HAIG OF BEMERSYDE

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 266, 31 January 1928, Page 8

HAIG OF BEMERSYDE

FOUR HUNDRED years ago Thomas the Rhymer sang, “Tide what may betide, Haig will be Haig of Bemersyde,” and set on the Fifeshire Haigs the imprint of a quality that Was already ancient and honourable. Not until many generations had passed through the halls of Bemersyde was the family elevated to the peerage, but down the long lanes of years they had continued to be the Haigs of Bemersyde, a race standing for the firmest in the firm Scottish character, and enriched with still finer traditions by the first Earl, who has died of heart failure after surviving the stress and peril of war. •Clifton College, that Newbolt sang, had its great doors when Douglas Haig was born at Edinburgh in 1861, but by the time the boy was of the schooling age it had started its career as a school designed primarily to equip candidates for the Army. Had it failed everywhere else, it would still have been brilliantly successful through the fact that it produced one of the few determined campaigners found to lead the British colours in the war. History may not reflect the late Earl Haig as a military technician, as a genius capable of delivering in a moment thrusts so paralysing as to turn the cofirse of war, but it will agree that he was a soldier who held to his purpose without vacillation, who set his mind above the persuasive poltroonery of a War Cabinet that was trembling at the knees, and clung to a thoughtful scheme of tactics even while the jealousies of wartime England were undermining his authority as commander in the field.

It was Haig, cool and immaculate, who galloped along the fire-swept Menin Road to rally the scattered Worcesters at the crisis of Ypres in 1914; Haig who had to prepare, after he had superseded French, for a war of attrition on a scale miattempted in the history of arms. He was called upon to hurl regiment after regiment into hopeless fields, to suffer the reduction of his forces through the British Government’s mania for secondary campaigns abroad; and to sacrifice bodies of troops in a manner that paralleled sheer butchery. Yet his tenacity never faltered. He predicted the terrific German onslaughts of early 1918. when his lines sagged, but did not break, and in August of the same year his ferocious strokes crumpled the Hindenburg line and brought the end of the struggle into view. Earl Haig of Bemersyde will have a place in history, but he was a modest, retiring man, and his soul will probably treasure more the lustre he has added to his line, and the plate that will speak for him in Clifton Chapel:

God send you fortune: yet be sure, Among the lights that gleam and pass, Yoji live to follow none more sure , Than that tvhich glows on yonder brass,