6 - Command, 1917

Summary

The command relationship had settled into routine by the end of 1916, as the Somme Battle drew to a close. It was a rather more comfortable arrangement for Haig and his staff than for the French. Haig accepted Joffre's strategic ideas – this was not hard since fighting the enemy on the main front was the principle underlying both men's conception of how to prosecute the war – but insisted on a large degree of independence in practice. Obviously the French would have preferred a greater degree of control since the BEF was operating in French territory, but, as the head of the French mission reported bitterly, GHQ showed ‘increasingly marked intransigence’.

The command compromise was to be shattered in December 1916 by two changes. First, David Lloyd George replaced H. H. Asquith as prime minister. Second, Joffre was kicked upstairs to the fiction of an advisory post and replaced by the inexperienced Second Army commander, General Robert Nivelle, who had won the victories that brought the Battle of Verdun to a close. Lloyd George was to overturn the command relationship, and Nivelle was to prove a disaster.

Lloyd George had come to the premiership via the Ministry of Munitions, the secretaryship of state for war, and a rousing and widely disseminated press interview about fighting to the knockout.