BOOKS.
HAIG'S GENERALSHIP.* Or the many vexed questions connected with the conduct of the War none has aroused more interest and discussion than Unity of Command, and none has been more obscured by claim and counterclaim and by ill-informed comment. The greatest among many services which Mr. G. A. B. Dewar and Lieut: Cola Boraston have rendered us in these two volumes is the telling for the first time of the story of how Foch came to be appointed to supreme control, and of Haig's relations to Foch subsequent to that event. Our authors say, very truly, that the popular idea that with the advent of Foch inspiration and imagination first illuminated the conduct of the War, and that the defeat of the Germans was entirely due to Foch's genius, does a grave injustice to the British Army and to the British Commander-in-Chief, and is respon Bible for much of the lack of confidence and for much of the pessimism from which we have suffered for the past years, and indeed are still suffering. Mr. Lloyd George was not aware of the proposal to give Foch the control, or of its con- summation, till after the event. On March 24th, 1918, the fourth day of the great German attack, Haig met Main at Dury, and the French Commander-in-Chief told him that, so far from being able to carry out the plans agreed upon for French support in the event of a great attack on the British front, he would, if the Germans continued to press towards Amiens, be obliged to draw back his left flank to cover Paris. This meant the achievement by the Germans of their first great aim, the separation of the British and French armies. That night Haig, after consultation with his Chief of the- Staff, Sir Herbert Lawrence, determined that the one thing to be done was to bring in Foch to direct the whole of the operations on the Western Front. He at once wired to Lord Milner and Sir Henry Wilson to come over. Lord Milner missed the wire, because he left for France on the 25th, Mr. Lloyd George having asked him to go over, not to bring about unity of command, but to report to the War Cabinet on the situation. When the famous conference took place at Doullens on the 26th it was Haig's support which carried Foch's appoint- ment through, and he obtained for Foch more extended powers than M. Clemenceau had proposed he should have.
After the Doullens Conference Haig remained responsible for the safety of the British Army with the right of appeal to the British Government. His support of Foch could not have been more complete, but it was the support, not of a submissive subordinate but of a loyal confrere.
Foch had planned that the second battle of the Marne should be followed by a series of limited attacks, designed to exhaust the Germans and free the Allied communications, but he had not then conceived the possibility of victory in 1918. The battle of Amiens of August 8th was one of these attacks, and was one of the greatest achievements of the British Army. Ludendorf has said that August 8th was the black day in the War for the German Army. Foch, naturally delighted, urged Haig to go on, for he wanted to cross the Somme and get Peronne. But on August 12th Haig discovered that the Germans were established in the old Roye-Chaulnes line, hidden by tangled masses of barbed wire, on ground pitted with dug-outs and shell-holes, covered with long grass, and he refused to sacrifice the lives of his men by
• Sir Douglas Haig's conosond, 1915-1918. By G. A. B. Dewar and Lient.-Col. Boraston. 2 vols. London ; Constable and Co. [42s. net.] trying to hammer his way through this paradise for machine. gunners. At a meeting which took place at Sarcus he proposed to Foch an alternative plan. Foch insisted on the Roye attack, but eventually, after a somewhat heated discussion, gave way and accepted Haig's plan, the plan which brought us victory. " Haig," as our authors say, " immensely im- proved and scientized the whole plan of the Allied advance, for the purpose of bringing the struggle to a close in 1918; until he intervened in this matter that plan was quite without coherency." But in winning over Foch, Haig had not done all. By the end of August the British armies had won their way forwards to the great Hindenburg line, which Foch and Haig, both now agreed and both confident, desired to assault that they might end the war in 1918. But the British War. Cabinet was looking to victory in 1919 with American aid, and on August 31st sent Haig a discouraging telegram, warning him of the strength of the Hindenburg line, of the danger of incurring heavy casualties, and practically implying that if he failed it would be the end of his command. Again Haig took on his shoulders the whole responsibility and carried through to its triumphant conclusion the plan which he had outlined to Foch at Sarcus.
This telegram was marked private, a shabby expedient which prevented Haig referring to it in his despatches ; it is not by any means the only shabby expedient adopted by the Government in its treatment of its Commander-in-Chief. It is notorious that Mr. Lloyd George distrusted Haig, and as the Spectator pointed out at the time of the famous Paris speech, he committed the greatest crime which a War Minister can commit of retaining a Commander-in-Chief while with- holding from him a full measure of support. Nothing was more calculated to undermine the confidence of the troops than his reference to " the bloody assaults of the Somme," and his implication, cruel to Haig and cruel to sorrowing relations at home, that the best of our men had been sacrificed unnecessarily. Nothing was more injudicious and unjustified than the intervention of a civilian Minister in the technical question of the number of men required to hold the front. At the cad of January, 1918, Mr. Lloyd George stated that in his opinion we were " over-insured on the Western front," and on that ground he refused the reinforcements for which Haig had pressed. The attempts to cover up these vital mistakes have been unpleasant and undignified. Important passages were deleted from Haig's despatches, particularly those relating to the strength of our Army before the great German attack of March, 1918. There may have been some reasons for these deletions while the War lasted, but they were not allowed to appear in the volume of despatches published in the end of 1919, and they are here given us for the first time. The deliberate belittling of Haig and of the British Army, which was continuous from the autumn of 1917, has weakened our influence in the world and done us a wrong which is now hardly reparable. Mr. Lloyd George's astonishing inaccuracy in his statements on military affairs is becoming notorious, and of these inaccuracies this book gives us a number of examples, the most remarkable being the late Prime Minister's eulogy of the Versailles forecast of the great German attack. It now appears that it was Haig who foretold exactly the time and place of the attack, and that the Versailles prophets expected it to take place on a front north of that held by the Fifth Army, and not before June or July. Mr. Dewar's comment on these things is : " Truth in this world,' said a cynic, ' must wait—she is used to it.' The wait in this instance strikes one as unnecessarily long." We shall not know the whole truth till Lord Haig's own papers are published, but we here get a large instalment of it and one which places the British Army and the British Commander-in-Chief upon the pedestals which they should long ago have occupied.
FREDERICK MAURICE.
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