British Generals of the First World War: ‘Lions led by Donkeys’

Were the British generals of the First World War as incompetent, callous and uncaring of human life as we have been led to believe since the 1960s?

Few of us know very much about the First World War; other than that it was fought about a hundred years ago, was an exceedingly bloody affair and involved Britain, France, Germany and America. There are half-remembered  foreign place-names such as Gallipoli, Jutland and the Dardanelles and also a few names of famous people; Lloyd George, Kaiser Wilhelm and of course Field Marshal Haig. Beyond that, the details tend to be rather sketchy. One thing that everybody does know though is that the British generals of the First World War were criminally incompetent; callous butchers who  wantonly sacrificed the lives of countless young soldiers in order to gain another few yards of muddy ground. How do we know this? It’s  hard to say, because few of us  have  troubled actually to read up on the military history of that war. It is just one of those things which are part of our heritage or shared cultural experience.

     For the present generation, it is axiomatic that senior officers like Haig were upper-class types who viewed the men of their army as no more than cannon-fodder; pawns to be thrown into battle as part of a dreadful and pointless war of attrition. Wave upon wave of these hapless victims were ordered ‘over the top’ into no-man’s land, where they were mown down by German machine guns. So powerful is this image, that it is rarely questioned; being taken rather as a given in any conversation about the First World War. If ever we do take the trouble to ask ourselves about how we know all this, the conclusion reached is that it must be some kind of folk memory, which has presumably been passed down from father to son for a century or so. This then is the myth as we have received it. A small group of heartless generals and field marshals, all of them privately educated; upper-class types who took the flower of English youth and hurled them into conditions of unimaginable horror on the battlefields of France. Those who objected to sacrificing their lives in this purposeless way were executed by firing squads for their ‘cowardice’ or desertion. For most of us, this view of the British generals of the First World War is almost axiomatic; whatever else might be debated about the conflict, this particular aspect is taken for granted.

     It might come as something of a surprise to readers to learn that our modern interpretation of  what was known at the time as the ‘Great War’ does not represent the authentic views, by and large, of those who actually fought in it. When Field Marshal Douglas Haig, by that time an Earl,  died in 1928, his funeral was the occasion of an outpouring of national grief  comparable in scale and intensity to the mourning which followed Princess Diana’s death in 1997.  Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them former soldiers, lined the route of his funeral cortege. There would be nothing like it again until the funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965. Whoever else might criticise Haig, he was beloved by the men who had served under him. The name ‘Douglas’ became very popular in Britain during the 1920s as old soldiers named their sons after their former Commander in Chief. Seldom was a public figure so loved and respected by ordinary people. The idea of Haig as a heartless butcher certainly did not originate with the soldiers who had actually fought at the Battle of the Somme.

     Our present image of generals like Haig, as uncaring, Colonel Blimp types, does not date from the time of the First World War at all, but is rather a creation of the 1960s; a time when many of the old certainties were being thrown overboard  and  iconoclasm was all the rage. A well-known figure like Filed Marshal Haig, still recalled fondly at the beginning of the 1960s by many men who had actually fought under him, was the perfect target for those who sought to blacken the names of anybody whom they saw as being part of ‘the establishment’; either past or present. In 1960, the First World War had only been over for a little over 40 years and so it was very much recent history. Of course, there had been criticism of Haig’s tactics during battles such as the Somme before; most notably in Lloyd George’s memoirs, published after Haig’s death, but it was in the sixties that the negative opinion of Haig and the other generals became the received wisdom; rather than just one point of view among many.

     In 1961, a young historian called Alan Clark published a book called The Donkeys, which portrayed Haig and his army colleagues as being cold-blooded and uncaring; wishing to win the war at whatever cost in human lives. The title was a reference to a supposed conversation between the German generals Ludendorff and Hoffmann during the war. Ludendorff was said to have remarked to  Hoffmann that the English soldiers fought like lions, to which the other man replied, ‘True. But don’t we know that they are lions led by donkeys.’ It is doubtful if this exchange ever really took place; Alan Clark was very cagy about his source for the quotation and it may be regarded as apocryphal. It is not in any case an original idea. Writing 2000 years ago Plutarch observed that, ‘An army of deer commanded by a lion is more to be feared than an army of lions led by a deer’.

     There had been criticism before of Haig’s conduct of the war and also the way in which his fellow generals seemed unable to adapt to the changing conditions of modern warfare; clinging to Victorian ideas, for instance the use of cavalry, rather than embracing new technology such as machine guns, aeroplanes and tanks.   Clark’s book The Donkeys and the thesis which it advanced might have passed unnoticed by the general public had it not been, improbably enough,  turned into a musical; a rare event indeed for a non-fiction work of military history! Perhaps it is something of an exaggeration to say that The Donkeys became a musical, but not much; there is a good deal of truth in the idea.

     A little over eighteen months after the publication of Clark’s book, a new musical opened at the Theatre Royal in East London. Developed by Joan Littlewood, Oh, What a Lovely War! featured many of the most famous music hall songs from the First World War. This was no exercise in nostalgia, however. It was rather a savage denunciation of the British generals, including of course Haig. The soldiers in the production wore pierrot costumes; lending them a grotesque and ridiculous appearance.  The portrayal of Haig was so offensive to some, that his family made strenuous efforts to stop the show being transferred to the West End, where it would of course be seen by far greater audiences than was the case in the little theatre in East London where it had opened. In 1969, Oh, What a Lovely War! was turned into a major film, starring John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Vanessa Redgrave and Kenneth More. This cemented in the public mind the notion of Haig and the other generals as clown-like and out-of-touch figures  who were responsible, because of their foolish and blinkered attitudes, for much of the carnage on the Western Front.

     In the  1960s, it was recognised that books like The Donkeys, along with the film of Oh, What a Lovely War!  really represented  radical and revisionist views of the First World War. They were daring and ran counter to the generally accepted interpretation of the war. By the 1970s though, this revisionist perspective on a major event in British history had somehow become, in the public mind at least, the orthodox version of history. Since then, this myth has been massively reinforced by another piece of popular culture; a satirical television comedy set during the period and starring Rowan Atkinson. Incredibly, episodes of this situation comedy are now widely used in secondary schools for teaching the history of the First World War!

     In the autumn of 1989 the fourth and final series of the popular historical sitcom  Blackadder was aired by the BBC. Blackadder Goes Forth was set in a trench on the Western Front during the First World War and showed how Captain Edmund Blackadder, played by Rowan Atkinson, attempted to survive the war by means of various stratagems. A key figure in the drama was Tony Robinson, playing Blackadder’s hapless batman Private Baldrick. Baldrick is the archetypal ‘everyman’; a simple person caught up in events of which he has little understanding and over which he is able to exercise no control at all. On the face of it, his character and position are in sharp contrast to the well-educated officer whom he serves, but as the series progresses, it becomes apparent that both are merely pawns in the  machinations of various senior officers; obvious fools, who have no regard at all for the lives of the troops under their command. Needless to say, General Haig makes an appearance.

     Part of the appeal of Blackadder Goes Forth lies in the way that both Blackadder and Baldrick are shown to be little men, each struggling in their own way to overcome authority. They do this not by fighting openly against those above them, but rather by various ‘cunning plans’. It was perhaps this appeal to the ancient mythic archetype of the little person using craftiness and subtlety against superiors, rather than open rebellion, which made the programme such a success. There are echoes here of Jaroslav Hasek’s First World War classic, The Good Soldier Svejk.

     Within a very few years, Blackadder Goes forth was being treated not as an extravagant fantasy, but as a realistic parody of the actual situation of ordinary soldiers at the time that the comedy was set. True, it was wildly exaggerated and grotesque, but the actual premise upon which it was based, the thesis advanced by both Alan Clark and Joan Littlewood in the 1960s, was assumed by viewers  to be historically accurate. This was a truly extraordinary situation; that a controversial minority perception of an important period of British history had been shaped by a musical and its film adaptation and was now treated universally as being the correct view of the past. A new offensive on the Western Front was described in Blackadder  in these terms;

     Haig is about to make yet another gargantuan effort to move his drinks

     cabinet six inches closer to Berlin

     The transformation of General Haig, as he was in 1916, from revered, national hero to blundering butcher was now complete. Episodes of the BBC comedy are regularly shown to school pupils studying history for GCSE and a new generation are thus indoctrinated with the myth of the British generals of that period. That Haig was at one time thought of by most people as one of the finest military figures of the age is quite unknown to almost everybody in Britain. A myth which has its origins barely 50 years ago has now become the  standard version of history which is taught to the rising generation.

     For many readers, it has probably come as something of a surprise that there is any other way of looking at the First World War generals; other, that is, than the one familiar to them from television and films. It is time now to look at what really happened in France a century ago and  try to work out the extent to which Haig and the others were culpable and if so, to what extent. We shall also be asking ourselves why this myth took such rapid hold in people’s minds decades after the end of the war. What was it about the Blackadder version of history which appeals so greatly to us that we prefer it to the historical facts? The influence of this mythic version of history is extremely strong and overshadows any modern war or even possibility of armed conflict. When we think of senior generals, at the back of our mind is the popular image of General Haig, sacrificing all those young men so needlessly on the fields of France.

     For almost the whole of human history prior to 1914, battlefields were places of movement and change. One side charged and the other either gave way or counter-attacked and charged in its turn. Cavalry was used to make breakthroughs and then infantry followed up and occupied the land won in this way. This was the way that wars had always been fought; from Biblical times until Waterloo. Warfare was a mobile activity which entailed advances and retreats, attacks and counter-attacks. The movement around the battlefield was always about gaining an advantage. Sometimes, this could be achieved by sending forces round to one side and then striking your opponent in his unprotected flank. At others, a retreat might be feigned, in order to lure the enemy into a heedless rush which would end in an ambush by superior forces lying wait.  Although there had been sieges in recent years where an attacker sat and tried to starve or bombard a fortress or town into submission; these were only minor episodes in wider campaigns which consisted, as in the past, of rapid, mobile conflict.

     When the British army went to the aid of Belgium in 1914, there was no reason at all to think that this war was going to be different from any other and indeed to begin with, there was plenty of excitement as the British and French armies fought to hold back the Germans and prevent them from encircling Paris. It was when the battling armies ground to a halt that all the old ideas of warfare had to be abandoned and new tactics devised to cope with a wholly unexpected situation; that of static, rather than mobile battlefields.

     During the early years of the twentieth century it became increasingly apparent that Germany and Britain would sooner or later be confronting each other. There were several false starts before the actual beginning of the war in 1914. The ostensible cause of Britain’s declaration of war in the summer of that year was Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality; which had been guaranteed by Britain many years previously in 1839. When Germany went to war with France in the first days of August 1914, their plan of attack called for German troops to bypass the heavily fortified frontier between France and Germany and instead to sweep through Belgium and into France; striking towards Paris from the north. It was an audacious plan, but it didn’t quite come off.

     There were several fast-moving military engagements in the opening weeks of the First World War; the Marne, Mons, the first Battle of Ypres. These were traditional battles, with the fortunes of the opposing sides changing rapidly. The British and Germans were both trying desperately to gain an advantage over each other, by moving their forces around the side and attacking the enemy from the flank.

     The forces moved back and forth and, for the first month or two at least, it really seemed that this was going to be a brisk and decisive war; one which would be over by Christmas. In the old days, it was true, wars dragged on for years, decades or even over a century, but with modern technological advances and with the resources of industrial societies behind them, it would not take too long before one country or another was able to deliver a knockout blow and bring matters to an end.

     Such predictions of swift victory appeared to be borne out in September, when after making a rapid advance, the Germans began a general retreat. In their enthusiasm to encircle Paris, the Germans had left wide gaps between their forces, into which the British Expeditionary Force was able to drive. Realising that their flanks were now exposed, the German generals ordered a general retreat; back towards their own country. For five glorious days, the British drove the Germans back and there was talk among high-ranking allied officers of the possibility of their being in Germany within a month. On 14 September, the exhausted German troops halted at the River Aisne. There, something quite unexpected happened.

     Having stopped at the Aisne, the Germans chose to make a stand and foxholes were dug; essentially, no more than holes in which men might shelter from enemy fire. Then machine guns were set up behind mounds of earth as a defensive measure. To everybody’s amazement, the machine guns were able to turn back the whole force of allied infantry. It was as simple as that. Men marching on foot were simply no match for automatic weapons. The allies halted in turn and then, seeing that frontal assaults were impossible, tried to move to the side; in other words, find their way around the devastating machine gun fire. They set up machine gun posts of their own and of course the Germans then did their best to begin outflanking the allies, so that they too could move forward.

       As both armies were engaged in the same tactic, they moved towards the coast; each seeking that breakthrough moment when they would be able to strike at the flank and then encircle the enemy. This never actually happened and of course once the sea was reached, there were no more flanks to be attacked. At this point, and with the realisation that frontal assaults were suicidal, the only option was to dig in and wait for some new development which would change things.

     Both machine guns and barbed wire had been in use for years, but now they came into their own. Once it had been discovered  that a few men hiding behind mounds of earth and operating machine guns could hold off a vastly superior force of enemy troops charging towards them, and  both the Germans and British discovered this interesting and novel  fact at about the same time, it led inevitably to both sides digging holes and hiding in them, while their machine guns protected them from potential attackers. This was at first regarded as a temporary expedient; nobody could possibly have known at that time that this stalemate would last for years.

     In a sense, the British army were fighting on home territory in France and the southern part of Belgium. They had of course been here before and at one time, during the Angevin dynasty, this area had been British territory. The Battle of Agincourt had been fought here and Waterloo was just a little to the north. When Arthur Machen wrote his short story about the spectral bowmen of Agincourt who had aided the British Expeditionary Force at Mons; he was evoking this British familiarity with the muddy fields of this part of western Europe.

     The dugouts in which troops sheltered gradually developed into a line of trenches which stretched from Switzerland to the English Channel. These were strictly defensive earthworks and anybody attacking them was likely to be mown down by machine gun fire. In such a situation, there could be no movement and no battles in the conventional meaning of the word. This then was what became known as the ’Western Front’; to distinguish it from the other theatres of war such as the Russian front to the east, and southern campaigns such  as the fight for the Dardanelles and the landings at Gallipoli, in Turkey.

     Thing soon became very embarrassing for leaders and politicians on both sides of the trenches. The Kaiser had told troops that they would be home, ‘before the leaves fell’, because the German plans were predicated on France being defeated in six weeks or so. In Britain too, the expectation was for a short, sharp clash, which would end in a decisive victory for Britain and France. And now, as far as those in Britain and Germany could see, the soldiers were just sitting quietly and doing nothing at all. It was all most disappointing!

     Of course, the officers commanding the troops on the Western Front knew what those at home did not; that an attack was the quickest and surest way to defeat. The Germans understood this very well, although it contradicted of course Clausewitz’ most famous dictum that, ‘The best defence is attack’. Besides, they were already winning, in a sense, because they had established themselves on French territory and only had to sit tight to look as though they had achieved at least some of their aims. The British and French, on the other hand, were left looking impotent and helpless. Here was the mightiest empire the world had ever known and they couldn’t even advance their troops a few yards against an implacable foe.

     For the British in particular, it appeared to be an insoluble conundrum. They were quite unable to shift the Germans from their positions inside France and nor did there appear to be any other weak spot, besides the Western Front, where it might be possible to strike at the Germans; in other words, a way to drive home an attack on their flank. The Balkans were tried, landings in Turkey were tried, action in the Middle East was attempted; none of it had the slightest effect upon the deadlocked battlefield of northern France. Not for nothing did those other theatres become known as ’sideshows’. When, after a protracted period of trench warfare, the British tried to force their way through the German lines by means of a frontal assault; it proved to be disastrous. In retrospect, it is easy to see why this should have been.

      The lesson of Agincourt was, or should have been, that if foot soldiers attack across a field of mud towards an enemy which has a strong, defensive position and is able to project death over a distance of half a mile or more; then the attackers are likely to come off worse by a considerable margin. This was certainly how it had been at Agincourt. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and it is upon this that all criticism of the British generals of the First World War is based. How could they not see that they were about to replay Agincourt; only this time, being on the losing side of the battle? The answer is of course that there had been so many exciting innovations in warfare over the half millennium since Agincourt, that the picture appeared to people like Haig to have changed utterly. Aeroplanes! Telephones! Heavy artillery! Railways! Radio! Barbed wire! Machine guns! Petrol driven engines! How could one possibly compare military activity in the twentieth century with that at the time of the Hundred Years War in  the Medieval Period?

     It is possible to have some sympathy with this perspective; however it might have proved in the long run to have been hopelessly wrong. Of course all the new technology must have looked like a game changer to the senior officers a century ago. The flaw in their thinking only gradually came to light and it was bitter experience which taught them, and us, how mistaken they were in their evaluation of the military position on the Western Front in 1915 and 1916. Their error was simple, but devastating. The technological advances which appeared to alter the nature of warfare so radically, all related to defence; they gave a very strong advantage to defenders, but none at all to the attacker. It was this which doomed the efforts of men like Generals French and Haig when they were planning their ‘big push’, the one which would bring about the much longed for ’breakthrough’.

     Take aeroplanes, for example. These were a great novelty, which had only been around for a little over 10 years when the First World War began. Exciting as they might have seemed, their role was limited to begin with to reconnaissance. They were no use for supporting ground forces in an attack. Railways were very useful for bringing reinforcements to the front to defend against an enemy attack, but they too were useless as a tool of offensive war. Machine guns and barbed wire were primarily defensive weapons and even artillery was often of more use to an enemy than it was to the attacking side. Its use gave early warning that an assault was about to be mounted. Petrol driven vehicles were, like railway trains, very good for bringing troops to the front, but not the least help during an attack.

     One can hardly blame those designing strategies at the time for breaking the stalemate of trench warfare for not being prescient enough to see all this, when it was only years after the event that military historians were able to analyse the course of the war and work out just how things had gone so badly wrong.  One thing was certain and that was that a defensive strategy could not be pursued indefinitely by the British. In effect, such a course of action would mean that the Germans had won the war, by continuing to occupy Belgium; the invasion of which had of course been the original casus belli. If the deadlock was not broken, it might lead too to a negotiated compromise with Germany, which would also be a political disaster for the British government. With many British soldiers dead and the huge popular support for the war, making any kind of concessions to Germany would be an act of suicide on the part of any politician at Westminster.

     It was for failing to get things moving on the Western Front that the Commander in Chief of the army, Sir John French, was sacked at the end of 1915. The new C in C, Douglas Haig, knew that he would have to take decisive action if he wished to retain his post. That is not to say that he was prepared to throw men’s lives away with gay abandon, in the way that he is popularly portrayed as doing, more that Haig was determined to come up with schemes which would, by breaking through the German lines in northern France, bring the war to an end.

      This then was the bind into which the senior officers of the British army found themselves after eighteen months of trench warfare in France. Various mean of breaking the deadlock other than by a direct frontal assault on the German lines had been tried.  The attempt to supply Russia via the Mediterranean, by opening up the straits of the Dardanelles had proved a failure and in the early summer of 1916 came a great naval encounter in the North Sea; the Battle of Jutland. This  was inconclusive and left matters in France just as they had been before.

     The Germans were now mounting an offensive of their own, on the French fortress of Verdun, and it was partly to relieve pressure on this key position that Haig and the other generals agreed to launch what was intended to be a decisive stroke against Germany at the Somme. It is this battle which has come, in the minds of many, to typify the needless slaughter of the Western Front during the First World War. This is a little strange, because for forty or fifty years after the end of the war, it was Passchendaele, otherwise known as the Third Battle of Ypres, which was, until the 1960s, known as a byword for the brutality and waste of those years. The adoption of the Somme as a new symbol dates only from that time.

     It is customary to describe the Battle of the Somme as opening on 1 July 1916, when wave after wave of British infantry went ‘over the top’ and marched towards the waiting German machine guns. In fact, it was a week earlier, on 24 June, that the fighting really began. The greatest artillery barrage the world had ever known began on that day and continued for an entire week; pounding away remorselessly at the German trenches and the no-man’s land which lay in front of them. The aim was both to cut the barbed wire entanglements which, in the usual way of things, prevented British soldiers from advancing across no-man’s land, and also of course to pulverise to dust the German dugouts and trenches. As General Sir Henry Rawlinson, who directed most of the operation in the field, said, ‘Nothing could exist at the conclusion of the bombardment in the area covered by it.’ The reality was rather different.

     The attack on the Somme was launched along a twenty five mile long section and it was the whole of this which had been subjected to that ferocious artillery attack. Because of the sheer size of the area being shelled and because the attack had been in depth, covering no-man’s land as well as the trenches themselves, the fire of the British guns had been greatly diluted. This was a random, blanket barrage, rather than surgical strikes against particular targets. Many of the shells which were fired were defective; falling into the mud and causing no more harm than a watery splash. Even worse, the effect of explosives upon coils of barbed wire was not really known at that time. The hope was that the shells would shred the wire into tiny fragments, leaving the way clear for the advancing infantry. In fact, much of the barbed wire was simply thrown up into the air by the force of the explosions; falling back to earth even more tangled and impassable than before!

     Perhaps the greatest miscalculation was the killing rate of the shells fired at the German positions. For all that Rawlinson believed that nothing could remain alive after the week-long attack, just two and a half thousand German soldiers had been killed. The remainder, guessing that when the artillery fell silent, the infantry assault would begin, simply climbed out of their dugouts and began training their machine guns at the soldiers picking their way through no-man’s land. Twenty thousand British soldiers were killed on that first day of infantry action on the Somme; the greatest slaughter ever endured by the British army in a single day.

      The next day, the assault was renewed and the fighting on this front continued until November. In the south of the area, the Germans were driven back a few miles, but there was no decisive breakthrough, such as would allow the war to become mobile once more. All that happened was that the German trench systems were reformed seven miles rear of the old ones and there they remained for another two years; despite the best efforts of the British and French.

      Since it is upon actions like those on the Somme that most of the criticism of the British generals are based, we must ask what, if anything, the fighting there actually achieved in the long run; in other words, if the terrible death toll did anything at all to bring the war any closer to an end. The answer is, perhaps surprisingly to modern audiences, that the Somme was a turning point in the First World War and although it may be seen in the short term as a tactical failure, it was of crucial strategic importance in defeating Germany and ending the war. In short, it was a great strategic victory; masterminded by Haig.

      Until the summer of 1916, it had been possible for the German high command to regard the British army with a certain amount of contempt. They were, after all, not a professional army, but largely a volunteer force; a rag-tag assortment of clerks, bricklayers, shop assistants and factory workers. How could such men hope to stand up to the Prussian military tradition which embodied the Kaiser’s armed forces? The answer was, after the Somme, that they could not only face up to the German army, but could more than hold their own on the battlefield against them. One German staff officer offered this comment after the fighting had ended, ‘The Somme was the muddy grave of the German field army.’ For Germany, at least, there was no doubt that this was a British victory, even though the Germans managed to cling on to the territory that they had seized two years earlier. It was plain after the Somme that Britain, with its mighty industrial capacity and the backing of the greatest empire the world had ever known, was more than a match for German ambitions.

     This gloomy acceptance that victory against Britain was unlikely to be achieved by force of arms alone, prompted the Germans to embark upon a strategy which practically guaranteed their defeat; although they did not of course realise this at the time. Since the Somme showed them that the best they could do was hang on against the British forces, it was decided to attempt an indirect attack upon the British nation. This was to be done by isolating the country from the rest of the world and preventing any imports of food or other supplies. After their bruising encounter at Jutland, the German High Seas Fleet did not leave harbour again for the whole of the war. This meant that if Britain was to be blockaded and ultimately starved into submission, then submarines would be the weapon to use. After all, the British were themselves operating a very effective  naval blockade of Germany; refusing to allow any supplies to enter the country by sea. This was causing hardship in Germany and it was thought that an even more severe blockade of Britain might swiftly bring the country to its knees and force the British to sue for peace.

     The German leaders believed that a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare might bring Britain to critical shortages of food and other necessities of life within just six months, which would the British to sue for peace. For this to be effective, the German submarines would have to sink any ship, of any nationality, found in British waters. Since many America ships plied the route across the Atlantic, it was inevitable that this strategy would eventually draw America into the war, but in Germany, it was hoped that Britain would be finished before this happened. It was a fatal miscalculation. Forty eight hours after Germany began to conduct unrestricted submarine warfare, America broke off diplomatic relations with Germany. Two months later, America declared war on Germany; a direct consequence of the activities of the German submarines, which was in turn a result of the fighting on the Somme. With America fighting alongside Britain, the result of the war could be in no doubt. The Somme had, in effect, brought about victory over Germany.

      It is certainly true that many soldiers were killed on the Western Front during the First World War, but the idea that men like Haig were squandering lives needlessly is a foolish one; however much it has over the past half century become the received orthodoxy. General Haig was given the job of beating Germany and he did his best to accomplish this end. If any criticism is to made, then it should perhaps be directed more at his political masters than the soldier charged with devising schemes to beat Germany on the battlefield.

     In the years following the end of the First World War, Haig was enormously popular with ordinary people; not least the men who had actually served on the Western Front and even taken part in the Battle of the Somme. The distorted version of this military leader with which we are all familiar today has its roots in the writing of those who were not even born until after the First World War had ended.

     The British generals of 1914 to 1918 did the best that they could with what they had available to them in manpower and resources, and ultimately they won the war for Britain. By the 1960s, the patriotism shown by ordinary men who volunteered for the army was seen as an embarrassing anachronism and was an easy target for a more cynical age. So vivid were the images with which these writers of both fiction and non-fiction juggled, that they have stuck in our minds in a way that mere facts and figures can never do.  That the whole war was a variation of the old story of Britain going to Europe to sort out their mess, made those years ready for mythologising of this sort.