"There goes young Haig. He says he intends to be a soldier."
The speaker was a young student at Oxford University, as he jerked his thumb in the direction of a slight but well-set-up fellow, a classmate, who went cantering past.
The chance remark, made more than once during the college days of Field
Marshal Haig, struck the keynote of his career. From early boyhood
Douglas Haig was going to be a soldier; and he stuck to his guns in a
quiet, systematic way until he won out.
The story of Haig's life until the time of the Great War, was the opposite of spectacular, and even in it, his personal prowess was kept studiously in the background. With him it has always been: "My men did thus and so." Yet in his quiet way he has always made his presence felt with telling effect. He has been the man behind the man behind the gun.
By birth Haig was a "Fifer," which sounds military without being so. He was a native of Cameronbridge, County of Fife, and came of the strictest Presbyterian Scotch. If he had lived a few centuries back he would have been a Covenanter—the kind that carried a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other. He was born, June 19, 1861, the youngest son of John Haig, a local Justice of the Peace. His mother was a Veitch of Midlothian.
The family, while not wealthy, was comfortably situated. The Haig children grew up as countrywise rather than townbred, having many a romp over the rolling country leading to the Highlands. But more than once on such a jaunt would come the inquiry: "Where's Douglas?" (We doubt whether they ever shortened it to "Doug," as they would have done in America.) And back would come the answer: "Oh, he stayed by the house, the morn. He got a new book frae the library, ye ken."
Douglas was, indeed, bookish and was inclined to favor the inglenook rather than the heather. As he grew older he discovered a strong liking for books on theology. It was the old Presbyterian streak cropping out.
The last thing one would expect from such a boy, was to become a soldier. A divinity student, yes,—perhaps a college professor—but a soldier, never! Yet it was to soldiering that this quiet boy turned.
The one thing which linked him up with the field was horsemanship. He was always a devotee of riding, and soon learned to ride well, with a natural ease and grace.
He received a general education at Clifton, then entered Brasenose College, Oxford, at the age of twenty. He was never a "hail-fellow-well-met" sort of person. Reserve was his hallmark. But the longer he stayed in college, the more of an outdoorsman he became. Every afternoon would find him mounted on his big gray horse for a gallop across the moors, or perhaps an exciting canter behind the hounds on the scent of a fox. It was then that his habitual reserve would melt away, and he would wave his hat and cheer like a high-school boy.