This is a detailed and technical study of battlefield lessons learned as a result of the British army's bitter experiences during the 1899–1902 Boer War, now more usually referred to as the Second South African War. Jones makes a persuasive case that the skillful tactical performance of the British Expeditionary Force during the maneuver battles of 1914 was a direct consequence of reforms enacted in response to the earlier conflict. Much of the existing historiography, for example, the works of Tim Travers and Martin Samuels, has included some scathing judgments about the British army's preparation for combat in the opening decade of the twentieth century, pointing to a failure to develop a coherent doctrine for modern war and an alleged conservative reluctance to accept the growing threat of modern firepower. Others, such as John Terraine and David Ascoli, have asserted that the British Expeditionary Force of 1914 demonstrated considerable competence in field craft, marksmanship, and dispersed tactics as a result of its experiences in colonial small wars but have failed to demonstrate empirically the connection. Jones's work thus fills a gap. His research rests securely on archival sources, contemporary professional journals, and successive editions of drill books and training manuals, and he traces the sequence of events, reaction, and debate that took the army from the disasters on the veldt in the opening months of the South African War to the achievements of 1914: rapid and accurate infantry marksmanship; artillery skilled at concealment and developing techniques of indirect fire; cavalrymen, equally capable of fighting mounted and dismounted, and in striking contradistinction to their continental counterparts, who now knew how to care for their horses on campaign.

Having sketched out the broad outlines of the South African conflict, Jones devotes a chapter to the British army as an institution, focusing on its doctrine and ethos. Like others before him, he notes that the small, professional British army, called upon to fulfill a variety of roles, could hardly develop an effective, unified doctrine. Flexibility and versatility were required of a force that operated primarily as a colonial police force, acting against indigenous peoples in a variety of environments, but which might also be thrust into a European war against a highly trained enemy. This militated against the formulation of common doctrine and thus practice and levels of skill varied from unit to unit. As Jones acknowledges, this would remain a problem; indeed, during World War I, it would be dramatically amplified as a mass army of first volunteers and then conscripts was hastily raised under wartime conditions without a common doctrine. Overall, reform was most successful at war's lowest level, that of tactics. Both lack of experience in major wars and the physically limited space available for peacetime maneuvers made the senior British officers' handling of larger formations, from divisions upward, clumsy and ill coordinated. Again, this was a problem at the operational level of war that would bedevil the British on the western front. Jones goes on to examine the reform of each of the three combat arms—infantry, artillery, and cavalry—in some detail. While, for the most part, he is favorably impressed, he does note difficulties too. The army was ambivalent about the role of the machine gun, not because it was technophobic, but partly because of financial strictures and partly because the cumbersome and bulky machine guns used in the fast-moving war on the veldt had not proved that useful. Similarly, the artillery was caught by the outbreak of war in 1914 halfway through an argument about the relative merits of direct and indirect fire. It had excellent equipment, but it was not yet sure how best to use that equipment in action.

Although this is a technical and, perhaps for many, rather dry subject, this book is very clearly written and would be accessible to an undergraduate. It does not, however, tell the whole story of the British army's preparation for war. While Jones notes carefully the impact of the Russo-Japanese War on British thinking, he does not examine other later developments that offered possible solutions to South African War tactical problems, for example, wireless communication, aerial reconnaissance, and motorized transport. These were important subjects for the British army in the early 1900s, and it would have been useful to have included them in this account. Nor does the author concern himself with the auxiliary arms, even though both the army's medical and veterinary services were essentially revolutionized subsequent to the South African War. This had profound, and positive, implications for overall British military efficiency, including the tactical performance of horse-mobile units, in World War I. Similarly, while Jones is, I think, correct to emphasize how many useful lessons were learned as a result of the 1899–1902 conflict, he is less forthcoming on what it did not prepare the army for: a prolonged war of positions. Those British soldiers in front-line trenches in France, Flanders, and Gallipoli, who, well into 1915, found themselves making hand grenades out of jam jars and gun cotton, might have had legitimate grounds for observing that combat on the veldt had its limitations as a school of modern warfare.

In some senses, therefore, this book is rather narrowly focused. Yet the author confidently achieves his own objectives in making the case for lessons learned and has written what is still quite rare: academically rigorous tactical history. His work is now on the must-read list for anyone with a serious interest in twentieth-century British military history, and this book is an excellent companion study to the works of leading tactical historians such as Antulio J. Echevarria II and Stephen Badsey. Indeed, as I read it, I came to think of it as a fine prequel to the late Paddy Griffith's seminal study Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army's Art of Attack, 1916–1918 (1994).