I'd love to know what lies the Army told those volunteering to join it, or what lies and propaganda they forced the press to publish. (Please do not witter on about the "Over by Christmas" thing as I think we now know, because it can be clearly demonstrated, that that had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with either the Government or those who had anything to do with the Army)

Also can we now put this shell scandal thing to bed as well:

1: The British Army that entered the war in 1914 was trained in "fire-and-manoeuvre" and the field artillery that supported it was equipped accordingly. They did not "take-on" strong points and "fortressed" areas, they by-passed them and isolated them.

2: From the outset of the Great War, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) suffered from a general lack of artillery ordnance; both guns and ammunition. As regards ammunition, the problem was that in 1914 there was not any stock at all of high explosive shells (H.E.) in the British arsenals. Shrapnel shells (e.g. holding 375 balls - weighing 11 ounces - per 18-pounder shell) had served the British well in the Boer War, and it was assumed that it would be the ordnance of choice for future wars.

3: While the early defensive battles, i.e. battles where you are firing at formations of troops and cavalry advancing against you, seemed to support established military thought, later offensive battles fought by the British highlighted short comings:

-   The ineffectiveness of shrapnel against barbed wire
-   The ineffectiveness of shrapnel against even modest fortifications.

4: This spawned a scramble to rectify the matter by the production of large numbers of H.E. shells. This culminated in the political hiatus of the Shell Scandal of 1915 in which both Lloyd George and Kitchener figured prominently. (It was left to the former, now Minister of Munitions, to sort it out best he could. To his credit great improvements were made, but it was not until late 1916 that the overall shell supply problem was largely resolved).

5: Major problems that had to be overcome:
- Lack of man power caused by the massive enrollment of volunteers into the Army (Volunteers, Christmas, volunteers in their tens of thousands, in droves, not lied to, not coerced, not conscripted). 6,000 Belgian refugees, wounded ex-soldiers and 52,000 women by July 1916 plugged the labour gap and shell production hit 70,000,000 shells per annum.

- The need to rush into mass production caused problems right across the board and to ensure that material reached the troops at the front quality control was sacrificed on the orders of Lloyd George. The worst was the poor quality and inherently dangerous design of the British 'Fuse, Graze, No. 100' which went from initial design to massed production in 10 days in late 1914, these technical problems were not resolved until after the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

- In 1917, increasing numbers of a superior French percussion fuse known by the British as the 'Fuse, Direct Action, No. 106' were procured. This fuse had 5 separate safety devices and proved to be totally safe. It also had the advantages of exploding closer to the surface of the ground, giving a much more effective result: The British 'Graze, No 100' fuse had a tendency to only explode when it had deeply penetrated the ground, much diminishing its destructive effect.

(Source: Dr David Payne, Historian Western Front Association - Paper dated 17th October 2008)

The British did learn from their mistakes as they went along, they did rise to tackle the technical problems they encountered and it was the British military establishment that devised the method of "all arms combined and co-ordinated attacks" that broke the stalemate of the Western Front, NOT the French, NOT the Germans, NOT the Americans.

By the way - your examples that you put forward to argue your case Christmas - they are the personal opinions of those putting forward their view as they saw it, as they experienced it as they felt it, they are not liars or dissemblers and their stated opinions do not outweigh those of their contemporaries who experiencing exactly the same things voice contradictory opinions - but at the end of the day those opinions in themselves do not constitute what is the fact of the matter - that is determined by the end result of actions fought and taken.

I rather liked the comment by the anonymous GUEST about the writings of the likes of Owen and Sassoon being more relevant than those of any historian writing after the fact. Which means of course that if that is correct and applied universally then the opinions of the German Generals Hindenburg and Von Kuhl about battles such as the Somme and Passchendaele written at the time were correct and that the opinions of those such as Lloyd George written in the 1930s orthodoxy of "mud, blood and futility" can rightly be dismissed as myth.