operations and the innovation which had enabled Napoleon to fuse manoeuvre
with battle.
THE GENERAL STAFF AND THE CREATION
OF DOCTRINEBidwell and Graham presumably chose 1904–6 as their departure dates as these were
the years when Britain finally created a general staff. Many Liberals feared that such a
body would inevitably make European war the focus of its planning activities and
that such plans would themselves limit the strategic flexibility both required by
Britain’s imperial commitments and vouchsafed by British sea power. From the
vantage point of 1918 and afterwards, their fears looked justified. The British army
did refashion itself on European lines between 1904 and 1916, and some would
argue that the British general staff did indeed hijack British national strategy. But
such interpretations both over-privilege hindsight and underestimate the intelli-
gence of the officers of the general staff; they also neglect the legacy of Henderson.
From the outset, the general staff orientated itself around its worst-case scenar-
io, war in Europe, but it did not as a result neglect its colonial commitments. It
developed plans for many areas of operations other than support for France or
Belgium, including the defence of India, Egypt, and even Canada. 31 The British
army remained organized along lines adapted for imperial garrisoning, and Britain
rejected European models of conscription. Henderson’s challenge, therefore, re-
mained: how was the army to develop doctrine for one sort of war which did not
make it unfit for all the other eventualities it was expected to confront?
The general staff’s answer wasField Service Regulations Part I: Operations, and
like many answers to difficult questions it rested on compromise. The prepara-
tion of both it and its companion volume,Field Service Regulations Part II:
Organization and Administration, was in the hands of Douglas Haig, director of
staff duties between 1907 and 1909. At a conference of general staff officers held at
the Staff College in January 1908 the draftField Service Regulationswas debated,
and Haig referred ‘to a note at the top of the first page, which said that these
Regulations were not intended for small campaigns’. No such note appeared in
the published version. He went on to cite the example of the South African War,
‘where three entirely different systems were adapted by three different headquar-
ters’. The new regulations would replace diversity with uniformity; they were to
be ‘the law’ for officers and their amendment was to be the product of collective
discussion and centralized decision making: ‘unanimity’, he declared, ‘is an
essential condition of collective action’.
Haig wanted the general staff to replace the regiment as the fountainhead of the
army’s education, and to produce a doctrine for war on the continent of Europe.
Those more loyal to Henderson’s precepts were deeply concerned about the
implications for the conduct of small wars, and the need for flexibility and
Operational Art and Britain, 1909–2009 105