remain untraced. A correspondent to The Daily Telegraph, in July 1963, wrote that librarians in London and Stuttgart had not traced the quotation and a letter to Clark was unanswered. Clark was equivocal about the source for the dialogue for many years, although in 2007 a friend Euan Graham, recalled a conversation in the mid-sixties, when Clark on being challenged as to the provenance of the dialogue, looked sheepish and said "well I invented it". At one time Clark said Liddell Hart had given him the quote (unlikely as Hart had asked him where it came from) and Clark's biographer believes he invented the Ludendorff and Hoffmann attribution. This invention provided critics of The Donkeys with an opportunity to condemn the work. Richard Holmes, wrote Dan Snow wrote in The Guardian:My family's dark Somme secret "Delving into his own ancestors' past, Dan Snow was stunned to discover that his great-grandfather Thomas Snow was a first world war general who sent thousands to die". Subsequently Snow wrote an article for the BBC in 2014 discussing 10 big myths about World War One debunked in which he posits the idea that "Much of what we think we know about the 1914–18 conflict is wrong" and that "This saying was supposed to have come from senior German commanders describing brave British soldiers led by incompetent old toffs from their chateaux. In fact the incident was made up by Alan Clark." While Clark is said to have admitted to his imagining "the incident" this has no impact on the appropriate (or otherwise) use of the phrase, since a book with this title had been published by Captain Peter Thompson in 1927 (through an independent publisher, T. W. Laurie). Thompson was a well-travelled writer who had served in the Royal Army Service Corps – a forerunner of the Royal Logistics Corps. He was part of a small but growing group of soldiers-turned-writers who used their prodigious talents to raise profound questions about the nature and management of World War One. Popular culture The musical Oh, What a Lovely War! (1963) and the comedy television series Blackadder Goes Forth (1989) are two well-known works of popular culture, depicting the war as a matter of incompetent donkeys sending noble (or sometimes ignoble, in the case of Blackadder) lions to their doom. Such works are in the literary tradition of the war poets like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon