Foreword: British Army Review #187

This timely special edition of The British Army Review, appearing as it does two years on from the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, offers us as readers an outstanding insight into the ongoing fight. It holds its true value, however, if the reader bears in mind two important things.

First, it is a fascinating analysis of personal accounts of a conflict that, with the vicissitudes of modern media and mediums, has largely otherwise been relayed to us through the filters of other people or agencies, each putting their own interpretation on events, on what they chose to show us and what they chose to leave out, and on what matters. The importance of first-hand accounts, of oral histories, of diaries, and of very human memories, has always been, and must surely remain, one of the cornerstones of the historian’s craft. As our ways of collecting and processing data become more and more prolific and more and more automated, and, dare I say it, more and more ‘artificial’, the need to remain focussed upon the very humanness of the experience of war is more vital than ever. Clausewitz, after all, reminded us repeatedly that war is, at the first and the last, a ‘human experience’. Anyone studying any war, surely, cannot offer a complete view without offering, first-hand, the human experience.

But second, as the authors are quick to point out, this personal visceral and vivid view of events is but a narrow-lensed snapshot. General Sir Rupert Smith uses an excellent analogy to caveat any collection of first-hand accounts of a battle, or a war. Such accounts, he says, are like listening to the post-event recollections of the audience of a huge gladiatorial contest, all of whom have watched the contest through their own individual drinking straws. Each observer has processed only their own narrow tunnel of experience and, from that, formed impressions and assumptions about the whole contest. Or, for those in the arena itself, their memories consist of the paradoxically blurred and sharp, intense and focussed pictures of the contest; the fight for personal survival has led, through a channelling of heightened senses, into a necessarily narrow and immediate field of view, with commensurately narrow but vivid memories. In this sense, the related experiences of either the gladiators or those who were watching the contest are immensely real and valuable – but flawed and incomplete.

The really outstanding work that has gone into producing this fascinating and, for the professional soldier, hugely valuable British Army Review is but a snapshot of a bigger picture; a few clips from the whole movie. It explores the experiences of a few people, in a single battle, in one of the opening campaigns of an ongoing and unfolding war. My word, we can learn a huge amount from this excellent publication; but, above all else, it really whets our appetite to devour more. The authors, therefore, have laid out at the end of their work a menu for further exploration, which allows this small and rewarding ‘amuse bouche’ to be consumed before going on to tackle the breadth, depth and context that Sir Michael Howard urges upon us. – Major  General (Retired) Dr Andrew Sharpe, Director of the CHACR.