The Chief

Douglas Haig and the British Army

Gary Sheffield

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781845137694
• eBook ISBN: 9781845137342
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Prima guerra mondiale

‘Well written and persuasive …objective and well-rounded….this scholarly rehabilitation should be the standard biography’ **** Andrew Roberts, Mail on Sunday

‘A true judgment of him must lie somewhere between hero and zero, and in this detailed biography Gary Sheffield shows himself well qualified to make it … a balanced portrait’ Sunday Times

‘Solid scholarship and admirable advocacy’ Sunday Telegraph

Douglas Haig is the single most controversial general in British history. In 1918, after his armies had won the First World War, he was feted as a saviour. But within twenty years his reputation was in ruins, and it has never recovered. In this fascinating biography, Professor Gary Sheffield reassesses Haig’s reputation, assessing his critical role in preparing the army for war.

1

Apprenticeship

At the end of October 1918, as the British Expeditionary Force prepared to launch its final victorious battle on the Western Front, a letter appeared in The Scotsman about the ancestors of the Commander-in-Chief, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig. The Haigs, it said,

have always been a martial family … One fought with Wallace at the battle of Stirling Bridge. One fought in Bruce’s army at Bannockburn, and afterwards at Halidonhill, where he fell … [Another] was in the army of the Regent Arran which defeated the English invaders at Ancrum in 1544, and had the honour of capturing Lord Evers, one of the English Generals … This is indeed a warlike record …

Douglas Haig was ‘a worthy and able successor of his warrior ancestors’.¹

He was born on 19 June 1861 in a house on Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, the eleventh and last child of John and Rachel Haig.² The baby was born into a life of wealth and privilege. A Norman knight, Petrus de Haga (the Latin version of Pierre de la Hague) had come to Scotland from Normandy in the mid-twelfth century and settled in the Borders near Bemersyde. The Haig family, as they became known, quickly cemented a place in Scottish society. The thirteenth-century bard Thomas the Rhymer had prophesied:

Tyde what may, what’er betide

Haig will be Haig of Bemersyde.

‘Tyde What May’ appears on the Haig family crest, and Bemersyde has remained in the family to the present day. Field Marshal Earl Haig became the 29th Laird of Bemersyde when he took in possession of the estate in 1923.

By the early nineteenth century the social standing of the Haigs had slipped. John Haig, Douglas’s father, was remembered as a rough old man with a thick Scottish brogue.³ What he lacked in social polish he more than made up for in money. John Haig was a wealthy whisky distiller, laying the foundations for a company that became a household name in Britain. In 1839 he made a shrewd marriage to Rachel Veitch, who was from another Border family of distinctly higher social standing than his branch of the Haigs. Victorian Britain was class-ridden and class-conscious, but it was a society in which families with ‘new’ money from ‘trade’ could make their way into high society, particularly if a judicious match raised their social profile. Social barriers could be porous. ‘Who can say’, asked a contemporary commentator, ‘where the upper class ends or the middle class begins’?⁴ John’s money and Rachel’s family helped their children ease into the social elite. Douglas, by being sent to a public school, attending Oxford and being commissioned into a smart regiment, took three important steps to consolidating his and his family’s place in the upper classes, although fellow officers could occasionally be snobbish about Haig’s origins in ‘trade’, even when he was a field marshal. In 1918 Major-General Pinney referred to him as ‘the opulent whiskey distiller’.⁵

John Haig is a rather shadowy figure. He was 59 at the time of his youngest son’s birth, and suffered from ill health that was exacerbated by heavy drinking. A letter of 1877 from Rachel to the 16-year-old Douglas speaks volumes. His father had ‘for the first time … done without Brandy, Whisky or Kirsche before breakfast’. John died, according to his death certificate probably of cirrhosis of the liver, in 1878.⁶ John Haig’s foul temper did not always make for a happy relationship with his children. It is always risky to argue from silence, but Douglas’s later reticence about his father probably reflects the emotional space between the two. But John Haig should not be written off simply as a stereotypical drunken, abusive Victorian father. His namesake, Douglas’s elder brother, remembered their father, for all his faults, with fondness.⁷ For all that, John Haig’s strongest influence on his youngest son was perhaps a negative one. Later in life, Haig was notably abstemious and health-conscious – although he seems to have lived the good life to the full as an undergraduate at Oxford – and it is tempting to read this as a reaction against his father’s excesses.

‘Willie’ Haig, the eldest of the brood, was a full two decades older than Douglas, and even before John Haig’s death he seems to have acted as something of a stand-in father for the youngest children.⁸ By far the greatest influence on the young Douglas, though, was his mother. Rachel had been just 19 when she married her 37-year-old husband. She was, remembered her daughter Janet, ‘a capable, sensible, clearheaded woman, absolutely unworldly, and with a deep and reverent sense of Duty’. Rachel was ‘selflessly devoted to her children’, but ‘she loved her youngest above them all’.⁹ Douglas’s Christian faith, instilled as a child, owed much to her. His mother had grown more pious with age: ‘I desire’, she wrote to her son John, ‘to acknowledge His loving Hand in this as in every other event’.¹⁰ Likewise, at the time of the greatest crisis of his life, the First World War, Douglas Haig found solace in a deepened relationship with God and affection for his Church. Haig revered his mother’s memory to the end of his days. She was, as his adoring wife Doris wrote, ‘perhaps the most abiding and powerful influence on his whole life’.¹¹

Rachel’s affection for her youngest may have been linked to the fact that Douglas was a sickly child, an asthmatic. A visitor wrote of young Douglas ‘sitting up in bed with a shawl around his shoulders fighting for breath’.¹² Self-control, especially in exercising regularly and keeping a close watch on diet, is the key to maintaining health for asthmatics. Later in life, Haig went out of his way to avoid anything, especially food, which might trigger a fresh attack. Memories of childhood asthma, added to a desire to avoid his father’s unfortunate example, offers a partial explanation of the adult Douglas Haig’s ‘cool’, restrained, personality.

The general who mastered the ‘mask of command’ – keeping his feelings to himself, no matter how severe the crisis – was certainly very different from the spoiled small boy who was subject to temper tantrums. One of those moments was frozen in time in a photograph that captures an extraordinarily grumpy-looking three-year-old Douglas glaring at the camera. The normal process of growing up, and the battle to maintain his health, gradually saw Douglas’s temperament move onto a more even keel. At fourteen he wrote a polite letter to his brother John. This was obviously out of a sense of duty; he wrote about a cat show before finishing, ‘as I have no more news’.¹³

Schoolboy and Undergraduate

After attending Edinburgh Collegiate, a day school, from 1869, Douglas was sent to Orwell Preparatory School in 1871. He did not shine at his lessons. Ill-health and not beginning formal education until the age of eight could not have helped. To Rachel’s disappointment, Douglas was not thought up to the academic standards demanded for Rugby. Instead, in 1875 he went to Clifton College, a relatively new public (i.e. socially exclusive, fee-paying) school near Bristol. There too he initially struggled with his studies, although he improved over time. The scholastic high point was coming first in Latin in his last term, and overall he finished a respectable seventh in his form. Douglas seems to have had few close friends at Clifton.¹⁴

A public-school education in the Victorian and Edwardian period was about far more than just academic subjects. Attending a ‘good’ school was almost a rite of passage into the top layers of the army, the civil service, and the church. It was partly a matter of meeting the right people, of being an initiate in an experience shared by a privileged few. It was also about absorbing the virtues of muscular Christianity, chivalry and, not least, the classics. Public schools aimed to mould ‘character’. Sport was especially prized. Although he does not seem to have shone at sport at Clifton, Haig in 1919 enthused that team games required ‘decision and character on the part of the leaders, discipline and unselfishness among the led, and initiative and self-sacrifice on the part of all’. Moreover, the ‘inspiration’ of games ‘has brought us through this war, as it has carried us through the battles of the past’.¹⁵

Douglas Haig’s character was moulded by a series of identities that spread out like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond. He was proud of the city of his birth. He was a Lowland Scot, but he was also British, a member of the United Kingdom’s upper classes and was to end his days as a member of the nobility. By religion he was a Presbyterian, a member of the Church of Scotland, a fact that undoubtedly influenced his suspicion of Roman Catholicism that broke the surface at various times. A convinced Imperialist, Haig (like many Scots) was to make his name in the far reaches of the Empire. Moreover, he grew up with a sense of what it was to be a gentleman. Gentlemen had a sense of duty; had ‘character’; held values founded on Christian and chivalric principles; behaved in a certain way in social situations; and had a set of attitudes about what was, and was not, right and acceptable. Thus gentlemanliness could lead to snobbery and prejudice, such as anti-Semitism.

Douglas Haig grew up at a time when the image of ‘heroic masculinity’ had set up the soldier of Empire as a role model for the young male. The frontier soldier embodied ‘the virtues of manhood’, and saw ‘war as [the] ultimate test and opportunity. A “real man” … was prepared to fight (and if necessary, to sacrifice his life) for Queen, Country and Empire’.¹⁶ Among the qualities of heroic masculinity were physical health, self-restraint and devotion to duty.¹⁷ All three were central to Haig’s persona. His personality was inclined to self-control, and, consciously or unconsciously, he became the heroically masculine Imperial Soldier incarnate. Some historians have seen the sublimation of sexual urges as a motivation in the drive to acquire the Empire. Perhaps; but sexual licence was also a notable characteristic of the British imperial military experience.¹⁸

England and Scotland had shared a monarch since 1603, but political union did not follow for another 104 years. In the course of the eighteenth century English and Scots cautiously edged closer together. A new sense of Protestant British nationalism emerged, forged by wars against a common enemy, Catholic France, and facilitated by trade and the common endeavour of building an overseas empire. British nationalism did not entirely replace older loyalties or institutions, but as a commentator wrote in 1887, ‘An Englishman has but one patriotism, because England and the United Kingdom are to him practically the same thing. A Scotchman [sic] has two but he is sensible of no opposition between them.’¹⁹

Douglas Haig never lost his sense of Scottishness and, like the vast majority of his compatriots, had no problems in reconciling it with a British identity. He often used England as a synonym for ‘Great Britain’ (i.e. England, Wales and Scotland) or the ‘United Kingdom’ (which included Ireland), or even ‘the British Empire’. Today no self-respecting Scot would do so, but many did then.

By Victoria’s reign the separate aristocracies of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland had melded into a new British upper-class which provided leadership for the British state in the army and navy and in government. This gave the social elite of all four countries a stake in the new nation-state.²⁰ Douglas Haig’s career demonstrates this process in action. The army was a primary vehicle for forging a ‘UK’ identity, even though it consisted of a number of regiments and corps, many of which had a strong national and local identity. Haig did not join the sole Scottish cavalry regiment, the Scots Greys, but rather the 7th Hussars, which had at least been raised in Scotland in the seventeenth century; he later commanded another English regiment, the 17th Lancers. As a high commander he was a member of an elite drawn from all parts of the United Kingdom, and, although he had patronage to bestow, he showed no particular preference for Scots.

Like wider British society, the elites and masses in the Victorian and Edwardian army were divided by a huge social and economic chasm. Edinburgh in the year of Haig’s birth presented the visitor with a picture of ‘antique grandeur’, but alongside its ‘extraordinary beauty’ was poverty and ‘unspeakable filth’. About a third of Scottish dwellings consisted of just one room, and in 1861 the average size of such a ‘house’ was 14 feet by 11½ feet.²¹ The upper classes had an uneasy suspicion of ‘the mob’ – espec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Foreword by Saul David
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Maps
• Introduction: Douglas Haig: Incompetent General or National Hero?
• 1 Apprenticeship
• 2 Rising Star
• 3 Corps Commander
• 4 Grappling with Trench Warfare
• 5 Commander-in-Chief
• 6 Attrition
• 7 New Battles
• 8 False Dawns
• 9 Backs to the Wall
• 10 Victory
• 11 Veterans’ Champion – and Potential Dictator?
• 12 Haig the Soldier: An Assessment
• Sources and Select Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright