SEVEN

The Middle Parts of Fortune: Heroism in

Evolution, 1915–1916

T

he campaign of 1914 was a brutal awakening for the BEF. Virtually
every pre-war assumption held by even the most dour military savant
proved wrong. The manpower needs, material expenditures, and
the number of casualties produced by industrial-scale warfare shocked the
nation, but at the same time inspired a spirit of national self-righteousness
that sent hundreds of thousands to the recruiting stations. The rush of
volunteers was gratifying, but it would take more than a year to train, equip,
and ship the troops to the front in any appreciable numbers. The campaigns
of 1915 were thus fought with the remains of the pre-war standing army,
augmented by men of the Territorial Force who had volunteered for service
outside the British Isles and bolstered by drafts from all corners of the
empire.
These troops, whether regulars, Territorials, or drawn from the Indian
establishment, were still part of the old order. Even the new levies arriving
from Australia and New Zealand had a disproportionate leavening of ‘old
sweats’ in the ranks; 43 percent of the First Australian Division had seen
military service before the war.^1 They correspondingly brought with them
the nineteenth-century’s ideals of heroism, though circumstances soon
dictated its supercession.
The biggest problem on the Western Front was the lack of a tactical
doctrine to deal with the stalemate. Both 1915 and 1916 were years of exper-
imentation, adaptation, and reorganization for all the combatants’ armies,
as the industrial resources of Europe were tapped for manpower and tech-
nology. The British Army was no exception. The fighting of 1915 was the
last gasp of the Haldane-era army; 1916 was the baptism of Kitchener’s
New Armies. New commanders floundered toward new doctrines, would-
be boffins introduced new gadgets guaranteed to send the Hun reeling,
and bewildered clerks learned which end of the rifle was the dangerous
132