Known for his Horatio Hornblower novels and 1935's The African Queen, Forester attempted in the work to portray the then recently finished conflict of World War I in a decidedly realistic though still narrative-based and compelling fashion.

Though surviving when many do not and displaying an honorable sense of individual character, Curzon finally determines his willingness to sacrifice his life during the fateful offensive of the Central Powers enacted in 1918.

During the Boer War he won some distinction in an old-style cavalry charge but his character-forming career since has been a matter of rigid and unimaginative peacetime routine.

[5] Curzon is appointed in command of the 10,000-man (fictional) 91st Infantry Division, ordering attacks that condemn many of them to mutilation and death amongst the shells, gas and the machine guns.

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 – it is about the attitudes and mores of the British Army and of British ruling society more generally: the limited and inflexible mindsets that (in Forester's view) contributed to the appalling casualties and the horrors of the First World War.

"[8] At the outbreak of war, "someone in London had done his work extraordinarily well to "put an Army” (the British Expeditionary Force) ashore lacking absolutely nothing.

[12] 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.

Historian Max Hastings, in his book Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War, calls The General "brilliantly contemptuous", and writes that "[Forester] likened the commanders of World War I to savages, striving to extract a screw from a piece of timber by main force, assisted by ever more fulcrums and levers" failing to grasp that simply twisting the screw would remove it "with a fraction of the effort."