19th March 2026
Join The Lord Leycester for monthly Smart Talks – a series of talks by learned academics, non-academics, and smart people across a variety of topics.
Tickets cost £30 per head which includes the presentation, supper and a drink.
March Smart Talk
‘The Rocky Road to Stalemate: How and why the First World War descended so quickly into trench warfare’
In the late summer of 1914 the First World War descended, in very short order, into deadlock, the battlefield dominated by trenches, barbed wire and machine guns.
That this seems to have been wholly unpredicted is the embodiment of idea that the generals in charge were utter donkeys, oblivious to technical change, leading their armies to slaughter.
But as Ross Beadle argues, the only recent actual European wars they had to go on were mobile, open and dominated by railways and flank attacks. There was even conflicting evidence from other wars, notably in Manchuria and South Africa, that while modern firepower had irredeemably changed war, the traditional verities held true.
The over-riding human dimension of high morale was still a match-winner. Stagnation was not inevitable.