Editing Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig (section)

===Post-war opinion===
[[File:Haig monument in Edinburgh Castle.jpg|thumb|Earl Haig statue, [[Edinburgh Castle]]. The statue was commissioned by [[Dhunjibhoy Bomanji|Sir Dhunjibhoy Bomanji]] of [[Bombay]].<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/download/meetings/id/21244/relocation_of_earl_haig_statue|title=Relocation of Earl Haig Statue – Edinburgh Council [PDF DOC]}}</ref> It was in full view near the Castle entrance, but now relatively hidden in a back courtyard at the entrance to the [[National War Museum]].<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.thesouthernreporter.co.uk/news/renovated-earl-haig-monument-rededicated-1-1534508|title=Renovated Earl Haig monument rededicated|access-date=2 June 2018|language=en}}</ref>]]
After the war Haig was praised by the American [[General of the Armies|General]] [[John J. Pershing]], who remarked that Haig was "the man who won the war".<ref>[[Gordon Corrigan]], ''Mud, Blood and Poppycock'', p. 204.</ref> His funeral in 1928 was a huge state occasion. However, after his death he was increasingly criticised for issuing orders which led to excessive casualties of British troops under his command on the [[Western Front (World War I)|Western Front]], earning him the [[nickname]] "Butcher of the Somme".<ref name=worst/>

Winston Churchill, whose ''World Crisis'' was written during Haig's lifetime, suggested that greater use of tanks, as at Cambrai, could have been an alternative to blocking enemy machine-gun fire with "the breasts of brave men".<ref>Churchill 1938, p. 1220.</ref><ref>Bond 2002, p. 43.</ref> Churchill also wrote that although the Allied offensives up until August 1918 had been "as hopeless as they were disastrous", "Haig and Foch were vindicated in the end".<ref>Churchill 1938, pp. 1374–1375.</ref> Churchill admitted to [[William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook|Lord Beaverbrook]] that "subsequent study of the war has led me to think a good deal better of Haig than I did at the time. It is absolutely certain there was no one who could have taken his place."<ref name="Sheffield 2011, pp. 365–6">Sheffield 2011, pp. 365–366.</ref><ref>Reid 2006, p. 499.</ref> Churchill's essay on Haig in ''[[Great Contemporaries]]'', written after Haig's death, was slightly more critical, noting the government's refusal to offer Haig employment after 1920, his emphasis on the Western Front and his lack of the "sinister genius" possessed by the truly great generals of history.<ref>Churchill 1937, p. 223.</ref>

[[File:Field Marshal Douglas Haig death mask, Edinburgh Castle.jpg|thumb|upright=.7|Haig's death mask, Edinburgh Castle]]

Lloyd George was more critical in his ''War Memoirs'', published in 1936. He described Haig as "intellectually and temperamentally unequal to his task", although "above the average for his profession—perhaps more in industry than intelligence". Lloyd George's biographer [[John Grigg]] (2002) attributed his vitriol to a guilty conscience, that he had not intervened to stop the Passchendaele Offensive. John Terraine, writing of the "shrill venom" with which Lloyd George sought to "exculpate himself", called the memoirs "a document as shabby as his behaviour at Calais".<ref>Terraine 1977, p. 341.</ref>

[[B. H. Liddell Hart]], a military historian who had been wounded during the First World War, went from admirer to sceptic to unremitting critic. He wrote in his diary:

{{blockquote|[Haig] was a man of supreme egoism and utter lack of scruple – who, to his overweening ambition, sacrificed hundreds of thousands of men. A man who betrayed even his most devoted assistants as well as the Government which he served. A man who gained his ends by trickery of a kind that was not merely immoral but criminal.<ref>Geoffrey Norman, ''Military History Magazine'', Vol. 24, No. 4, June 2007, p. 41.</ref>}}

[[John Laffin]], an Australian military historian who had served in the Second World War, commented unfavourably on Haig:<blockquote>Haig and other British generals must be indicted not for incomprehension but for wilful blunders and wicked butchery. However stupid they might have been, however much they were the product of a system which obstructed enterprise, they knew what they were doing. There can never be forgiveness.<ref>Laffin 1988, p. 168.</ref></blockquote>