How warfare had changed

"Good morning; Good morning!" the General said

When we met him last week on our way to the line.

Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,

And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

"He's a cheery old card," grunted Harry to Jack

As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both with his plan of attack.

The feelings of the British war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, on the generals that ran the war are clear enough. 'Incompetent swine' is probably one of the more printable insults that men like Sassoon used. Sassoon eventually refused to fight any more. But he was an officer who had won the Military Cross for bravery. His wealthy family and important friends ensured that he was treated for 'shell shock' and returned to 'Blighty' (Britain). An ordinary soldier would certainly have been executed.

Sassoon served in the trenches; the generals did their duty in comfortable divisional headquarters, miles from the front line. But the easy life that they had was probably not the real reason for Sassoon's hostility. What angered Sassoon were the strategies which the generals used to try and win the war. The lives of men seemed to count for nothing.

The generals of the First World War are easy to criticise, but they had no idea what the war would be like. They had not expected the way military technology and industrial power had changed the nature of warfare. They insisted on fighting the war according to the old textbooks, using strategies suited to a kind of warfare 100 years old.

War in 1815

The generals expected that the war would be broadly similar to the last major war Britain had fought in Europe - the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815 with the battle of Waterloo. That was a war of massed infantry attacks, with men advancing shoulder to shoulder, and dashing cavalry charges to provide the decisive breakthrough. Each man carried a musket which a well-trained infantryman could fire three times a minute. The bullet was made of lead and was the size of a marble. It was accurate up to about 80 metres and could only be reloaded with the soldier standing up.

War in 1914

By now rifles, like the British Lee Enfield, could be reloaded and fired lying down, at a rate of about a round (bullet) every three or four seconds. More devastating still was the machine gun with a rate of fire of 7 - 8 rounds a second. Artillery pieces, like the British howitzer, could now fire shrapnel shells weighing 131 kg (288 lbs). These had a range of over nine kilometres (5½ miles) and were timed to explode in the air, scattering hundreds of small lead balls over the enemy troops. One French railway gun could fire a 900 kg shell (the weight of a family car) over 16 kilometres (10 miles)!

The generals believed that the massive increase in fire-power now available guaranteed their attacks success. Massed infantry attacks would force their way through the enemy lines, just as they had always done, with cavalry held in reserve for the decisive blow. They do not seem to have given much thought to the fact that the enemy would be equipped with the same weapons to stop them.

Neil Demarco: Britain and the Great War; Oxford University Press, 1992/2000, page 18 f.