In Haig's Shadow: The Letters of Brigadier-General Hugo De Pree and Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig

By Gary Sheffield and Janet Glover

This collection of correspondence and newly discovered family papers is “a good read for anyone interested in WWI, or the British Army” (The NYMAS Review).
 
Hugo De Pree was the nephew of the better-known Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig. However, De Pree had a distinguished military career in his own right. He served in the Boer War. He was sent to the Western Front, as Chief of Staff of IV Corps, and played a key part in planning the Battle of Cambrai in 1917.
 
In 1918 De Pree was appointed to command 189 Brigade in 63rd (Royal Naval) Division. His part in the March Retreat showed that he was not a chateau general. In August 1918, he took the morally courageous decision to cancel his Brigade’s attack, fearing heavy losses for little gain. He was sacked, but after appealing was appointed to command a brigade of 38th (Welsh) Division, which he commanded with distinction in the last weeks of the war. Afterward, De Pree rose to Major-General and was the Commandant at RMA Woolwich. His son, John, was killed in 1942 when attempting to escape from a POW camp in Germany, a story told in this book by one of the leading academics in the field, which combines De Pree and Haig family papers with incisive commentary to give a multi-faceted insight into both an important but obscure senior officer of the First World War, and his hugely famous uncle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781784383558

Gary Sheffield

Gary Sheffield is Professor of War Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. He was previously Chair of War Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK, held a personal chair at King's College London, UK, and was Land Warfare Historian on the Higher Command and Staff Course at the Joint Services Command and Staff College. He has published widely on military history.

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Introduction

IT IS WORTH SETTING OUT

right at the beginning what this book is, and what it is not. It must be emphasised that this book is not a biography of Major-General Hugo De Pree, still less of Field Marshal Earl Haig. Rather, it is a collection of primary-source material, mainly written by the two men who were both relatives and close friends;¹ and a memoir of Haig written by Ruth De Pree (née Haig, Douglas’s niece, and also sister-in-law of Hugo). These papers are a valuable supplement to the sources that have already been published.² As a bonus, there are letters from prominent soldiers of the Great War era such as Birdwood, Wilson and Kiggell; and letters from the extended and inter-related De Pree, Haig and Jameson clan, giving a glimpse into the impact of the Great War on members of an upper class family spread across Scotland, Ireland and England, as well as Gallipoli and the Western Front. The bulk of the material comes from, or is concerned with, the period of the Great War. However, to place this material in context some letters are included from before and after 1914–18.

Hugo De Pree

Hugo De Pree was a part of what might be termed the ‘higher middle management’ of the British Army in the First World War. A Regular officer who after the war rose to the rank of major-general, he held a series of significant staff posts at divisional and corps level and commanded two different infantry brigades in the field. This in itself would be enough to make the publication of his correspondence worthwhile, especially as he had a significant role in devising the plan of attack for the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917, and in August 1918 was removed from command of one brigade under controversial circumstances, only to be given command of another shortly afterwards. However, De Pree’s association with Douglas Haig gives his letters added interest. A number of letters suggest the closeness of their relationship, such as Haig’s humorous response to a Christmas present from De Pree, and the mention of casual lunches and other meetings. Hugo De Pree was also best man at Haig’s wedding in 1905. Moreover, after the Field Marshal’s death in 1928, De Pree, as one of his Trustees, played an important role in defending Haig’s reputation, not least in being closely involved in both the selection of Haig’s authorised biographer, and the subsequent controversy. Hitherto, Hugo De Pree has been an obscure figure known only to specialist military historians for his role in one incident on the Western Front, for some writings on the Great War, and for being Haig’s relative. Now, through his correspondence, De Pree emerges from Haig’s shadow as a fascinating and not insignificant figure in his own right.

Hugo Douglas De Pree was born on Christmas Day 1870 into a military family. His father, Colonel George Charles De Pree (1832–87), Bengal Royal Artillery, was Surveyor-General of India from 1884 to 1887, and Hugo was born in Mussoorie, a hill station in West Bengal. His obituary, almost certainly written by a fellow gunner officer, remarked that De Pree’s ‘subconscious mind may have retained some memory of his early childhood in India but he soon spoke Hindustani (and, later, Pushtu) with a refinement of idiom and pronunciation which few British officers attain, and in those years he acquired an affection for India and its people which strongly influenced his later service’.³ His mother, Mary Elizabeth De Pree, née Haig, was the elder sister of Douglas Haig. Hugo went to Eton and then the Royal Military Academy Woolwich, ‘The Shop’, the training college for officers of the Royal Engineers and Royal Artillery. In July 1890 he was commissioned into the Royal Artillery as a 2nd lieutenant. Hugo’s first posting was the 18th Battery, which was stationed at home in the UK. He was promoted to lieutenant in 1893.

In June 1895, Hugo De Pree was posted to K Battery of the elite Royal Horse Artillery (RHA) at Lucknow, in India. Two years later came his first experience of active service, in the 1897 Tirah campaign. Promoted to captain in February 1900, he became the Divisional Adjutant at Woolwich in the following April. This posting lasted for a year, and was followed by active service in Jubaland in East Africa in 1901, and then in the Second Boer War, in which De Pree served with the Imperial Yeomanry. Returning to India in 1902, Captain De Pree served as second-in-command of L Battery, Royal Horse Artillery, before going to the Staff College, Camberley, gaining the coveted postnominals ‘psc’ (passed staff college) in December 1905. The British Army’s officer corps was becoming increasingly professional, but going to Staff College marked out Hugo De Pree as an officer who took his profession unusually seriously, even among officers of the technical arms. Staff College was followed by a mixture of staff appointments (at the War Office, 1st Division, and then the Indian Staff College, Quetta), and two years as a battery commander. De Pree was promoted to major in January 1908.

Like so many other Army officers, the course of De Pree’s career was changed abruptly by the outbreak of war with Germany in August 1914. He went to France in late 1914 as Deputy Assistant Quartermaster-General (DAQMG) of the Indian Corps, being promoted to lieutenant-colonel in January 1915. De Pree briefly served as General Staff Officer, Grade 1 (GSO1) of the Lahore Division of the Indian Corps, before moving to 2nd Canadian Division as GSO1 in May 1915. He did well enough in this post to be moved to IV Corps as Chief of Staff (technically, Brigadier-General General Staff or BGGS) in February 1916, being appointed a temporary brigadier-general in the following month. In this role he had a hand in planning the Battle of Cambrai, launched on 20 November 1917. De Pree was clearly proud of his part in this battle. His youngest son, born while it was raging, was given the middle name of ‘Bourlon’, after a key topographical feature of the battle.

In March 1918 De Pree’s career took a different path when at short notice he was appointed to command 189 Brigade of 63rd (Royal Naval) Division. Under the immensely difficult conditions of the ‘March Retreat’, De Pree handled his brigade with skill. This was followed by the most controversial moment of De Pree’s career, when in August 1918 he was sacked because he called off his brigade’s attack at short notice. De Pree took this morally courageous decision because he feared that men would be killed without any chance of achieving their objectives. The rights and wrongs of De Pree’s decision are considered below. He was rapidly exonerated and appointed to command 115 Brigade in 38th (Welsh) Division. De Pree commanded this formation with distinction in the final weeks of the war. His war was marked by the award of the CMG in 1916, CB in 1918, DSO in 1919, and six Mentions in Despatches.

Following the end of the Great War, the British Army shrank in size. It was the fate of many Regular officers to lose their temporary wartime promotions, and to revert to their substantive rank. De Pree was not one of them. He returned to his beloved India in 1919 as commander of 13 Indian Infantry Brigade. For De Pree to be appointed to command at the same rank as he had held in 1918 is significant, as he only became a substantive colonel in January 1919. De Pree’s subsequent post-war career was characterised by steady if unspectacular advancement. He became a major-general in 1924 and was appointed to command the Territorial Army 55th (West Lancashire) Division in 1925–6. Major-General Hugo De Pree’s last post was as Commandant of the Royal Military Academy Woolwich, from 1927 to 1931, and on the completion of his term he retired. The writer of his obituary thought De Pree’s finest work came as the Commandant of Woolwich, where

[. . .] besides maintaining a high state of discipline and of work he effected a considerable improvement in the amenities of the cadets’ life [. . .] [H]e impressed his character and his high standard of duty and behaviour on so many lads who were to become the backbone of our present great army [of the Second World War].⁴

Hugo De Pree’s final years were clouded by the death of his youngest son, John Bourlon De Pree. John continued the family tradition by becoming a Regular officer. His letters from Sandhurst to his father allows us a glimpse behind the curtain of the process of appointment to regiments. His father lobbied for John to join the Rifle Brigade, but ‘J. Bourlon’ (as Haig referred to him in one letter) had other ideas. John eventually got his way and joined the Seaforth Highlanders. Thus he was present at St Valery-en-Caux in June 1940, when the 51st (Highland) Division was forced to surrender. John made numerous attempts to escape, and was killed in 1942 while digging a tunnel out of a German prison camp.

De Pree’s letters to his family create a vivid picture of the life of an Army officer around the turn of the twentieth century. The letters range from his schooldays at Eton, when he lovingly recounted Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee of 1887, through his service in India, East Africa and the Boer War. Unfortunately, there are not as many of these letters as the historian would have wished. Worse, it seems that none of De Pree’s letters from the early years of the First World War have survived. However, he appears in some entries for 1916 in the diary of Sir Henry Wilson, De Pree’s boss at IV Corps. From late 1917 onwards we have a run of valuable letters, supplemented by De Pree’s recollections of the 1918 German offensive, first published in a divisional history in the 1920s. Apart from fascinating military detail, these letters testify to the importance of his family, especially his wife, Diones (Di), in keeping up De Pree’s morale. Indeed, Di’s letters to her husband, written at the moment of victory in November 1918, rate with the letters from John’s widow to her father-in-law in 1942, as some of the most poignant documents in the book. Di died in 1930, but De Pree re-married in 1937. He was as fortunate with his second wife as his first. His marriage to Mary Putnam Fisher (1878–1952), an American widow, was a happy one.

Like his relative Douglas Haig, Hugo De Pree was a student of war. In the 1920s and 1930s, he made two contributions to very recent military history. The first was a long article on Cambrai, published in a professional journal.⁵ This remains an important source for the battle to this day and has often been used by historians. I have included in this book some of the most interesting material from that article, namely De Pree’s analysis of the operations and his reflections on the place of Cambrai in the history of war. This material – astute, thoughtful and analytical, and of course written by an insider – nicely complements his letters home written while the battle was still going on. De Pree’s Cambrai letters are raw, immediate, and of course lacking hindsight, and extremely useful to historians of the battle.

De Pree also wrote an important long article on the role of 38th Division in the final weeks of the war, which encompassed the Battles of the Selle and the Sambre (in October and November 1918 respectively).⁶ This piece is less well-known than De Pree’s Cambrai writings. Cambrai, which witnessed the first mass use of tanks in history, has understandably been a favourite subject for historians, who have been drawn to De Pree’s work. Inexplicably, the Hundred Days, that great series of victories that actually ended the war on the Western Front, has attracted far fewer studies, and consequently De Pree’s article has been somewhat neglected. Yet the Selle and the Sambre were both crucial victories. De Pree’s valuable analysis of operations is included here, as is some of the primary evidence – letters written to him by officers involved in the fighting – upon which he based his account. He took a scholarly, detached stance in this article, as he did in his Cambrai piece, and one can wish that he had put more of his own experiences into his writings. Hugo De Pree’s published contributions to the history of the First World War as a participant, chronicler and analyst, have stood the test of time well, and can now be supplemented by his family letters.

When Douglas Haig died in January 1928, he was at the height of his popularity as the victorious commander of 1918. Coincidentally, around the time of Haig’s death, there was a backlash against patriotic views of the war as a glorious victory. Whether Haig would have been spared if he had lived longer is a moot point, but his reputation soon came under sustained attack. As he was one of the Trustees of Haig’s estate, De Pree’s letters reveal important details about the decision to appoint Alfred Duff Cooper as the Field Marshal’s authorised biographer. A number of other figures, including John Buchan and even Winston Churchill, were initially considered for this role, and King George V took an active interest in the matter. De Pree’s letters also chronicle the sad story of the dispute with Haig’s widow, Dorothy (Doris). Lady Haig wrote her own book on her late husband, in spite of having, as a Trustee, agreed to Duff Cooper’s appointment. The two books would have been in direct competition and the dispute ended in the courts. De Pree’s correspondence adds an important dimension to our understanding of this critical phase in the evolution of Haig’s reputation.

Hugo De Pree’s letters reveal various aspects of his character. He was, above all, a countryman. His advice to his eldest son on fox hunting, his letters recounting his shooting exploits in India, the pressed flowers he sent home to his wife – all testify to his love of the outdoors, as does his success as a farmer after he left the army.⁷ De Pree’s obituary declared:

Direct, happy and kind, he had a gift of making others so; he endured personal misfortunes with equanimity, but his temper was always aroused by meanness and by injustice to others, especially to the weak; his judgement of men was unusually sound. Hugo De Pree was the salt of the Earth: there must be many who are proud and happy as I am to have had his friendship.⁸

Douglas Haig

Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from December 1915 to April 1919, remains the single most famous and contentious British general of the First World War – indeed one of the most controversial soldiers in history. As such, only a brief biography is needed here.⁹ He was born in Edinburgh, the son of a prosperous whisky manufacturer, in 1861. Haig was educated at Clifton College and Brasenose College, Oxford, before becoming a Gentleman Cadet at the Royal Military College Sandhurst in 1884 and being commissioned into the 7th Hussars in 1885. During subsequent service in Britain and India, Douglas Haig rapidly acquired a reputation as a highly competent regimental officer. He attended the Staff College, Camberley in 1896–7, where he was seen as a thinking soldier who was going places in the Army. Haig’s first taste of active service came in Sudan in 1898, where he commanded a squadron of Egyptian cavalry at the Battle of Omdurman.

The Second Boer War proved the making of Douglas Haig’s career. Between 1899 and 1902 he served in a number of staff and command posts, emerging from the conflict clearly marked for promotion to the highest ranks. He was a newly appointed major at the beginning of the war, a substantive lieutenant-colonel at the end but with the local rank of brigadier-general. Appointed to command the 17th Lancers, Haig took a step backward in rank with the coming of peace in 1902 but in 1904 was promoted to major-general. He had royal favour, serving as Aide de Camp to King Edward VIII from 1902 to 1904. But Haig was no mere courtier. In the years before the outbreak of the First World War he devoted his efforts to overhauling the British Army. This involved undertaking a series of demanding jobs: Inspector of Cavalry in India; Director of Military Training then Director of Staff Duties at the War Office (Hugo De Pree served under Haig at the War Office); Chief of Staff, India; and, from 1912, General Officer Commanding, Aldershot Command. Haig played a critical role in assisting Richard Haldane, the Liberal Secretary of State for War, in his reforms of the British Army. He did so believing that war with Germany was inevitable, and there was little time to get the Army into shape.

In August 1914, Haig took I Corps of the BEF to war. At the end of the year Haig was appointed to command the newly created First Army, and by mid-1915 Haig had emerged as the natural successor to Field Marshal Sir John French as C-in-C of the BEF. He succeeded French in the aftermath of the Battle of Loos (September–October 1915), taking up his post in late 1915. The two years that followed, the years of the grim attritional battles of the Somme (1916), Arras, Third Ypres (‘Passchendaele’) and Cambrai (1917), are the foundation of Haig’s generally poor reputation among lay people. Some scholars have a different view, pointing to the enormous challenges that Haig faced, not least in transforming a hastily raised and poorly trained force while in contact with the enemy, at a time when the conduct of war was undergoing profound changes. The year 1918, when under Haig’s command the BEF first weathered the great German offensives and then went over to the attack, winning the greatest series of victories in British military history, is not nearly so well remembered by a lay audience. After the war, Haig, who had been promoted to field marshal in early 1917, was ennobled as Earl Haig of Bemersyde. In the 1920s Haig was a fully fledged national hero and became President of the British Legion, playing a prominent role as a leader of ex-servicemen across the Empire. His death at the age of sixty-six in January 1928 triggered widespread mourning.

Any new Haig material is of interest to scholars and indeed the wider community of people fascinated by the First World War, such is the interest that he still generates. These Haig letters, published here for the first time, add texture and nuance to our portrait of this highly divisive character. In these letters, mostly written to his niece Ruth De Pree, Haig mixes family gossip and fascinating details of his daily life with comments on military affairs, and some pungent remarks on the likes of Lloyd George. The letters for 1915, when Haig was commanding First Army, are especially interesting, as this remains a relatively under-studied year in his life – certainly in comparison with the years of the Somme and Passchendaele that were to follow. This ‘new’ Haig correspondence also sheds light on Haig’s post-war role as the President of the British Legion and the de facto leader of ex-servicemen. These papers are a significant addition to Haig’s diaries, and to his letters to Doris, which have been in the public domain for many years.

In addition, this book includes a valuable short memoir of Douglas Haig, containing a wealth of personal detail and family information, written by Ruth De Pree. To my knowledge, this has never been in print in its entirety before, although an excerpt has appeared on the internet. Uncle and niece were close, Ruth sending him a steady supply of parcels of foodstuffs and treats throughout the war. Ruth’s memoir is tinged with hero-worship. For instance she referred to Haig after the Great War having ‘a calm glory about him, an indescribable completeness. If my pen could tell what my mind knows of him the world would be enriched with a picture of a great and good man’. But Ruth also mentioned some of the less attractive of her uncle’s traits – his tendency to interfere and micromanage, his dislike of Ireland and the Irish, his pettiness over post-war honours. She commented amusingly on Haig’s brand of Christianity, quoting his friend (and fellow Scot) General Grierson: ‘The sort of thing he cares for is more like this Oh Lord come doon and help us, come doon and help us in oor need, and if ye dinna come doon and help us ye’ll hear mair aboot it.’ Interestingly, her memoir contains a version of the familiar anecdote that, when chided for proposing marriage to a woman he had only just met, Haig replied, ‘I have made up my mind on more than one occasion, on far more important subjects, with even greater rapidity.’

Two points in particular emerge from reading these letters and Ruth’s memoir. The first is Douglas Haig’s Scottishness. Writing to his family, he sometimes used Scots idiom, such as ‘freens’ (instead of friends), ‘to please ye’, ‘I’ll get ye some sma’ thing’. Haig did this self-consciously, placing the words in inverted commas; the impression given is of the man relaxing, no longer needing to keep up his guard as he did in communicating with his staff, subordinate commanders, allied leaders and British politicians. Haig’s Scottish identity rested easily alongside his British one. Like most Scots of his day, he saw no incompatibility between the two. But these papers remind us of the importance of Scotland, and specifically the Scottish Borders, to Haig. Reminders of home and normality, whether they were letters and newspapers from home, or small luxuries such as tea and cigarettes, were important props to the morale of soldiers in the trenches. High-level commanders such as Douglas Haig craved similar support, although the challenges to his morale were radically different from those faced by the front line Tommy. It is already well-known how important his wife, and his young family were in providing Haig with a hinterland. The letters to his niece Ruth illustrate the significance of his wider family. By writing to him about familiar, family matters, she provided Douglas Haig with a brief respite from the unrelenting pressures of a highly stressful job. In replying, he is nostalgic, recalling childhood seaside holidays, and asking her to buy him some ‘Berwick cockles’, a type of sweet. Although he was famously undemonstrative, even in his diary, Haig occasionally let slip to his family some of the pressure he felt.

The second point is his family’s attitude to Douglas Haig. Ruth De Pree’s memoir shows that he was regarded as someone very special from an early age. She highlighted the young Douglas’s devotion to his dying mother; the fact that his sayings and opinions were well known and treated with respect by his family; and that he was expected to rise high in the Army (there was a family prophecy of ‘see[ing] the Field Marshal’s baton in Douglas’s hand’. Undoubtedly there was a degree of hindsight here – Ruth’s memoir was written shortly after Haig’s death, when his reputation was coming under fire – but there was more to it than that. During the First World War there was obvious pride that one of their own had risen so high, which was accompanied by natural worry that Haig was affected by criticism in the press. The family also (mostly) refrained from bothering Haig about trivial matters, at least during the Great War. There is a revealing comment from Mary De Pree, Douglas’s sister, in a letter to her son Hugo. A Mrs Sanders was trying to get some strings pulled on behalf of her son: ‘I have not yet written to her. When I do I will tell her I forwarded her letter to you – But I am not going to write to Douglas. You are quite a great enough person to appeal to!!’ When peace came Haig’s favour was still much in demand, and he politely but firmly turned down Ruth’s attempts to get him to help third parties with whom he had no connection: ‘I am in full sympathy with his most deserving object, but you can see that if I put my name to everything I am asked, my name would soon be of little value.’

Taken together, this new material concerning Hugo De Pree and Douglas Haig is a valuable resource for the history of the British Army in the period of the Great War. I only wish that I had had access to it in the past, especially when writing my biography of Douglas Haig. Certainly, future historians of the Western Front will need to take account of it. It gives a more rounded picture of a man who has too often been caricatured, and allows another to step out from obscurity.

The last word goes to Ruth De Pree. In her memoir of her Uncle Douglas, she stated:

Many lives, many histories, will be written about Douglas Haig, great men will describe the whole course of the War, but these trivial fond records will be lost and the little events, intimate detail, that can help the future historian to know the present, will be put on record as far as I am able to do so. My large and interesting collection of war time letters, and those of the time after the War, will I hope be useful to some writer. I will gladly lend them all I can and anyone commissioned to write his life shall have all the information I am able to give him.

Posthumously, through these pages, she has done just that.

1. De Pree is often described as Haig’s cousin. In fact, as the son of Haig’s sister Mary, he was his nephew. However, the two men were only nine years apart in age, Haig being born in 1861 and De Pree in 1870.

2. Robert Blake (ed.), The Private Papers of Douglas Haig (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1952); Gary Sheffield and John Bourne (eds), Douglas Haig: War Diaries and Letters, 1914–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005); Douglas Scott (ed.), Douglas Haig: Diaries & Letters 1861–1914: The Preparatory Prologue (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2006).

3. ‘E.S.H.N.’, Printed obituary ‘Appreciation’ of Hugo De Pree, c. 1943, in De Pree papers, held by Lady Glover.

4. E.S.H.N, ‘Appreciation’.

5. ‘The Battle of Cambrai’, Journal of the