From Spion Kop to the Somme: Experience of warfare and its imperial context
Creators: name: Carlson, Joel
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2008
Subjects: subject: Literature, Modern.
subject: History, European.

description: The First World War caught Europe's military establishments largely unprepared for a conflict that exceeded contemporary expectations of length, scale and advances in technology. The British Army was no exception. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) may have entered the war as one of the most professional forces in the field, but throughout the war British generalship suffered from a distinct lack of imagination in their attempts at coping with the realities of modern warfare. Indeed, the names of such battles as Loos, Arras, the Somme, and Passchendaele evoke images of tragic and unnecessary waste of thousands of lives. Amongst all the major protagonists, Britain alone possessed a truly extensive catalogue of experience pointing to what a future conflict on continental Europe might entail, courtesy of the many colonial wars Britain fought during the nineteenth century. During the Omdurman campaign (1898) and the South African War (1899-1902) in particular, the brutal effectiveness of the machine gun, smokeless gunpowder, quick-firing artillery, trench warfare, and the complexities of organizing large formations were clearly demonstrated. These lessons seemed mostly forgotten or ignored, despite the existence of substantial reform sentiment and current criticisms of the Army's performance in Africa prior to 1914. Why had the British military failed to capitalize on its experiences in its African campaigns and bring those lessons with them into the First World War? Almost the entire British Army High Command from 1914 to 1918 had participated in the Sudanese and South African campaigns, yet virtually to the man they proved remarkably resilient in rejecting the lessons on modern warfare learned by the lower ranks at a very high human cost. Even when these lessons were reinforced by the observations of British officers during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), they went largely ignored or misinterpreted. What prevented the senior British officers from heeding the voices of commonsense? Experiences during the South African War were considered anomalous and it was suggested impossible to apply to a European context. There was also a general trend of imparting more emphasis on personal training and qualities of elan as the best method of dealing with advanced battlefield technology. Britain's social hierarchy also played a part in this process, abetted by the fact that the majority of senior officers were from the Cavalry Arm, perhaps the most resistant to any sort of change or reform and comprised mainly of members of Britain's elite class. In addition, the British Army, like any other army in history, suffered from an institutional unwillingness to adopt new ideas and technology. A notoriously spendthrift British peace time government compounded the situation by ensuring that not only would there be substantial resistance to reform but that any reform would be constrained by tight fiscal considerations of Parliament and His Majesty's Treasury. This thesis will examine the reasons why the lessons of imperial and African conflicts were largely dismissed by military strategists on the eve of the Great War and reveal how such thinking lay in a long running conflict between the Victorian outlook on life and the new realities of the world ushered in by Industrialism. With the rise of Industrialism in Britain, this clash began to take form as the established British elite class saw a host of social ills residing within the movement that threatened their perceived order of society, especially their place at the top of that order. This clash of "progress versus nostalgia," a term coined by Martin J. Weiner in his book English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980, was a driving force behind the British High Command's struggle to undo the reform efforts of men such as Field Marshal Roberts and Richard Haldane as the Victorian/Edwardian elite class sought to bring this conflict to a resolution. The end result was that in 1914, the British Army, having only partially benefited from its African experience, was still in a state of transition and even those small gains had vanished along with most of the original BEF by early 1915.