Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig

With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.

Field Marshal Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig (19 June 1861 – 29 January 1928) was a Scottish senior officer of the British Army. During the First World War, he commanded the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front from late 1915 until the end of the war. He was commander during the Battle of the Somme, the Battle of Arras, the Third Battle of Ypres, the German Spring Offensive, and the Hundred Days Offensive.

Quotes

• There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the freedom of mankind depend alike upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.
  • Special Order of the Day (12 April 1918) during the Spring Offensive, quoted in The Times (13 April 1918), p. 7

Quotes about Haig

• On April 11th, after a dizzying rush of wounded from the new German offensive...I stumbled up to the Sisters' quarters for lunch with the certainty that I could not go on—and saw, pinned up on the notice-board in the Mess, Sir Douglas Haig's “Special Order of the Day.” Standing there spell-bound, with fatigue and despair forgotten, I read the words which put courage into so many men and women whose need of endurance was far greater than my own. ... Although, since that date, the publication of official “revelations” has stripped from the Haig myth much of its glory, I have never been able to visualise Lord Haig as the colossal blunderer, the self-deceived optimist, of the Somme massacre in 1916. I can think of him only as the author of that Special Order, for after I had read it I knew that I should go on, whether I could or not. There was a braver spirit in the hospital that afternoon, and though we only referred briefly and brusquely to Haig's message, each one of us had made up her mind that, though enemy airmen blew up our huts and the Germans advanced upon us from Abbeville, so long as wounded men remained in Staples, there would be “no retirement.”
  • Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (1933), pp. 419–420

• There was no conspicuous officer in the Army who seemed to be better qualified for the Highest Command than Haig. That is to say, there was no outstanding General fit for so overwhelming a position as the command of a force five times as great as the largest army ever commanded by Napoleon, and many more times the size of any army led by Alexander, Hannibal or Caesar. I have no doubt these great men would have risen to the occasion, but such highly gifted men as the British Army possessed were consigned to the mud by orders of men superior in rank but inferior in capacity, who themselves kept at a safe distance from the slime which they had chosen as the terrain where their plans were to operate.
  • David Lloyd George, War Memoirs: Volume II (1938), p. 2042