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Lloyd George faced a tricky problem when it came to providing an account of 1918. How to narrate the events on the Western Front, particularly from July, without acknowledging the outstanding performance of the BEF, still under the command of Sir Douglas Haig? Lloyd George’s solution is soon evident. First, the Allied reverses suffered during the German offensives beginning on 21 March were primarily Haig’s responsibility. The BEF had been seriously weakened during the previous year’s Flanders campaign, and Haig’s inappropriate disposition of the BEF’s divisions along the entire British line and his neglect of the Fifth Army’s defences practically invited catastrophe. Second, the reversal of fortunes beginning in July and the eventual German defeat were due not so much due to Haig’s abilities, but rather because the Allies had at last found a general of ‘genius’, Foch, who in response to the setbacks in March and April, and largely due to Lloyd George’s pressure, was appointed to command Allied forces in France. Under the command of Foch, Lloyd George notes, Haig performed well, but as a ‘second-in-command’. Lloyd George’s third strategy is to downplay the significance of the Western Front in the defeat of Germany: rather, he points to the collapse of Germany’s allies, Austria, Bulgaria and Turkey, as the main factor in bringing the Germans to seek an armistice, rather than any military defeat of the German army in France.

Following his account of the outbreak of war, Lloyd George provides a critique of several aspects of British strategy in the first weeks of hostilities. He first argues that the decision to deploy the BEF on the left wing of the French was wrong and instead that BEF would have been better placed to inflict a severe, even decisive blow against the German advance by concentrating in Antwerp and joining forces with the Belgians. He then describes his proposal to circumvent the developing stalemate in France with an audacious Allied attack on Austria-Hungary in alliance with the Balkan states. This was rejected by the Cabinet, however, in favour of an attack on Turkey in the Dardanelles, initially with naval forces alone and later with substantial land forces, with well-known results. Allied forces were later deployed in Salonika at the end of 1915, but rather than launching a powerful attack on Austria as Lloyd George wanted, they were too weak in numbers and equipment to be anything but an irritant to Austria and Bulgaria until the last months of the war.

At the outbreak of war in August 1914, Lloyd George occupied the second place in the government. He had been Chancellor of the Exchequer for six years, and while he remained the most important ‘Radical’ member of the Cabinet, in the realm of foreign policy there was, at least from 1911, in reality little dividing him from his Liberal ‘Imperialist’ colleagues such as H.H. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey. Like them he was determined to maintain the strength of the Empire, convinced of the need for a strong navy to protect it, and aware of and determined to resist any German ambitions for dominance in Europe at the expense of Britain’s Entente partners. This was underlined in particular by his intervention in the Agadir crisis of 1911 and would be again by his eventual support for British entry into the war in August 1914.