A great exponent of a new form of technocracy was H.G. Wells, one of the most popular authors of the day. Wells made his reputation with such hugely successful works of science fiction as The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). But in 1902, a year after the death of Queen Victoria had symbolised the end of one era and the start of another, Wells published what was, for him, an unusual book. Anticipations was an extended essay in which Wells envisaged a world run by technocrats and engineers, a world in which some nations had adapted to new technologies and others had not. He was one of the great critics of the public school ethos, writing: ‘The nation that produces in the near future the largest proportional development of educated and intelligent engineers and agriculturists, of doctors, schoolmasters, professional soldiers, and intellectually active people of all sorts … will certainly be the ascendant or dominant nation before the year 2000.’12 In a core section of the book, Wells imagined with extraordinary prescience how the wars of the future would be fought. He anticipated the end of generals riding about on horses and carrying a sword, for they would be replaced by engineers, as all wars would involve the use of new technology. He foresaw the coming of ‘total war’, in which the old divisions between combatant and non-combatant would disappear. He anticipated trench warfare in vivid detail. He predicted the development of the tank as an attempt to overcome the stalemate of the trenches, calling these new machines ‘land ironclads’.13 He even anticipated aerial warfare – and he was writing a year before the Wright Brothers’ first successful powered flight. He went so far as to anticipate the development of aerial bombing, and predicted with haunting accuracy that the next war would bring an appalling number of casualties: ‘thousands and thousands of poor boys will be smashed in all sorts of dreadful ways and given over to every form of avoidable hardship and painful disease.’14
Wells did not get everything right. He thought the submarine had no future and he imagined that aircraft would have giant steel battering rams at their front. But he was absolutely clear in his prediction of a future society in which science would rule supreme, and that unless Britain adapted others would take over. He concluded, ‘the power of the scientifically educated, disciplined specialist … [will be] provably right. It may be delayed, but it cannot be defeated; in the end it must arrive – if not today and among our people, then tomorrow and among another people, who will triumph in our overthrow.’15
It is unlikely that Anticipations was read much by senior figures in the army, but many younger officers were perhaps concerned by his predictions. Winston Churchill, then a young MP and not yet in office, read the book avidly and responded by sending Wells an eight-page critique in which he disputed some of its conclusions.16 The book certainly had an impact, contributing to the extensive debate in Edwardian England about the role of science and technology in a changing world. Some new independent schools were founded with a mission to teach scientific subjects. The whole debate started up again when in July 1909 a Frenchman, Louis Blériot, and not an Englishman, made the first flight across the English Channel. A xenophobic uproar followed in the press, while Wells argued in the Daily Mail that this was not only a failure to take up a new technology, but was also a failure in education that showed other nations were moving ahead.17
Yet although the British army was not at the forefront of the scientific debate that gripped the age, there was much discussion of future technologies and new tactics. Traditionally, the army had taught that the ‘charge’, often by cavalry, was the tactic that led to final victory on the battlefield. But how could this be translated to an era of massed firepower when to cross open ground would be suicidal? There was fierce debate about such questions at the Staff College, the Camberley institution where ambitious officers went to study, train and prepare for high command. For instance, the technology of the machine gun was widely accepted, but how was the weapon to be best used? Was it a device for use by the artillery or the infantry? The artillery rejected its use. But the infantry found the early Maxim machine gun to be large, cumbersome and slow to mount on its heavy tripod. In the Boer War it took a team of ten men and almost as many horses to transport, set up and operate a heavy machine gun. In the decade before the First World War it was the man at the top, the CIGS, General Sir William Nicholson, who was pressing for the wider employment of heavy machine guns, while it was still unclear exactly how they would be used in combat and whether they were primarily a defensive or an offensive weapon. There was also debate about the use of automatic rifles and what would later be called light machine guns. The new Lewis gun, much lighter and easier to fire than a heavy machine gun, was in use in the navy and in military aircraft, but the infantry had not yet found a role for it.
While such matters were the subject of active debate, however, it was still possible for an influential figure like Brigadier Sir Lancelot Kiggell (who would be Haig’s chief of staff later in the war) to pronounce that despite the firepower that could be brought to bear on the modern battlefield it was the individual soldier who would still determine the outcome of battle. ‘Victory is won actually by the bayonet, or by the fear of it,’ he said at a military conference in 1910.18 Clearly, change was very slow to come.
The use of aircraft was also a topic that generated much discussion. At first Nicholson proved to be hostile to the new technology and was opposed to the use of aircraft until the highly fragile contraptions of the pioneer aviators had become more reliable and were powered by better engines. In April 1909, the reforming Haldane established an Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. He appointed some of the finest physicists and scientists in the land to advise the army on topics including ‘the mathematical investigation of stability’, ‘the effect of rudder action’ and the ‘materials for aeroplane construction’. In this way, Haldane hoped to bring science to bear on the activities of the small group of enthusiastic but often amateurish pioneers.
Still some senior army figures were sceptical. After watching a flying demonstration one senior commander was overheard saying, ‘These playthings will never be of use in war.’19 However, after the French had successfully used aircraft for reconnaissance in their annual manoeuvres in 1910, Nicholson changed his mind. Realising that the British army would be left behind unless it began serious experiments with different aircraft types, he started the process that led two years later to the establishment of a new unit within the army, the Royal Flying Corps. The RFC was set up to train pilots and observers, to develop the appropriate technology and to create up to eight squadrons of trained fliers for active service. By the advent of war, the RFC would put a squadron of aircraft into the field to support each infantry corps of two divisions.20
Many of the era’s contradictions are represented in the thinking of General Sir Douglas Haig. A Lowland Scot, Haig had attended the Staff College in 1896–7, when he was in his mid-thirties. Studying military history, largely from the era of Napoleon and Wellington, Haig had come to some conventional conclusions about strategy: that the primary purpose of the artillery was to support the infantry; that an enemy had to be confronted head-on and when worn out was to be defeated by the deployment of one’s own reserves; and that the cavalry were to exploit the success of the infantry and make a victory decisive. He was taught that it was the morale and discipline of the individual soldier and his commander that brought victory. These values and assumptions were those of the nineteenth-century army.
However, after many years of service in India and the Empire, and after making a name for himself in the Sudan War of 1898 and in the Boer War a few years later, Haig began to update his ideas. Thanks to his excellent social connections which, through his wife, went right up to the royal family, he became Director of Training. In 1907 Haldane selected him as Director of Staff Duties, and he was placed in charge of drawing up a new set of Field Service Regulations summarising the changes in tactics, strategies and command of the army. The new Regulations were an attempt to bring together many of th
e technology-led changes that were taking place. As his recent biographer has pointed out, Haldane the science-led army reformer would not have put his faith in Haig to carry out such a central task if he were simply ‘a well-connected duffer’.21
While remaining politically and socially conservative, Haig had become one of the reforming group within the army. In 1911 he supposedly dismissed aviation, saying ‘Flying can never be of any use to the army,’ but as aircraft improved in capability he very soon came around and by 1914 was an enthusiast for their use. At times he was almost over-confident in the use of prototype and unproven technology. This would manifest itself later on the Western Front. As an individual, Haig in many ways represented the contradictions within the British army in 1914. New ideas and support for new technologies were bubbling away within an all-embracing philosophy that emphasised the validity of tradition and a dislike of doctrine.
The medical service, the Royal army Medical Corps (RAMC), was part of the wing within the army that actively embraced modernity, in an effort to bring it up to date with the immense advances of early twentieth-century medicine. The RAMC had been formed in 1898 largely due to pressure put on the War Office by the British Medical Association to renew its medical services and bring them more into line with the services available to civilians. Before then, army medical staff had suffered from low status within the army; as non-combatants, military doctors were often seen as unwelcome outsiders and sometimes were even excluded from army messes. Many within the medical profession also looked down on military medicine, and in Victorian times it was extremely rare for the brightest young medical students to go into the army. The joke about army doctors was that they were ruled by the principle of NBR – ‘No Bloody Research’. The new military medical corps would change all that, giving doctors and surgeons military status right up to a newly invented rank of Surgeon-General.
Almost immediately after its creation the RAMC faced the challenge of the Boer War. The performance of the brand new medical corps was variable, and the lack of trained military doctors meant that the army was forced to call upon hundreds of civilians with no military experience to go out to South Africa to offer their services. Typhoid fever was rampant within the armed forces in South Africa and the lack of sanitary provisions caused a public outcry. But overall the new medical service provided a marked improvement, roughly halving from the previous major conflict the proportion of casualties who died of their wounds.22
After the Boer War, a royal commission was set up to recommend reforms in the provision of medical services for the army and this ushered in a decade of change. Haldane’s army reforms and his belief in scientific progress also profoundly affected the RAMC. The old Army Medical School at Netley on the south coast near Southampton (created under pressure from Florence Nightingale after the debacle of the Crimean War) was closed. A new, modern Royal Army Medical College opened in Millbank in 1907, just behind what was then the brand new Tate Gallery. In a further attempt to bring military medicine up to speed with the rapid developments taking place in the civilian field, this was given the status of a postgraduate medical college affiliated to the Faculty of Medicine at London University.
The RAMC’s Director General was the energetic and ambitious Sir Alfred Keogh. From a leading Anglo-Irish family, Keogh was tall, with a large forehead, and had a genuinely commanding presence. A brilliant young physician, he had unusually chosen to specialise in military medicine. Having impressed the high command with his ability to get things done during the Boer War, a rapid series of promotions brought him to the top job in the RAMC in 1905 and he saw eye-to-eye with Haldane on the need for reform.
Keogh had suffered from mild typhoid fever during the Boer War, and so with reforming zeal he set about improving the deficiencies in military sanitation. He opened a School of Hygiene at Aldershot, while a new manual on Military Hygiene and Sanitation for Soldiers in 1908 proclaimed that ‘disease prevention is synonymous with military efficiency’.23 Meanwhile, Sir William Leishman, Professor of Pathology at the new Military College, developed a form of inoculation against typhoid that would prevent this ancient scourge of armies in the field from becoming endemic in the next war.24
Keogh also tried to improve the standards in base hospitals and to equip them with modern operating theatres and the latest medical technology. He introduced new field ambulance units to speed up the provision of advanced medical care between the front-line regimental aid post and the general hospitals in the rear. Furthermore, he encouraged civilian consultants to join the Territorial Force, bringing their expertise within the remit of military medicine in an attempt to ensure that if civilian reinforcements were needed in a future war, then there would be a pool of those with some military experience. The British Medical Association gave Keogh full support in this initiative and called for 1,200 medical officers (MOs) and 12,000 NCOs and men to join the medical reserve. In 1910, Keogh left the RAMC to become Rector of Imperial College, London, but the reforms he had unleashed continued to transform military medicine. Keogh had shown what a committed reformer with energy and vision could achieve, even when operating within the conventional structure of the traditionally minded War Office.
There was one area, however, in which no developments took place within the new RAMC. Although well established in continental Europe, psychology was still a relatively young science in Britain. In the early days of the RAMC army doctors had to take courses on anatomy, physiology, general health care and the use of antiseptic dressings, as well as more specialised sessions on tropical diseases, malaria, dysentery and cholera. In addition there was a course of six lectures on ‘lunacy’, what today would be called psychiatry. But in the Boer War there were few cases of nervous trauma. The only reported cases were of officers who, under the stress of command, suffered from anxiety or ‘panic attacks’, the cure for which was usually a period of rest and a quiet talk with the padre.25 As the RAMC addressed and updated many of its medical practices it did nothing to review its understanding of or concern for mental illness, no doubt reflecting a general view in Edwardian Britain that such illnesses were a sign of weakness or character deficiency. Mental patients in early twentieth-century Britain were consigned to long periods cut off from the rest of society and shut away in lunatic asylums. Like the rest of British society, the RAMC preferred to, as it were, sweep the problem of mental illness under the carpet. Although a medical congress in Germany in 1907 had included a session on Kriegsneurosen (war neuroses), based on the study of the nervous breakdown of Russian officers in the war with Japan, there was no equivalent interest in Britain. Partly this was because with a small, volunteer army it was thought to be unnecessary; only ‘the right sort of chap’ would join up and he would never be in need of psychiatric help.26 As a consequence, observers noted in the early months of the Great War, there was not a single specialist in mental or nervous diseases within the ranks of the RAMC.27 It was simply not regarded as a subject worthy of pursuit; there was no need in military medicine for trained psychiatrists. It was with this attitude that the military medical services approached the impending war.
The army that, in 1914, faced its first general European war in a hundred years was therefore an institution torn between the rituals of tradition and the challenges posed by new technologies and reforming ideas. It was small, unlike the vast armies of the continental powers. While the British army did not exceed 200,000 men, the German army could call on over five million; the French and Imperial Russian armies could mobilise four million each. Britain’s army now had to face the unique challenge of growing in size twelve-fold while fighting a war that no one seemed to have seriously anticipated. The strains would soon begin to tell.
There had been no planning for how the army’s procurement system might prepare for the scale of recruitment that took place in the autumn of 1914, with three-quarters of a million men volunteering by the end of September. The textile companies that manufactured army uniforms produced only on a small scale. Now
that mass production was needed, the War Office took some time to find ways to scale up manufacturing output. One problem was that many of the dyes needed, particularly khaki, were produced in Germany before the war. That nation had by far the most advanced chemical industry in Europe. Since it would take time to produce the hundreds of thousands of new khaki uniforms needed, battalions received temporary uniforms made out of other materials. Having waited until November for their first uniforms to arrive, the Sheffield Pals, for instance, were horrified to find that they were not the khaki that they could wear with pride, but blue-grey. The men felt they looked like an army of postmen. It was not until mid-1915 that they were fully kitted out in khaki.28 Nor was there enough webbing kit available. New webbing was manufactured by Hepburn, Cole and Ross of Bermondsey and was known as 1914 Pattern. Instead of five pouches on each side of the waist belt, there was only one slightly larger pouch. It could not carry as many rounds of ammunition as the standard pre-war issue, but it was easier to mass produce and would do for now.
In line with the size of the army, the armaments and munitions industries in Britain were also only small in scale. In 1914, 80 per cent of army orders for guns and shells came from a small number of government-run ordnance factories. Most rifle production was carried out at the Royal Small Arms Factory in Enfield, north London. It was here at the end of the nineteenth century that the Lee Enfield rifle (named after the designer of the rifle’s bolt system, James Lee, and the site of the factory) was first produced. This bolt-action, magazine-fed weapon soon became the standard issue rifle of the British army and would remain so throughout the two world wars. The government factory at Enfield doubled its weekly production to 3,000 rifles by November 1914, but at that rate it would still take six years to equip all the new volunteers.
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