Sir Stanley Maude

Wikipedia:

Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stanley Maude KCB CMG DSO (24 June 1864 – 18 November 1917) was a British Army officer. He is known for his operations in the Mesopotamian campaign during the First World War and for conquering Baghdad in 1917.

. . .Maude arrived to catch the end of the British failure at the Siege of Kut where he was promoted to temporary lieutenant general, replacing Lieutenant General G. F. Gorringe as commander of the newly dubbed Tigris Corps (III Indian Army Corps) in July 1916. Despite being instructed to do no more than hold the existing line, Maude set about to re-organising and re-supplying his mixed British and Indian forces. He was made commander of all Allied forces in Mesopotamia in late July 1916, replacing Sir Percy Lake.

. .Given reinforcements and more equipment, Maude directed his force in a steady series of victories. Advancing up the Tigris and winning the battles of Mohammed Abdul Hassan, Hai and Dahra in January 1917, recapturing Kut in February 1917, he took Baghdad on 11 March 1917, shortly after his rank of lieutenant-general had been made permanent, “in recognition of his distinguished service in the field as Commander-in-Chief of the Forces in Mesopotamia”.[27] (He issued the Proclamation of Baghdad on 19 March.) From Baghdad, he launched the Samarrah Offensive and extended his operations to the Euphrates and Diyala rivers.

. . .After a lull over the summer, in November 1917, whilst his forces were engaged at Ramadi and Tikrit, Maude contracted cholera (some sources[which?] claim it was caught from drinking unboiled milk) and died in the same house as German Field Marshal von der Goltz nineteen months earlier. 

An excerpt from, “The life of Sir Stanley Maude” by Charles Edward Callwell, London, Constable and Company, Ltd., 1920, pg. 320:

When endeavouring to sum up the salient features in the character, the qualifications and the methods of Sir Stanley Maude as soldier and man, the biographer enjoys this great advantage : the achievements of the subject of this Memoir were so conspicuous, his popularity amongst those who came into close contact with him was so unquestionable, and his nature was so unselfish, that there is no temptation to gloss over such minor shortcomings as ought in the interests of truth and of example to be touched upon. Where assets are so rich and overflowing, there is no excuse for concealing a few liabilities. Maude’s fellow-countrymen will ever regard him primarily as a soldier, and it is in his capacity of soldier that he will in the first instance be discussed here. Nor can an examination of his attributes as an officer be more appropriately initiated than by indicating certain points in his disposition and in his normal procedure which lay him open to some tempered disparagement. Reference has already been made to them in passages scattered through earlier chapters of this volume.

By nature Maude was exceedingly tenacious — an invaluable trait for a soldier to possess in many situations. As one of his warmest friends indeed says of him in the striking appreciation quoted on p. Ill : ‘ When he did speak he put the pros and cons clearly and concisely and gave a decided opinion, from which nothing would turn him.’ (The italics are the author’s.) Fixity of purpose was one of his most valid professional resources, because he was generally right. But no man can always be right, and if Maude by any chance happened to be wrong, this characteristic of his lost its merits — as is illustrated by an incident which occurred when he was serving as a regimental subaltern in the Coldstream Guards.