Britain
Horace Smith-Dorrien
1858–1930 Commander, II Corps, 1914; Second Army, 1914–1915
Horace Smith-Dorrien was one of only five British officers to escape the Zulu victory at Isandlwana in 1879. He became a major general in the Second Boer War and commanded Aldershot from 1907 and Southern Command from 1912. When Sir James Grierson died in August 1914, Lord Kitchener gave him II Corps of the British Expeditionary Force. It bore the brunt of the German attack at Mons, and at Le Cateau on 26 August he decided to stand and fight rather than keep retreating. The 1922 Britannica and the historian John Terraine both judged that this slowed the German advance. Commanding the new Second Army from late 1914, he was relieved in May 1915, soon after advising withdrawal from the Ypres salient. He later served as governor of Gibraltar.