disillusionment of armies who saw now that war on the western front
was to be a long struggle, with enormous slaughter, and no visible
sign of the end beyond a vista of dreadful years. Sir Douglas Haig, in
his general headquarters at St.-Omer, and afterward at Montreuil, near
the coast, had the affection and loyalty of the staff--officers. A man
of remarkably good looks, with fine, delicate features, strengthened
by the firm line of his jaw, and of singular sweetness, courtesy, and
simplicity in his manner toward all who approached him, he had
qualities which might have raised him to the supreme height of
personal influence among his armies but for lack of the magic touch
and the tragic condition of his command.

He was intensely shy and reserved, shrinking from publicity and
holding himself aloof from the human side of war. He was
constitutionally unable to make a dramatic gesture before a multitude,
or to say easy, stirring things to officers and men whom he reviewed.
His shyness and reserve prevented him also from knowing as much as he
ought to have known about the opinions of officers and men, and
getting direct information from them. He held the supreme command of
the British armies on the western front when, in the battlefields of
the Somme and Flanders, of Picardy and Artois, there was not much
chance for daring strategy, but only for hammer-strokes by the flesh
and blood of men against fortress positions--the German trench
systems, twenty-five miles deep in tunneled earthworks and machine-gun
dugouts--when the immensity of casualties among British troops was out
of all proportion to their gains of ground, so that our men's spirits
revolted against these massacres of their youth and they were
embittered against the generalship and staff-work which directed these
sacrificial actions.