since governments henceforth could exercise very near real-time control over distant
armies. The electric telegraph enabled commanders to issue orders promptly over great
distances, always provided they were connected by cable and that the enemy, or nature,
had not imposed too much friction. Obviously, though, armies on the move would be
difficult, if not impossible, to reach by telegraph.
In several respects the electric telegraph meant new challenges for civil–military
relations. Governments now could intrude into operational military matters, a subject
that military professionals regarded, and continue to regard, as properly and uniquely
their field of expertise. Also, for the first time in history, the telegraph meant that war
news could be transmitted to publics at home and abroad. The new profession of war
correspondent appeared in the Crimea. The transmission of news ‘from the front’ to the
increasingly literate and somewhat enfranchised home public produced the novel peril of
public opinion for politicians over their foreign and strategic policies. The wiring of the
world by the ‘Victorian internet’, as the electric telegraph has been called, was the vital
technical enabler of the political involvement of the general public with the behaviour of
its country’s armed forces (Standage, 199 8 ). In modern times, public opinion had hardly
ever played a significant role in policy-making for war and peace. In the 1 8 50s that
condition changed for ever. In the uncomfortably direct democracies of ancient Greece,
of course, public opinion was a decision-maker with lethal, prompt powers.
Conclusion
The Industrial Revolution allowed states to equip, train, move, command and sustain
logistically in combat armies of a size unprecedented in history. There were potent
strategic reasons why the decisive theatre in World War I was the Western Front in
Belgium and northern France. However, there was also an eminently practical reason.
In 1914–1 8 , Belgium and northern France comprised the only area on earth where
intensive mass warfare was logistically feasible. In a vital enabling sense, the Great War
was a great railway war. This is not to deny that Europe had conducted a cycle of great
wars from the end of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth. But
the totality of the great wars of the twentieth century was feasible only because of the
marriage of mass manufacture and surplus food to a rise in national sentiment almost
everywhere. M. S. Anderson has conveniently summarized the implications of the
revolutions of industrialization, national feeling and even the transnational culture of
attitudes towards war in a single, high-voltage sentence: ‘In every great European state,
therefore, armed forces in 1914 were larger, more national, more eager for conflict,
and endowed with enormously more destructive power than in the year of Waterloo’
(Anderson, 2003: 346).
This history moves on to look more closely at the impact of these revolutions upon the
armed forces, especially the armies, that Clausewitz insisted had to be instruments of
policy. The focus initially will be on technical advance, with its uncertain strategic,
operational and tactical implications. Above all else, though, strategic and military
history must be related to their all-important and sometimes highly dynamic political
context.
Nineteenth century: strategy 59