ABSTRACT
The First World War has no close rivals as a theatre of controversy for combative historians. Despite the passage of more than eighty years since the guns fell silent at 1100 hours on 11 November 1918, intellectual firepower ranging over many aspects of the war is livelier that ever. To the longstanding debates on the war’s origins and precipitating causes,1 and the merits or otherwise in its characteristic higher generalship,2 have been added disagreements about the skill with which the war was conducted tactically and operationally. To a social scientist whose professional focus typically is on the near future (e.g. the contemporary RMA debate), it can be quite startling to realise that virtually every major question one can ask about the First World War is as yet not settled beyond reasonable doubt by scholarship. Citing a stream of innovative studies which began to appear in the 1980s, Williamson Murray claims persuasively that it was only with the appearance of those recent works
that we have finally began to understand the World War I battlefield. We still do not have an equivalent work [to those by Lupfer and Travers] for the French, Italian or Russian armies. If historians who possess the documents and unlimited time have taken seventy years to unravel the changing face of the battlefield, one should not be surprised that the generals had some difficulty during the war.3
