- "We can't be seen sending troops into German-occupied Belgium as we are... ...negotiating their surrender."
"Sir, I have seen that gas with my own eyes. If it is used, it will kill everyone on both sides. They will all die."
"That is what soldiers do, captain." - ―Douglas Haig and Steve Trevor[src]
Douglas Haig was a senior officer of the British Army during World War I. He was also a member of the British War Council.[2]
Biography[]
To be added
Behind the Scenes[]
- Field Marshall Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, was a real-world figure, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), the primary British army deployed in Western Europe during World War I, from 1915 through the war's end in 1918. Prior to then, he served in the Mahdist War, the Second Boer War and as a divisional commander of the BEF, until he maneuvered to replace his superior, General John French. Initially praised for his leadership during the war and its immediate aftermath, he was excoriated by subsequent generations of historians for committing his troops to costly and seemingly pointless offensives (especially the Somme and the Third Battle of Ypres, also known as Passchendale), and for his apparent indifference to the extremely high casualties among his men.
- Haig's appearance in Wonder Woman is ironic, given that the term "Olympian" was used to describe him both by contemporaries and later historians - in both cases, the term was used to criticize his aloofness from the realities his army was facing.
- In April 1918, when the Germans launched offensives on multiple fronts, Haig wrote an inspirational speech and had it distributed among his men, ordering that "with our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end." One officer on the frontline sarcastically commented, "There was not the remotest contact between us and the Olympian figures at GHQ [General Headquarters] ; there never had been... It was almost two days since this circular had been signed and a good many walls had been given up during that time. Against which particular walls must our backs now be placed?"
- Likewise, Sir John Keegan, in his history The First World War wrote that "the Olympian Haig", who was a fundamentalist Christian, believed that he was playing a divinely-ordained role in the course of the war and so remained entirely undisturbed by the thousands of deaths that occurred under his command.
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 This article assumes that the DCEU version of Douglas Haig closely matches the one from the real world.
- ↑ Wonder Woman
