Ever since the publication of their seminal work Command on the Western Front (Oxford, 1992), each new book on the Great War by Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson has been eagerly awaited by scholars and general readers alike. While their latest account of the 1916 Battle of the Somme inevitably crosses some of the same ground as their highly acclaimed study of the First World War career of General Sir Henry Rawlinson, it fully lives up to expectations in several respects. The Somme bears all the hallmarks of earlier books by Prior and Wilson: crisp writing, cogently presented arguments, lengthy and detailed research, impressive scholarship, and easy mastery of a mass of published and unpublished sources. As in their Passchendaele: The Untold Story (New Haven, CT, 1996), they focus their attention primarily, though not exclusively, on the conduct of operations by the British commander in chief, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, and by the principal army commanders involved—in this case Rawlinson (Fourth Army) and Sir Hubert Gough (Reserve or Fifth Army). However, the book also contains much excellent analysis of the realities of operations “at the sharp end,” not least the impact of battle on individual formations. One of the most interesting and original chapters in The Somme is that dealing with the experience of the British First Division from 11 July to 28 September 1916. In this eighty-day span, the First Division suffered 10,458 casualties (almost 100 percent of its infantry strength) without actually taking part in any of the major set-piece assaults launched by the British during the period in question. Despite such losses, the First Division, like many others, not only survived the bloody ordeal of the Somme but still emerged as an effective fighting unit. The explanation, Prior and Wilson contend, lay not in superior training or skill in maneuvre warfare but rather in what Winston Churchill called the “wonderful tenacity” of the British infantry.

The politicians, particularly the members of the civilian War Committee, do not escape Prior and Wilson's censure and are deemed by the authors to bear a considerable share of the overall responsibility for both the inception and the continuation of the offensive. In the authors’ own words, the pattern of “assertion and inaction—of acerbic criticism and an inability to direct—would dog the War Committee's dealings with the high command from the first day of the Battle of the Somme until the last” (14). Prior and Wilson's main criticisms are, nonetheless, leveled throughout at Haig and his principal subordinates, who, in their view, were repeatedly deficient in strategic insight, tactical understanding, and organization. Some Corps commanders—such as Sir William Pulteney Pulteney (III Corps), Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston (VIII Corps), and Sir Henry Horne (XV Corps)—are similarly castigated for poor decision making. To be fair, a handful of divisional and brigade commanders, including Sir Harold Walker (First Australian Division), H. H. Tudor (Ninth Division), Ivor Maxse (Eighteenth Division), H. W. Higginson (Fifty-Third Brigade), and Thomas Shoubridge (Fifty-Fourth Brigade), are credited with tactical flair and imagination, yet most brigadier generals and divisional commanders remain shadowy figures at best in this study. Prior and Wilson indirectly justify this collective omission by observing that “it was often not the quality of the brigade or divisional command that led to success but the position in which their troops were placed by decisions made elsewhere.” If fire support was adequate, a well-trained division could capture its objective. “If such support was absent a Maxse, Tudor, or Walker could make no difference whatever” (304). Extending Prior and Wilson's own logic, one might therefore feel that there is less excuse for their relative neglect of key chiefs of staff in this campaign, especially Archie Montgomery (Fourth Army) and Neill Malcolm (Reserve/Fifth Army).

Most First World War scholars would find it hard to disagree with Prior and Wilson's central criticisms of the British high command on the Somme. There were fatal contradictions, faulty assumptions, and misunderstandings between Haig and Rawlinson in the planning for the initial assault on 1 July 1916. As the offensive wore on, Haig consistently failed to exercise sufficient “grip” on his subordinates, to coordinate their actions, or to control their tendency to persist in small-scale, isolated, and narrow-front attacks. In addition, Haig, Rawlinson, and Gough never really seemed to grasp the obvious lessons of the successes on 14 July and 25 September with regard to the formidable weight of artillery fire that had been concentrated on every yard of enemy trench attacked. And yet, however accurate these observations may be, the almost unrelieved litany of criticism in this book (as, indeed, in Passchendaele: The Untold Story) gives the study an unnecessarily negative and sour tone. In their concluding reflections on the Somme, the authors themselves totally fail to mention the positive lessons that Haig and general headquarters (GHQ) not only drew from the campaign but acted on during the winter of 1916–17. There is no mention, for instance, of the appointment of Arthur Solly-Flood to establish and head a Training Directorate at GHQ; of the vital reorganization of the infantry platoon in early 1917; of the widespread dissemination of the lessons of the Somme, and the standardization of “good practice” in operational procedures through the SS series of instructional and training pamphlets; of the important measures of artillery reorganization introduced by Haig's chief artillery advisor, Lieutenant General Sir Noel “Curly” Birch; or of the improvements in British logistics wrought by Eric Geddes as director general of transportation. In these respects, Gary Sheffield's The Somme (London, 2003) presents a much more balanced picture. One has a doubly uncomfortable feeling that the Prior and Wilson approach to the study of the Great War, with its recurrent emphasis on the cardinal importance of artillery fire as an almost universal solution to all tactical problems, is now just a trifle formulaic and that, in their largely negative view of the British high command, they are not only at variance with the majority of “revisionist” historians in Britain but are in danger of becoming the scholarly community's equivalent of “grumpy old men.”