During the first week of August1914, German armies invaded Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Great Britain, together with the other Great Powers of Russia, Austra-Hungary, France and Germany, was a guarantor of Belgian neutrality and it was the cynical infringement of Belgium neutrality by Imperial Germany which forced Britain into the war.
A British Expeditionary Force of two Infantry and one Cavalry corps with all supporting arms, under the command of Sir John French, was sent to France. Its one hundred thousand men formed a highly-trained extension on the left of the France line.
The early German assaults were highly successful. The Allies were forced back towards Paris and it was not until September that the French brought the attack to a halt. In October, the British went north, to where the front was still fluid. In the bitter fighting which followed, as the German command tried to smash through to the Channel ports, the British Expeditionary Force was virtually destroyed.
The Great War of 1914 – 1918 was a World War, a long and bitter struggle in which casualties were enormously high. Trench warfare was not confined to France and Flanders and artillery – the scourge of the infantry – killed by day and by night.
Towards the end of 1915, Sir Douglas Haig succeeded Sir John French as Commander-in-Chief of the British Army. In the political field, Asquith – whose war leadership was generally regarded as being akin to that of the gentleman amateur who found the whole business very tiresome – was replaced as Prime Minister by a fiery and determined professional politician, David Lloyd George.
Ahead lay the 1916 Battle of the Somme, the 1917 Battle of Ypres – generally known as Passchendaele – and the ‘Hundred Days’ of 1918.
By November 1918, Sir Douglas Haig commanded some two million men in the field, the greatest number ever under the control of a single commander in the history of the British Army.
