GUEST with regard to your post of 24 Nov 15 - 12:54 PM

The first bit and the "made up" quote from Sheffield - Well maybe it wasn't made up maybe some "man-in-the-street" in the city of Sheffield said it but certainly not Dr Gary Sheffield the historian whose specialty is the study of the First World War - Keith A has quite comprehensively just blown that little invention of yours out of the water.

Let us therefore have a look at rest of your post.

"If Keith A of Hertford repeats his mantra enough times, he thinks others might believe him. The evidence, fields of the fucking things, says otherwise. The hours of carving on thousands of war memorials say otherwise. The evocative words "lest we forget" says otherwise."

What Mantra? I recall he listed three points that represented the current prevailing historical opinion with respect to Great Britain's involvement and prosecution of the First World War, he put those points up for discussion and was attacked for doing so on the basis that those points of view had been formulated by Keith A himself - not really his fault that his moronic attackers could not read and comprehend basic English. The "evidence" you are emotively trying to refer to are the graves, which are to be used as the metric for judging the competence of those who led the British Army? If that is the case then please explain why those who commanded the French and German Armies do not feature? After all of the three main protagonists fighting on the Western Front the British suffered the fewest killed and wounded, was that down to the poor quality of their leaders?

"Incompetent military thinking goes back as long as you can think."

Hate to burst your bubble but:

"Incompetent thinking in all walks of life, both in peace and in war goes back as long as you can think."

Only trouble is that looking back through those ages in terms of military thinking Great Britain's Army and more importantly her Navy did rather well when asked to act in defence of the realm.

When it comes to incompetence and waste related to Government Ministries and their "budgets", why highlight the MOD (After all their "Budget" is tiny compared to those of the real wastrels) C'mon GUEST tell us about the billions wasted in Health, Welfare and Education. On Coroner Inquests I don't think our hospitals come out too well there especially the Stafford Hospital - tell us the number of deaths deemed to be excessive due to lack of care over a two year period - IIRC it was roughly three times our entire Afghan fatalities which were spread over 13 years of combat - Incompetence you prat with those figures it meant that you were safer on foot patrol in Sangin District of Helmand Province in Afghanistan in 2007 than you would have been if you were admitted to that hospital's A&E Department the same year.

"So... Why, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, should anyone believe that military top brass just happened to become competent for four years out of a few hundred? Especially four years when all over Europe, a whole generation were butchered and damned, to coin the phrase."

What evidence to the contrary? The achievements and innovations introduced by the British in those four years were astounding considering the starting points for each of the main 1914 combatant nations. And if victory is any metric by which to judge military success and most people who DO KNOW about such things would say that that is an important, if not THE most important, marker then over those hundreds of years you were wittering on about earlier on, then we have done far, far better than many we have had to come up against - and believe me GUEST there IS overwhelming evidence of that.