Call to Arms: The British Army, 1914-18 (review)

In the English-speaking world (and, indeed, in many areas outside of it), interest in the Great War, 1914–18, shows no sign of abating. Not surprisingly the expansion of the British Army from what in 1914 constituted a diminutive colonial police force to a vast and sophisticated army capable of battling on several fronts simultaneously in 1918, while at the same time spearheading the allied advance in northern France and Flanders, exerts an exceptionally powerful allure. From Lord Kitchener's call to arms and the destruction of the Old Contemptibles in 1914, to the formation of the New Army Divisions and the "Pals" battalions that comprised many of them, to the successive bloodings at Loos and Gallipoli (1915), on the Somme (1916), and at Arras and Passchendaele (1917), and finally to the direction of the war, including Sir Douglas Haig's leadership, there are solid reasons for this. While old controversies are regularly revisited, new studies and fresh perspectives are constantly emerging.

Charles Messenger has done historians of Great Britain during the twentieth's century first total conflict an immense service with the publication of Call to Arms, which falls into the category of a new, valuable study, incorporating both fresh research as well as much work that has gone before, into a comprehensive whole. This is not a survey of the political and strategic questions that figured in Britain's decision to go to war in 1914, or of the decisions that saw British forces despatched to various theatres and fight during specific campaigns. And though Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener's belief in a lengthy war and his decision to raise New Army divisions from scratch, bypassing the existing territorial army organization in the process, is rightly emphasized, this study does not subscribe to a one-dimensional Great Man theory of the transformation of the British Army during the Great War. Instead, what it does do, is attempt to explain just how the British people as a whole created an immense army of citizen-soldiers from the remnants of a small regular force, building upon existing institutions whenever possible but not hesitating to create new ones when the old ones were deemed inadequate.

Call to Arms is organized thematically. The recruitment, classification, and use of manpower form a central core, with chapters devoted to officers, the regulars, territorials, new army volunteers, and conscripts. Other chapters document the rise (heavy artillery, tanks, labour corps) and fall (cavalry) of different branches of the service. Every aspect of army organization and administration, including medical and welfare provision, officer training and advancement, the role of women, labour, discipline, and the awards system, to name a few, is scrutinized and reviewed. Everything considered, what the British nation undertook, the author argues, was unprecedented. (Ample proof is provided for Peter Simkins's assertion that "The army of 1914–18 was also the largest and most complex single organisation created by the British nation up to that time.") Without blueprints and with few signposts, the government suffered numerous knocks and setbacks along the way, but emerged, by 1917 and 1918, with an enormous amount of credit.

Based on an impressive array of published and unpublished sources, supplemented by a fine collection of photographs, Messenger explains to us what the British Army was in 1914 and how it became what it was in 1918—a vital, if not the vital, weapon in the allies' arsenal.