I’ve had the pleasure meeting Peter Hart on two occasions where he provided seminars on the First World War at a local school at which I was teaching. Mr. Hart was insightful, incisive, and on occasion cutting to the point of acerbic, but his knowledge of the conflict at both the tactical and strategic levels was extremely impressive. It was through these encounters that I acquired two of Harts previous works – his one-volume ‘The Great War’ on the conflict in its totality, and ‘1918: A Very British Victory’, which outlined the achievements of the British Army during the Hundred Days Offensive which finally concluded the war. Both works were not only accessible in their prose and structure, but academically rigorous in the arguments presented - a leitmotif of which was to explode the popular ‘Donkeys’ and ‘Blackadder’ myths which still dominate the British cultural memory of the first World War.
It did, therefore, cause me a certain degree of discomfort to learn that Hart’s latest book on the British Expeditionary Force of 1914 purported to take a similarly revisionist bent. I’ve had an interest in the BEF of 1914 from a very early age, and was practically raised on the British military legend of ‘The Old Contemptibles’, having watched and read content by the late Richard Holmes, as well as Lyn MacDonald, John Terraine, David Ascoli, and Tim Carew et al. For me, the BEF has always been the vaunted ‘Rapier Amongst Scythes’, the ‘Best Trained and Best Equipped Army Ever Sent Forth to War’, and the ‘Contemptible Little Army’ that regularly punched above its weight and threw the Schlieffen Plan into disarray. As a consequence, I was placed in the position of being subjected to a work by a capable author, which undoubtedly sought to undermine something which had a great degree of emotional resonance with me. Nonetheless, I purchased ‘Fire and Movement’ and prepared to have my long-standing preconceptions challenged. As Cardinal John Henry Newman once said: 'The energy of the human intellect does from opposition grow.'
Fire and Movement is indeed a revisionist work, and I can confidently assert that it largely succeeds in its aim. The great strength of the book derives from Hart’s position as the Oral Historian of the Imperial War Museum. As a consequence, the sheer amount of primary source accounts he has managed to provide not only substantiates every argument made, but never fails to remind the reader of the human element of the conflict in their pathos, humour, and often downright harrowing detail. Traditional histories of the BEF of 1914 have always had a ‘guts and glory’ take on the first few months of the war – all mad minutes and courageous last stands - but the first-hand accounts in Fire and Movement leave the reader in no doubt as to the hellish depredations experienced by the British Regulars, in particular by the sheer destructive power of the German artillery on both body and mind. In this, Hart really takes a lot of lustre off the old British Military legends without descending into the realm of polemic, for which other authors such as Terence Zuber have been criticised. Another great strength of the book lies in the sheer number of German sources, which are plentiful and again provide substance to Hart’s arguments as well as balance to the overarching narrative. I was always under the impression than the archives in which these sources were held were destroyed by bombing during the Second World War, and their presence truly marks Fire and Movement apart from other related works in its uniqueness and academic rigor. Finally, Hart succeeds in relating a facet of the BEF that has only really been explored in specialist military history works, such as ‘Stemming the Tide’ (Spencer Jones et al.) - namely the untried and untested nature of the Command and Control aspect of the British Expeditionary Force of 1914, and all of the concomitant effects of the performance – and at times survivability – of the British Army in the field. The Commander in Chief does not come off well. Sir John French, although personally brave, did not have the temperament to command the BEF in an administrative capacity. At Corps level, Smith-Dorrien and Haig do as best as they can given the mercurial quality of overall British command, with the latter really shining during the defence of Ypres. Hart is justifiably favourable in his assessment of Haig, and does not spare in the foreshadowing of his future achievement of turning the BEF from a global gendarmerie into an all-arms field army with the technology and resources required to defeat the Germans on the Western Front.
A minor criticism of Fire and Movement takes the form of one of the old British military myths identified and subsequently attacked by Hart – namely the reputation of the French Army as an ‘unreliable ally with poor quality troops’. I must confess that from my previous reading (albeit from established works), I’ve never seen these accusations applied wholesale to the French Army in 1914, which was courageously led at the sharp end in face of horrific casualties, and had commanders of great resource such as Joffre and Foch. I’ve only ever read disparaging remarks about French arms being applied to General Lanrezac , and even then by Sir John French, with whom he had a notoriously bad natured and uncooperative relationship. As a consequence, I felt that Hart may have set up not quite a straw man, but at least a small bushel in this regard. I may of course be wrong, but can’t quite shake this impression.
In sum, Peter Hart’s Fire and Movement is an essential corrective to the old British Military myths surrounding the original BEF and the campaign of 1914, and is a deeply valuable contribution to the historiographical canon. It manages to place the BEF of 1914 in its appropriate historical context without embellishment, yet also pays tribute to skill, adaptability, and endurance of the men of the Old Regular Army who were thrust into a truly apocalyptic conflict without precedent. I’d urge anyone – even the most dyed-in-the-wool Old Contemptible-phile - to give it a read.
George H.
(Bristol)
Fire and Movement: The British Expeditionary Force and the Campaign of 1914
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a magnificent addition to WW1 collections covering a much ignored and misunderstood part of the Great War.
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