Despite the many books written about him, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig (later Earl Haig of Bemersyde), the man who from December 1915 to the Armistice in November 1918 led the British and Dominion armies on the Western Front, remains a mystery. Opinions on his generalship range from admirable but unlucky to callous and blockheaded, and everything in between.
David Lloyd George, war minister and then prime minister during most of Haig’s command, wrote in his War Memoirs that Haig was “intellectually and temperamentally unequal to the command of an Army of millions”, and a “second-rate commander in unparalleled and unforeseen circumstances”.
