ABSTRACT
Despite the renewed surge of interest in the Great War over the last 20 years or so, the overall tactical performance of the BEF on the Western Front has, until very recently, received low or negative ratings from the majority of writers and historians. Martin Samuels, in his book Doctrine and Dogma, comparing German and British infantry tactics between 1914 and 1918, states: ‘The British Army in the First World War was characterised by its unsubtle and inflexible approach to battle. Having once adopted this approach, it proved virtually impossible to alter it’. 2 Similarly, Bruce Gudmundsson, in Stormtroop Tactics, claims that most British officers worked hard to maintain an air of ‘detached amateurism’. According to Gudmundsson, the few regular officers who took their profession seriously found themselves concentrated on staffs, ‘leaving small unit leadership to enthusiastic but tactically incompetent schoolboys’. In his view, whereas the French were provided with the answers to tactical questions before they were asked, the British, at least at the regimental level, ‘rarely even bothered to ask what the questions were’. 3 Denis Winter observes that whenever Haig planned a breakthrough or faced a particularly obdurate German position, ‘British units were pushed aside and Dominion troops put in charge’. Judging it to be poorly trained and ill-equipped, supported by low-quality staff work and commanded by generals inadequate to the task, Haig’s BEF, he asserts, ‘was, indeed, the bluntest of swords’. 4
