One of my least favourite types of history books are those that rely not on what happened, but on what people said.

When evaluating an event as massive as the Great War, it’s inherently a perilous thing to rely on what people say, or are alleged to have said...

...or are alleged to have said about other people.

Not least because one is in danger of simultaneously losing sight of what actually happened and of spuriously selecting quotes to support your preconceived hypothesis (aka quote mining).

There are going to be a lot of people who said a lot of things, and the problem for a historian is in not relying too much on a small selection of sources, and thus absorbing and assimilating whatever inherent bias those sources convey, to the exclusion of contrary viewpoints.

Target for tonight is Tim Traver's "The Killing Ground" which uses what people said, to evaluate the role of the Haig, the BEF and GHQ in the First World War.

Hashies: #FWW #WWI #Military #History

Lets look at the selection of sources to start with by dip sampling some chapters.

Looking at Chapter 1, we find 106 references of which Liddell-Hart is mentioned 18 times and Edmonds 40 times.

Chapter 7. This time there are 146 references of which Liddell-Hart is mentioned 7 times and Edmonds 60 times.

Chapter 8 there are 40 references of which no less than 27 refer to Liddell-Hart or Edmonds.

50% of references in the chapters I examined relate to just 2 individuals

Pages 103 and 104, Travers gives us a potted biography of Haig from Sandhurst onwards, based entirely on what Charteris said, along with the obligatory back-hander from Liddell-Hart.

The chapter is topped off by the following Hot Take:

Haig’s personality prevented him from easily accepting innovation and change

This, about the man who pressed for the earliest possible use of tanks for the first time in history, and then ordered 1,000 of them just days later

Presumably the blistering pace of tactical and technological innovation that occurred within the BEF just kind of happened.... by osmosis...?

To back up the assertion that Haig was a technophobe, he posits the following, which leaves us with a fair bit to unpack

I mean, where would they have got idea that the mitrailleuse was a bit like an artillery piece? Silly Edwardians! I mean The gun alone clocked in at a third of a metric ton and the artillery carriage it was mounted on brought it up to a bit shy of the ton.

"Adye was overruled"

He bloody well wasn’t. The mitrailleuse was never adopted for service in the British army. It wasn’t adopted by the Russians, the Turks or Proosians or any other army, and even the French ditched them after ’71 on account of their shitness.

And next we see a gentle segue from discussing a failed French weapons system and applying the entirely justified assessment of it to the machine gun as a whole

"Most of these attributes, particularly the last, stayed with the gun into the first world war"

"gas recoil system"

The Maxim gun was recoil actuated. Travers seems to be confused here about the gas actuation of the Lewis gun.

"not introduced into the army until 1894"

Sir Garnet Wolseley placed the first order for Maxim guns in 1888. Travers is probably getting confused here between the introduction the Maxim and its first real use in the First Matabele War of 1893 to 1894.

"it is clear that the mitrailleur faced two main obstacles in the British Army"

Hang on a sec! I thought we were talking about actual machine guns here, having established that the "mitrailleur" was never adopted in the first place.

"except in colonial warfare"

As opposed to all the non-colonial warfare the British army was engaged in at the time?

"this meant that its role was also fixed as peripheral – as a weapon of unusual or exceptional use"

This is completely at odds with the use of Maxims in the Sudan. To quote Haig complaining that they didn’t have Maxims available when actively seeking out the enemy:

"The Horse Artillery against enemy of this sort is no use. We felt the want of machineguns when working alongside of scrub for searching some of the tracks"

Travers seems capable of making distinctions between the mitrailleuse and the Maxim, but seems incapable of understanding that they are very different weapons and that the poor assessment of the former is not only totally valid, but was in no way applicable to the latter.

As with machine guns, so it is with tanks.

On page 76, he attempts to draw analogies between the way the high command regarded and implemented the tank and the machine gun, completely failing to factor in the evolving (and generally poor) performance of the tank

Travers imagines that new weapons were pushed to the periphery due to the conservatism of the high command in some imaginary battle between the psychological battlefield and the technological battlefield.

It is in obsessing over his own synthesis of morale vs firepower, and technology vs psychology that Travers fails to see the wood from the trees – to evaluate what someone said against what actually *happened*