Changes in Haig's staff

On 22 December 1917 Lieutenant-General Ronald Maxwell, who since January 1915 had been responsible for supplying the British army in France, stood down as Quartermaster-General of the British Expeditionary Force. The next day his duties were taken over by General Travers Clarke. The British official history states that Maxwell was suffering from a fall from his horse. The sixty-five-year-old general, however, had long lacked the confidence of some commanders, and historians believe that his health served as a convenient pretext. His departure was the first of several changes that at the turn of 1917 and 1918 reshaped the general headquarters of Field Marshal Douglas Haig at Montreuil.

Striking at the staff instead of the commander

After the bloody months at Ypres and the failure at Cambrai, Prime Minister David Lloyd George lost what remained of his confidence in Haig. He could not, however, remove him. Haig had support in the army, from the King, in part of the press and among the Conservatives, and the Secretary of State for War, Lord Derby, threatened to resign if the commander-in-chief or the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, William Robertson, were removed. The government therefore struck at Haig’s closest associates, who were accused of feeding him over-optimistic assessments. In mid-December The Times joined the criticism, demanding the removal from general headquarters of those responsible for the mistakes. Haig’s chief of intelligence, Brigadier-General John Charteris, noted on 12 December that the field marshal’s opponents were trying to get at him precisely through his staff.

The first target was Charteris himself. Since 1916 he had headed intelligence at general headquarters and was the author of reports according to which German morale and manpower reserves were close to exhaustion. He was accused of having disregarded signs of German preparations before 30 November. Haig defended him for a long time, but Derby insisted on his removal, and according to some biographers Robertson came to general headquarters with an order already signed by Derby in case Haig refused. The field marshal gave way. On 31 December Charteris was handing over intelligence to General Herbert Lawrence, until then commander of the 66th Division, and moved to the post of deputy inspector-general of transportation.

New men

Travers Clarke was an experienced officer of the quartermaster services who before the war and in 1914 had served under Haig at Aldershot and in I Corps. He remained Quartermaster-General until 1921 and ran the army’s supply through the great battles of 1918. The changes did not end with him. Lieutenant-General Launcelot Kiggell had been Haig’s chief of staff since 22 December 1915, exactly two years. Suffering from nervous exhaustion, he was regarded as too submissive to his superior. On 1 January 1918 Derby gave Haig to understand that the government wanted the departure of a “tired man” and would not accept the field marshal’s candidate, the deputy chief of staff Richard Butler. On 24 January (according to some works 22 January) Lawrence became chief of staff, and Kiggell, with a medical opinion on his poor health, took the quiet post of Lieutenant Governor of Guernsey. Butler received command of III Corps, and at the end of January intelligence was taken over by Brigadier-General Edgar Cox.

Haig accepted these changes with great reluctance and took them as a sign that the government did not trust him. In the view of many historians, including those sympathetic to the field marshal, they nevertheless did the army good. Lawrence, who after the Boer War had left the army and made a career in business, did not tie his future to the military. He was a stronger personality than Kiggell and was not dependent on Haig. General headquarters, with a new chief of staff, a new quartermaster-general and a new chief of intelligence, led the British through the German offensive in the spring of 1918 and the victorious advances in the autumn.