The Making of the First World War

by Ian F W Beckett

  CHAPTER 5

  THE POWER OF IMAGE

  The First Public Screening of The Battle of the Somme, 21 August 1916

  IN THE public mind, the memory of modern war is now largely encapsulated in a series of visual references. A campaign, even an entire war, can be summed up in a single image. For Dunkirk, it is one of long lines of men snaking across the sand towards the sea; for the Battle of Britain, one of pilots scrambling for their Spitfires; for Iwo Jima, a handful of American marines raising the Stars and Stripes on Mount Suribachi. In the case of the Vietnam War, it is perhaps either the South Vietnamese police chief executing a Vietcong suspect with a shot to the head in Saigon during the communist ‘Tet’ offensive, or that of a badly burned nine-year-old girl running naked from a US napalm strike. This is not entirely a new phenomenon. Roger Fenton's photographs from the Crimean War (1854–56) aroused extraordinary interest in Britain, albeit they were mostly static scenes of groups or individuals. Alexander Gardner's photographs of bodies – often artfully arranged after death – on the American Civil War battlefield of Antietam (1862) had an even greater impact in the United States.

  Photographs of the drama of war in the mid and late nineteenth century were powerful enough when most ordinary civilians had little awareness of its realities. Previously, the public had relied on the written word, drawings and paintings. Francisco de Goya's illustrations of the horrors of the guerrilla war in Spain between 1808 and 1814 were certainly realistic, but Victorian battle art, prints, illustrated periodicals and the increasingly popular postcard were more likely to have stereotypical views emphasising courage and gallantry. Moving images, even if silent apart from a pianist's accompaniment, were always going to have a much greater effect on people's perceptions.

  Such was the impact of the first true war documentary, The Battle of the Somme, shown to the wider British cinema-going public for the first time on 21 August 1916, that its images have continued to define the popular vision of war on the Western Front. The same two seemingly obligatory images recur over and over again in television documentaries, and in any news feature on the Great War. In one, soldiers climb out of a shallow trench: two fall, the second sliding back down into the trench. In the other image, a group step off over some low wire entanglements into enveloping smoke, two again falling. Knowing observers of the second sequence in particular will always note that one of these ‘dead’ soldiers casually crosses his legs, while the other glances back at the camera. Plain common sense ought to suggest that any cameramen standing in the open, as must have been done to film these sequences, would have been riddled with bullets if these were real attacks. It is usually assumed that these scenes were added in an attempt to provide missing elements of human involvement. The two sequences are separated by a perfectly genuine brief piece of film, showing distant and indistinct figures in No Man's Land, that demonstrates all too clearly how difficult it was to capture live battle action in any meaningful way.

  The fact that these two famous scenes were so clearly faked does not somehow ring any alarm bells for lazy producers. Soldiers going ‘over the top’ died in very large numbers on the first day of the Somme, 1 July 1916, therefore this is what it was truly like. Given the limitations of the cameras available, as Stephen Badsey has argued, perfectly genuine footage ‘produced a . . . film record of monstrous guns and strange landscapes, the sinister “empty battlefield” of twentieth-century industrialised warfare, and in an unusually exaggerated form’. Indeed, the greater ease of filming behind the lines placed an undue emphasis on the dramatic scenes provided by heavy artillery firing at distant targets, a subject that followed a set routine, which could be filmed from different angles to make a more satisfying edited image. As Badsey has also noted, soldiers marching in high spirits to the front in the early part of the film were next seen ‘collapsing with pain at a dressing station or fatigue at a rest camp’.1 Cinema had created a series of visual clichés, to which audiences became accustomed through constant repetition. War had become shapeless, and individuals helpless, in a mythic version of the conflict that the images fashioned and perpetuated.

  Already by 1914, there were over 4,500 cinemas in Britain, with an estimated weekly audience of 7 million, legislation in 1909 having demanded separate projection rooms and encouraged purpose-built buildings to replace the earlier bioscope tents and ‘penny gaffs’. Tickets were cheaper than for theatres or music halls, and cinema was already the most popular form of entertainment for the working class. There were more than 12,000 cinemas in the United States. The first motion pictures at the birth of cinema had consisted of simple films of ordinary people undertaking unstaged everyday activities. William Friese-Greene's first films in 1889 were of Londoners strolling in Hyde Park on a Sunday morning. On the continent, the Lumière brothers filmed German and Austrian cavalry exercises in 1896. In Britain, Bert Acres filmed the Boat Race in March 1895 and the Derby in June 1896. The latter was shown on the following night at the Alhambra theatre in London's Leicester Square, and Acres's collaborator, Robert Paul, began regular weekly programmes at the Alhambra. A number of companies such as the Biograph Company in Britain began producing so-called ‘topicals’ and, in 1910, two French newsreel companies, Pathé and Gaumont, began operations throughout much of Europe and the United States. Clearly, the cinema had enormous potential as a news medium although newsreels reached individual cinemas at different times, the smaller provincial towns coming well behind the larger towns in terms of the distribution cycle.

  The drama of war was always likely to be a winning formula. The problem with real war, however, was that it often occurred in inconvenient places. Early cameras were also immensely cumbersome, with lenses and film stock unsuitable for work in poor light conditions or at long range. Setting up a hand-cranked camera on its tripod in a war zone was hardly feasible and, in any case, the camera could only cope with a few hundred feet of film at a time, which was little more than a few minutes’ screen time. Faking events for the camera was not uncommon. In 1898 the French film-maker, Francis Doublier, faked an entire film of the French officer, Alfred Dreyfus, supposedly being tried for treason, transported to Devil's Island and imprisoned there. Doublier cobbled together his film from a scene of a French army parade, a Paris street scene, a Finnish tug going out to meet a barge, and a shot of the Nile delta. Another Frenchman, Georges Méliès, made several fake newsreels, including one of the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902 shot long before the actual event, which was delayed by several months because of the king's illness.

  James Williamson's Attack on a Chinese Mission Station in 1898, supposedly an episode in the ongoing Boxer Rebellion, was shot in his own backyard, while the Edison Company filmed Capture of a Boer Battery by the British in 1900 in New Jersey. In 1904 the Biograph Company shot Battle of the Yalu, supposedly about the Russo-Japanese War, on Long Island after a snowstorm. Some early film-makers, however, did journey to war zones. In the case of the Spanish-American War in 1898, a film was shot of the charge of Theodore Roosevelt's ‘Rough Riders’ up San Juan Hill in Cuba, but it was too distant to make out much and looked more like a slow walk. In the case of the South African War, William Dickson of the British Biograph Company was one of several cameramen who went out in 1899. He took a new experimental telephoto lens, but it proved inadequate to the dust and haze. As Dickson reported, it was difficult to cover action due to ‘the enormous bulk of our apparatus which had to be dragged about in a Cape cart with two horses’.2 Dickson staged scenes for the camera, but only actually faked the raising of the British flag over Pretoria when he arrived too late to capture it in person. The films were immensely popular, those produced by one of Dickson's rivals, the American-born Charles Urban, giving the Warwick Trading Company a 52 per cent increase in its profits in the first six months of 1900.

  Those companies without representation in South Africa simply faked action scenes, mostly on Clapham Common. A trade journal cautioned in January 1900 that common sense should preva
il when viewing an apparent hand-to-hand encounter between British soldiers and Boers. Thus, ‘when one sees gentlemen with tall hats, accompanied by ladies, apparently looking on, common sense would at once pronounce the film of the sham order’.3 In January 1914, Hollywood's Mutual Film Corporation signed a contract with the Mexican revolutionary Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa for $25,000, permitting them sole rights to film coverage of his campaigns. Villa agreed to fight as far as possible in the hours of daylight, to delay his attacks until the cameras were ready to roll and also to postpone executions from dawn until 0700 hours to take advantage of the better light. Any action that went on beyond dusk would be re-enacted at some convenient later time. Unfortunately, Villa never quite got the hang of movie making for, when asked to ride slowly past the cameras, he persisted in galloping. Consequently, little of the footage was of any use.

  When war broke out in Europe, it was not inevitable that thoughts would turn to utilising this infant medium for propaganda, for it was damned, as one War Office memorandum remarked, as an ‘instrument for the amusement of the masses’.4 When it was first suggested that the cinema could be employed for propaganda, the Secretary of the Board of Film Censors remarked, ‘What, has the country come to this?’5 There was recognition, however, that the maintenance of national morale was crucial. While liberal democracies like Britain entered the war with greater legitimacy in the eyes of their population than more coercive political systems, much still depended on astute manipulation of public opinion by political leaderships. Initially, there was more than sufficient support for the war, the appeal to patriotic nationalism being reinforced by the shared values, and political and cultural symbols and rituals, that underpinned the concept of nation and state. The national and provincial press were overwhelmingly hostile to Germany, and the general tendency of a patriotic press to play the game with respect to domestic news consumption meant that most British government propaganda was actually targeted at opinion overseas. The Germans themselves did much to make the work of British propagandists easier. Naturally, German atrocities in France and Belgium were heavily featured. On 12 October 1915 the Germans executed the British nurse Edith Cavell for helping allied servicemen to escape from Belgium to the Netherlands. On 27 July 1916 they executed Captain Charles Fryatt of the British steamer Brussels for having previously outrun one U-boat and attempting to ram another attacking his vessel. The issue by a German firm of a medal commemorating the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, intended as a satirical comment on British hypocrisy in allegedly carrying munitions on a liner, was equally turned against the Germans.

  It is easy to exaggerate the impact of wartime propaganda, though most governments clearly believed it to be effective. As the war continued and casualties mounted, governments were increasingly concerned to maintain the national will to win. The targets of this more coordinated effort, which was often concentrated on the projection of war aims, were primarily domestic opponents of the war such as pacifists and socialists. Generally, the state sought to project ideals of duty, sacrifice and solidarity within the civilian population while, at the same time, dealing with perceived injustices undermining civilian resolve such as war profiteering and ‘shirking’. Propaganda embraced the efforts of both official and unofficial groups and organisations, including churches and schools. It extended into virtually all aspects of ordinary life, including popular leisure, be it music hall, gramophone records, and even children's board games. It also capitalised on the thirst for war news, and for entertainment.

  Though frivolity made many uncomfortable, and theatres trod a careful path, escapism had much to do with the determination to maintain leisure pursuits, and with the popularity of plays, concerts, musical revues and films. The weekly cinema audience increased dramatically to an estimated 21 million by 1917, embracing both middle- and upper-class audiences for the first time, though the imposition of new taxes upon places of entertainment in May 1916 had some effect. The additional halfpenny on cinema tickets up to 2d, and 1d on seats up to 6d, pushed the wealthier patrons into cheaper seats, pricing out many working-class patrons. The tax also closed about a thousand cinemas. Only a small proportion of the total films produced in wartime Britain, amounting perhaps to no more than 10 per cent, dealt directly with wartime themes. As elsewhere in Europe, escapism and entertainment were the order of the day: the German authorities classed such products as Schundfilme (trash films). In 1915 the National Union of Women Workers undertook a survey of London cinemas for the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police due to fears that indecency was taking place in darkened auditoriums. While commenting mainly on lighting conditions, many of these impeccably middle-class ladies also remarked on the films being shown. Visiting the cinema at 53 The Strand, a Miss Hicks noted ‘a hopelessly silly and vulgar American performance’.6 Many of her colleagues especially disliked Charlie Chaplin's comedies, but Chaplin was altogether the greatest attraction at British wartime cinemas. His comedy, Shoulder Arms, opening just two weeks before the armistice in 1918, was immensely popular despite the risks involved in cinema going from the influenza pandemic, which led to widespread cinema closures.

  The mobilisation of the cinema was the work of Charles Masterman's War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House in London's Buckingham Gate, which had already turned to the talents of prominent writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells. Similarly, Wellington House moved towards sponsoring official war artists, the first of whom was Muirhead Bone, a Scottish landscape artist, in July 1916. Technically, Masterman was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, but upon appointment to the Cabinet in February 1914 he had lost by twenty-four votes the by-election still then customary for those accepting government office. Failing to find another seat, he was to resign from the Cabinet in February 1915. Previously Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Masterman had also played a prominent role in the introduction of national insurance in 1911 and remained chairman of the National Health Insurance Commission, whose headquarters happened to be Wellington House. A Christian Socialist rather than a Liberal, Masterman was characterised by his own more forceful wife, Lucy Lyttleton, as a ‘vivid, tormented man’.7 Largely unfulfilled, he died from a combination of excessive alcohol and other ailments in 1927. There is no doubt, however, that his wartime work was invaluable.

  Masterman perceived that it was precisely the cinema's appeal for the working class that made it so valuable. He was increasingly frustrated at the lack of photographs or film to use in attempts to influence British and neutral, especially American, public opinion. A number of film companies had attempted to get cameramen out to the Western Front in August 1914. F.W. Engholm of the Topical Film Company reached Belgium and managed to make eleven newsreels up to the fall of Antwerp to the Germans in October 1914. However, Kitchener, who had enjoyed a poor relationship with the press in his campaigns in the Sudan and South Africa, ordered all newsmen and photographers expelled from the Western Front in September 1914. The War Office even wanted to ban the export of any newsreel from Britain during the war on grounds of security. The French by contrast permitted filming at least in rear areas from May 1915 onwards, while the Germans had established a special film unit at the start. A suitably edited version of a German war newsreel was shown at the Scala cinema in London's Fitzroy Square in May 1916 in the absence of any British material.

  Sir John French, however, believed that film could be a useful recruiting tool, and his GHQ Intelligence Section also wanted to give some publicity to the Indian Corps in view of fears of potential revolutionary subversion in India. Accordingly, a Canadian-born commercial travel photographer, who had covered both the Boxer Rebellion and the Russo-Japanese War, Hilton DeWitt Girdwood, was tasked in May 1915 with filming Indian troops in France. Girdwood, who hoped to turn a decent commercial profit from the resulting film, was in France between 22 July and 10 September 1915. He was frequently frustrated, however, by opposition from Sir Douglas H
aig, in whose First Army the Indians were serving. Eventually, Girdwood managed to film in the front line under fire, though two ‘attacks’ he filmed were staged for him in rear areas. About 4,000 feet of film proved useable, but contractual problems meant that With the Empire's Fighters was not premiered until 11 September 1916, by which time The Battle of the Somme had stolen all the limelight. Though Girdwood was the first official cameraman in France, only provincial audiences saw his film, and it has been all but forgotten.

  The problem Girdwood encountered was that Masterman had pressed ahead with his own scheme to get cameramen to France. The main press agencies would not cooperate with the restrictive conditions laid down by the War Office for any relaxation of the prohibition, so Masterman turned to the cinema newsreel firms. These had established a consortium known as the Topical Committee of the Kinematograph Manufacturers’ Association in March 1915. The Topical Committee had already been in contact with the Permanent Secretary at the War Office, Sir Reginald Brade, and it would appear that the Army Council agreed to establish an official film unit sometime between March and July 1915. This would be paid for by the Topical Committee, but act under the direction of GHQ's Press Section, which provided news for the press. The War Office would retain censorship rights, and provide the captions for films produced, retaining copyright and taking a penny royalty out of the hiring charge to cinemas of 41/2d per foot. In August, Distin Maddick, the proprietor of the Scala, was appointed Director of Kinema Operations to oversee filming in France. In deference to Girdwood, the contract finally signed between the War Office and the Topical Committee in October 1915 excluded the latter from marketing films in Egypt or India. Equally Girdwood was prevented from marketing his film in Britain, and it was only in May 1916 that he reached an agreement by which he could lecture and tour with just one print of his film in Britain.