Awww c'mon Musket tell us when it was that Haig was called "The Butcher of the Somme" - go on lad, go seek, google away all you like. You will find that not once in his life did he ever read or hear that description of himself.

Here is another question that you failed to answer:

Britain - Population 45.4 million, % deaths 1.79% to 2.2%

France - Population 39.6 million, % deaths 4.29% to 4.39%

Germany - Population 64.9 million, % deaths 3.39% to 4.32%

Straightforward military deaths:
Britain - 888,246
France - 1,397,800
Germany - 2,037,000

So if the British were being led by "donkeys" WTF were the others being led by??

Looking at those figures Musket which mob would you rather have been in, British, French or German? Put those figures to Ladbrooke's and how would they load the odds?

What on earth are you wittering on about abbattoirs for? The essence of war is basically that you kill more of them than they kill of yours (IIRC Hugh Dowding said something on those lines about the Battle of Britain: "For us to win - Our young men have got to kill their young men at a rate of 4:1"). From the Somme in 1916 onwards we did kill more of them than they did of ours - one of the reasons we won - they decided on fighting a war of attrition, a war that they could only lose primarily because taking into account our Empire and Commonwealth - we simply had more men.

Three weeks after the end of their greatest offensive since the start of the war, in 100 days in 1918 we had pushed them out of France, pushed them behind their own last line of defence - all down to Haig's perserverance, tenacity and his belief in his troops and his confidence in their commanders. It all started on the Somme in 1916. We continuously learned and modified our approach and won, the Germans stayed with the tactics they started out with and lost. Greatest compliment and validation of British tactics in the First World War under Haig? A little thing used by the Germans in the opening phases of the Second World War - they called it Blitzkrieg.