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Smith-Dorrien’s post-war defence of his reputation cannot answer
all the necessary questions. Plumer has now been adequately
served but nothing is known of Henry Horne and, apart from a
recent popular biography, for Allenby there is only a suggestive
article, although postdoctoral research is now underway. The muchmaligned
staffs is also worthy of more examination beyond Peter
Scott’s article in Stand To, the brief coverage of Johnnie Gough’s
role as Haig’s first wartime chief of staff, and the edition of Lord
Moyne’s diaries edited by Brian Bond and Simon Robbins 27 . It is to
be hoped that the latter’s postdoctoral research on GHQ will be
completed, while Nigel Cave has begun work on the General Staff as
a whole.
Not surprisingly, no such lack of modern interest relates to
the figure of Haig, who has the same capacity after 10 years as
after 80 years to generate either extreme hostility as manifested by
Haig’s Command or extraordinary praise. John Terraine still acts as
counsel for the defence, the central tenet of that defence as
outlined in Home Fires and Foreign Fields remaining the army’s
problems in facing the main body of the main enemy on the main
front of a continental war as a junior alliance partner, the losses of
1916 and 1917 contributing to the necessary attrition of German
strength which alone made possible the unjustly neglected
achievements of the last 100 days of victory. While Terraine’s last
book on the Western Front, White Heat, appeared as long ago as
1982, the message has been beaten out in book reviews and the
annual presidential addresses to the Western Front Association.
Somewhere in the middle is Gerry de Groot’s 1988 biography which,
reflecting his original postdoctoral research, is stronger on Haig’s
pre-war career than on the wartime command. Consequently, while
still the most acceptable study available, de Groot is not definitive
and it might also be said that a new edition of Haig’s papers to
supplement the 1952 version would be distinctly useful 28 .
Haig merely personified much that was wrong with the
military establishment as a whole but it is clear from the studies of
Travers, Prior and Wilson and de Groot that Haig’s own
inconsistencies stultified the system at the top. He was wholly
inconsistent in his approach to operational planning with army
27 Keith Jeffery (ed.), The Military Correspondence of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, 1918-22,
London, 1985; David Woodward (ed.), The Military Correspondence of Field Marshal Sir William
Robertson, 1915-18, London, 1989; Ian Beckett, The Judgement of History: Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien,
Lord French and 1914, London, 1993; Geoffrey Powell, Plumer, London, 1990; L. James, Allenby,
London, 1994; Jonathan Newell, Allenby and the Palestine Campaign, dans Brian Bond (ed.), First
World War and British Military History, p. 189-226; Peter Scott, The Staff of the BEF, Stand To, vol.
15, 1985, p. 44-61; Ian Beckett, Johnnie Gough, VC, London, 1989, p. 173-210; Brian Bond and Simon
Robbins, Staff Officer, London, 1987. Voir aussi John Hussey, The Deaths of Qualified Staff Officers in
the Great War: A Generation Missing? dans «Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research»,
75, 304, 1997, p. 246-259.
28 John Terraine, White Heat, London, 1982; Gerard de Groot, Douglas Haig, 1861-1928, London,
1988; Robert Blake (ed.), The Private Papers of Douglas Haig, London, 1952.
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