On May 11th, 1745, the British Army went into battle against the army of France near the village of Fontenoy, in what is now Belgium. 15,000  British soldiers marched forward bearing not only their muskets, but the reputation that they had gained in the continental campaigns of John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough. But Marlborough had by then been dead for nearly 25 years, and the British Army had not adapted or altered. The result was a humiliating defeat, with 6,000 of those 15,000 British either killed or wounded. Another result was a long process of reform, the creation of new forms of knowledge, new approaches that had to be conceived, innovated upon, and then deployed “in the face of organizational tradition, institutional resistance and personal suspicion of change.”

My guest Huw Davies describes this long process of reform, and the always speedier process of forgetting, in his new book The Wandering Army: The Campaigns That Transformed the British Way of War. It is not only a book about the British Army, the “Second 100 Years War”, the Enlightenment, and the long 18th century, but also one about creating new institutional cultures, change management, and the reform of complex organizations in difficult circumstances.

Huw J. Davies is reader in early modern military history at King’s College, London. His previous books include Wellington’s Wars: The Making of a Military Genius and Spying for Wellington: British Military Intelligence in the Peninsular War.

For Further Investigation

Kutuzov and the military enlightenment in Russia was the subject of my conversation with Alex Mikaberidze

Cathal Nolan described the enduring and nearly always futile quest for a decisive, war-determining victory in battle in Episode 79

The experience of an army learning, and then forgetting; and learning, and then forgetting, was also a focus of Episode 215, on the book The Other Face of Battle

I discussed the Howe family with Julie Flavell when we talked about her book The Howe Dynasty: The Untold Story of a Military Family and the Women Behind Britain's Wars for America