The Untold Battles

British Military History

The people. The battles. The stories history remembers.

Field Marshal Earl Haig (1861–1928): The Somme, Passchendaele and the Poppy Appeal

Field Marshal Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, KT, GCB, OM, GCVO, KCIE (19 June 1861 – 29 January 1928) commanded the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front for the last three years of the First World War. No British commander of that war is more argued over. To some he was the steady, relentless soldier who held the line in the spring of 1918 and then led the greatest run of victories in the British Army's history; to others he is remembered above all for the Somme and Passchendaele, where huge losses bought little ground. Both judgements rest on the same record, and the record is worth setting out in full — because Haig's story does not end at the Armistice. In the seven years after the war he gave his name and his energy to the men who had served under him, founding the British Legion and the Poppy Appeal. It is that second act, as much as the battles, that makes him the fitting subject for Remembrance Sunday.

Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig in full dress uniform, 1918.

Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig in full dress uniform, 1918. Credit: National Army Museum.

Early life and the making of a cavalryman

Douglas Haig was born on 19 June 1861 in Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, the youngest son of John Haig, head of the whisky-distilling family of Cameronbridge in Fife. He was educated at Clifton College and at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he studied from 1880 to 1883. Illness cost him a term and, with it, his degree, though he passed his final examination. In January 1884 he entered the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and passed out first in the order of merit, winning the Anson Sword. On 7 February 1885 he was commissioned as a lieutenant into the 7th (Queen's Own) Hussars.

Haig spent his early years as a regimental officer in India, where he excelled at polo and built a reputation as a serious student of cavalry warfare. He passed through the Staff College at Camberley in 1896, and his staff work and social connections — he moved easily in the circles of the Army's senior officers — helped him rise quickly. In 1905 he married the Honourable Dorothy Vivian, daughter of the 3rd Lord Vivian, who would stand beside him through the war years and the long campaign for veterans that followed.

Sudan and South Africa

Haig's first active service came in the Sudan in 1898, on the staff of Sir Herbert Kitchener's force reconquering the country. He was present at the Battle of the Atbara on 8 April and at Omdurman on 2 September, and was promoted brevet major for his services. The campaign confirmed his standing as a capable staff officer and a cavalryman of the new school, interested in firepower and organisation as well as the charge.

The Second Boer War, from 1899 to 1902, gave him wider experience still. He served as chief of staff to Major-General John French, commanding the Cavalry Division, during the advance through the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, and later commanded a column in Cape Colony during the guerrilla phase of the war. He was mentioned in despatches four times. The war taught him hard lessons about the limits of cavalry against modern rifles and about the sheer difficulty of supplying a large army at the end of long lines of communication — lessons he would carry, for better and worse, into the far larger war that followed.

The road to high command

Between the wars Haig's rise continued without interruption. He was Inspector-General of Cavalry in India from 1903 to 1906, and in 1904 became the youngest major-general in the Army. From 1906 to 1909 he worked at the War Office, where he was involved in the reforms that produced the Territorial Force in 1908, giving Britain a trained reserve it had previously lacked. He was Chief of the General Staff in India from 1909 to 1912, and in 1912 he returned home to take command at Aldershot, the Army's principal training command. When war broke out in August 1914, he was one of the best-prepared senior officers in the British Army — a staff-college graduate, a veteran of two campaigns, and a man who had thought deeply about how a modern army should be organised and trained.

Commander-in-Chief: the Somme

Haig went to France in command of I Corps, which he led at Mons, on the Marne, on the Aisne and at First Ypres in 1914. In December 1914 he took command of the newly formed First Army, leading it at Neuve Chapelle and at Loos in 1915. On 19 December 1915 he succeeded Field Marshal Sir John French as Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, a post he would hold until the end of the war. He was promoted field marshal in January 1917.

The Somme, in the summer and autumn of 1916, was his first campaign as Commander-in-Chief, and it has defined his reputation ever since. The opening day, 1 July 1916, was the bloodiest day in the British Army's history. Haig had believed that a long artillery bombardment would cut the German wire and destroy their defences, and that his infantry could then break through into open country. The bombardment did neither. The battle ground on for nearly five months, through the summer and into the autumn mud, while the French, under terrible pressure at Verdun, needed the Germans to be held on the Somme. The Imperial War Museum records that Haig's armies suffered more than 400,000 casualties for no significant gain, and that he finally agreed to end the campaign on 18 November 1916. The Somme relieved Verdun and wore down the German Army, but at a price that shocked Britain and has been debated ever since.

King George V with Sir Douglas Haig at Beauquesne, 12 August 1916, during the Battle of the Somme.

King George V with Sir Douglas Haig at Beauquesne, 12 August 1916, during the Battle of the Somme. Credit: Imperial War Museum.

Passchendaele

If the Somme made Haig controversial, the Third Battle of Ypres — Passchendaele — in 1917 made him notorious. Once again he predicted a breakthrough that did not come. His armies attacked through the summer and autumn towards the ridge at Passchendaele, and the Flanders rain turned the low ground into a sea of mud in which men, guns and horses drowned. The village was eventually taken, in November 1917, at enormous cost and for no strategic advantage that justified it. Haig's critics then and since have accused him of persisting with costly operations longer than necessary, and of justifying them as battles of attrition when no decisive advance was possible. His defenders point out that he was under political pressure to attack, that the French Army was exhausted after the Nivelle offensive and its mutinies, and that Britain had to keep the Germans occupied on the Western Front. The argument has never been settled, and it should not be settled here: the casualties were real, the gains were small, and the responsibility is shared between the commander, his government and the nature of the war itself.

1918: "Backs to the Wall" and the Hundred Days

The spring of 1918 brought the greatest crisis of the war for the Allies. On 21 March the German Army launched its Spring Offensive, driving the British Fifth Army back and threatening to split the British and French armies apart. On 11 April, with the Germans pressing towards the Channel ports, Haig issued his famous "Backs to the Wall" order of the day, calling on every man to fight on to the end. The line held. Haig displayed great tenacity during those weeks, and he accepted the value of a unified Allied command under Marshal Ferdinand Foch, a step he had long resisted.

Then, on 8 August 1918, the Allies struck back at Amiens, and the war changed. From that day until the Armistice on 11 November, the forces Haig led defeated the main body of the German Army in what the Imperial War Museum calls the greatest succession of victories in the British Army's history. The Hundred Days Offensive drove the Germans back across the ground they had held for four years, broke through the Hindenburg Line, and took nearly 200,000 German prisoners. The same army that had been bled white on the Somme and at Passchendaele had become, by the summer of 1918, a sophisticated instrument of war — with artillery, tanks, aircraft and infantry working together — and it was Haig who had overseen its expansion and its transformation. That is the other half of his record, and it is often obscured by the failures that came before it.

A contested reputation

Haig's reputation has swung violently since his death. In the years immediately after the war he was honoured and widely admired; his funeral in 1928 was a day of national mourning. From the 1960s onwards, as the war came to be remembered above all for its waste, he became the symbol of generals who sent men to die in futile attacks — "Butcher Haig", in the phrase his critics gave him. More recent historians have pushed back, arguing that the horrific casualties owed more to the nature of trench warfare and to the British Army's inherent shortcomings in 1916 and 1917 than to the mistakes of any single commander, and that his commitment to defeating Germany on the Western Front was the right strategy, carried through to victory. The honest verdict is that both parts of the story are true: the Somme and Passchendaele were terrible, costly failures of judgement, and the Hundred Days were a genuine triumph of command. Haig the commander cannot be reduced to either half alone.

Later life: the British Legion and the Poppy Appeal

Field Marshal Douglas Haig, bronze by Charles Sargent Jagger, about 1921.

Field Marshal Douglas Haig, bronze by Charles Sargent Jagger, about 1921. Credit: National Army Museum.

Haig's second career began the moment the guns fell silent. He was created Earl Haig in 1919, and served as Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, until 1920. But his real work after the war was with the men who had fought it. By the end of the war there were four rival organisations helping ex-servicemen, and Haig saw the pressing need for one single body to represent them and to hold the government to account. On 15 May 1921, representatives of the four societies marched to the Cenotaph in Whitehall and laid four wreaths; the British Legion was born, and Haig became its first President.

He also established the Earl Haig Fund in 1921 to provide help in time of need to all who had served and their dependants. That autumn, persuaded by the Frenchwoman Anna Guérin, who offered to fund and manufacture a million artificial poppies in France, Haig announced on 6 October 1921 that 11 November would henceforth be known as "Poppy Day". The first Poppy Day Appeal, on the third anniversary of the Armistice, sold nine million poppies and raised a sum worth more than £5 million in today's money. The black centre of the poppy was stamped "Haig's Fund" until 1994. For seven years, until his sudden death from heart failure on 29 January 1928, aged 66, Haig toured Britain with Lady Dorothy Haig — visiting branches, opening hospitals, making speeches — tirelessly championing the needs of ex-servicemen and their families. He is buried at Dryburgh Abbey in the Scottish Borders.

Every November, when poppies appear on lapels across Britain, it is Haig's appeal that people are supporting and Haig's Legion — now the Royal British Legion — that they are funding. The man who ordered the attacks on the Somme spent the last years of his life trying to make amends to the men who survived them. That is the part of his story that Remembrance Sunday exists to remember.

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