C. S. Forester's book The General is a short novel about an ordinary British Army officer in the Great War, or World War I. The cover of the 1974 paperback edition of one of Foresters non-fiction titles: Hunting The Bismarck Cecil Scott Forester was the pen name of Cecil Louis Troughton Smith (August 27, 1899 – April 2, 1966), an English novelist who rose to fame with tales of adventure with military themes. ... The British Army is the land armed forces branch of the British Armed Forces. ... Ypres, 1917, in the vicinity of the Battle of Passchendaele. ... “The Great War ” redirects here. ...

Forester is best known for his famous series of Horatio Hornblower novels which he began in 1937; few of his other works are well-known: The General (1936) and The African Queen (1935) are exceptions and remain popular. Horatio Hornblower is a fictional character, an officer in the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, originally the protagonist of a series of novels by C. S. Forester, and later the subject of films and television programs. ... Year 1937 (MCMXXXVII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1936 (MCMXXXVI) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar). ... The African Queen is a 1951 film made by Horizon Pictures and Romulus Films, and distributed by United Artists. ... 1935 (MCMXXXV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display full calendar). ...

The General follows the career of Herbert Curzon from the time he joins the army as a subaltern through his experiences in the Second Boer War to the happy day he is given a regiment of his own to command. Curzon is unexceptional in every way, an officer like any other officer, and it is the very ordinariness of Forester's character that serves to give the novel power. A subaltern is a military term for a junior officer. ... Combatants British Empire Orange Free State South African Republic Commanders Sir Redvers Buller Lord Kitchener Lord Roberts Paul Kruger Louis Botha Koos de la Rey Martinus Steyn Christiaan de Wet Casualties 6,000 - 7,000 (A further ~14,000 from disease) 6,000 - 8,000 (Unknown number from disease) Civilians...

As the Great War begins Curzon takes his part as a major of an unfashionable cavalry regiment. He is given a temporary promotion to battalion command and then quickly a brigade command. At the battle of Ypres, he manages to keep his head about him and upon the death of his brigadier becomes a general. Curzon returns to England while his unit is in Belgium, and is promoted again through odd intrigues. He is promoted again and again, eventually being placed in command of a hundred thousand men, and orders attacks that condemn many of them to pointless mutilation and inevitable death amongst the shells and the gas and the machine guns. There were four Battles of Ypres during World War I: First Battle of Ypres (October 19 – November 22, 1914) Second Battle of Ypres (April 22 – May 15, 1915) Third Battle of Ypres (July 31 – November 6, 1917) (also known as Passchendaele) Fourth Battle of Ypres (September 28 – October 2, 1918...

Yet Curzon—General Sir Herbert Curzon by this time—is not a brutal man or an uncaring one: simply a brave and honest but stubborn and unimaginative leader. For Forester, the tale of Herbert Curzon's almost inevitable rise to high command, the senseless slaughters he directs, and his eventual retirement to the life of an aged cripple in a wheelchair, is not about Curzon himself—it is about the attitudes and mores of the British Army and of British society more generally, the attitudes that (in Forester's view) led to the appalling casualties and the horrors of the First World War.

For Forester, to understand Herbert Curzon's simple courage and determination to do his duty is to understand how men like Curzon, who were not by nature evil, were led to order the cream of their country's manhood to sacrifice themselves in the pointless bloody slaughter of the Somme or Verdun or Gallipoli. For other battles known as Battle of the Somme, see Battle of the Somme (disambiguation). ... Combatants  France  German Empire Commanders Philippe Pétain Robert Nivelle Erich von Falkenhayn Strength About 30,000 on 21 February 1916 About 150,000 on 21 February 1916 Casualties 378,000; of whom 120,000 died. ... For other uses, see Gallipoli (disambiguation). ...

The General has been widely praised as being an excellent and very realistic account of the mindset of the British Officer Corps in times of war, and as such many veterans are surprised to learn that the author himself never actually served in the armed forces. In fact, a persistent, yet unsubstantiated, rumor states that Adolf Hitler was so impressed with the novel that he made it required reading for his top field commanders and general staff in the hopes that it would allow prominent German officers to be able to understand how their British counterparts thought. This rumor is referred to as fact by Forster in a foreword to a later edition of the novel. Hitler redirects here. ...