On 9 April 1917 the British launched the Battle of the Scarpe at Arras and put into operation many of the lessons learnt on the Somme—and particularly from its disastrous first day. The integration of Lewis gun, rifle grenade and trench mortar fire with short rushes forward of riflemen and bombers, together with an increasing confidence in the gunners’ ability to lay down effective creeping barrages, truly transformed the BEF’s battlefield performance and, in the words of one historian, had turned the British army ‘from a largely inexperienced mass army to a largely experienced one’.23 Far from ‘Kitchener’s Mob’, it was now the highly professional force that won the great victories of the last hundred days in 1918. ‘The British army learnt its lesson the hard way during the middle part of the Somme battle,’ stated Charles Carrington, an infantry officer, ‘and, for the rest of the war, was the best army in the field.’24

We may recoil from the thought of generals learning by trial and error at the expense of hundreds of thousands of men’s lives, but for all their many faults, Haig and his fellow generals were fighting a war that had no precedents in its awfulness and capacity for industrialized slaughter. Haig was a good diplomat in a Western coalition that would eventually include the French, Belgium, Dominion and American armies. He learned faster and better than any of the Allied generals how to defeat Britain’s most formidable and efficient foreign enemy since the Battle of Waterloo. Although no one—not even his greatest champions—pretends that Douglas Haig was a Marlborough or Wellington, his recent biographer was right to dub him ‘not… the greatest military figure Britain has ever produced, but… one of the most significant—and one of the most successful.’25 Amongst military historians such as John Terraine, Brian Bond, Gary Sheffield and Hew Strachan, there has been a strong resurgence in Haig’s favour, and they have largely restored his reputation, albeit not yet with the general public.