Abstract
The soldier, writer, and military theorist Charles Callwell has long been a feature of British military history. Yet despite his ubiquity, Callwell has seldom been investigated in great depth, or viewed as a worthy subject for thoroughgoing analysis in his own right. Often dismissed as one of the ‘dug-out’ officers who populated the ineffective General Staff between 1914–1915, or ignored in favour of more prominent military writers of the age such as G.F.R Henderson, Callwell's life and work has thus been little understood, even if it is oft-mentioned. As Daniel Whittingham illustrates in this tightly argued and insightful book, this neglect has come at the expense of overlooking a fascinating and varied career which can reveal much about the context in which Callwell fought, wrote, and thought.
Callwell's career began in the 1870s and saw him serve in a series of the colonial campaigns which defined much of the Army's activity in this period. He saw action in India, the Sudan, and South Africa, experiences which he encapsulated into what many writers have viewed as his signal contribution to military thought – Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, published in 1896. This volume found renewed prominence in the early 2000s as part of the burgeoning interest in counterinsurgency which accompanied the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was widely commented upon at the time. Yet, as Whittingham demonstrates, to abstract Callwell's work from its context is to fundamentally distort its meaning in important ways – to say nothing of ignoring the late-Victorian racial and moral perspectives which imbue its pages. Indeed, the importance of viewing Callwell as a participant in contemporary debates over military and imperial matters is a core theme of this book, a choice which reflects its subject's appreciation of and engagement with the broader channels of military thought of his day. As Whittingham argues, Callwell was not solely concerned with the conduct of ‘small wars’, but rather with the issue of war in general. His work thus sought to explore the relationship between the campaigns the British Army was called to take part in, and the nature of contemporary war in other contexts – particularly ‘civilised’ warfare in Europe. Here Callwell made a notable contribution, often attributed in large measure to more frequently discussed writers such as Basil Liddell Hart. He argued that Britain had no need to emulate the military systems and doctrines prevalent in the European Great Powers. Soldiering in the Empire provided more than enough experience from which the Army could learn, and was a more suitable basis from which to approach the unique security challenges which Britain faced. He therefore straddled his own definitions of ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ warfare, viewing both as functions of the same phenomena – war itself. In addition to pre-empting by over a century some of the more potent critiques of modern counterinsurgency thinking, Callwell can thus also be seen as part of a tradition of military thought concerned with a specifically British approach to war, one rooted in her particular geography, culture, and strategy.
This notion of a ‘British way in warfare’ has most commonly been associated with theorists of maritime warfare, or at least those who viewed seapower as fundamental to British strategic thought. In a series of much less well-known contributions, Callwell also intervened in this area, promulgating a series of ideas about amphibious warfare and the inter-relationship between naval and military forces. Whittingham rightly describes his work in this area as original, and as worthy of consideration by those who locate the origins of thinking about ‘joint’ warfare primarily in the work of those concerned with maritime conflict. Seapower played a larger role in contemporary military thought than is often allowed, a reality which Callwell himself embodied.
One of the features of Callwell's career that makes him such a rich subject for study is that he straddled the two spheres of military theory, and the formation of strategy in practice. Whittingham integrates these strands subtly and effectively throughout the book, illustrating how Callwell's experience in South Africa between 1899–1902 both reflected and changed his views on the conduct of ‘small wars’. This dialectic between strategic theory and the practice of war reached its apogee in 1914–1916, when Callwell returned from voluntary retirement to serve in the War Office during the opening years of the First World War. Here he was involved in the fateful decision-making (and avoidance) that culminated in the Gallipoli campaign, a rare instance of a theorist of amphibious warfare playing a key role in the conduct of a campaign of this nature.
Whittingham has produced a well-researched, lucid, and valuable account which will be of interest to a wide variety of readers interested in military affairs and strategic thought more broadly. His conclusions about Callwell are considered and balanced, and he highlights failings and inconsistencies alongside aspects of his subject's work which were more insightful. The result is a readable account which will doubtless remain the key work on Callwell's life for decades to come. Perhaps even more valuable, however, are the possibilities this work opens up for other scholarship in the area. Whittingham has demonstrated with alacrity how the study of a previously unsung figure can provide a valuable window into broader currents of military thought. Yet we lack similar treatments for a series of contemporaries such as Spenser Wilkinson and Frederick Maurice. Let us hope that Whittingham's intervention paves the way for a wider contextualisation of the well-worn historical canon of British military thought. As he has shown, there is much to gain from such an endeavour.