Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 99/397

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apparatus of the Entente – in particular the Supreme War Council (SWC) and the Allied General Reserve – were used as levers in this feud. J.M. McEwan has examined the relationship between Lloyd George and the wartime press, while George Egerton has successfully re-contextualised the War Memoirs as a formative stage in the development of the memoir as a political medium. 17 The historiography nonetheless retains a tendency to take Lloyd George’s War Memoirs at face value. However welcome David French’s warning is that historians risk ‘placing too much emphasis on the machinery of government and too little on the personalities of the men who ran it’, he remains far too willing to accept Lloyd George’s version of events. 18 As this article will demonstrate, his downplaying of Lloyd George’s ‘animus against professional soldiers’ and his insistence that the Premier’s understanding of ‘strategy extended beyond that of many of his professional advisers’ is decidedly flawed. 19 The same goes for Stig Förster, who adheres to the notion of an inviolable distinction between politicians and soldiers. As recently as 2014, Förster insisted that the Dardanelles Campaign was ‘the only case when British politicians meddled…with military operations’. 20 The civil-military divide, however, was far more complex than Förster envisages and as this article will demonstrate, Lloyd George’s political chicanery proved detrimental to the prospect of military success on the Western Front in 1918. The first order of business will be to demonstrate that, although an identifiable ‘military party’ did seek to frustrate the Premier’s ambitions, the ‘military agenda’ was advanced through proxies in Parliament and a skilful cultivation of the political press, rather than being an attempt to replace the War Cabinet with a ‘military dictatorship’. Secondly, it will be emphasised that this ‘military agenda’ was paralleled by – and was in many cases a deliberate response to – Lloyd George’s subordination of constitutional norms to his own objective of civilian control over the military. Civil-military relations during the Great War will thus be re-contextualised as a clear and obvious power struggle, one in which the Army was determined to maintain its independence from a civilian government which, doubting the ability of Haig and Robertson to win battles, endeavoured to achieve the exact opposite. The obvious methodological points of departure for such an exercise are the two primary ‘machinations’ depicted in the War Memoirs . It should be reiterated that the dismissal of Robertson in February 1918 was not precipitated by an attempt to install a government loyal only to ‘the military party’. 21 Rather, it was the climax of a tug-of-war between Lloyd George and Robertson for control over military strategy. The former was convinced that ‘Westerners’ like Robertson were 17 See Suttie, Rewriting the First World War, Cassar, Lloyd George at War 1916-1918, Egerton, ‘The Lloyd George “War Memoirs” and J.M. McEwan, ‘Northcliffe and Lloyd George at War, 1914- 1918’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 24, (September 1981). 18 French, ‘“A One Man Show?”, p. 106. 19 Ibid., p. 88.

20 Förster, ‘Civil-military relations’, p. 100. 21 Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 1669.