The Chief: Douglas Haig and the British Army

A worthwhile look at Douglas Haig leaves the general’s personality vague

The Chief: Douglas Haig and the British Army

by Gary Sheffield

Aurum Press, 460pp, £25

It’s not at all long since I heard the late military historian Richard Holmes declare himself aghast at the prospect of any more books about Douglas Haig. Since then at least three more have appeared. Gary Sheffield’s is the latest.

They keep coming because there remains such a savage division of views about the man who commanded the British army in France for most of the First World War. To those who see the war through the poetry or Blackadder, Haig remains forever the blinkered, stupid butcher of the Somme. Most (but not all) serious historians know that the caricature is wildly false. Haig was not a strategist like Marlborough or Wellington. He was not even a great general. When Henry Wilson, Chief of the General Staff, suggested to Haig towards the end of the war that he was now a famous general, he deprecated the idea but said that there was by then “a surprisingly large number of capable generals”.

Haig was exactly that, a capable general, a great manager. By 1918 the tiny army that was the BEF in 1914 had become a force of almost 3 million men and half a million animals. The British military presence in France was the equivalent of six times the population of Birmingham. The nature of the army had changed, too. Huge technical innovations had taken place, and in its multi-weapon, all-arms cooperation, the army had assumed the character that would define it until the mechanisation of the 1970s.

Haig presided over all this, and he presided over the great advance that is rarely mentioned in the history books, “the Hundred Days”, the unbroken series of victories that began with the Battle of Amiens on 8 August 1918, “the day we won the war”, and ended at the Armistice on 11 November. These were British victories, and Haig was the man who delivered them. This is the story that Sheffield has to tell.

I have to declare an interest as the author of a Haig biography, broadly from the same revisionist perspective as Sheffield. But our books are not in competition. Sheffield’s subtitle is significant. His book is focused on Haig and the army – indeed, really on Haig and the war. After just 66 pages Haig is off to France, a general, aged 53, with just 14 years left to live, of which 9 will be in retirement. As a result quite a lot of Haig’s early military career is dealt with cursorily.

Concentration on the war in the space available is understandable, and as Professor of War Studies at Birmingham, Sheffield is very good indeed in his analysis of Haig’s battles – though his largely chronological, as opposed to thematic, approach is more appropriate to those who are familiar with the outline of events than for the general reader.

His account of the Somme is particularly good and he makes well the point that if Sir Henry Rawlinson had used his reserves as he was supposed to, there could have been a breakthrough, though only a limited one.

That highlights a problem in assessing Haig. What did he really expect at the Somme – or indeed, ahead of his other battles? He was spectacularly inarticulate in speech, but he wrote well, and he wrote too much. His diaries alone extend to some 750,000 words, and they are full of irreconcilable statements. Ahead of a battle he started cautiously, talking of “wearing-down”, attrition. But as the big day approached, optimism would come forward, and talk of breakthrough. There are many hostages to fortune.

A wise general makes his predictions after the event, as Montgomery did. Haig had his own shot at this, and after the war he and his wife re-wrote bits of his diaries. Mostly the changes simply aim to clarify, but on a couple of occasions they go further. Sheffield deals with one of these, the events around the Doullens Conference in the spring of 1918, when the great German offensive threatened to separate the French from the British. I agree with his conclusion here, and with many of his other judgements, but it’s a pity that he doesn’t have more space to set out the route by which he reaches them.

Leaving aside end-notes and so forth, his publishers have only given Sheffield 380 pages, and that simply isn’t enough for such a big subject. There are two important results. One is that that Haig’s personality, admittedly elusive, doesn’t really emerge. He was a little more human than he appears here. The other is that while Sheffield concludes with the important plea that Haig should be judged not as our contemporary, but as a man of his time, the scanty treatment of his earlier years doesn’t effectively put him in his historical context.

This is a good book and a balanced book – something rare for books about Haig. If it doesn’t add a lot to what is already known, it does add to the weight of revisionist evidence. But as long as the First World War is approached through the pathos of its poetry, Haig books will keep on coming. Richard Holmes wouldn’t have been pleased.

• Walter Reid was elected 2008 Fellow by the Douglas Haig Fellowship. His Architect of Victory: Douglas Haig is published in paperback by Birlinn, £10.99. His latest book, Empire of Sand: How Britain made the Middle East, is also published by Birlinn, hardback, £25.