Henry Rawlinson
Born on 5th of April 1810
Died on 5th of March 1895
Rawlinson was educated at Eton and trained at Sandhurst, and became a career soldier, seeing action in Burma and with Kitchener at Omdurman, then proving himself to be one of the more competent British commanders in the Boer War (which may be damning with faint praise). He is most remembered, however, for the idiocy of his command at the Battle of the Somme, where his tactics saw tens of thousands of British soldiers mown down by German machine guns as they advanced, overburdened with equipment, across difficult terrain towards trenches and barbed wire that he (and other senior commanders) would not believe had not been destroyed by lengthy bombardment. He was given a peerage in 1919.
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