BRIGADIER GENERAL PHILIP HOWELL
GENERAL STAFF
7TH OCTOBER 1916 AGE 37
BURIED: VARENNES MILITARY CEMETERY, FRANCE
British First World War generals are meant to be ancient, incompetent, callous and out of touch, swigging claret in their chateaux, unaware of what's going on on the front line. Obviously this is an exaggeration but the stereotype still holds good in many people's minds.
Brigadier General Philip Howell bore no resemblance to this model. For a start he was only 37 when he died. Professor Gary Sheffield sums him up in his book 'Command and Morale': "Howell was an intellectual, something of a Bohemian, and a political radical". You can see the nature of the man from this letter he wrote to his wife in September 1915 after he had been at the front for more than a year:
"It is VILE that all my time should be devoted to killing Germans whom I don't in the least want to kill. If all Germany could be united in one man and he and I could be shut up together just to talk things out, we could settle the war, I feel, in less than one hour. ... Shall I desert and see if any of them will listen on the other side?"
Howell was one of General Haig's proteges; Haig saw great potential in him. However, General Gough considered him a thorn in his side since Howell was always arguing with him. Howell objected to the automatic top-down control Gough expected and felt that the man on the spot should not always be overruled. Howell frequently visited the front line trenches in order to see the situation for himself and it was whilst on one of these solo reconnaissances that he was killed by a stray shell just behind the front line at Authuille.
His wife, who was also an unusual and adventurous person, chose his inscription. It sounds like a forthright statement of what life is going to be like now that she has lost his fellowship. She may have meant this but the quotation comes from William Morris's novel about the Peasant's Revolt, 'A Dream of John Ball'. Morris holds that fellowship - mutual respect and mutual support - should be the basis of a new society. For Morris it was a political statement, a socialist statement, and Mrs Howell in all probability meant it as such in this inscription.
"Fellowship is heaven, and the lack of fellowship is hell: fellowship is life, and the lack of fellowship is death:"
A Dream of John Ball IV
William Morris