These principles, even if they were the basis for instruction at the Staff College,
were not reflected in theField Service Regulations. The official publication
eschewed ‘operational art’, did not discuss Jominian lines of operation, and,
although it boasted ‘operations’ in its title, contained no definition of that
word (or of strategy or tactics, for that matter). Its focus, like Henderson’s
published work, was on the ‘tactics of the three arms’. ‘The full power of an
army’, it stressed, ‘can be exerted only when all its parts act in close combination’.
In a typically Hendersonian turn of phrase, it declared that ‘the fundamental
principles of war are neither very numerous nor in themselves very abstruse, but
the application of them is difficult and cannot be made subject to rules’. 43
However, it did not then set out what the fundamental principles of war were.
Neither concentration of force on the decisive point (the ninth principle in
Henderson’s notes on strategy) nor economy of force, both of them perennials
in most lists of the principles of war, figures in the index. Surprise does, but not as
a general principle of war; instead, it was important in siege operations, necessary
in night operations, and to be guarded against by the principle of protection. The
regulations were full of ‘general principles’ for application within specific topics,
but totally lacking in general principles per se.
In other words, although theField Service Regulationswas designed to prepare
a British Expeditionary Force for war in general, either in Europe or in the
empire, it was not, despite Haig’s best endeavours, designed to be a doctrine for
a specific sort of war. In April 1911, Major L. H. R. Pope-Hennessy, an infantry-
man then engaged in translatingLes transformations de la guerre, the work of the
French general Jean Colin, into English, published anonymously a review of the
Field Service Regulations, together with other works on contemporary warfare, in
theEdinburgh Review. ‘It is among the first duties of the General Staff of a great
modern national army’, he declared, ‘to indoctrinate it with a clear conception of
the basic principles of war, and of the method on which it intends to apply those
principles to the conduct of national war’. Pope-Hennessy believed that all that
the British general staff had done so far was to produce a ‘method of action’:
It is a matter of moment for us to follow the process by which the thinking organ of an
army, the General Staff, extracts from the records of the past and the wars of the present the
principles which have governed the success and failure of great commanders; to learn how
from those principles it forms a conception of war adapted to the circumstances and
characteristics of the nation and army it serves; and then to note how, transmitting the
conception into doctrine permeating the whole body of the army, it leads that army to seek
for victory along certain definite lines, to follow which has become instinctive to leaders
and subordinates alike. 44
The issue was not just whether Britain should have a doctrine at all, given its
Continentalist associations, but also whether that doctrine should be modelled
on Germany’s or France’s. The former aimed at applying superior force through
envelopment: there was none of this in theField Service Regulations. By contrast,
whole chapters were devoted to protection, embracing flank guards, rear guards,
and so on, and to information, a section which discussed such topics as the role of
108 The Evolution of Operational Art