Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 193. Chapters: Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, Clement Attlee, David Lloyd George, Harold Macmillan, Stanley Baldwin, Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Anthony Eden, Benjamin Disraeli, Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, Bertrand Russell, Harold Alexander, 1st Earl Alexander of Tunis, John French, 1st Earl of Ypres, H. H. Asquith, David Beatty, 1st Earl Beatty, Arthur Balfour, Archibald Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell, Alexander Cambridge, 1st Earl of Athlone, John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, George Jellicoe, 2nd Earl Jellicoe, E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax, Frederick Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts, Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester (seventh creation), F. J. Robinson, 1st Viscount Goderich. Excerpt: Field Marshal Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig of Bemersyde, KT, GCB, OM, GCVO, KCIE, ADC, (19 June 1861 - 29 January 1928) was a British senior officer during World War I. He commanded the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from 1915 to the end of the War. He was commander during the Battle of the Somme, the battle with one of the highest casualties in British military history, the Third Battle of Ypres, and the Hundred Days Offensive, which led to the armistice in 1918. Although a popular commander during the immediate post-war years, with his funeral becoming a day of national mourning, Haig has since the 1960s become an object of criticism for his leadership during the First World War. Some dub him "Butcher Haig" for the two million British casualties under his command, and regard him as representing the very concept of class-based incompetent commanders, stating that he was unable to grasp modern tactics and technologies. However, Major-General Sir John Davidson, one of Haig's biographers, praised Haig's leadership and since the 1980s some historians have argued that the public hatred in which Haig's name had come to be held failed to recognise the adoption of new tactics and technologies by forces under his command, or the important role played by the British forces in the Allied victory of 1918, and that the high casualties suffered were a function of the tactical and strategic realities of the time. As a Hussar at age 23 in 1885Haig was born in Charlotte Square, Edinburgh - he was not an aristocrat by birth, or even landed gentry. His father John Haig - an irascible alcoholic - was middle class ("in trade"), and as head of the family's successful Haig & Haig whisky distillery had an income of 10,000 per year. His mother (Rachel) was from a gentry family fallen on straitened circumstances. Haig attended Clifton College. Both Haig's parents died by the time he was eighteen, leaving him financially independent from a young age. Until his marriage he was close to his