-east of us over the French lines. It was the sort of mist one expects to see over water meadows on a frosty night. We were rather puzzled by it. We soon noticed a peculiar smell which made our noses and throats tingle, but it was some time before we realised that this was the much-talked-of gas.'

The German chemical assault had come close to tearing a decisive hole in the French and British defences but, after terrible fighting, it became clear the Allied line had been bent but not broken.

Snow commanded from a flimsy bunker under constant enemy fire. He described how 'at night we cleared out the tables and slept on the floor packed like sardines. The noise was terrific, what with telephone bells ringing and shells bursting nearby.' His tenacity earned him a knighthood and a promotion.

Snow's memoir finishes after Ypres in 1915 but his darkest days of the war still lay ahead. In the summer of 1916 Britain's vast new volunteer army was ready for its first full-scale offensive. On the fateful day, July 1, the battle of the Somme began.

Snow's men attacked the strongest stretch of German line as a diversion for the main assault, which went in to the south. Even by the standards of that bloody and futile day, the attack of Snow's VII Corps was a disaster.

Snow and his staff were in a chateau by that stage, and I went there myself. It feels a long way from the carnage of the trenches but, in his defence, he was closer to the action than military commanders are today. In the aftermath, it appears Snow attempted to shift the blame away from himself, writing to his seniors that: 'I regret to have to report that the 46th Division in yesterday's operations showed a lack of offensive spirit.'

This was after the men had fought their way through unbroken barbed wire. Then, once they did manage to get into the German trench system, they held off counterattacks until they had run out of ammunition and were forced to use shovels and their bare hands. It was an inexcusable attempt to shift the blame.

After a spell at Arras and then at Cambrai, where he helped repel a devastating assault by German veterans of the Eastern Front, it seems the stress started getting to the old war horse. Snow wrote to his wife saying he believed it was time to make way for a younger man. Did someone have a word and ask him to resign? I would love to know.

He must have been disappointed to miss the triumphant summer of
1918. An event that he and so many others had worked so hard, and sacrificed so much, to bring about.

Generals in the First World War were confronted with a mass of problems that would have stretched the greatest of commanders. My great-grandfather was no Wellington, but his memoirs give a powerful insight into his struggle to build a coherent picture of the battlefield.

He will not be remembered for military genius but I hope he will be remembered for writing this honest, critical and objective account of his time in charge. I am proud of him.

Confusion Of Command: The Memoirs Of Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas D'Oyly 'Snowball' Snow, edited by Dan Snow and Mark Pottle, is published by Frontline Books at £19.99. To order your copy for£15.99 with free p& p, call The Review Bookstore on 0845 155 0713 or visit www.MailLife.co.uk/Books.