At 11 o'clock on the night of 4 August 1914, the British ultimatum to Germany expired without a satisfactory response. Germany had invaded Belgium, a country whose neutrality Britain had guaranteed by treaty, and the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey watched from his window in the Foreign Office as the lamps were extinguished along Whitehall. He is said to have remarked that the lamps were going out all over Europe and that they would not be relit in their lifetime. It was a more accurate prophecy than most predictions made in those heady August days, when many on both sides believed the war would be over by Christmas.
Britain entered the war with a small professional army — the British Expeditionary Force of some 100,000 men, described by the Kaiser as a contemptibly small army, a phrase that the BEF adopted with sardonic pride as the Old Contemptibles. By the war's end, Britain had mobilised over four million soldiers through voluntary enlistment and, from 1916, conscription. The transformation of a society that had kept military service voluntary throughout the industrial era into one where the state compelled men to fight was itself one of the war's profound consequences for British democracy and civil liberty.
The Western Front — the 450-mile line of opposing trenches from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border — became the defining image of the First World War for the British imagination and remained so for a century. The tactical problem was a genuine one: modern firepower, particularly the machine gun and artillery, had made offensive operations extraordinarily costly. Defenders in prepared positions with artillery support could inflict catastrophic casualties on attackers crossing open ground. No general on either side in 1916 had found a reliable solution to this problem.
The Battle of the Somme, which began on 1 July 1916, has haunted British memory ever since. On that single day, the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties — killed, wounded and missing — the greatest loss in its history in a single day. The New Army battalions of volunteers — men who had enlisted together from the same town, the same factory, the same regiment's county — went forward in waves and were mown down by machine guns that the preliminary bombardment had failed to destroy. Whole communities were bereaved simultaneously. The Accrington Pals, the Sheffield City Battalion, the Grimsby Chums — names that had been local terms of pride became local synonyms for collective grief.
Yet the British Army of 1918 was not the Army of 1916. It had learned, painfully and at enormous cost, how to fight the industrial war. The tactics of 1918 — combining artillery, infantry, tanks, aircraft and gas in coordinated operations that kept the enemy off balance — were light years ahead of the attritional slogging of the Somme. The Hundred Days offensive that ended the war in November 1918 saw the British Army at its most effective and most lethal.
The human cost — approximately 750,000 British military dead, with perhaps twice that number wounded, many permanently — marked British society in ways that lasted for generations. The memorials in every village churchyard, the annual Remembrance ceremony at the Cenotaph, the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, the bitter arguments about lions led by donkeys: all are testaments to a wound in British collective memory that has never entirely closed.
