As the debacle at the Somme ground to a halt in the chilling autumn rains and the squalid muck of the battlefield, the Allied leaders gathered in Paris, in mid-November 1916, to assess the military situation. Two men who shared growing doubts about the British role in the war took a ‘stroll’ before a morning session of the conference, exchanging views about their country's contribution. One of them was the well-known and controversial politician, David Lloyd George; the other, hardly a public figure, was Lieut Col. Maurice Hankey, a leading military adviser to the government who had served as Secretary to the pre-war Committee of Imperial Defence and during the war as Secretary to the three committees which had, in turn, worked with questions of military policy for the Cabinet. Although a recent appointee as Secretary of State for War, Lloyd George had already become frustrated with the deference consistently shown to the military views voiced by the Imperial General Staff and the British Expeditionary Force exhibited by Prime Minister Asquith, head of a Coalition government.

According to Lloyd George's recollection, Hankey took the initiative and sketched proposals for a re-organization of the British war effort: