Douglas Haig - War Diaries and Letters 1914-1918
edited by Gary Sheffield and John Bourne
Phoenix, $210
The 1914-18 war could only ever have been a war of attrition, says historian and reviewer Max Hastings of London's The Telegraph. The technology of destruction was too far ahead of developments in communications and mobility for either side to exploit a weakness. 'Haig's commitment to the doctrine of attrition seems repugnant, because its human cost was unspeakable,' he says in his review of Douglas Haig - War Diaries and Letters 1914-1918. 'Yet he was correct ... victory was unattainable without it,' Hastings adds in pronouncing on this 'handsome and uncommonly well-edited edition'. He agrees with Sheffield and Bourne 'that it is wrong to calumniate Haig merely because, to a 21st-century eye, he seems an unsympathetic human being'. That Haig was no great writer is also clear, but Sheffield and Bourne have done a fine job in presenting the commander-in-chief of the British Army as a soldier who held firm to the belief that victory was possible. He was a political animal, too, and the unexpurgated diaries illustrate 'how toxic the relationship between the civilian and military leaders became', says The Independent.