Blood & Mud

IN FLANDERS FIELDS (308 pp.)--Leon Wolff--Viking ($5).

Along with Sir Douglas Haig, British commander in chief during World War I, mud is the villain of this excellent book. It deals mostly with the British campaign around Ypres ("Wipers" to the troops) in 1917, when British soldiers learned on Belgian soil the dread military truth uttered by Napoleon: "God--besides water, air, earth and fire--has created a fifth element--mud!"

Author Leon Wolff, a World War II airman, draws a memorable picture of stiff, inarticulate Field Marshal Haig, who racked up about 450,000 British casualties (some 150.000 killed) in five months in order to capture a few miles of mud. Haig was an old-fashioned cavalryman who was mentally saddlebound in the kind of war in which a good deep hole was a soldier's best friend. One of his dictums alone should have disqualified him for command: Bullets, he said, had "little stopping power against the horse."

Deeply religious, Presbyterian Haig knew that God was on his side, but this did not keep him from setting great military store by fortunetellers. Airplanes, tanks and even machine guns struck him as frivolous inventions that no solid warrior need take seriously. Early in 1916 he had shown the kind of war he preferred to fight when at the Somme he lost 60,000 men on the first day of battle. In Flanders Haig bore out the assessment of British Military Historian General J.F.C. Fuller, himself a Flanders veteran: "He lived and worked like a clock; every day he did the same kind of thing at the same moment; his routine never varied. In character he was stubborn and intolerant, in speech inarticulate, in argument dumb."

Haig never got a chance to use his beloved cavalry effectively. The horses not only failed as bullet stoppers, but they suffered almost as much from mud and barbed wire as the men. The tanks that Haig despised ripped through the Hindenburg Line with trifling losses, but by that time Haig's reserves were used up and he had no follow-through. Flanders was a sickening campaign, and Author Wolff's clear, cool account effectively re-creates its horror. Perhaps the last word falls to Haig's chief of staff. Lieut. General Sir Launcelot Kiggell, who, according to Historian Fuller's introduction, "meditated like a Buddhist bhikku: revolved the prayer wheel of his doctrines, and out of them concocted Napoleonic battles on paper, which on the ground turned out to be slaughterhouse dramas." Not until the end of the Flanders campaign did Kiggell visit the corpse-filled swamp where countless thousands of British and German infantrymen had died in the mud. Kiggell burst into tears: "Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?"

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