The "Backs to the Wall" order

On 11 April 1918, in the most difficult days of the German offensive in Flanders, Field Marshal Douglas Haig, commander-in-chief of the British Armies in France, issued a special order of the day (PL). The document, dated that Thursday, was addressed “to all ranks of the British Army in France and Flanders”. Haig, a cavalry officer known for his dryness and reticence, wrote it in his own hand and included in it a sentence that has gone down in history: “With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end.” The order demanded that every position be held to the last man and forbade any retirement. According to British sources it reached many units at the front by runner the next day, 12 April, and on 13 April newspapers in Britain printed it word for word.

Three weeks of retreat

When Haig sat down to write, his armies had been falling back for three weeks. On 21 March the Germans had launched Operation Michael, shattered the British Fifth Army and reached the approaches to Amiens. Only four days after it was halted, on 9 April, they struck in Flanders, where a few dozen kilometres separated the British from the sea. In three days of the Battle of the Lys they had broken the front on the plain along the river and taken the Messines ridge, and on 11 April they took Armentières and broke into Merville. Many British soldiers had already been through the fighting on the Somme, and the replacements were largely very young soldiers freshly sent out from home.

Haig had no reserves left. On the afternoon of 11 April he drove to Second Army headquarters at Cassel, where General Herbert Plumer was calmly convinced that the worst was over. On returning to General Headquarters at Montreuil, Haig wrote to General Ferdinand Foch, who since the Beauvais conference had been directing the strategy of the Allied armies, asking him to concentrate at least four French divisions between Saint-Omer and Dunkirk. Foch refused. He replied that the British must “hold on where they stand” and that he could not guarantee them reinforcements beyond the divisions already allotted. Meanwhile the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Henry Wilson, was pressing Foch to prepare the flooding of the country around Dunkirk and Saint-Omer in case of a further retreat. The British official history records that it was on this day that Haig issued his order.

Text of the order

The full text of the order reads:

To all ranks of the British Army in France and Flanders.

Three weeks ago to-day the enemy began his terrific attacks against us on a fifty-mile front. His objects are to separate us from the French, to take the Channel Ports and destroy the British Army.

In spite of throwing already 106 divisions into the battle and enduring the most reckless sacrifice of human life, he has as yet made little progress towards his goals.

We owe this to the determined fighting and self-sacrifice of our troops. Words fail me to express the admiration which I feel for the splendid resistance offered by all ranks of our Army under the most trying circumstances.

Many amongst us now are tired. To those I would say that Victory will belong to the side which holds out the longest. The French Army is moving rapidly and in great force to our support.

There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the Freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.

D. Haig, F.M., Commander-in-Chief, British Armies in France. General Headquarters, Thursday, 11 April 1918.

The manuscript differs from the version sent out to the troops in one detail. According to the British Library, the last sentence was left out of the printed version: “Be of good cheer. The British Empire must win in the end.” At the moment of writing the assurance of French help was more a hope than a fact. French divisions were slowly moving north, but Foch did not yet intend to throw them into the fighting in Flanders, which he called “the battle of the north” and regarded as above all a British affair.

Reception

The order made a great impression, though not the same on everyone. The British official history says that for many officers and men at the front it was the first sign that the situation was really serious, and that it produced in the fighting units “a strong wave of determination not to be beaten”. According to the history it mattered even more in Britain and to the soldiers behind the lines and in units at rest. At the front the reception was more mixed. A young officer, Huntly Gordon, recalled that the order was brought to his unit by a runner the next day, 12 April, and was received mostly in silence. He himself admitted: “I got the general drift, but the rhetoric did not carry me away; on the contrary, it made me critical.” He pointed to the gulf between distant General Headquarters and the soldiers who had been fighting for weeks in a constantly changing situation.

On 12 April, while the order was going round the trenches, the German Sixth Army advanced on the railway junction of Hazebrouck, and Haig’s appeal was to be put to the test in practice. In the following days many British units defended themselves exactly as he had demanded, to the last round and the last man.

Haig later gave the manuscript of the order to his private secretary, Philip Sassoon, a cousin of the poet Siegfried Sassoon. After Sassoon’s death in 1939 the document passed by bequest to the British Museum, and today it is kept in the manuscript collections of the British Library. The words “backs to the wall” are among the best-known sentences of the whole war and remain to this day a symbol of the crisis of spring 1918.