Stephen Heathorn, Haig and Kitchener in Twentieth Century Britain: Remembrance, Representation and Appropriation

With governments, publishers, and cultural institutions gearing up for the hundredth anniversary of the Great War, tensions have already come to the fore about how the event should be marked. Should this be a time for national celebration or global reflection? In Britain, the inclusion of Sebastian Faulks on the First World War Centenary Advisory Board has exacerbated the concerns of some academics that the general public will be presented with yet another variant of Paul Fussell's “Oh What a Literary War” (in The Great War and Modern Memory [2000]). In this representation, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force from December 1915 to 1918, takes center stage as the donkey-in-chief, blundering from one attritional disaster to the next, while Lord Kitchener, the secretary of state for war from 1914 until his death in June 1916, serves as a metonym for the heroic age of Victorian imperialism that had had its day.