Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 99/397

Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 99 (2021), 183-193

ÂMACHINATIONSÊ OF A ÂMILITARY CLIQUEÊ? CONSTITUTIONAL NORMS AND THE BRITISH ARMY IN LLOYD GEORGEÊS WAR MEMOIRS

F REDERICK H YDE

Writing in Great Contemporaries in 1937, Winston Churchill predicted that the version of events depicted in David Lloyd George’s War Memoirs was unlikely ‘to be accepted by history’. Lloyd George and the senior officers of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), he suspected, would be deemed by posterity as ‘much better men than they deemed each other’. 1 The historiography of civil-military relations in the First World War has spent the past few decades proving Churchill right. Indeed, it has now become common scholarly practice to regard Lloyd George’s War Memoirs as an exercise in political score-settling, undertaken by a politician determined to address the grievances he had amassed over four years of wartime government, rather than an objective history of the dispute between the Cabinet ‘frocks’ and the military ‘brass-hats’. 2 Not that Lloyd George was unusual in using his memoirs to depict the past in his own terms. Many senior officers and their associates published books advocating particular – and political – interpretations of the war. In 1922, for instance, Sir Douglas Haig’s private secretary published Sir Douglas Haig’s Command , which depicted Lloyd George as a political intriguer who ‘dabbled’ in military operations despite knowing ‘nothing about them’. 3 It was no coincidence that Sir Douglas Haig’s Command appeared in November 1922, shortly before the election that definitively ousted Lloyd George from political office. The former Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) Sir William Robertson’s memoirs similarly accused Lloyd George of unscrupulously attempting to acquire ‘control over the military chiefs’. 4 Lloyd George’s War Memoirs , however, occupy a position of key historical significance for several reasons. Firstly, the scope of the invective which he deployed against the British Army’s senior officers was without parallel, most notably the charge that a ‘military party’ spent its time ‘intriguing with all the discontented elements in politics to overthrow the government’. 5 This allegation can be broken down into two specific charges. Firstly, the War Memoirs hold that 1 Winston S. Churchill, Great Contemporaries (London, 1937), p. 229. 2 See George Cassar, Lloyd George at War 1916-1918 (London, 2009), George W. Egerton, ‘The Lloyd George “War Memoirs”: A Study in the Politics of Memory’, The Journal of Modern History , Vol. 60 (March 1988), pp. 55-94 , David French, ‘“A One Man Show?” Civil-Military Relations during the First World War’, in P. Smith, (ed.), Government and the Armed Forces in Britain, 1865-1990 (London, 1996), pp. 75-108 and A. Suttie, Rewriting the First World War: Lloyd George, Politics and Strategy, 1914-1918 (Basingstoke, 2005). 3 George A.B. Dewar & Lt-Col. J.H. Boraston, Sir Douglas Haig’s Command , December 19 1915 to November 11, 1918 , Vol. 1 (London, 1922), p. 8. 4 W.R. Robertson, From Private to Field Marshal (London, 1921), p. 329. 5 David Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George (2 vols., London, 1938), Vol. 2, p. 1671.

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