2

THE HUMAN FACTOR

I am ‘meant to win’ by some Superior Power.

Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, in a letter to wife, 27 December 1915

I am not prepared to accept the position of a butcher’s boy driving cattle to the slaughter.

Prime Minister David Lloyd George, 9 February 1917

At what cost was the war worth winning? Would the great struggle extirpate the European powers, their empires and Western civilisation itself? For what were they fighting: king and country, freedom, the privileges of the ruling class, the war profiteers? If they were winning, why did they have so little to eat? At the start of 1917, people of all political persuasions and social backgrounds, from Liverpool factory workers to liberal intellectuals, German housewives to Russian Bolsheviks, were asking such questions. The huge losses on the Somme, at Verdun and in the eastern theatre had traumatised European society, and rumblings of dissent were growing: workers were refusing to work in war industries; civilians were turning against the war; even rogue conservatives were rethinking whether the huge cost was worth it. The Australian people upset Britain (and infuriated the Labor prime minister, Billy Hughes, who lost his seat as a result) by narrowly rejecting conscription in a national referendum on 28 October 1916, sending a clear message that the little dominion would not jump to fulfil British demands for more men.

And men were precisely what the British war effort needed. ‘The overwhelming preponderance in man power,’ David Lloyd George later wrote, ‘which had given the Allies such a false sense of security and lured them in 1915 and 1916 into enterprises where human life was thrown lavishly and recklessly into the conflagration to feed the flames as if there was an endless store of available men in reserve, had now practically disappeared.’ Militarily, the Central Powers looked ‘stronger and more unbreakable than they had ever been’.¹

By 1917, the belligerents’ ‘war aims’ had fundamentally shifted. The Entente Powers (Britain, France and Russia) continued to insist on their 1914 goals – that they were at war to punish German aggression and liberate Europe from tyranny. Germany and her allies continued to insist that they were fighting a defensive war, a ‘preventive strike’, to secure the Reich and their empires against the three-way vice of the Triple Entente. By now, however, the world had changed, and the powers adjusted their policies and propaganda accordingly. Tsarist Russia teetered on the brink of collapse, and France and Britain were gravely weakened: the Triple Entente looked like crumbling, and deep pessimism infected the three governments. Britain and France used state propaganda and an acquiescent press to reassure their people that they were engaged in a sacred struggle to avenge the immense sacrifices of 1916. Germany had come through 1916 in a stronger state, and the Prussian High Command believed they could win the war and implement the fantastic program for European conquest that they’d unveiled in September 1914, to which the German government had not committed.

In fact, the European powers were in a state of crystallising panic. They had everything to lose if they lost – their empires, markets and financial power. A new enemy, the ‘enemy within’, was threatening to overthrow the very systems of government that had prevailed for centuries, founded on the divine right of kings, imperial rule (and partial democracy), and the concentration of capital in the hands of a small elite. The new socialist and liberal parties were determined to overturn the political order that had tolerated systemic inequity and social exclusion. Extremists in Russia and Germany went further: they aimed to dismember the ruling classes and reorder society along communist lines. A spectre was indeed haunting Europe, as Karl Marx had warned: workers were organising and unions railing against their employers. The shortage of food and huge casualties were political gifts to opposition parties such as Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the British Labour Party. On the extreme fringes, the Bolsheviks, Anarchists and other militant movements welcomed the prospect of their nations’ military collapse as the handmaiden of revolution and the decapitation of the bourgeoisie. Lenin, the Bolsheviks’ self-exiled leader, longed for his country’s defeat as an opportunity to seize power and destroy Tsarism forever. The authoritarians in power in Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary played into their hands by refusing even moderate social reform.

Even that relatively docile political species, the British worker, had begun to place class loyalty ahead of loyalty to country. Socialist leaders exploited the widespread feeling that the English aristocracy who had taken Britain to war in 1914 had more in common with their German and Russian counterparts than with the ordinary people of their country. The perception exacerbated extreme social tension. Relatively liberal Britain, driven by rising political stars David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, had made concessions to social reform: the introduction, for example, of a collective labour law (Trade Disputes Act 1906), a nod at security for the elderly (Old Age Pensions Act 1908) and provision of assistance to the unemployed (National Insurance Act 1911). The irony of the state caring for the old and unemployed while killing off the young was not lost on many soldiers.

If Britain was a beacon of social progress in the leaden, authoritarian facade of Europe, her government postponed deeper reforms: to extend votes to women, improve public healthcare and alleviate extreme poverty. Mothers had no say in the choice of government that would force her sons to fight and die, if necessary. Many workers were outraged at the profiteering of war-related businesses at a time of extreme food shortages: a record number of strikes would animate 1917. All of this alarmed the richest echelons and capital-owning classes. A glance at the graphs in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows just what was at stake for Europe’s upper orders: in 1914, total net private wealth in Europe was worth about 600–700 per cent of national income.² The elites had everything to lose if they lost the war.

Governments were thus acutely aware that they were fighting two wars: against the enemy without, who wanted to carve up their empires and extract a big war dividend; and against the enemy within, who wanted social reform, votes and higher wages (or the ‘redistribution of capital’). The year of 1917 would see the most acute expression of this inner-outer tension, especially in Russia. Only total victory would give the German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian regimes the authority they needed to defeat their internal enemies and preserve their empires. Having refused to liberalise their otiose systems, they had little choice other than to fight to the bitter end, for their ancient privileges and financial power, the preservation of which they continued to sell to their people as a noble sacrifice for god, the Fatherland and the incumbent crowned head.

In sum, the Great Powers’ war aims now boiled down to ‘victory at all costs’, as the German historian Holger Herwig concludes:

the more the war cost in blood and treasure and the longer it went on, the greater the clamour for post-war gains. The conservative regimes of the Central Powers feared that failure to bring home vast indemnities and annexations would endanger their near-exclusive rights to rule.³

The crowning irony is that the imperial dynasties of Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans were genuinely at risk just as their people were losing interest in defending them.

While most governments and their press pulpits continued to bellow for war, a rising number of moderate, middle-class people were beginning to disagree with them, on moral and religious grounds. Shocked by the huge losses on the Western Front, many British, French and German people no longer believed the costs justified the aims of the war, whatever they happened to be. The Catholic Church had made its opposition to the war very clear, and would make several doomed appeals for a peaceful settlement. Indeed, one of the church’s most outspoken anti-war voices was Daniel Mannix, the Irish-born Catholic archbishop of Australia, who provoked uproar in 1917 by damning the global conflict as ‘just an ordinary trade war’.⁴ In Germany, middle-class women who couldn’t feed their children were taking to the streets in violent protests, stealing and attacking shops. For them, a looted ham meant far more than news of the fall of Bucharest.⁵

Powerful government officials felt moved to find a peaceful solution. An eminent British example was the former Conservative foreign secretary and statesman Lord Lansdowne (Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne), who, in November 1916, privately circulated a letter in the Cabinet urging the government to seek a negotiated peace with Germany. No war aims could be advanced after the Somme, Lansdowne argued, that would recompense Britain for the cost of victory in the blood of the nation’s youth.⁶ The British Government were aghast that so prominent a Conservative should put forward a ‘defeatist’ position. It was considered exceedingly bad form, notwithstanding the fact that several powerful figures, including Herbert Asquith, the embattled Liberal prime minister who had recently lost his son on the Somme, were ‘in complete concurrence’ with Lansdowne.⁷

Lansdowne’s plea fell on barren ground. A strong majority in Cabinet supported the war, and would accept nothing less than Germany’s unconditional surrender. A peace deal that failed to secure this, they declared, for which so many had paid the supreme sacrifice, was not worth the paper it was printed on. The huge casualty lists reproached both sides of the argument: those who would politicise the soldiers’ sacrifice to justify further slaughter in the guise of vengeance; and those who would undermine the sacrifice by negotiating an ‘unworthy’ peace.

Lansdowne looked forlorn when, on 12 December 1916, the Allies received Berlin’s notorious ‘Peace Note’, signed by Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. From a position of ‘indestructible strength’, having won ‘considerable successes’, it declared, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey would ‘not seek to crush or annihilate’ their adversaries. On the contrary, ‘conscious of their military and economic power’ and their readiness ‘to carry on to the end, if they must, the struggle that is forced upon them’, they proposed ‘to enter even now into peace negotiations’.⁸

The tone of haughty triumphalism struck entirely the wrong note: the German Peace Note was risible, London, Saint Petersburg and Paris swiftly decided. It made no concessions, failed to mention the restoration of Belgian and Serbian sovereignty, and amounted to a display of Teutonic chest thumping. Russia rejected the Note on 15 December, followed by France and Britain two weeks later. It coincided with the appointment of a new British Liberal prime minister who would attempt to rejuvenate the nation and transform the mood of despair into a new faith in victory.

A formidable political leader with the hide of a rhino and the personal drive to bind the Liberal–Conservative coalition in an all-out effort to defeat Germany: that was how David Lloyd George sold himself as the fittest man to rule Britain at war – and, by extension, the Dominion armies. We haven’t the space to navigate the full circumference of this colossus of British politics. (I recommend biographies by Roy Hattersley, John Grigg and Peter Rowland.)⁹ We aim chiefly to distil the personal attributes of this immensely gifted, exceptionally self-confident and deeply duplicitous character that helped or hindered his leadership in the darkest year of the war, after which the memory of Passchendaele would weigh on his conscience for the rest of his life.

David Lloyd George was a genuine radical of British politics. The English instinctively distrusted this Welsh firebrand. And yet, to call him ‘the Great Outsider’ is half-accurate: his huge ambition, forceful personality, soaring oratory and divisive political style compelled others to conform to him, rather than he to them. Iconoclastic, contemptuous of (English) tradition, Lloyd George used his points of difference to bend the establishment to his will and recreate the political order in his image. By 1917, ‘the Great Insider’ more accurately described his central place in British power, dominating the four-man War Cabinet that he appointed to run the war: the great outsider would soon turn the inside out.

Lloyd George’s ability to slash away at impediments to action and bully his opponents into submission won the grudging support of his harshest critics and most avowed enemies. These were the personal attributes with which, as minister of Munitions (a department he created), he had broken the shell famine, launched the tank-building program and reorganised procurement; as chancellor, introduced old-age pensions and laid the foundations of the modern welfare state; and as prime minister, transformed the Cabinet and the nation into a war-winning political machine. That is the familiar, outward character of Lloyd George. To cut a keener profile of his leadership during Third Ypres requires a sharper scalpel.

Born in Manchester and raised in a Welsh village, David George lost his father as a boy and grew up under the powerful influence of his uncle, Richard Lloyd, who was determined to ensure that his gifted nephew received a solid religious education. We need not dwell on the small Baptist sect in which the Georges worshipped, except to say that the Children of God, or the ‘Campbellites’, as they were known, gave the boy his first taste of English ‘oppression’. Young David found it intolerable that the Welsh nonconformist faith should be subject to the laws and traditions of the Church of England and would later deploy his sense of outrage at this ‘injustice’ as a political weapon.

As he rose in the world, by stages a journalist, lawyer and politician, Lloyd George honed his talent for speech-making into a crushing ad hominem style. His political oratory sizzled with personal rancour, burning off much of the substance that lay within it. His speeches advanced like an artillery barrage and were ‘almost entirely destructive’, observed Hattersley: ‘Demolition of his opponents’ arguments was rarely followed by the construction of something to put in their place. There was never a suggestion of an underlying ideology or philosophical principle – both of which were alien to his nature.’¹⁰ As Lloyd George himself observed, he was never quite sure what he really stood for. In spirit a pacifist – he had opposed the Boer War – he abandoned any outward show of pacifism during the Great War. He entertained no ideology or set of guiding principles. ‘I know I have the religious temperament,’ he wrote as a young man, ‘but if an angel from Heaven came to demand it, I could not write down what my convictions are.’¹¹ He cleaved to his own gut feel and ideas rather than to those of any political party or creed.

As a mature politician, Lloyd George relished the role of fixer and arch manipulator, for whom everything was in flux and nothing beyond his will to amend or reverse. Under Lloyd George, ‘Was it rule by a dictator or a democrat?’ wondered the Welsh historian Kenneth O. Morgan. ‘Did any consistent principle animate the “man in the saddle”, or was it all opportunism gone berserk?’¹² Even Lloyd George’s closest associates were unable to answer with certainty. John Maynard Keynes later alleged that the values of Wales’s ‘Great Commoner’ were ‘rooted in nothing’.¹³ The prime minister’s friendships were as fragile as his sense of loyalty, a virtue he used sparingly. Nowhere would he find a natural ‘fit’ in the partisan swim of politics; rather, he sought to enmesh the fish that surrounded him in his school of thought. One idea that possessed him was the iniquity of unearned income (rentiers, inheritors, investors, and so on), and he waged a lifelong campaign against inherited wealth of the kind that had enriched his future commander-in-chief, Douglas Haig.

On 10 April 1908, Prime Minister Asquith formally offered Lloyd George the job of chancellor of the exchequer. Despite Lloyd George’s many enemies, who accused him of leaking the news to the press in order to pre-empt a royal veto (King Edward VII disapproved of his philandering), his success as president of the Board of Trade couldn’t be overlooked. Lloyd George’s letter of acceptance revealed the man in full: ‘Men whose promotion is not sustained by birth or other favouring conditions are always liable to be assailed with suspicions of this sort.’¹⁴

Germany’s invasion of Belgium in August 1914 won Lloyd George over to the hawks, whose war he’d hitherto opposed. Some construed his conversion as brazen self-interest masquerading as principle; yet who in politics has not mixed principle with self-interest? His decision to back the war combined his abhorrence of military aggression, his support for Britain’s treaty obligations to Belgium, and his political ambitions. Suddenly, the war was very popular, and so was Lloyd George.

Once he’d declared his hand, he threw all his verbal and political powers at rallying the people to the war effort. ‘It will be a terrible war,’ he boomed, in his great speech at Queen’s Hall, London, on 19 September 1914. ‘But in the end we will march through terror to triumph.’ Invoking his homeland in the famous metaphor ‘I know a valley in North Wales between the mountains and the sea … a beautiful valley, snug, comfortable, sheltered’,¹⁵ he warned the British people that they had been living in a valley like it for too long and had turned selfish and indulgent. The war would shake them to their senses.

Lloyd George took a close interest in military strategy – close enough (he felt) to pass judgement on the authority of Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener. The hero of the Battle of Omdurman (1898), commander-in-chief of India, and now war secretary knew a thing or two about drill. By contrast, Lloyd George had spent a testing week or so in the militia. That did nothing to dissuade the latter from pressing Kitchener to open a third front outside France, an idea Winston Churchill embraced. Intensely irritated, Kitchener knocked the idea down. (Churchill would soon bring it disastrously back to life, in the Dardanelles.)

Kitchener’s aristocratic hauteur did little to inhibit the Baptist upstart from the Welsh hills, who would later describe the war secretary as ‘a good poster but a bad general’,¹⁶ and uncharitably dismiss him, after his death in 1916, as ‘a driving force’ with ‘no mental powers’.¹⁷ Lloyd George’s scornful assessment of the then highest ranking British soldier was a mere shadow of his bruising relationship with the soft-spoken, straightforward Scot soon to become commander-in-chief of the British forces on the Western Front, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig.

Lloyd George quickly came to be seen as the war leader in waiting: who else had the energy and mental toughness to lead Britain to victory? Who else could win over the people? The glaring answer took shape in his mind, until ‘winning the war became … an aspect of his destiny which had to be fulfilled’.¹⁸ Even his Tory enemies accepted his accession as inevitable. The former Conservative prime minister Lord Balfour disagreed with his policies yet came to see Lloyd George as the saviour of the nation: ‘[T]he only man who can, at this moment, break down the barriers of red tape and see that the brains of the country are made use of’.¹⁹ Indeed, if he believed in anything, Lloyd George believed in action, in getting things done. At 7.30 pm on 7 December 1916, Lloyd George ‘accepted’ the prime ministership from the incumbent, Herbert Asquith, as head of a precarious Liberal–Conservative coalition.

The war, not Lloyd George, had destroyed Asquith. The death of his son Raymond, an officer in the Grenadier Guards, on the Somme in September 1916 had reduced the Liberal prime minister to a ghostly presence in Westminster. Unbearable grief rendered him unfit to govern the nation at war, as he later admitted. ‘Whatever pride I had in the past,’ he wrote of his son’s death, ‘and whatever hope I had in the future, by much the largest part was invested in him. Now all that has gone.’²⁰

Lloyd George had secured the leadership of the Conservative-dominated coalition government, in cahoots with several powerful Conservatives and two press barons.²¹ A condition for the Tories’ support carried a heavy hostage to fortune: they would not abide the sacking of Douglas Haig, the commander-in-chief of the British and Dominion forces in France. That condition grated, for Lloyd George had repeatedly made public his abhorrence of Haig’s methods. There would be no more Sommes, he had warned, in November 1916. Glaring at the journalist Charles à Court Repington, the new prime minister repeated the message on 9 February 1917: ‘I am not prepared to accept the position of a butcher’s boy driving cattle to the slaughter.’ Repington dismissed this as sentimentality.²²

Lloyd George’s revulsion at the losses on the Somme was sincere, and he would spend the rest of the war championing a third front, in an effort to minimise British casualties. The prime minister failed or refused to accept his commanders’ conviction that the war must be fought and won on the Western Front, at Germany’s strongest point, and that the only way was to continue battering away at the enemy’s trench lines with vast armies, machine guns and heavy artillery. The seeds of a disastrous relationship were sown.

The new prime minister took charge of a nation reeling from her recent ‘victories’. A pall of grief hung over thousands of British and Dominion homes. The very real fear of defeat animated the highest officers in the realm: German and Austro-Hungarian forces had stalled Russia’s advance, held the Italians, and overrun Romania; German U-boats were sinking a rising toll of British shipping; the French were mutinous and exhausted; and the Americans would not arrive in strength until mid-1918. Lloyd George would have none of this defeatism. His greatest political asset was his war-winning confidence and calm in the face of destruction. He flourished in adversity. There would be ‘no compromise, no deals done, no talk of peace’ under a Lloyd George government. ‘How shall we win’ was the only counsel the War Cabinet listened to.²³

In his first weeks in power, the prime minister moved to put the nation on a total war footing. The primacy of supply was second nature to the man who had created the Ministry of Munitions. In this spirit, he cut the size of the War Cabinet, to make it more responsive, and able to make fast decisions. Almost immediately, he created a string of new ministries to address the emergency: Shipping, Labour, Food and Pensions – and, later, National Service and Reconstruction – all of them radiating outwards from the ‘supreme arbiter’, the prime minister.²⁴ With admirable pragmatism, he struck up an effective partnership with the Conservative leader and chancellor, Andrew Bonar Law, who would remain quietly loyal to his ideological opponent even as Lloyd George bypassed him and assumed increasingly dictatorial powers.

The War Cabinet met every day or so, to confront the myriad challenges of the war effort. Their immediate concerns were pooling manpower, fixing the prices of the 1917 harvest and putting down strikes. The most exigent was the soaring cost of the war: Britain would have to borrow US$1.5 billion from America (an enormous sum at the time, equivalent to US$30.5 billion in today’s money) to finance the war up to March 1917, the War Cabinet learned on 9 December 1916. ‘We must strain every nerve to obtain the money,’ advised Morgan, Grenfell & Co., the government’s agents in New York, whose agents confessed that they were ‘staggered’ by the amount.²⁵

Lloyd George’s gravest political concern was manpower. The shortage of fighting men threatened to derail the great offensives planned for the summer of 1917. In late 1916, Haig had requested 500,000 more, infuriating Lloyd George. In the prime minister’s eyes, Haig had already wasted hundreds of thousands of lives, for meagre results; he should not be allowed to do so again. The prime minister’s preferred strategy was to use non-British troops on his proposed third front; to join France’s defensive war; or to inflict a knockout blow that would end the war soon. Of one thing he was clear: Haig’s war of attrition was politically unacceptable, and somehow must be stopped or changed.

In Haig’s eyes, Lloyd George misunderstood the nature of the war and the sacrifices necessary to win it. Indeed, a contradiction lay at the heart of the prime minister’s war: he would never reconcile this determination to win it with his condemnation of the way his commanders were fighting it. Not until many years after the armistice would he put these feelings on public display (see Chapter 17).

Intensifying the British manpower crisis was the German decision on 5 December 1916 to conscript all males aged between seventeen and sixty, with the exception of those employed in vital war-related industries. The forcible recruitment of able-bodied German men – passed by 235 votes to fourteen in the Reichstag – deeply disturbed the British War Cabinet. Earlier in 1916, Downing Street had relaxed constraints on employees in war industries, in order to ‘comb’ the nation for new recruits. Now Britain would match Germany and conscript them: on 12 December 1916, the War Cabinet approved the adoption of compulsory national service for all men between the ages of eighteen and sixty. It came into force on 2 March 1917. Thus far, the Military Service Act had prevented, as far as possible, the dispatch of anyone under nineteen to the front line. Henceforth, grandfathers, school-leavers and those with physical defects (poor eyesight, flat feet, etc.) were deemed eligible for overseas service. If an eighteen-year-old wanted to serve at the front, he should be sent, the War Office advised the government on 9 January 1917.²⁶ At a stroke, school-age boys could be dispatched to the Western Front.

On 18 December, the government went further, withdrawing war service badges and certificates that had exempted men with jobs in war industries. Now they, too, were eligible for combat duty, and punished with up to six months’ hard labour and a fine of £100 if they refused.²⁷ Nor was the ‘dad’s army’ of half a million men deemed necessary to defend the home front: two divisions of these, too, were released for active service.²⁸

These measures would never deliver Haig’s 500,000. At any rate, Lloyd George refused to send so many British troops. He fastened instead on Britain’s overseas allies as the next best source of manpower: the Dominions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, and the colonies of India and parts of Africa. On 23 January, the War Cabinet approved the recommendations of the Army Council to shake down the ‘Available Resources of Man-Power, both White and Coloured, in the Overseas Dominions and Dependencies of the Empire’. The Australian Government should ‘be urged to take steps at once for the formation of a sixth Australian Division’; New Zealand encouraged ‘at once’ to form a second New Zealand Division; and the Canadian Government persuaded to dispatch as soon as practicable a fifth division to France and ‘to examine the possibility of raising a sixth’.²⁹

Australia disobliged the Mother Country. In vain, Britain pressed the government of Billy Hughes to deliver up the ‘large reserve’ of Australian manpower, but a slim majority of people voted against conscription at a referendum on 28 October 1916 (and again in December 1917), removing any hope of the country of 4.75 million sending a further division and even putting at risk the maintenance of the existing five then serving in France. The New Zealanders were less reluctant. Here, the British Government had identified a further 30,000 men ‘for disposal’, enough to form a division with five months’ reserves. The New Zealand people were ‘extremely alive’ to the importance of a bigger contribution, reported The Dominion newspaper. That, noted the British Army Council contentedly, ‘could hardly fail to stimulate similar efforts from other Dominions’. Canada, Newfoundland, India and South Africa also sent troops, to the extent that they were able, though the Canadian Corps would not exceed four divisions. In the event, Britain would shoulder the burden of the Anglo-Saxon war effort, enlisting 16.08 per cent of its male population of 22,485,501; compared with about ten to twelve per cent in Australia, Canada and New Zealand (see Appendix 2).³⁰ By these measures, Haig would get most of the men he needed for his huge 1917 offensive.

Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig comes down to us as one of those wintry British commanders who placed duty, victory and loyalty to the king above all else, no matter the cost in lives and human misery. Like a surgeon in the days before anaesthetics, Haig at war was ‘entirely removed … from the agony of the patient’, Churchill would write.³¹ Haig’s methods have since provoked the wrath of regiments of critics, some of whom tend to portray the British field marshal as a rogue butcher, over whom the War Cabinet had no control. That impression, whose chief architect was Lloyd George, is false. Like Turner’s sea monster, monstrous truths lurk beneath the surface of the water, all-seeing if barely seen. As we shall see, one man alone cannot have borne the weight of responsibility for 1917; rather it was the dysfunctional relationship between Haig and Lloyd George that kindled and fomented the tragedy of Passchendaele.

Current impressions of Haig conjure two extremes: the bungling, blimpish cavalryman, indifferent to the soldiers’ suffering, who sent wave after wave of young men to certain death; and the hard-working ‘educated soldier’, the professional commander, who did his best in dreadful circumstances and felt genuine concern for the men under his command. The second image is the more accurate.

And there is a third, lesser known, dimension to Haig. The field marshal’s implacable calm – his only sign of anxiety in the worst of the fighting was a tendency to stroke his moustache, remarked one general³² – belied an intensity of feeling of which few people outside his family and staff were aware. This ‘inner Haig’ was a man of deep emotion and acute religious feeling. On the eve of an offensive, he would pray quietly to his Presbyterian god and confide in his favourite chaplain. His religious belief was a source of deep consolation, as was his family. At the height of his personal crisis on the Western Front, he would turn for emotional solace to his beloved wife, Doris, to whom he confided in a series of letters; to his loyal sister, Henrietta, who helped his career and to whom he was devoted; and to the spirit of his late mother, Rachel, who died when he was eighteen, the memory of whom he would revere to the end of his days. In a sense, Haig was a ‘woman’s man’, more at ease with female love than with the knockabout company of men.

Douglas Haig was born on 19 June 1861, the eleventh son of John and Rachel Haig (née Veitch), in a large town house on Charlotte Square, in Edinburgh. He was a direct descendant of the Norman knight Pierre de la Hague, who had settled in the Scottish lowlands near Bemersyde in the twelfth century. By the early nineteenth century, the family’s aristocratic pedigree had deteriorated to the merchant class, reflected in the rough brogue and manners of Douglas’s alcoholic father, a wealthy whisky distiller. Such defects were no block to social advancement in Victorian Britain so long as you were rich, and the Haigs were very rich.

Like many families of the lowland Scottish elite, the Haigs felt at least as ‘British’ as they were ‘Scottish’, and were among the stoutest defenders of the Empire. Privately educated, young Douglas wore the trappings of his class a bit too seriously, like a man trying to adapt to an ill-fitting garment. He lacked the ease with which the aristocratic young men of his acquaintance deigned to move in any social milieu, and perhaps this explained his need to distinguish himself, to get on, to succeed. He was suspicious of outsiders (be they Catholics, French or ‘foreigners’) and disdainful of uppity new men like Lloyd George, whom he tended to dismiss as ill-bred opportunists. He felt a genuine affection for the ‘real’ men under his command, such as the ordinary British and colonial troops – he especially admired the Anzacs – although this often went unreciprocated.

Early on, Haig proved himself an exemplary soldier with outstanding promise: in December 1884, he passed out first of 129 Gentleman Cadets at Sandhurst and received the Anson Sword of Honour. He enjoyed hunting and excelled at polo and horseman-ship – a career in the cavalry beckoned. In one marked respect, Haig differed from his fellow graduates: he was a deeply serious young man who considered soldiering a career, not an enjoyable pastime or a sort of ‘blood sport’. He had little of the irreverence of his fellow junior officers. For one thing, he was certainly ‘educated’ in a way most of them were not. His regimental nickname, ‘Doctor’, referred to his unusual attendance at Oxford and the impression he gave as a ‘thinking soldier’.³³

Haig certainly thought a lot, and rose through the ranks with a mixture of will, ability and powerful friends. This cannot be dismissed as crude ‘nepotism’: Haig’s friends were smart enough to discern and reward genuine ability. G. F. R. Henderson, a professor of military history at Camberley Staff College at the time of Haig’s attendance (1896–97), rated him as the ‘coming man in the army’ and ‘a future commander in chief’.³⁴ In 1896, Haig co-wrote the ‘Cavalry Drill Manual’ with John French, ‘the tactical bible for cavalry operations’.³⁵ He received a commission with the illustrious 7th Queen’s Own Hussars and served with distinction as the regimental adjutant in India.

His determination to excel as a professional soldier distinguished him from the British military tradition of ‘gentleman amateurs’, who tended to regard too much ‘success’ as a bad thing. Not if you were Douglas Haig. He was an innovative and adaptable commander who would embrace the use of new technology (e.g. the tank, the machine gun, the artillery barrage, aircraft and poison gas) no matter how controversial, belying the popular impression of a buffoonish cavalryman. He studied and learned from history, approving of Napoleon’s ‘wearing down’ war as the prelude to the decisive, pitched battle. He preferred the German Army’s command system of delegating responsibility to junior officers over the British ‘top-down’ approach.³⁶ In recognition of his precocious ability, Lord Kitchener made him inspector general of cavalry in 1903, conferring the rank of general on Haig at the age of 42.

To top off this accomplished résumé, Haig was physically brave, a quality conspicuous by its absence from Lloyd George. During Haig’s first taste of combat at the Battle of Atbara in Egypt in 1898, he galloped onto the field to rescue a wounded Egyptian soldier – a Victoria Cross–winning feat had the Egyptian been British, according to one biographer.³⁷

In 1906, he was recalled to England to serve as Lord Haldane’s right-hand man in reforming the British Army. Between them, they created the BEF, of one cavalry and six infantry divisions, conceived to serve anywhere in the Empire, supported by a home reserve, the Territorial Force (later the Territorial Army). It was the most radical reform of the British Army since the age of Wellington. Knighted for this work, Haig returned to India in 1909 to serve as chief of staff of the Indian Army with the rank of lieutenant general.

As an army commander, in October 1914, Haig co-led the defence of Ypres from repeated German attacks. At Second Ypres, in April 1915, the hideous effects of chlorine gas – then first used in combat, by the Germans – persuaded him of its utility as an offensive weapon, not for its destructive power (gas caused relatively few casualties) but for the sheer panic it spread among the ranks. He felt similarly about ‘liquid fire’, primitive flame-throwers, then also in use for the first time. Haig was nothing if not a great learner, and ruthlessly pragmatic. His determination to win the war silenced any qualms of conscience he might have felt over the use of gas, then banned under the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which explicitly forbade the use of ‘poison or poisoned weapons’. He ordered up great quantities of the stuff for use at Loos and the Somme, insisting that gas factories work ‘night and day’ (his emphasis) to deliver the necessary supplies.³⁸ He studied the evolution of gas technology and was an early adopter of gas shells, in 1916, a great improvement on the wind in sending lethal clouds into enemy trenches.

Haig’s moral outlook was inherently Victorian, circumscribed by his social class and his belief in the superiority of the British race. Honour, chivalry and respect were, for him, the highest personal virtues, sharpened by privilege and a sense of noblesse oblige to the lower orders. This outlook was not suited to a world war, whose polyglot racial and class mix tended to level social distinctions. The ordinary soldiers respected him; they did not love him. The ranks called him ‘Duggy’, with little enthusiasm, one wrote: ‘He was too remote – but that was not his fault. The show was too big.’³⁹ The soldiers denied him the affection they felt for more ‘human’ commanders such as Plumer, Birdwood, Byng, Monash and Currie, whom they saw a lot more of. Yet, if Haig lacked the ‘common touch’, he took a genuine interest in the men and their families, and the dead and wounded deeply aggrieved him. He regularly visited the field hospitals.⁴⁰

As befitted this career soldier, Haig always dedicated himself to the task at hand, because the completion of every task advanced the fulfilment of his orders.⁴¹ That is what made this commander tick. He tended to place efficiency (and personal ambition) ahead of loyalty. He would thus abandon his friends, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, ‘Wully’ Robertson, and Lord Derby, the secretary of state for war, when they were no longer useful or hindered his work; he sacked many subordinates, not all of them inept. He justified his pivotal role in the downfall of Sir John French on the grounds that Sir John was wholly responsible for the botched offensive at Loos. In his diary, Haig blamed Sir John’s ‘unreasoning brain’ and ‘ignorance of the nature of the fighting’ for the disaster.⁴² Yet Haig shared responsibility for Loos and many other costly errors, as Dr John Paul Harris reveals in his masterful study of Haig’s war.⁴³

Haig succeeded French as commander-in-chief of the BEF on 10 December 1915. In accepting the command of the British and Dominion forces on the Western Front, on 28 December 1915, Haig relished his ‘special task’ set by Lord Kitchener: to drive the German armies out of France and Belgium (see full text, Appendix 3).⁴⁴

Field Marshal Haig now had the power to run the war as he saw fit. His large, liquid eyes and solid frame, his quick step and handsome, reliable face, brought renewed confidence to the British and Dominion armies in France. Moderate in his habits, calm and inscrutable, he ‘tended to speak only when he had something important to say’, observed one biographer. ‘He would not have been the life and soul of a cocktail party, but … one does not have to be a jolly good chap to win wars.’⁴⁵ He measured every action, however harsh, against his determination to forge an army with the resolution to win. On Wednesday 3 March 1915, for example, ‘I recommended that 3 men of the Loyal North Lancs who had deserted deliberately (one found in Paris) … should be shot. The state of discipline in this battalion is not very satisfactory …’ In the event, the accused were spared.⁴⁶

In January 1917, Haig, now 55 and recently promoted to field marshal (having served as a corps commander for the past two years), was about to embark on the greatest test of his career. He commanded, for better or worse, the lives of more than a million men. He believed in his bones in the offensive war, of never letting the enemy rest. His bold plans, important meetings and impressive moustache suggested he exerted great control over the war; less often examined is the extent to which the war exerted control over him. And one thing is important to understanding him, in light of what follows: he would always act in accordance with the instructions of his government. Only in this context can we understand the reasoning of a commander who would be held personally responsible for the death or wounding of the best part of a generation.

Haig’s gravest weaknesses, as seen at the Somme, were his failure to intervene to prevent needless slaughter and his inclination to overestimate the physical endurance of his men. He tended to believe in what he wanted to believe (he unquestioningly accepted, for example, his intelligence chief John Charteris’s exaggerated reports of the enemy’s weakness), and he seemed unable to communicate clear, direct orders (a striking exception being his ‘backs to the wall’ order of April 1918) or terminate or amend bad ones. His notorious inarticulacy provoked cruel jokes and anecdotes (that he was at least as fluent in French as in English said little for his French, ran one). Countering these flaws were his ready willingness to learn and adapt to the exigencies of war, and to listen to the advice of others. He delegated to a fault, sometimes failing to rein in errant generals or ideas. A defining trait of his command was his apparent optimism, a ‘mask of command’ that rode out news that might have unhorsed a more self-reflective man.

Whence arose Haig’s iron imperturbability, his reassuring sanguinity? The field marshal’s Christian faith and doting wife had much to do with it: on finding General Gough ‘downhearted’ at Loos, for example, Haig reminded Gough that trust in God alone would deliver victory.⁴⁷ In this spirit, he urged his chaplains to preach the cause of the war to the men, that ‘we … are fighting for the good of humanity’.⁴⁸ Unlike the impersonal, pragmatic Anglicans on his staff, Haig drew on a deep well of personal feeling that placed God and his Presbyterian faith at the heart of his decision-making. In his lonely position, carrying an immense burden, Haig understandably sought the consolations of a spiritual authority. He usually read a chapter of the Bible before going to bed and confided weekly in his favourite chaplain, the erudite Reverend George Duncan, in whom he placed a near mystical trust. For a hard-headed commander, Haig could be curiously superstitious: when Duncan considered leaving his service, Haig persuaded him to stay, comparing the chaplain to Aaron who held Moses’ hands aloft to ensure the Israelites were victorious in battle.⁴⁹

At times, Haig suggested that God had selected him to lead the Allies to victory. ‘All … somehow give me the idea that they think I am “meant to win” by some Superior Power,’ the field marshal confided in a letter to his wife, soon after his promotion.⁵⁰ At the time, this was not outlandish or bizarre: powerful, proud men of the day often supposed themselves to be the instruments of the Divine. The trouble with this way of thinking was that the thinker could validate any outcome, no matter how disastrous, as the mysterious workings of the Lord. On the eve of the first day of the Somme, 30 June 1916, for example, Haig told Doris that ‘whether or not we are successful lies in the Power above. But I do feel that in my plans I have been helped by a Power that is not my own.’⁵¹ Such power deserted the British the next day, at the end of which almost 60,000 men lay dead, wounded or missing. ‘A day of downs and ups!’ was how Haig responded, conceding that ‘the news about 8 am was not altogether good’.⁵² When he was informed of the casualties of the Somme, he wrote that they ‘cannot be considered severe in view of the numbers engaged, and the length of front attacked’.⁵³

If Haig was ‘not a religious fanatic’, as the Reverend Duncan assures us,⁵⁴ his faith in Calvinistic predestination seems to have been a dangerous psychological disposition in a man at the head of an army: what scale of sacrifice was necessary to win the war and realise the will of the Lord? How many casualties would justify the ways of God to men? A singular goal animated everything he did and said: the defeat of Germany. In this, he shared something with David Lloyd George: both men were driven by an insatiable desire to win, and to be seen to have won.

That is all they shared. In truth, it is hard to imagine two more different men in command of the British war on the Western Front: Haig, the privately educated Oxford and Sandhurst man, a friend of the King’s, married to Queen Alexandra’s maid of honour, and closely connected with the Conservatives in Cabinet; and Lloyd George, the cottage-bred Welsh lawyer turned Liberal prime minister, with a reputation as a philanderer and no respect for English traditions.

Their relations began to slide in September 1916, when Haig learned to his fury that Lloyd George, then secretary of state for war, had gone behind his back and asked Ferdinand Foch, the French commander-in-chief, for his opinion of British generals and why – if the British had gained no more ground than the French forces – they had suffered such heavy casualties. ‘I would not have believed that a British Minister could have been so ungentlemanly as to go to a foreigner and put such questions …’⁵⁵ Later that year, their dislike intensified over the cost of the Somme. ‘I have no great opinion of L. G. as a man or a leader,’ Haig wrote to his wife in September 1916.⁵⁶ In 1917, their relationship would reach new depths of mutual loathing, poisoning a vital liaison at the heart of power and endangering soldiers’ lives.