Introduction

Looking back upon the operations of 1916, and in anticipation of the battles to come, the French prime minister, Aristide Briand, remarked that military offensives had become ‘really like a great industrial undertaking. There were so many miles of front, so many troops, and so many guns required; all had to be calculated to a nicety, and all kinds of preparations made’.¹ In the wake of 1917’s inconclusive campaigning season, The Times provided a more concise observation: ‘Modern war is modern industry, organised for a single definite purpose’.² The years between 1914 and 1918 witnessed the ‘advent of a totalising war strategy that pitted industrial nations and their citizenries against each other’.³ The conflict’s dimensions made it impracticable for all of the belligerents to rely exclusively upon their cadre of professionally trained soldiers both for its conduct and its coordination. All turned to the manpower of civil society to enhance the size and strengths of their martial forces. In Britain, an influx of volunteers and conscripts provided the world’s foremost naval power with an army capable of matching the vast forces raised in continental Europe. Their presence imbued almost every aspect of the British war effort. Examples of their bravery, sacrifices and eventual mastery of modern warfare on the industrial battlefield have inspired a prodigious literature in the century since the war was fought. Yet civilian brain power, as well as muscle power, played a vital role in the prosecution of the First World War.

When did the potential utility of civilian expertise find acceptance within the higher political and military administration of the British war effort? How were the skills and aptitudes possessed by the members of a highly industrialized society like pre-war Britain applied to the conduct of an industrial war? Was the relevance of non-military experience recognized and valued within the War Office and the army’s various theatres of operations? This book addresses these questions. It comprises a detailed investigation of the roles performed by Britain’s transport experts in support of the British army’s military operations during the war. Two things are of particular importance to this study: the contributions made by senior employees of the British empire’s transport concerns to the character and conduct of the war; and what these individuals’ experiences can tell us both about how the First World War was conceptualized as it unfolded and about the relationship between soldiers and civilians at the summit of an international coalition. Through an examination of civilian specialists at war, this book illustrates how the British army leveraged modern business methods – developed for the administration of a global trading empire and with the aim of improving profitability – and discusses the ways in which the business of killing and the intensification of military power were shaped by the input of non-military figures during the twentieth century’s first great conflagration.

The First World War did not create the phenomenon of civilian expertise augmenting the work of the state’s military apparatus in the prosecution of war. Following the so-called military revolution of the mid sixteenth century, merchants known as sutlers followed the armies of early modern Europe and provided soldiers with the opportunity to purchase non-military items such as sugar, tobacco and coffee – a practice that continued until as recently as the American Civil War.⁴ Britain’s efforts in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were supported by a vast network of contractors who produced tents, kettles, knapsacks, uniforms, boots and sundry other items for the British troops, which provided the material foundations for the national war effort against France.⁵ Following the advent of rail travel, the civilian contractors Samuel Morton Peto, Edward Betts and Thomas Brassey provided staff and materials for the construction of a fourteen-mile-long railway between the port of Balaklava and the British lines when the existing transport infrastructure’s inadequacies jeopardized the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War.⁶ Such activities, undertaken either to sustain the morale or increase the fighting abilities of the armies they served, were carried out on a far larger scale and with a higher degree of integration during the industrial wars of the twentieth century.

After 1914, civilians were drawn into the war in a way that was profoundly more immersive than in previous conflicts. The British government found work for the employees of railway companies in the construction of railway lines in various theatres, the maintenance and operation of locomotives, and the prosecution of duties in the ‘War Office, the Admiralty, the Home Office, the Colonial Office, the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, the Ministry of Munitions … the Ministry of Shipping, the Ministry of Food, the Wool Transport Office, the Trench Warfare Department, Army Canteens, [and] the Petrol Committee’ among others.⁷ Whereas in the past civilians in the proximity of the battlefield remained a distinct entity, the First World War cultivated military efforts in which the ‘soldier-civilian relationship’ was ‘intermeshed’ to an unprecedented degree.⁸ In some of the cases within this book, Britain’s transport experts assumed military rank and acquired recognizable positions within the military chain of command. In others, particularly on the home front, they operated on the fringes of the army and fulfilled quasi-military, quasi-civilian functions. Throughout the war effort, this book argues, their exertions helped to sustain and ultimately bring about a successful end to the bloodshed.

The various ways in which civilians navigated the First World War have attracted increasing scholarly interest in recent years. Historians have addressed the question of why non-military participants in the war became involved in the conflict and considered wider questions about ‘the variety of meanings of “civilian” in wartime’.⁹ Laura Ugolini has explored the motivations and experiences of middle-class men on the English home front, a category applicable to many of the individuals discussed within this book. For Ugolini, the war forced middle-class men, particularly those who were middle-aged or older, to confront popular understandings of manliness and patriotic duty. Those who attempted to emulate the military commitments of younger men were ‘often not an object of admiration, but of ridicule and contempt’.¹⁰ Yet through the direction of their skills and expertise into activities deemed valuable to the war effort, men unable to fight made contributions that – although not as dangerous as those of their sons – provided them with a sense that they had borne their ‘fair share’ of the war’s burden. Sir Sam Fay, general manager of the Great Central Railway and the director of movements (DOM) at the War Office from 1917 onwards, provides evidence that reinforces Ugolini’s argument. The dedication page of Fay’s memoir, The War Office at War, confirmed the book’s purpose as a permanent record of what ‘Grandad’ had done during the war.¹¹

Tammy Proctor’s work has gone beyond middle-class men to discuss civilians’ contributions on a broader scale. However, while recognizing the varied roles taken on by non-soldiers between 1914 and 1918, her analysis concentrated upon those in care-giving or humanitarian capacities rather than those drawn into the conflict for more overtly aggressive purposes. Consequently, although Proctor acknowledged that the First World War ‘spawned the modern phenomenon of “expert” assistance in the management and maintenance of war’,¹² her examination of civilian influence over the conduct of operations was largely restricted to the manufacture of chemical weapons. In doing so, Proctor’s work joins a corpus of literature that has considered the technical and moral implications of the mobilization of scientific knowledge during the conflict.¹³ This book seeks to draw business knowledge and managerial acumen into the same discussions. In an era before the establishment of private military contractors able to provide states with what Marc Lindemann has referred to as ‘expertise at a price’,¹⁴ during the First World War civilians were deeply embedded in the war machine and performed tasks both directly and indirectly related to their peacetime specializations. Businessmen were less inhibited by the values of internationalism that had served as guiding principles for leading scientists in the century prior to 1914,¹⁵ but their contributions to the technical and organizational aspects of the war had a similarly profound effect on the scale and duration of the violence that the opposing armies inflicted upon one another.

The place of civilian expertise within the British war effort merits further study, as the subject has been embroiled within one of the conflict’s most noxious historiographical legacies. In his War Memoirs, the wartime prime minister David Lloyd George asserted that it was only through his ‘forcing’ of ‘unwanted civilians’ upon the army in the summer of 1916 that the military reluctantly agreed to engage with the myriad talents and abilities prevalent in Britain’s sophisticated industrial economy.¹⁶ In Lloyd George’s version of events the British army was handicapped in its operations by the predominance of insular, incompetent ‘inexperts’ within its senior ranks. The army’s high command was incapable of understanding the organizational and conceptual implications of modern warfare, unable to offer effective solutions to the battlefield challenges it faced and unwilling to accept the advice of those who possessed skills and experience with demonstrable applicability to the prosecution of a multi-dimensional and complex war effort.¹⁷ In contrast to the image of upper-class senior officers wedded to an outdated Victorian model of warfare that has become a standard trope in the popular memory of the war, Lloyd George’s premiership comprised – in the words of his most prominent biographer –‘vitality, urgency, [and] improvisation’, and was dominated by an ‘astonishing disregard for convention’.¹⁸ As prime minister, Lloyd George oversaw the creation of a small war cabinet to oversee the higher direction of the war, established new government ministries to manage crucial areas such as shipping, food, information and reconstruction, and maintained his commitment – initially demonstrated at the Ministry of Munitions in 1915 – to the use of men with ‘first class business experience’ in positions of great responsibility.¹⁹ He campaigned and won the khaki election of December 1918 on the platform of having been the man who won the war. Many on the other side of the civil–military divide took great issue with that slogan between the two world wars.

The so-called battle of the memoirs, fought during the 1920s and 1930s between those who had led Britain’s political and military war efforts, established the terms of a debate that largely dominated the British military history of the war for generations.²⁰ Lloyd George’s stringent criticisms of the army’s conduct of the war – built upon foundations provided by the output of his political colleague Winston Churchill and that other prolific wordsmith of the age, Basil Liddell Hart – fixed the terms of discussion upon a polarized examination of two men and the decisions they made during the war: Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) through the Somme, Passchendaele and the final year of the war; and Lloyd George, director of Britain’s global war effort from December 1916 and a prominent member of the cabinet throughout the conflict.²¹ Whereas Lloyd George embodied drive, energy and innovation, and espoused the industrial approach to war, Haig came to personify an army command that was reactive, technophobic, unimaginative and isolationist. The work of Tim Travers has exemplified a historical focus on the latter of these deficiencies. Across a series of books and articles, Travers argued that the conservatism that pervaded the BEF’s general headquarters (GHQ) produced a concept of warfare that had been rendered obsolete by technological developments.²² In addition, Haig’s personality ‘prevented him from easily accepting innovation and change … [which] led to his own isolation [and] the isolation of GHQ as a whole from the rest of the BEF’.²³

Lloyd George’s ‘forcing’ of an ‘unwanted civilian’ into this cloistered environment could be expected to have met a furious backlash from such an inflexible and ‘inner-directed’ character.²⁴ However, the unwanted civilian in question, Sir Eric Geddes, formed an instant working bond and a lasting personal friendship with the taciturn professional soldier. Haig appointed Geddes as the BEF’s director-general of transportation (DGT) in October 1916, sought to retain his services as a transport advisor following Geddes’s appointment as controller of the Royal Navy in May 1917, singled him out for praise within his wartime and post-war despatches²⁵ and even asked Geddes to act as godfather to his son in 1918.²⁶ The depth and warmth of the personal relationship between Haig and Geddes was exceptional among the soldiers and civilians who were thrust into close proximity between 1914 and 1918, but this book contends that the portrayal of a hidebound, aloof, narrow-minded and deeply jealous officer class cannot be supported by an examination of the interactions between the military and Britain’s transport experts. While individual examples of animosity on both sides of the civil–military divide will be discussed below, no evidence can be found to support the concept of institutional insularity that has formed a sturdy bedrock for criticisms of Britain’s military approach to the conflict’s organizational challenges.

Britain’s military leaders from the period surrounding the First World War are not alone in having been traduced in the historical record. In 1986 Donald Coleman and Christine MacLeod unearthed ‘a mountain of apparently damning evidence’ as to the ‘incompetence … ignorance, indifference, hostility [to new technology], prejudice and complacency’ of British businessmen in the century after 1850.²⁷ Both at the time and in the historical analysis of the period that followed, the industrial elite in turn-of-the-century Britain have been largely denigrated in comparison to their counterparts in advanced nations such as the United States and Germany. American methods and processes in industries as diverse as railways, shoe making, printing and machine tool manufacturing were acknowledged as superior to the procedures followed by British companies, while in pre-war debates over Britain’s economic competitiveness ‘Germany assumed the dual role of model and enemy’.²⁸ In his position as commandant of the British army’s staff college at Camberley between 1906 and 1910, Brigadier-General Henry Wilson delivered a series of lectures that implored his students to learn from close studies of the German language, people and army.²⁹ The outbreak of war did nothing to shift perceptions that Germany was ‘the best organised community in the world, the best organised whether for war or peace’, and that Britain had ‘been employing too much the haphazard, leisurely, go-as-you-please methods, which, believe me, would not have enabled us to maintain our place as a nation even in peace very much longer’.³⁰ According to Lord Esher, Britain’s principal enemy possessed ‘the concentrated, unified and organised capacity, both scientific, military, philosophical, etc., of the highest developed nation the world has ever known’.³¹

Examples of a ‘civil servant being ignorant of technology, a businessman not investing in a modern machine, or a soldier doubting the efficacy of new weapons’, have been used to create an impression of Edwardian Britain as ‘congenitally short-sighted’ and incapable of responding effectively to the diffusion of new techniques, equipment and working methods that took place in the years before the war.³² Admirers of foreign dynamism and critics of perceived domestic deficiencies have been held up as beacons of unheeded prescience, commentators who foresaw the predictable decline of Britain’s status as a great power. Correlli Barnett’s 1986 study, The Audit of War, typified such material.³³ Barnett’s pre-war Britain comprised a workforce of unskilled ‘coolies’, a managerial cadre hostile towards professional education and a decadent and irresponsible governing class of ‘romantics’.³⁴ The mass rejection of urban volunteers for service in the South African War due to their lack of physical fitness embodied the decline of British manpower. The low output of graduate scientists and engineers created a ‘crisis’ of British industry exemplified by an ongoing dependence on ‘rule-of-thumb’ and a rejection of systematic management principles. In comparison to the rigorous sponsorship and application of scientific knowledge in Germany, and the emergence of standardization and mechanization in the United States, British industry appeared to be backward, stagnant and primitive.

Such a pessimistic outlook raises a series of tough questions. If Britain was in such a relatively weak position in 1914 – populated by an unfit, uneducated, unskilled workforce and directed by an elite more interested in cricket and classics than the latest technological advances – how then was the country able to organize the largest, most wide-ranging, most total war effort in its military history? How were the complexities and scales of industrial warfare recognized, comprehended and coordinated with such success against Germany, the apparent model of national and military efficiency? How was all of this achieved despite the absence of a mass army drawn from the entire cross-section of British society in 1914?

That the ethos, workforce and managerial ability capable of meeting this challenge existed in Britain has been central to arguments advanced by David Edgerton. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, Edgerton identified in Britain ‘a military-industrial-scientific complex which was … second to none’.³⁵ The absence of a large British army to match those put into the field by the other great powers in 1914 was not evidence of a liberal aversion to defence. Instead, it was a manifestation of Britain’s desire to wage war using its own chosen means: a naval force capable of dominating world trade and depriving its enemies of the means to live. Britain’s success in both world wars, Edgerton argued, depended on the ‘pre-war international, modern and capital-intensive orientations of British armed force and the British ability to harness the resources not only of the nation but of much of the world … The British empire was victorious … because it was rich and could and did use its unique position in the world to fight wars of steel and gold’.³⁶ Before 1914, no nation on earth either imported or exported more than Britain. From 1914 onwards, the trading network that connected the wheat fields and cattle ranches of the Americas to Britain, and the British cotton factories and coal fields to the world, was redirected to the application of steel and gold to combat.

The existence and maintenance of a global trading empire centred on London demonstrates that Britain possessed the human and material resources required for the mass transportation that industrial war demanded. Over 620,000 employees operated an integrated railway network that linked the major urban centres to each other, and joined the great export-and import-dependent industries to ports able to handle colossal tonnages of goods. At the outbreak of the First World War the London and North-Western Railway (LNWR) employed around 110,000 people, distributed across a network that stretched from London to Carlisle and from Swansea to Leeds. The next largest railways – the Great Western, Midland and North-Eastern – each employed in excess of 50,000 men across a range of specialist occupations. In fields as diverse as locomotive engineering, marketing, ticket sales and hospitality, the growth of the railways in the nineteenth century had necessitated the establishment of new methods for the mobilization, control, supervision and direction of large and intricate operating systems.³⁷ By 1911, the national transport system (comprising the rail and canal networks) possessed the ability to handle some 1,500 million passenger journeys and 560 million tons of goods per year.³⁸ This book analyses the manner in which the men, materials and methods that maintained this colossal peacetime traffic were redeployed and repurposed to the task of transporting Britain’s military power during four years of conflict.

Transportation provides an ideal lens through which to observe Britain’s application of civilian expertise to the demands of the First World War for three reasons. First, the popular image of the war in Britain may revolve around the static, rigid line of trenches that stretched across Belgium and France from the English Channel to the Swiss border, but the fighting relied upon movement and transportation to an unprecedented degree. The war drew in participants from all continents and consumed raw materials sourced from all over the globe. As the BEF expanded in size between 1914 and 1917 – and as British troops went into action at Gallipoli, in Italy, Macedonia, Palestine and elsewhere – they were entirely dependent upon complex production and distribution networks that connected the factories of Britain and the world to the front line. The colossal volumes of material required to sustain offensive operations – during periods of heavy fighting a total of 1,934 tons of supplies (including ammunition, engineering stores and food) were required each day for every mile of front held by the BEF – could not be sourced locally.³⁹ Therefore, the rail, road and waterway networks surrounding the areas where fighting took place were essential both to the soldiers’ sustenance and to the evolution of material-intensive combat methodologies.

Old methods of transportation based upon the carrying capacities of horse and cart – and designed to supply armies unburdened by vast quantities of barbed wire, sandbags, duckboards, spare parts for aircraft and tanks and myriad other impedimenta – were inadequate to handle the demands of modern war.⁴⁰ In previous eras, except in the case of sieges, fighting had been conducted between opposing bodies of men armed with weapons they could carry to and from the battlefield. During the First World War, the principal combat role was taken by machines that ‘require[d] a constant supply of material in the form of shells and cartridges to render them of any use’.⁴¹ The bald statistics of the war effort can be converted into detailed tables and graphs, which chart the belligerents’ capacities to devour resources during the conflict. However, numbers and images alone cannot convey crucial information about the development of the material war. As successive problems of battlefield supply were identified and solved between 1914 and 1918, fresh challenges emerged. Viewing the war from the perspective of Britain’s transport experts provides a platform from which those challenges can be examined, both in terms of their impact on the British army’s ability to wage war successfully and in relation to the applicability of industrial methods to the industrial battlefield.

Second, by focusing upon a factor of the war that was ubiquitous – that is to say that the limitations of the available transport infrastructure were an inescapable reality to the military and political leaders of 1914– 18 regardless of their nationality – this book is able to move beyond the vituperative, personalized debating chamber occupied by the ‘frocks and brass hats’. Instead, it contributes to an ongoing scholarly campaign to shift attention away from the great or not-so-great individuals in military history and towards a more complete understanding of the vast organizations and complex, integrated bureaucratic systems that were constructed for the task of winning the war.⁴² In doing so, it complements studies that have analysed Britain’s mobilization of economic and human resources, and have begun to identify how civilian expertise and technologies were applied to the challenges of the industrial battlefield. This process is particularly advanced in terms of the wartime exploitation of advances in communications and myriad branches of science.⁴³ According to Martin van Creveld, the allies’ victory was significantly influenced by their more efficient management and administration of the gigantic organizational systems that underpinned the war. During what van Creveld described as ‘the age of systems’, technological advances between 1830 and 1945 ‘very largely turned war itself into a question of managing complex systems’. This process forced senior politicians, military commanders, scientists and business leaders to consider warfare through a series of interconnected, delicately balanced organizations that were highly responsive to change.⁴⁴ Throughout the First World War, allied leaders were faced with the identification and resolution of a host of conceptual, technical and administrative conundrums that could not be tackled in isolation. As will be seen, comprehending this truth proved a slow process. Until the nations (not just one nation, nor solely the military forces created by those nations) engaged in the struggle accurately identified the likely scale of effort and organization required to bring about victory, all too frequently individuals and institutions attempted to solve Rubik’s cube while only able to view one face of the puzzle.

This book catalogues some of the difficulties grappled with by Britain’s transport experts over the course of an evolving four-year conflict. It augments recent work that has analysed the British army’s ability to learn, adapt, implement and innovate between 1914 and 1918. Building upon broadly sympathetic analyses – certainly in comparison to earlier works of the ‘lions led by donkeys’ persuasion – of the BEF’s evolution in combat tactics and battlefield command published from the 1980s onwards,⁴⁵ both Jonathan Boff and Aimée Fox have demonstrated that learning in the army was a multifaceted process. New methods were developed but applied neither universally nor consistently across the British military campaigns, while knowledge itself was disseminated throughout the organization by a combination of formal structures and informal networks.⁴⁶ Their work has added a much-needed layer of sophistication to the hitherto over-simplified concept of a learning curve or learning process within the wartime army, one that is supplemented by the conclusions drawn in this book.⁴⁷

Alongside supporting the continued examination of the British army and state’s approach to industrial war, this book hopes to provide a framework for further studies on the development of the transportation systems in the war efforts of Britain’s allies and enemies. Britain fought throughout the war in a coalition and against another coalition. The individual elements of both coalitions acted independently and in concert; they responded to their enemy’s activities and sought to outwit them with carefully guarded innovations, such as poison gas and the tank. At no point in the war did one national effort exist in isolation from those of other nations: ‘there was a continuous dynamic of push and pull, measure and counter-measure, between [and within] the two sides’.⁴⁸ On the allied side alone, French and British forces – and at various points, and with varying degrees of influence, those of other allied or associated nations – coexisted on the western front and required access to sufficient warehouses, trains, railheads, road space and vehicles to maintain the fighting efficiency and health of their troops. Further afield, the gap between Russian demands for material and financial assistance, and the ability (and willingness) of its partners to fulfil them, shrank and grew as the war unfolded and assessments of Russian capabilities changed.⁴⁹ The war engaged the allies in a constant process of re-evaluation and reconfiguration of the human, material and financial commitments required to maintain and improve the coalition’s martial qualities. At the same time, national interests and the coalition’s priorities were sometimes incompatible – and between 1914 and 1918 inter-allied relations were further complicated by a plethora of linguistic and cultural factors.⁵⁰

Understanding how these crucial issues influenced the relationship between coalition partners has been central to relatively few studies of the First World War. In recent years William Philpott, Elizabeth Greenhalgh and Chris Kempshall have addressed various dimensions of the political, military, social and administrative mechanics of the Franco-British (and, in Kempshall’s case, the Franco-British-American) coalition.⁵¹ Each have illustrated how victory was ultimately achieved through coalition but also charted the ‘muddled perceptions, stifled communications, disappointed expectations, [and] paranoid reactions’ that underscored inter-allied relations.⁵² Britain’s transport experts – men used to operating within the competitive atmosphere of a capitalist economy and occupying executive positions of great influence – were not always temperamentally suited to an environment that demanded conciliation, negotiation and a sympathetic approach to harmonize inter-allied disputes. The transport systems that developed on the western front and in other theatres populated by coalition forces were never the result of British ingenuity and resources alone. Therefore, the influence of, in particular, French attitudes towards the demands and desires of Britain’s transport experts feature in much of the narrative that follows.

Third, comparatively few full-length studies of transportation’s influence over the conduct of the war have been published. Transportation, as contemporary observers understood, was ‘so interwoven with modern commerce and industry’ that it could not be separated from the history of such matters.⁵³ Yet as the experience of the First World War receded, the intricacies and minutiae of transport details were eclipsed by more glamorous and controversial debates over the British army’s strategic and tactical evolution. Two of the most enduring histories of the war, both repackaged for new audiences during the centenary, paid scant attention to the supply and movement challenges that taxed the military authorities between 1914 and 1918.⁵⁴ Recent scholarship has improved in this direction, but analyses of supply issues remain for the most part superficial and subordinated to narratives that focus upon combat operations. Paul Harris’s account of the western front’s climactic battles – during which time transport factors exerted the defining influence over the allies’ ability to pursue the retreating German army – exemplifies the trend. Harris acknowledged the ‘essential’ importance of logistics and military engineering to the BEF’s achievements between August and November 1918, but devoted a mere handful of pages to discussion of these topics.⁵⁵ As the railway journalist Edwin Pratt lamented while the war was in progress, military historians ‘have too often disregarded such matters of detail as to how the armies got [to the battlefield] and the possible effects of good or defective transport conditions, including the maintenance of supplies and communications, on the whole course of a campaign’.⁵⁶

Martin van Creveld’s pioneering work has underlined the importance of logistical support as a precursor to successful military operations,⁵⁷ but scholars of the First World War have yet to adequately address Pratt’s challenge. Van Creveld argued that logistical factors fixed the parameters of what an army could or could not achieve on the battlefield, and highlighted the dangers to modern armies of both scarcity and superabundance. At the most basic level, an army’s failure to provide a steady supply of 3,000 calories per day meant that men would ‘very soon cease to be of any use as soldiers’.⁵⁸ Conversely, the impedimenta of the modern army – guns, tanks, aeroplanes, tractors, road stone, barbed wire, sandbags, duckboards, petrol, spare parts, tools and sundry other items – created a situation in which gargantuan volumes of material occupied the capacity of road, rail and waterway networks in the vicinity of the troops. Consequently, the armies’ abilities to reduce dependency upon their lines of communications were severely restricted. In this sense, the global reach and financial superiority of the allies over the central powers were less pronounced than the figures imply. The allies could, and did, considerably out-spend and out-produce their opponents throughout the war. Yet their ability to bring their human, territorial and economic advantages to bear upon the central powers (see Table 0.1) was constrained by the efficiency with which the transport networks in France and Belgium, Russia, Macedonia and elsewhere were operated.

Table 0.1. Resource and development ratios, allies:central powers.

As yet, attempts to remedy the historical ignorance of how transportation functioned during the First World War have largely focused upon the infrastructure behind the western front.⁵⁹ The most prominent single-volume treatment of the British experience, by Colonel A. M. Henniker, appeared in 1937 as part of the official history of the conflict.⁶⁰ It remains the most thorough overview of the BEF’s evolving challenge and a vital source of organizational details. However, according to one reviewer, Transportation on the Western Front was ‘not for the casual reader in search of easy entertainment. Its subject is wanting in popular appeal, and its lack of the human touch will make it unattractive even to the serious-minded’.⁶¹ Published towards the end of the ‘battle of the memoirs’, Henniker’s text was unashamedly coloured by its author’s background and made little impact on a public debate framed by Churchill’s and Lloyd George’s livelier accounts. Henniker, a career soldier who served in a variety of transportation roles between 1914 and 1918, argued that many of the difficulties experienced by the BEF were the result of insufficient foresight on the government’s part coupled with a lack of faith in the soldiers’ abilities to discharge their duties. As summarized by Sir James Edmonds’s acerbic comment in the volume’s introduction – a clear rejoinder to Lloyd George’s attacks upon the military’s supposed incompetence – the official history’s view was that ‘what soldiers had been denied was freely accorded to a civilian. Similarly, all his ideas for expansion were accepted’.⁶² Whereas Henniker and his colleagues had been forced to make the best of inadequate resources early in the war, Lloyd George’s attempts to circumvent the military leadership by appointing civilians to senior positions within the British war effort in 1916 were accompanied by a new willingness to commit manpower and materials to the BEF’s rearward organization.

The subject of Edmonds’s statement was Sir Eric Geddes, who occupied a central role in the first scholarly assessment of the BEF’s transportation services. In British Logistics on the Western Front, Ian M. Brown argued that the BEF’s evolution in combat tactics and battlefield command was predicated on superb leadership in the fields of administration and logistics.⁶³ Administrative excellence from mid 1917 onwards, built upon foundations established by Geddes, freed the BEF’s senior commanders from having to concern themselves with questions of supply. Following Geddes’s reorganization of the transport services in France, the material requirements of the BEF’s ‘teeth’ were satisfied by an increasingly efficient ‘tail’. Reliable logistics were the conduit that permitted the allies to make effective use of their resource advantage over the central powers, fostering what Hew Strachan has described as ‘prodigality in munitions expenditure’.⁶⁴

Brown’s work was the first to thoroughly acknowledge the wide-ranging influence that an individual civilian, aside from political leaders, could have over the conduct and character of the fighting on the western front. However, Brown’s study focused predominantly upon the army’s response to the challenge of supplying the industrial battlefield rather than the interaction between civilian and military expertise. Consequently, his text – which echoed Lloyd George in its accusation that the BEF displayed ‘anti-civilian’ phobia prior to 1916 – created an impression that Geddes emerged that summer from a hitherto undervalued and largely untapped pool of talent.⁶⁵ The narrow terms of Keith Grieves’s 1989 biography of Geddes provide little material to alter that conclusion.⁶⁶ While Grieves emphasized the applicability of his subject’s business experience to the many wartime roles that Geddes occupied, the constraints of the biography’s structure conspired to limit opportunities for Geddes’s wartime endeavours to be placed in their proper context. A key aim of this book is to redress this shortcoming in the existing literature by looking beyond Geddes and considering the contributions of Britain’s transport experts more broadly. It does not attempt to minimize Geddes’s impact or suggest that he was not a pivotal figure in the history of the war, but rather argues that Geddes was far from unique as a manifestation of civil–military cooperation in the British war effort. He was not the first senior transport expert to work closely with the British army to improve the force’s supply system, nor was he the last to occupy a prominent position in the upper echelons of the military hierarchy. Instead, Geddes represents a crucial link within a chain of civil–military connections between the army, government and principal transport enterprises, which was forged long before the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914.

Charting the existence of the longstanding professional relationship between some of Britain’s largest private companies and the state – in both its political and military forms – in the decades before the First World War is the central focus of this book’s first part. In chapter one the image of the pre-war British army as an insular, conservative institution, unreceptive to outside influences, is challenged. Professional soldiers and civilian experts participated in a mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and experience, which produced officers proficient in the skills necessary for the operation of a modern army’s lines of communications and a cadre of transport professionals cognizant of an industrial army’s logistics requirements. Chapter two considers the implications of this working relationship for the army’s mobility in wartime. The ‘with France’ (WF) scheme, which placed the BEF on what became the western front in 1914, incorporated within its preparations the most thorough example of civil–military cooperation in peacetime British military history. Working in conjunction with the army, navy and each other, Britain’s privately owned, competitive railway companies propelled the BEF to the continental mainland in time to help stem the tide of the German invasion.

Part two of the book covers the war before October 1916, and charts the remarkable and unplanned expansion of the British war effort. The creation and maintenance of a mass army – to supplement and rival the conscripted forces of France and Germany respectively – coupled with the spread of hostilities far beyond the fields of France and Flanders, presented the British authorities with a series of colossal organizational challenges. Chapter three examines the multifarious contributions made to the prosecution of an increasingly global war by Britain’s transport experts. It emphasizes the depth and breadth of the civilian talents available to an imperial power like Britain, and demonstrates the restrictions placed upon British freedom of action by the priorities and requirements of its coalition partners. The latter theme recurs in chapters four and five, which comprise two case studies that demonstrate both the extent to which the army recognized and appreciated civilian expertise – prior to Lloyd George’s ‘forcing’ of Eric Geddes upon them – and the limited extent to which the complexity and interconnectedness of wartime transportation was understood within the British war effort ahead of the battle of the Somme. Chapter six outlines both the BEF’s underdeveloped conceptual awareness of transport’s function in military operations and the existence of professional suspicion towards ‘outsiders’ within GHQ during the Somme. It argues that Geddes’s transportation mission played a pivotal role in ‘show[ing] what transportation meant, and how each variation in one process of movement must inevitably have its effects on the others’.⁶⁷ The Geddes mission, and Sir Douglas Haig’s response to it, established the platform upon which the material-intensive warfare of 1917 and 1918 was fought.

The third and final part of this book discusses the implications of Haig’s decision to appoint Geddes as DGT and investigates the manner in which Britain’s transport experts directly and indirectly contributed to the prosecution of a war effort of unprecedented ferocity. In successive chapters it analyses: the material and methodological implications of the ‘civilianization’ of Britain’s war effort; the global diffusion of British expertise and the pursuit of a more harmonic, inter-allied approach to the conflict; and the impact of civilian specialists upon the industrial battlefield. These chapters argue that civilian intervention was not a panacea to the complex organizational problems posed by the First World War. Disagreements and disputes over the application of Britain’s human and material resources continued to permeate the civilian and military leadership of the war effort, but by the late summer of 1918 the transportation services behind Britain’s armed forces were ‘good enough’ to ensure the allies’ advantages could be brought to bear upon the exhausted Germans. Overall, this book contends that Britain’s ultimately successful war effort was the result of a synthesis between civilian and military expertise, which had been gathered and applied to the challenges involved in the acquisition and maintenance of a global empire during the previous century.

The civilians who operated the transport network that connected Britain to the world in peacetime became a central pillar of the British response to the conundrum of an industrial war. They joined their colleagues from the political, military, industrial and scientific communities in the task of seeking a pathway to victory on the western front and beyond. In documenting their contributions, this book addresses just a few of the myriad ways in which the ‘existing structures, organizations and modes of thinking’ in pre-war Britain influenced the direction and administration of warfare in the early twentieth century.⁶⁸ It is those existing structures, assembled collaboratively by Britain’s transport experts, the government and the military, which will be considered first.

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¹ TNA, CAB 28/2, papers I.C. 13–32, Secretary’s notes of allied conferences held at the Consulta, Rome, 5–7 Jan. 1917, p. 5.

² ‘An army of labour. Behind the lines in France’, The Times, 26 Dec. 1917, p. 8.

³ T. M. Proctor, Civilians in a World at War, 1914–1918 (New York, 2010), p. 3.

⁴ M. van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 5–8.

⁵ R. Knight, Britain against Napoleon: the Organization of Victory, 1793–1815 (London, 2014); J. Uglow, In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793–1815 (London, 2015), pp. 46–8.

⁶ T. Coleman, The Railway Navvies (London, 1981), pp. 212–20.

⁷ E. A. Pratt, British Railways and the Great War: Organisation, Efforts, Difficulties and Achievements (2 vols., London, 1921), i, p. xiii.

⁸ H. Jones, ‘The Great War: how 1914–18 changed the relationship between war and civilians’, RUSI Journal, clix (2014), 84–91, at p. 90.

⁹ Proctor, Civilians in a World at War, p. 8.

¹⁰ L. Ugolini, Civvies: Middle-Class Men on the English Home Front, 1914–18 (Manchester, 2017), p. 109.

¹¹ S. Fay, The War Office at War (London, 1937). Fay’s eldest son, Samuel Ernest, served on the western front with the 111th Railway Company.

¹² Proctor, Civilians in a World at War, p. 177.

¹³ R. MacLeod, ‘The scientists go to war: revisiting precept and practice, 1914–1919’, Journal of War and Culture Studies, ii (2009), 37–51; R. M. MacLeod, ‘The “arsenal” in the Strand: Australian chemists and the British munitions effort 1916–1919’, Annals of Science, xlvi (1989), 45–67; R. MacLeod, ‘The chemists go to war: the mobilization of civilian chemists and the British war effort, 1914–1918’, Annals of Science, l (1993), 455–81; D. C. Richter, Chemical Soldiers: British Gas Warfare in World War I (London, 1994); P. Doyle, Disputed Earth: Geology and Trench Warfare on the Western Front 1914–18 (London, 2017); G. Hartcup, The War of Invention: Scientific Developments, 1914–1918 (London, 1988).

¹⁴ M. Lindemann, ‘Civilian contractors under military law’, Parameters: US Army War College Quarterly, xxxvii (2007), 83–94.

¹⁵ E. Crawford, ‘Internationalism in science as a casualty of the First World War: relations between German and allied scientists as reflected in nominations for the Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry’, Social Science Information, xxvii (1988), 163–201.

¹⁶ D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George (2 vols., London, 1938), i. 474.

¹⁷ Lloyd George, War Memoirs, i, pp. v–vi.

¹⁸ J. Grigg, Lloyd George: War Leader, 1916–1918 (London, 2003), p. 11.

¹⁹ C. Wrigley, ‘The Ministry of Munitions: an innovatory department’, in War and the State: the Transformation of British Government, 1914–1919, ed. K. Burk (London, 1982), pp. 32–56; K. Grieves, ‘Improvising the British war effort: Eric Geddes and Lloyd George, 1915–18’, War & Society, vii (1989), 40–55; D. Crow, A Man of Push and Go: the Life of George Macaulay Booth (London, 1965).

²⁰ I. Beckett, ‘Frocks and brasshats’, in The First World War and British Military History, ed. B. Bond (Oxford, 1991), pp. 89–112. Key works within the ‘battle of the memoirs’ include W. S. Churchill, The World Crisis (6 vols., London, 1923); E. Grey, Twenty-Five Years, 1892–1916 (2 vols., London, 1925); H. H. Asquith, Memories and Reflections (2 vols., London, 1928); M. Aitken, Politicians and the War, 1914–1916 (2 vols., 1928); R. B. Haldane, Richard Burdon Haldane: an Autobiography (London, 1929); D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George (6 vols., London, 1933); D. Haig, Sir Douglas Haig’s Despatches (December 1915– April 1919), ed. J. H. Boraston (London, 1919); J. D. P. French, 1914 (London, 1919); W. R. Robertson, Soldiers and Statesmen, 1914–1918 (2 vols., London, 1926); H. Gough, The Fifth Army (London, 1931).

²¹ For a range of judgments on Haig, see B. H. Liddell Hart, Reputations, Ten Years After (1928); A. Duff Cooper, Haig (2 vols., London, 1935); J. Terraine, Douglas Haig: the Educated Soldier (1963); J. Laffin, British Butchers and Bunglers of World War One (Gloucester, 1988); G. J. De Groot, Douglas Haig, 1861–1928 (London, 1988); D. Winter, Haig’s Command: a Reassessment (1991); W. Reid, Douglas Haig: Architect of Victory (Edinburgh, 2006); J. P. Harris, Douglas Haig and the First World War (Cambridge, 2008); Haig: a Reappraisal 80 Years On, ed. B. Bond and N. Cave (Barnsley, 2009); G. Sheffield, The Chief: Douglas Haig and the British Army (London, 2011). On Lloyd George’s wartime career, see K. O. Morgan, ‘Lloyd George’s premiership: a study in “prime ministerial government”’, Hist. Jour., xiii (1970), 130–57; R. J. Q. Adams, Arms and the Wizard: Lloyd George and the Ministry of Munitions, 1915–1916 (London, 1978); J. Grigg, Lloyd George: From Peace to War, 1912–1916 (London, 1985); Grigg, War Leader; D. French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916–1918 (Oxford, 1995); G. H. Cassar, Lloyd George at War, 1916–1918 (London, 2011).

²² T. Travers, ‘The hidden army: structural problems in the British officer corps, 1900–1918’, Jour. Contemp. Hist., xvii (1982), 523–44; T. Travers, ‘A particular style of command: Haig and GHQ, 1916–18’, Journal of Strategic Studies, x (1987), 363–76; T. Travers, The Killing Ground: the British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare, 1900–1918 (London, 1990); T. Travers, ‘The evolution of British strategy and tactics on the western front in 1918: GHQ, manpower, and technology’, Jour. Military Hist., liv (1990), 173–200; T. Travers, ‘Could the tanks of 1918 have been war-winners for the British Expeditionary Force?’, Jour. Contemp. Hist., xxvii (1992), 389–406; T. Travers, How the War was Won: Command and Technology in the British Army on the Western Front, 1917–1918 (London, 1992).

²³ Travers, The Killing Ground, p. 104.

²⁴ For a critical assessment of Haig’s character, see Travers, The Killing Ground, pp. 85–118. For a more balanced account, see Sheffield, The Chief.

²⁵ Haig, Despatches, pp. 77, 351.

²⁶ TNA, ADM 116/1807, Sir Eric Geddes – private correspondence, letters from Lady Haig to Geddes, 1918.

²⁷ D. C. Coleman and C. Macleod, ‘Attitudes to new techniques: British businessmen, 1800–1950’, Economic History Review, xxxix (1986), 588–611, at p. 588.

²⁸ G. Paish, The British Railway Position (London, 1902); S. B. Saul, ‘The American impact on British industry 1895–1914’, Business History, ii (1960), 19–38; G. R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: a Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899–1914 (Oxford, 1971), pp. 54–57.

²⁹ Imperial War Museum (IWM), private papers of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, HHW 3/3/7, ‘Intelligence in peace and war: knowledge in power’, 13 Nov. 1907, p. 13.

³⁰ D. Lloyd George, Through Terror to Triumph: Speeches and Pronouncements of the Right Hon. David Lloyd George, M.P., since the Beginning of the War, ed. F. L. Stevenson (London, 1915), p. 104.

³¹ Quoted in E. Greenhalgh, Victory through Coalition: Britain and France during the First World War (Cambridge, 2005), p. 29.

³² D. Edgerton, ‘The prophet militant and industrial: the peculiarities of Correlli Barnett’, Twentieth Century British History, ii (1991), 360–79, at p. 366.

³³ C. Barnett, The Audit of War: the Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (London, 1986).

³⁴ The idea of a spread of ‘rural romanticism’ among the British upper classes is developed further in M. J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (2nd edn., Cambridge, 2004).

³⁵ D. Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 1.

³⁶ D. Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: a Twentieth-Century History (London, 2018), p. 47.

³⁷ A. D. Chandler, ‘The railroads: pioneers in modern corporate management’, Business History Review, xxxix (1965), 16–40; M. Campbell-Kelly, ‘The Railway Clearing House and Victorian data processing’, in Information Acumen: the Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business, ed. L. Bud-Frierman (London, 1994), pp. 51–74.

³⁸ L. Shaw-Taylor and X. You, ‘The development of the railway network in Britain 1825– 1911’, The Online Historical Atlas of Transport, Urbanization and Economic Development in England and Wales c.1680–1911 (2018), p. 26 <https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/transport/onlineatlas/railways.pdf> [accessed 19 July 2018].

³⁹ A. M. Henniker, History of the Great War: Transportation on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (London, 1937), p. 157.

⁴⁰ J. Thompson, The Lifeblood of War: Logistics in Armed Conflict (Oxford, 1991), pp. 40– 41; Van Creveld, Supplying War, p. 141.

⁴¹ R. Bonham-Smith, ‘Railway transport arrangements in France’, Royal United Services Institution. Journal, lxi (1916), 47–62, at p. 47.

⁴² An example of this approach, applied to the Second World War, is P. Kennedy, Engineers of Victory: the Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (London, 2013).

⁴³ See the texts listed above in n. 14, and B. N. Hall, ‘The “life-blood” of command? The British army, communications and the telephone, 1877–1914’, War & Society, xxvii (2008), 43–65; B. N. Hall, ‘Technological adaptation in a global conflict: the British army and communications beyond the western front, 1914–1918’, Jour. Military Hist., lxxviii (2014), 37–71; B. N. Hall, Communications and British Operations on the Western Front, 1914– 1918 (Cambridge, 2017); E. Bruton and G. Gooday, ‘Listening in combat – surveillance technologies beyond the visual in the First World War’, History and Technology, xxxii (2016), 213–26.

⁴⁴ M. van Creveld, Technology and War: from 2000 B.C. to the Present (New York, 1991), p. 161.

⁴⁵ See, e.g., S. Bidwell and D. Graham, Fire-Power: British Army Weapons and Theories of War, 1904–1945 (Barnsley, 2004); P. Griffith, Battle Tactics on the Western Front: the British Army’s Art of Attack, 1916–18 (New Haven, Conn., 1994); J. B. A. Bailey, The First World War and the Birth of the Modern Style of Warfare (Camberley, 1996); G. Sheffield, Forgotten Victory. The First World War: Myths and Realities (London, 2001); A. Simpson, Directing Operations: British Corps Command on the Western Front, 1914–18 (Stroud, 2006).

⁴⁶ J. Boff, Winning and Losing on the Western Front: the British Third Army and the Defeat of Germany in 1918 (Cambridge, 2012); A. Fox, Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2017).

⁴⁷ For a synthesis of the existing literature and a deconstruction of the learning curve thesis’s limitations, see Boff, Winning and Losing, pp. 11–12, 247–9; Hall, Communications and British Operations, pp. 3–5.

⁴⁸ J. Boff, Haig’s Enemy: Crown Prince Rupprecht and Germany’s War on the Western Front (Oxford, 2018), p. 5.

⁴⁹ K. Neilson, Strategy and Supply: the Anglo-Russian Alliance, 1914–17 (London, 1984).

⁵⁰ G. Sheffield, ‘“Not the same as friendship”: the British empire and coalition warfare in the era of the First World War’, in Entangling Alliances: Coalition Warfare in the Twentieth Century, ed. P. Dennis and J. Grey (Canberra, 2005), pp. 38–52.

⁵¹ W. Philpott, Anglo-French Relations and Strategy on the Western Front, 1914–18 (Basingstoke, 1996); Greenhalgh, Victory through Coalition; C. Kempshall, British, French and American Relations on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (London, 2018). On the complexities of coalition warfare more broadly, see Coalition Warfare: an Uneasy Accord, ed. K. Neilson and R. A. Prete (Waterloo, ON, 1983); S. Bidwell and D. Graham, Coalitions, Politicians and Generals: Some Aspects of Command in Two World Wars (London, 1993); Britain and France in Two World Wars: Truth, Myth and Memory, ed. R. Tombs and E. Chabal (London, 2013).

⁵² Richard E. Neustadt, quoted in Greenhalgh, Victory through Coalition, pp. 1–2.

⁵³ C. Travis, ‘The science of railroading: a further plea for the establishment of a transport institute’, Great Central Railway Journal, xiii (1917), 40–2, at p. 40.

⁵⁴ B. H. Liddell Hart, The Real War: 1914–1918 (London, 1930); A. J. P. Taylor, The First World War: an Illustrated History (London, 1963).

⁵⁵ J. P. Harris, Amiens to the Armistice: the BEF in the Hundred Days’ Campaign, 8 August–11 November 1918 (London, 1998), pp. 54–5, 218.

⁵⁶ E. A. Pratt, The Rise of Rail Power in War and Conquest, 1833–1914 (London, 1916), p. vii.

⁵⁷ Van Creveld, Supplying War.

⁵⁸ Van Creveld, Supplying War, p. 1.

⁵⁹ For exceptions to this trend, see L. J. Hall, The Inland Water Transport in Mesopotamia (London, 1921); K. Roy, ‘From defeat to victory: logistics of the campaign in Mesopotamia, 1914–1918’, First World War Studies, i (2010), 35–55; K. C. Ulrichsen, The Logistics and Politics of the British Campaigns in the Middle East, 1914–22 (Basingstoke, 2011). Further material, albeit of uneven coverage, can be obtained from the relevant sections in R. H. Beadon, The Royal Army Service Corps: a History of Transport and Supply in the British Army (2 vols., Cambridge, 1931), ii; History of the Corps of Royal Engineers, ed. H. L. Pritchard (11 vols., Chatham, 1952), vi; W. J. K. Davies, Light Railways of the First World War: a History of Tactical Rail Communications on the British Fronts, 1914–18 (Newton Abbot, 1967).

⁶⁰ Henniker, History of the Great War.

⁶¹ W. J. Wilgus, ‘Review of transportation on the western front, 1914–1918. Compiled by Colonel A. M. Henniker’, American Historical Review, xliv (1939), 386–8, at p. 386. Wilgus was far from an uninterested observer of wartime transportation. He had served on the headquarters staff of the American Expeditionary Force’s transportation service in France, and authored a volume on America’s transportation effort that ‘bristle[d] with dry and dusty figures and statistics’. See W. J. Wilgus, Transporting the A.E.F. in Western Europe, 1917–1919 (New York, 1931), p. xxv.

⁶² Edmonds’ introduction in Henniker, History of the Great War, p. xxii.

⁶³ I. M. Brown, British Logistics on the Western Front, 1914–1919 (London, 1998).

⁶⁴ H. Strachan, The First World War: To Arms (Oxford, 2001), p. 999.

⁶⁵ Brown, British Logistics, p. 89.

⁶⁶ K. Grieves, Sir Eric Geddes: Business and Government in War and Peace (Manchester, 1989).

⁶⁷ M. G. Taylor, ‘Land transportation in the late war’, Royal United Services Institution. Journal, lxvi (1921), 699–722, at p. 705. Emphasis in original.

⁶⁸ A. S. Fell and J. Meyer, ‘Introduction: untold legacies of the First World War in Britain’, War & Society, xxxiv (2015), 85–9, at p. 87.