'Lions Led By Donkeys'
James Edward Edmonds
(1861-1956)
Brigadier-General
Deputy Chief Engineer CB CMG
King's College School RMA Woolwich psc
Royal Engineers
James Edward Edmonds (‘Archimedes’) was the son of J
Edmonds. Although he was born in London, the family was of Cornish stock.
Edmonds’s education was essentially scientific, but his father taught him
languages at the breakfast table and he became fluent in German, French, Italian
and Russian while still a schoolboy. He was clearly not an average child.
Edmonds confirmed his intellectual prowess by passing first into ‘The Shop’
in July 1879. Two years later he also passed out top and was awarded the Pollock
Medal. He was commissioned on 26 July 1881. In 1895 he came top in the Staff
College entrance examination. It was at Staff College that his peers, who
included Allenby and Haig, bestowed the nickname ‘Archimedes’
on him. He coped with the demands of the Staff College so easily that he even
found time to write his first book, The History of the Civil War in the
United States 1861-1865. Soon after passing Staff College Edmonds was
offered a position in the Intelligence Division. During the next decade
(1899-1910) he held a series of intelligence appointments. His work during this
period gives him a major claim to being the founding father of the British
Secret Service, which he helped to establish on proper professional lines,
though he was not immune to the outbreaks of ‘spy fever’ that occasionally
surfaced in pre-war Britain.
On 1 March 1911 Edmonds became chief of staff (GSO1) 4th
Division, commanded by Major-General Thomas Snow. Edmonds went to war
with 4th Division in August 1914, but was relieved of his post on 4 September.
The Retreat from Mons took a heavy toll. His nerves and constitution succumbed
to exhaustion, brought on by lack of sleep and food. He was nearly 53. After a
period of rest and light duties, Edmonds spent the remainder of the war as a
staff officer at GHQ until appointed Deputy Chief Engineer by Haig in 1918.
Edmonds’s importance, however, lies after the war not
during it. On 1 February 1919 he became Director of the Historical Section,
Committee of Imperial Defence, with responsibility for producing the British
Official History of the war. Edmonds held the post for 29 years. The production
of the Official History took 33 years of Edmonds’s life. Edmonds wrote nearly
half the 29 volumes, including three-quarters of the volumes dealing with the
Western Front. The work involved the ‘sorting, recording and analysing of over
25 million documents’. Drafts were circulated to large numbers of
participants, involving Edmonds in a huge correspondence, which is now in the
CAB 45 series of the National Archives, to the great benefit of modern
historians. Edmonds never had more than a handful of assistants. He was 87 when
the final volume was published in 1949. Without him the project would never have
been concluded. Even so, Edmonds has received scant respect for his heroic
efforts. The Official History is widely dismissed as ‘official propaganda’,
a concerted attempt to cover up the incompetence of the high command, written in
language that was emotionally sterile. People who hold these views have clearly
never read the books. Edmonds was an exceptional scholar. He went to immense
lengths to establish the facts and to interpret them truthfully. His prose is
often vivid and severely judgmental. He wrote and edited a work of enduring
historical and literary value and of great integrity.
John Bourne
Centre for First World War Studies
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