January 1902. For his service in South Africa, he was mentioned in despatches twice and awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO). Following the end of the war in June 1902, Fanshawe returned to the United Kingdom in the SS Dunottar Castle, which arrived at Southampton the following month. In September 1902 he was posted to the staff of the 4th Division on Salisbury Plain as deputy assistant adjutant-general, after he received the brevet promotion to lieutenant colonel on 22 August 1902. He returned to his regiment in 1903. He commanded the 2nd Battalion from 1907 to 1911, when he was promoted colonel and posted as chief of staff (GSO.1) to the 1st Division. First World War At the outbreak of the First World War, Fanshawe's division was mobilised as part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) for service in France. On 20 September 1914, he was appointed an acting Brigadier-General to command the 6th Brigade, part of the 2nd Division. He led the brigade through the First Battle of Ypres and the Battle of Festubert in early 1915, where it played a key part in the initial successful night attack. In mid-June, he was promoted to take over the 48th (South Midland) Division, a Territorial Force (TF) unit, after its previous General Officer Commanding (GOC), Major-General Henry Heath, fell ill. He commanded the division at the Battle of the Somme, the Battle of the Ancre, and the Battle of Passchendaele, then on the Italian Front from late 1917 onwards, including the Austrian offensives of June 1918. Fanshawe spent a good deal of time visiting front-line units, where he "liked to drift into the trench in an old raincoat so that men were not intimidated" and would sometimes venture out with a single escort to patrol no-man's land. More unusually, he had a habit of giving his soldiers chocolates when he met them returning from the lines or on inspections. Such behaviour scandalised his staff officers, who were privately disapproving of Fanshawe's informality with his troops but it did not lead to the disapproval of his superiors; in September 1917, a confidential report by Ivor Maxse, his corps commander, had judged him to be "a good average divisional commander and trainer". Fanshawe was strongly in favour of elastic defence, where a lightly garrisoned front line would delay an enemy attack, and then a strong counter-attack would recapture lost ground, and had