The First World War

by John Keegan

In their time, almost all the leading commanders of the war were seen as great men, the imperturbable Joffre, the fiery Foch, the titanic Hindenburg, the olympian Haig. Between the wars their reputations crumbled, largely at the hands of memoirists and novelists – Sassoon, Remarque, Barbusse – whose depiction of the realities of ‘war from below’ relentlessly undermined the standing of those who had dominated from above. After the Second World War the assault on reputation was sustained, in that era by historians, popular and academic, particularly in Britain, who continued to portray the British generals as ‘donkeys leading lions’, as flinthearts bleeding the tender flesh of a generation to death in Flanders fields, or as psychological misfits.3 There were counter-attacks, particularly to salvage the reputation of Haig, who had become an Aunt Sally to playwrights, film directors and television documentary makers committed to the view that the First World War exposed the oppressiveness of the British class structure. Little ground, however, was won back.4 By the end of the century the generals, who had stood so high at the end of its Great War, had been brought, it appeared, irredeemably low by a concerted offensive against their names and their works.