The anonymous writer is welcome to his opinion, but the idea that Haig was neurotically obsessed with cavalry has long been exploded.

And consider the level of insight in this quotation:

"At the end of the war, after all, the army he commanded—and had almost ruined—was, if not victorious, then plainly on the winning side."

Facts: the British Army was indeed "victorious" by any standard. And rather than merely being "on the winning side" (as if the French, Belgians, and Americans had done all the work), the British Army was the primary instrument of German defeat, particularly in blunting the German offensive of March, 1918.

And how did Haig "almost ruin" it, since in the course of the war the British Army had become ever more proficient in battle? Indeed, British casualties were enormous, but German, Austrian, Russian, and French casualties were considerably greater. By the writer's own standards, that alone makes their generals far worse.

A vast butcher's bill was the inevitable nature of a largely stalemated war that should have been ended through negotiation by all governments involved within weeks of its outbreak. Aside from the initial aggression by Austria and Germany, *that* was the greatest scandal of the war. (Not that negotiations would have gone anywhere, since the aggressors were bent on crushing Serbia, Russia, Belgium, and France, and were undeterred even after three more years of carnage....)

Haig was a general, not a diplomat. The war wasn't his fault. He was neither a military genius nor an idiot, and nobody has yet suggested what other tactics were open to him. Passive resistance perhaps?

The Haig-bashers rarely bother to match his record as "the worst general of the war" against the records of others, including the losers. How about Falkenhayn, who determined to "make France bleed to death" by turning Verdun into an instanchable wound? Falkenhayn was responsible for 150,000 German deaths in a "strategy" with little purpose other than mass killing. Or the military dictator Ludendorf, who couldn't beat the Allies in 1918 even with an infusion of hundreds of thousands of troops from the Russian front and even more command experience than Haig?

Yes, the Great War was a disaster for the claims of western civilization. But Douglas Haig bears no special responsibility for that. Others might have done better, that's true of almost any historical figure. And in the case of Haig, one wonders "But who? And how?"