Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 99/397

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ARMY HISTORICAL RESEARCH

Robertson’s opposition to the formation of an Allied General Reserve in January 1918 was such that he attempted to replace the War Cabinet with ‘a military dictatorship’. 6 Secondly, the Maurice Debate of May 1918 is likewise presented as an attempt by ‘the opposition and their military confederates’ to topple the government. 7 That both charges were complete fabrications made no difference to Lloyd George, who had deliberately set out to demolish Haig’s reputation as the orchestrator of the Allied victory in 1918. In this endeavour, the Prime Minister was aided by the extensive popular support which he enjoyed and the wide audience which his War Memoirs attracted. Though, in addition to Haig and Robertson, senior officers such as Sir Ian Hamilton and Sir John French, together with Admirals John Fisher and John Jellicoe had published their own memoirs, none could hope to match Lloyd George’s popular appeal. Even in 1934, at the age of seventy, Lloyd George remained a household name, the extent of which is indicated by the amount of money advanced for the publication rights to the War Memoirs . The British book rights were sold for an advance of £10,000, while the Daily Telegraph paid £25,000 for the serialisation rights . 8 The extensive commercial success of the War Memoirs deeply affected popular understanding of the Great War. Lloyd George’s sensationalist narrative contributed in no small way to a wave of popular disillusionment with the conflict, doing much to cement an interpretation of the war as one waged by incompetent senior officers who based their strategy on the presumed ‘docility of cannon fodder’. 9 Serious damage was inflicted on the reputations of Haig, Robertson and other senior officers to such a degree that the War Memoirs can be conceptualised as laying the groundwork for Alan Clark’s book The Donkeys . Though the depiction of the Great War espoused by Lloyd George and Clark has since been extensively refuted at a scholarly level, the image of the BEF’s leadership in popular memory is recognised by historians as owing much to Lloyd George’s version of the war, a fact which requires repeated engagement with the War Memoirs at every opportunity . 10 The second reason for the historical significance of the War Memoirs lies in the study of civil-military relations. Paradoxically, the extent of the invective that Lloyd George deployed against the BEF’s generals has, until relatively recently, prevented historians from appreciating the degree to which senior officers did play politics during the war. So outlandish was the notion of a ‘military party’ which sought to ‘overthrow the government’ and make Robertson a ’virtual dictator for the rest of the war, as Hindenburg was in Germany’, 11 that historians examining the war from a constitutional perspective were quick to emphasise the gulf between the tangled web of intrigue and jealousy that Lloyd George envisaged

16 Ibid., p. 1669. 17 Ibid., p. 1786. 18 Egerton, ‘The Lloyd George “War Memoirs”, p. 65.

19 Ibid., p. 77. 10 Ibid., p. 90. 11 Lloyd George, War Memoirs , p. 1687.