Gaming - Worldbuilding, Homebrew, "The White Cliffs of Dover"

Continuing writing down thoughts on worldbuilding for a game I may never have a chance to run...

No nation entered the Great War as well-prepared for global war, and as ill-prepared for a European war, as the United Kingdom.  Britain's global empire meant that the Royal Navy was the best-trained, best-equipped fleet in the world; meanwhile, the British Army, even with extensive experience in colonial war, was tiny compared to their Continental rivals.  

British industry had catapulted the country out of the Enlightenment and into the Industrial Revolution, and the foundation of this industry was the railroad.  By the mid-1840s, two schools of thought had emerged and the first of the great industrial wars - the Gauge War - began.  The two schools were the Wide Gauge, championed by Sir Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and the Narrow Gauge, championed by George and Robert Stephenson.  Despite the term "Gauge War," Brunel and the younger Stephenson began their careers as, at worst, friendly, respectful rivals, and ended as firm friends and allies.  This friendship was perhaps unique among industrialists of the period, made more remarkable by the impact which it had on British industry as a whole.  "Of all the minds of the age, no two were more in concord than [Brunel] and I," Stephenson remarked on Brunel's death in 1859.

Brunel won the Gauge War, making the more expensive Wide Gauge the standard in Britain and Ireland, mostly because Stephenson was mostly out of the country from 1845 to 1857 working on projects overseas, despite the fact that both Brunel and Stephenson were elected to Parliament in 1847, the year after the Regulation of Railway Gauge Act 1846 settled the Gauge War in Brunel's favor.  Stephenson was consulted on the potential for the construction of a canal at Suez and concluded that it was a difficult but feasible undertaking.  Thus, most of Stephenson's addresses in Parliament were actually read into the record by Brunel.  The Canal opened to service in 1857, just in time for the Sepoy Mutiny to break out in India; to quote the Suez Canal Company's first president, former Chancellor of the Exchecquer Benjamin Disraeli, "never has a lock been turned in a more timely fashion."

The other great achievement of Brunel and Stephenson was to press to reform the way British engineers were educated.  They both felt that the apprenticeship method produced uneven results, and pointed to the effectiveness of educating military engineers at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst.  Through tireless work, publicity, and firing the public's imagination, they managed to get faculties of Mechanics and Practical Mathematics established first at Cambridge, in 1859, and then Oxford, in 1875.  Stephenson, who had already declined knighthood, declined the honor of the chair at Cambridge as well, indicating the honor should go to Brunel, who only held it for six weeks before dying, but his cousin George Robert Stephenson, who took on the family business after Robert died in 1859, was less averse to the honor; thus, the Brunel and Stephenson chairs are located respectively at Cambridge and Oxford.  These reforms were not always popular; the Earl of Derby, an Oxford man, Prime Minister, and noted Classical scholar, grumbled that they had made the schools into "nothing more than a dashed school for tradesmen."  However, they added a respectability to engineering, and an entry for sons of the gentry into the field.  One of the side effects of this was that British engineers acquired the studious indifference of the British upper class. This would have drastic, nigh-disastrous effects during the Dreadnought Race and the early years of the Great War.

One of the immediate consequences of gentrifying the mechanical professions - at least partly enshrined by Brunel and Stephenson, who actively argued against improved education for laborers and tradesmen, on the grounds that all they truly needed was to understand their particular task - was that labor conditions, already indifferent, became generally worse between 1860 and 1910, leading to strikes and walk-outs and doubtless contributing to the imagination of the German writer Karl Marx, at the time living in London.  Labor relations were always strained, but especially in Ireland, they were nothing short of explosive, and in Wales, the source of most of Britain's coal, mine strikes were as often as not put down by "volunteer" rifle clubs organized by mine owners.  This was because England's engines required two things: the labor of Ireland, and the coal of Wales.  The interests of those countries were, at most, secondary.

Steam engines, steam ships - steam powered the British Empire, and nowhere was this more evident than in the Royal Navy.  The Royal Navy was the first in the world to adopt steam power in any widespread use, and tended to be the most advanced in the world (with minor exceptions, such as the Hertzfinder and the Tesla Torpedo).  They were not, it is true, completely free of anachronisms - sails were still mandatory on new designs entering service as late as 1880 - but they had adopted steam in the 1820s, the screw propeller in the 1830s, and even contracted Brunel to build a trio of ironclad frigates in the early 1850s, though only one was ever delivered due to construction issues.  Lessons from the American Civil War and the Crimean War showed that turrets and torpedoes were the future of warfare, and all of this culminated in the Fisher Board of 1902-1904, chaired by Admiral Sir John "Jackie" Fisher, an ugly, pugnacious, but brilliant naval thinker, who recommended all-big-gun warships and the adoption of the torpedo as a long-range weapon.  HMS Dreadnought, laid down in late 1904 and commissioned in 1905, immediately rendered all vessels prior obsolete and started yet another industrial war, this one international and with disastrous long-term consequences, because it placed Germany and Britain on a collision course.

The Dreadnought Race saw the navies of Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Austro-Hungary, the United States, and even Japan racing to construct new, modern, competitive battleships, but hands-down the winner of the Dreadnought Race was the Royal Navy.  Between 1905 and 1914, the Royal Navy commissioned between two and four dreadnoughts a year, and by 1914, the 1905 Dreadnought was thoroughly obsolete and fit only for Home Fleet defensive duties.  The last four of these, the Iron Duke class of four (laid down 1913, launched 1914, commissioned early 1916) were even more revolutionary - they replaced the previous coal boilers with fuel-oil boilers, reducing weight and increasing range.  This rapid growth came at a price, though, both literal (despite Fisher's deep cuts to fund his program, the Royal Navy budget doubled from 1905 to 1914) and metaphorical.  One of the consequences of Brunel and Stephenson's reforms, as mentioned, was the gentrification of engineering as a profession, and the neglect of "trades," studious nonchalance, and glorification of the amateur common to the British upper class had little place in manufacture.  Coupling this with the demanding timelines laid down by the Admiralty, most ships sailed with serious defects, resulting in the difference between HMS Dreadnought's commissioning - three months after launch - and HMS Iron Duke's - eighteen months.  Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, during the inquiry following the disastrous loss of three battlecruisers at Jutland to no great gain, complained that half his ships' engines had failed due to manufacturing defects, and called the conditions at Vickers "the surest path to murder of a man at sea by a man on land of which Man has yet conceived."  It became a service joke that HMS stood for "Hard to Make Steam."  That the Royal Navy was as effective as it was is down to the professionalism of its crews and officers, not to the perfection of its equipment.

If the Royal Navy loathed the studied indifference of the gentry, the British Army reveled in it.  It was not until 1862 that Parliament did away with the practice of purchasing commissions, in the wake of the Crimean War and the Sepoy Rebellion, not until 1872 that the practice of requiring a training program for officers was standardized with the establishment of the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich for line officers and Royal Military College, Sandhurst, for specialist officers, and not until 1881 that standardized training for lower ranks was established as part of a broad reform program.  The 1881 reforms were especially significant because they greatly reduced the number of regiments in active service, brought militia into the army establishment, established regional training depots, and formalized existing procedures for the development of new weapon systems.

Thus, the British Army that fought in the Zulu War of 1879 was the last of the old, and the first of the new.  The stunning defeat at Isandhlwana, the role played by Woolwich and Sandhurst officers, and the reports of Lieutenant-General Sir Garnet Wolseley, a career officer, polymath, and reformer, when he took command all lent force to the reform process, but also wound up being the proving ground for at least one officer who served on the Western Front forty years later: Lieutenant Napoleon Eugene Louis Jean Joseph Bonaparte, Royal Artillery, seconded to the Royal Engineers.  Carrying the sword his famous ancestor carried at Austerlitz, he became known as an almost foolishly brave officer, and won the Victoria Cross for foiling several Zulu ambushes near the end of the campaign.  Thus, the future Lieutenant-General Napoleon Bonaparte, Earl of Guernsey, VC made his name, which would become a feature of dispatches from Egypt, the Sudan, and again in South Africa, where he would befriend the future First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill.

The army of the Zulu War, and the British Expeditionary Force of 1914, were perhaps not the same army, but were clearly very close relatives.  Wireless telegraphy, which had been readily adopted by the Royal Navy, was uneasily adopted by the British Army, who favored homing pigeons almost exclusively, and decision-makers at army level had resisted the adoption of the otherwise excellent Lee-Enfield magazine-fed rifle, on the grounds that a detachable box magazine would be lost by soldiers.  Coordination between the British and French armies, thanks to the efforts of Edward VII and General Bonaparte, was remarkably good, which is almost certainly the only reason that the rout of 1914 was not worse.

The first six months of the war was a disaster, and became known as the Recessional, after Kipling's poem of the same name.  The BEF lost 90% of its strength in relentless, grinding combat with the German army, making conscription painfully necessary; Admiral Louis Mountbatten was forced to resign as First Sea Lord because of his German family ties; his successor, the returned Jackie Fisher, quit in protest after fighting with the First Lord, Winston Churchill, who himself resigned in disgrace after the disastrous losses sustained by the Mediterranean Squadron while attempting the failed landing at Gallipoli.

Thus, with a strained navy, a depleted army, and a labor force always on the edge of boiling over, Britain faced the prospect of a long war.