ROY A. PRETE. Strategy and Command: The Anglo-French Coalition on the Western Front, 1914. Ithaca, N.Y.: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2009. Pp. xvii, 299. $75.00

Abstract

Roy A. Prete's book is the first of three volumes he promises on the evolution of the Anglo-French Coalition in the first half of World War I. It is written within the now well-established paradigm that the essential starting point for an understanding of the strategies of the belligerents during that war is to recognize that it was a war fought between two competing coalitions. Coalitions are drawn together by the threat of a common enemy. But they can crumble if the agendas of their members diverge too widely. If a coalition is to survive and prosper, the parties involved usually have to compromise. Prete focuses on two issues: in what ways did British and French grand strategies clash; and how, at the level of the major field commanders, Field Marshal Sir John French and Marshal Joseph Joffre, did the two partners hammer out compromises that worked to hold the coalition together? He relates in some detail the development of the prewar plans that the two General Staffs produced to ensure that the British army arrived in France in time for the opening battles. But, as he shows, these plans had two major lacunae. They did not establish a clear structure to ensure unity of command between the two armies in the field, and they did not provide for the defence of Belgium. These became bones of contention because, although the British and French were equally determined to defeat Germany, they did not agree on how they should go about it. To French consternation, not only were the British slow to mobilize their army in 1914, but they also briefly considered lending direct assistance to Belgium rather than sending the army to France. Furthermore, even having taken that decision to go directly to the aid of France, the orders that Lord Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for War, gave to Sir John French on August 9 demonstrated that they were intent on fighting the war on limited liability principles. The small regular British army would lend the French moral support, but Sir John was ordered that at all costs he must not hazard it. Victory, according to Kitchener's formula, would come when the French and Russian armies had fought the Germans to a standstill, and the British could then step in to win the peace.