"What was the issue was not the combatativeness of the British soldier but the still colonial outlook of their commanders, who expected decisive results for a comparatively small outlay of force and shrank from casualties. French generals, from a different tradition, expected large casualties, which their soldiers still seemed ready to suffer with patriotic fatalism. The British soldier, regular, Territorial, wartime volunteer, was learning a similar abnegation, while their leaders were coming to accept that operations in the new conditions of trench warfare could succeed only with the most methodical preparation. The qualities of dashing improvisation that had brought victory in mountain and desert for a hundred years would not serve in France."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Chapter 6, “Stalemate” (pp. 212-213)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Keegan
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
John Keegan
Sir John Desmond Patrick Keegan OBE FRSL (15 May 1934 – 2 August 2012) was an English military historian and journalist.
28 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by John Keegan →
Related Quotes
"The First World War inaugurated the manufacture of mass deaths that the Second brought to a pitiless consummation."
"War’s rancours are quick to bite and slow to heal."
"Within fifteen years of the war’s end, totalitarianism, a new word for a system that rejected the liberalism and cons…"
"It was broadly true that all European royalty were cousins; even the Habsburgs of Austria, most imperious of sovereig…"
"The tragedy of the diplomatic crisis that preceded the outbreak of the fighting in August 1914, which was to swell in…"
"All European armies in 1904 had long-laid military plans, notable in most cases for their inflexibility. None was int…"
"The effect exerted by paper plans on the unfolding of events must never be exaggerated. Plans do not determine outcom…"
"Time, in all crises, is usually the ingredient missing to make a solution. It is best supplied by an agreement on a p…"
"The opening months of the First World War marked the termination of two hundred years of a style of infantry fighting…"
"The First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict. Unnecessary because the train of events that led to its ou…"