The title of “Lions for Lambs”, the Robert Redford film starring Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep was inspired by a scene in the film where college professor Dr. Stephen Malley (Redford) assails the apathy of the American public towards world events and, specifically, the War on Terror. Dr. Malley contends, “The problem is not with the people who started this. The problem is with us, all of us, who do nothing.” The professor tries to encourage one promising but disaffected student (Andrew Garfield) to feel a sense of personal responsibility and take action against politicians and military leaders who are all too willing to see the deaths of as soldiers as a negligible costs of the war. To illustrate his point, Dr. Malley tells the student that during World War I, hundreds of thousands of British soldiers died in futile attacks on deeply entrenched German troops. The German soldiers came to admire their counterparts so much that they wrote poems and stories praising their bravery. They also derided the arrogant incompetence of the British Army officers who, safely in the rear, held high teas as young men were needlessly sacrificed.

One such composition included the observation, “Nowhere have I seen such Lions led by such Lambs.” While the exact provenance of this quotation (in its original German, “Ich habe noch nie solchen lowen gesehen die solche lamer gefuhrt werden.”) has been lost to history, most experts agree it was written during the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest clashes in modern warfare. While some military archivists credit the author as an anonymous infantryman, others argue that the source was none other than General Max von Gallwitz, Supreme Commander of the German forces. In either case, it’s generally accepted to be a derivation of Alexander the Great’s proclamation, “I am never afraid of an army of Lions led into battle by a Lamb. I fear more the army of Lambs who have a Lion to lead them.”

The Battle of the Somme began in July of 1916. A massive Allied advance on the Western Front stalled near the Somme River in Northern France and suffered a grisly fate. Entrenched and heavily armed troops of Kaiser Wilhelm II mowed down 58,000 British soldiers, one third of them on the first day of the battle. The tally still holds as the all time single-day casualty record. The disastrous attack was finally called off in November. After a five-month campaign, the Allies had advanced only twelve kilometres at a cost of 420,000 British casualties, plus an additional 200,000 French.

Some believe the Lamb referred to in the quotation was in fact General Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force. The controversial Haig was responsible for the tactics that doomed so many Lions with his “decisive battle” concept rather than the more commonly employed “bite and hold” approach. The strategy amounted to little more than repeated charges meant to demoralise the Germans.

The suspicion that Haig held the lives under his command in such low regard first surfaced at the defeat of Neuve Chappelle, where he lost 17,000 men. In the worst tradition of military bureaucracy, General Haig was rewarded for his failure and given command of the Allied forces at Somme.

In an interesting historical footnote, the long months of bloody fighting were captured on camera and released in the United Kingdom as the propaganda film The Battle of Somme. This marked the first time civilians on the home front were exposed to the horrors of modern warfare.

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