Major-General Sir Frederick Barton Maurice, KCMG, CB (19 January 1871 – 19 May 1951) was a British Army officer, military correspondent, writer and academic.

[14] Maurice stressed that the high troops-space ratio was the main cause of the stalemate on the Western Front, an argument which he would later repeat in his book British Strategy (1929).

Because the defender could bring up reinforcements quicker than the attacker could feed in fresh units and move his guns forward, no breakthrough was likely to be achieved without a long preceding bataille d’usure (battle of attrition) elsewhere.

The former aimed at breaking through to open country even if launched from tactically unfavourable ground, preferably over a wide breach to lessen enemy enfilade fire from the flanks.

Good artillery observation and communications (to allow reinforcements of men and shells) were required, not least as the enemy would be retreating towards his own bases whilst the attacker advanced over ground devastated by bombardment.

[15] Maurice was strongly critical of proposals to launch a major offensive out of the Ypres Salient (such plans would be discussed for two years before eventually resulting in the 1917 Battle of Passchendaele).

After Maurice’s departure for the War Office, his former staff at GHQ continued to produce papers for his successor “Tavish” Davidson, pointing out that the BEF had never fought a pure battle of attrition but had rather, both at Loos and the Somme, been attempting to achieve breakthrough and attrition more or less simultaneously; disputes continued to simmer during the planning of the Battle of Passchendaele with both Rawlinson and Plumer producing plans too cautious for Haig’s liking.

[19] One of Maurice's daughters, Nancy, was the long-term secretary and mistress of Edward Spears, eventually marrying him in 1969 after the death of his first wife Mary Borden.

[5] Whilst waiting to hand over his job as DMO to Major General Percy de B. Radcliffe, Maurice visited Haig, who offered him not command of a division but a staff post in the new Army being rebuilt from the wreck of the Fifth.

[5] Hankey later told Liddell Hart in 1932 that he had a friendly conversation with Maurice on the eve of his press letter, telling him that Lloyd George thought highly of him and suggesting a number of suitable jobs for him; Grigg speculates that the conversation might have been at Wilson's behest after Maurice's letter to Wilson, and that the staff post in France (which he had been offered on 15 April) might have been one of the mooted jobs.

Robertson wrote to him on 4 May, writing that not too much credence should be given to imminent predictions of Lloyd George's downfall, that Maurice should take especial care to get his facts exactly right, and adding: "You are contemplating a great thing – to your undying credit".

[23] Maurice wrote a letter to The Times and other newspapers, criticizing Lloyd George for misleading the public about the state of the British Expeditionary Force during the German spring offensive.

He had a friendly exchange of letters with Lord Milner, Secretary of State for War (16 May) in which he agreed to exercise self-censorship in view of the secret information to which he was party.

"[25] In a hearing before the Committee on Inquiry of the National Assembly on November 18, 1919, a year after the war's end, Hindenburg declared, "As an English general has very truly said, the German Army was 'stabbed in the back'.

[29] Cabinet Secretary Maurice Hankey had a low opinion of the military's disingenuous use of statistics and took pride in having assisted Lloyd George in preparing his speech of 9 May 1918.

[5][24] Field Service Regulations were reissued and in 1924 the War Office published “Volume II (Operations)” (from the context, apparently an extension of the FSR) by Brigadier Aspinall-Oglander (Official Historian of the Gallipoli Campaign) assisted by JFC Fuller, then a senior instructor at Camberley Staff College.

Partly inspired by this, Maurice gave a series of lectures on strategy and whether or not the art of war could be boiled down to principles, illustrating his talks with historical examples.

[34] Three days before war commenced on 1 September 1939, Maurice, as President of the British Legion, broadcast an appeal to Hitler urging him not to invade Poland, an action which John Grigg attributes to naivety.