Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Asquith knew most of the French were concentrated near their eastern frontier, and envisaged the Germans bypassing them and getting to Lille, Dunkirk and the sea. The military situation confirmed Kitchener’s view, already outlined to his cabinet colleagues, of the need for an extra 600,000 or 700,000 men under arms by April 1915. Thus far, having asked for 100,000 men he had got 120,000. ‘He is not at all downcast,’ Asquith told Miss Stanley. ‘Nor am I.’142 But reliance on volunteers doing their patriotic duty was not enough for Churchill. At a cabinet on 25 August, he raised ‘the necessity of compulsory service’, something anathematical to most Liberals.143 According to Joseph Pease, the president of the Board of Education, Churchill ‘harangued’ colleagues for half an hour. Although such a step was unthinkable to most ministers, Kitchener agreed the need might arise; but admitted he could not arm more men until April. That should have alerted the cabinet to the poor rate of weapons production, about which, when a scandal broke on the matter in the spring of 1915, it would profess to be shocked.

  The BEF’s retreat from Mons and the French army’s debacle there highlighted not only a need for more men, but also the certainty of a casualty rate unprecedented in the public’s experience of conflicts involving Britain. General Sir John Cowans, the Quartermaster General, who lunched with the Asquiths on 24 August as the bad news was coming in, thought the BEF might have lost 6,000 men all told killed, wounded and taken prisoner, and observed, to Mrs Asquith’s horror, ‘if so, it’s very good.’144 When she asked how such losses could be regarded as ‘good’, he told her: ‘The losses, my dear Mrs Asquith, will be tremendous in this war.’

  The government then had to address the problem of how to convey the news of casualties to the public without wrecking morale, and without exposing the blunders that had caused the defeat. On the second day of hostilities Asquith went into the Council of War having just heard that the cruiser Amphion, which the previous day had sunk the Königin Luise after catching it laying mines off Harwich and Southwold, had itself been sunk by one of the mines. Seventeen officers, including the captain, and 143 men were saved: but the list of 148 petty officers and seamen who died that appeared five days later was the first of a stream over the next four years, and one of the shorter ones. Churchill told the Commons that the government was not ‘alarmed or disconcerted’: but that this method of warfare needed to be ‘attentively considered by the nations of a civilised world’.145

  Churchill also attacked the press for whipping up rumours. Newspapers had taken a self-denying ordinance in the national interest, but little was told to them anyway. In vain, war correspondents waited at home for an order to move, but after a month they learned they could not go (that would change the following spring). Some went unofficially, though risked arrest by the French authorities if caught. Churchill (a former war correspondent himself) claimed that because censorship restricted them from knowing what exactly was happening ‘newspapers, in default of facts, are rather inclined to fill up their columns with gossip which reaches them from irresponsible quarters along the coast.’146 His remarks would increase tensions with Fleet Street and make things uncomfortable for colleagues, and for himself.

  A special edition of the Daily Mail on 8 August published a story about a great naval battle off Holland that a Unionist MP – the future home secretary, William Joynson-Hicks – said ‘appears to be absolutely untrue in every detail’: Joynson-Hicks urged the government ‘to stop such infamous conduct’.147 McKenna, as home secretary, confirmed that the story was fiction and urged the House to join him ‘in an expression of condemnation in the strongest terms of the fabrication of false news’. He speculated this might have been ‘wilfully done for the purpose of assisting the circulation of a newspaper.’

  This could not continue, and so the Liberal government imposed the latest of the illiberal measures necessitated by the national emergency, and instituted a press bureau. It opened shop in a disused Admiralty building at Charing Cross, under the command of the First Lord’s crony F. E. Smith, the Unionist MP, lawyer and rabble-rouser for Carson. Smith, one of the highest-paid barristers in England and with a lifestyle to match, was anxious that he would suffer financially: his friend Aitken guaranteed his bank account for an overdraft up to £7,000.148 The bureau was staffed by naval and Army officers. At a time when the Navy was on battle stations but the BEF had yet to reach the front, McKenna trusted no newspaper would publish anything about naval activities that had not been approved by the bureau. The stricture would also extend to the Army’s activities. To keep the people as informed as national security permitted, in the era before broadcasting, it was arranged to display press bureau bulletins at every post office, updated every Sunday. Like so much of importance during the war, the regulation of censorship developed ad hoc, rather than according to any great government plan. The Revd Andrew Clark, rector of Great Leighs in Essex, who kept an exhaustive diary of life throughout the war, called the bulletins ‘extremely meagre’.149 The squire of his village told him on 9 August that the BEF was being assembled – information gained from his son, a captain in the Coldstream Guards – so he at least was not entirely in the dark. In most towns and villages, since few had reliable information, rumours of varying degrees of absurdity abounded.

  Ministers quickly realised the need to use propaganda to maintain morale and confuse the enemy, and the idea of a press bureau was central to this. Smith, a captain in the Territorials, was given the rank of colonel, and therefore discharged the function of heading it with military authority. However, he did not do so especially well, partly because of an occasionally rash temperament – especially after he had started on his formidable daily intake of alcohol – and partly because the bureau was understaffed. He soon ran into trouble. On 30 August a special Sunday edition of The Times and another Northcliffe paper, the Weekly Dispatch, published unedifying and graphic accounts of the retreat from Mons from someone claiming to be in Amiens, with suggestions of an army overwhelmed, mildly chaotic and in headlong retreat and, above all, sustaining heavy casualties. H. A. Gwynne, editor of the Morning Post, told Lady Bathurst, his proprietrix, that he thought The Times had ‘behaved abominably’ in printing the reports.150 ‘It is no excuse for them that the censor passed it,’ he added. ‘Every Editor must be his own censor in these days when there is no law’. Gwynne was reluctant even to print casualty lists in case they sabotaged morale, and believed that ‘the very existence of Northcliffe in a time like this is to my mind a great national danger’.151 Before long Northcliffe would be described, without irony, as ‘the most powerful man in the country’.152

  The Commons held Smith to account on 31 August, after he had been attacked not just by MPs but by editors such as Gwynne, who had shown more restraint. Asquith upset Northcliffe by saying that although ‘it is impossible too highly to commend the patriotic reticence of the press as a whole’, this particular publication was ‘a very regrettable exception.’153 He said the public deserved better information, and would get it. The Times defended itself: the dispatch was ‘from the pen of an experienced and trustworthy correspondent … not in the least likely to be deceived by idle rumours.’154 The censor had seen it, and added ‘embellishments’. The newspaper had come, ‘not unnaturally, to the conclusion that it was the wish of the government that it should appear.’

  It quickly became clear that Smith had souped the story up to encourage recruitment. The attack on his conduct was led by a Liberal MP, Sir Arthur Markham, who objected not only to his work but to the fact that Smith had appointed his brother Harold, also an MP, as secretary of the bureau. Markham had had complaints from newspaper editors that Smith frère ‘acts more like one of the Kaiser’s staff officers in his dealings with the press’.155 He demanded the work of the censor be put under a member of the cabinet. Asquith said that, given the amount of work that had fallen on the shoulders of all his colleagues in taking through emergency legislation, he was loath to impose any more on them. Harry Lawson, a Liberal Union
ist MP whose family owned The Daily Telegraph, made a point relevant to all accounts of war: that while the testimonies of individual soldiers may have been truthful and accurate, they only saw a small section of the action. It was the overall picture, obtained from his commanders by French and relayed to London, that was nearer the exact truth.

  The censor defended himself: he had never sought the post, and its duties had been ‘very arduous’.156 He and his staff were learning on the job; and the latest amendment to DORA would punish those using information gained in areas of military sensitivity to cause ‘alarm or disaffection’, which would make editors think twice before publishing a damaging story.157 He made a robust defence of his brother, his staff, and – being a good Tory – of the Northcliffe press. Esher noted laconically that ‘FE Smith was remonstrated with for having allowed the publication of the telegram [the dispatch from Amiens], but he said that he thought it would do the country good. This was not Lord Kitchener’s opinion.’158

  Smith misled the House, saying that he should have written a covering note when he returned the censored story advising against publication. In fact, he did attach a covering note, but it said he was ‘sorry’ for having to censor ‘this most able and interesting message’, and urged the paper ‘to use the parts of the article which I have passed to enforce the lesson – reinforcements and reinforcements at once.’159 In September McKenna assumed responsibility for the bureau. Smith resigned as director a fortnight later, and tried and failed to go to France with his territorial regiment, the Oxfordshire Hussars. Then he was sent to Marseille to meet the Indian troops, charged with writing dispatches about their deeds and heroism that could be sent back to India. His remarkable war had, however, barely started.

  The Times was unrepentant. If the story was accurate the censor was right to let it be published, and if it was not the censor made an error of judgement: ‘In either event our hands are clean.’160 Churchill was sent to rebuke Northcliffe, but Northcliffe told him that ‘when it [the story] was not merely passed, but carefully edited, and accompanied by a definite appeal to publish it, there was no other possible conclusion except that this was the government’s definite wish.’161 Churchill berated him for the ‘harm’ done by allowing the publication of the story in The Times, and said: ‘I do not think you can possibly shelter yourself behind the Press Bureau, although their mistake was obvious.’ Northcliffe (who told Churchill that ‘this is not a time for Englishmen to quarrel’) stood his ground – the story had been ‘not merely passed, but carefully edited, and accompanied by a definite appeal to publish it’, so he had concluded it was the government’s ‘deliberate wish’ to see it printed.162 By now the newspapers, notably Northcliffe’s Daily Mail, were thick with stories, and photographs, of German atrocities, which helped harden public opinion.

  To allay press and public concerns about concealment, the government decided to send an official ‘eye-witness’, Major Ernest Swinton, to the front, to send back approved reports to the British press, a role he discharged until July 1915: he later became Chichele Professor of Military History at Oxford. Although his reporting was even-handed, the press found it inadequate, and stepped up their campaign to be allowed to send reporters. That would not happen until May 1915, and even then everything would be censored under DORA. In lieu of facts, the rumour factory stepped up its operations, its rumours condoned by the government if they increased admiration of Tommy Atkins and loathing of the Hun; if news such as that of the retreat from Mons was going to get out it had to be countered, and the government needed to take the offensive. Thus came stories such as the Angel of Mons, babies on bayonets, raped nuns, and a million Russian troops landing at Aberdeen for the Western Front, a collection of myths and lies containing occasional truths. Not everything was quite so sensational or so vaguely sourced. Asquith had spoken to a wounded soldier from Mons who claimed to have witnessed the Germans advancing behind a group of Belgian civilians being used as what a later generation would term ‘human shields’. Another version had it that the civilians were schoolgirls.

  The government’s obsession with secrecy reflects how febrile public opinion was deemed to be, and why little was reported of the heavy casualties in the BEF around Ypres. Some regiments were left with only a handful of those officers and men who had been mobilised in early August. The 2nd Highland Light Infantry, for instance, had just thirty soldiers left out of a thousand. Then a dreadnought, HMS Audacious, on gunnery exercise with the Grand Fleet, hit a German mine off County Donegal on 27 October, just as Prince Louis of Battenberg was preparing his resignation as First Sea Lord, and sank with, luckily, no loss of life. Jellicoe asked that the loss of one of the Navy’s most powerful ships be kept secret: Asquith and Churchill agreed, though rumours soon abounded, partly because the sinking had been witnessed by passengers on the RMS Olympic, sister ship of the Titanic, which had tried to tow Audacious into port. The British press, despite protests, published nothing until the Admiralty announcement, three days after the Armistice, that the ship had gone down. A country used to a free flow of information found the restrictions on news hard to understand, especially where its broadcast could not assist the enemy. On 11 November, the morning of the King’s Speech, HMS Niger had been sunk by a torpedo, and Fleet Street had known within hours: but it was not confirmed until after the next morning’s newspapers had gone to bed, incomprehensible to a number of MPs who could see no benefit in delaying it by one day.

  After the Dogger Bank action on 24 January 1915, when damage inflicted on Vice Admiral Sir David Beatty’s flagship in an otherwise successful action was hushed up, Asquith complained to Miss Stanley that such secrecy was ‘quite puerile … it is not the least likely to deceive the Germans, who no doubt know perfectly well that they hit and injured the Lion, and when the truth comes out people here will say with justice that they have been treated with lack of candour.’163 The Admiralty admitted the damage to Lion in a terse communiqué three days later. However, it would be years before the realities of life and death on the Western Front came anywhere near a British newspaper’s readers.

  The military situation continued to deteriorate as the Germans headed towards Paris, crashing through the champagne towns of Reims and Épernay. Newspapers published maps showing the Germans crossing into France and, as a measure of how serious matters were, diagrams of the forts surrounding the capital, and news that Lille and Amiens were being evacuated. This avalanche of bad news was compounded on 2 September by the first casualty list from the Western Front, showing 188 officers and 4,939 men killed, wounded or missing.

  Appropriately, a Times editorial calling upon the British to assert the superiority of their civilisation over the barbarous Hun shared a page with a poem by Laurence Binyon, a keeper in the printed books department of the British Museum. His reputation as a poet was sufficient that he had, in 1913, been considered for the laureateship that went, instead, to Bridges. Written in response to the first wave of heavy casualties, and entitled ‘For the Fallen’, it would enter the national consciousness, notably for its quatrain:

  They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.

  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

  At the going down of the sun and in the morning

  We will remember them.164

  Asquith heard on 2 September that the Russians were being held back in East Prussia by the Germans: the expectation of the Tsar’s army crushing all who came before it had proved as unrealistic as the impregnability of Belgian defences. This was the Battle of Tannenberg, and matters were even worse than London realised. Paul von Hindenburg’s 8th Army destroyed the Russian 2nd Army, inflicting 30,000 dead and missing and 40,000 wounded, and taking 92,000 prisoners and around 500 heavy artillery pieces: it would then smash the 1st Army, rendering the Russians largely impotent for months. However, news soon arrived about the Austrian defeat at Lemberg, where the Russians inflicted 324,000 casualties and took 100,000 prisoners, breaking the back of the Austro-Hu
ngarian army.

  There was worse news from the Western Front. The weekly bulletin in post offices issued in the name of Sir John French on 6 September mentioned 15,000 dead, wounded or missing in the first actions of the war, and stated the BEF was now south of the Marne. Reims had fallen and Paris was in German sights. The government delayed the publication of lists until next of kin had been informed: but this release of news confirmed the cost of fighting, and caused a wave of concern about the superiority of the German army. On 8 September Asquith read a telegram from the British mission in Bucharest saying the Kaiser had told the King of Romania that ‘the German troops in France will have crushed the Franco-British forces in 20 days … he will then leave 500,000 German troops in occupation of France and will “turn his attention” to Russia. Qui vivra verra.’165 As Belgian refugees arrived in Paris at the end of August, some Parisians began a spontaneous evacuation further south, with the government heading for Bordeaux. Otherwise, as in 1870, the city prepared for a long siege, as the Germans headed towards them through northern France, and the BEF was not yet able to stand its ground. The French were expecting the Germans to head for the sea, and Boulogne had braced itself: and the British government knew that once the Germans were there, they were but a short step from England. Worries about supplies of guns and ammunition were exacerbated when the Belgians asked for, and received, 20 million rounds to defend Antwerp. Neither Kitchener nor anyone else had predicted constant trench warfare with frequent barrages, rather than big intermittent battles: therefore no one had foreseen the heavy rate of consumption of ammunition. By the spring, this would have grave military and political consequences.