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Except that the French and British did deploy machineguns. As I said, the British adopted the Maxim in 1884 and used it on campaign in Africa. The machinegun was part of the OOB in the BEF in 1914. Though they didn't have as many per battalion as the Germans, they still had them and used them.

The Germans were not immune to the "walk steadfastly into the face of fire" paradigm the author attributes to the British. Losses among German troops in the battles of 1914 were horrific.

After the Fall of 1914, the Germans dug into their newly captured areas (well away from the German frontier) and for all intents and purposes stood on the defensive for the rest of the war. The few offensives undertaken (Verdun, for example) were not meant to gain territory but to bring the war to a close on terms favorable to the Germans). Because of the defensive nature of the German positions, they used more machineguns (the weapon was too heavy at the time to be used in an offensive role).

Most of the stories of British soldiers walking shoulder to shoulder into machinegun fire are exagerations of the situation during the Spring offensive of 1916, when after more than a week of heavy artillery preparation, the British troops were told that the forward German trenchline was obliterated (and any survivors were just dying to surrender to someone) and the German troops in the support trenches were too stunned to fight. Additionally, the newly-conceived "rolling barrage" would proceed the attacking forces to keep the enemy's head down until the last moment when the British would storm their trenches.

That being the plan, at H-Hour the initial barrage lifted and the British troops vacated their trenches and dressed ranks (for command and control purposes) and set off across no-man's land. Unfortunately, while a lot of the German forward trenches were destroyed, the average German trench in this region was about 12 meters deep. On top of that, they commanded the high ground (having been able to pick their positions in 1914). The rolling barrage moved too quickly for the attacking troops to keep up and lifted too early to be effective. The surviving German troops were able to man their defenses and slaughter the attacking British troops, killing and wounding about 60,000 the first day of the offensive (the highest losses ever experienced by the British army).

In other words, the only reason the British marched in orderly rows into the killing fields in 1916 was because they thought the Germans wouldn't be there, not because it was something they had done since time immemorial. One need only look at the Second Boer War 12 years before the Great War to see the author did not get his facts straight.