ABSTRACT
Haig’s concept of the decisive offensive was cited in the context of Napoleon and Clausewitz. Both Liddell Hart and Professor Robin Higham see the influence of Clausewitz as crucial in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in persuading the British army that the decisive offensive was essential to victory. Baker-Carr certainly exaggerated the High Command opposition to the machine gun but he was not so far wrong when he remarked that the British army shied away from substituting machinery for manpower. The Machine Gun Corps officially came into being on 14 October 1915, and the machine gun training centre at Grantham was approved by the Military Members of the Arrhy Council on 12 November 1915. In fact the difficulty over the tactical role of the machine gun extended from the 1870s to 1915–1916, and it can be argued — as might perhaps be expected — that disputed weapons or innovations tend to retain their earliest characteristics and tactics.
