ABSTRACT
The moderns, who have undertaken to write the history of different wars, or of some renowned Commanders, being chiefly men of learning only, and utterly unacquainted with the nature of military operations, have given us indeed agreeable, but useless productions.’ Thus did Henry Lloyd, a Welshman who had achieved general’s rank in Russian service, commence his History of the Late War in Germany, published in 1766. What Lloyd was anxious to do was to point to the distinction between the didactic function of the study of warfare and the purely historical. For him the pre-eminent examples of the first category were the ancients, Xenophon and Caesar, but it has remained the dominant trait in military historical writing up until our own times. In 1925 another major-general, J.F.C.Fuller, concluded from his study of light infantry in the eighteenth century that ‘Unless history can teach us how to look at the future, the history of war is but a bloody romance.’
