Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  The idea of glory – or having no idea what modern war was like – unquestionably shielded many civilians from the truth, and thus kept them from protesting about the enormity of the tactical disaster the Somme represented. The Rupert Brooke school of poetry and its associated values of sacrifice and purification were now relics: soon, works by Siegfried Sassoon and others would convey with undiluted force a reality Brooke could not have imagined. R. H. Tawney, who would after the war become a leading economic historian, used his convalescence from a wound that autumn to write two essays on his experiences on the Somme, including a description of the first day. Tawney perceived a barrier – he calls it a veil or ‘the dividing chasm’ – between those who had been at the front and those who had not; and was appalled by politicians who spoke about the country’s fighting spirit without ever understanding what that fighting actually entailed, in either physical or psychological terms.77

  To the public, helped by censored and self-censored accounts from the trenches, the war was still one of Brooke-style idealism, or of the ‘duty’, ‘glory’ and ‘honour’ on the pre-conscription recruitment posters. Mainly for commercial reasons, and also under government censorship, newspaper and magazine publishers produced daily papers and part-works that gave a heroic and rosy picture of the conflict. It was propaganda and not fact. Not until the scale of the slaughter became understood, later in 1916, did opinions start to change. It also helped Haig, and the cause of downplaying the scale of death for which he, through his tactical errors, had been responsible, that Northcliffe was devoted to him; a devotion Haig assiduously cultivated, and which kept the dogs of The Times and, more important for wider public perception, the Daily Mail off him.

  The non-combatant public were not entirely ignorant of how life was on the Western Front. The war differed from earlier conflicts because of how photographs and moving pictures could now convey an impression to those at home of what was going on. Kitchener’s attempt to ban photographers from the front had soon unravelled, and by 1916 images of destruction and desolation were familiar to readers of illustrated magazines and newspapers: however, even this further distanced the public from the realities, because the main condition under which photographers were permitted was that no British dead were depicted. What was presented was a sanitised picture of the war; and it was an inevitable step from allowing photography to allowing cinematography, and the government quickly realised the propaganda value of such an exercise. Two official cameramen with primitive, static cameras were sent to the front in the spring of 1916, and filed various items of newsreel footage. Masterman commissioned the film that would be entitled The Battle of the Somme as a morale-booster, and attached the cameramen to the 4th Army. For technical and censorship reasons no actual fighting was filmed – even had it been allowed and could the cameras have gone close enough, footage of men being mown down by machine guns would never have been permitted to be shown.

  However, the crew was allowed to film the more distantly positioned artillery, soldiers marching up to the trenches and men in the trenches preparing to attack; and German prisoners of war and some German dead. The War Office wrote captions for the footage; and the film, more than seventy minutes long, was shown to an audience of officials, ministers, journalists and senior staff officers in London on 10 August. It opened at thirty-four theatres in London on 21 August, at which ‘crowded audiences … were interested and thrilled to have the realities of war brought so vividly before them’, though it was noted that ‘women had sometimes to shut their eyes to escape for a moment from the tragedy of the toll of battle’.78 It has no narrative but is a collection of scenes, almost all authentic; its appeal lay in giving the public a sight of the world of their soldiers, into which they were never otherwise admitted. Its audiences exceeded those for the films of the great star of the silent screen, Charlie Chaplin, who himself – being a Briton of military age – came under criticism for not having returned from Hollywood to do his bit. An estimated 20 million had seen the film by the end of September.

  Lloyd George wrote a letter to be read out at the premiere (and shown on screen at all other performances) in which he described the film as ‘an epic of self-sacrifice and gallantry’.79 Men were exhorted to ‘herald the deeds of our brave men to the ends of the earth’; and women, widowed in their thousands in the preceding weeks, and whose support for the war effort was even more vital if doubt, questioning and possibly even defeatism were to be avoided, were told that ‘your hearts will beat, your voices will speak in honour and glory of the living and the dead.’80 The part the film played in staying public disquiet in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe of July 1916 is unquantifiable. It also raised £30,000 for military charities.

  There was some distaste at the spectacle, sanitised though it was by the avoidance of the sight of British dead, being promoted as a form of entertainment; but the King too urged that people should see it, and its general impression was positive. There is one scene – shown constantly in documentaries about the war over the succeeding century, in which men go over the top and one is seen to slide back down the parapet, killed or wounded, and one or two others fall when out in no man’s land. The set piece was the only one to be entirely staged, and was filmed well away from the front: the prohibition of showing actual British death remained. Film, though, became an important cultural feature of the war after the success of The Battle of the Somme. From the following year newsreels, under the auspices of the War Office Cinematograph Department, appeared in cinemas twice weekly, and Charlie Chaplin and his friends had their films interspersed with two-minute ‘shorts’ urging the public to conserve food and fuel and buy war stocks.

  Repington, writing after the war, said posterity would be amazed at how the public took such relentlessly heavy losses. He claimed that from the Marne onwards ‘the heroines who suffered in the glorious deaths of those whom they loved set a notable example of fortitude, and it was thanks to their early example that public opinion subsequently remained so steady.’81 Later in the war the public ‘displayed unexampled courage in hundreds and thousands of stricken homes … nothing could exceed the steadiness with which they took good and evil news alike, or the tenacity with which they set themselves to suffer anything rather than to lose the war.’82 He was close to the truth. It was not merely that the public had grown to accept a massive toll of dead and wounded. Fear and detestation of the Germans was sufficient to drive people to endure such losses. Also, they were helped by a lingering deference to authority – though the Great War would do more than perhaps anything else to undermine that, when it was finally recognised how cack-handed authority had often been – and a strong sense of community.

  In some parts of the kingdom that had endured enormous losses no amount of censorship could conceal the catastrophe, or prevent spontaneous public demonstrations of loss and grief. The sheer number of bereaved families in Ulster made obvious what the censor would not admit; on the first day of the Somme the 36th (Ulster) Division sustained 4,900 casualties, including 79 officers and 1,777 other ranks killed. On 12 July, the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, there was a graphic demonstration of collective grief in Belfast. ‘On the stroke of 12 all traffic came to a standstill, men raised their hats, ladies bowed their heads, the blinds in business and private houses were drawn, and flags were flown at half mast.’83 The silence lasted five minutes: after which bells tolled. The scale of the losses further explained the resentment – not just in Ulster – caused by the refusal of so many in the other three provinces to enlist, and the demands they made for the government to extend conscription to Ireland. In the east end of London, as in other towns and cities that sustained heavy losses, makeshift shrines of photographs and flowers appeared in churches. In streets and in villages women stood outside looking for the arrival of the postman. At Rugby school the headmaster ended his practice of reading out the names of casualties among old boys because of the depression it caused among his charges, some of them shortly to
start military training. The scale of the catastrophe Haig’s strategy had caused was undisguisable.

  The epic of death that the Somme caused drove many bereaved wives, mothers and fathers into the arms of spiritualists and mediums, most of whom appear to have been calculating charlatans, with a small minority genuinely believing they were talking to ‘the other side’. Public interest was stimulated not just by the ubiquity of deaths for which most were completely unprepared, but also by some prominent figures – such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes – associating themselves with the psychical movement. Ironically, Haig’s sister Henrietta was a convinced spiritualist, and she – and it seems to a limited extent he – believed during the war that the spirit of their brother George, dead since 1905, was guiding Haig.84 Spiritualism was also helped by an almost biblical idea of the apocalypse being unleashed on the suggestible and grief-stricken, creating a climate in which anything, however unreal, was possible. After Captain Malcolm Leckie, Doyle’s brother-in-law, had been killed at Mons in August 1914 – when an angelic host was said to have appeared above the trenches, but which existed only in fiction – Doyle, who had been interested in psychic phenomena since the 1880s and who in 1922 would proclaim the existence of fairies on the basis of a series of faked photographs, put his full heart and soul into the study.

  Although Doyle would also lose a brother and son to the war, neither had died when in 1916 he professed to the public for the first time his belief in spiritualism. He would later claim that his son Kingsley came through to him after his death in 1918, to congratulate his father for spreading the ‘Christ-like message’ of spiritualism, as well as his old friend W. T. Stead (who had gone down with the Titanic) and Cecil Rhodes. He would tour Britain and America after the war, lecturing on spiritualism to audiences desperate to resume contact with lost sons, brothers, husbands and fathers.85 Nor was Doyle, a qualified doctor, the only educated man drawn into the spiritualist obsession caused by the slaughter. Even more prominent was Sir Oliver Lodge, the physicist and pioneer of radio, who like Doyle had been investigating spiritualism since the 1880s. The two men were by 1916 old friends, having first met at Buckingham Palace in 1902 on the day they were knighted.

  In 1909 Lodge – whose practical achievements also included developing the spark plug and the loudspeaker – had published Survival of Man, in which he argued that mediums had proved the existence of life after death. This would become of central importance to him when his youngest son, Raymond, was killed near Ypres in September 1915. Eight days after learning of his death Lady Lodge visited a Mrs Osborne, a celebrated medium, who by table-tilting relayed the message: ‘tell father I have met some friends of his’.86 In subsequent seances with Mrs Osborne and other mediums the Lodges built up a comforting picture of Raymond’s life on ‘the other side’, in a place he called Summerland; but Lodge, who lacked Doyle’s thirst for publicity and desire to evangelise on behalf of spiritualism, did not immediately publish details, fearing mockery.

  When, in the darkest days of 1916, Lodge did publish his book, he received obloquy. Some were appalled that a man of his reputation should lend credence to the operations of charlatans; others pitied him; a few derided him or expressed outrage. One passage caused special opprobrium, in which Raymond said that men coming over to ‘the other side’ could, if they wanted, have cigars and whisky sodas. ‘Don’t think I’m stretching it when I tell you they can manufacture even that,’ the spirit supposedly said. ‘But when they have had one or two they don’t seem to want it so much.’87 Teetotallers and the anti-tobacco lobby joined many clergymen in denouncing the book, which was banned from at least one public library.

  Wells took a more rational view of bereavement in what became the war’s most popular novel, Mr Britling Sees it Through, published in September 1916 while the casualty list from the Somme was still lengthening. As in many of Wells’s novels, the eponymous hero is a thinly disguised autobiographical construct: he lives in a gracious house in north Essex, is a sort of public intellectual, and a philanderer. Unlike Wells, he has a son who is killed at the front. Although he is in no doubt that Germany is to blame for the war, it causes him to question not just the conflict (a young German friend is killed and he grieves for his family, something not hitherto characterising the public mood in Britain) but also the nature of religion; and he begins to feel a community of grief brought by the war, united not merely in loss but by a wish to end the fighting: another unpopular sentiment at the time.

  ‘And suddenly it was borne in upon his mind that he was not alone,’ Wells writes of Britling.88 ‘There were thousands and tens of thousands of men and women like himself, desiring with all their hearts to say, as he desired to say, the reconciling word.’ But then Wells, an atheist, continues: ‘He was no longer lonely and wretched, no longer in the same world with despair. God was beside him and within him and about him.’ Later, Wells has Britling write: ‘Life falls into place only with God. Only with God. God, who fights through men against Blind Force and Night and Non-Existence; who is the end, who is the meaning.’89 He is writing to the parents of his dead German friend and talks of ‘our sons who have shown us God …’ In a nation stunned by death, and the death of those with unfulfilled lives, it was no wonder Wells’s account of an Englishman coming to terms with the consequences of the horror had such resonance.

  IV

  Politicians and generals took very different views of the slaughter. Although Riddell told Lloyd George, when they met on 16 July – on the basis of what evidence it is not clear – ‘I think the nation is prepared for heavy losses,’ Lloyd George confided in him that ‘the casualties may shock the nation when they appreciate the small results.’90 Three days later Lloyd George lunched with Repington and told him he ‘did not see how we were going to win on the present lines.’91 The Somme sowed within Lloyd George the seeds of utter conviction that such warfare should never be tried again. Churchill sent a memorandum to the cabinet via Smith on 1 August in which he deprecated the offensive, believing that in the first two days 40,000 men were either killed, had died of wounds or were so severely wounded that they could never fight again. He estimated at 150,000 the totals lost for good to the end of July, half the effective men of thirty divisions. The greatest advance for this huge loss was three miles, and the ground obtained ‘utterly devoid of military significance’.92 Having just been in the trenches for six months, Churchill knew what he was talking about; but even though his memorandum was designed to prevent the Army being used in such a way again it was the politician in him, rather than the soldier, that realised what effect the truth would have on the public if it knew. Hankey believed Lloyd George had had an input into the memo.

  In France, Haig nevertheless continued to see the bright side of the hundreds of thousands of casualties – the British total on the Somme would be around 490,000: ‘Proof given to the world that Allies are capable of making and maintaining a vigorous offensive and of driving the enemy’s best troops from the strongest positions … Also impress on the world, England’s strength and determination, and the fighting power of the British race,’ he recorded in his diary.93 Esher had noted two days earlier, on 27 July: ‘Douglas is very calm and confident, and undisturbed by losses or criticism. We have lost about 150,000 men so far in this fight, but this is not more than the number upon which he calculated, and stated to the Cabinet, before the offensive commenced. He said he would require 200,000 drafts before the end of July.’94 When apprised of Churchill’s view, Haig observed that ‘I also expect Winston’s judgement is impaired from taking drugs.’95

  Robertson told Haig on 29 July that the cabinet was unconvinced by what he had told them, given how casualties were ‘mounting up’: ‘The powers that be are beginning to get a little uneasy … they will persist in asking whether I think a loss of say 300,000 men will lead to really great results …’96 Since the battle began Haig had stopped maintaining the war would be won in 1916; but he believed the German army would b
e exhausted before the British was, and – fortunately out of earshot of the bereaved public – said July’s losses were but ‘120,000 more than they would have been had we not attacked.’97

  Haig would not wind the offensive down, which was what doubters in Whitehall were now starting to suggest he should. However, his response to Robertson was read to the War Committee on 5 August and, according to the CIGS, ‘it pleased them very much indeed’. It would be circulated to the cabinet, not least to counter Churchill’s memorandum in which he had criticised Haig’s strategy.98 Robertson was asked to send Haig a note minuting the government’s ‘full support’ for his offensive.99 Meanwhile, conscious of the mounting numbers of dead, Esher wrote to Hankey on 3 August to ask: ‘Can you prevent people at home from fixing their eyes upon the Roll of Honour, and gluing their noses to the map?’100

  Esher’s parroting of the official line reflected his desire for opacity, not least as a means of protecting his friend Haig from criticism. When questions began to be asked in Parliament about the high casualties, the government, and some backbenchers, responded by deploring such enquiries, partly because of the information they might, if answered, give to the enemy, but also because of the effect the confirmation of the carnage might have on morale. Eventually, on 21 August, Henry Forster, financial secretary to the War Office, told colleagues Asquith had agreed that any MP might, ‘privately and confidentially’, be given the true figures; but even that level of disclosure was subject to considerations of ‘military expediency’.101 This remained the line for some time.