Despite the substantial output of revisionist scholarship over the last decade reappraising the performance of the British Army on the Western Front during the First World War, there still remains a stubborn perception that its commanders were incompetent, inflexible and unimaginative. Whilst much ink has been spilled vilifying or defending individual commanders, or looking for overarching trends and learning curves, this is the first work to examine systematically the vertical nature of command - that is the transmission of plans from the high-command down through the rank structure to the...