Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 99/397

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114 of whom served as regimental officers in fighting formations while retaining their seats in Westminster. 41 The Liberal MP Sir George Scott Robertson wrote of ‘a general feeling of uneasiness’ that these MPs were ‘acting as mouthpieces’ of the Army in Parliament. 42 He was not wrong. It was for a time romantically envisaged by historians that such officers had neither ‘the suppleness, the temperament, (n)or the time for a continuous application to politics’, 43 and that ‘military disaffection’ with the government was ‘constrained by constitutional scruples’. 44 It is now clear, however, that Service Members routinely indulged in underhand practices to advance a distinct military agenda, often with the active encouragement of their senior officers. The lengths to which many Service Members went in promoting the campaign for conscription is one such example. Though King’s Regulations prohibited serving officers from taking part in ‘any meetings, demonstrations, or processions, for party political purposes’, 45 Service Members frequently and publicly advocated the introduction of conscription. In 1916 Henry Page Croft was summoned to divisional headquarters and told that it was his ‘duty to return to the House of Commons and do everything in (his) power to get (the) manpower measures passed’. Croft duly returned to Parliament and voted for conscription, which he later wrote was the ‘most patriotic decision to make’. 46 Nor was Croft’s vote an isolated case. General Rawlinson told the Conservative MP Leo Amery that he had ‘sent round to all my MPs to say they may have leave to go and vote’ for conscription. 47 Another way in which the ‘military party’ asserted itself was through the press, with the latter routinely supporting senior officers in their disputes with politicians. In 1914, the attack by The Daily Express and The Morning Post on ‘elderly doctrinaire lawyers with German sympathies’ had prevented Asquith from appointing Richard Haldane as Secretary of State for War, ensuring that it was Kitchener who was given the War Office. 48 As the war progressed, the Army increasingly sought to insulate itself from criticism by cultivating a working relationship with the press, to such an extent that Lloyd George complained of how the newspapers had become ‘the mere kettledrum of Sir Douglas Haig and the mouth-organ of Sir William Robertson’. 49 Though his defenders have sought to claim that Haig was ‘so little a politician that he could hardly have consorted much with that fraternity’, 50 in the summer of 1916, when the anticipated 41 Johnson, ‘Leading from the Front’, p. 616. 42 Ibid., p. 628. 43 A. Vagts, ‘The Military and Politics’, in Freedman, Lawrence (ed.), War (Oxford, 1994), p. 127. 44 French, ‘“A One Man Show?”, p. 100. 45 Johnson, ‘Leading from the Front’, p. 627. 46 Lord Croft, My Life of Strife (London, 1948), p. 103. 47 Johnson, ‘Leading from the Front’, p. 628. 48 J.M McEwan, ‘“Brass-Hats” and the British Press during the First World War’, Canadian Journal of History , Vol. 18, (1983), p. 45. 49 McEwan, ‘Northcliffe and Lloyd George at War’, p. 665. 50 Vagts, ‘The Military and Politics’, p. 128.