Lions Led By Donkeys - Attribution To First World War German or British Officers

Attribution To First World War German or British Officers

Evelyn, Princess Blücher, an Englishwoman who lived in Berlin during the First World War, in her memoir published in 1921, recalled hearing German general Erich Ludendorff praise the British for their bravery and remembered hearing first hand the following statement from the German General Headquarters (Grosses Hauptquartier): "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."

The phrase Lions Led by Donkeys was used as a title for a book published in 1927 by Captain P.A. Thompson. The subtitle of this book was "Showing how victory in the Great War was achieved by those who made the fewest mistakes."

Alan Clark based the title of his book "The Donkeys" (1961) on the phrase. Prior to publication in a letter to Hugh Trevor Roper he asked "English soldiers, lions led by donkeys etc - can you remember who said that?" Liddell Hart, although he did not dispute the veracity of the quote, had asked Clark for its origins. Whatever Trevor Roper's reply, Clark eventually used the phrase as an epigraph to The Donkeys and attributed it to a conversation between German generals Erich Ludendorff and Max Hoffmann:

Ludendorff: The English soldiers fight like lions.

Hoffmann: True. But don't we know that they are lions led by donkeys."

The conversation was supposedly published in the memoirs of General Erich von Falkenhayn, the German chief of staff between 1914 and 1916 but the exchange and, indeed, the memoirs remain untraced. Clark was equivocal about the source for the dialogue for many years although in 2007, a friend Euan Graham recalled a conversation in the mid sixties when Clark on being challenged as to the dialogue's provenance looked sheepish and said "well I invented it". At one time Clark claimed that Liddell Hart had given him the quote (unlikely as Hart had asked him where it came from) and Clark's biographer believes he invented the Ludendorff-Hoffmann attribution This invention has provided a major opportunity for critics of "The Donkeys" to condemn the work. Richard Holmes, for example, wrote of The Donkeys "..it contained a streak of casual dishonesty. Its title is based on the ‘Lions led by Donkeys’ conversation between Hindenburg and Ludendorff. There is no evidence whatever for this: none. Not a jot or scintilla. Liddell Hart, who had vetted Clark’s manuscript, ought to have known it."