HAIG'S GREATNESS

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 164, 14 July 1930, Page 6

HAIG'S GREATNESS

"OUTSTANDING FIGURE OF THE WAR." That an English war correspondent should give as his deliberate opinion that Haig was the outstanding figure of the Great War will surprise many people, perhaps most, but it will bo said that tha source is prejudiced. The famo comment cannot be advanced against this judg-' ment when it is passed by General Persbing, commander of the American forces. As Sir Harry Perry Robinson, the correspondent cited, says, if anybody was in a position to judge, it should be Pershing. The average Briton will be surprised at this ranking, because he has not thought of Haig as occupying this exalted position. By common agreement Foch was the outstanding soldier in the war. Haig has been looked upon as a fine soldier and a great gentleman, but neither his personality nor his position nor his achievement was as spectacular as Foch's. His is relatively a shadowy figure. He was unusually shy and reticent, content to ignore criticism, leaving it to posterity, with the help of his still unpublished diaries, to do him justice. In his article on Haig in the current "Nineteenth Century" Sir Harry Robinson asks how it is in the face of the known facts that the world has such a distorted view of the events and personalities of the war, and he answers: "Only those rushed into print—politicians, soldiers, publicists—who had something to explain, or to apologise for, and pacifists who having been restrained from railing at the war or its conductors till the victory was won, now burst into agitated description of its horrors . . . till the public, wearied, begged that there should bo no more war talk." Some of the most popular writers on the war, Wells, Montague, Nevinson, Tomlinson and Gibbs, "are responsible for an amount of misunderstanding and depreciation of the British High Command and of staff officers in general which has been cruelly unjust." This "Times" correspondent of course is not the very first writer to demand justice for Haig. In their volumes, "Sir Douglas Haig's Command," Dewar and Boraston planted a growing doubt in some men's minds as to the superiority of the French over the British military conduct of the war, a superiority that so many Britons seem to take for granted. It is now fairly common knowledge that the British Government and Foch expected the war to last into 1919, that it was Haig's breaking of the Hindenburg line that enabled Foch to finish the job in 191 S. and that Haig took this momentous decision without the backing of his Government. That is to say, Haig shortened the war by from six months to a year. It is pretty well known, too, and the proofs of it accumulate, that the British Flanders offensive of 1917, with its appalling casualty lists (Passchendaele has tragic memories for Xew Zealand) was undertaken to save the French army, the morale of a large portion of which had become gravely weakened by the failure of Nivelle's offensive. That offensive had been substituted by the politicians for the plans that Joffre and Haig had made for that year, plans that might have ended the war a year earlier. It is now known —thank heaven we did not know it at the time—that whole French divisions mutinied and started to march on Paris. This and other points Sir Harry piles up with deadly effect. It is his contention that in disputes with the French Haig was consistently right. He re-fused to carry out Joffre's wishes on the Somme, and attained the desired ends by other and cheaper movements. He had no belief in Nivelle's catastrophic offensive of 1917, but did his best to support it. The French refused to believe the British predictions of the German withdrawal in 1910-17. They failed disastrously to interpret correctly the German preparations for the March, 1918, offensive, the direction of which the British High Command had accurately gauged. Later, when five exhausted British divisions had been sent to the Aisne sector of the French front to rest, and the British command warned the French that a German attack was coming there, the warning was disregarded and the divisions were wiped out. It was Petain's "pitiable" conduct in the crisis of the spring of 1918 that, according to this writer, made Haig ask for a generalissimo. Haig had been forced to take over more line against his judgment; French headquarters refused to believe that the attack wae coming there; Petain failed to move his reserves in accordance with the spirit of the agreement with Haig, and decided to try to cover Paris, which was just what the Germans wanted him to do. Haig saw that a change must be made: Yet Clemencea-u in his "Memoirs' , depicts Haig as opposed to the generalissimo idea; his version of the Doullens Conference "clashes at every point with the authentic records." He actually says that when the idea was broached to him Haig "leaped up like a jack-in-the-box with both hands shot ttp to heaven and exclaimed, 'M. Clemenceau, I have only one chief, and can have no other—my King.'" As if Haig, the most self-contained of men, could possibly so behave! Clemenceau's version, however, has gone all over the world and been accepted by millions. French publicity, as Sir Harry says, is much more efficient than British. "The story of Verdun is familiar to millions in many countries who know nothing of Ypres."

! With the "gallant and honourable" Foch, Haig was able to co-operate heartily, but "the strategy which finished the war in 191S was not Foch's but Haig's own." Haig corrected the whole scheme for the Allied advance, with momentous results. As strategist and tactician he was superior to all of the French commanders-in-chief and his conduct of the war has never, in any material particular, been seriously criticised by any soldier of repute. Sir Harry Robinson writes to satisfy a burning sense of injustice, and it is from a similar motive that the humble writer of the present article passes on his views. Haig, he says, was shockingly treated by his Government and his countrymen and the world have not yet realised what a great soldier he was. He will emerge in time as incomparably the greatest figure of the war. All thoee who were close to him in the war are confident of this; they are sure that he wi.ll rank with Marlborough, Nelson and Wellington. But while his work awaits due recognition the delay is unjust to Great Britain's reputation among the nations and to the armies that he led. ~ —CYRANO.