own lack of foresight, were reduced to the position of human cattle’, Fuller
fulminated inThe Reformation of War, published in 1923; ‘they browsed behind
their fences, and on occasion snorted and bellowed at each other’. Fuller dubbed
this ‘the last lap of the physical epoch’. He called the plans for 1919, to which he
himself had contributed but which were never implemented because of the
suddenness of the German collapse, ‘the first lap of the moral epoch’. Fuller
imagined masses of fast tanks driving deep towards the enemy’s command
headquarters and railheads, ‘which for slaughter substituted nervous shock,
aiming a mortal blow at the brain in place of a physical blow at the body of the
enemy’s army’. 52 For Fuller, war at its most elemental was a matter of science, as
its theory depended on scientific method and its practice was shaped by technol-
ogy. But its application required art. Mobility was the key to putting art into
operations.
The chapter inThe Reformation of Wardevoted to ‘the science and art of war’
is, above all, a discussion of the principles of war. Fuller castigated the 1909Field
Service Regulationsfor their failure to spell out what the principles of war were,
but somewhat disingenuously failed to mention that the first post-war revision of
Field Service Regulations, Volume II: Operations: Provisional, published in 1920,
had remedied the deficiency. 53 Moreover, those principles were to all intents and
purposes identical to those listed by Fuller inThe Reformation of War—mainte-
nance of the objective, the superiority of the offensive, the effect of surprise, the
concentration of forces in time and space, economy in the use of force, the
priority of security, the value of mobility in conferring flexibility and achieving
surprise, and the need for cooperation. Fuller’s principles claimed ‘greater uni-
versality’ than anything Jomini had written, but did so ‘at the price of greater
abstraction from any concrete reality’. 54 Between 1920 and 1935,Field Service
Regulationspassed through four editions, and, although the specific principles
were changed and adapted, the principle of having principles remained. 55
Four revisions toField Service Regulationsin fifteen years give the lie to the
argument that the army failed to address the lessons of the First World War. By
1916, Robertson himself had moved away from the Hendersonian position he
had espoused before the war, just as Haig was moving in the opposite direction:
‘each war has its own peculiarities, but one would think that no war was ever so
peculiar as the present one, and Field Service Regulations will require a tremen-
dous amount of revising when we have finished with the Boche’, he wrote to
Henry Rawlinson, then commanding the 4th Army in the Battle of the Somme.
He went on, ‘Principles, as we used to call them, are good and cannot be
disregarded, but their application is a very difficult business, and I think that
we still take these principles too literally’. 56 After the war was over, the general
staff did not turn its back on war in Europe in its rush to embrace the familiarity
of imperial commitments. Lord Cavan, the chief of the Imperial General Staff,
said in 1922 that ‘the present policy is to train for a small war against an enemy
whose armament is on an equality with our own’. 57 Nor was it quite so content as
it had been before the war to use a generalized vision of war to cover all wars. The
chapter in the 1920Field Service Regulationson ‘Warfare against an Uncivilized
112 The Evolution of Operational Art