Trevor Wilson,

Haig was not the dunderhead, certainly not the intentional butcher, that he's often portrayed as being.

"There's a popular view that Haig really set out to get his troops killed, believing that he would swap one of his men for one of the Germans. There would be a bloodbath on both sides; and because he had rather more men than the Germans, he would, at the end of the day, be left victorious, and the Germans defeated.

"This view of Haig is really quite untrue. Haig, in fact, remained an imaginative commander.
http://www.pbs.org/greatwar/historian/hist_wilson_05_haig.html