by Paul Ham
An unappealing feature of Lloyd George’s character was the puerile way in which he relished the coming destruction of his rivals, real or imagined. Buoyed by the blow he was about to inflict, he laughed and joked on the journey across the Channel. Yet the shooting down of Haig had an ingredient of calculated malice extreme even by Lloyd George’s methods.15
Haig and Robertson travelled to Calais suspecting nothing. Unusually, Robertson had not been invited to attend the War Cabinet two days earlier, because he would have opposed the scheme to dethrone Haig and blown the plot. Lloyd George merely suggested to the four-man meeting that agreements reached in London about the command structure would be formalised in Calais. Maurice Hankey, the formidable secretary of the War Cabinet, mildly minuted this as an endeavour to adopt ‘such measures as might appear best calculated … to ensure unity of command’.16 The Calais meeting would complete Haig’s deception in the most destructive way.17
The conference began at 3.30 pm in the Hotel of the Gare Maritime, a harbour-side haunt of illicit lovers, recently seasick passengers and anxious immigrants, flung up in the path of a restless, moaning wind. Lloyd George and Hankey represented the British Government; Prime Minister Aristide Briand and Minister for War General Hubert Lyautey, the French. Between them sat Haig and Nivelle, and fellow generals and staff members. The minds of the French and British commanders moved in different orbits. Haig and Robertson arrived expecting a robust discussion about logistics and railway timetables, involving Auckland Geddes, the director of recruiting at the War Office – though the presence of such powerful personages must have alerted them to the likelihood of a far more important agenda. Nivelle arrived expecting to hear the confirmation of his appointment as supreme commander of the French and British forces, which he presumed a fait accompli. (Nivelle would soon tearfully claim that he knew nothing of the plot to unseat Haig, and that it shocked him to find that he’d been used as the unwitting instrument of a politician’s dirty work. In fact, Nivelle had known the French were plotting to seize command of the British Army in late December 1916, though in fairness he may not have known the extent of Haig’s ignorance.)18
The mood rapidly deteriorated when the meeting reconvened at 5.30 pm, and Lloyd George raised the question of unity of command. ‘The enemy has but one army,’ he said. ‘The Entente Powers should secure for themselves the same advantage, especially in battle. If we do not do this we cannot hope for success.’19 He asked for complete frankness, and invited Nivelle to present his plan and to raise any differences of opinion he had with ‘Marshal Haig’. The prime minister urged Nivelle ‘to keep nothing back’.20
After a little prefatory padding on the strengths of his relationship with Haig, the Frenchman rather hesitantly advanced the idea that unity of command was indispensable. Goaded by Lloyd George to force the point, Nivelle bluntly declared that France should have full command of the British forces.
Haig’s camp met this with astonished silence. Haig then opened his mouth, firmly declaring that he would decide ‘where and how I would dispose of my troops …’21 To relieve the tension, Nivelle was asked to put his terms in writing. The meeting adjourned.
The slow humiliation of Field Marshal Haig and his commanders resumed at 8 pm that night, when General Nivelle handed his written terms to Lloyd George, in the prime minister’s rooms. Haig and Robertson were not then present. These terms stated that the French commander-in-chief ‘will, as from March 1st, have command over the British forces operating on [the Western Front], in all matters affecting the conduct of operations’.22 The extraordinary document sought to give the French commander absolute power over planning, operations, munitions and supplies of the British Army, leaving Haig in command of discipline and arranging reinforcements – the powers, in effect, of little more than a provost marshal. A British ‘Quarter Master General’ would be installed at the French headquarters in Beauvais, through whom Haig would have to communicate to reach London.
Under this ‘unity of command’, the British Army, along with its Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and South African components, would henceforth cease to exist as a distinct entity and would become a mere appendage of the French, rather like the colonial forces of Morocco or Algeria. Lloyd George professed himself satisfied with the document, apparently unaware of the extent to which he would be handing over the camel of the British forces to France and leaving Haig barely holding its tail. The Dominions had had little say in the transaction that would bargain away the control of their soldiers. (Australia’s prime minister Billy Hughes had been unable to attend the Imperial War Cabinet meetings in early 1917, leaving him in a state of ‘complete ignorance’ of negotiations that would have a direct bearing on Australia’s army.)23
Digesting the translation of Nivelle’s statement over dinner that night, Robertson turned a deep shade of red and showed ‘every sign of having a fit’.24 ‘Get ’Aig!’ he yelled. On reading it, Haig was speechless with rage at the connivance of his prime minister with the French in his effective removal from command of the British Army. Spears would later compare this ‘monstrous farce’ to a Borgia family dinner at which the guests were pronounced poisoned upon the arrival of dessert.25 ‘Seldom in history,’ his florid account continued, ‘can Englishmen have been asked to subscribe to such abject conditions. It seemed incredible that the greatest army we had ever sent abroad, now at the height of its power and absolutely confident of its superiority over the enemy, should be confronted with terms such as might be imposed on a vassal state.’26
The execrable terms would be rejected, of course. The two commanders carried their rage – Haig’s silent and wounded, Robertson’s sulphuric – to the prime minister’s rooms at 10 pm that night. A violent row ensued. ‘[I]t would be madness to place the British under the French,’ Haig told the prime minister, adding that he ‘did not believe our troops would fight under French leadership’.27 Lloyd George hit back with the insulting insinuation, ‘I know the British soldier very well. He speaks more freely to me and there are people he criticises a good deal more strongly than General Nivelle.’28 Lloyd George concluded by shouting that Nivelle would command the British forces, and he showed his top soldiers the door.
They retreated to Robertson’s rooms for a post-mortem, joined by Lieutenant General Launcelot Kiggell, chief of the general staff of the British Armies in France. Aghast at their treatment, but braced by Hankey’s revelation that Lloyd George had not received ‘full authority’ to act from the War Cabinet, Robertson proposed the mass resignation of the top brass. He quickly thought the better of it. He was needed now, as never before, to defend the British Army. Instead, the commanders decided to disobey the plan, even though that meant disobeying their own government. They would ‘rather be tried by Court Martial than betray the Army’ by placing it under the French. ‘And so we went to bed,’ Haig brooded in his diary, ‘thoroughly disgusted with our Government and the Politicians.’29
That night, Hankey prevailed upon Lloyd George to soften the arrangement, to preserve a semblance of cooperation. The prime minister reluctantly agreed, and Hankey and Major General Frederick Maurice found themselves deputed to stay up all night and hammer out a solution.
The next morning, in a meeting with Robertson (which Haig refused to attend), Lloyd George tabled a modified proposal: Nivelle would command the British Army only for the planning and duration of his offensive, after which Haig’s powers would be reinstated. Robertson rejected this, and fought tooth and nail for the army’s independence. Haig fired off a memo, warning that the proposal to subordinate the British forces to the French ‘must involve the disappearance of the British commander-in-chief and GHQ’: ‘So drastic a change in our system seems to me to be fraught with the gravest danger.’30
Lloyd George thrashed about in a rage, and refused to compromise. After much coming and going between hotel rooms, a deal was reached: Nivelle would command the French and British forces on the Western Front for the duration of the offensive; Hai
g would have the right to challenge French orders if he believed they ‘would compromise the safety of his army’ and be free to choose the means of deploying his troops in the ‘zone of operations [the French] allotted him’.31 It was the best the British commanders could hope for, and they signed. From that moment, until the end of Nivelle’s campaign, the British Army would be a unit of the French.
Haig left Calais bridling with unconcealed disgust at the proceedings. He lunched at Boulogne, where he overheard a remark by General Joseph Micheler, commander of the French reserves, who happened to be sharing his doubts about the Nivelle Offensive: ‘it does not matter what the politicians decide’, Haig later quoted Micheler as saying, ‘the French soldier is not going to fight after the autumn!’32
Haig and Robertson would never forgive Lloyd George for what they saw as an act of gross disloyalty. They were soldiers, above all; their loyalty to the army was indivisible. And so, on their return to London, Robertson at once informed the Army Council of what had happened, turning the ‘icy douche’ of responsibility on the government.33 Ministers, he stressed, would now be held accountable for the safety of the troops and the consequences of a decision taken without his or Haig’s agreement. He made violently clear that his signature on the paper did not indicate concurrence.34 His anger festering, Robertson later wrote to Haig, ‘I cannot believe that a man such as he can remain for long head of any Government. Surely some honesty and truth are required.’35
Haig offered his resignation to the King, who rejected it. The old friends agreed that it was ‘a calamity for the country to have such a man at the head of affairs in this time of great crisis’.36 Haig’s diary summed up the weight on his mind: ‘All would be so easy if I only had to deal with the Germans.’37 ‘LG,’ he told his wife, is ‘looking about to find something else to increase his reputation as the “man of the hour” and the saviour of England. However I am doing my best and have a clear conscience. If they have someone else who can command this great Army better than I am doing, I shall be glad to hand over to him, and will be happy to come back to my darling wife and play golf and bring up the children.’38
The War Cabinet regrouped on 28 February, and the prime minister made a half-hearted effort to patch things up. The Calais agreement, he back-pedalled, ‘merely’ sought to secure a ‘clearly defined unity of control’, and in no sense cast aspersions on Haig’s ability and qualifications, ‘in whom the War Cabinet continued to entertain full confidence’.39 One can almost hear Wully Robertson’s heart thumping with Scottish rage at this twisted representation.
Unity of command should have devolved upon an overarching commander to whom Haig and Nivelle were equally answerable, under an Anglo-French war committee. Instead, the British commanders now faced the complete immersion of their beloved army into the French one. What neither man fully realised was that the subordination of Haig was the first blow in Lloyd George’s personal campaign against his ‘unsackable’ commander-in-chief. On either side, feelings were incandescent.
The war that had seemed like ‘noises off’ in this tawdry drama of power and control was allowed to resume. On 8 March, Haig was told that he ‘enjoyed the full confidence of the War Cabinet’; a week later, fresh words were inserted into the agreement, according to which ‘the British Army and the Commander-in-Chief will be regarded by General Nivelle as Allies and not subordinates, except during the particular operations … explained at the Calais Conference’.40 Haig set aside his personal misgivings and resolved to enact the agreement to the letter.
Nivelle, however, nonplussed at not getting full control over the British, now revealed himself as the kind of man who sought power for its own sake. He continued to dispatch orders to Haig’s headquarters, eliciting the latter’s contempt for this ‘junior foreign commander’, a remark that did Haig no favours.41 The French general added to Haig’s woes by requesting that General Sir Henry Wilson, the bellicose Francophile schemer whom Haig deeply distrusted, be made head of the British Mission at Beauvais, through whom Haig would have to liaise.
Haig shot off a letter steaming with indignation at Nivelle’s ‘dictatorial language’ and bid to ‘grasp more power over our Armies’ than was agreed at Calais. He demanded that the British Government inform the French that their commanders had no authority to issue orders to British units other than through himself; and that Nivelle had no right to inspect British or Dominion units, ‘visit them’ or remove their troops from the line without his consent. He was even reduced to asking the Cabinet to dispatch an ‘expression of confidence in myself’ to the French authorities, painfully revealing just how little confidence Haig felt his government had in him.42
Clearly, it was an unworkable arrangement, and the friction escalated. A ‘dangerous divergence of views’ now arose between Haig and Nivelle, the War Cabinet heard on 8 March. Haig had refused to cooperate, the French Government complained. Haig found it galling to be at the beck and call of a French officer of lower rank, in whose plans he had little faith; and with every slight, every humiliation, Haig’s contempt for Lloyd George deepened.
The next day, the British Government meekly complained to the French that Nivelle’s office had treated Haig as a subordinate (no surprise, surely, as that was exactly what the prime minister had reduced him to) and not an equal temporarily under Nivelle’s orders, itself a meaningless notion.43 The fallout could imperil the Allied cause if the dysfunctional arrangement continued, so Lloyd George proposed another meeting to resolve the crisis.44 This came to nothing; the French Government declined to attend.
On 14 March, the War Cabinet struck a conciliatory note. Haig (in one of his rare appearances) was asked whether he felt he had the ‘personal freedom of action’ necessary to deal with a surprise attack by the enemy on the Flanders front. He replied through gritted teeth that his freedom to act in Flanders would be assured so long as Nivelle didn’t take his troops ‘out of my hands at the critical moment’.45
A few days later, Jellicoe, the first sea lord, posed a similar question: were British ground troops prepared for a possible enemy attack by sea, to the rear of Haig’s forces, at Nieuport? Jellicoe calculated that the Germans could land 20,000–30,000 troops using tugs and lighters assembled in the canals of Zeebrugge and Ostend.46 A man less self-disciplined than Haig might have barked back that a disloyal prime minister had removed his power to act. Again, Haig kept his composure. No, he had not detected signs of enemy preparations for a seaborne invasion, he replied, warning however that ‘our coastal defences were not designed to deal with anything more than small raids’.47
A month before the French offensive, Nivelle’s brittle confidence took a battering. In March, Briand lost power to his declared enemy Paul Painlevé, who became minister for war. A socialist intellectual, Painlevé thoroughly disliked Nivelle and thought his battle plan a recipe for ‘mass manslaughter’.48 He threw his support behind Nivelle’s rival, General Philippe Pétain, the ‘Lion of Verdun’ and a national hero, who had consistently argued that the French infantry should dig in and wait until the Americans arrived. When Painlevé took office, on 19 March, however, Nivelle’s plans were too far advanced to halt. The new minister yielded to the momentum and hoped for the best.
Nivelle’s great moment approached. Heavy rains postponed zero hour well into April. The French train system groaned under the vast logistical exercise, and the target itself – the German forces stationed along the Aisne – seemed to be thinning out. The weary French Army began moving up, and the British diversionary battles, at Vimy Ridge and Arras, were set in motion.
Neither Nivelle nor Lloyd George, in their enthusiasm for the two-day miracle, had paused to consider the state of the French soldiers who were supposed to achieve it. Lloyd George’s readiness to accept huge French (and Italian) casualties ahead of British ones underscored the political over the humanitarian motive that prevailed. Yet any commander, or politician, with an ounce of compassion should have been able to see that the French troops wer
e not up to the job. After their staggering losses at Verdun, these men were being ordered, again, to charge into the furnace.
That scarcely troubled Nivelle, who assumed the poilu would never tire of throwing his blue-uniformed body at German guns. Exhausted, badly fed and utterly demoralised, many had not had leave in months. Most had lost friends, brothers and sons at Verdun. Since 1914, between 2,560,000 and 3,285,000 French soldiers (depending on the source) had been killed or wounded, compared with 1,120,204 British and Dominion troops. The French people were numb with grief and the French Army close to collapse.49
Meanwhile, on the other side of no-man’s-land, the Germans were fully aware of what the French were about to attempt. Nivelle had unwisely circulated his plan to the lower ranks. On 3 March, the Germans captured a French sergeant who happened to possess ‘a memorandum … of extraordinary value’, noted Crown Prince Rupprecht, commander of Army Group Rupprecht, ‘as to the particular nature of the surprise which the attacker has in view’.50 On 6 April, a German raid captured the order of attack of France’s Fifth Army, laying out the Nivelle Plan in detail. The Germans immediately deployed 30 fresh divisions (about 400,000 men) to reinforce the vulnerable sector, and extended and fortified the wire and trench lines.
At this point, the Germans were able to draw on hundreds of thousands of fresh troops, thanks to mass conscription and the imminent arrival of reinforcements from the Eastern Front. The March Revolution had heralded the end of Russia’s participation in the war, and the redeployment west had begun. By April 1917, 151 German divisions (almost two million men) were entrenched on the Western Front, compared with 119 at the start of the Somme. The number of German rifles ‘opposing us’ was 100,000 greater than the total on the first day of the Somme, Robertson warned the War Cabinet on 10 April 1917.51 That said, the combined French and British forces exceeded four million, and they had many more guns than the Germans.
