Edmund Ironside

Field Marshal the Lord Ironside gives a relatively sanitized account of his command of Allied Forces in North Russia in 1918 and 1919. Though he is candid about the woeful lack of preparation, the inadequacy of the equipment supplied to his soldiers and the damaging lack of political and cultural understanding demonstrated by superiors in Whitehall, Westminster and at Versailles, he nobly neglects to name names unless he has something complimentary to relate. So, he makes it very clear that the General Staff headquarters that he inherited in North Russia was run amateurishly and indolently without being so mean as to criticise his predecessor General F. C. Poole. While he was clearly aggrieved that his advice to evacuate Archangel in spring 1919 was overruled, forcing his army to fight a wasteful summer campaign alongside White Russian forces that he didn't trust, Lord Ironside is kind enough to keep Sir Winston Churchill out of the frame for blame.

A touching concern for the Army's reputation causes him to brush off the many severe instances of insubordination and mutiny that his force endured. To his mind, looking back, these were just the activities of people from the Royal Army Pay Corps, the French 21st Colonials and other mainly non-fighting units who lacked the soldierly spirit to get on with the job. However, his still-forceful regret that he couldn't shoot any of the British mutineers due to King George V's secret amnesty for capital offenders after Armistice Day, tells that the trouble was graver and more widespread than he allows.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Field Marshal ducks any discussion of the Allies' enthusiastic use of poison gas against the Reds in the campaign's closing stages, but it's a memoir not a history and one can't help but admire Ironside's energy and application as he relates how he held together and encouraged his multinational force, fighting a war they had no feeling or support for, trapped behind miles of ice in the most extreme conditions of debilitating cold.… (meer)