The soldiers had to live their lives in the trenches for months at a time. The trenches were crammed with soldiers, wounded or alive, and they had to share their living quarters with lice and rats. We are told about the state of the trenches in source C1, written by Siegfried Sassoon who was a captain on the Western Front. In a poem written about the life of the soldiers in the trenches he mentions how a soldier kills himself because he cannot stand the life in the trenches. The trenches were very shallow, shown in source A5 (i), enabling men’s heads to be seen above the trenches, so they had to crouch and crawl a lot of the time. The trenches also did not protect the soldiers from debris and therefore it was easy to be injured from flying shrapnel. If the overflowing conditions of millions of soldiers were not bad enough, there was a horrible stench of rotting corpses, toilets and their waste, and the sweat of men. Any soldier had to be a lion to be able to be brave enough to live in them. The trenches were more like graveyards and hospitals than they were shelters.
Men were also depressed because the amount of soldiers that were dying. This was due to many reasons, many of which related to Field Marshall Haig. Haig was a man of higher class that had had previous combat experience in the South African War, some 11 years previous to the First World War. Therefore he was not up to date with the artillery and still believed that using cavalry would work. He did not use the machine gun as he thought it was a much over rated weapon and it wasn’t what it was made out to be. This was untrue because it was killing thousands of his men every time they stepped over the top of the trenches.
He made big mistakes whilst he was Field Marshall. For example, there were 20,000 deaths at the battle of the Somme. This battle was led by Haig, who later was named “The Butcher of the Somme” as he literally murdered thousands of soldiers. It took him 5 months of brutality to realise that only a few square kilometres had been gained, so on the 18th November he called an end to the attack. Examples of peoples feelings from the Somme are shown in source D3 and source D5 (ii).
However, although all of this is true, it has to be taken into consideration that we did actually win the war! Although it took a while for Haig to learn from his mistakes, he eventually did and we started to win more battles. He was also a very optimistic general and he had high confidence in himself and his men. He was very proud of his soldiers and he knew that they were risking their lives for him and for their country, but when you sign up to the army you know this. It has been said by some soldiers, that he was hated because they thought that he was a coward. But if they really though that, then why did 100,000 soldiers turn out at his funeral? And why did 30,000 veterans follow him to his burial site?
Also we cannot really take source C1 into consideration as the man who wrote it, Siegfried Sassoon, spent some time of his life in a mental clinic and threw away his military cross. This could suggest that maybe he had a personal loss during the war, or he was just personally affected badly and therefore this source is not really valid.
Also not all the blame can be shifted onto Haig as he was under mass pressure from the government to end the war. The government had promised the people at home that the war would not last long, so they pressurised Haig to end it. Source B5 is a very good example of the media trying to keep the morale of the people at home up by telling them that great progress was being made, when in actual fact it wasn’t and this put Haig under a lot of pressure form the politicians. For example, in source D1, David Lloyd George wrote in his memoirs that Haig was to blame for the death of soldiers in the war, yet he being prime minister at the time accepts no blame for any of it and he didn’t even go and see the injured in hospital because deep down he knew that it was his fault. Source D2 tells us of how Haig had no other option, but to use the tactics he knew.
Moreover, by 1918 things started to look up as victories were being won. Source A5 (ii) is completly wrong. It was written when war had changed. By this time the British had learnt to fight well and they had an advantage against the Germans, the tank. Another incorrect source is source A1. It does not show the land won by the allies and makes the British seem like they were useless and that the war was fought for nothing. The British did in fact go over the Hindenburg line, yet this is not shown on the map. It comes from a book which was called the “Fields of Death” which is basically about the pointlessness of the war. There was a good outcome of the war, and Haig was not all donkey. He was a good leader, as is shown in Source A3. The soldiers are shown wearing gas marks which showed that they were organised and that there was good leadership as this had been planned in advance.
Also people back home thought that the Generals were “donkeys” because so many men died in combat in the First World War, but as Haig says, in source B3, “no superiority of arms and ammunition, however great, will enables victories to be won without the sacrifice of men’s lives”. This is completely true and people knew that when their sons, husbands, brothers, fathers were risking their lives when they signed up to the army. So WHY did people still want to blame Haig? This is probably because they had no one else to blame, even if it wasn’t his fault.
In my opinion Haig was innocent and the soldiers were very brave to have seen their friends dying, and then to go and join them. But I do not think the blame for their deaths can be entirely dumped onto Haig as he was not responsible for putting pressure on himself. I think the Government had a big part in this war and people seem to forget that.
