The orders given to Gen. Sir Douglas Haig were as crisp as the seams on his staff officers’ trousers. ‘I was to keep friendly with the French,’ he noted in his diary after a meeting with Lord Kitchener at the War Office in Whitehall on Friday, 3 December 1915. ‘General Joffre should be looked upon as the C-in-C… In France we must do all we can to meet [Joffre’s] wishes whatever may be our personal feelings about the French Army and its Commanders.’ Kitchener was not a man to cross, and as Secretary of State for War he had the final say over whether Haig would be given the job of commander-in-chief of the BEF, the post Haig had been angling for ever since the current occupier, Sir John French, had badly mishandled the Battle of Loos that October. Kitchener was older than Haig, a military hero since Victorian days, an earl, the man on ten thousand recruitment posters and the proud possessor of an even more luxuriant moustache than Haig’s own.

At the meeting Kitchener had confirmed that he ‘had taken the matter in hand’ and would be pressing the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, to give Sir John French’s job to Haig over the next few days, so, as Haig recorded, ‘I must not trouble my head over it. As soon as I was in the saddle he would see me again.’ Such was Kitchener’s confidence and invulnerable position in public esteem that he told Haig he ‘must not be afraid to criticize any of his actions which I found unsatisfactory: he had only one thought, viz. to do his best to end the war.’3 Beyond replacing his superior, that was Haig’s main thought too, but when he left the War Office that day, he was under no illusions but that he would be implementing General Joseph Joffre’s overall strategy once he got the job he craved.

Sir Douglas (later Field Marshal Earl) Haig is easily the most controversial commander-in-chief in British history. It could hardly be otherwise with the man whose battle plans were responsible both for the slaughter of the Somme in 1916 and Passchendaele a year later but also for the stunning series of victories on the Western Front that sealed Germany’s fate in the last hundred days of the war in 1918. His reputation has veered between mass national veneration—his funeral in February 1928 was the largest since the Duke of Wellington’s—and denigration of him as a callous, ignorant war criminal in Alan Clark’s book The Donkeys, written in 1961 and immensely influential in popular culture, as the TV comedy series Blackadder Goes Forth showed to such absurdly poignant effect.4

Douglas Haig was fifty-five years old when he was appointed commander-in-chief of the BEF in December 1915. He came from a Scottish whisky distilling family, and had gone to Clifton College, Bristol, then Brasenose College, Oxford, and on to the British Army’s officer training establishment at Sandhurst. A cavalryman, he had done well in the 1898 Sudan campaign and, unlike many British officers, also distinguished himself in the Boer War. Far from being the hidebound reactionary idiot of popular misconception, he was an Army reformer who had collaborated with the visionary Secretary of State for War, Richard Haldane, between 1905 and 1912. These reforms created the Territorial Army and the British Expeditionary Force, among other innovations, and as director of military training Haig wrote Field Service Regulations, the first-ever tactical manual for the British army. He taught himself French, and some historians believe that he was more fluent in that language than in English; he has been described as ‘a reserved, tongue-tied Lowland Scot… positively incoherent once he strayed off a written paper’.5 He was highly enthusiastic about and supportive of new inventions that he hoped might provide his longed for breakthrough on the Western Front, such as mortar shells for smokescreens, wireless sets, poison gas, aeroplanes, and of course tanks, which he championed from the start, unlike some other cavalry officers.*1 The accusation that he thought machine guns were overrated, or ever said that two per battalion were enough, has also been comprehensively discredited.6 He might not have been a particularly endearing person but generals do not need to be; much more importantly, he had a burning desire to win the most vicious conflict in human history, which had become an immovable war of position by the autumn of 1914.