Why Lloyd George didn’t stop the slaughter

Politicking was to blame for the tragic waste of life at Passchendaele, which took place 100 years ago

Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the imperial forces on the Western Front, is popularly thought to bear the guilt of Passchendaele, that catastrophic slaughter whose 100th anniversary we mark today. It is time to redress this injustice. David Lloyd George, the then prime minister, should at least share the blame. He promised to stop the carnage should Passchendaele descend into another Somme. It did, and he didn’t. Why?

Part of the answer lies in the poisonous relationship between Lloyd George and Haig. The Field Marshal was a proud man who never forgot or forgave Lloyd George’s secret deal with the French to replace him with a French commander at the Battle of the Aisne in April 1917. Mutual hatred infected everything that followed.

According to Haig’s original plan, the capture of Passchendaele ridge, five miles north-east of Ypres, was his “fallback” position if he failed to break through enemy lines and destroy the German submarine bases on the Belgian coast as planned. In October 1917, with the rain pelting down and the battlefield a quagmire, he threw every available soldier into seizing Passchendaele ridge. Militarily useless in its own right, it served a vital symbolic role: Haig couldn’t go back to the Cabinet with nothing.

Had he failed even to reach the village, at such immense cost in soldiers’ lives, the prime minister would have jumped at the chance to sack him and destroy his name. Lloyd George admits as much in his sulphurous memoir, further claiming that “I did my best to persuade the Generals to break it off ” when the failure of the battle of Passchendaele was “beyond reasonable doubt”.

He did nothing of the sort. True, Lloyd George opposed it in the planning stage, but there is no record of him telling Haig to end it after it had begun; and not the slightest sign of him intervening when it degenerated into an appalling slog over a field of liquid mud. The prime minister, rowdiest of political animals, later claimed that the conservatives in his coalition government had tied his hands. This is risible.

But there is a good, Machiavellian explanation for Lloyd George’s inaction. He was giving Haig enough rope to hang himself. The prime minister recognised the cost to his own position – politically – if he’d intervened as promised and halted the offensive. Doing so could have rescued Haig from any responsibility for its failure. The field marshal would even have been able to blame Lloyd George for preventing a success. The press would have leapt to defend their favourite commander against a meddling politician. Lloyd George would have risked going down as the prime minister who almost lost the war.

And so, throughout October, Lloyd George stood quietly by, watching the tragedy in Flanders unfold, letting Haig pursue an offensive that the prime minister already believed to be a spectacular, bloody failure – but one that must be seen to be Haig’s failure.

Afterwards, Allied morale sank to its lowest depths since the war began. The British and Dominion forces had gained a mere five miles for 271,000 men killed and wounded, against German losses of 217,000. Many of them drowned in mud-filled craters or expired in agony on a battlefield so flooded and pulverised that the stretcher-bearers couldn’t reach them. Huge members of New Zealand’s Maori battalion were seen carrying men out over their shoulders.

Haig’s men held the wretched ridge for a few weeks before they surrendered it to the German counter-attack. By then it was strategically meaningless.

How should we remember the tragic waste of life at Passchendaele? Most will mourn it as a catastrophe. But a new tribe of military revisionists now says something else: “It had to be done. Absolutely necessary. Saved the world from tyranny.”

This means we’ve come full circle, from the wrong-headed case for the “war to end all wars” just before the conflict, through a century’s remorse, disgust and satire, back to the wrong-headed case for the war today.

If that is true, how many millions would have had to die, how many nations be destroyed, how many families struck down with grief, before anyone is prepared to concede that the First World War was not worth it?

Paul Ham is the author of ‘Passchendaele: Requiem for Doomed Youth’