Architect of Victory (eBook)

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BUTCHER AND BUNGLER OR ARCHITECT OF VICTORY?

Douglas Haig died on 29 January 1928. In the years since the end of the Great War, almost ten years earlier, he had certainly not been at the centre of the national stage. On the other hand, his activities, particularly his work for the British Legion, continued to attract regular mention in the press. He was only sixty-six, and not known to be in ill health. His death was accordingly unexpected as well as sudden. It occurred late on a Sunday evening, and the news did not become generally known until the Tuesday morning: then for several days the newspapers were filled with memoirs and tributes. Even if Haig was never loved by the nation, like a Nelson, he was certainly respected, both by the millions of soldiers of whom very few indeed would ever have seen him and also by the great mass of the population, for whom he was the man who had brought victory to Britain and returned the world to peace. There was a profound sense of loss.1

Tributes poured in from around the world, from royalty, politicians and generals. From South Africa, Field-Marshal Smuts said: ‘All honour to him. He left a record of qualities and work of which the British people may justly be proud.’ When tributes came to be paid in Parliament, speakers sought to identify what for them had been special about Haig. In the House of Lords, the Marquis of Salisbury said:

In one respect the position of Lord Haig was different from and more difficult than that of any other Commander because of the vastness of the forces which it was his duty to control. This not only made the complexity of operations much greater, but it necessarily prevented him from having that personal contact with the soldiers in the field upon which great Commanders in the past have so much relied to inspire their armies to achieve their purpose.2

Lord Beauchamp said:

He was a man of a rare and single-minded devotion to duty – during these last few years we had, I think, specially learned to admire the reticence he has shown with regard to the great operations in which he was engaged. That is an example of dignity which has commended itself, I am sure, to every member of your Lordships’ House.3

In the Commons, Major-General Sir Robert Hutchison said:

I loved Lord Haig. I have known Lord Haig all my life . . . I had the privilege of serving in two campaigns with him – in South Africa and in the Great War – and in the Great War for a time I was one of his Staff Officers. The memory of Haig will always remain with me, sweet, clean and just what I would like it to be.4

Brigadier-General Charteris, perhaps the closest of all his Staff Officers, quoted the verse that Kipling had written of Lord Roberts:

He lay in state in St Columba’s Church, Pont Street, London, for two days, while a constant stream of mourners, some 25,000 in all, passed by for more than twelve hours each day. Lady Haig came to the church twice. On the first occasion she left two wreaths of Flanders poppies on the coffin. Among those who came to pay their tributes were many sightless and handicapped ex-servicemen, who were helped through the crowds. A Scotsman laid a sprig of heather at the foot of the coffin.

The family had been offered a burial in St Paul’s, the usual dignity for someone in Haig’s position, but he had made it known that he wished to buried at home in Scotland. After a brief service in St Columba’s, the official funeral took place at Westminster Abbey on 3 February. With all the pomp and ceremony appropriate to the obsequies of a famously victorious field-marshal, it was little less than a state funeral. The three eldest sons of the King, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York and Prince Henry, walked behind the gun carriage that bore the coffin. With them walked two Marshals of France, Pétain, still the victorious defender of Verdun, not the peacemaker of 1940, and Foch, Supreme Allied Commander, defiant, magnificent, indomitable. Haig’s charger followed his body, boots reversed in the stirrups. Ahead of the charger walked his servant of twenty-five years, Sergeant Secrett, who had carried his sick chief on his shoulders from his quarters in 1914. The huge crowds that attended the ceremonial were subdued, the atmosphere not that of a pageant, but intimate and moving to a degree that impressed itself on London and the Empire. Nothing remotely similar had taken place or would take place for any of the other First World War leaders. Indeed, of the Second World War leaders, only Churchill’s funeral eclipsed Haig’s. While the ceremony was taking place in Westminster Abbey, simultaneous services took place for Haig in cities throughout the United Kingdom, something that did not happen for Churchill.

After the ceremony, the coffin was taken by train to Edinburgh. It arrived at midnight. The ground was covered in snow. The coffin was carried on a gun carriage to St Giles’ Cathedral on the ancient High Street, through denser crowds than had ever attended a royal visit, in a silence broken only by sobs and by the pipe melody, The Flowers of the Forest, written to commemorate the Battle of Flodden in 1513. This haunting and historic lament, played so often in Scotland since 1914, was heard twice in the course of the journey from Lothian Road to St Giles’. The cathedral remained open until Haig’s waiting countrymen had all passed by, some 70,000 in all. The minister of St Giles’ and Dean of the Thistle, Dr Charles Warr, said that not since the burial of the Regent Moray in the sixteenth century had Edinburgh seen such a display of grief.

The mood of respect and admiration, perhaps even affection, to which the events in London and Edinburgh testified, remained undissipated until the outbreak of the next war, and even beyond that. Railway engines and streets were named after Haig. Children were given his names. Many statues were erected.

The most celebrated of these statues was unveiled on Whitehall on 10 November 1937 (though its design offended Lady Haig, who did not attend the ceremony, and technical solecisms disturbed cavalry traditionalists) in the presence of contingents of regular troops representing the navy, army and air force, and including Indian, Dominion and Colonial detachments: 2,000 serving personnel in all, together with 700 members of the Territorial Army.6 The importance of the occasion and Haig’s position in the national pantheon was reflected by the fact that the statue was unveiled by the Duke of Gloucester, a cavalryman himself. After the unveiling, the Duke laid a wreath and gave an address. On the following day, 11 November, after laying his wreath at the Cenotaph in commemoration of the Armistice, the King – against the advice of his home secretary – walked up Whitehall to the statue, inspected it and laid another wreath at its foot.

What prompts the writing of this book is the profundity of the change in the mood of the times, and in how the nation regarded Haig, which had taken place by the time that the same statue was the subject of press reports 61 years later, on the eightieth anniversary of the Armistice. The Express (as the Daily Express was known at the time) opened a campaign to have the Whitehall statue melted down, the metal to be used to strike medals for the families of those executed as deserters and mutineers.7 Shortly afterwards A.N. Wilson wrote an article in the Sunday Telegraph, claiming that Haig had never deserved a statue in the first place.8 And neither the Daily Express nor Wilson were maverick voices. The Express claimed that it spoke for ‘the modern generation of military historians’. That is not the case, but it probably did speak, as did A.N. Wilson, for a body of generally well-informed and educated people with an interest in current affairs and twentieth-century history. What had happened to reverse Haig’s fortunes in the two generations after his death? Haig’s Oxford College was Brasenose. After the First World War the college was proud of its distinguished son, and enthusiastically celebrated his achievements. Two generations later the college’s undergraduates defaced his portrait in the college hall with the inscription, ‘Murderer of 1,000,000 Men’; and the war memorial at the college entrance was removed.

Little had changed in Haig’s lifetime. The public’s immediate reaction to the horrors of the war was to turn its back on them, and it was a full decade before the anti-war literature started to flow. C.E. Montague wrote Disenchantment in 1922, but it was only in the late 1920s that Rupert Brooke began to be displaced as the most popular war poet by Wilfred Owen, and that writers like Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and R.C. Sherriff came to attention, and the process of displacement really only achieved full force in the 1960s. Interestingly, only Wilfred Owen, amongst these authors, was arguably anti-war: Graves and Sherriff were proud of their wars, and surprised to be thought anything else, and Sassoon was a brave officer who admired his men, even if he came to challenge the reasons for which the war was prosecuted.

As far as the history of the war generally was concerned, Church-ill’s magisterial account, The World Crisis, appeared in six volumes between 1923 and 1929. Haig’s reaction to what he read of it is explored later, but Churchill’s criticisms of Haig were qualified by a number of...