Enemy’ said that in such operations ‘the normal application of the principles of
regular warfare’ should be ‘considerablymodified’, 58 and the 1935 edition began a
chapter now called ‘Special Types of Warfare’ with the statement that ‘In the
preceding chapters warfare in a highly developed country against a civilized
enemy had been the type mainly considered’. 59
Freeing operational thought from its need to embrace all types of war enabled
it to focus on major war: it seemed as though Henderson was out, and Haig (at
least in this respect) was in. Doctrine, and with it operational art, should have
grown on the back of such assumptions. But it did not. The 1935Field Service
Regulationswas divided into three, not two, volumes, the third calledOpera-
tions—Higher Formations. Whereas part II treated ‘the tactical employment of all
arms in co-operation’, part III covered ‘the principles governing the employment
of all armed forces in war’. But it promised more than it delivered. The third
volume was still focused on ‘the tactical employment of larger formations’.
Operations remained a dirty word in the sense of a level of war between tactics
and strategy. And so too did doctrine—still typecast as Teutonic and dogmatic,
the enemy of flexibility. Hence the continued stress on the principles of war: they
underpinned the commitment to adaptability rather than to convergent ways of
thinking.
For all its readiness to take war against ‘first-class’ enemies as its benchmark,
the general staff was reluctant to impose too much shape on how it envisaged the
fighting which would result. In 1929, Major General Sir Frederick Maurice, the
son of J. F. Maurice and a former director of military operations at the War Office,
published a book calledBritish Strategy: A Study of the Application of the Principles
of War. Strategy was defined by Maurice in traditional terms, as ‘the leading of
troops up to the time of contact with the enemy’, and tactics as ‘the methods of
employing troops in contact with the enemy’. Based on the principles of war as
enumerated inField Service Regulations,British Strategycarried the imprimatur
of the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir George Milne. Milne
drew particular attention to chapter IX, that on the principle of mobility.
‘Mobility’, the chapter began, ‘is one of the chief means of manoeuvre, which is
in turn the means of engaging in battle to advantage’. 60
Maurice’s book was in direct descent from Henderson in two respects. The first
was its title: the epithet ‘British’ was deliberate, a contrast to (in the words of
Milne’s introduction) ‘the ideas of continental strategists, generally expressed in
terms untuned to British ears and dealing with situations likely to affect conti-
nental powers more than the British empire’. 61 The second lay in Maurice’s
emphasis on the principles of war, derived from a study of military history,
‘fundamental truths which...remain immutable, just as do the mechanical
principles which govern the art of architecture, whether the materials used are
wood, stone, iron or reinforced concrete, just as the principles of harmony, which
govern the art of music’. However, according to Maurice the principles of war
were not, strictly speaking, principles at all, but methods, guides to action, ‘by
which certain results can be obtained’. As Maurice confessed, ‘a mere knowledge
of the principles of war...will not help a soldier to solve a problem of war any
Operational Art and Britain, 1909–2009 113