A GREAT GENERAL

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXIII, 6 February 1923, Page 6

A GREAT GENERAL

HAIG AND HIS CRITICS. NEW LIGHT ON A FINE PERSONAL!!A. .I - - The Manchester Guardian reviewer, discussing “Sir Douglas Haig’s Command, December 19, .1915, to November 11, 1918” (by George A, B. Dewar, assisted by Lieut .-Colonel J. H. Boraston, C. 8.), remarks that the book “comes about as near as anything we are likely to see to a defence of his generalship against adverse crftics. . - t adds many important or interesting points to the facts already generally known.” If accepted as wholly convincing (says the reviewer) it would gibbet Mr Lloyd George as an impressionable •soloist who nearly lost US the war by capricious meddling in technical matters beyond his power to understand. It would depress Marshal Foch to the rank of a highly fallible general whose crude strategic plans had to be repeatedly overruled dr rendered scientific by Haig. And it would transfer to Haig the credit both for the creation of unity of command in 1918 and for its successful exercise—in effect by himself during the four months of victory, and also for having averted a complete German victory early in that year by refusing to contribute six or seven of his divisions to the general reserve proposed by the Supreme War Council.

The new facts adduced in the course of this striking contention are in themselves of much interest. One of them is that early in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 Joffire and Foch pressed Haig to go on striking at the Thiepval-Pozieres sector and not at the German centre near Montauban and the accursed woods, and that Haig refused and went on as we know. Another is that in February, 1917, Nivelle, the architect of disaster at the Chemin des Dames in that spring, put his money very hotly on the prediction that the Germans would not fall back from the recent Somme battlefield to the Hindenburg line—which they did, as our G.H.Q. had expected. Another is that Nivelle —at that time put over Haig in the luckless early experiment in unity of command —was dead against our attacking the Vimy Ridge in the Battle of Arras in 1917 (in which the ridge was the only thing of high value that we gained), whereas Mr Lloyd George in the House of Commons in the following Augustclaimed the capture of Vimy as a result of unified command. Another: That Mr Lloyd George’s Government first approved and encouraged our plans for the Flanders offensive of the autumn of 1917, and then, when the offensive had failed of its hopes,

cut out of Haig dispatches, before pubplication, a passage which indicated that they had backed this loser as well as he. Another: That only a threat of resignation by Haig in January, 1918, saved us from having to take over the French front down to the River Ailette, at the bidding of Sir Henry Wilson and his fellow stra. tegists on the Supreme War Council, as well as the sector from St. Quentin to Barisis, which proved more than we could hold in March. Another : that on March 24, 1918, Petain, the French Commander-in-Clhief, told Haig that if the German advance on Amiens continued he (Petain) would have to fall back so as to cover Paris; that Haig, seeing that this would mean the opening of a fatal gap between the British and the French armies, and believing that only a hard-fighting French generalissimo, Foch, could stop Petain, wired at once to our Secretary for War and our C.I.G.S. to come over, and so got the thing put through l at the Doullens conference, this action of Haig’s being the whole genesis of the unity of command for which so many others, English and French, have taken credit. Another: that on August 12, 1918, after our great victory cast of Amiens on August 8 (Ludenworff’s “black-letter day” for the German army) Foch urged Haig to renew the attack in the same sector, that Haig dissented and proposed an alternative attack further north, that Foch iiwsted. Haig finally declined, and Foci; caved in, the sequel being Haig’s series of victories, parts of the general concentric or converging British advance which finished the war. Most of these and many minor revelations made in the book are, if none of the sufferers by them successfully impugn* their accuracy,, substantial scores for the authors and for their here. He is one whom many of us would mart gladly have for a hero, being a man of a tourage, kiindlness, courtesy, sincerity, and sense of duty that shine through him. No commander could be more loyal to every

Bubo dinate, more lull of thought for his men, more honorable, more free ■from the Utile pushing meannesses I that disfigure the careers of bo many

great soldiers as well as statesmen. And yet this careful, well-written book, eagerly read with a full wish to assent and applaud, does not banish doubt. Was Haig, besides being so many noble and lovable things, also a great general? To the • book’s authors any dispraise of his seems to present itself as the ignorant carping of civilian politician ; Mr Dewar’s eloquent passages of scorn would) almost suggest a conflict between a consummate scientific soldier, the worshipped leader of an

enthusiastic fighting force, on the one j side, and on the other a set of cavil- | place at which criticism of our comling, shabby, know-nothing, jealous detractors sitting safely at home. Would it were so. But no one who had to .pervade all ranks of our combatant forces in France, from Haig’s first great attack onwards, could honestly deny that there, not at the base or battalion commander, who sees Ins unit reduced to a. shadow, for no tactical purpose that he can see, would often revise his opinion if he could see with the eyes of an army, or even of a corps, commander. But what are you to say to the effect on all ranks of a catastrophe like our failure in foresight and organisation on the left of our Somme attack of July 1, 1916? Was the blundering Haig’s? Or Rawlinson’s? Or that of some helpless corps or divisional staff ? No regimental officer or man had any idea. All they knew was that the valor and endurance of their comrades were being reduced wholesale to military worthlessness by some power above which did not know his work well enough even to assemble them methodically and providently for attack. Again, at the end of 1917, when the long Flanders battles of attrition had ended at Passchendaele, and then the brilliant tank battle near Cambrai had gained a great tactical victory cheaply, only to be frustrated by the missing of a cavalry opportunity and by the lack of reserve troops to hold on to our gains and exploit them, what were you to say to officers and men who asked why had the Flanders attrition been maintained untl the reserves were used up that might, if husbanded, have won us Cambrai? Perhaps there was no time or place at which criticism of our command was more hitter, from front-line dug-outs to divisional headquarters, than during the costly and unrewarding second half of the Battle of Arras in 1917. And it has been harder than, ever to believe that ’the criticism was worthless since Ludendorff's memoirs have shown that earlier in the battle a decisive victory was within our grasp and was let slip, and the battle allowed to sink into the heartbreaking affair of attrition that it became. Among the Dominion troops, especially, the adverse opinion which this book attributes only to jaundiced civilians was prevalent from the Pozieres operations of 1916 onwards. The Australians, above all, with their extraordinary natural aptitude for shrewd as well as strenuous soldiering—best shown, perhaps, in the masterly little series of minor battles by which General Monash took the German pressure off Amiens in 1918—and their remarkably frank manners, scarcely troubled to conceal from English officers their low estimate of the operations work of our command and our Staff, while recognising the excellence of the Q. and the Intelligence sides. Mr Dewar and Colonel Boraston do justice most worthily to the. fighting spirit of all opr combatant troops. Their achievement was the more extraordinary because, from Sir John French’s failure onwards, they can never be said to.have recovered confidence in their own higher command. From Loos onward the determination with which they fought was the more extraordinary because—to a degree little realised at home—their courage was that most difficult of virtues, courage almost without hope. One of the things that will be most eagerly read in the book will be its defence of Haig in the matter of the destruction of our Fifth Army in March, 1918. The agreed facts are that, after much dispute between British and French generals apd much pressure exercised on Haig, directly or indirectly, by British and French politicians, we took over from the French, a short time before the last great German advance, a long stretch of additional front -down to Barisia in the Gobain Forest region. It was wholly against the wish of Haig, who at the time was complaining of the lack of men. When the huge reservoir of German force which our Intelligence had ascertained to be massing itself opposite this new front and the southern part of our old one was opened on March 21, it found our Fifth Army sector thinly held and only sketchily dug or wired. As soon as its frontal defences were driven in, no reserves of mtn were found in the rear.

There followed the greatest defeat in British military hi-.tory, and one of the greatest of all British feats of arms. Throughout a week of continuous, sleepless exertion the Fifth Army, worn to a mere screen, drew slowly back, fighting desperately but never qifitc breaking, till the battle came to i

standstill near Villers-Bretonneux, east of Amiens, the overwhelming German army too utterly exhausted) to advance, the Fifth Army so nearly annihilated that scratch teams of cooks, telegraphists, and clerks were holding vital parte of our line. . The Fifth Army commander, Sir Hubert Gough, not a successful general in Flanders in the previous year, had conducted the retreating battle unexceptional ly. Given the impossible’ to do, he had done it; he had lost hjs army but not let the enemy through. The sequel was ignoble. Gough, the one authority wholly and clearly unblamable for the catastrophe, was deprived of his command. He was the obvious scapegoat; his tongue was well tied; he was of Haig’s breed, which does not whine. And 1 , even now, responsibility has not been finally fixed for the crime of leaving the Fifth Army to its fate, unsupported. Was the fault Lloyd George’s? Or Haig’s? Or that Foch and Henry Wilson and the other admirabte talkers on the Supreme War Council at Versailles ? Tlje anti-George. party say that the British Prime Minister was keeping 300,000 serviceable men at home to guard against some dreamt-of invasion or to use for fancy excursions in the East. The anii-Haig party say that the Supreme War Council had devised a sound provision against such blows by means of a mobile Reserve Army, to which each of the Allied command-ers-in-chief had been invited to contribute a few divisions, the whole to be at the disposal of Foch and the Council; and that Haig and Petain had conspired to evade the requisition, Haig by simply not answering it till too fate. Now, the pro-Haig and anti-Supreme War Council party’ in this book explain that Haig and Petain had madte a private arrangement for mutual support in emergency, but that when the emergency came the arrangement broke down, and no French support arrived till the Fifth Army had finished its agony.

The controversy makes sad reading. Everybody was so unshakably sure that he knew the right way and the others were wrong, and that whatever might happen would be somebody else’s fault —and, between them all, the splendid Fifth Army was destroyed, its reputation was bespattered with groundless censures in Parliament, its commander was got rid of instead of being honored. With this book before us and carefully read, we are still left without anything describable as evidence sufficient for a confident distribution of relative shares of blame. We find only an amplified record of the tremendous positiveness with which each party to the great quarrel kept up his end, guarded his own prestige, or fought for a bigger share in the control of affairs, and afterwards washed his hands of the blood of those innocent persons the dead officers and men of the Fifth Army. Mr Dewar and Colonel Boraston are on firmer ’ground in praising Haig for his conduct of the succession of big victory east of Amiens on August 18, 1918. During the four last months Haig’s generalship shone as it had not done before. general plan of this converging series of attacks was—as any civilian can appreciate now —coherent and sound, and each attack was carried out with the care and persistence which are indisputable attributes of Haig’s steadfast character and dutiful mind. Foch has handsomely done justice to them in public, and it is hardly a secret—though not mentioned in this book—that he felt Haig a more completely loyal coadjutor than even the French Commander-in-Chief. The book confirms the impression that, as Generalissimo, Foch left the commanders under hi ma pretty free hand, and that the British command was virtually independent. Mr Dewar and Colonel Boraston feel exultantly that Haig, in fact, overrode Foch, after procuring his appointment for a particular and temporary reason, and exercised supreme command himself. That opens up a region of controversy almost illimitable. How far. for example, should Haig get credit for the model battle of Messines in the summer of 1917, and how far is the glory really Plumer’s and HaringtCfii’s ? When our Fourth Army gives Ludendorff his “black letter day” on August Sth, how divide the fame between Haig, Rawlinson, and Rawlinson’s chief of staff, Montgomery? Such puzzles are insoluble, though the special admirers of every general will incline, whatever his relation to others above or below, to give him credit for the failures to others. Beyond dispute, Haig's work during the last four months was done well. It could not be compared in difficulty with the tasks which, in 1916 and 1917, had reduced him to the function of an organiser of successive passages of attrition. The German army’s spirit was half-broken now 7 through the breaking of the spirit of the German people. The blockade had 1 done its work. The German front

in Turkey was cracking. And though many German troops fought heroically to"-the last, resistance was becoming , patchy and would sometimes amazingly cease here and there. But all that

Haig had to do was well done. We wish we could feel that it quite justified all the enthusiastic epithets conferred on it in his book. We feel more sure that gross injustice was done to him in the endless French speeches and books which have said or implied that Foch thought out all the operations by which the British army, with slight aid from those of France and Belgium, administered the death blow in France. Haig was also treated scurvily in more than one Ministerial speech in England, in which it was implied that everything done well after March, 1918, was done by Foch’s brain. We may scarcely be able to hope that history will place Haig among the greatest of generals. But he showed himself a man of great qualities, and he came through a most extraordinary test of will and self-control without ever losing balance or treating anyone unworthily. He was at any rate able to stand among some of the greatest events of history and never look dwarfish or grotesque in that tremendous company.