Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 99/397

‘ MACHINATIONS ’ OF A ‘ MILITARY CLIQUE ’?

189

accusation. Though David Westwood rather generously maintains that Lloyd George can be ‘forgiven’ 35 for thinking that Maurice intended to bring down the government, most historians agree that Lloyd George’s accusation was an attempt to counter the charge that the government had deliberately ‘starved’ the BEF of men, which was widely believed at the time he wrote his War Memoirs . Haig’s former director of intelligence had recently accused Lloyd George of having failed to ‘provide the necessary manpower to keep (the BEF) up to defensive strength.’ 36 The British Official History of the Great War had similarly claimed that the Army could easily have been ‘brought up to full establishment’ without ‘unduly weakening the forces elsewhere had the government been so willed’. 37 What Lloyd George needed was a means of countering this narrative, hence the claim that the German breakthrough was a consequence, not of insufficiencies in manpower, but of the Army’s inability to ‘hold entrenchments dug and wired against an attack from inferior numbers of troops’, an inability which the Army sought to deny by ‘caballing against the government’. 38 That such a narrative dramatically exaggerated the military’s willingness to challenge the government made no difference to Lloyd George. What the Maurice Debate demonstrated was not the military’s desire to topple the government, but Lloyd George’s willingness to lie to Parliament for the sake of his own self-preservation. The two principal attacks on the ‘military party’ in Lloyd George’s War Memoirs are therefore deliberate misrepresentations of the political realities of wartime. This is not to claim, however, that at no point in the war did the military present a threat to constitutional normality. Though the Army never tried to topple the government, an identifiable ‘military party’ routinely circumvented parliamentary oversight to advance its own agenda. The Army’s insistence on its own autonomy was such that, as Matthew Johnson has noted, one can conceivably speak of a ‘military agenda’ being advanced throughout the war. 39 Elements of the Army sought to challenge the barriers imposed by the pre-war CID and actively sought to wrest political control of the war from Parliament. Examples of this can be seen as early as 1914, when the Commons surrendered its right to undertake an annual scrutiny of the Army and Navy estimates. By 1916, Robertson was able to accept the post of CIGS on the condition that he should have complete control over military strategy. Even Lord Kitchener can be seen as having aided the military agenda, given his encouragement to Haig that the latter should write to him secretly ‘on any subject affecting the army’, a clear violation of the proper channels of communications. 40 Perhaps the most significant challenge to the constitution, however, came from the Service Members in Parliament. There were 264 MPs who held some form of military rank during the war, roughly forty percent of the Commons membership,

35 Woodward, ‘Did Lloyd George Starve the British Army of Men’, p. 248. 36 Ibid., p. 243. 37 Ibid.

38 Lloyd George, War Memoirs , pp. 1781-1784. 39 Johnson, ‘Leading from the Front’, pp. 644-645. 40 French, ‘“A One Man Show?”, p. 99.