30 April, to outline his position. Wilson did not respond. 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. Maurice composed his press letter on 2 May but did not yet send it. 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". 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. The publication of this letter on 7 May caused a political storm, and members of the Liberal opposition, including former Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, called for a debate. This subsequently occurred on 9 May, and Lloyd George was able to imply that the source of confusion was, in fact, Maurice's office, rather than the Prime Minister's. Maurice was put on half-pay on 11 May, and was soon "retired" from the Army. He was also denied a court martial. However, he was far from disgraced and soon became military correspondent of the Daily Chronicle. 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. He was also later a military correspondent for the Daily News. Postwar life In 1919, the reviews in the German press that misrepresented his book, The Last Four Months, contributed to the creation of the stab-in-the-back myth. "Ludendorff made use of the reviews to convince Hindenburg." Maurice was never formally exonerated for his role in May 1918. He wrote his own secret account of the incident on 22 May 1918, not published until his daughter Nancy’s book in the 1950s. In 1920 Arthur Balfour declined to assist him in getting