ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the numerous biographical treatments of Haig since his death effectively turned him into a lieu de memoire a site or vessel of meanings associated with remembering the war. Duff Cooper's book was considered by many to be the definitive biography of Haig until John Terraine took up the subject in the early 1960s. Popular culture during the Second World War helped to reinforce long-existing perceptions of British officers as 'heroes and idiots' but the public reputation of Haig was more particularly damaged by the publication of an edited version of his war diaries in 1952. Haig was a metonym for the whole war, standing in for both the socio-political elites and institutions that directed it, and the nation that fought it. The claims of military historians to have a corner on the real meaning or the 'truth' about the war and of the men like Haig do not hold the field unchallenged.
