Lions led by donkeys
Encyclopedia
"Lions led by donkeys" is a phrase popularly used to describe the British
infantry
of the First World War and to condemn the general
s who commanded them. The contention is that the brave soldiers (lion
s) were sent to their deaths by incompetent and indifferent leaders (donkey
s). The phrase was the source of the title of one of the most scathing examinations of British First World War generals, The Donkeys - a study of the 1915 western front offensives - by politician and writer of military histories Alan Clark
. The book was representative of much First World War history produced in the 1960s and was not outside the mainstream — Basil Liddell Hart
vetted Clark's drafts - and helped to form the predominant popular view of the First World War (in the English-speaking world) in the decades that followed. However, the work and its viewpoint of incompetent military leaders have both been subject to more recent criticism.
a letter was reportedly sent home by a British soldier quoting a Russian officer who had said that British soldiers were ‘lions commanded by asses'. This was immediately after the failed attempt to storm the fortress of Sevastopol and, if verified, this citation would take the saying back to 1854‑5. These and other Crimean war references were included in the 1997, British Channel 4
TV’s The Crimean War series and accompanying book (Michael Hargreave Mawson, expert reader). The Times
reportedly recycled the phrase as "lions led by donkeys" with reference to French
soldiers during the Franco-Prussian War
: ‘Unceasingly they [the French forces] had had drummed into them the utterances of the “Times”: “You are lions led by jackasses.” Alas! The very lions had lost their manes’ [On leur avait répété tout le long de la campagne le mot du Times: – Vous êtes des lions conduits par des ânes! – Hélas! les lions mêmes avaient perdus leurs crinières ” – (Francisque Darcey [sometimes Sarcey], Paris During the Siege, Chap. 3, translated from Le Siège de Paris (both editions 1871).’ There were numerous examples of its use during the First World War, referring to both the British and the Germans." Richard Connaughton's book Rising sun and tumbling bear: Russia's war with Japan (p 32), also attributes a later quotation to Colonel J. M. Grierson (later Sir James Grierson) in 1901, when reporting on the Russian contingent to the Boxer Rebellion
, describing them as 'lions led by asses'.
, 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
:
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 [sic] 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."
(1963) and the comedy television series Blackadder Goes Forth
(1989) are two well-known works of popular culture depicting the war as consisting of incompetent donkeys sending noble (or sometimes ignoble, in the case of Blackadder) lions to their doom. Such works are in the literary tradition of the war poets like Wilfred Owen
and Siegfried Sassoon
and Erich Maria Remarque
's novel (and subsequent film) All Quiet on the Western Front
which have been criticised by revisionists such as Brian Bond
for having given rise to what he considered the myth and conventional wisdom of the Great War as a war of absolute futility. What Bond found most objectionable was how, in the 1960s, the works of Remarque and the Trench Poets slipped into the nasty caricature of lions led by donkeys, while the more complicated history of the war receded into the background.
Producers of television documentaries about the war have had to grapple with the "lions led by donkeys" interpretive frame since the 1960s. BBC Television
's 1964 seminal and award-winning The Great War
has been described as taking a moderate approach with co-scriptwriter John Terraine
fighting against what he viewed as an over-simplification, while, in one noted instance, Liddell Hart resigned as an advising historian to the series in an open letter to the Times
, in part over a dispute with Terraine's minimizing the faults of the High Command on The Somme and other concerns regarding the treatment of Third Ypres. The Great War war was viewed by approximately one-fifth of the adult population in Britain and the production of documentaries on the war has continued ever since. While some more recent documentaries such as Channel 4's 2003 The First World War have confronted the popular image of lions led by donkeys head-on by reflecting current scholarship presenting more nuanced portrayals of British leaders and more balanced appraisals of the difficulties faced by the High Commands of all the combatants, they have been viewed by much less of the public than either 1964's The Great War or comedies such as Blackadder.
, in editing a 1991 collection of essays on First World War history, expressed the collective desire of the authors to move beyond "popular stereotypes of The Donkeys," while also acknowledging that serious leadership mistakes were made and that the authors would do little to rehabilitate the reputations of, for instance, the senior commanders on The Somme. For example, Hew Strachan
, in that collection of essays, quoted Maurice Genevoix
for the proposition "[i]f it is neither desirable nor good that the professional historian prevail over the veteran; it is also not good that the veteran prevail over the historian" and then proceeded to take Liddell Hart to task for "suppressing the culminating battles of the war" thus "allow[ing] his portrayal of British generals to assume an easy continuum, from incompetence on the Western Front to conservatism in the 1920s...." Later, Strachan, in reviewing Aspects of the British experience of the First World War edited by Michael Howard, observed that "In the study of the First World War in particular, the divide between professionals and amateurs has never been firmly fixed." He points out that revisionists take strong exception to the amateurs, particularly in the media, with whom they disagree, while at the same time Gary Sheffield
welcomes to the revisionist cause the work of many "hobby"-ists who only later migrated to academic study. Major Corrigan
, for example, did not even consider Clark to be a historian. The phrase "lions led by donkeys" has been said to have produced a false, or at least very incomplete, picture of generalship in the First World War, giving an impression of Generals as "chateau Generals", living in splendour, indifferent to the sufferings of the men under their command, only interested in cavalry charges, and ultimately, cowards. One historian wrote that "the idea that they were indifferent to the sufferings of their men is constantly refuted by the facts, and only endures because some commentators wish to perpetuate the myth that these generals, representing the upper classes, did not give a damn what happened to the lower orders" Some current academic opinion has described this school of thought as "discredited".
However, Strachan quotes Gavin Stamp
, who bemoans "a new generation of military historians" who seem as "callous and jingoistic" as Haig, while himself referring to the "ill-informed diatribes of Wolff and Clark".
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
infantry
Infantry
Infantrymen are soldiers who are specifically trained for the role of fighting on foot to engage the enemy face to face and have historically borne the brunt of the casualties of combat in wars. As the oldest branch of combat arms, they are the backbone of armies...
of the First World War and to condemn the general
General
A general officer is an officer of high military rank, usually in the army, and in some nations, the air force. The term is widely used by many nations of the world, and when a country uses a different term, there is an equivalent title given....
s who commanded them. The contention is that the brave soldiers (lion
Lion
The lion is one of the four big cats in the genus Panthera, and a member of the family Felidae. With some males exceeding 250 kg in weight, it is the second-largest living cat after the tiger...
s) were sent to their deaths by incompetent and indifferent leaders (donkey
Donkey
The donkey or ass, Equus africanus asinus, is a domesticated member of the Equidae or horse family. The wild ancestor of the donkey is the African Wild Ass, E...
s). The phrase was the source of the title of one of the most scathing examinations of British First World War generals, The Donkeys - a study of the 1915 western front offensives - by politician and writer of military histories Alan Clark
Alan Clark
Alan Kenneth Mackenzie Clark was a British Conservative MP and diarist. He served as a junior minister in Margaret Thatcher's governments at the Departments of Employment, Trade, and Defence, and became a privy counsellor in 1991...
. The book was representative of much First World War history produced in the 1960s and was not outside the mainstream — Basil Liddell Hart
Basil Liddell Hart
Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart , usually known before his knighthood as Captain B. H. Liddell Hart, was an English soldier, military historian and leading inter-war theorist.-Life and career:...
vetted Clark's drafts - and helped to form the predominant popular view of the First World War (in the English-speaking world) in the decades that followed. However, the work and its viewpoint of incompetent military leaders have both been subject to more recent criticism.
Origins of the phrase
The origins of the phrase pre-date the First World War. During the Crimean WarCrimean War
The Crimean War was a conflict fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the French Empire, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia. The war was part of a long-running contest between the major European powers for influence over territories of the declining...
a letter was reportedly sent home by a British soldier quoting a Russian officer who had said that British soldiers were ‘lions commanded by asses'. This was immediately after the failed attempt to storm the fortress of Sevastopol and, if verified, this citation would take the saying back to 1854‑5. These and other Crimean war references were included in the 1997, British Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
TV’s The Crimean War series and accompanying book (Michael Hargreave Mawson, expert reader). The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
reportedly recycled the phrase as "lions led by donkeys" with reference to French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
soldiers during the Franco-Prussian War
Franco-Prussian War
The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and...
: ‘Unceasingly they [the French forces] had had drummed into them the utterances of the “Times”: “You are lions led by jackasses.” Alas! The very lions had lost their manes’ [On leur avait répété tout le long de la campagne le mot du Times: – Vous êtes des lions conduits par des ânes! – Hélas! les lions mêmes avaient perdus leurs crinières ” – (Francisque Darcey [sometimes Sarcey], Paris During the Siege, Chap. 3, translated from Le Siège de Paris (both editions 1871).’ There were numerous examples of its use during the First World War, referring to both the British and the Germans." Richard Connaughton's book Rising sun and tumbling bear: Russia's war with Japan (p 32), also attributes a later quotation to Colonel J. M. Grierson (later Sir James Grierson) in 1901, when reporting on the Russian contingent to the Boxer Rebellion
Boxer Rebellion
The Boxer Rebellion, also called the Boxer Uprising by some historians or the Righteous Harmony Society Movement in northern China, was a proto-nationalist movement by the "Righteous Harmony Society" , or "Righteous Fists of Harmony" or "Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists" , in China between...
, describing them as 'lions led by asses'.
Attribution to First World War German or British officers
Evelyn, Princess BlücherEvelyn, Princess Blücher
Evelyn Fürstin Blücher von Wahlstatt , diarist and memoirist, wrote a standard account of life as a civilian aristocrat in Germany during World War I.-Early life:...
, an Englishwoman who lived in Berlin during the First World War, in her memoir published in 1921, recalled hearing German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
general Erich Ludendorff
Erich Ludendorff
Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff was a German general, victor of Liège and of the Battle of Tannenberg...
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
Captain (British Army and Royal Marines)
Captain is a junior officer rank of the British Army and Royal Marines. It ranks above Lieutenant and below Major and has a NATO ranking code of OF-2. The rank is equivalent to a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy and to a Flight Lieutenant in the Royal Air Force...
P.A. Thompson. The subtitle
Subtitle (titling)
In books and other works, a subtitle is an explanatory or alternate title. For example, Mary Shelley used a subtitle to give her most famous novel, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, an alternate title to give a hint of the theme. In library cataloging the subtitle does not include an...
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
Erich Ludendorff
Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff was a German general, victor of Liège and of the Battle of Tannenberg...
and Max Hoffmann
Max Hoffmann
Max Hoffmann was a German officer and military strategist during World War I. He is widely regarded as one of the finest staff officers of the imperial period....
:
- 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
Erich von Falkenhayn
Erich von Falkenhayn was a German soldier and Chief of the General Staff during World War I. He became a military writer after World War I.-Early life:...
, 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
Richard Holmes (military historian)
Brigadier Edward Richard Holmes, CBE, TD, JP , known as Richard Holmes, was a British soldier and noted military historian, particularly well-known through his many television appearances...
, 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 [sic] 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."
Popular culture
The musical Oh, What a Lovely War!Oh, What a Lovely War!
Oh, What a Lovely War! is an epic musical originated by Charles Chilton as a radio play, The Long Long Trail in December 1961, and transferred to stage by Gerry Raffles in partnership with Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop in 1963...
(1963) and the comedy television series Blackadder Goes Forth
Blackadder Goes Forth
Blackadder Goes Forth is the fourth and final series of the BBC situation comedy Blackadder, written by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, which aired from 28 September to 2 November 1989 on BBC One....
(1989) are two well-known works of popular culture depicting the war as consisting of incompetent donkeys sending noble (or sometimes ignoble, in the case of Blackadder) lions to their doom. Such works are in the literary tradition of the war poets like Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC was an English poet and soldier, one of the leading poets of the First World War...
and Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon CBE MC was an English poet, author and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches, and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's...
and Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque was a German author, best known for his novel All Quiet on the Western Front.-Life and work:...
's novel (and subsequent film) All Quiet on the Western Front
All Quiet on the Western Front
All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. The book describes the German soldiers' extreme physical and mental stress during the war, and the detachment from civilian life felt by many of these soldiers upon returning home from the front.The...
which have been criticised by revisionists such as Brian Bond
Brian Bond
Brian James Bond is a British military historian and professor emeritus of military history at King's College London.-Early life and education:...
for having given rise to what he considered the myth and conventional wisdom of the Great War as a war of absolute futility. What Bond found most objectionable was how, in the 1960s, the works of Remarque and the Trench Poets slipped into the nasty caricature of lions led by donkeys, while the more complicated history of the war receded into the background.
Producers of television documentaries about the war have had to grapple with the "lions led by donkeys" interpretive frame since the 1960s. BBC Television
BBC Television
BBC Television is a service of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The corporation, which has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a Royal Charter since 1927, has produced television programmes from its own studios since 1932, although the start of its regular service of television...
's 1964 seminal and award-winning The Great War
The Great War (documentary)
The Great War is a 26-episode documentary series from 1964 on the First World War. It was a co-production involving the resources of the Imperial War Museum, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation...
has been described as taking a moderate approach with co-scriptwriter John Terraine
John Terraine
John Alfred Terraine , though not permanently associated with any academic institution, was a leading British military historian...
fighting against what he viewed as an over-simplification, while, in one noted instance, Liddell Hart resigned as an advising historian to the series in an open letter to the Times
Times
The Times is a UK daily newspaper, the original English language newspaper titled "Times". Times may also refer to:In newspapers:*The Times , went defunct in 2005*The Times *The Times of Northwest Indiana...
, in part over a dispute with Terraine's minimizing the faults of the High Command on The Somme and other concerns regarding the treatment of Third Ypres. The Great War war was viewed by approximately one-fifth of the adult population in Britain and the production of documentaries on the war has continued ever since. While some more recent documentaries such as Channel 4's 2003 The First World War have confronted the popular image of lions led by donkeys head-on by reflecting current scholarship presenting more nuanced portrayals of British leaders and more balanced appraisals of the difficulties faced by the High Commands of all the combatants, they have been viewed by much less of the public than either 1964's The Great War or comedies such as Blackadder.
Criticism of the characterization of military leaders as donkeys
Brian BondBrian Bond
Brian James Bond is a British military historian and professor emeritus of military history at King's College London.-Early life and education:...
, in editing a 1991 collection of essays on First World War history, expressed the collective desire of the authors to move beyond "popular stereotypes of The Donkeys," while also acknowledging that serious leadership mistakes were made and that the authors would do little to rehabilitate the reputations of, for instance, the senior commanders on The Somme. For example, Hew Strachan
Hew Strachan
Brigadier Professor Hew Francis Anthony Strachan, DL, FRSE, FRHS is a Scottish military historian, well known for his work on the administration of the British Army and the history of the First World War...
, in that collection of essays, quoted Maurice Genevoix
Maurice Genevoix
Maurice Genevoix was a French author.Born on 29 November 1890 at Decize, Nièvre as Maurice-Charles-Louis-Genevoix, Genevoix spent his childhood in Châteauneuf-sur-Loire. After attending the local school, he studied at the lycée of Orléans and the Lycée Lakanal...
for the proposition "[i]f it is neither desirable nor good that the professional historian prevail over the veteran; it is also not good that the veteran prevail over the historian" and then proceeded to take Liddell Hart to task for "suppressing the culminating battles of the war" thus "allow[ing] his portrayal of British generals to assume an easy continuum, from incompetence on the Western Front to conservatism in the 1920s...." Later, Strachan, in reviewing Aspects of the British experience of the First World War edited by Michael Howard, observed that "In the study of the First World War in particular, the divide between professionals and amateurs has never been firmly fixed." He points out that revisionists take strong exception to the amateurs, particularly in the media, with whom they disagree, while at the same time Gary Sheffield
Gary Sheffield (historian)
Professor Gary Sheffield is an English academic at the University of Birmingham and a military historian. He has published widely, especially on the First World War, and contributes to many newspapers, journals and magazines. He frequently broadcasts on television and radio.Sheffield studied...
welcomes to the revisionist cause the work of many "hobby"-ists who only later migrated to academic study. Major Corrigan
Gordon Corrigan
John Gordon Harvey Corrigan MBE is a former British soldier and historical writer and broadcaster.Corrigan was educated at the Royal School, Armagh, and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He served in the British Army's Royal Gurkha Rifles, mainly in the far east, and reached the rank of major...
, for example, did not even consider Clark to be a historian. The phrase "lions led by donkeys" has been said to have produced a false, or at least very incomplete, picture of generalship in the First World War, giving an impression of Generals as "chateau Generals", living in splendour, indifferent to the sufferings of the men under their command, only interested in cavalry charges, and ultimately, cowards. One historian wrote that "the idea that they were indifferent to the sufferings of their men is constantly refuted by the facts, and only endures because some commentators wish to perpetuate the myth that these generals, representing the upper classes, did not give a damn what happened to the lower orders" Some current academic opinion has described this school of thought as "discredited".
However, Strachan quotes Gavin Stamp
Gavin Stamp
Gavin Stamp is a British writer and architectural historian. He is a trustee of the Twentieth Century Society, a registered charity which promotes the appreciation of modern architecture and the conservation of Britain’s architectural heritage...
, who bemoans "a new generation of military historians" who seem as "callous and jingoistic" as Haig, while himself referring to the "ill-informed diatribes of Wolff and Clark".
External links
- The Donkeys (1962) on archive.org
- The Western Front Association: British Military Leadership In The First World War, John Terraine, 1991
- University of Birmingham Centre for First World War Studies: Lions Led By Donkeys
- National archives: Learning Curve WW1
- BBC History's World War's in Depth: World War One