1855), on the British military's strategic mistakes and failings during the fall of Sevastopol, and particularly General James Simpson's military leadership of the assault on the Great Redan. The Times reportedly recycled the phrase as "lions led by donkeys" with reference to French soldiers during the Franco-Prussian War: There were numerous examples of its use during the First World War, referring to both the British and the Germans. In Rising Sun and Tumbling Bear: Russia's War with Japan (2003), Richard Connaughton attributed a later quotation to Colonel J. M. Grierson (later Sir James Grierson) in 1901, when reporting on the Russian contingent to the Boxer Rebellion, describing them as 'lions led by asses'. More recent usage In the Second World War Erwin Rommel said it about the British after he captured Tobruk. In early 2019, the hashtag #LedByDonkeys was coined by an anti-Brexit campaign group that highlights perceived hypocritical statements by British politicians. Attribution Evelyn, Princess Blücher, an Englishwoman who lived in Berlin during the First World War, in her memoir published in 1921, recalled German general Erich Ludendorff at German General Headquarters' () praising the British for their bravery: "I will put it exactly as I heard it straight from the Grosse Hauptquartier: 'The English Generals are wanting in strategy. We should have no chance if they possessed as much science as their officers and men had of courage and bravery. They are lions led by donkeys.'" The phrase Lions Led by Donkeys was used as a title for a book published in 1927, by Captain P. A. Thompson. The subtitle of this book was "Showing how victory in the Great War was achieved by those who made the fewest mistakes". Alan Clark based the title of his book The Donkeys (1961) on the phrase. Prior to publication in a letter to Hugh Trevor Roper, he asked "English soldiers, lions led by donkeys etc. – can you remember who said that?" Liddell Hart, although he did not dispute the veracity of the quote, had asked Clark for its origins. Whatever Trevor Roper's reply, Clark eventually used the phrase as an epigraph to The Donkeys and attributed it to a conversation between Ludendorff and Max Hoffmann: The conversation was supposedly published in the memoirs of General Erich von Falkenhayn, the Chief of the German General Staff of the German Army between 1914 and 1916, but the exchange and the memoirs