Who commanded the British army in France for most World War 1?

Answer 1

Douglas Haig, afterward Lord Haig. His family was "in trade", owners of the Haig & Haig brand of Scotch whiskey. Though there is a statue of him in Whitehall (in London) he is probably the most hated man in England, even though he has been dead more than 80 years himself. He was married to a Lady in Waiting of the Queen and enjoyed a very friendly relationship with the King himself, and under those circumstances he wasn't going anywhere, no matter how grotesquely enormous a butcher's bill he might run up. The British Prime Minister for the last couple of years of the war, David Lloyd-George, absolutely despised Haig but couldn't fire him, given Haig's Royal patronage. So what the PM did was to withhold troops from Haig by keeping them in England, which at least kept them from slaughter in senseless, prolonged attacks, but almost caused a disaster when the German's last, mighty win-the-war "Friedensturm" ("Peace Offensive") fell first on the British Army in March, 1918. In recent decades some historians have attempted an historical rehabilitation of Haig, arguing that after all, he DID learn, and eventually led the British with their Allies to victory. Its just that the learning curve for Haig was so ghastly, gruesomely murderous. The arrogant, supercilious breezy optimism of his staff is still resented, and the average person still feels that Haig would get 250,000 men killed and wounded "just to move his drinks cabinet six inches closer to Berlin". His famous attack on the Somme River front on July 1, 1916 saw 60,000 casualties the first day, and he persisted in it for four months, ultimately gaining a few thousand yards of shell blasted mud. And he repeated this folly the next year in Flanders. Recently the British Parliament posthumously pardoned all of the more than 300 British soldiers shot by firing squads in WWI, many of whom were no doubt scoundrels who richly deserved this fate. Haig's son was still alive and protested this in the newspapers, and met with great scorn and ridicule, because its still good politics to bash Lord Haig.