1996 Haig Fellow’s Address

The following is the paper delivered at the 1996 Annual Lunch by the Haig Fellow, John Terraine.

Patron, Secretary, Officers and Members of The Douglas Haig Fellowship, Today it is my privilege, and great pleasure to greet you and offer you my congratulations on our first anniversary, the first anniversary of our inaugural meeting a year ago. It has not been a year of spectacular achievement - more, I should say, a year of' settling in1. In particular, it has seen a valuable strengthening of our administration - the appointment of an Hon Treasurer, Miss Bridget Hill. A satisfying feature of your serving officers is their age: your Hon Secretary and Public Relations Officer are in their early 40s, your Hon Treasurer is nearly 30. I find that very encouraging - it certainly saves us from a 'fuddy-duddy' image.

Life, of course, is not, even for a Haig Fellow, all privilege and pleasure. There is also the little matter of Duty - a subject on which the Field-Marshal himself was particularly strong and therefore all the more inscrutable to his present-day traducers. My duty now is to offer you the first of our Haig Fellow Lectures and I have to tell you that I have found this no easy task. The passing years have taken me further and further from Douglas Haig's critics; they appear to me to be, at best ignorant, often absurd, at worst malicious and often downright dishonest. Against such opposition, it is hard to know where to begin.

It is now a very long time ago that I sadly realised that for British students and historians of the First World War, Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig had become a touchstone. Those who got Haig wrong usually got the War wrong - and vice versa. It is a British Problem: east of the Rhine and the Alps you would usually have to explain who Sir Douglas Haig was. But people would generally know what the War was, all right.

I was aware of this peculiarity when the first edition of my book Douglas Haig: The Educated Soldier came out 33 years ago. I was also aware that my message would be running almost entirely against the mainstream of received opinion at that time. It was, in modern parlance, not 'PC -absolutely not 'Politically Correct' to try to defend the victorious British Commander-in-Chief on the Western Front in the 1960s, any more than it is today.

I knew that, so I can't pretend to have been taken by surprise; yet the volume of the hostile reaction, and the depth of the bitterness expressed in some of it - 45 years after the War, 35 years after Haig's death - did rather amaze me. And as another generation of denigrators came into view in the '80s, I formed the clear impression that the more closely people had known Haig, the more they were likely to be pleased with my defence of him, while the less they knew him, the further they were away from him, the less they liked him, and therefore me. There seemed to be significance in this. And we have to remember that most people are getting further away.

Some have expressed wonder when I appear surprised at the sheer virulence of most of the attacks on Haig. There are critics who wonder how I can possibly defend a man whom a letter from one infuriated veteran called 'history's mass executioner of his own race'; they wonder whether my writing was some kind of affectation, a pose which I didn't really mean. I can assure you that that was not the case. One recent hostile biographer - Gerard de Groot - has stated that while

Haig's critics argue from the war to the man, his champions (of whom I am a clear example) take the opposite approach. Their study of Haig (ie. my study) reveals a man whose values were the same as those which made Britain great. They glide smoothly towards the conclusion that if a man of such stature could not limit the casualties, no one could ... etc, etc

This curious capsule contains the exact opposite of the truth. That is precisely how I did not approach my study of Haig. I started with the War, and in my annoying, simplistic way, I started with the notion that it was what it said, a world war. Its character - its horrifying, cruel, bloody character -was fully formed before the British Army or Douglas Haig began to take a noticeable part in it. A brief look at the year 1914, twelve months of fighting that it contained, tells us all.

The British Expeditionary Force began to assemble in France on August 12 1914, and when it met the Germans at Mons on August 23 it consisted of two army corps and a cavalry division, a total of about 100,000 men. The BEF took up its agreed position on the extreme left of the French Army, which for immediate purposes numbered about one million, one hundred thousand men. The Germans were deploying a field army of nearly 2½ million men, East and West. The Austro-Hungarians initially deployed some 1,360,000. The Russian peacetime strength was about 2 million men, with whom they at once faced both Germans and Austrians. I don't have to dwell upon the point that the British element was somewhat exceptional, regarding size. The same, naturally, was true regarding casualties. By the end of 1914, the five months had cost Britain a total of just over 93,000 officers and men. The French, in the Battles of the Frontiers, which effectively began on August 20, lost 211,000, mostly in the remaining 12 days of that month. By the end of the year - and we are now talking about a period roughly equivalent to the duration of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 - the French had lost 955,000. These were our allies. We were there to support them: We needed them. They had four more years of tribulation ahead of them. And in that same space of dreadful time in 1914 our other allies, the Russians, lost over 1,350,000 killed, wounded or taken prisoner.

And what about our enemies? Dr de Groot is an American; he doesn't tell us very much in his book on Sir Douglas Haig about the Germans, though Haig had a lot to do with them. But another American - and no admirer of Haig, let me say -Robert Asprey, has written a book on the German High Command and its performance on both the Western and Eastern Fronts. According to Asprey, the German Army 'had suffered 840,000 casualties, including 150,000 dead, in just five months of war.' And it is Professor Norman Stone, in his book on The Eastern Front, who tells us that those five months cost the Austro-Hungarians 1¼ million men.

I am sorry to plunge you straight into the abiding misery of the Great War studies - statistics, statistics, statistics - in this fashion. But there really is no option. Some of you may remember that back in the 1950s, during the Korean War, we were frequently told that the enemy (especially the Chinese) were advancing in 'hordes'. One Press Conference, presided over by a smooth-talking American staff officer, was informed that the 'hordes' were coming again, and a fed-up reporter, who had probably encountered one horde too may, asked him, 'Colonel, how many men to a horde?' It was a good question. With World War One, we constantly read - and often speak - of 'masses' -mass armies, mass weapon production, mass casualties. Clearly, we need to know, at least roughly, how many men to a 'mass'? Hence the statistics.

The point of the figures I have just given you - and it would have been very hard to make the point without the figures - is that the almost 4½ million casualties sustained by the great European powers in the first five months delineated, once and for all, the nature of the war. Of course, it got worse as it went along - not surprisingly, as the armies swelled, the weapons multiplied and became more lethal.

And the further point is that, as I have said elsewhere,

If it had been possible to subtract the British Army and all its generals entirely from the proceedings, the nature of the war would not have been one whit different.

And that is where I start from.

One comparison in particular continued to exert a meaningful influence. By the end of 1915, when Haig became C-in-C of the BEF, Britain, with a population of 46 million, had sustained just over half a million casualties. France, with a population of just under 40 million, had suffered 1,961,000. I don't think anyone was aware of this contrast in those stark terms at the time, but a loss of practically two million men in less than a year and a half obviously cannot be entirely concealed, and must be both horrifying and menacing. And there was still more than half a year to go before the British really began to lift this terrible burden off the French army.

When they did this, they made a sadly inauspicious start - July 1 1916. We have never got over the shock of what happened on that day; it supplied the great British trauma. I fear that we may see a vigorous revival of it during this 80th Anniversary year. It coloured our view of the whole war, and Haig's reputation suffered accordingly. A lot of people don't really hate Haig; they hate the War. Haig became the scapegoat. Yet, in truth, Britain had been very fortunate in delaying her encounter with the true nature of the war for two years, and though the shock, when it came, was understandable, we owe it to our own reason and dignity to appreciate the event in its true perspective.

In July 1916 the British Army, for the first and only time in its history, began to engage the main body of the main enemy in a continental war. The French had spent two years finding out what this meant, at an awful cost. In the next war, the Russians also found out, and their loss was astronomical. In each case, the dreadful experience was a product of modern, industrial, total war. The question that arose in July 1916 was simply whether Haig and the British generals would be able to find a way of avoiding the experience that every other power engaged in the war had to undergo - the experience which had become, tragically, the 'human condition' of 1914-1918. Could Haig find a way of escaping the 'human condition1? In my opinion, that would have required supernatural powers. He did not have supernatural powers. And neither did anyone else.

The powers that he did have were, however, not negligible. We must ask ourselves what a general is supposed to do, what he is for. I know no better answer than that supplied by Field- Marshal Lord Slim, writing about the black days of defeat in Burma in 1942, Slim said:

Defeat is bitter. Bitter to the common soldier, but trebly bitter to his general. The soldier may comfort himself with the thought that, whatever the result, he has done his duty faithfully and steadfastly, but the commander has failed in his duty if he has not won victory - for that is his duty. He has no other comparable to it.

Pondering this verdict, I concluded that, at bottom, generals come in three sizes. The most numerous without doubt are those who reach the ends of long, honourable careers without any outstanding distinction, and quietly fade into the oblivion of country churchyards, with perhaps a memorial inside the church. Others are less fortunate: they are remembered by association with humiliating disasters, and no nation's history is exempt from these. In Haig's war there were not many such, Britain being represented by the unhappy Major-General Sir Charles Townshend, who surrendered to the Turks in 1916 in Kut-al-Amara in what was then called Mesopotamia (now Iraq) with some 10,000 British and Indian troops. The Western Front did not witness such chilling occasions, though many careers came to grief there. Haig clearly does not belong to the categories of either the anonymous or the defeated.

That leaves the winners, the generals who were, in varying degrees, successful. In my opinion, defeating the main body of the main enemy on the European continent was the hardest task that has ever faced the British Army. Only three generals have had to perform it: The Duke of Marlborough, against Louis XIV; the Duke of Wellington, against Napoleon; and Lord Haig. He stands therefore in good company. All three fought as part of coalitions, but the difference between Haig and the Dukes is that they were commanders-in-chief of whole alliances, whereas Haig, despite the great size of his army (its ration strength in November 1918 was 1,794,000) was always a junior partner. He didn't like this - indeed, there were times when he positively hated it. But he knew that fighting in France beside a very much larger French Army (in 1918 its ration strength was still over 2 ½ million) there was no alternative. Very soon after taking over the command-in-chief, he called in his French liaison officer, and, he says,

I showed him the instructions I have received ... containing the orders of the Government to me. I pointed out that I am not under General Joffre's orders, but that would make no difference, as my intention was to do my utmost to carry out General Joffre's wishes on strategical matters, as if they were orders.

I think that was a sign of true greatness, all the more because the performance of his intention was so often so distasteful. But he stuck to it, as a matter of Duty, deferring to successive French commanders-in-chief, playing a major role in the appointment of General Foch as Generalissimo, and continuing right through the final Allied offensive when his own armies played the largest part in obtaining victory, as shown by their achievement in taking almost 50% of all the prisoners and over 40% of all the guns captured by all the Allies. I look on that as the 'finest hour' of the British Army.

Haig's war being, as I said at the beginning, a world war, I shall finish by quoting a German opinion of him, pronounced by a body roughly equivalent to our Royal United Services Institute; this states:

The circumstance that Haig never could act really independently, but always had to make his decisions subject to conditions imposed on him, is no reason to deny him the position of commander-in-chief... What is more important is whether his actions were conducted with strategic ability, firm will, strength of character, acceptance of responsibility and political insight. Haig possessed all these qualities and used them in ‘harmonious combination' as Clausewitz requires of a great commander ... in the last three years of the war Haig contributed the most to prevent a German victory. Thus he really remained 'master of the field'.

In all the studies of Haig (and of course, of other subjects, too) the starting-point seems to me to be the essential matter. When I was writing my own book, I developed a very great admiration for Duff Cooper's excellent Haig, two volumes published in 1935, bitterly attacked by Lloyd George and in recent decades almost entirely, but foolishly, neglected Because Duff Cooper's starting-point was a calm, objective stance, he was able to write about various' controversial matters with an illumination far removed from the barren, unperceptive venom of so much recent work. I should like to give you just one example, but to my mind a striking one, of what I mean.

I think - and clearly, so did Duff Cooper - that Haig's relations with his French allies are very revealing of his character - in particular of his deep sense of duty. His full and unfaltering acceptance of the subordination of himself and his Army to French strategy seems to me all the more admirable because he found the French almost impossible to fathom and a great trial to deal with. This, I need hardly say, has been noted and duly sneered at by his critics. What does Duff Cooper - famous Francophile - have to say about it? He remarks that Haig never succeeded in even approaching intimate relations with a Frenchman in the manner of Henry Wilson with Foch (though Haig always worked hard at preserving cordiality), and Duff Cooper concludes,

'Had his character been cast in a more cosmopolitan mould, had he been more hail fellow well met with all and sundry, many difficulties which arose might have been avoided, but in that case he would not have been Douglas Haig, and many difficulties which were avoided might have arisen.’

That seems to me to be exactly the truth of the matter - a lesson, I think, for our Fellowship - and a further illustration of the need for such  a Fellowship If we can promote an atmosphere in which such a civilized balance as Duff Cooper strikes here (and all through the book) can flourish, we may be able to arrive at that justice for DH's name and reputation which, as I said at the beginning, is our true aim.
And now it is my very pleasant duty to ask you all to be upstanding for the toast to the memory of 'Field-Marshal Earl Haig of Bemersyde, OM, KT, GCB, GCVO, KCIE, Legion d'Honneur, etc, etc, etc, the victorious Commander-in-Chief.