As has been considered earlier, tactics and strategies were a major scapegoat for the huge total killed in the First World War. But these did not affect anything on their own. They did not order people to attack or defend : they needed a controller. This controller was the general. Probably the most famous British general was Sir Douglas Haig. He has been portrayed as an even bigger killer than the artillery or machine gun. However, is this verdict as a murderer fair, or was he an innocent man with a tough task?

This was a war like no other. It required wholly new strategies and tactics, and so the generals had to understand these. But there was no textbook answer – the generals had to write their own textbooks. As a result , Haig would have to have many attempts, and lose many soldiers, before the answer was discovered.

Most generals knew that the nature of modern warfare meant many lives would be lost. Allied generals saw that the Germans rarely attacked, and so they realised that unless they made the first move, the war would drag on for many years. To finish the war quickly, a brave general was needed who would have the courage to press home an attack, despite heavy losses, and take the punishment from the public and press. The British army believed they had found this in the Scot, Haig.

Haig realised that this was a different war, and that casualties would be high. As has been shown many times, if you accept that casualties will be high, they will indeed be high.

Tactics were still being learned in the early stages of the war. Haig was no different, and didn’t use his artillery properly. He attacked widely and deeply, and lost the intensity of the bombardment. However, Haig had the ability to learn and by the end of the war he had embraced tanks, aircraft and artillery, and used them together with the infantry to attack as a combined force.

Whilst lack of knowledge may be forgivable, the lack of a sense of reality may not. On the first day of the Somme, there were sixty thousand casualties. Despite these immense losses, Haig did not stop the attack. Instead, he allowed it to drag on for over four months. There may be several reasons for this. Firstly, the British had promised the war would be over in six months and Haig felt an obligation to fulfil this. Interestingly, the second reason may not have been the general’s fault at all. The intelligence picture Haig had been fed was that one more push would be sufficient, the breakthrough would follow, and Germany would collapse. This meant that Haig pressed attacks, even when to do so seemed futile to everyone else.

The Chief of Intelligence to the British army was Sir John Charter. Charter could see that Haig had the burden of a whole country on his shoulders, and attempted to lighten this burden by putting spin on his intelligence. For example, he viewed Germany’s fighting ability as "half empty" as opposed to "half full". Charter had a very different idea of intelligence to everyone else. He did not think his job was to find out about the Germans, but to provide Haig with evidence that he was winning the war. The result was that as Haig thought he was winning he had no reason to change his plan and ended up adding to the slaughter further.

Haig is often portrayed as an old cavalry ‘fuddy-duddy.’ Although he did embrace some advances such as the tank, others were left neglected. A good example of this is in the training of new soldiers where much attention was given to pomp and ceremony, yet the realities of modern warfare were left alone. Walter Hare joined the West Yorkshire Regiment and was shocked at how inadequate and misguided his training was:

Haig was also criticised that he didn’t know what was going on at the front. He lived forty miles from the trenches in the luxury and splendour of Chateau de Beauvepaire, a far cry from the muddy dugouts of the soldiers. Indeed, Haig never went to the front line and had no comprehension of the conditions such as the mud and barbed wire that his men faced It is argued a good general, such as Bernard Montgomery in the Second World War, had to be with the troops every step of the way.

However, in Haig’s defence some say that going to the front would have served no useful purpose. He would only have seen a small sector of the front, where as he had to see the wider picture. They say Haig achieved this from his chateau.