The prevalent attitude of senior ranks at the outbreak of the Great War can be summed up by the opinion of an officer expressed a decade earlier that a single battery of machine guns per army corps was a sufficient level of issue.

After a year of warfare on the Western Front some commanders advocated crewing them with specially trained men who were not only thoroughly conversant with their weapons but understood how they should be best deployed for maximum effect.

[citation needed] While the undeniable bravery and self-sacrifice of the corps stands testament to the men and their regimental esprit de corps[peacock prose] it is also a symptom of the fixed belief on the part of senior commanders that machine guns were confined to a marginal if useful role, that of an adjunct to massed rifle fire, ignoring the proven potential of this weapon in the indirect role (in effect rifle-calibre fire employed as ultra-short artillery.)

As stated by Paul Cornish in Machine Guns and the Great War: "The theory behind this technique had long been understood... as early as 1908... the mathematical work required to provide a reliable basis for the conduct of such fire was carried out by a group of British enthusiasts at the Hythe musketry school...

A clinometer, combined with a graduated elevation dial fitted to the tripod would be employed to set the gun to the correct elevation..." The obvious complexities and the exacting preparations[editorializing] - in effect identical to those of artillery gunners - may have seemed[weasel words] arcane and pointless to those who carried - or whose men carried - rifles firing the same ammunition but could neither see (or more importantly imagine) the terminal effect of a long-range barrage.

And in that 12-hour period the ten guns fired a million rounds..."[9] Towards the end of the Great War some if not all deeply-entrenched attitudes were changing, and not only on the part of British and Commonwealth personnel.

Following the extensive barrage fire at Vimy Ridge and Battle of Messines a demonstration was held on the dunes at Camiers by request of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) of the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front, who insisted all his Corps commanders attend.

[citation needed] The MGC also served prominently in the British force that occupied parts of Germany in the period between the Armistice of 1918 and the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919 as its equipment and training made it possible for a relatively small garrison to control a large population but by 1920 the headquarters in Belton Park was closed and the War Office began to dispose of the many buildings.