Command and Morale

The British Army on the Western Front 1914–1918

Gary Sheffield

• Publisher: Praetorian Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781781590218
• eBook ISBN: 9781473834668
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Gary Sheffield is one of the most versatile and stimulating of military historians at work today, and this selection of his outstanding essays on the First World War is essential reading for anyone who is keen to broaden their understanding of the subject. For three decades, in a series of perceptive books and articles, he has examined the nature of this war from many angles from the point of view of the politicians and the high command through to the junior officers and other ranks in the front line. Command and Morale presents in a single volume a range of his shorter work, and it shows his scholarship at its best.Among the topics he explores is the decision-making of the senior commanders, the demands of coalition warfare, the performance of Australian forces, the organization and the performance of the army in the field, the tactics involved, the exercise of command, the importance of morale, and the wider impact of the war on British society. Every topic is approached with the same academic rigour and attention to detail which are his hallmarks and which explain why his work has been so influential. The range of his writing, the insights he offers and the sometimes controversial conclusions he reaches mean this thought provoking book will be indispensable reading for all students of the First World War and of modern warfare in general.

PART 1

CONTEXT

Chapter 1

Britain and the Empire at War, 1914–1918: Reflections on a Forgotten Victory

To this day the First World War remains contested territory; people still care passionately about it and hotly dispute its causes, its character, and its legacies.¹

Perceptions of the First World War

On the eve of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, the debate over the role of Britain and the British Empire in the First World War showed no signs of ceasing. In the UK the conduct of the war on the Western Front lies at the heart of the controversies, while in Australia and New Zealand the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 dominates the debate.² The issue of whether Britain and the Empire should have become involved at all has been a source of controversy in recent years. The nature of the wartime relationship between the ‘Mother Country’ and the Dominions, and how it was changed by the First World War, has of course been a fruitful ground not only for historians, but also for journalists and politicians.³ In 1998, on the eightieth anniversary of the Armistice, two influential books appeared: John Keegan’s The First World War and Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War.⁴ There is much to admire in both books. Keegan’s was beautifully written, while Ferguson has some very interesting things to say about economics, and the nature of combat. However, on two key issues – the origins of the war and the combat performance of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) – I found myself in profound disagreement with both Keegan and Ferguson. My 2001 book Forgotten Victory: The First World War – Myths and Realities was, in part, a response to their books.⁵

Forgotten Victory reflected, and is in large part a synthesis of, the research of the last two decades. Here I will reconsider two of my major themes. First, that far from being futile, the war was fought for the very highest of stakes. It was forced upon Britain, which was compelled to fight a defensive war that it could not afford to lose. Moreover, the war was popular in the sense of it being a total, ‘people’s war’; there was a broad national consensus that the war had to be fought and won. Second, that the British Army was not the incompetent set of ‘lions led by donkeys’ beloved of popular myth; rather, that it underwent a steep learning curve and emerged as a formidable force which took a leading role in defeating the German army on the battlefield in 1918.

To some, these ‘revisionist’ views appear to be heretical. For the New Zealand writer Maurice Shadbolt, ‘Gallipoli had no more significance than a lethal bar-room brawl’.⁶ This view is representative of a school of thought that sees the war as pointless. Some regard it as somehow ‘outside’ history, disconnected from the normal course of events, and only accessible through literature and art produced by veterans of the conflict. My approach, as part of an informal global historical school of English-speaking historians that has for the last thirty years been using archival research to reassess the war, is rather different. I locate the First World War firmly within the context of political and military history. This war was, like any other, fought over political issues, and can be treated by historians like any other conflict.

The truth is that it is impossible to treat the First World War like any other: the scars on the psyche run too deep. Even to attempt to distance oneself from the emotional baggage of the last century by viewing the First World War in Clausewitzian terms runs the risk of accusations of callousness, although, gratifyingly, one reviewer described the book as ‘compassionate’.⁷ One can turn the ‘callousness’ argument on its head. It is tragic that bereaved families have for so long been told, quite wrongly, that their loved ones died in vain. The ‘One Million Dead’ of the British Empire, their widows and orphans, and descendants, deserve at the very least a sober reconsideration of why and how the war was fought.

In New Zealand, Australia and Canada, the First World War is seen as an important step on the road of nation building.⁸ Glyn Harper has argued that the war led to the recognition ‘that New Zealand and New Zealanders were different and this difference did not imply inferiority. New Zealand nationalism and a sense of identity had been born.’⁹ Tom Frame has commented that ‘25 April 1915 gave birth to several powerful and abiding myths which said more about Australian identity and hopes for nationhood than about a short military expedition concentrated in a place few Australians knew anything about’.¹⁰ Perhaps much the same could be said about New Zealand, and, with appropriate adjustments and ‘Vimy Ridge’ substituted for ‘Gallipoli’, Canada too. In these countries the memory of the First World War has a positive aspect that sits alongside perceptions of waste, incompetence and futility.

This positive view is missing from the British national perception of the conflict. The dominant images are, in the words of one of the most influential writers on the First World War, A.J.P. Taylor, ‘brave helpless soldiers; blundering obstinate generals; nothing achieved’.¹¹ Moreover, the war is viewed as being fought over trivial issues. This perception is brilliantly parodied in the influential BBC TV comedy series Blackadder Goes Forth, when the origins of the war were reduced to ‘some chap called Archie Duke shot an ostrich because he was hungry’.¹²

Historians, especially since 1980, have explored the riches of private and public archives to produce a composite and multi-faceted picture of Britain during the First World War that is at odds with received wisdom. But little of this research has entered the public consciousness. Even some historians seem to find it difficult to let go of the ‘lions led by donkeys’ version. I was fortunate in that Forgotten Victory was widely reviewed, and the positive reviews dwarfed the number of bad ones.¹³ As Brian Bond commented, ‘Most military historians who have seriously studied this subject will be in general agreement with Gary Sheffield’s standpoint.’¹⁴ By contrast, the reaction of one or two critics reminded me of Alfred Duff Cooper’s comments about Liddell Hart’s critique of his biography of Haig: ‘His article was a polemic rather than a review … He set out to prove that Haig had always been wrong and it therefore followed that anyone who sought to defend him must have written a book that was misleading and worthless.’¹⁵ Certainly some criticism of Forgotten Victory seemed to be the product of emotion rather than cool analysis and knowledge of the subject.

Given the role that the First World War is perceived to have played in nation-building, that the conflict remains politically contentious in Australia and New Zealand is perhaps to be expected. The fact that it remains so in the UK is rather more surprising. For some writers on the Left, there is an assumption that revisionist historians must be pursuing a reactionary agenda. In his review of Forgotten Victory, Frank McLynn described me as ‘a simple-minded right wing ideologist’. As I pointed out in a letter to the newspaper in which this review was published, my political sympathies happen to lie on the Left, not the Right, as do those, incidentally, of a number of other revisionists, while still others are Conservative in their politics or apolitical. Other critics further to the Left of the political spectrum continue to see the First World War in starkly ideological terms. One reviewer argued that the war ‘was a battle for the right of British and French capitalists to continue to exploit the workers and peasants of Africa and Asia … The revisionists are as wrong now as … Douglas Haig and his gang were then. The popular view of the war is the right one, Blackadder and all.’¹⁶ Under the interesting title of ‘Misled (sic) attempt to justify bloody war’, another review explicitly linked the First World War to the 2003 war in Iraq: ‘The First World War raises the questions – how can … wars be stopped? Not by voting Labour! The Labour Party opposed the war, until it started and then backed it when it began – just as now.’¹⁷

Turning to writers on the Right, a maverick Conservative MP, the late Alan Clark, was one of Haig’s fiercest critics. His 1963 book The Donkeys, although panned at the time and ever since – Michael Howard condemned it as ‘worthless as history’ – remains in print. Clark believed that Britain was wrong to have entered the war, as its national interests were not at risk. The war destroyed an idyllic society (which existed largely, in fact, in Clark’s imagination) in which interclass harmony prevailed. Once Britain joined the war, it was a monumental error to fight on land as opposed to imposing a naval blockade: ‘the sacrifice of a whole generation in Flanders was little more than a placebo to the mulish vanity of the general staff’. It is not surprising to find Clark in 1999 arguing against intervention in another Balkan war in which, he said, Britain had no interest; nor to discover that he entered politics out of a sense of duty, believing he had to make amends for the way that the elite had betrayed the masses in 1914–1918.¹⁸

In the 1990s the First World War became a vehicle for debate on Britain’s role in the European Union. A Thatcherite historian, Niall Ferguson, argued the British decision to go to war in 1914 as ‘the greatest error of modern history’. Through the medium of the European Union, he argued, Germany has achieved the economic leadership of Europe that it sought in 1914, despite Britain fighting a war to prevent it happening.¹⁹ Similarly, John Charmley’s 1999 work arguing that British intervention in 1914 was neither inevitable nor desirable is implicitly, and in one place explicitly, linked to current debates about Britain’s place in Europe.²⁰ On the Left and Right, there is a consensus that Britain’s involvement in the First World War was a disastrous mistake.

The Origins of the War

Britain fought the First World War essentially to uphold the balance of power,²¹ and to keep Belgium, long regarded as the outer fortification of Fortress Britannia, from German occupation. Any assessment of Britain’s decision to go to war must begin with a survey of the state of the debate on the origins of the conflict. In Forgotten Victory I argued that the notorious ‘War Guilt’ clause (article 231 of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles) was essentially correct in blaming the war on ‘the aggression of Germany and her allies’.²² Nothing that I have read since has caused me to change that view. There is a consensus among historians that the primary responsibility for bringing about the war rests with Germany and Austria-Hungary. The work of the distinguished German historian Stig Forster ‘stresses that no serious historian today could be an apologist for German policy prior to August 1914’.²³ However, as Annika Mombauer has recently commented, ‘there are still commentators who refuse to acknowledge Germany’s large share of responsibility for the events that led to war’.²⁴

It is clear that Austria-Hungary’s aggression against Serbia ‘plunged Europe into war’. Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Vienna wanted a limited war in the Balkans, but was prepared to run the risk of a general war; the Austrian elite was astoundingly myopic as to the possible reaction of Russia. Germany’s culpability is equally clear. On 5–6 July the Kaiser, in consultation with Bethmann Hollweg, his Chancellor, issued what became known as the ‘blank cheque’ of support for Austria-Hungary’s military actions. Now, with German support, the Austrians could initiate military action. Without it, Vienna would have had to try another tack, ‘somethi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: Context
• Part 2: Command
• Part 3: Morale