Haig becomes commander of British forces in France

On 19 December 1915 General Sir Douglas Haig took command of the British armies in France and Flanders. He replaced Field Marshal John French, forced by the government to resign after the failed offensive at Loos. British headquarters was then at Saint-Omer. The day before, the two commanders had met for a last conversation before the handover of command. French, visibly ill, asked among other things that Winston Churchill, who had recently left the government and come to the front as a major, should be given command of a battalion. Haig agreed.

The new commander-in-chief was 54 years old. He was born in 1861 in Edinburgh, into a family of well-known whisky distillers. He was a cavalry officer. He fought in the Sudan at Omdurman and in the Boer War, where he was chief of staff of French’s cavalry division. Later, at the War Office, he helped the Secretary of State for War, Richard Haldane, to reform the army and create the Expeditionary Force. In August 1914 he led its I Corps to France, which went through the retreat from Mons and held out in the First Battle of Ypres. From the end of 1914 he commanded the First Army, and it was this army that carried out all the great British attacks of 1915, from Neuve Chapelle to Loos.

Haig had known of his appointment for several days. The government had also considered French’s chief of staff, General William Robertson, but chose the commander who had led troops at the front since the beginning of the war, and earmarked Robertson for Chief of the Imperial General Staff in London. According to Haig’s biographers, the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, informed him of the choice in a letter of 10 December. The British chronology of the war records the appointment as early as 15 December, and the assumption of command under 19 December. The change also required new men in other posts. The First Army was to be taken over from Haig by General Charles Monro, but he was still commander-in-chief at the Dardanelles, so it was commanded temporarily by General Henry Rawlinson. Haig wanted to make General Richard Butler, his chief of staff at the First Army until then, his chief of staff, but Butler was considered too junior and became only deputy to the new chief of staff.

The new commander’s first day was not a quiet one. At dawn on 19 December the Germans released a gas cloud at Ypres against the British VI Corps, in which, for the first time on the Western Front, the much more dangerous phosgene was added to chlorine. The soldiers had been warned and had gas masks in the form of impregnated hoods, so the German patrols that advanced behind the cloud were driven back. According to the British official history, however, 1,069 men were gassed, of whom 120 died. The same day the evacuation of Suvla and Anzac was under way at the Dardanelles.

Haig took over an army then numbering nearly a million men, most of them volunteers of Lord Kitchener’s New Armies who were only just learning war. On 28 December Kitchener signed for him an instruction that was the basis for his actions in the following year. Haig commanded the British Expeditionary Force until the end of the war. He led it into the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and at Passchendaele in 1917, and in 1918 into the victorious Hundred Days Offensive. To this day he remains one of the most controversial figures of the war: for some the architect of victory, for others a symbol of senseless losses.