ABSTRACT
The origins of this debate may be traced back to before the middle of the nineteenth century, driven by the impact of the industrial revolution on land warfare, including increases in the effectiveness of firearms and artillery, and in Europe and North America at least by the potential for considerable increases in the size of armies provided by the rapid growth of urban populations.3 The extent to which European land warfare was transformed between the early nineteenth century and early twentieth century almost cannot be overstated. The Battle of Waterloo in 1815 was fought in a single day, with fewer than 200,000 soldiers actively engaged, using linear tactics on a battlefield of a few square miles, mostly obscured in clouds of smoke produced by smoothbore muskets with effective ranges of barely 100 yards and smoothbore cannon with ranges of 1,000 yards, both with rates of fire rarely greater than two or three rounds a minute. There could hardly be a more complete contrast between this and the Battle of the Somme in 1916, fought over five months on a frontage of more than twenty miles by several hundred thousand soldiers in rotation, armed with magazine rifles and machine-guns whose maximum ranges and rates of fire exceeded practical ammunition resupply capabilities; protected by barbed wire, earth and concrete; and supported both by artillery using indirect fire at ranges
1 Henderson, The Science of War, p. 51. 2 The Boer War has also been known as the South African War, the Anglo-Boer War,
the Second Boer War, the English War, and the Second War of Independence (or Liberation); its present official title, as stipulated by the government of South Africa, is the ‘South African Anglo-Boer War’.
