Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military)

by Gordon Corrigan

  Germany’s immediate target in the west, France, had a standing army of 820,000, including around 45,000 colonial troops, mostly, but not all, stationed in France. Conscription had been reintroduced after the 1870 war with Prussia and refined in 1905, after which all able-bodied males between twenty and forty-five spent two years with the regular army, eleven years with the regular army reserve and twelve years in the territorial army. In 1913 the French government, realising that the German army was larger and better equipped than its own, increased the period to be spent with the regular army from two years to three. On the outbreak of war the French army could call upon two and three-quarter million reservists.

  As this study concentrates on the British way of making war it is apposite to examine how the British army of 1914 came to be as it was. The British had long eschewed conscription. To the general public the navy was England’s defence, and the army existed to keep order in the empire and to provide expeditionary forces of modest size when needed. The British regular army in 1914 was 247,432 strong, but one-third of it was in India and there were large garrisons in Ireland (including twenty infantry battalions and three cavalry regiments), Africa, the Middle East and Egypt, with smaller contingents scattered around the globe. The army reserve, of men who had completed their service with the colours but either had a liability for reserve service or volunteered for it, totalled around 210,000, and the Territorial Force around 280,000, including the Channel Islands Militia.

  In 1871, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, there began a series of reorganisations to turn the British army from something which had not changed very much since Wellington into the force that went to war in 1914. Purchase of commissions12 was abolished, the infantry was grouped into (mainly) two-battalion regiments and given geographical areas from where to recruit, and conditions and equipment were improved. As a result of the South African War, 1899–1902, it was clear that further reform was needed. Britain had never before sent so many troops abroad, and the regular army was simply not large enough to cope. Volunteer, Yeomanry and Militia units volunteered to send contingents overseas, and the Dominions rallied too; but it became clear that the British army must now be prepared to fight sophisticated, well-armed enemies – and Germany was increasingly looking like a possibility – rather than numerous but ill-trained and technologically inferior native hordes. The British army, relying on voluntary enlistment, could never hope to compete against European powers in numbers, but it must be organised and equipped along modern lines, and it must have a realistic reserve.

  In 1904 the post of Commander-in-Chief of the British Army was abolished. Ever since the death of Wellington in 1852 its powers had increasingly been arrogated to himself by the Secretary of State, and its administrative and policy-making functions were now assumed by an Army Council, presided over by the Secretary of State and consisting of four military officers, led by the newly created Chief of the General Staff (Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1910), and two senior civil servants, one responsible for finance. The British army had never before had a staff as such. Staff officers, those persons responsible for training, planning and administration, and for the direction of an army on operations, were found as and when they were needed. The Prussians had invented the modern staff system, and it had manifestly worked in 1870–71. Increasingly it became clear to British military thinkers and policy-makers that the old make-do system of cobbling together a headquarters and staff when needed, from whoever was available, was outdated and unsuited to modern war. An Army Order of November 1905 sanctioned the formation of a General Staff and the process was accelerated on the appointment of Richard Haldane as Secretary of State for War in December 1905. In 1908 a further reorganisation divided the staff into three main branches. In broad terms the General Staff were responsible for operations and training, the Adjutant General’s Staff for personnel matters and the Quartermaster General’s Staff for administration and logistics. Colloquially, these branches were known as G, A and Q. The latter two branches had existed for a century and a half, under various guises; what was new was their formal and permanent establishment at levels below that of the War Office, and the imposition of a General Staff, whose functions had previously been the responsibility of the Commander-in-Chief at the very top, and of the theatre commander and his quartermaster general at subordinate levels. From now on the A and Q staffs would be subordinate to the General Staff. The Chief of the General Staff would be the professional head of the army, and the senior military adviser to the Secretary of State.

  Staff training, previously not regarded as an essential to career progression, began to be taken more seriously, and arrangements were made with the London School of Economics for potential staff officers to be trained in the technical aspects of their likely future employment, including business studies and the management of railways. Although much was copied from the Prussians, one major doctrinal principle would not be adopted. In the German army there was effectively a separation of the staff and command avenues to promotion. There, officers who had done well at the staff college and in their first staff appointment were selected to become members of the Great General Staff. They wore the coveted red stripe on their trouser legs and usually spent the rest of their service as staff officers. Commanders and their chiefs of staff bore joint responsibility for results, and a staff officer who was unhappy about his commander’s decisions had the right of direct access to the senior staff officer of his branch at the next higher headquarters. The British army was too small to have separate pools of commanders and staff officers, and such a system would in any case have been unacceptable to the British military ethos. The British staff would remain subordinate to command, and officers would not advance by merit in only one stream; they would alternate between the staff and command, needing recommendations in both spheres to gain promotion. At this stage this was but theory; it would take time to train the necessary staff officers, and the British force that deployed to France on the outbreak of war was short of trained staff officers, and would remain so as expansion of the army ran far ahead of the outputs of the Staff College and wartime staff courses.

  British military perception was changing too, and it was becoming evident that the British guarantee of Belgian neutrality might, in view of the burgeoning power and ambition of Germany, require British intervention in Europe. If this were to occur, or indeed if Britain had to fight anywhere on the scale of the South African War, expansion of the peacetime army would be necessary; and if conscription was unacceptable, as it was, then reserves would have to be put on a proper footing.

  Britain’s immediate reserves consisted of men who had served in the regular army and who retained a commitment for recall in war. Additionally there were Volunteer units raised during the various invasion scares of the nineteenth century, Yeomanry (cavalry, with men providing their own horses) and the remnants of the Militia, a hangover from the Napoleonic Wars but with the compulsory element long in abeyance. All were subject to a variety of rules and regulations and manifested a wide disparity in standards of military effectiveness. The Volunteers, Yeomanry and Militia could not be forced to serve outside the United Kingdom, and the individual reserves could not be embodied short of general war.

  In 1908 a fundamental reorganisation of the reserves took place. Lifetime enlistment into the regular army had already been replaced by enlistment for a specific period, part to be spent with the colours (that is in the regular army) and the remainder on the reserve. Now the old Militia became the Special Reserve, formed into units but with the role of providing individual reinforcements to the regular army; and the Volunteers and Yeomanry became the Territorial Force, intended to mirror the regular army in organisation and equipment and formed into divisions commanded by regular officers, but available only as home defence unless its members had signed for general service. By 1914 only five complete units – three battalions of infantry, one cavalry regiment and a Royal Engineers company – had signed.


  The need to provide officers for war was not neglected, and universities that already had Volunteer Corps found these converted into the Officer Training Corps, and other universities were encouraged to set them up. The same conversion applied to those schools that had Volunteer units, the forerunners of today’s Combined Cadet Force.13 The quid pro quo for the universities and schools was the right to nominate a number of boys for Sandhurst without further examination.

  By 1914 the British regular army had eighty-four infantry battalions at home and seventy-three abroad. The spearhead of the home forces was the Expeditionary Force, available for immediate deployment in the event of a major war. It consisted of six divisions and a cavalry division. Each division was commanded by a major-general and had three brigades, each commanded by a brigadier general.14 A brigade consisted of four infantry battalions, each commanded by a lieutenant colonel. As divisional troops, in support of the whole formation, were a squadron of horsed cavalry, the divisional artillery, a company of engineers, a signals company (then also part of the Royal Engineers), a supply and transport company of the Army Service Corps, and a field ambulance. This last was not, as its name might suggest, a solitary vehicle with a red cross on its sides, but a medical unit responsible for first-line medical attention and the evacuation of casualties. The divisional artillery consisted of fifty-four eighteen-pounders (the recently introduced standard British field gun), eighteen 4.5-inch howitzers and four sixty-pounders. Altogether, once the division had received its individual reservists, its war establishment was 18,000 all ranks, of which 12,000 were infantry and 4,000 artillerymen. Each infantry battalion had two Maxim medium machine guns.

  The cavalry division had four brigades, each with three regiments of horsed cavalry. It too had its own engineers, signallers and administrative and medical support, and twenty thirteen-pounder guns of the Royal Horse Artillery (smaller and lighter than the infantry divisional guns because they had to move at the same speed as the cavalry). Its war establishment was 9,000 men and 10,000 horses. Each cavalry regiment had two medium machine guns of the French Hotchkiss type, as it was lighter than the Maxim.

  It was intended that, should the Expeditionary Force deploy, it would be commanded directly by a General Headquarters, the staff for which existed in Aldershot. Each division had its own staff but, as an economy measure, only two of the projected six staff officers were actually provided in peace.15

  The combat-arm units of the Territorial Force were now organised into fourteen divisions, although a worrying factor was that they were mostly under strength. While they mirrored regular units as closely as possible, their artillery was largely obsolescent, consisting of converted fifteen-pounders, five-inch howitzers from the South African War and 4.7-inch guns. The old Garrison Artillery Militia was re-formed into ammunition supply columns, to ensure rapid resupply of the greater quantities of ammunition needed by modern guns, and by 1912 there were forty-two of these in existence, which could expand to forty-eight in time of war. With training carried out at weekends and at an annual camp, the Territorial Force was not immediately ready for war in 1914, and planning was based on the assumption that its divisions would be ready for deployment six months after war broke out, and then only to relieve regular units in the United Kingdom, unless its members agreed to overseas service.

  Given that the British army, like all armies, was almost entirely horse-drawn, large numbers of horses would be needed on mobilisation, and a national census of horses was carried out and the necessary legislation enacted to requisition them for war. Developments in technology were not neglected, and while there were few of the new-fangled and as yet unreliable motor vehicles on peacetime equipment tables, a government subsidy scheme was devised which provided assistance towards the purchase of private vehicles, built to military specifications, that could be requisitioned in wartime, and measures to provide each division of the Expeditionary Force with an entirely lorry-borne supply column were well in hand. The British were generally ahead of European armies in the development of military aviation, although methods of artillery fire control using aircraft lagged behind those of the Germans.

  British army training at home was based on an annual cycle. The winter was spent in individual training: weapon-handling, shooting, specialist weapon cadres, route marching, map-reading and signals. In the spring the army moved on to sub-unit training by companies and squadrons, followed by unit training by battalions and regiments. Brigade training occupied the summer, and divisional and army manoeuvres were carried out in the autumn.

  On the face of it, the Expeditionary Force was a balanced, well-equipped and well-trained organisation; but there were problems. It could not expand with anything like the speed of the European armies with their huge reserves of manpower provided by conscription. Being all-volunteer, the British army had to take its recruits where and when it could find them, and they trickled in to units in dribs and drabs throughout the year. Unit cohesion was not helped by large drafts departing for India during the trooping season, and there was a constant drain of high quality instructors to the Territorial Force and to depots. In addition the army was seriously deficient in artillery ammunition, particularly high-explosive shells (although to be fair, experience in South Africa had suggested that the majority of artillery shells should be shrapnel); it had no trench mortars (trench warfare was not expected to be a major part of any future war); and while there was a British army hand grenade, each one costing £1 1s. 3d., it was unsuitable for use in confined areas. The most striking deficiency was in those items needed for trench warfare, but again, at this stage there was no indication that the coming war would largely be one of siege operations. There had been some discussions (kept highly secret) between the British military and their counterparts in Belgium (from 1906) and France (from 1911) as to how the British might cooperate in the event of involvement in Europe, but there was no commitment, and this was not the only war for which the Expeditionary Force had to prepare. It might have to fight anywhere: on the borders of India, in Egypt, in the Middle East or in Africa, and commanders and trainers had to keep all options open. The army was specifically forbidden to base field exercises on a German enemy, for Germany was still officially a friendly power.

  All in all, despite its problems, the Expeditionary Force, renamed the British Expeditionary Force or BEF when it did deploy to Europe in 1914, was probably the best-trained and best-equipped army this nation has ever sent abroad; but it was pitifully small. When war broke out and the German navy enquired whether it should interfere with British shipping conveying the army to France, the attitude of the German supreme headquarters was that the English might as well be allowed to come across and take part: it would be convenient to get them out of the way early on.

  Mobilisation of the British army was necessarily later than that of the French, but on 7, 8 and 9 August the BEF crossed to France and began to concentrate on the left of the French armies in the area of Maubeuge, Le Cateau and Hirson. Although the planned Expeditionary Force consisted of six infantry divisions, only four actually went in the first instance. Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, first soldier of the empire and appointed Secretary of State for War on 6 August, did not entirely trust the French, and in any case the British were concerned about the state of Ireland, so most of one division – the 6th – was left there. There was some concern about an attempted German invasion and the 4th Division and the rest of the 6th were moved to the English coast to counter it. It was an unlikely possibility – Admiral Fisher, repeating the words of the Earl of St Vincent in an earlier war, proclaimed that he did not say the enemy could not come, but he did say that they could not come by sea.

  To put the British contribution – four infantry divisions, one cavalry division and an independent brigade – into perspective, on the outbreak of war Germany fielded one hundred infantry and twenty-two cavalry divisions and France sixty-two infantry and ten cavalry divisions. Even Belgium managed six infantry divisions and one of cavalry. By
the end of the war in 1918, there would be 240 German and over 200 French divisions, while the BEF would number fifty-one British and ten empire divisions. In August 1914 the BEF held twenty-five miles of the Western Front, the French 300 miles. At the end of hostilities the British held sixty-four miles and the French 260. While the length of front held by each participant altered with the ebb and flow of the fighting, at no time did the British ever hold more than 123 miles (in 1918 during the so-called Kaiser’s offensive), nor the French less than 202 miles. Britain did however have the largest navy and the longest purse. During the course of the war Britain made loans totalling almost £1.5 billion to her allies,16 the equivalent of one-sixth of total government revenue in 1999. On land, however, she was very much the junior partner and, at least until 1917, she would have to dance to the French tune.

  On 23 August 1914 the BEF moved into Belgium and met the Germans at Mons or Bergen (depending on whether you are a French or Flemish-speaker). Fighting there went on all day, and Field Marshal Sir John French, commanding the BEF, thought he could hold. A withdrawal by the French on his right forced him to conform, however, and the British retreated, fighting a rearguard action at Le Cateau on 26 August. The retreat went on and the BEF crossed the River Marne on 3 September. It was now that the Schlieffen plan began to come unstuck. A gap had opened up between General von Kluck’s First German Army, which was pushing along the Channel coast at the extreme right of the plan’s wheeling movement, and its neighbour, von Bülow’s Second Army. General Joffre, commanding the French army, saw an opportunity and pounced into the gap, severely mauling von Bülow. Von Kluck now had little option but to come to the aid of his fellow army commander, and instead of passing to the west of Paris, as the plan demanded, had to turn in east of Paris, thus exposing the German right flank. The Germans were forced back forty miles to the River Aisne, where they went on the defensive.