The British Military Mission to Berlin and The Stab in the Back Myth

Or, "A Classic Example of the Abuse of Footnotes by Citing Sources which Actually Support the Exact Opposite Position to the Claim you are Currently Attempting to Make"

Punch Magazine, October 2nd 1918

The British Army, undefeated in the field and in a time of war, about to be stabbed in the back by Labour at home.

Both the German Republic proclaimed on November 10th 1918, and the Kaisers' elected Reichstag that immediately preceded it were dominated and controlled by a Centre-Left block of Socialists and Social Democrats - the House of Commons was not.

NB - "Myth" is not in any sense a synonym for "fictional" or "factually false, fraudulent or untrue"; perhaps a better definition, taking Plato's concept of the Noble Lie as the principle of basis for any successful exercise in nation-building or statecraft as its starting point, a better description of what constitutes myth might be "Those stories we tell each other that become more powerful and important than what may actually be more accurately true".

The Tojan War, with its dramatic equestrian finale bringing the ten year siege to a final close is a Classical Greek myth describe via the epic poetry of Homer, but the city and Siege of Troy were both real historical events, as was the burning and sack of the great city by the army of the Greeks. 

It's a myth, yes - but it's also true.

It's the meaning of what you take from that which is infinitely more crucial to influencing your life and belief systems than the question of whether or not it actually happened - especially since, if nobody believes in something, then we tend to simply write it off and say that it just didn't happen, evidence to the contrary be damned.

From Shirer : 

 ”As an English general has very truly said, the German Army was ’stabbed in the back.’ ”∗

Field-Marshall Paul von Hindenberg

Committee of Inquiry of the National Assembly

November 18, 1919

∗ The attribution of the myth to an English general was hardly factual. 

Wheeler-Bennett, in Wooden Titan: Hindenburg, has explained that, ironically, two British generals did have something to do – inadvertently – with the perpetration of the false legend. 

”The first was Maj. Gen. Sir Frederick Maurice, whose book The Last Four Months, published in 1919, was grossly misrepresented by reviewers in the German press as proving that the German Army had been betrayed by the Socialists on the Home Front and not been defeated in the field.” 

The General denied this interpretation in the German press, but to no avail. Ludendorff made use of the reviews to convince Hindenburg. 

”The other officer,” says Wheeler-Bennett, ”was Maj. Gen. Malcolm, head of the British Military Mission in Berlin, Ludendorff was dining with the General one evening, and with his usual turgid eloquence was expatiating on how the High Command had always suffered lack of support from the Civilian Government and how the Revolution had betrayed the Army. 

In an effort to crystallize the meaning of Ludendorff’s verbosity into a single sentence, General Malcolm asked him: 

’Do you mean, General, that you were stabbed in the back?’ 

Ludendorff’s eyes lit up and he leapt upon the phrase like a dog on a bone. 

’Stabbed in the back?’ he repeated. ’Yes, that’s it exactly. We were stabbed in the back.’”