148 AWARDED FOR VALOUR
The Somme was a harsh baptism for the Kitchener soldiers, and it cost the
commanders the confidence of the men they led:
They say we smashed the old German Army there on the Somme, but
we smashed something else too. The faith we’d had found its grave there
in the nuckly hills and valleys round the AncreNever again was the
spirit or the quality so high. After the Somme, the French sneered at the
British, and the British at the French, and the Australians and Americans at
both. Last sons were called up and the conscripts went forward like driven
sheep. I never heard them singing again as I heard them that summer of
1916.^65
The swing toward more ‘war-winning’ Victoria Crosses in 1916 cannot
be explained by a fundamental difference in the character of the New
Army. While its social composition was different from that of the pre-war
Army, it did not exist in a vacuum separate from the older institution. The
Kitchener men were integrated into the existing system and if anything,
their commanders expected a lower level of dash and directness in their
battlefield conduct. It was not so much the conduct of the soldiers, but
rather the expectations and doctrines of their commanders that created a
greater emphasis on equating aggressiveness with heroism. At the core of
this change was Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig.
Douglas Haig took command of the BEF from Sir John French in December
1915. As a subordinate he had been critical of what he perceived as his
commander’s timidity and failure to commit himself to a decisive blow.^66
Now he had the opportunity to prove his fitness as a theater commander
and in the process justify his criticism of French by achieving the breakout.
Haig had long been an advocate of the offensive as the proper means
of conducting a war. In a staff study written in 1907 he asserted that ‘the
real objective in war is the decisive battle.’ He expanded on that statement
in 1909, declaring ‘decisiveness in battle can be gained only by a vigorous
offensive.’^67 For Haig there was only one sort of war: offensive, decisive,
and mobile. Haig looked for the breakout battle that would sunder the
German lines and allow him to end the war in an overwhelming defeat of
the enemy in the open field.^68
A cavalryman first and foremost, he never lost his conviction that the
horseman would strike the decisive blow in this war. It is truly amazing that
even after well over a year of combat on the Western Front he protested a
proposal to reduce his cavalry force as a matter of economy in 1916.^69 For
Haig, the infantry was merely the tool to open the breach for his cavalry.