First Published in 1981. The essays collected together in this volume deal, for the most part, with the two themes which have seemed to the author the most significant and the most intriguing in the passage made by the military in Britain from the Victorian age to World War. The major theme is that of the transition of military strategy and policy from a preoccupation with the limited, though by no means undemanding, requirements of a sprawling empire in an age of diplomatic self-sufficiency to the enormous burdens of continental involvement in Europe against Germany, as the mass army replaced the capital fleet in the world's military pecking order.

Chapter 1 'The Bolt from the Blue'; Chapter 2 Attitudes to War in Late Victorian and Edwardian England; Chapter 3 Great Britain and the Defence of Canada, 1896-1914; Chapter 4 Sir George Clarke's Career at the Committee of Imperial Defence, 1904-1907; Chapter 5 Mr Haldane's Army:Military Organization and Foreign Policy in England, 1906-7; Chapter 6 The War Office and the Curragh Incident; Chapter 7 Soldiers, Strategy and War Aims in Britain, 1914-1918; Chapter 8 The Maurice Case;

John Gooch Lecturer in History University of Lancaster