Beyond the Western Front: The Practice of Inter-Theatre Learning in the British Army during the First World War

Discussions on learning in the British army of the First World War centre on the Western Front with a focus on the outcome rather than the process. This article redresses this imbalance by examining how the British army shared knowledge between its operational theatres. It illustrates that, as the British army expanded and its commitments increased, it could no longer rely on purely ad hoc methods for learning. Instead, it had to adopt increasingly bureaucratic methods when sharing knowledge across tactical and geographic boundaries, which forced it to realign its pre-war learning ethos to accommodate the challenges of modern war.