David Lloyd George access to the Cabinet so as to bypass Kitchener. However, he did succeed in securing the appointment of Sir Eric Geddes to take charge of military railways behind British lines in France, with the honorary rank of major-general. Lloyd George told a journalist, Roy W. Howard, in late September that "the fight must be to a finish – to a knockout", a rejection of President Wilson's offer to mediate. Lloyd George was increasingly frustrated at the limited gains of the Somme Offensive, criticising General Haig to Ferdinand Foch on a visit to the Western Front in September (British casualty ratios
Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig Gough, for the defeat of March 1918 (although he had actually defended him and the alternative would probably have been Haig's own dismissal) and his claims to have subsequently accepted the appointment of Foch as Allied Generalissimo, which Lloyd George claimed that Haig had opposed. On another occasion he is said to have described Haig as "brilliant – to the top of his boots". Lloyd George's biographer John Grigg (2002) attributed his vitriol to a guilty conscience, that he had not intervened to put a stop to the Passchendaele Offensive. John Terraine, writing of the "shrill venom" with which Lloyd