Lawrence replaces Kiggell

On 24 January 1918 Lieutenant-General Herbert Lawrence became Chief of the General Staff of the British Expeditionary Force in France, that is, chief of staff to Field Marshal Douglas Haig. This is the date given by the British official history. Some studies give 22 January, and the British chronology of the war records separately that his predecessor, Lieutenant-General Launcelot Kiggell, stepped down on 27 January. It was the last and most important of the changes at GHQ that the government forced on Haig after the bloody battles of 1917.

Kiggell’s departure

Kiggell had been Haig’s chief of staff since December 1915 and for two years had planned the offensives on the Somme and at Ypres with him. After the setback at Cambrai the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, unable to remove the field marshal himself, demanded the departure of his closest associates. Kiggell had long gone without the leave due to him, and two doctors diagnosed nervous exhaustion. Haig would have preferred to give him a longer rest and keep him in post, but he had to give way. A well-known anecdote is connected with Kiggell: on his first visit to the battlefield at Passchendaele he is said to have asked, with tears in his eyes, whether men had really been sent to fight in such mud. It was told after the war by Basil Liddell Hart, and many historians regard it as doubtful. Kiggell took the quiet post of Lieutenant-Governor of Guernsey.

The new chief of staff

Lawrence, born in 1861, a son of Lord Lawrence, Viceroy of India, had served in the 17th Lancers and during the Boer War worked in intelligence on the staff of General John French’s cavalry division, whose chief of staff was Haig. In 1903 he left the army and made a career as a banker in the City of London. On the outbreak of war he returned to service. He commanded a brigade and a division at Gallipoli, where he directed the evacuation of Cape Helles, and in August 1916 he fought at Romani in defence of the Suez Canal. From February 1917 he commanded the 66th Division on the Western Front, with which he went through the Battle of Passchendaele. At the turn of the year he took over intelligence at GHQ from the dismissed General John Charteris. Intelligence passed from him to Brigadier-General Edgar Cox.

Haig had wanted his deputy, General Richard Butler, as chief of staff, but the government would not agree. Butler was given command of III Corps, and his duties at GHQ were taken over by Major-General Guy Dawnay, known from Gallipoli and Palestine. Charteris noted in February that the new chief of staff had “the independence of a civilian and the training of a soldier”: a high position awaited him in civilian life, so he did not need to court a further career in the army and could stand up to the field marshal.

In the shadow of the quarrel with the government

The change came at a particularly tense moment. On 21 January Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail published a sharp article by Lovat Fraser which ridiculed the strategy of attrition and demanded attacks on other fronts. In the same days Lloyd George sent to France the minister Jan Smuts and the secretary of the War Cabinet, Maurice Hankey, instructing them to look around discreetly among the generals for a possible successor to Haig. None of the army commanders, however, wanted to take his place. On Haig, whose chief of staff, quartermaster-general and head of intelligence had been replaced within a few weeks, the changes made a painful impression. Lawrence nevertheless proved a good choice. The two formed a well-matched team and, with the new staff, led the army through the German offensive in the spring of 1918 and the victorious advances in the autumn.