Abstract: A summary of the correspondence between Robert Graves and Sir Basil Liddell-Hart (1895-1970), author of T. E. Lawrence to His Biographer,[1] housed at the Liddell-Hart Centre for Military Archives at Kings College, London University. The correspondence as discussed here looks at issues relating to Britain’s actions in the ongoing war (World War II) and the chances for peace.

Keywords: World War II, Basil Liddell-Hart, Robert Graves

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By way of an introduction, I want to refer to a letter written to Robert Graves from Kathleen Liddell-Hart, Sir Basil Liddell-Hart's wife, in the summer of 1970, after his death in January of that year.

Kathleen expresses her wish that her late husband's library and papers ‘can perhaps stay here and become part of perhaps London University [… where] many scholars come. I have had a stream of them already’; she confides that she has already had enquiries from American Universities but was determined that everything should ‘stay in this country’.[2]

I am glad to say that her wishes were fulfilled for the most part and that the articles did stay in Britain. I want to thank the staff at the Liddell-Hart Centre for Military Archives at Kings College, London University for allowing me to study and quote from the letters.

It is often said that someone ‘had a good war’ if among other things they came through the war relatively unscathed and went on to better things afterwards. And to this extent, although he lost a son in battle, Robert Graves and Basil Liddell-Hart (L-H) each had a good war. Both lived the bulk of the war in the countryside. Graves in Essex and then Galmpton, in Devon, after his return from Mallorca in 1936 and Liddell-Hart in Ambleside in Westmoreland. Both continued with their writing careers; Graves with his historical novels, such as Wife to Mr Milton,[3] and his book on the Gospels,[4] and Liddell-Hart book on current affairs The Expanding War.[5]

But neither had an easy war. In his letter 7 June 1942 to L-H, Graves freely admits that after paying income tax ‘I will be without any money until the Autumn and I will find it a little difficult to live with so many responsibilities’.[6] He has to ask for L-H’s help in getting a mutual friend, Dorothy Elmhirst, to contact a fourth party for the return of a loan. L-H answers Graves on 26 June that he has taken steps towards the refund of the loan but that: ‘other trustees have been difficult.’ L-H for his part had been criticised within Whitehall for expressing his opinions too freely about Britain’s strategy in wartime.

Aside from these problems, both men had children either involved in the war effort or keen to be. Graves’s daughter, Jenny Nicholson had been running the Woman’s Auxiliary entertainment, his sons Sam and David had applied to join the forces as they had come of age, as had L-H’s son Adam.

In the same letter, L-H speaks about his work in reorganising the Home Guard in Britain, detecting a manifest bias against guerrilla-type warfare and an ‘undue satisfaction with static defence’.[7] And as an acknowledged military historian and strategist, L-H was even more worried about the need for mechanized warfare in the theatre of war. He claimed that the two years of war in the Middle East had confined and entrusted this process to ‘unmechanized-minded’ generals, too intent on previous methods of attack and defence. What he wanted was to turn ‘coachmen into chauffeurs’. He details the ratio of armoured divisions to those which were not and argued for increasing the armoured brigades. He points to the existing deployments combining handicaps in strategic mobility, tactical flexibility and sheer punching power, and later complains that the publication of The Expanding War has been delayed from February to August 1942.[8]

But it was his remarks on a Second Front in Western Europe that had been gaining ground ‘in the woolly world of Whitehall’. L-H immediately concedes that while desirable in principle and useful from the political point of view, he has great doubts from his knowledge of ‘the means and minds available’.[9] He believes that any ‘shallow lodgement’ on the enemy shore would not, for example, force German troops away from the Romanian front, which would lead to disappointment and that the proposed Second Front (on the mainland of Europe) would be no more than an expensive gesture. At worst, Allied forces might be driven back into the sea, a second Dunkirk with the difference that not only equipment but our troops as well could be lost.[10] Coming events in August 1942 were to suggest that he was close to being right.

Robert Graves took a longer view of the Second Front in Europe, as evidenced by his letter to the The Times (London, England), dated 15 August 1942 on the subject.[11] He begins by quoting from a private letter written by General Sir John Moore in 1804. On the subject of a contrary notion of France’s possible invasion of Britain by Napoleon, Moore asserts that any such invasion would ‘end in our glory and his disgrace’. Moore mocks current newspaper reports that he is leading secret expeditionary missions on the European coast. Graves concludes that while Napoleon did not invade, it was four more years before a Continental front was up by way of Portugal and that Sir John Moore was himself ‘Dunkirked at Corunna’, where British forces were forced out by Napoleonic forces in 1809 and Moore lost his life.[12] Graves notes that the French were not defeated until six years later in 1815. His letter ends with a single word ‘Patience’, which the editor of The Times uses to headline the letter.

Graves’s letter just about coincided with the Allied forces raid on the French coast at Dieppe by mostly Canadian and British forces on 19 August 1942. Of over 6000 troops landed, 3604 were either killed, wounded or captured. L-H writes to Graves on 7 September on this ‘rather disastrous failure’.[13] Analysing the expedition, he claims that the Allied forces were expecting to stay forty-eight hours and longer on the enemy soil and that some sectors of the attack were more successful than others. Graves replied in pithy terms on 14 September praising the Canadian troops as the ‘toughest and bloodiest minded in the whole English-speaking world’.[14] This ‘did not make up for the lack of military common-sense’. Graves tells L-H that his son, Sam, had recently been rejected by the army and this was a source of deep disappointment: ‘for [his] son was counting on personal involvement in the forces’. Graves confides that he does not know what is to be done with him: ‘as he has no particular bent — too many really’.

Earlier in the letter he comments on receiving proofs of Wife to Mr Milton and inviting L-H to add corrections, with a very backhanded compliment, saying that it is largely a book for women ‘who do all the reading’.

This letter calls forth a lengthy response from L-H, dated 18 September 1942,[15] in which he refers to a restatement of his broad conclusions about war, claiming that he based them on the guiding principles of British foreign policy, which the Liberal government had drawn up the year before the Franco-German War of 1870 [sic] and the British still adhered to.[16]

We do not have a copy of these principles, but they may be inferred from the tenor of what follows. ‘They form a fateful slide’, says L-H, remarking ‘how so easily honour can lead to dishonour where the fulfilment of an honourable policy by force is undertaken without calculation of strategic practicality’. And he outlines some of what he thinks are the results of this misguided policy: the destruction of the country we had so recklessly, in his view, guaranteed (Poland). The betrayal of so many allied and neutral peoples by the ‘foolish dream-talk of counter moves that we were not capable of fulfilling’. Thus, again in his view, Allied bombing of these peoples constituted an inherently barbarous process that was being indefinitely prolonged and increased, adding to the ‘rape’ of large parts of Britain’s partner’s territory outside of Hitler’s control, and ‘spreading starvation among the helpless people who were our friends’. And the British government justifies these actions with the platitude ‘necessity knows no law’. According to L-H, this campaign of destruction was not compatible with the moral grounds on which Britain opposed Hitler. The letter ends with a confusing pronouncement about the fatality of following ‘the path of honour’ without an accompanying ‘honesty of thought in dealing with the facts’.

All this was too much for Graves, who writes back on 22 September.[17] Referring to L-H’s ‘memorandum’, he writes that ‘I don't think that our points of disagreement can be satisfactorily settled by correspondence’, although he feels their moral principles are identical and that the only use of discussion is to clarify facts. He believes there is no hope of a physical meeting between the two men in the near future and so he wants to summarise their points of disagreement. He writes that L-H seems to suggest that ‘victory’ has the same connotations for the average British citizen now that it had in 1812 and 1915, although it means something very different at different times in English history. Graves believes that victory for the average Englishmen no longer means triumphal marches on Unter Den Linden or through the Arc de Triomphe but merely a return to ‘Civvy Street’ and the burning of his black out contraptions.[18]

And Graves thinks that L-H ideas are not applicable to the present war when the original quarrel has grown out of proportion into a world war in which the most powerful nations of one alliance (China, England, the USA, and Russia) are the technical aggressors and two are the victims of aggression. And although he does not specify which is which, assuming L-H will agree, he argues that no one is in a position to pull out unless militarily crushed by members of the opposing alliance.

He disagrees with L-H’s statement that this war has drained either ‘natural’ or moral resources and asserts that the Great War took far worse a toll, and points to the German ‘recovery’ by 1932. Still less does he believe that Britain is a ‘slave state’ differing ‘in mainly degree of efficiency’ from the Nazi system. He objects to the vocabulary that L-H has adopted and says L-H has spoilt his case by use of ‘unscientific, passionate metaphor’, a phrase Graves adopts from Maurice Newfield.[19] He also objects to L-H’s use of the terms ‘rape’, ‘mirage’, ‘Churchillian folie de grandeur’, and ‘slave state’. He concludes that WW2 is more like a national flu and that the most that can be done is to keep the ‘patient from flinging off the blankets and diving into the nearest pool’. His own simile is followed by an extended metaphor concerning Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-Shek meeting on a raft in the Indian Ocean and working out a peace agreement that would have the desired effect of detaching the Nazis from their hold on the German army and people. Graves wonders whether it was madness or inability to allow the Nazis to obtain their hold and asks L-H if they can be gotten rid of except by military defeat.

By their shooting of hostages and committing other ‘well-authenticated acts of barbary’ the German army has committed themselves to world victory or death. Now that the army has ‘identified itself with the Nazi party’, he believes that political opposition or popular revolution is impossible. ‘While the Storm Troopers control the tanks, airplanes and the concentration camps, what farm worker is likely to rush out with a shotgun and scythe to reassert popular liberty?’ [20]

Graves believes that this war cannot be compared to any in Britain’s history and that Britain is not dealing with a reasonable enemy but a pathological case. Germany is deliberately cultivating barbarism, denies reason, and has cultivated a mob mentality among German citizens through its deployment of a coercive police presence. The only favourable end to the war Graves can foresee is for Allied air or ground assaults to precipitate a sudden German collapse into hysteria. He sees Hitler, who broke down in the last war with hysteria, as the perfect embodiment of contemporary Germany. He ends ‘his long letter’ with his greatest affection for L-H and the greatest desire for them not to agree for the sake of agreeing.

L-H duly replies on 3 October,[21] returning from a tour of Scotland, which was rounded off with a meeting with Clementine Churchill, wife of Winston. He goes through the points raised by Graves, minimizing their differences and classifying them as definitional. What Graves calls his (L-H’s) ‘memorandum’ was really ‘broad reflections’ and his ‘connotations of victory align with Graves’. (So much for any real meeting of minds here!) Not to be fazed, Graves replies immediately with a letter dated the same day, ‘3rd, October, I think’.[22]

He notes that Clementine Churchill has his full admiration and one of Winston’s ‘victories is that he married her’. He mentions that he had a slight correspondence with her at the time when her daughter Sarah ran off with the band leader Vic Oliver.[23]

Getting back to the contentious points at issue, Graves asks about whether the connotations of victory make interesting reading. His impression is that for most people, victory does not have the active meaning it used to have and that ‘anything that makes a nuisance stop is good’. On the other hand, the idea of a spectacular triumph is dying off, in his view.

He believes that a restoration of the status quo ante in Europe, i.e. the pre-Munich status quo and multilateral disarmament, would be generally regarded as a victory.[24] He asserts that ninety-nine out a hundred British people would be satisfied with this form of peace, and mentions that Germany’s losses in material terms have been so much greater than Britain’s. He repeats an earlier contention that Poland’s sovereign rights must be respected. He also adds the proviso that if these terms could be accepted by the Allied High Command then it would be regarded as a decisive military defeat of Germany.

Graves is mindful, however, that a major difference between this war and the last is the presence of 200 thousand Americans on British soil.[25] Therefore, he says, it would be very difficult to pull out of an Anglo-American military alliance in circumstances that bore comparison with the British Expeditionary Force, which prevented the French from pulling out of the war in 1918. (We may think Graves reaches the heights of speculation here.)

But on the question of L-H’s phrase ‘draw(ing) on moral resources after 1918’,[26] Graves believes it too vague to discuss adequately. He agrees there was a sharper moral consciousness in the 1920s, but the ‘wrong sort of people’ got into Parliament and the result was to concentrate wealth of the country in fewer hands. But if L-H was talking about military morale, then Germany had suffered worse because of a pathological condition i.e. the rise of Hitler. It was not a moral condition, as L-H understood it to be. Graves adds that he thinks Britain had been militarily enfeebled by the Peace Pledge Union and similar moral movements.[27]

About the question of a ‘slave state’, Graves believes that there has always been a percentage of the English population that could be led by the nose into ritual slavery, and to support this he gives a shaky historical example of Presbyterian puritanism between 1630 and 1640. However, the power of independent thinkers — an eccentric, dynamic minority — has always been strong enough to stop any enslaving process. In an extraordinary exercise into social history, Graves goes on to talk about the difficulties of placing equal burdens on different sections of the community and the effect this could have on cultural progress and the independence of spirit that keeps a nation alive. He gives the example of a proposal to place purchase tax on books. His impression is that the outrages to individual liberty were more glaring in the past than in the present. He says that he has not felt in the least hampered in his activities beyond the restrictions of war-time economy, and that he can express his views far more widely than in the past without creating a ‘rough house’, a very Gravesian expression for the times. The strain of what he calls ‘the active war’ must be distinguished from what Britain’s role has been for the past year, preparation for war.[28]

Graves goes on to question whether sufficient air presence can be brought to bear on Germany. He is in the dark and is ready to discount 60-70% of ‘American boasting’ but he anticipates there will be enough support by the end of next year (1943) if Britain can avoid other serious problems. The tank situation seems to preclude any invasion of the continent.[29] He accepts L-H as an authority here. After a digression about the vagaries of bank managers, Graves observes that after Dunkirk, most nations would have sued for peace, but Churchill would not. He controlled Britain’s armies and had a lucky windfall in the Russian alliance. It is obvious, as far as Graves is concerned, that Britain has not made adequate use of this breathing space and no other windfalls are now possible. However, this is not to discredit Churchill’s policy, which was justified in the event. Considering Stalin’s (open) letter about a second front (on mainland Europe), Graves rather surprisingly thinks this will lead to a slowdown in our military efforts and until this is done, he can see no end to the war one way or the other.

This time Graves avers ‘that we do not disagree […] on the facts or principles’, saying that the situation with the war is hopelessly confused.[30] But he admits that he is likely to draw his conclusions from a set of observations ‘which are different from yours’. He finally pleads with L-H not to use language which he would use in a speech or ordinary conversation as they are likely to be misconstrued because of the greater latitude of speech ‘which comes from the heart and cannot be reversed as one goes along’.[31]

Conclusion

So, what are we to make of these two middle aged veterans of WW1? Do they adequately describe the middle years of the war they were witnessing from the mainland of Britain, and do they add anything to our knowledge of military and social history?

It is interesting that when talking about the proposed Second Front in France, Graves still considers that an invasion of Britain is a real possibility. His words of caution and references to historical precedents in the Napoleonic Wars seem to be aimed at the invasion of the Continent. His experiences with the British Expeditionary Forces in WW1 would have been more than enough to persuade him of the difficulties inherent in any premature invasion this time around. It is unlikely that he had precise information that the Dieppe raid (or something like it) was about to take place and it seems remarkable that he wrote such prescient words in his letter to The Times a few days beforehand urging a patient approach to the war. There were to be no further attempts to make large scale landings in France before D-Day.

It is also remarkable that Liddell-Hart, for all his rhetoric about moral decline, adverts to his theory of mechanised infantry transforming the battleground. He had urged the building of more tanks in the 1930s when the British army and defence budget was small and he had some success in arguing his case. However, his animadversions on foreign policy objectives were long removed and his attempts to link these to current concerns read to me like the views of an Edwardian, which of course he was.

Although Robert Graves was brought up in the same era and social milieu, he had both the insight and flexibility to realize that society had changed and that the reactions of ordinary people to circumstances in the middle of a war like no other were going to be very different from those of the Great War and its aftermath.

Joseph Bailey is an independent scholar who publishes regularly in The Robert Graves Review.