Challenge that failed
Michael Bentley
The Maurice Case edited by Nancy Maurice, with an appreciation by Major-General Sir Edward Spears (Leo Cooper £4.50).
Supreme among Lloyd George's favourite reminiscences about his career as a statesman was always his cool handling of the crisis produced by the last, desperate German offensive of the First World War. Just as Churchill could in later years look back to the summer of 1940 with pride, so did Lloyd George conceive the spring of 1918 to be his finest hour. Amid a bumbling, unimaginative soldiery, Lloyd George alone had the measure of the crisis and a mind equipped to overcome it — or so his reflections ran. There was one flaw in his triumph, in retrospect a mere bitter irritation but at the time a source of the greatest concern to supporters of Lloyd George's government. This was the attempt of an "unbelievably guileless and simple soldier" Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice, to prove two things: that the extension of the British front before the battle was forced on the army by the politicians; and, more damagingly, that Lloyd George had know ingly misinformed the House of Commons about British strength on the Western front prior to the German offensive in order to shift the blame for the military disasters suffered there away from himself and on to the shoulders of the army commanders.
Maurice failed in his attempt. He was beaten partly by his own political naiveté, partly by the unmatchable political acumen of Lloyd George, partly by a paltry clerical error on the part of a subordinate. The first consideration, coupled with a pronounced sense of military honour, compelled him to act alone without consulting the opposition groups centred on Asquith. The second and third considerations were related: Lloyd George was able to come to the parliamentary debate, which Maurice's allegations provoked, holding a document containing figures prepared by Maurice's own department which seemingly argued the Prime Minister's case for him. The figures were wrong. Lloyd George knew that they were wrong. A correction had been sent to him before the debate; it is still among his papers. By ignoring it Lloyd George was able neatly to sidestep the agitation created by Maurice's revelations and consolidate moderate forces behind the government in a masterly speech which concluded with an angry plea for "an end of this sniping." Yet that was not the end of the Maurice case. General Hague felt at the time that Maurice had not yet done with Lloyd George and the war between the two men in the nineteen-twenties and -thirties proved him right. Maurice wrote to Lloyd George, to Balfour, to Philip Kerr, in subsequent attempts to vindicate himself. He wrote pamphlets and articles. In 1936 he joined battle with his old adversary in the pages of the Daily Telegraph when the relevant volume of Lloyd George's War Memoirs was serialised there. Twenty years later, the case was reopened when Lord Beaverbrook printed in Men and Power the extract from Frances Stevenson's diary which alleged that J. T. Davies had burned one of the relevant documents in her presence a few days after the Maurice debate. And now MajorGeneral Maurice's daughter returns to the attack in a volume which she describes as both a memorial to her father and a contribution to history.
Neither the validity nor the justice of the former task will be contested. In making his challenge to Lloyd George, Maurice consciously sacrificed a distinguished, possibly a brilliant, military career. Compelled to retire on half pay (and that only after some wrangling), Maurice was obliged to turn to journalism and later to academic life. His daughter's book contains his diary during the crucial months of 1918 and all the relevant documents which show that his allegations were correct. That his fig ures were the right ones has been known for many years; but the publication here of a letter from Kerr to Maurice in March 1920 shows that Lloyd George had received the correction to the wrong figures previously sent to him. Beaverbrook's statement that Lloyd George did not see the correc tion (J. T. Davies overlooked or withheld one copy: but there were two copies) is the more surprising since he had this let ter in his possession at the time of writing. As for Maurice's defence of his army chiefs with regard to the foolish extension of the British line, his position is fully supported by his diary and its exegesis by MajorGeneral Sir Edward Spears.
To regard the book as an important contribution to history is, however, less eas.y, for it is a disappointment to the historian.
Readers sick of the sight of eclectic ' readings ' and ' documents ' will find little to sustain them here. Within the body of the book there are only fifty or so pages of historical prose; for the rest, it is a case of reading about the same thing from different angles through the documents. The fifty-page ' appreciation ' which precedes the book is useful as to the military aspects of the build-up to the German attack, but the rest is a compendium of flaccid reminiscences. The case which the book hopes to present is a complicated one: it surely required expounding in a piece of narrativelyarranged, connected prose, using the documents where they were relevant. Instead, the material is piled up and the reader given a hammer and a bag of nails. Nor will the joinery be a simple matter when readers reach a facsimile letter misdated by two years and rows of inexplicable dots pacing across several sentences of Major-General Spears's appreciation.
But austere thoughts such as these are probably inapposite. For is there, not in fact an unbridgeable gulf between writing, on the one hand, a memorial volume and, on the other, a serious work of history? If it was the intention of the author to produce a balanced perspective she would not use a phrase such as "act of villainy," nor her husband write about an "example of skullduggery." Perspective would also demand that Lloyd George be treated as something more than the devil's advocate that this book insists he was. In 1918 Lloyd George was Prime Minister during the most severe national crisis England was to know before the Spitfire summer. Chronically overworked, exhausted, harassed from every conceivable quarter, fully aware that a burgeoning opposition was waiting to crush him, Lloyd George is here dismissed in retrospect as "unfit to be Prime Minister" because he was insufficiently moral in his treatment of one individual.
Perhaps the Maurice case presents in embryo an exposition of how demagogy can murder democracy, as Major-General Spears believes. But if it does, the case is not proven by this book. Rather does it suggest that modern war can murder more than men. In any case, it was the aim of the author neither to defend democracy, nor even to condemn demagogy, but to honour her father's name and rescue it from the slanders of half a century. She has done so.
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