Introduction

The vision of the battlefield we have formed over the past century is in large part a legacy of the reflections of those who directed the war. Both in general headquarters and in ministries of state, command decisions were taken, primarily on three levels: on grand strategy, on the unfolding of particular military and naval campaigns, and on logistical problems, covering both manpower and material. The balance between civilian and military authority in these decisive areas of the waging of war was unstable. And this shifting political terrain is one on which the major actors had much to say in the interwar period. Blaming the other side was an unavoidable part of the unfolding military history of the war. Since generals and politicians were responsible for the way the war was waged, the subject of leadership and command in the historiography of the Great War must be treated as requiring comment on both the military history of the war per se and the structure of civil–military relations during the conflict.

We can distinguish three periods of historical debate in this field. First, between the two world wars, there was a ‘heroic’ period, during which battle was conceived generally in nineteenth-century terms. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, there was increased interest in questions of command under the pressures of industrialized war. Finally, in the 1980s and 1990s, there ensued a third period, one in which there was much greater division of opinion and contested interpretations.