Lions and Donkeys

Were British servicemen in the First World War "lions led by donkeys?" Military historian Peter Caddick-Adams looks at the Battle of the Somme and finds that a lot of what has been accepted as truth in the '60s is really tells more about the historians than history.

When I was lecturing on history at university, the First World War was something of a bete noir for me, because until relatively recently it was almost impossible to find a modern work on the subject that didn't subscribe to the lions and donkeys school of thought. Worse, the popular narrative of the war always seemed to fit a template:
Archduke Ferdinand assassinated in 1914.

1. Tommys march off to France shouting "God save the King."
2. By Day Two the entire Western Front becomes a pointless killing ground of mud and blood that lasts for four years with Allies having no hope whatsoever of winning the war.
3. Inexplicably, the Allies suddenly win the war in 1918.

Somewhere in here the Bolshevik Revolution, Gallipoli and the Lusitania would get shoe-horned in, but that was the general drift. Naturally, the Allied generals were all ultra-conservative boobs and their men were all lambs to the slaughter who'd have been better off committing suicide if they couldn't desert. This reached its nadir in 1986 with a BBC drama called The Monocled Mutineer, which as much as said that the war was nothing but a Capitalist conspiracy to destroy the working class.

Leaving the paranoid conspiracy theories in the land of elves and fairies, this narrative turns out to have been remarkably unfair. True, the sheer destructive power of modern warfare caught everyone by surprise, horrible mistakes were made in every theatre and, yes, the Western Front was a charnel house for the first part of the war, thanks to the deadly combination of barbed wire and machine gun that made massed infantry obsolete and stopped any hope of an advance until the development of the tank, but, as Caddick-Adams points out, the Allies, and especially the BEF, were not led by cowardly "donkeys" who never saw the Front. In fact, he understates the case, in that not only were scores of generals lost at the front, but that those losses were higher that at any time before or since.

As for the idea that Haig et al were a load of conservative dunderheads who were fixated on cavalry charges and the like, most people forget that the generals' belief in breaking the lines so that the horses could have a go was not based on reactionary thinking, but rather a fascination with modern technology. The cavalry of 1914 had advanced lightyears beyond the broken nags that Wellington had to rely upon a hundred years before and represented genreations of concerted developmetn in weapons and tactics. It was firmly believed that new firearms, artillery and cavalry techniques made modern horsemen a devastating force that simply needed room to maneuver in order to tip the scales of battle. In other words, it was analogous to a Bomber Command twenty years later saying, "clear the anti-aircraft away and my bombers will finish the job."

But what I find most telling is that the "lions and donkeys" narrative always tends to gloss over that one annoying little fly in the storyline: The Allies won. The charnel house gave way to hard-earned victory. At devastating cost, the Germans did break and Berlin was laid bare to the threat of an Allied advance that was halted only by the Armistice. However, those historians who were so quick to condemn the generals for their follies seemed rather reluctant to credit them for their victories.

Reminds me of certain journalists today.