planning and logistics, of choosing one’s own line of operations, and mastering
those of the enemy. ‘Strategic culture’ played no part in his understanding of war:
neither colonial warfare nor the role of sea power figured. His case studies were
Napoleonic, supplemented by illustrations from the American Civil War and, in
the second and later editions, from the Wars of German Unification. Hamley
came close to using ‘operations’ as Clausewitz had usedHandeln. Although the
title of his book made the military use of the word ‘operation’ current, he did not
define ‘operational art’. Moreover, he saw operations as belonging in that purely
professional sphere to which Bidwell and Graham would also in due course
allocate them. ‘The Theatre of War is the province of Strategy—the Field of Battle
is the province of Tactics’, Hamley laid down. ‘All operations must ultimately rely
for success upon power of fighting; for it is of no avail to conduct an army into
situations which it cannot maintain in battle. It is the object of Strategy so to
direct the movements of an army, that when decisive collisions occur it shall
encounter the enemy with increased relative advantage.’ 16
Hamley’s understanding of operations was, therefore, less developed than that
of Jomini, and his book was both mired in the tactical past and limited in
conception. But he was enormously influential, enjoying a prestige unequalled
by any other ‘English military writer in the nineteenth century’ and producing
‘one of the most significant books ever written by a British soldier’. 17 Although
The Operations of Warwas dropped as the only text specified for the Staff College
entrance examinations in 1894, it remained on most reading lists up to the First
World War; it was updated before that conflict by Sir Lancelot Kiggell, who was to
be Haig’s chief of staff in 1916 and 1917, and after it by Sir George Aston.
According to Aston, Hamley’s book had influenced Sir John French in his
decisions in the retreat from Mons in 1914. 18
The Operations of Warwas the most obvious British precursor ofField Service
Regulations Part I: Operations. Hamley saw operations as the link between tactics
and strategy, even if he did not say so in so many words. His most important
successors as British military writers, John Frederick Maurice and G. F. R
Henderson, did not. Maurice, the professor of military art and history at the
Staff College between 1885 and 1892, wrote an essay on war for theEncyclopaedia
Britannica, which was separately published in 1891. It divided war into strategy
and tactics, without reference to operations at all. Henderson, who succeeded
Maurice at the Staff College, in 1902 penned a piece on strategy for the same
publication which used the word ‘operation’ sparingly, and then solely in the
more general sense of Clausewitz, not in the specific and scientific framework of
Jomini. 19 Significantly, Henderson, although writing at the beginning of the
twentieth century, used phrases for operational art that had been favoured by
Napoleon 100 years earlier: he spoke of ‘grand tactics’ and ‘the tactics of the three
arms combined’. 20
However, this does not mean that either Maurice or Henderson was unper-
suaded of the value of lines of operations or of the roles of planning and supply;
what their approaches reveal is a much more general point. For all nineteenth-
century analysts, Clausewitz and Jomini, Hamley and Henderson, strategy and
Operational Art and Britain, 1909–2009 101