Exchange of the week

To The Times

Ben Macintyre is absolutely right: it is well beyond time to restore Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig to the heart of poppy remembrance and to acknowledge as well his remarkable and successful role in that conflict. Arguing, debating and criticising the means of success is all too easy 100 years after the event and with the benefit of hindsight, but as his son, with whom I fished for more than 20 years in the Scottish Borders, said to me on several occasions: “My father was put in charge to win the War – and he won it.” He showed courage and leadership at a time when it was desperately needed. Stephen M. Fielding, Galashiels, Selkirkshire

To The Times

My late father was recruited at the start of the Great War (nothing great about it, he said), and for the next four years was in France, with one break to recover from a wound. Those four years in the Durham Light Infantry were mostly spent in the trenches: the Somme and elsewhere. Such was his hatred of the field marshal that he refused to wear a remembrance poppy because it bore the word “Haig”, and he would not join the British Legion because he considered that it celebrated the conflict rather than condemned it. It was clearly a very traumatic experience for him – and for all those who fought on the front lines on both sides. I don’t think we can ever forget that; I certainly can’t. David Stephenson, Dorridge, Solihull