To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [102]
New conscripts filled training camps in Britain, most of them eventually destined for Haig's forces in France and Belgium. His subordinates at headquarters "all seem to expect success as the result of my arrival," the general wrote to his wife, "and somehow give me the idea that they think I am 'meant to win' by some Superior Power." Strait-laced, humorless, intolerant of off-color jokes, gambling, and ribald songs, Haig was convinced that he had been led to the Western Front by God's hand. He urged a visiting party of clergymen to "preach ... about the objects of Great Britain in carrying on this war. We have no selfish motive but are fighting for the good of humanity."
"We lament too much over death," Haig approvingly quoted his own chosen army pastor, Reverend George Duncan of the Church of Scotland, whose services he attended. "We should regard it as a change to another room." Duncan's views fitted, chillingly, with the general's own thinking. "The nation must be taught to bear losses," Haig wrote, "...[and] to see heavy casualty lists for what may appear to the uninitiated to be insufficient object[s].... Three years of war and the loss of one-tenth of the manhood of the nation is not too great a price to pay in so great a cause."
For manhood of prime military age, the price would prove far higher.
As the year began, Haig was as relentlessly optimistic as his predecessor, supremely confident that his tenacity and skill could succeed—and swiftly—where French had failed. "The Germans might bargain for peace before the coming winter," he told the King. Shortly after taking command, Haig urged renewed cavalry recruiting and ordered a fresh round of inspections of his five cavalry divisions, to put spine into "some officers who think that Cavalry are no longer required!!!" In a letter to the chief of the Imperial General Staff, he spoke of being prepared for a version of Murat's famous cavalry pursuit of the retreating Prussians at the Battle of Jena—in 1806. Haig's obsession was shared by British painters and illustrators, who filled canvases and magazine pages with heroic cavalry charges that bore little resemblance to reality. "Straight at the Guns the Lancers Rode," read a typical caption in the Illustrated London News.
At the front, most soldiers were focused on less glorious matters, such as the slimy mass of frogs and slugs that infested the trenches as the weather grew warmer and wetter with the spring thaw. One 36-year-old infantry officer wrote to a friend that "lately a certain number of cats have taken to nesting in the corpses, but I think the rats will get them in the end; though like all wars it will doubtless be a war of attrition." This observation came from Raymond Asquith, son of the prime minister and a widely admired lawyer and wit. Of trench life in winter, he wrote to his wife, he was trying to "take the same sort of interest ... as an ill-tempered tourist may take in an uncomfortable hotel."
An unending stream of VIP visitors enjoyed far better lodgings when they called on Haig at his headquarters, which were spread among a military academy, a hotel, and other buildings in the medieval French town of Montreuil; the commander himself lived in a small château nearby. "Montreuil was a place to bring tears to the eyes of an artist.... The tiny walled town on a hill had that poignant fulness of loveliness, making the sense ache at it, like still summer evenings in England," wrote the author C. E. Montague, whose army job was to take journalists on tours of the front. "It was a storied antique, unscathed ... weathered mellow with centuries of sunshine and tranquillity.... Walking among its walled gardens, where roses hung over the walls ... you were not merely out of the war; you were out of all war."
For Haig's entourage, their uniforms marked by staff officers' distinctive