I died in hell – They called it Passchendaele

I want to be careful what I say, yet I don’t think it will have any effect. There are a bout a dozen Machine Gunners among you – I don’t want you to be hurt at what I am going to say, but at the same time if you are not hurt I don’t think we shall get any better. If your resentment has the effect of driving it home, then I shall not mind a bit. In fact anyhow I shall not mind.

oh shit he's gonna rip them a new one

Oh General Maxse!

31/8/18 My dear Maxse, Many thanks for your tracts, which I have read with interest. Yes, I think they supply a long felt want, and will be useful to those want to learn, of course, the moment is not very propitious for training propaganda, as the immediate question is the amount of MG fire which is coming from the quarry in U 13.d.35.70.!

Lieutenant-General Charles Fergusson to the Inspector General of Training Lieutenant-General Ivor Maxse on receiving some leaflets on training during the Battle of the Scarpe.

Captain Crofton Sankey (what a fuckin English name) was one of these guys. A captain in the Royal Engineers and expert on Fortifications Sankey wrote a short article in a 1909 edition of the Royal Engineers Journal.

Looking at the Russo-Japanese War he picks up on the exact trends that defined WW1 five years later.

Pretty spot on there Crofton my old lad. So what'll happen then?

Yep that's pretty much how it goes.

Industrialised more than civilised, but otherwise yeah that's shockingly prescient.

And then you draw completely the wrong conclusion from it all. Spot on with how it will change the battlefield but completely wrong with what that means for war more broadly.

I send you a very interesting photograph showing how the concrete dam across the Yser was shot away by a 15" Howitzer. It is pretty accurate shooting and it may interest your friends of the War Cabinet. Hugh Trenchard to Frederick Maurice - 2/11/17.

is that so?

thank you sir arthur hort

the english aristocracy is a joke

My old Canadian overlord rather tries me with his ‘buck’ and eye wash [bullshit]. I don’t care about Colonials. They may be better and wiser than we, but they are very wearing. Their ways are not our ways. Their views are not our views. Their language is not our language. Their whole outlook upon life is different to ours. I suppose that it is of no use enlarging upon all this, for it is clear that we have got to put up with them and stroke them and say what fine fellows they are until the end of time. They respond to flattery and nothing else. They are like children in that way and the more you are ’all over them’, the happier they are. Old Mitchell is a good old fellow, but he is terribly Canadian.

Captain Cuthbert Headlam to his wife Beatrice, 13/10/16

Lt Col Charles Mitchell for reference.