The Good Soldier, By Gary Mead

AN Wilson called for one of the most prominent statues in Whitehall to be vandalised. He claimed that Douglas Haig, the Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force from 1915-18, was "arguably a mass murderer". In this epic but absorbing re-assessment, Mead casts doubt on the universal execration of the general.

Haig is "deserving of neither simple condemnation nor rapt adulation". He was stolid, professional, "incorrigibly private"; his obsession with victory, for which he is now condemned, was regarded as "a mark of his inestimable dedication". This well-wrought book underlines the danger of applying the standards of one era to another.

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