Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Lovely example of this book. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> The theme which runs through this book is the apparent conflict between two essential military requirements; on the one hand the will to stand and fight and the habit of unquestioning obedience; on the other the need for initiative for subtlety and subterfuge and the necessity to use all possible means of overcoming the will of the enemy at the least cost to oneself. A lack of the resolution inherent in the first was the undoing of Buller in the Boer War and the double pull is seen in Roberts’s conduct of operations. It is however in the Great War that the conflict becomes fully apparent. It is wrong to believe that British strategy on the western front was unthinking and blind concentration on the first essential; there were real efforts to resolve the deadlock but undoubtedly some of their mistakes from 1915 to 1917 were rooted in a failure to reconcile the two conflicting requirements. The cost of the resolution of the problems of the Great War made a deep impression on the minds of those who were to become the commanders in the Second World War; the extent to which they understood the reason and learnt from their mistakes is the subject of the later. (SP)