Lions led by men?

While reading the Spring 2017 edition of the Western Front Association's excellent Bulletin, I was intrigued by an exchange between a WFA member, Peter Crook, and the historian Gary Sheffield. Mr Crook was unhappy that Mr Sheffield, in a recent article, had dismissed Alan Clark's 1961 book, The Donkeys, as bad history. Gary (to whom I once gave an SSF pen) responded to the effect that no serious historian - presumably excluding Basil Liddell Hart who oversaw the publication - considers the book to be of any value.

I admit I have never read The Donkeys. However, the focus of criticism has for a long time been that Clark, son of the better-regarded Sir Kenneth, and now remembered chiefly for the controversial diaries covering his career as a Tory MP, "made up" the quotation "Lions led by donkeys" from which he took the title of his book on the First World War. Whatever the merits or demerits of the book, this accusation is wholly unjustified.

In the days before digital media and the internet made out-of-print books so accessible it was never easy to find out where a quotation had originated, unless it happened to be so well-known that it appeared in a published book of quotations. When asked, Clark was evasive. It seems clear to me that he had heard the phrase but did not know where it came from. He and Liddell Hart had puzzled over its origins, but it was too good a title to give up, so they used it regardless.

It has been left to others to point out that the phrase had been used as a book title by one P A Thompson as long ago as 1927, for his own book about the First World War, with the subtitle "Showing how victory in the Great War was achieved by those who made the fewest mistakes". It has in fact been traced back as far as the Crimean War, when an identical quotation, albeit in French, appeared in print in 1855. As an afterthought, sources now tend to mention that Evelyn, Princess Blücher, an English gentlewoman who in 1907 had married into German nobility, stated in her published diaries that she had "heard it straight from the Grosse Hauptquartier". The full quotation, as she puts it, reads like this:

"The English Generals are wanting in strategy. We should have no chance if they possessed as much science as their officers and men had of courage and bravery. They are lions led by donkeys."

What exactly is going on here? Why is Evelyn Blücher's account ignored as though it could not possibly have anything to do with the overall debate? Is it because she was female and a non-combatant? Evelyn, maiden name Stapleton-Bretherton, was ten years older than Siegfried Sassoon and was descended from a family of Lancashire coach proprietors as well as from the 12th Baron Petre. Following her marriage to a descendant of the great Prussian general Blücher, she went to live on Herm in the Channel Islands, moving to Berlin when war broke out.

The memoir Evelyn based on her diaries, called An English wife in Berlin, was published in 1920 and is therefore far closer to actual events than any secondary history written by Alan Clark or Gary Sheffield, neither of whom was yet conceived. (Basil Liddell Hart had actually served at the Western Front before eventually being invalided out of the forces.) Evelyn lived until 1960 and was thus still alive when Clark and Liddell Hart were working on The Donkeys. Her divided loyalties naturally caused her to question the "lions led by donkeys" statement, which was made in 1918, possibly by Ludendorff, the man who nearly won the war for Germany. It was to him that Clark attributed the quotation and it seems to me he may well have been correct, even if he could not remember where he had heard it.

In the past I've sometimes doubted feminist historians when they talk about women being "airbrushed out of history" and so on. This is, however, a case in point. Evelyn Blücher may not have been party to much military intelligence, or had much understanding of what was happening at the Western Front, but she was there, in Berlin, and certainly knew Ludendorff in person. She was suitably sceptical about what she heard, as was her husband, who was in charge of a hospital train. "...The offensive has not made the wished-for impression on the enemy," she writes, "but if anything has put new courage into them. The pacifists in England and France are fewer and have retired into the background." I suppose she would have numbered Sassoon among these.