IN TERMS OF reputation, history has not served Haig well. This is unfair. The idea that he was dim is not borne out by any responsible corpus of evidence, nor that he was pitiless.

Very well, say his detractors, but he was a plodder. Over four years spent by the British Army chewing barbed wire on the Western Front testify to that. What more evidence do you need?

But even that is not true. As Western troops continued their advances, Haig was determined to capitalise upon the successes of the week. General Mangin attacked, in characteristically dramatic fashion, on 20th August, between the Oise and the Aisne and reached Lombray at a depth of three miles. Eight thousand French on the following day, just as General Byng’s Third Army, many of them young recruits, began the battle of Bapaume. Haig had briefed Byng a couple of days earlier that his job was to break “the enemy’s front, and gain [the town] as soon as possible…”

There was to be no slouching either:

Now is the time to act with boldness, and in full confidence that, if we only hit the army hard enough, and combine the action of all arms in pressing him, his troops will give way on a very wide front and acknowledge that he is beaten.

Typically keen to muscle into the scene of any action, Minister of Munitions Winston Churchill arrived to see Haig while the battle was raging, bearing the news that the General Staff in London had calculated “the decisive period” of the war could not come for another eleven months, in July 1919.

Haig was having none of it. As he later recorded:

I told him [Churchill] we ought to do our utmost to get a decision this autumn. We are engaged in a ‘wearing-out battle’, and are outlasting and beating the enemy. If we allow the enemy a period of quiet, he will recover, and the ‘wearing-out’ process must be recommenced. In reply, I was told that the General Staff in London calculate that the decisive period of the war cannot arrive until next July.

Haig was not a line-shooter. He firmly believed the new tactics of “bite-and-hold” attacks were perfect for an enemy on the skids. On 22nd August, the British attacked between the Ancre and the Somme on a six-mile front, and re-captured Albert, an important town held by the Germans since March.

Not that there was much to find there. Major Lemmon recorded:

Our maps showed we were approaching Albert, but in the evening light no town could be seen at all, and I realised all at once that we couldn’t billet in Albert, because, for all practical purposes, there was no such place. A jumbled mass of stone and iron-work on our left was identified with difficulty as a cemetery, and then we entered a street, represented by two rows of brick heaps, in which there was hardly a cellar intact.

On 23rd August, enemy lines were penetrated to a depth of two miles and 8,000 prisoners were captured, and on 26th August, the battle of the Scarpe began, east of Arras.

British press reports were euphoric:

These are great days. It surely must be that they will even loom greatly in history, but they are certainly great to live in…

Three days later, the news was better still:

The arrival of our forces at the outskirts of Bapaume yesterday set the seal on a wonderful weekend, and brought into view possibilities which were certainly not in sight a week ago.

Exposed flanks inevitably incurred casualties, however. After the initial fog, 23rd August turned out to be swelteringly hot — adding greatly to the danger and discomfort of the one hundred tank crews Byng had in support.

The heat temporarily put several Whippets out of action as fighting weapons. On a hot summer’s day one hour’s running with door closed renders a Whippet weaponless except for revolver fire. The heat generated is so intense that it not only causes ammunition to swell so that it jams the guns, but actually in several cases caused rounds to explode inside the tank. Guns became too hot to hold, and in one case the temperature of the steering wheel became unbearable.

Not, of course, that the Germans were having much fun. Private Holmes observed a posse of prisoners taken on 23rd August:

Crouching figures in strange green uniforms with their hands held up loomed out of the smoke… a pitiful sight. Their senses must have been pounded out of them by the bombardment, but they had enough instinct to realise that their lives hung on the slender thread of what happened to them in the next ten minutes. They were grey with fear.

Some held watches and army caps and cried, ‘Souvenir, Tommy, souvenir!’ Other cried, ‘Kamerad, Tommy, Kamerad! Me piccanin!’ and raised the palms of their hands 1 foot, 2 feet, 3 feet off the ground to indicate their parental responsibilities. One or two dragged a wounded figure in khaki with them, on the reasonable assumption that this act of mercy would save them from being shot dead.

Snippets of evidence from this time suggest many front line troops on the German side no longer believed in victory. That same day, Leutnant von Dechend was alarmed by the sight of a mass of grey-clad figures retreating in panic after a half dozen British tanks penetrated the early morning fog:

This was not an orderly retreat, this was a wild escape. We are their officers and why couldn’t they be stopped and turned around in a counter-attack?

Dechend was not merely surprised but decidedly unimpressed:

Not understandable… I tried to comfort myself that these men were probably just young recruits who hadn’t even completed training. Surely other companies would resist the enemy.

He tracked down a sergeant with a bandaged arm who “could not give a reasonable answer to what had happened”. They had been encircled, he claimed. His company had been captured and only a few had escaped.

The fact that seasoned NCOs, as well as raw recruits, were becoming demoralised alarmed commanders. General von der Marwitz, bearing the brunt of the latest British attack with his Second Army, fired off an angry order:

The unreasonable rumours lately circulated in the rear by men who have lost their heads surpass all imagination. These men with troubled consciences see squadrons of tanks, masses of cavalry and dense lines of infantry everywhere. It is indeed high time that our war-hardened soldiers speak to these pusillanimous and cowardly persons and relate to them the truth about the front.

This kind of binary thinking — cowards on the left, heroes on the right — belongs to a time and a place. Marwitz was far from alone in feeling indignant. Hitler, currently a corporal (as well as holder of the Iron Cross) felt much the same. He is reported to have become embroiled in a furious row, shouting “in a terrible voice that pacifists and shirkers were losing the war”. The shouting match culminated in his having a fistfight with another NCO which, most regrettably, he won. According to one of his compatriots: “the new ones despised him… we old comrades liked him more than ever…”

The bigger question for many commanders was working out how a withdrawal might remain tactical rather than degenerate into a rout. Crown Prince Wilhelm wrote to Ludendorff on 26th August:

Systematic withdrawal remains but a temporary expedient. It must end in the occupation of a strong permanent line… so far from the present battlefield that even if the fluctuating actions now in progress continue for weeks, we shall have ample room for a systematic retirement.

Erich Maria Remarque, later to win huge fame as the author of All Quiet On The Western Front, was presently in a military hospital in Germany, recuperating from earlier injuries sustained fighting, and undeceived by propagandist attempts to explain away recent setbacks:

Our artillery is fired out… We have too few horses. Our fresh troops are anaemic boys in need of rest, who cannot carry a pack, but merely know how to die. By thousands. They understand nothing about warfare, they simply go and let themselves be shot down… The summer of 1918 [has been] the most bloody and the most terrible…  man here knows we are losing the war… Still the campaign goes on— the dying goes on.

Princess Evelyn Blucher’s diary shows a similar despondency:

It seems impossible now for Ludendorff to force any decisive successful battle this year… It is apparently unity of command which restored the Allied fortunes, and if the American troops go on coming over at the rate of 300,000 a month, the American army alone will be as big as the German one…

None of this prevented the Germans providing formidable in opposition. The previous week, British and Commonwealth fatalities stood at 3,392; this week, the total reached 10,195.

Undeniably, the Germans appeared to be losing the war in the west. In the east, the narrative had become too byzantine for concepts such as winning and losing to have much meaning. A Japanese detachment joined General Semenov at Manchuria Station which duly defeated a Bolshevik force on 23rd August. Two days later, General Horvath, the anti-Bolshevik leader, seized power in Siberia. That same day, the Czecho-Slovaks occupied Kazan on the river Volga.

All this augured ill for Lenin, but in western Russia there was a parallel move, not exactly pro-Bolshevik but more specifically anti-German. The Ukrainian National Council in Paris issued a plea on 26th August, requesting moral support against Germany, while the Finnish Government announced it had no intention of supporting an expedition to Murmansk which the Germans had plans to launch.

Princess Blucher’s diary offers an interpretation on events in the East, along with slightly peppery thoughts on the role of rumour-mongering:

There are reports current here to the effect that King Ferdinand [of Bulgaria] is going mad, and is subject to fits of melancholy and weeping. This, I presume, we may class with the rest of reports of this nature, according to which all the remaining monarchs in Europe should have been long since dead or in a mad-house; although the responsibility of this war is enough to send any one into an asylum.

Ferdinand is probably frightened at the dimensions which the Czecho-Slovak uprising is taking on. It has come in most opportunely for England, and may mean the freeing of Russia from the Bolshevists and prove a serious check to Germany’s plans.

There was no comparable difficulty understanding the war at sea. Some oddities had started to emerge, insofar as the Germans seemed to have become keener in picking off small schooners, rather than armed merchant vessels. The submarine U–156, targeted Canadian schooners off the coast of Nova Scotia — eight were scuttled, but their crews were unharmed. On 24th August, the same fate awaited seven Dutch fishing vessels attacked off the Norfolk coast by UB–111, again without loss of life. Allied tactics seemed unchanged, however: the previous day, a German torpedo-boat was shelled and sunk in the North Sea off Belgium and the nineteen crew members killed.

In some ways, a society in the thick of war is more accessible to historians than one daring to contemplate its end. General Pershing elicits the awe and respect which is surely the due of any commander whose army had incontrovertibly done more than any other in 1918 to turn the war in the Allies’ favour. Even so, his diary for this week contains allusions to ideas we now find difficult and even disturbing. On 21st August, he visited the 92nd Division and had a long chat with General Ballou about

…negro troops generally. There is considerable difficulty about using them. There is a question as to their fighting value and the problem presented by negro officers is filled with complications. Small percent of them give any hope of being able to command on the field.

More familiarly, he was fed up with the British. On 25th August, he noted a talk with General Bridges, to whom he had made clear that he “didn’t want any more instruction with the Allies”. In Pershing’s view, some of Bridges’ countrymen were so actively harmful

…that I did not care to have the British instruct my men as they instruct their own — to go into an attack at a high point… at this stage of the game, people who do that are behind the times.

There is a hint of New World brashness in that last remark — or perhaps it was just fatigue. The British, for all their faults, were famously good at muddling through. This week, to widespread relief, the transport and coal disputes were settled, even though the coal shortage remained a serious problem. Women munition workers were given a pay rise, perhaps to fend off a strike in that sector.

Lloyd George’s preoccupations seem to have shifted as well. He had brought assorted colleagues and advisers to Criccieth for discussions on election strategy. One of them was Christopher Addison, Minister of Reconstruction, who had been working on the establishment of a ministry of health. He notes that the PM and the War Secretary, Lord Milner, had journeyed to the riverside, but then found themselves unable to get across:

Finally L.G. took his trousers off on a stone mid-stream and paddled up to his middle in his shirt and pink pants… They had previously been followed by a photographer, but managed to shake him off before this choice moment…

It is somehow easier to enjoy this vignette in the context of August 1918 than it might have been at a time when the fate of the war hung so obviously in the balance.

There was also jubilation this week when news spread of the return to England of ten weary men who, almost unbelievably, had escaped from a German POW camp near Hanover, about 170 miles from the Dutch border. Using only spoons and other bits of stolen cutlery, they were part of a team of who had spent nearly nine months digging a tunnel, measuring fifty-five metres long and a mere sixteen inches high. On the night of 23rd July, seventy-nine of them, dressed in civilian outfits and provided with fake documents, had prepared to escape.

Alas, only twenty-nine had emerged when the tunnel collapsed and, of these, a mere ten made it all the way home. One of them, Colonel Rathborne, sent a telegram to the camp’s sadistic commandant, Karl Niemeyer, from the safety of Holland:

HAVING LOVELY TIME STOP IF I EVER FIND YOU IN LONDON I WILL BREAK YOUR NECK STOP

Back in England, the men were welcomed by the King at a private dinner at Windsor Castle, having already received awards and promotions at Buckingham Palace. Their pleasure and relief was overshadowed by apprehension for the fate of the recaptured escapees. These were well-founded: the unfortunates had been placed in solitary confinement for up to eight weeks, fed on bread and water, and had their goods from home all confiscated.

Maybe a few people on the Allied side, probably civilians, allowed themselves a lighter heart. But the evidence for suffering at this time abounds as much as ever, and the pathos which attended all victims of war continued to be piercing. The American neurologist, Harvey Cushing, visited Fort St André this week, now a neurological hospital:

…one of the centres given over to the psychoneurotics — more particularly those with congealed hands (les mains figées) and clubbed feet. These, of course, represent the neuroses which are apt to arise in the case of men with trifling wounds — men whose psyche is not satisfied with the magnitude of their injuries and who fear they may get sent back into the line.

Official sympathy for their predicament was limited by the need to get men back into the line, and to avoid any sense that there was an easy opt-out from the Front. Cushing observed the harrowing spectacle of one group of discharged patients preparing to go back to the line:

They were drawn up on parade, the first group fully equipped for service, under command of a crippled captain wearing an apparatus for a musculo-spiral paralysis. As they marched by us Roussy picked out one probable récidive… He will doubtless be sent back to Fort St. André for three days’ solitary confinement followed by another strenuous therapeutic session — one mind struggling to get control of another that has good reason to resist.

Most soldiers, of course, found ways to persuade themselves into keeping on. Bodies, typically, gave way before minds. Sister Edith Appleton at Le Tréport noted on 22nd August:

…One spine case died yesterday. His wife was with him, dear simple soul, and it was very pathetic… She suffered untold anguish but grief is strange — the heart enveloped in it is constantly finding little peepholes of comfort, and occasions for rejoicing. The poor thing would weep that she was losing a good husband, then say, ‘…but his colonel was proud of him, and is going to write to me, and then it’ll be all in the paper!’…Sergeant Partlin was only 35, but I thought from looking at him he was about 50. War does age them so.

The anguish of onlookers is often the nearest we can ever get to knowing the hearts of those who suffered. In and out of battle come glimpses of exceptional courage. On 21st August, Private Albert Fereday of the London Regiment wrote reassuringly to his mother:

My dearest mother…At present I am in a very comfortable trench about 5 miles from the front line, so of course I am ‘safe as houses’. I am only here for a few hours though as I am going a good way back to a little village where I intend to have a good rest.

Then, rather more candidly, he wrote to his friend:

I cannot settle down to write a good letter this week as I have had such a horrible shaking and have not quite got over it… On Sunday morning (early hours) I was digging a communication trench near the front line when Fritz got wind of it. For three hours he shelled us with very heavy stuff — 5.9s etc., high explosive and gas. It was impossible for us to go back to our dug-outs as we should have had to go about 300 yards in the open under fire and at the time no shelter was known in that trench sector.

Unfortunately, there were one or two direct hits, which killed two of our boys and wounded several — one of them, Cansick, was a chum of mine; he was killed… It was hell! How I came through without a scratch I don’t know. It must have been that God thought fit to answer many prayers; but I hope I never have to go through such an awful ordeal again. We get shelled pretty heavily each day so that very little work could be done.

While in reserve in this sector I was able to explore the battlefield, the scene of the recent fighting. Even if I wanted to describe all I saw I could never do justice to the scene but I don’t want to. If ever I was sick of this war it was when I first saw this place. If only everywhere knew of the horrors of this was it wouldn’t last another five minutes. But until it’s over we have got to ‘stick it’; the only reward I desire is to come out alive… not so much for my own sake but for others.

Happily Mother didn’t know I was even in the trenches, and you are the only one I shall ever tell the little I have of the experiences of the last week. After all they are dead and buried so far as I am concerned altho’ they have left their mark; I don’t feel I could face the same again with the same fortitude or steady nerve. But by prayer all things are possible and what better assurance of anything do I want than that.

A rumour has just been circulating that we are going up the line again and that there is to be a push I am practically sure. What part I shall play in it I don’t know but I hope I do my best. This letter is quite ‘off colour’ but never mind — it is an expression of love from your affectionate chum.

Fereday was killed the next day and his body was never found.