Newspapers favorable to the army, such as the Globe and Morning Post, continued to be a thorn in the government's side, holding it, not the generals, responsible for the German breakthrough. The daily pummeling of Lloyd George by a section of the press had its echo in parliament. On April 9 Lloyd George addressed the House of Commons and in the course of rebutting charges that he had deliberately kept Haig short of reserves, made several incorrect statements. He declared that in spite of heavy casualties in 1917, the British army in France was “considerably stronger” on January 1, 1918 than it had been twelve months earlier. The allegation is misleading. It can be justified only if Lloyd George had included noncombatants such as labor battalions. The prime minister also denied that he had large British forces locked in secondary theaters, forces that would have been more useful fighting the Germans in France. He claimed that there was only one white division in Mesopotamia, and in Egypt and Palestine there were only three white divisions; the rest were either Indians or mixed, with a very small proportion of white troops. Here, what Lloyd George said was clearly untrue. In Palestine alone, Allenby had eleven divisions, consisting of about 100,000 white and only 6,000 Indian soldiers.