I believe the great wakeup of the British Military was not WW1, but the Boer war - here is this completely pointless expansionist war, against some backward "white savages" and the mighty British Army is suffering defeat after defeat and having to send in a staggering half a million troops to defeat a force of barely eighty-eight thousand untrained yokels from the arse end of nowhere!

Which is why the Germans were so taken by surprise at Mons, in 1914, by the dogged resistance of severely outnumbered BEF troops.

The army had learned the lessons of the Second Boer war and was operating changes in a lot of areas, only it was operating these changes with the standard speed with which armies everywhere change in times of peace - dead slow.

The British uniforms were by now all a dull khaki rather than the blazing scarlet used at the start of hostilities in South Africa, and the equipment was practical - lighter cotton webbing instead of leather, adjustable multi-piece chest rig closer to what you would find nowadays, and the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield Mk III, unarguably some of the best infantry rifles ever produced, with a magazine capacity double that of the German Mauser Gewehr 1888 and 1898, lighter, shorter, allowing for staggering volumes of fire and yet just as precise at normal engagement ranges in the hands of the highly trained BEF troopers.

It's true that there was an even more advanced rifle in the works, the superb Mauser based Pattern 1914 Enfield (one could say this was the rifle born directly out of the lessons of the Second Boer War), but while that was optimised for long ranged accurate gunnery the trenches of the first world war favoured volume of fire at medium range over accuracy at longer ones.

This is, of course, a far cry from the French army of 1914, which, while certainly not lacking that very French "élan", were nonetheless dressed in heavy, impractical uniforms (they wore their greatcoats even in the summer) with blazing scarlet trousers and caps, encumbered by heavy backpacks (they not only had a wooden frame, but they included such things as a Mess Kit the size of a small pot and an extra pair of shoes that were carried everywhere the soldier marched. They were also armed with the unwieldy Lebel 1886 whose tubular magazine caused an ever shifting balance. Because of the conscription going on in France at the time there were a lot more soldiers to be fielded, but they were a lot less trained than the elite corps of the BEF.

Since my comic takes place earlier, the BEF will be smack in the middle of the readjustment period - the second Boer War will still be raging, stretching the British Army thin as they are forced to fight on two fronts, but the changes will take place faster - while at the start of the campaign the British Army will still be wearing their M1888 Slade-Wallace Valise equipments (modified in 1895 for the Enfield Mk1) by the end of the first year they would of switched to the new M1900 Bandoleer equipment (in our world M1903).

In the same way the French would have switched their old uniforms first for khaki M1901 "reseda" uniforms and then, to avoid friendly fire incidents, for Blue Horizont M1902 uniforms (In our world, the M01 "reseda" really existed but was never introduced on a large scale before the war and then couldn't be produced fast enough to meet demand and was replaced by the M1915 Blue Horizont uniform).

The Shadowless French M1902 will not be an exact copy of the real-life M1915, but instead will be a mix between that and the Romanian M1912/16, with which I am intimately acquainted, being an active reenactor. T
hey were, however, pretty similar - in the pictures of the Bucharest Victory Parade in 1919 the only way you can tell which are Romanian troops and which are the French Expeditionary force of General Berthelot is by the different helmet badge and the fact the French wear the bottoms of their greatcoats buttoned at the back, while the Romanian Army wears them free (and this was done on purpose, to differentiate the troops to the eyes of those watching) - the colour of the Romanian Uniform is also a bit more grey, although due to cloth shortages of 1917 (when the factories were all in German hands) French cloth was sometimes substituted and sometimes even British or American uniforms were worn!

Here's a few pictures of us in the military parade on the National Day of Romania, in December 2012 so you can see how these uniforms looked: [link] (link unfortunately in Romanian, but we're the ones wearing ww1 uniforms, so you can't miss us XD)

Same will go for the weaponry. In my comic the French will soon abandon the full sized Lebels, first in favour of Berthier M1900 rifles and carbines (real life m1903), and then, due to the Berthier's limited magazine capacity of only three rounds in favour of Lebel and Bertier carbines with vertical magazines.
And then, of course, some more esoteric weapons will make their appearance, such as the self-loading Meunier A6 rifle (in our world invented 1897 and adopted in limited numbers in 1912) and the M1905 RSC (Ribeyrolles, Sutter and Chauchat, in our world known as the M1917 RSC) and finally the Chauchat-Ribeyrolles Mle.1906 submachine gun (in our world introduced in 1918, too late for active duties).

All these to be counterbalanced by Commonwealth weaponry, such as the Canadian Huot Automatic Rifle, the "Rifle, .303 inch Mk III Experimental Self-Loading" (our world 1918), the Farquhar-Hill Automatic Rifle (our world 1908)and the Danish Madsen – Rasmussen M1896 Automatic rifle and model 1902 light machine gun. (both of which existed in our world at the appropriate time)