A Counsel of Despair: British Strategy and War Aims,1917–18

Abstract

In 1917, after a year of disasters and disappointments, the guiding premises upon which Britain's war policy was founded shifted. The war, in the future, would no longer be directed toward achieving victory, which few believed possible, but toward putting Britain in the best possible position to survive an inconclusive war, perhaps a defeat. The movement to this new vision was associated with the change of government, after December 1916, with the movement to new ways of making war policy, and with changes in personnel in the army. This new war policy, in turn, spawned component policies which proved largely irrelevant to the actual course of the war but which were of enormous consequence.