War

The manner in which the Great War was fought after 1916, writes John Terraine, has decided the nature of the century we live in.

Front page of the New York Times, November 11th, 1918When the guns ceased firing at 11am on November 11th, 1918, and the war ended at last, the land forces of the British Empire numbered over four and three-quarter million combatant troops. Of this total, more than three and a half million were from the United Kingdom. These figures embody the most significant fact about the First World War from the British point of view. The rejoicing and happiness of Armistice Day, as of VE Day and VJ Day twenty-seven years later, were spontaneous and natural. But both in 1918 and in 1945 they were compounded mainly of relief at the ending of a dreadful ordeal, and pride at the fortitude with which it had been borne. For Britain, on each occasion, the victory lay in what had been averted, not in what had been achieved. Each struggle contributed a stage in the contraction of British power, in the diminution of Britain’s status in the world. The origin of that transformation lies in the manner in which she fought the First World War.

The year 1918 witnessed the nadir and the zenith of the British Army’s effort. When it opened, there were approximately two million British troops in France and Flanders, of whom half were combatants. The infantry were organized in fifty-seven divisions, forty-seven of them from the United Kingdom. In March the Germans began the series of offensives by which they hoped to win swift victory: the British Army was their principal target. They succeeded in driving back and largely destroying the Fifth Army in Picardy, but they failed to break the Allied Front. When this attack stopped on April 5th, the British had suffered 163,943 casualties. On April 9th the Germans launched a new attack on the Ypres-Armentieres front, where an advance to only half the distance covered in Picardy would have brought them to the Channel. Two days later, Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig issued the famous Order of the Day which ended with these words:

There must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.

The German attack was held; but by April 21st, when the purely defensive fighting on the British front ended, casualties had risen to almost 250,000, more than those at Passchendale, almost all of them infantry. The British Army appeared to be at its last gasp. Yet, within a matter of weeks, it had embarked upon one of its greatest victories.

Despite the weakness of his Army, and the paucity of the reinforcements he received, Haig was quick to grasp a possibility of victory after the failure of the two huge German blows. As early as January 7th, 1918, the Intelligence Branch of G.H.Q. had stated that 'The German accession of morale is not of a permanent character and is not likely to stand the strain of an unsuccessful attack with consequent losses. ... If Germany attacks and fails she will be ruined'. It was on this conclusion, contrary to the prevailing pessimism of the period, that Haig based his ideas. New and massive German onslaughts were still to be delivered against the French in May, June and July. These again achieved spectacular successes, but failed in their main object. And already, at Villers Bretonneux, on April 25th, British troops had counter-attacked on a local scale. On May 17th Haig had instructed plans to be drawn up for a large offensive in the Amiens area. The prelude of this was the Battle of Hamel on July 4th; and the great attack itself was delivered by the British Fourth Army on August 8th, the “black day” of the German Army. From then until the Armistice on November 11th, the British Army advanced continuously, breaking the Hindenburg Line, and driving the enemy back to the area of the first battlefields of 1914. In four months of ceaseless attack it captured 188,700 prisoners and 2,840 guns; the French, Americans, and Belgians in the same period, captured between them 196,500 prisoners and 3,775 guns. The British achievement was superb; but the cost of it went far beyond the 350,000 casualties sustained in this grand victorious offensive.

These are the bald facts. Like most of the statistics of the First World War, they have a stupefying quality. It is impossible to visualize 350,000 casualties. It is only by an intense effort that one can visualize the arena and the conditions in which they were sustained. There was no precedent for losses on this scale. The last decisive victory won by the British Army on the Continent of Europe had been Waterloo, where the British contingent numbered 23,991. The largest previous effort of the Army had been in South Africa, where in the first eleven months, the period that covered the whole of the “regular” warfare, its losses in battle were 39,785 -- two-thirds of those suffered on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The Second World War did not reproduce the holocausts of the First: for the whole war, 1939-1945, the Army’s losses were less than in the fighting of 1918. Thus the First World War was a unique and revolutionary experience in British history; a nation used to enjoying all the advantages of Imperialism and Great-Power Status at a low cost, through the exercise of naval supremacy, discovered with a shock the price that had to be paid when that supremacy was no longer effective. For, in a sentence, the final meaning of all these daunting figures, all the huge numbers of men engaged and lost in battle, and the very small numbers of the miles and yards gained, was this: British naval supremacy had ended, and Britain had become a land power, one among many, not by any means the strongest.

In 1914 Britain was still the supreme naval power, with only a tiny standing Army. Her value in an Alliance, her “great deterrent,” lay in her mighty Fleet, which had not been challenged since Trafalgar. As late as the close of the century, she had been able to disregard the almost unanimous opprobrium of Europe over the South African War, and virtually denude herself of troops to wage that distant campaign, behind the shield of the Navy. It was the German Kaiser’s fleet-building, more than anything else, that drew her into the Entente with France and into the morasses of continental politics. The building of the German Fleet was a gesture that could point in only one direction, and to which the modern developments of naval construction lent an unexpected probability of success. For, just as the coming of steam had rendered all existing navies obsolete, so the launching of H.M.S. Dreadnought in 1906 put all major ship-building nations on an equal footing as regards battleships. And battleships were still the core of the Navy. It was in May 1912, that the implications of these two factors began to be acutely felt, and when the first symptom of weakening was seen in Britain’s most valued weapon. In order to meet the German threat in the North Sea, the Admiralty withdrew battleships from the Mediterranean; the effect was that Britain no longer commanded the Imperial lifeline between Gibraltar and the Suez Canal. Informed opinion was deeply disturbed; at the War Office, Henry Wilson, Director of Military Operations, wrote in his diary: “We have ... 25 Dreadnoughts in the North Sea. The Germans likewise 25. Our 8 from the Mediterranean will make 33... . The net result is that we can just hold our own in the North Sea, and the Mediterranean is gone. This is a most parlous condition of affairs.” Parlous as it was, there was an even graver defect in the Royal Navy at that time.

Although -- indeed, perhaps because -- it had enjoyed an unchallenged supremacy for over a century, the Royal Navy had produced no theoretician with a doctrine of war that would serve as a common ground for all its officers, and as an accepted point of departure for statesmen and soldiers. It was left to the American Admiral Mahan to study and analyse the campaigns of Nelson and the influence of sea-power on history. Britain produced no naval Clausewitz, nor even a Hamley, to concentrate her unique store of tactical and strategic experience into principles that would command the attention to which the Navy was entitled. The reason for this is not far to seek: authoritative doctrines of war emerge from a consensus of professional opinion. Such a consensus is embodied in a General Staff, and there was no naval General Staff until 1912. The Navy, in fact, until then resembled the Army before the Cardwell Reforms: just as the Army had consisted of a collection of Generals and Regiments, the Navy consisted of a collection of Admirals and ships. The corporate central brain was lacking. The seriousness of this situation became apparent during the Agadir crisis in 1911; and Lord Haldane, then Secretary for War, tells how, at a meeting of the Defence Committee presided over by the Prime Minister to discuss mobilization arrangements, an astounding discrepancy emerged between the plans of the War Office and the Admiralty. The First Sea Lord, Sir Arthur Wilson, stated the Navy’s intentions:

They wanted to take detachments of the Expeditionary Force and to land them seriatim at points on the Baltic Coast, on the northern shores of Prussia. We of the War Office at once said that such a plan was from a military point of view hopeless, because the railway system which the great General Staff of Germany had evolved was such that any division we landed, even if the Admiralty could have got it to a point suitable for debarkation, would be promptly surrounded by five to ten times the number of enemy troops. Sir John Fisher appeared to have derived the idea from the analogy of the Seven Years’ War, more than 150 years previously, and Sir Arthur Wilson, his successor, had apparently adopted it. The First Lord backed him up. I said at once that the mode of employing troops and their numbers and places of operation, were questions for the War Office General Staff and that we had worked them out with the French. The results had been periodically approved in the Committee of Defence itself. Sir William Nicholson (then C.I.G.S.) asked Sir Arthur whether they had at the Admiralty a map of the German strategic railways. Sir Arthur replied that it was not their business to have such maps. ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Sir William, ‘if you meddle with military problems you are bound not only to have them, but to have studied them.’ The discussion became sharp ...

Very shortly after this incident, Mr. Winston Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, with the task, bluntly, of dragging naval thinking and organization into the twentieth century. A naval staff was created, and certain valuable new doctrines were evolved and implemented -- in particular the doctrine of remote blockade, with the necessity of hastening the building of new bases in the Orkneys and on the East coast. The great base at Scapa Flow was only just sufficiently prepared to receive the Fleet when war broke out. Indeed, Churchill and his assistants, called too late to their work, were caught in a trap that was shortly to engulf the Army too. The sheer magnitude of their material task, the urgent need to build new ships and bases and train the men for them, drew off energy from the intellectual effort that needed also to be made. But in any case there was simply not enough time to evolve balanced doctrines; it requires decades, not months, to produce a valid theory for war.

This, then, was the true state of naval affairs in an Empire that depended on its naval supremacy. What of the Army? Here the picture was significantly different. The Army had had all its weaknesses -- and they were many --  exposed in South Africa. Succeeding governments and their supporters were clear that reform was needed. When the Liberals came to power in 1905, the process received a new impetus. This was the more extraordinary since the Liberal Party was thoroughly permeated with pacifism, and entertained the deepest distrust of militarism in all its forms. A significant snippet of conversation was recorded as Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman carried out the formation of his government; it went as follows: “I said, ‘What about the War Office?’ ‘Nobody,’ answered Campbell-Bannerman, ‘will touch it with a pole.’ ‘Then give it to me ...’.” The speaker had his wish; he was Mr. Haldane, and by the end of his remarkable tenure of office three major reforms in the Army had been brought to completion: a General Staff was firmly lodged in control; the Expeditionary Force had been organized; the Territorial Army had been created.

Haldane was a man of alarming intellectual prowess. He studied Philosophy at Edinburgh and Goettingen Universities; he declined a professorial chair at Edinburgh and turned to Law. Having mastered this new subject with sufficient thoroughness to earn about £20,000 a year, he entered politics. He joined up with Asquith and Grey, and together they formed the core of the Liberal Imperialist group whose views were regarded askance by the bulk of the Party, but whose intellectual eminence thrust them inevitably to the top. Haldane’s previous career at no point contained any link with military affairs. He stunned his first meeting of the Army Council, when he was asked what type of Army he envisaged, with the reply, “An Hegelian Army.” “The discussion,” he remarks, “then fell away.” He was the greatest Secretary of State for War that Britain has ever had. But underlying all his work was a fatal weakness for which he was in no way responsible. His approach to his task was from first principles. “What is the Army for? What role must it fulfil?” were his questions. Having received his answer, and being satisfied with it, he implemented it with an unrivalled thoroughness. It was the total absence of any equally clear thinking, any similarly cogent answer on the naval side to balance against the Army view, that marred his achievement. For, in the existing context of German belligerence, and of the closening relationship with France, the answer to these fundamental questions that Haldane accepted as his working basis was this: “To fight beside the French Army in the event of German aggression.” It was to this end that all his work was directed; it was for this purpose that the Regular Army was re-organized into six divisions to constitute an Expeditionary Force, and the Territorials were organized as a second line to replace the regulars in all their normal duties and supplement them in the field. The man most closely concerned in working out this concept was the ardently Francophile Irishman, Henry Wilson, Director of Military Operations from 1910 to 1914. He tells how, on one of his periodic pilgrimages to the battlefields of 1870, he reverently laid at the foot of the statue of France at Mars-la-Tour a fragment of a map showing the proposed area of concentration of the British Army in France in the event of war -- an odd procedure on many counts, not least that of security. But odder still is the fact that this was the only war plan that Britain possessed when she entered the war on August 4th, 1914.

When the war broke out, a further complication was added: the new Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener. Kitchener discerned at once, through those processes of personal intuition on which he had depended all his life, what no Staff Officer nor politician fully perceived, that the war would be a long one, at least three years, and that Britain must have a very large Army to wage it. He set about raising this Army immediately. “Even if Lord Kitchener had done nothing more than this,” remarks one of his severest critics, “his taking office would have been an inestimable service to the country ...” Kitchener’s conception of the New Armies has been generally treated as a masterpiece of organization; in fact, it was the opposite. One of his best friends has written, “he hated organizations; he smashed organizations ...” This would seem to be the truth. For Lord Kitchener, contrary to popular belief, was not a military “expert”; he was not a qualified Staff Officer. He was a leader, with brilliant intuition and mastery of expedient, and immense force of character. The whole of his career in the Army was spent overseas, in Egypt, South Africa and India. Everything that he did was a personal endeavour; he scarcely knew how to delegate, nor did he believe in the machinery of office. As General Rawlinson, who served on his tiny staff in the Sudan campaign in 1898, said, “The one serious criticism that I have is that this is too much a one-man show.” Drawing on his huge reserves of mental and physical energy, Kitchener made everything he touched a one-man show. It worked in the Sudan; it worked (more or less) in South Africa; it set things moving in the congealed conditions of India during the first decade of the century. But, applied to the overwhelming problems of modern war in Europe in 1914, it would not do.

Kitchener was entirely unfamiliar with European armies and military organization. Intuition told him what needed to be done. All his practical experience tended to draw him into wrong methods of doing it. The raising of the New Armies -- his greatest achievement --  is a case in point. Nothing could have been more personal than the manner in which he set about this. “Kitchener needs you!” roared the posters. Battalions, whole brigades, sprang into being at Lord Kitchener’s word, or at the stroke of his pen. The story of the 23rd (Sportsman’s) battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, if not typical, is indicative: “That popular sportswoman, Mrs. E. Cunliffe-Owen ... on chaffing some of her friends towards the end of August on not being in khaki, was challenged to raise a battalion of middle and upper-class men up to the age of forty-five. She promptly ... telegraphed to Lord Kitchener, ‘Will you accept complete battalion of upper and middle-class men, physically fit, able to shoot and ride, up to the age of forty-five?’ The answer came promptly back, ‘Lord Kitchener gratefully accepts complete battalion.’ Mrs. Cunliffe-Owen got to work at once. The India Room at the Hotel Cecil was engaged as a recruiting depot... . Mrs. Cunliffe-Owen, seated behind a screen, signed the papers herself. A triumph.” By such means as these the First Hundred-Thousand was raised, and the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who came after them. As Lord Esher commented: “Since it was conceded that the War would be fought under a system of voluntary enlistment and unequal sacrifice ... it is more than doubtful whether armies could have been raised by any method other than the one he chose.” But this was a concession, adds Lord Esher, for which England was destined to pay a heavy price. That price is still being paid today. The immediate cost of the personal method was a double one. First, it involved the complete setting aside of the Territorial system which Lord Haldane had envisaged as the natural manner of expanding the Army, through the County Associations. Instead of using this excellent machinery, and turning to best account the existing Territorial divisions, Kitchener preferred to add another category of entirely raw troops to the Army, thereby hampering the Territorials severely in reaching their full utility. The reason for his rejection of the Territorial System is interesting. Having taken part in the Franco-Prussian War, he had grimly vivid memories of the French Territorial troops in 1870-1871. He entirely ignored the fact that the British Territorials of 1914, enthusiastic, mainly young, citizen soldiers, were utterly different from the old French reservists who shared their title. Such is the power of a word, and such is the cost of the personal method. But even more serious was his refusal to throw the huge weight of his prestige behind compulsory service. The result of adhering to the voluntary method was that the Kitchener Armies skimmed off the best blood in the country, the most ardent, the mentally, spiritually and physically most active, leaving very little, when they were expended, to leaven the masses that must follow. The sequel of the story of the 23rd Royal Fusiliers is revealing. In one hut at their first camp, says their historian, “the first bed was occupied by the brother of a peer. The second by the man who drove his car.... Other beds were occupied by a mechanical engineer, an old Blundell School boy, planters, a mine overseer from Scotland, a man in possession of a flying pilot’s certificate ... an old sea-dog who had rounded the Cape Horn on no fewer than nine occasions, a man who had hunted seals ...” No doubt this was splendidly democratic; but one senses a waste of talent, and one learns without surprise that “with this as with other high-class battalions the number of men taking commissions proved a serious drain on its strength ...” The New Armies themselves, the Army as a whole, and ultimately the nation, were all gravely injured by this haphazard, improvised method of recruiting. But there was worse to follow when the question arose of how the New Armies were to be used.

Whatever may have been the merits or demerits of the strategy of conveying the British Expeditionary Force to France immediately on the outbreak of war, there can be no question about the efficiency with which it was carried out. Mobilization proceeded smoothly; concentration was ahead of schedule; security was astonishingly complete. It is no criticism of the B.E.F., nor of its organization and training, that it was instantly involved in a debacle which came very near to being fatal. The criticism must be against the absence of positive thinking that allowed the military effort of the Empire to follow at the heels of French strategic doctrine.The result was the retreat from Mons, with its sequel, the Marne, and the Race for the Sea. This operation represented the sole possibility that ever existed of a great turning movement on the Western Front. It ended at Ypres, in October 1914, where the French and British forces, vainly supposing that they were about to turn the northern flank, met huge masses of enemy troops who were intending to perform a similar feat. By heroic exertions, which brought about the almost total destruction of the original British Expeditionary Force, the Allies were able to hold the Germans at bay outside Ypres, and dig in along a line that thereafter stretched unbroken from the Channel to Switzerland.

Two permanent results stemmed from this fighting in 1914. The first was the increasing clamour that then arose, and continued until the very end of the war, for reinforcements to the Western Front. The French Army is known to have lost 374,000 men in the three months of September, October and November. Its losses in August have never been officially stated, though some have put them as high as 300,000 men in the first ten days of the war; they must have been immense, since they included those of the disastrous Battles of the Frontiers, which exposed the fatal fallacies underlying the French doctrine of offensive at all costs. These human losses, coupled with the loss of the occupied Northern provinces, not unnaturally produced a certain frame of mind in Frenchmen. The desire to expel the invader, and to avenge the outrages that he had committed, assumed a tremendous force. In the context of early 1915, with this determination (shared by many Englishmen) ascendant in France, and with almost every reputable military leader convinced that the drawn battles of 1914 were artificial and impermanent results, the endless argument about “The Line” made its appearance. The French insisted that the British must take over more front: they must release French divisions for the offensive if they could not attack themselves; preferably they would take over more front and attack themselves, alongside the French. In view of France’s losses it was hard to resist these demands. In any case, they were supported by our own G.H.Q., which had its own defeats and injuries to avenge. But these emotional inclinations, however comprehensible, had little relevance to the stark tactical reality of deadlock which was the other result of 1914. With the equipment of the Allied armies of 1915, and, indeed, much later, there was no solution to the problem of assaulting successive trench positions, protected by barbed wire and defended by machine-guns and massed artillery.

This was the moment when the hiatus in British pre-war strategic thinking was exposed: for it was now, at the beginning of 1915, the great German gamble having failed, that Britain should have been able to exert the large influence due to her naval supremacy. For only naval power, with its opportunity for amphibious attacks, could tilt the balance that had been arrived at in the field. It was not, of course, that no one perceived this: but it was too late to have to begin trying to re-orientate the whole strategy of the Allies. 1911 would have been the latest moment to commence the laborious process of talking the French out of their delusion; but as we have seen, there was a total lack of understanding between the War Office and the Admiralty in 1911. Consequently the belated attempt to revive a truly maritime strategy was doomed to failure. Indeed, there was no real agreement among the British leaders themselves about such a strategy. Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief of the B.E.F., and the bulk of the General Staff Officers, not unnaturally, since they were now serving in France, clung to the view that this was the only front that mattered. Lord Kitchener, on the other hand, inspired again by his almost infallible intuition, wrote to French on January 2nd: “I suppose we must now recognize that the French Army cannot make a sufficient break through the German lines to bring about the retreat of the German forces from Northern Belgium. If that is so, then the German lines in France may be looked on as a fortress that cannot be carried by assault and also that cannot be completely invested, with the result that the lines may be held by an investing force, whilst operations proceed elsewhere.” Sir John Fisher, now First Sea Lord again, was reviving his ideas for attacks on Germany’s northern coasts. Colonel Hankey, Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, was suggesting a blow against Germany’s new ally, Turkey. Mr. Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was for withdrawing the bulk of the B.E.F. from France and despatching it to a new theatre, unspecified; later, he became especially enamoured of the possibilities of Salonika. Into this confusion of counsel Mr. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, threw, with all the persuasive force at his command, the idea of an attack on the Dardanelles.

There was nothing new about this idea; it did not emanate from a Churchillian brainstorm. Ever since the probability of an alliance between Turkey and Germany had been envisaged, the question of forcing the Dardanelles straits and attacking Constantinople had been considered. In 1904, 1906, 1908, and again in 1911, the General Staff had surveyed the problem, and had finally reached the conclusion that “without surprise any attempt to land an army on the Gallipoli peninsula would be too hazardous.” Such was the chaos of British war planning, under its various pulls and stresses, that it would appear that no attention was paid to these earlier examinations of the problem. Certainly the conditions laid down in them for success were totally ignored. Yet the potential value of this campaign was beyond question greater than that of any other operation undertaken by the Allies until the final campaign of 1918. Sir William Robertson, who, as Chief of Staff to Sir John French at that time, and later as C.I.G.S., bitterly opposed the Dardanelles campaign, has recognized its promise as clearly as anyone: “The advantages to be derived from forcing the Straits were perfectly obvious. Such a success would, as the advocates of the project have said, serve to secure Egypt, to induce Italy and the Balkan States to come in on our side, and, if followed by the forcing of the Bosphorus, would enable Russia to draw munitions from America and Western Europe, and to export her accumulated supplies of wheat.” One can add that success would also have offered the only possibility of uniting the Eastern and Western Fronts, with the further chance of staving off the Russian Revolution. Brigadier J. E. Edmonds, the British Official Historian, a consistent supporter of the “Western Front” policy, as opposed to all “sideshows,” has written: “In view of the situation on the Western Front and the subsequent failures of the French and British offensives in 1915, the wisdom of the decision to make trial elsewhere -- provided that surprise was ensured can hardly be questioned.” And the Official Historian of the Gallipoli campaign itself adds: “There can be still less doubt that in the spring of 1915 the operation was not beyond the capacity of the Entente, and that a combined naval and military attack, carefully planned in every detail before troops embarked, and carried out with the essential advantages of surprise, would have succeeded.”

These were the very desiderata that did not exist. The story of the campaign is the story of a series of opportunities missed by inches. The historian of Gallipoli sums it up in this conclusion: “Many reasons combined to frustrate an enterprise the success of which in 1915 would have altered the course of the war. But every reason will be found to spring from one fundamental cause -- an utter lack of preparation before the campaign began.” At the root of this lack of preparation lay the long-standing absence of accord between the General Staff and the Admiralty. It was because of this that the idea originated with the Admiralty, and was conceived at first as a purely naval venture. Lord Kitchener stated categorically that he had no troops to offer. When, inevitably, it was recognized that the Army must come in, the troops were scraped together. There were just too few of them; reinforcements were belatedly sent, but always just too few. Finally, almost half a million Allied soldiers were sent to Gallipoli, but after the initial loss of surprise they were always too few and too late to swing the balance. By sickness and battle the British Army lost over 200,000 men in this unhappy, but potentially decisive, campaign. Brigadier J. E. Edmonds makes the lesson clear: “... once the decision was reached ... all attacks in the West on a large scale -- at any rate by the B.E.F. -- should have been prohibited; for in 1915 there were neither the munitions nor the men to sustain two serious efforts with any hope of bringing either of them to a successful conclusion.” Even with this proviso, one must question whether the Gallipoli venture could have succeeded in 1915. As has been shown, the French were in no mood for a suspension of offensives on the Western Front. Could they ever have been convinced, at this late stage? And what of the enemy? Just three days before the first landing at Gallipoli, the Germans launched the first Gas attack. This operation, the Second Battle of Ypres, was one of the great crises of the war. The strain imposed on the British Army was very great, and its urgent demands for reinforcements and munitions could scarcely have been refused. In short, one is forced to the conclusion that Gallipoli could only have succeeded in terms of a clearly stated intention, long before the war, to use the bulk of Britain’s reserves amphibiously, and in terms of an agreement by France to shape her strategy accordingly.

The failure of the Gallipoli campaign meant the failure of sea-power itself. This was Britain’s last great adventure as a supreme maritime state -- her last attempt to use sea-power as a decisive weapon. For the remainder of the 1914-1918 war, Britain’s main effort was lodged in the Army fighting on the continent of Europe, and depending on the Navy only for maintenance and supply. By November 1918, nearly five and a half million British troops had been sent to France and Flanders. Kitchener’s brave New Armies were the first of these hosts to enter the new type of warfare that now began. Their great test was the Battle of the Somme in 1916. On the first day of the fighting, July 1st, the British Army sustained 57,000 casualties. In the four .and a half months that the battle continued, it lost 415,000 men. This was by far the most terrible ordeal in its history. The Official Historian says: “... the real war of attrition starts with the assumption by the British Armies on the Somme of the leading role in the fighting on the Western Front.” Sir Winston Churchill has added: “The battlefields of the Somme were the graveyards of Kitchener’s Army.”

The tragedy of the Somme goes even beyond this loss of life. Its immediate effects were, first, to thrust Britain into an undesirable military leadership, which she had to sustain thereafter; and, secondly, to sow the seeds of deep distrust between soldiers and politicians that bedevilled her effort throughout the rest of the war. In the post-war years, most of the disillusion and pacifism which grew up arose out of memories of the slaughter on the Somme. In the Second World War, many of the inhibitions of British strategy, and differences between British and American Staffs, were derived from these same memories, and the fact that America has had no Sommes. Today, a poverty of inspiration is discernible in the age-group that guides the country, through the extinction of a whole generation of talent on the Somme. Because of the turn that the war took when Gallipoli failed, and attrition took the place of manoeuvre, peace itself brought little comfort. Again, it was Sir Winston Churchill who defined the quality of the Armistice of 1918: “No splendid harmony was to crown the wonderful achievements. No prize was to reward the sacrifices of the combatants. Victory was to be bought so dear as to be almost indistinguishable from defeat. It was not to give even security to the victors... . The most complete victory ever gained in arms has failed to solve the European problem or remove the dangers which produced the war.” In other words, the manner in which the Great War was fought after 1916 has decided the nature of the century we live in.

John Terraine (1921-2003) was a leading British military historian, a producer and scriptwriter for the BBC television series The Great War and a regular contributor toHistory Today.