On a crisp morning in December 1905, a British general by the name of James Grierson and a French major by the name of Victor Huguet had what both later claimed was a chance encounter while horseback riding in London's Hyde Park. Grierson, however, happened to be the British War Office's director of operations and a passionate Francophile, while Huguet happened to be the French military attaché in London. Whether accidental or not, that encounter was followed by another less accidental meeting the following day, and a few weeks later by the inauguration of informal but officially sanctioned Anglo-French “staff conversations” that would continue off and on until the outbreak of World War I in August 1914.

Those conversations, and their contribution to Britain's subsequent decision to participate in a great power conflict on the European continent for the first time since the defeat of Napoleon a century earlier, continue to fascinate diplomatic and military historians. Most agree that, whatever their direct impact on that decision, the conversations themselves reflected a fundamental transformation of British foreign policy, the culmination of more than a decade of mounting concern about the British Empire's continued security and prosperity and the strategic arrangements needed to sustain them.