Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 99/397

‘ MACHINATIONS ’ OF A ‘ MILITARY CLIQUE ’?

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and the supposed reality of a clear-cut distinction between politicians and soldiers. The fact is, however, that the fabrications of the War Memoirs aside, constitutional norms did come under pressure during the war from what Lloyd George refers to as the ‘machinations of the military clique’. 12 Edwardian constitutional orthodoxy allowed to military personnel, even when sitting as equals with civilians in bodies such as the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), advisory powers only. The war imposed considerable strain on such a convention, as senior officers repeatedly intervened in politics to advance what historians have now begun to refer to as a ‘military agenda’. 13 Recent attempts to re-examine wartime civil-military relations have caused the degree to which the line between politics, personalities, strategies and operations which had become blurred beyond recognition to become more apparent. Matthew Johnson’s analysis of the Service Members in Parliament, for instance, has provided a valuable means of broadening the analysis beyond the dominant personalities in the War Memoirs . The War Memoirs , however, also fail to acknowledge Lloyd George’s equal willingness to challenge constitutional norms in order to further his own objective of civilian control over the military. Though Britain’s was a system in which contemporaries agreed that authority over the armed forces was vested in civilian ministers responsible to Parliament, 14 Lloyd George pushed the boundaries of this system to the limit. As this article will demonstrate, he frequently relied on highly dubious methods to push for control over British strategy, including a reliance on media backchannels and the manipulation of both government manpower policy and the apparatus of the Entente. Whilst it is true that he ‘never [fully] established the supremacy of the civil power over the military leaders’, 15 Lloyd George came far closer to succeeding in this endeavour than Edwardian constitutional orthodoxy would have deemed possible. The notion that, with the appointment of Kitchener ‘the army was solely in the hands of generals’ who ‘ran the war without parliamentary control’ and ‘successfully resisted all attempts by politicians to interfere’ is therefore in dire need of correction. 16 The purpose of this article is to provide a synthesis of recent studies, which combines an exploration of the ways in which soldiers played politics in the First World War with analysis of the self-justificatory nature of Lloyd George’s War Memoirs . Much has been done in recent years to further our understanding of the War Memoirs and the interactions between the key players. Andrew Suttie, for instance, has grounded the War Memoirs in the context of Lloyd George’s disdain for Robertson and Haig. George Cassar has noted the extent to which the 12 Ibid., pp. 1671-1673. 13 Matthew Johnson, ‘Leading from the Front: The “Service Members” in Parliament, the Armed Forces, and British Politics during the Great War’, English Historical Review (2015), p. 644. 14 Ibid., p. 613. 15 A.J.P. Taylor, ‘David Lloyd George’, in Chris Wrigley (ed.), British Prime Ministers and Other Essays (London, 1999), p. 46. 16 Stig Förster, ‘Civil-military relations’, in J. Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, Vol. 2 : The State (Cambridge, 2014), p. 99.