INTRODUCTION

The Battle of Loos (25 September–13 October 1915) occupies a unique place in British military history. When it took place it was the biggest land battle Britain had ever fought. It witnessed the debut on the Western Front of several New Army divisions that had been raised after the outbreak of war and was the first and only British offensive to be preceded by a discharge of cylinder-released chlorine gas and smoke. The battle was also a key moment in the rise of General Sir Douglas Haig, who replaced Field Marshal Sir John French as Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) after the battle had ended. But while these facts have been widely recognised as marking a significant milestone in the experience of the BEF, apart from the appropriate volume of the British Official History, published in 1928, Loos has failed to attract much scholarly attention.¹ It remains a ‘forgotten battle’, lost in the mists of rumour, hearsay and myth.

The Battle of Loos is also important in that it defies the usual image of the First World War. It was fought before modern industrialised warfare, with its shattering artillery bombardments, had turned the Western Front into a hellish moonscape of craters and trenches, devoid of any human movement. British troops fought at Loos in flat caps with a rifle and bayonet. Although certain areas of the battlefield, particularly in the north, saw close-fought bombing actions of the type that would become so familiar to the British later on in the war, there was also fighting in woodland, on slag heaps and in built-up areas, as well as large-scale manoeuvres across the open. Many books deal with the experience of the British Army on the Western Front, but very few have concentrated on this early part of the war, with most British commentators preferring to focus on either 1916, the year of the Somme, or the Third Battle of Ypres (‘Passchendaele’) in 1917. However, the early battles of the war, particularly during 1915, defined what would happen later on as experience was gained, lessons were learnt and soldiers and politicians gradually came to terms with the revolution in warfare that they were witnessing.

Details of Loos can be found in numerous books and in various individual chapters scattered through more general pieces on the Western Front.² Its haunting presence can also be found in a wide variety of memoirs and personal histories.³ Opinions on the battle have tended to range between the two extremes that generally characterise writing about the British Army during the First World War. The most common view is that Loos was a prime example of‘bungling’ on the part of British High Command. Indeed, it may have initially been heralded as a great victory, but as the long-desired war of movement failed to materialise and as the huge casualty returns sank in, disillusionment and disappointment were swift to emerge. Around Loos there lingers a bitter sense of futility and slaughter, only redeemed by tales of astonishing courage. While Robert Graves called the battle a ‘bloody balls-up’, the experience of another young subaltern distilled down to a feeling of utter helplessness, ‘cannon fodder’ as he called it.⁴ To David Lloyd George, the poor results of the battle – what he called ‘futile carnage’ – could be blamed squarely upon internal problems within the BEF, particularly the blinkered ‘military minds’ that so frustrated him.⁵ Captain Basil Liddell Hart agreed, calling it ‘the unwanted battle’, and Alan Clark, whose The Donkeys (1961) has perhaps been the most influential account of the fighting, wrote a bitter, if unreliable, polemic against the butchery of the British High Command and the scandalous squandering of the lives of their own men.⁶

This view has not gone unchallenged, however. The British Official Historian, Sir James Edmonds, saw Loos in different terms. In sharp contrast to Lloyd George and Alan Clark, Edmonds’s account emphasised the external factors that plagued the BEF during this period, such as the restrictions of coalition warfare, the lack of artillery ammunition, poorly trained officers and men, and the excellence of the Imperial Germany Army. Although Edmonds did not shrink from criticising a number of senior British commanders, most notably Sir John French, he was mainly concerned with other matters. According to him, Loos was the inevitable result of ‘using inexperienced and partly trained officers and men to do the work of soldiers, and do it with wholly insufficient material and technical equipment’. He also believed that had ‘bad luck’ and a ‘succession of accidents’ not occurred, much more could have been accomplished.⁷ Despite the heavy casualties and bitter disappointment, Loos was not futile. For example, Brigadier-General John Charteris, who served on the staff of First Army during the battle, emphasised its role in the ‘hard experience’ of the Western Front.⁸ Another staff officer, Lieutenant-Colonel J.T. Burnett-Stuart, agreed. He felt that the battle had ‘taught many lessons’, including the importance of ‘limited objective’ attacks, the movement of reserves and the handling of artillery.⁹ In more recent times, John Terraine has defended the capability of British High Command and stressed the ‘lack of anything approaching strategic independence’, which forced Britain to take part in a battle for which she was ill prepared and which her generals had counselled against.¹⁰ The continuing influence of these ideas can be found in two recent popular accounts: Gordon Corrigan’s The Unwanted Battle (2006) and Niall Cherry’s Most Unfavourable Ground (2005), both of which echo the conclusions first made in the British Official History.¹¹

Which of these opposing views is correct? While the more vitriolic attacks of the ‘lions led by donkeys’ school can be safely dismissed,¹² an explanation for the problems experienced by the British at Loos that relies totally upon external factors is not satisfactory, however. Indeed, not all historians have been persuaded by this line of argument. One of the most influential critics is the Canadian historian Tim Travers. Travers occupies something of a middle position between those who see the problems experienced by the BEF as primarily caused by internal problems – for example, poor command and leadership – and those who blame external factors, such as the lack of pre-war preparation, the quality of the enemy and the constrictions of coalition warfare. While agreeing that a ‘learning curve’ took place and the BEF certainly improved and developed during the war, Travers is critical of the structure and ethos of the pre-war Regular Army. According to Travers, it was rigid, dominated by factions, cliques and class, and was also curiously backward-looking. In a number of books and articles,Travers has criticised the British High Command for its reluctance to abandon an established, but out-of-date and even dangerous, mental paradigm of the ‘cult of the offensive’, which elevated the importance of character and morale in warfare above firepower and technology, with devastating consequences.¹³

Travers is not without his critics, however. A consistent concern is his reliance upon several ‘court gossips’ – including the correspondence of the military theorist Basil Liddell Hart – and his failure to explain the massive improvement in the BEF’s battlefield performance in 1917–18.¹⁴ Nevertheless, Travers’s findings on 1914–16 remain valid. External problems, such as lack of equipment and shells there may have been, but as numerous historians have pointed out, these were not helped by some of the curious decisions made by British High Command itself. Several examples from 1915 will suffice. The vindictive dismissal of Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, the repeated, unnecessary and fruitless counter-attacks at the Second Battle of Ypres, and the debacle over the reserve divisions (XI Corps) at Loos point to structural failings in command and leadership within the BEF that had little to do with shell shortages or political pressure. This cannot be ignored. In 1915 the BEF was far from being the hardened meritocracy of later years, but on the other hand, it was not an army of stupid amateurs, welded to optimistic and out-of-date pre-war ideas either. It is clear that only by seeing both external and internal factors together can a true picture of events emerge.

This book will examine both how the BEF came to fight the Battle of Loos, and how it planned and executed the subsequent operation with reference to both internal and external factors. It aims to place the experience of the British at Loos firmly in the context of much recent research, including the ‘learning curve’ and ‘revolution in military affairs’,¹⁵ and seeks to shed fresh light upon some of the controversies of the battle, such as the employment of poison gas and the contentious issue of the reserve divisions. It is based mainly upon unpublished archive material, most of which is contained in archives scattered around London, such as The National Archives, the Imperial War Museum, the National Army Museum and the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives. The personal papers of many of the key actors have been consulted at length, including those of Herbert Asquith, Sir John French and Lord Kitchener. A host of other personal papers, diaries and eyewitness accounts have been also been used. Most of the operational and tactical details from the battle stem from the army papers held in The National Archives. These sources include unit war diaries, operation orders and draft plans, and allow a close analysis of the events of the battlefield to emerge, which is untainted by later arguments and controversies. The correspondence between Sir James Edmonds and numerous veterans of Loos has also been extensively mined. These letters provide useful information on command, especially the relationships between senior officers, the ‘feel’ of the battlefield and the impact of Loos upon subsequent British offensives.

Although many of these sources have been available for nearly forty years and have been quoted briefly in some recent studies, the vast majority of the material used in this account has never been consulted previously in the context of a complete operational history of the Battle of Loos. They can, therefore, provide important and often ‘fresh’ information about the strategic complexities of the war, how the battle was planned and executed, the wider development of the BEF on the Western Front, the response of Britain’s wartime volunteers to battle, and the nature of combat during the First World War. Admittedly these sources can have drawbacks. For example, unit reports and war diaries can range in detail – from the concise to the very poor – and some tend to exaggerate the heroism of the rank and file, but they often provide an unparalleled glimpse into the operational and tactical realities of the Western Front. This study will concentrate primarily on the planning and execution of the attack at Loos from the British perspective, while the German side of operations will only be summarised briefly. Analysing the tactical performance of German units on the Western Front can be difficult because many of the battalion and brigade war diaries were destroyed in Allied bombing raids during the Second World War. However, from a consultation of the relevant regimental histories and the German Official History, both written in the 1920s, important details can be gleaned, which can aid understanding of how the British attacks progressed and why there was no decisive breakthrough.