Secret Warriors

by Taylor Downing

  Part Five

  Propagandists

  12

  The War of Words

  When war was declared on 4 August 1914 Lord Kitchener, the newly appointed Minister of War, was the only prominent politician who believed it would not be over in a few months. In Cabinet he predicted a devastating war, adopting the full force of modern weapons that would last for at least three years. To fight this war, Britain would need massively to increase the size of its small, professional army, and accordingly, Kitchener made an immediate appeal for volunteers to join up. His appeal led to the production of one of the most famous posters of all time, in which a large picture of Kitchener staring out and pointing his index finger, appealing directly to everyone, was accompanied by a caption of just a few words: ‘Your Country Needs YOU’.

  The image was immensely powerful. A moustachioed and uniformed Kitchener not only represented the military leadership but epitomised Britain’s imperial past; he was the victor of the Sudan, the hero of the Boer War, the commander-in-chief of India and the ruler of Egypt. His face embodied British history as he appealed to every man to join up and do his bit. Alfred Leete, the poster’s designer, was a commercial graphic artist who had created adverts for brands like Rowntrees, Bovril and Guinness, as well as for the London Underground. Now he brought successful advertising techniques to the business of building new armies for war. Produced also in a version featuring the words ‘Britons [Kitchener] Wants You’, and below this, ‘Join Your Country’s Army’, the poster first appeared in September 1914 and Kitchener was soon staring out from thousands of hoardings, shop windows, buses, trams, railway carriages and vans all over the country. It is an image that is still well known today.1

  Posters aimed at recruiting young men into the army were the government’s first attempt at public propaganda, and they were successful beyond even the wildest, most optimistic hopes of the War Office. Tens and then hundreds of thousands of men came forward in a fever of patriotic enthusiasm. Recruiting offices could not cope with the influx. Thousands had to be turned away and asked to come back a week or a month later. Kitchener had expected 100,000 volunteers in the first six months. In fact, by the end of September 500,000 men had already come forward, and about 100,000 volunteered in each of the following fifteen months, after which the numbers went into a marked decline. An all-party group, the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, took responsibility for the recruitment campaign, producing dozens of different posters over the next year. The message was always simple and clear: ‘Come Along Boys! Enlist Today’, ‘There’s Still a Place in the Line for YOU, Will You Fill It?’ Some of them appealed to women to encourage their sons, brothers or fiancés to join up, with messages like ‘Women of Britain Say “Go!”’

  Local figures printed their own posters; in recruiting a battalion of men on his estate near Penrith in Cumberland, the Earl of Lonsdale put up a poster in his racing colours of red, yellow and white that asked bluntly, ‘Are you a Man or Are you a Mouse? Are you a man who will for ever be handed down to posterity as a Gallant Patriot... [or] as a rotter and a coward?’2 By spring 1916 it was estimated that 12.5 million copies of 164 different posters had been printed and distributed.3 The result was that more than two million men had volunteered. But none of the later posters had the impact of the first, with Kitchener’s bold in-your-face appeal. If the first attempt at domestic propaganda had proved a triumphant success, it was not the case with what came next.

  In the first days of war, Kitchener at the War Office and Churchill at the Admiralty formed a press bureau to censor all news about the progress of the war and to control the flow of information from the military to the press. It was effective from the start: the press were not even informed that the British Expeditionary Force was preparing to go to France until three days after it had actually arrived. Journalists and editors were soon very unhappy about what they quickly nicknamed the ‘suppress bureau’. But Kitchener had a decidedly old-fashioned view about the press. Seeing them as a nuisance, his main concern was to avoid releasing any information that could possibly be of use to the enemy. He wanted the newspapers to print nothing other than the brief reports of progress here or advances there that had been handed down to them. The wars Kitchener was used to were imperial campaigns fought in foreign lands and usually over quite quickly. He certainly had no conception of how a modern war would come to need a supportive press to keep up public morale at home.

  In addition to setting up the press bureau, Kitchener also banned all journalists from visiting the front. Such severe methods failed utterly to recognise the growing power and influence of the press. Even Asquith, the Prime Minister, thought the restrictions went too far and complained to a friend that ‘K[itchener] … has an undisguised contempt for the “public” in all its moods and manifestations’.4 Kitchener defended himself in the House of Lords in November, saying, ‘It is not always easy to decide what information may or may not be dangerous, and whenever there is any doubt, we do not hesitate to prevent publication.’5 Such an attitude could not be sustained for long in a twentieth-century war.

  The legal framework for the press bureau, as for many other restrictions brought in at the beginning of the war, was established in the Defence of the Realm Act (known as DORA), passed in the first weeks of conflict. DORA made it an offence to ‘collect, record, publish or communicate’ any information that might be ‘directly or indirectly useful to the enemy’. Specific clauses prohibited the reporting of information about the movement of troops, ships or aircraft. The Act also made it an offence to publish news ‘likely to cause disaffection’ among the civil population or the armed services of Britain and her Allies.6 DORA was not primarily aimed at controlling public opinion, but was intended to enable the government to prevent the flow of sensitive military information and to censor cables and correspondence going overseas. However, it now provided the legal basis on which to control the output of the press, and few newspapers showed any inclination to challenge it. It was clear that with people like Kitchener in charge, an obsession with national security would be paramount and secrecy would be the order of the day.

  The result was that for some weeks the British people had little idea of what the war was like. There were no photographs, no reporters and only bland communiqués from the front. For the war pictorials launched at the start of the conflict, artists had to imagine what the war looked like. They looked back to previous conflicts and imagined great cavalry charges and the heroic stance of the noble BEF against the dreadful Germans. As a result, while trying to be serious and accurate, the various illustrated magazines looked more like boys’ comics.

  When a real story did leak out there was near panic. By the end of August, the British public knew only the barest outlines of the French retreat and their army’s action in engaging the Germans at Mons. When The Times reporter, Arthur Moore, managed to get hold of the story that the British Army was also in full retreat after the engagement, Lord Northcliffe, the paper’s owner, went ahead and published it, reporting the ‘terrible defeat of British troops’ and of ‘broken British regiments’.7 It was a bombshell to the British public. People read reports gathered by Moore from soldiers who had spent days in a chaotic withdrawal. No one had been remotely aware that the situation was so black. Churchill complained to Northcliffe, ‘I think you ought to realise the harm that has been done … I never saw such panic-stricken stuff written by any war correspondent before.’8 This was deeply ironic coming from a man who had made his own reputation as a war correspondent on the North West Frontier, in Sudan and during the Boer War, and who was not at all averse to sensationalist writing.

  Northcliffe justified the piece by saying it had been approved by the press bureau, and that since it revealed the need for more recruits it was therefore in the public interest. It was true that the report included the words, Is an army of exhaustless valour to be borne down by the sheer weight of [German] numbers, while young Englishmen at home play golf and cricket? We want
men and we want them now.’9 And the immediate response was a big rise in the number of volunteers coming forward. The press bureau ought to have learned the lesson of this incident: that they should open up the channels of information so the public were better informed about what was happening with their army in the field. In fact, they drew the opposite conclusion, that what was needed was more control and a greater restriction on the leaking of news.

  The irony was that in the first months, the government and the military had little to worry about as public opinion was firmly supportive of the war. There was no need to justify the war other than in the most basic of terms. Two days after war was declared, Prime Minister Asquith addressed a passionate and supportive House of Commons in a rousing speech: ‘We are fighting to vindicate the principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed [cheers] in defiance of international good faith, by the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering power.’ Asserting that ‘This war has been forced upon us [cheers],’ he continued that Britain was ‘unsheathing its sword in a just cause [more cheers].’10 Britain had declared war to protect Belgium, and ‘Remember Little Belgium’ would become a catchphrase in the early phases of the war.

  Britons saw themselves as fighting a moral war, to defend the weak against the strong, to defend what was good against the forces of evil aggression. Political dissension ceased overnight. All the major political parties came together in support of the government. And most of the groups threatening discontent before August, such as the trade unions and the Irish nationalists, declared their support for the war. Even the main body of suffragettes who before the. war had threatened the fabric of British society now expressed their support. Christabel Pankhurst wrote in the Daily Telegraph, ‘The Germans are playing the part of savages, overriding every principle of humanity and morality.’11 The divisions of the pre-war months were patched up the moment that British soldiers marched off to war.

  With the absence of real news, stories of dreadful atrocities and barbarism flourished, fanned by a hysterical popular press. Lurid stories abounded of the murder of civilians, the burning of homes and the mutilation of children. It was a classic case of rumours, unchecked, getting out of hand. When Belgian refugees began to arrive in Britain the stories grew wilder. Everyone seemed to know someone who knew someone who had witnessed an atrocity. Women and children had apparently been gathered and used as human shields by cowardly German soldiers. Young children who had courageously stood in the way of advancing troops had supposedly had their hands amputated. A nurse had her breast cut off and bled to death. Convents had been emptied and the nuns raped. When Rheims Cathedral was shelled on 22 September, it was presented once again as the ultimate infamy of the German war machine.

  Such stories could only grow and multiply, of course, if they landed on fertile ground. And the sad fact is that the British people were all too willing in 1914 to believe the worst of their one-time friend and ally. Years of naval, industrial and imperial competition and a fear of all-pervading German Kultur was quickly fanned into the belief that the Germans were barbarians committed to an inhuman and overbearing Prussian military culture. Racist cartoons appeared in the press showing obese, swaggering, grotesque German soldiers in pin-helmets banishing everything from their path. The most obscene depicted German soldiers laughing as they paraded babies on the end of their bayonets. Northcliffe’s newspapers, which had long been anti-German, led the way. But a belief in German barbarity went right to the top. In October, Asquith spoke of Germans as ‘the hordes who leave behind them at every stage of their progress a dismal trail of savagery, of devastation and of destruction worthy of the blackest annals of the history of barbarism’.12 When even the Prime Minister indulged in talk like this, it was not surprising that very few people were ready to stand up and challenge the prevailing mood of anti-German hysteria.

  The fact was that the German army had on occasions behaved harshly in its march across Belgium and northern France. Civilians had frequently been rounded up although only on few occasions had they been maltreated. The Belgian government had, however, encouraged its citizens to conduct a guerrilla campaign against the occupying forces. The Germans found this contrary to the rules of war and as a consequence felt justified in detaining civilians who resisted them. Other attacks on the Germans sometimes had at their root a story that was never reported in Britain. For instance, the press whipped itself into a frenzy over the execution of a British nurse, Edith Cavell, who had stayed behind in occupied Brussels. In the British press she was portrayed as an innocent victim, a martyr to German barbarism. In fact, she had been involved in an underground network to smuggle Allied prisoners out of Belgium, for which she knew the penalty was death. When the French executed two nurses for helping Germans to escape it was not reported.

  Other, more generalised stories were also found to have little or no foundation. The story of the nurse having her breast cut off had been entirely made up by the woman’s younger sister back home in England. Shelling churches or cathedrals was commonplace on both sides as they could be used as artillery lookouts. A photograph in the Daily Mirror of German cavalrymen supposedly holding up stolen booty was actually a pre-war photo of the troops showing off the cups they had won in an army steeplechase tournament.13 But people almost everywhere believed the stories of atrocities and the accepted image of the German soldier became that of the ‘Wicked’ or ‘Evil’ Hun.

  The most tragic aspect of this hysteria was that thousands of people with German origins, many of whom had been resident in Britain for decades if not for generations, were suddenly seen as the enemy within. The Daily Mail told its readers to refuse service from German waiters and demanded a boycott of German goods. People were told to fear the presence of German spies, particularly near naval bases where it was believed they were cunning enough to be sending signals to ships out at sea. Vigilante committees were formed in towns around the country to protest against what was seen as the lenient attitude of officialdom to enemy aliens. Horatio Bottomley, before the war a convicted swindler, established a newspaper, John Bull, that became the ultimate expression of this patriotic fervour, whipping up emotions even further. In its most extreme manifestation, this hysteria led to the banning of German music and even the stoning of dachshunds in the street. Thousands of harmless people with German-sounding names were thrown out of work and made destitute. In October 1914 a form of internment was introduced, although it had to be suspended after a few weeks due to the lack of accommodation for the thousands of internees. The hysteria percolated to the top of society. Prince Louis of Battenberg, the popular First Sea Lord, was accused of being sympathetic to the Kaiser, and was assailed with anonymous letters accusing him of being on the side of Germany. On 24 October, John Bull wrote, ‘Blood is said to be thicker than water; and we doubt whether all the water in the North Sea would obliterate the ties between the Battenbergs and the Hohenzollerns [the German royal family].’14 Prince Louis resigned his post four days later.

  Lord Haldane, the reforming Secretary of War who by 1914 was Lord Chancellor, was another leading figure suspected of being in league with Germany. It was known that he had gone to a German university, studied German philosophy and admired German values. Now the finger was pointed at him for his army reforms which, it was absurdly claimed had really been intended to wreck the British Army and undermine its ability to fight. Again rumours abounded. It was said that he was in secret correspondence with the German government, even that he was an illegitimate brother of the Kaiser. In 1915, the Conservatives made it a condition that he should leave government (along with Churchill) when they entered the coalition. Haldane, a great believer that logic would always prevail, was deeply scarred by these accusations.15

  Even the royal family became conscious of its German origins. They sat out this first outburst of anti-German sentiment, but in 1917, on the advice of his advisers, King George V announced that the royals would no longer go by the surname Saxe-Coburg. A committee set up to consid
er alternatives settled on a suitably solid and appropriate British surname. The royal family would in future be known by the name of Windsor.

  In the frenzy of pro-war, anti-German hysteria in these first weeks and months, it was not only journalists but most of the literary establishment who rallied to the cause. Even those who would later come to question the value of continuing the war saw things in simple black and white terms at this stage. Rudyard Kipling wrote in the Morning Post, ‘However the world pretends to divide itself, there are only two divisions in the world today – human beings and Germans.’16

  It was not just in Britain that intellectuals and writers came out in support of the war. In France, the leading philosopher Henri Bergson, president of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, was just one of many to enthusiastically take up verbal arms. He could not have put it more simply when as early as 8 August 1914 he declared, ‘The fight against Germany is the fight of civilisation against barbarism.’ In Germany itself, a group of ninety-three leading intellectuals and professors came together and issued a public declaration entitled an ‘Appeal to World Culture’ (Aufruf an die Kulturweltl). The signatories were a who’s who of German arts and sciences, and included just about every leading academic in the country. They refuted every charge made by the Allies against Germany, from claims that the country was responsible for the war to claims of abuse committed by German soldiers in Belgium. Arguing that because Germany was encircled by its enemies, the war was an act of self-defence and was consequently entirely justified, they denounced the French and the British.17 Those who took a pacifist position and spoke out against the war – such as George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell in Britain, or Romain Rolland in France – encountered intense personal hostility for their stance. With very few exceptions it was clear that most intellectuals and writers willingly signed up to support their national position.