The Defence of Duffer's Drift

The Defence of Duffer's Drift -- written in 1904 by British Major-General Ernest Dunlop Swinton under the pseudonym Lt. Backsight Forethought -- is a short book on military tactics set during the Second Boer War. Over the Framing Device of a sequence of six dreams, Lieutenant Backsight Forethought, or BF, must defend a river crossing, the eponymous "Duffer's Drift", against a numerically superior force of Boers. The scenario starts out the same way over each dream, and BF doesn't remember the terrain or the events each new time the scenario is replayed. What he does remember are a series of tactical lessons learned, which he applies to good effect in each new iteration. Eventually, his force does better and better until, on the sixth run-through, he manages to successfully defend the crossing.

The tactics that BF uses are a little dated for today, but many of his observations on entrenching and terrain tactics are still valid. It is all-but-required reading in military academies today and spawned a series of Follow the Leader works of varying quality, using the same dream format to examine logistics, procurement, and Second Iraq War counterinsurgencies.

In the Public Domain. Project Gutenberg's copy is available here.

Needs Wiki Magic.


 * Big Book of War: not that big at less than 200 pages, but otherwise fits the bill.
 * Combat Pragmatist: the Boers are this, all the way; they start by infiltrating the British camp with civilians, and when BF learns not to trust civilians and to entrench, they pepper his freshly-built trenches with Nordenfeldt guns. BF himself develops from a fresh-faced new lieutenant into a combat pragmatist as things go along.
 * Deployable Cover: at the beginning, BF has no earthly idea what to do with the sandbags and entrenching tools he's been handed (over his protests), since to him warfare is about volley fire and bayonet drill, not about digging. He learns his lesson soon enough.
 * Ensign Newbie: BF starts out as one, fresh from Britain, more concerned with parade-ground neatness than with proper tactics. He gets better as the book goes on.
 * Geo Effects: the whole point of the book is how to use them effectively.
 * Groundhog Day Loop: each dream is set the same way: defend Duffer's Drift against an unknown enemy force. It differs from the norm in that BF remembers nothing of the previous loop except for general tactical lessons learned to prevent him from "cheating" at the scenario.
 * Imagine Spot: following the final, successful defence in the last dream, BF begins dreaming that his actions ended up being so decisive to the conduct of the whole war that he receives a knighthood--just before he's woken up for good.
 * Lemony Narrator: BF's naivete at the start is so painful that he himself plays up his earnestness for comical effect.
 * Nicknaming the Enemy: the Boers are referred to ironically as the "brothers" or the "brethren".
 * Rebel Leader: guess who the friendly farmowner turns out to be? One of the first lessons learned: during times of guerilla warfare, do not trust strangers.
 * Second Boer War: the setting.
 * Stupid Enough to Work: BF finally wins in the sixth dream by throwing away the standard military advice of "hold the high ground" and entrenching in the riverbed itself--an idea that he dismissed as crazy nonsense when he first thought of it since it went against all of his conceptions of warfare. One of the key lessons learned is "a hill may not, after all, though it has 'command,' necessarily be the best place to hold".
 * Values Dissonance: Imprisoning civilians and shooting their livestock are generally not considered to be valid counterinrgency tactics in the modern era, mainly because it no longer has the same effect.
 * War Is Glorious: BF invokes the trope early on, thinking of massed volley-fire and desperate bayonet clashes. The reality, of course, is very different, with long-range sniping and guerillas all around.