advance guards in detecting the enemy’s line of advance and in screening one’s
own. These were the key themes of French doctrine, which aimed to retain
freedom of movement and to observe the principle of economy of force, so that
fresh troops could intervene at the right time. In this respect, at least there was
more doctrine in theField Service Regulationsthan Pope-Hennessy cared to
admit. Both theField Service Regulations(at least between the lines) and Pope-
Hennessy (more explicitly) were acknowledging that doctrine could be the
framework for the development of operational art. The trouble was that many
officers of the British army went further than a simple neglect of doctrine; they
rejected it. Another literate infantry officer, J. F. C. Fuller, spoke for many when he
declared at the Royal United Services Institute in 1914 that, ‘I have no doctrine,
for I believe in none. Every concrete case demands its own particular solution....
If there is doctrine at all then it is common sense, that is action adapted to
circumstances’. 45
In 1912, Pope-Hennessy returned to the charge with a second article which
pointed out that the principles of command, in other words the exercise of
operational art, rested on the commander’s ability to control his forces, and,
therefore, on a general who knew how he intended to use his army and an army
who understood that intention. He used the word ‘operations’ when describing
how Napoleon had harmonized his principles of command. Following his own
reading of the recently published French literature, not just that by Colin, but also
by Hubert Camon, he attributed Napoleon’s defeat in 1813–15 to the failure of his
subordinate commanders to follow the workings of their commander’s mind. By
contrast, the success of the elder Moltke in the Wars of German Unification was to
be attributed to harmony between his intentions and the actions of his subordi-
nate commanders, a ‘unity of thought which is the fruit of common adherence to
a common doctrine’. For Pope-Hennessy, the choice was stark—intellectual order
or intellectual anarchy.
He dismissed the argument that doctrine would be ‘bad for an army, which
may be called up to operate against a great variety of enemies in various totally
dissimilar theatres of war’. The ‘doctrine of no doctrine’, resting on what he called
an empirical conception of war, could not be defended by reference to the
‘infinite variety of situations ranging from war against Afghans in Afghanistan
to war against Germany in Belgium’. Major war should be given priority over
small wars. Defeat in Afghanistan could be rectified, but ‘if the British Army is
beaten by a Continental Army in Europe, be it in Belgium or in Norfolk, the
defeat will be decisive’. 46
THE FIRST WORLD WARAt the end of August 1914, the British Expeditionary Force was defeated in
Belgium by a Continental army. Whether that defeat was due to the lack of
doctrine or a lack of skill in the exercise of operational art was not much debated
Operational Art and Britain, 1909–2009 109