To the western front: British war plans and the ‘military entente’ with France before the first world war

Abstract

In November 1914 the Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence produced a ‘Report on the Opening of the War’. In his notes towards this Report, Julian Corbett maintained that “our arrangements with the French Naval and Military Staff … fettered our freedom of action”, with the result that “our Army … became committed as an integral part of the allied line and we had to forego all the advantages of operating independently on a line of our own and at our own selected moment, in order to break into the German scheme after it had developed”.