the death of his first wife Mary Borden. Spears later wrote of Maurice in Prelude to Victory "As imperturbable as a fish, always unruffled … a rather abrupt manner. A little distrait owing to great inner concentration, he simply demolished work, never forgot anything … [a] most efficient if not outwardly brilliant second. No man ever wasted fewer words nor expressed himself when he spoke with greater clarity and conciseness". John Grigg suggests that Maurice inherited something of the inner turmoil and rebelliousness of his grandfather, the Victorian divine Frederick Denison Maurice. Resignation Following the removal of Robertson in February 1918, Henry Wilson, the new CIGS, proposed that Maurice be given command of a division. Maurice became convinced that troops were being withheld from the Western Front in order to undermine the position of Douglas Haig. The situation became particularly tense after the near catastrophic defeat of Hubert Gough's Fifth Army in late March 1918. When David Lloyd George announced in the House of Commons on 9 April that British troop levels on the Western Front were at all-time highs, Maurice believed that he was deceiving both Parliament and the British public. Whilst waiting to hand over his job as DMO to Maj Gen P de B Radcliffe, Maurice visited Haig, who offered him not command of a division but a staff post in the new Army being rebuilt from the wreck of the Fifth. Maurice never explained why he declined the offer, although he recorded (15 April) that officers at Haig’s staff were dissatisfied with Lloyd George’s speech of 9 April. Maurice later claimed not to have read Lloyd George’s speech of 9 April until "his attention was drawn to it" whilst in France, 13–16 April. Lloyd George’s speech of 9 April had been widely reported in the press and was being discussed by officers at Haig’s headquarters, so it seems unlikely, in Grigg’s view, that he could have been unaware of it. Maurice's baby daughter Betty had died, aged not quite one, on 16 March (not mentioned in Nancy Maurice’s 1950s book about her father). He was disappointed at being sacked as DMO and at Haig not offering him the division he had been promised. In his capacity as Director of Military Operations, Maurice knew that the troop statistics available to his office did not bear out Lloyd George's claims. He wrote to Robertson's successor Henry Wilson on