The National Army Museum in Chelsea, London was delighted, on 25 March 2013, to host the conference ‘The Origins of Small Wars: From Special operations to Ideological Insurgencies’. It was the first time that the Museum had sponsored such an ambitious event, with speakers drawn from France, the United States, Germany, as well as the United Kingdom. The new readiness of the Museum to do so is indicative of the way in which the approach taken to its work has recently changed; a fresh approach which in turn stems from the successful application made by the Museum to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) in May 2012 for an initial grant to undertake the complete redevelopment of the site in Chelsea. Assuming that the HLF approves the final plans – and matching funding is raised – the Museum will close in April 2014 for a two-year period to enable its interior to be removed and new galleries installed. The project will cost £22,750,000.
Clearly, prospective donors are unlikely to be attracted to the enterprise if the intention were simply to tell the story of the British Army in the same chronological fashion that the Museum currently does, or even as it has in the past, with galleries devoted to specific types of exhibit – paintings, weapons, uniforms, and medals. Consequently, an ambitious new interpretation strategy has been put in train, which will see the Museum's displays grouped in themes. These include ‘Soldier’, looking at the serviceman's life cycle (recruitment, training, daily life, combat, and demobilisation); ‘Battle’, its planning, preparation, execution, aftermath and the change and innovation that results from the British Army's key engagements; ‘Army’, what the British Army is, how it is organised, what it is like to be part of, and how it has changed over time; ‘Society’, examining the Army's relationship with civilians and the responses provoked; and ‘History’, intended to guide the visitor in discovering more not only about the British Army and its impact on national and world events, but how to ask the right questions when it comes to finding out about the Army and their family's past.
A thematic approach to telling the story of the British Army is a tricky thing to carry off: the certainties of a linear treatment of events are no longer available. If it is to be done convincingly, it has to be thought through and a premium placed on expert knowledge. This explains the National Army Museum's new-found interest in academic conferences. What better way to access the latest and best thinking on a given topic? Indeed, to better facilitate this engagement with the outside world, the entire organisational structure of the Museum was reconfigured in 2012, the old curatorial departments broken up and replaced by departments of access and outreach (among others). I myself ceased to be Head of Archives and Photographs and became Head of Academic Access instead. As such, I have been given the remit to organise conferences and, following on from ‘Origins of Small Wars’, two further conferences on the cultural afterlife of the Crimean War and ‘Making Military History in Museums’ are scheduled for 2013.
What then did we at the National Army Museum learn from ‘Origins of Small Wars’? Bearing in mind some of the themes identified above, the work of Hervé Drévillon on territorial control in France is relevant to the gallery provisionally designated ‘Society’, inviting comparisons with the role of the British Army in Ireland during the same era. The papers of George Satterfield and Bertrand Fonck – the former showing how partisans operating in the Spanish Netherlands in the 1670s were increasingly valued as an adjunct to French regular forces, and the latter detailing how Marshal Luxembourg eventually clasped them to his bosom – are interesting illustrations of the ways in which armies change (the theme of our intended third gallery). If one were to draw comparisons with the British experience, it would date from a century later, when the potential of the irregulars who had served in North America in the 1750s was only fully realised by Sir John Moore and his Shorncliffe-trained light infantry over 40 years afterwards.
I was struck too by the dehumanising concept of one's opponents as ‘other’ in many of the small wars of the period. This came across particularly strongly in Alan Forrest's paper on the insurgency in the Vendée, was touched upon by Charles Esdaile in his analysis of events in Andalusia during the French occupation, and was implicit when Christopher Duffy spoke about the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. Because the British Army enjoyed the widest experience of extra-European campaigning, it had perhaps the greatest opportunity to dehumanise the enemy, something given its fullest rein during the suppression of the Indian Mutiny in 1857–1858. These, however, are the kinds of difficult issues which the National Army Museum is nowadays expected to treat in its displays and it was instructive to hear them aired, in a comparative context, during the conference. In the same way, it was illuminating to hear both Charles Esdaile and Martin Rink talk about national mythologising in relation to small wars, explaining how what occurred in the Serrania de Ronda in 1810–1812 was not an expression of guerrilla resistance but simply a reaction to French foraging, and how the 1813 war of liberation in Germany was, ultimately, but an imagined insurgency. This is useful to us because it will inevitably fall to the Museum to perform a similar exercise in its representation of the Indian Mutiny, tactfully pointing out the ahistoricism of terming it the ‘First War of Indian Independence’ when the description ‘Mutiny of the Bengal Army’ is more accurate.
The National Army Museum is highly gratified that the excellence of the papers presented during the conference will leave a permanent mark in the pages of Small Wars and Insurgencies. Our thanks are due to Professor Beatrice Heuser not only for facilitating this, but for suggesting the conference's theme in the first place and enlisting the majority of the speakers.