A soldier much traduced
Robert Blake
FIELD MARSHAL EARL HAIG
by Philip Warner Bodley Head, £15.99, pp.296 Of the making of books about Douglas Haig there seems to be no end. Even at this late date, 63 years after his death, and 73 years after the end of the war in which he played such a major part, there have appeared two books. The first by Denis Winter, published in March, displays an almost paranoiac hatred of its subject. It was cut to pieces in the Times Literary Sup- plement by Correlli Barnett, who described it as 'an exercise in journalism of the kind that has been dubbed Pilgerism', and point- ed out a multitude of errors, follies and misjudgments. The second, which has been published at too short an interval to deal with the first, is by Philip Warner, a reputable military historian, who tries to give a balanced portrait, and on the whole succeeds.
Why does Haig still stir such passions — for or against? For instance, people do not feel thus about Marlborough, Wellington, Kitchener; or about Auchinleck, Alexan- der, Montgomery. Even 'Bomber Harris', whose aircrews suffered more deaths than those of all the junior officers in the 1914- 18 army — the most vulnerable category — does not inspire a similar angry debate. The reason may lie in the unprecedented magnitude of the armies involved and the sheer size of the casualty lists. The propor- tion of deaths to survivors was not very dif- ferent from the figures of the Napoleonic wars, but the numbers were far greater. For Britain, unlike any of the continental Euro- pean countries, this became its first con- script or 'citizens' war — which may explain why Joffre, Foch, Hindenburg and Ludendorff have never attracted compara- ble controversy. France and Germany were inured to the military way of life. Britain was not. The shock was far greater and the need to seek scapegoats far stronger, although British 'casualties' — a bland word which covers 'dead', 'missing' (nearly always dead) and 'wounded', many of whom died later — were both in numbers and percentage of population much less than those suffered by France, Germany and Russia.
But the attitude of British writers on the subject of modern war has, with some exceptions, been parochial to a high degree. We are told again and again to contrast the losses in the second world war with those in the first, and to conclude that there was a great improvement in general- ship since the days of Haig. Whether there was or not, the figures prove nothing. British losses were certainly less, but Britian did not carry the burden borne in the 1914-18 war. The Sommes and Passchendaeles were fought on the eastern front where conditions were just as lethal, where German and Russian casualties were on a horrific scale and where the war was actually won — just as in 1918 it was in the end won on the western front. The truth is that no short cut to victory exists when the armed forces on the two sides have roughly equal weaponry. It is another matter when `we have got the Maxim gun and they have not'. Contrast Omdurman with Loos, or the Gulf war with the eight-year stalemate of Iraq against Iran. In the second world war there were differences in war technolo- gy — the Allies had better planes, the Germans better tanks — but there was no vast gulf; and in 1914-18 there was little to choose between the weaponry of the two sides. In those circumstances a war of attri- tion is inevitable, unless one side makes colossal blunders, like the French in 1870. It is a matter of manpower, munitions and morale. If these are at all evenly matched a rapid result is remote.
The critics of Haig and the 'Westerners' believed that somehow somewhere there was a short cut which would avoid the interminable hard pounding in Flanders and northern France. Why not turn the enemy's flank by an attack on his allies, Turkey, Bulgaria, Austria? 'Knocking away the props', it was idiotically called, as if they propped up Germany and not vice versa. The phrase was as silly as the 'soft under-belly of Europe' in the second world war. The casualties in the Dardanelles cam- paign in proportion to numbers were as heavy as those in France, achieved nothing and had no effect whatever on Germany. The Italian campaign against Austria was scarcely less futile. All the eloquence of Churchill and Lloyd George cannot dis- guise these facts.
To say that Haig was right on the general strategy is not to say that he made no mis- takes in the conduct of the war in the west. He certainly did, and Passchendaele — or rather his persistence in continuing the campaign so late into the autumn of 1917 — was one of them. The launching of the attack had a measure of justification — the weakness of the French armies after the mutinies which followed the disastrous Nivelle offensive, and the possibility of capturing the northern Channel ports. But misled by the optimism of his chief intelli- gence officer, he believed in a break- through, which in retrospect seems very unlikely. The Somme, the other big subject of criticism, is a different matter. He had no option but to take part in the inter- allied effort co-ordinated in 1916 between Russia, Italy and France, even though his troops were ill-trained and raw. And one should not totally ignore, as Denis Winter does, that in the end the British armies under Haig played the major role in defeating the German forces in 1918.
This is a very readable and fair account of a soldier who, though no military genius, has been much traduced over the years by people unable to understand the limita- tions within which any commander then had to act and the unprecedented scale of operations. No one has ever seriously suggested an alternative. If I have criticisms of an otherwise excellent book, one is the excessive use of the phrase 'of course'; another, more seriously, is the absence of source references in a study of what still remains a highly controversial subject.
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