‘Total war’ in Britain during 1914–18 meant total war for everyone, not just men and women, but children too. The phrase describes the way war permeated every aspect of daily life on the home front, and this included both the physical and mental mobilisation of children. Children were not shielded from the war but were encouraged and expected to ‘do their bit’ for the war effort through acts of both physical participation and mental commitment. Their mobilisation was achieved through a variety of state, commercial and voluntary means, and encompassed most aspects of their daily lives from their school experience and youth group activities to their leisure time through reading and play.1

The First World War was a period of development and experimentation in propaganda and official relations with the press. Policies and organisations were created ad hoc throughout the war. With each stage, however, both operations and content stressed patriotism and voluntary participation as key ideals. Older accounts of propaganda and press coverage emphasise the exploitation of atrocity stories and demonisation of enemies to suggest primarily negative manipulation.3 More recent scholarship increasingly stresses the frequency of positive and inclusive messages.4 It largely recognises that the negative picture of propaganda as a deceptive, dishonest, secretive and cynical assault on public understanding does not reflect wartime propaganda activity so much as a post-war turn against the war’s validity that left some blaming propaganda for their own previous endorsement. Moreover, the greater excesses in the war that followed settled its reputation.

In 1815 Napoleon made a last desperate attempt to persuade Europe to accept him rather than the Bourbons as ruler of France. When Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia agreed to invade France to remove him he chose the last possible moment to attack the British and Prussians in Belgium, hoping to separate them and capture Brussels without fighting or defeat each in turn. He achieved sufficient surprise to come close to success on 16 June, but his plans required a smoother-running machine than his army provided: poor staff-work, distrust, weary cynicism and some treachery undermined French efforts and the encounters at Quatre Bras and Ligny ended in a draw and a narrow victory. On 17 June Napoleon failed to crush Wellington before the weather intervened to ruin his pursuit. Wellington withdrew his army skilfully to a chosen position where Blücher promised to join him. Napoleon underestimated the dogged determination of his enemies to support each other and the Prussians outmarched Grouchy to arrive in time to transform Wellington’s well-organised, stubborn and brave defence at Waterloo into a crushing victory. After this catastrophic defeat Napoleon had again to abdicate.

Prior to the war, as a supply industry, shipbuilders were acutely aware of periodic booms and slumps in demand. Shipping capacity cannot easily be adjusted to changes in demand, and fluctuations in world trade (to which shipbuilding is highly vulnerable) are immediately reflected in the level of freight rates, and consequent laying up of ships when rates prove unremunerative. In the short term, war at least promised some consistency of demand and an expectation that demand would probably increase as the war was prosecuted. This, to an extent, compensated for the loss of export markets in this sector, but did not apply to the mercantile-only yards which were not as well equipped as the larger mixed naval and merchant establishments. The latter’s share of warship contracts after the Naval Defence Act of 1889 grew in the naval race with imperial Germany. In the period 1901–13 the private sector built around 60 per cent of warships, and from 1902 all main engines for the Royal Navy and for foreign account. The rest were constructed in government-controlled and administered Royal Dockyards, two of which, Portsmouth and Plymouth, built battleships.1 The latter, however, did not have to bear contractions in demand, as the private shipbuilders did.2

When David Lloyd George bought a St Bernard puppy, Punch showed his new pet about to rescue him from an avalanche of papers dealing with pressing political issues [see Fig. 30.1]. Some were international – the crises in Poland and in Mesopotamia and the menace of Bolshevism – but most were domestic – the coal dispute, soaring prices, strikes, direct action and the cost of living. Lloyd George was scratching his head, and he had reason to feel overwhelmed by his post-war problems. The negotiations at Versailles were difficult, but the challenges at home were considerable: demobilisation of troops and the war economy, social tensions caused by inflation and militant trade unions, political difficulties with the war debt, the implications of a wider franchise, and ending the war of independence in Ireland.

In 1915 J. Albert Frost wondered whether his book The Shire Horse in Peace and War was timely. He told how ‘the War horse of the olden days became the Old English Cart Horse’.1 Shire mares and geldings hauled heavy guns in France but, he apologetically concluded, ‘What is the good of talking about such a peaceful occupation as that of agriculture while the nation is fighting for its very existence’.2 Horsemen, stockmen and ploughmen with knowledge of animal power, tillage methods, soils, climate, seeds and traditional customs were still connected to immemorial cultures. A lifetime spent interviewing the old rural community in East Anglia and analysing their use of farm tools and domestic equipment, led George Ewart Evans to conclude that the ‘last carriers’ of abundant lore were born in the years 1885–95.3

On the eve of the outbreak of war in August 1914, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was more socially and politically divided than it had been at any other stage since its inception in 1800. Militant campaigns for workers’ rights and female suffrage, combined with an escalating crisis over Irish home rule, directly threatened the ability of the Liberal government to rule effectively and were undermining social cohesion.1 The formation, arming and drilling of paramilitary organisations in Ireland in the eighteen months before the war had generated particularly intractable tensions between state and society and given rise to a threat of civil war that had no had parallel elsewhere in Western Europe.2 These deep-seated divisions in British and Irish society meant that the support of significant swathes of the population, and Irish nationalists in particular, could not be taken for granted when Britain intervened in the European conflagration. The process of mobilising the state for war was further complicated by the fact that Britain, alone among the belligerents, could not rely on conscription to expand its comparatively small peacetime army and would have to encourage men to freely volunteer for military service.

The maritime aspects of the wars of the French Revolution and Empire were asymmetric, between a British seapower empire of oceanic connectivity and a French dominated European system that focussed on territorial control and economic restriction. The inclusive British political system privileged naval strength, the defence of trade, and sea control. This position was based on battle fleet dominance, which remained undefeated across two decades. British identity became ever more closely linked to naval success as Nelson, the Nile and Trafalgar added new names to national culture. This sustained long-term funding for major infrastructure projects, new ships, and high levels of skilled manpower. Superior ships and men enabled the Royal Navy to defeat naval rivals, and attacks on commercial shipping by national warships and privateers. Naval dominance sustained a hard-line economic war that broke the Russian economy, and seriously damaged that of France, while the City of London and the British economy more generally continued to support the national war effort through extensive capital loans, and private measures, such as those of Lloyds Patriotic Fund. Seapower could not defeat Napoleon, it supported a grand alliance that would achieve that aim. By 1815 Britain had become a global seapower empire of unrivalled wealth and influence.

Between 1808 and 1814 Spain and Portugal were devastated by the single most destructive episode of the Napoleonic Wars, namely the so-called Peninsular War. Originating in a foolhardy attempt on the part of Napoleon to render the former country a more reliable ally in the wake of his bloodless occupation of the latter in October 1807, this soon turned sour. French armies sustained one embarrassing reverse after another; assailed by multiple problems, the puppet regime of Joseph Bonaparte was unable to impose its authority; the Spanish armies proved easy to beat but hard to eliminate; the British ejected the French from Portugal and turned her into an unassailable stronghold; the French suffered heavy casualties; and political revolution in Spain made it very hard to claim the ideological high ground. Had Napoleon been willing to concentrate all his efforts on the struggle, he might yet have prevailed, but his decision to attack Russia badly destabilised the position of his armies, the result being that within two years the whole of the Peninsula had been liberated. All this makes for a dramatic story, but in practice the impact of the Peninsular War on the fate of Napoleon was very limited, its real importance lying rather in its influence on the history of Spain and Portugal.

Fighting in the Napoleonic Wars was in the continuity of the eighteenth century and even the two preceding ones. Major changes in weapons on a large scale would not occur before the years 1850. Generals and officers were still nurtured by the military writers of the eighteenth century, but among these writers some had envisioned what war could become if large-scale ‘operations’ were conducted and if armies grew in size. With the Revolution and the dictatorial power Napoleon inherited from it, France set the tone for waging war with more intensity, in the movement of armies as well as in tactics on the field of battle. Other powers simply had to follow, but interior conditions and social imperatives resulted in partly adaptations and half-measures.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 invasion of Egypt represented the first modern attempt to incorporate an Islamic society into the European fold. Although the expedition was a military fiasco, it left a lasting legacy in the region. The invasion constituted the formative moment for the discourse of Orientalism, when all of its ideological components converged and a full arsenal of instruments of Western domination was employed to protect it. The occupation itself did little to modernize Egyptian society, because the revolutionary principles that the French tried to introduce were too radical and foreign, and met determined local resistance. But Napoleon created a political vacuum in Egypt that was soon filled by Kavalali Mehmet Ali Pasha, who, within a decade of the French departure, began laying the foundation for the reformed and modernized Egypt that later would play such an important role in the Middle East.

By comparison with the continental powers, Britain had no more than a medium-sized army, but the largest navy in Europe.  This chapter seeks to explore the bases of Britain’s naval strength, going back to the seventeenth-century Navigation Acts, and then to consider how that strength was deployed in the war against Napoleon.  It argues that the Royal Navy, despite the limited impact it might be thought that it could have on land warfare, played an important part in the final defeat of Napoleon.

The British Army took part in numerous operations, ranging from small expeditions to the West Indies, Africa and along the European littoral to major operations in Portugal, Spain and Belgium. Initial struggles with these responsibilities, together with those of imperial policing and maintaining order in Ireland would oblige the Army to implement extensive reforms, particularly in tactics and unit organisation, even while the system of purchase for officers remained intact. While British infantry produced mixed results in the field during the French Revolutionary Wars, in time it became noteworthy for its musketry and remarkable doggedness in battle. Chronically understrength and notoriously difficult to control, the cavalry tended to play only a minor part on campaign, while shortages of artillery and engineers plagued the Army throughout this period. Albeit comparatively small, in creating an Iberian foothold which soon developed into a major theatre of operations, the instrument forged in the battles and sieges of the Peninsula and southern France helped drain Napoleon’s resources over a substantial period and established the high standard of battlefield performance which was to reach its apogee on the field of Waterloo, from which would emerge one of history’s greatest commanders – the Duke of Wellington.