The British military took the word camouflage from the French painters, and then British painters helped their own military to enact the idea. Foremost among them was Solomon J. Solomon, the portly Royal Academician whom we last saw spreading coloured muslin sheets over the shrubbery of his mother-in-law’s garden at the outbreak of war. Solomon got a persistent bee in his bonnet about the subject and became indefatigable in proselytising for it.
Solomon Joseph Solomon was born in the Paragon, an elegant part of Blackheath, south London, on 16 September 1860, fifth of the twelve children of Joseph Solomon and his cultured wife Helena Lichtenstadt from Prague. He was a lively and brilliant boy who believed in numerology: his luck apparently ran in sixes. Solomon’s great-grandfather had been a silversmith in Amsterdam and they were a respected Anglo-Jewish family who went to the synagogue but were only moderately orthodox. Because of the second commandment prohibiting ‘graven images’, it was not usual at that time for a Jew to become a painter by vocation, but at 17, Solomon was enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools in the basement of Burlington House. Among his teachers, John Everett Millais was particularly kind to him. There had only ever been one Jewish Royal Academician: Solomon Hart of Plymouth, elected in 1840. But Solomon was determined to be another. And why not, if he were good enough? After all, Benjamin Disraeli was Jewish-born, and he had risen to become Prime Minister, twice. Being Anglo-Jewish meant putting the emphasis on the ‘Anglo’, not being incongruous. Integration was a kind of social camouflage.*
After travelling through Europe and to Tangier, studying and looking at pictures, S. J. Solomon started painting noble and romantic works of art himself, first making his name in 1887 with the dramatic painting Samson (now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) which depicts a wild-eyed muscle man being restrained by brawny Philistines as semi-naked Delilah brandishes his chopped-off hair. Solomon J. Solomon’s obituary in The Times said that his work in this vein ‘suffered from the two tendencies, the sensational and the sentimental’. His obituarist thought portrait painting was his real gift, because of Solomon’s ‘wide knowledge of humanity’.
He was certainly jovial and clubbable. A stalwart of the convivial Savage Club, he was also a member of the New English Art Club, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the Art-Workers’ Guild and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and later became President of the Royal Society of British Artists, saying: ‘I feel I ought to accept because I am a Jew.’ He was a good singer and dancer, a canoeist and an avid horseman.
A convinced Zionist, he was the first president of the Order of Maccabeans, an association of English Jewish professional men, as well as a member of the Jewish Territorial Organization, which was dedicated to finding a homeland for the Jewish people after the first scheme to settle them in Uganda had failed. And yet Solomon embraced Englishness. In 1906, one of his lucky years with a six in it, the artistic establishment of the Royal Academy elected him Academician. Solomon was ‘R. A.’ d in all his glory’ after painting a picture of England’s national saint, St George.
Approaching his fifty-fourth birthday at the time WW1 broke out, Solomon was a well-established and ambitious painter beginning to get portrait commissions from the rich and powerful, and from large institutions like the Houses of Parliament. He had recently been to Buckingham Palace in July 1914 to paint oil-on-panel preliminary portraits of King George V, Queen Mary and Edward, Duke of Windsor for a huge canvas depicting the 1910 Coronation Luncheon held at the Guildhall.
When war broke out, Solomon signed up as a private soldier in one of the first volunteer corps for home defence, formed from older men in the arts world who could not join the Regulars or the Territorials. The United Arts Rifles had the playwright Sir Arthur Pinero as their chairman and were nicknamed ‘The Unshrinkables’ from the white jerseys that were their first drill uniforms. Solomon designed their badge, a dove flaring on to a sabre (which the irreverent dubbed ‘the duck and skewer’), and got them permission to drill in the courtyard at Burlington House in Piccadilly, as well as the right to use half of the galleries at the Royal Academy. The refreshment room doubled as the United Arts Rifles’ mess and the store for their elderly Japanese rifles, although they were forbidden to leave ammunition on site.
Solomon first staked a public claim to the as-yet-unnamed field of camouflage by the very English expedient of writing a pompous letter to The Times. It appeared on Wednesday, 27 January 1915, under the headline ‘Uniform and colour’:
Sir, – The protection afforded animate creatures by Nature’s gift of colour assimilation to their environment might provide a lesson to those who equip an army; seeing that invisibility is an essential in modern strategy. To be invisible to the enemy is to be non-existent for him. Our attempts in this direction might well be a little more scientific. A knowledge of light and shade and its effect on the landscape is a necessary aid to the imagination of a designer of the uniform in particular, and the appurtenances of war in general.
Solomon had clearly read Abbott Thayer on counter-shading because his letter criticises the sameness of uniforms: ‘ … the khaki tunic is good in summer – in winter it is too yellow – but the same colour cloth clads the whole man. Here a knowledge of light and shade comes in.’
Solomon suggested darkening soldiers’ caps and shoulders and lightening their trousers and gaiters, and questioned why uniforms had to be so uniform. If in each section the colour of the tunic or coat varied between the excellent winter blue of the Guards’ greatcoat, a grey-green, and the present khaki, a broken effect of colouring would be obtained with advantage. He warned of the danger of shape and shadow: ‘The cap now worn detaches the men in this way from almost any setting and affords a most excellent target for the enemy marksman.’
He suggested new forms of colour assimilation:
The artillery officer is covering his gun with grey tarpaulin, but with a team of six or eight horses in front of it, the airman is not likely to mistake it for a butcher’s cart. The horses have merely to be covered with a thin grey-green stuff to make them equally inconspicuous. Wagons are a leaden grey, unlike anything in nature; a warm dust colour would be more harmonious. A similar observation applies to warships. The North Sea is almost invariably a pearly green, and experiments with models should evolve something more subtle than their metallic hue.
He ended by proposing that painters and artists, ‘the makers of the arts of peace’, could be useful to ‘the designers of the munitions of war’.
From the earliest days of organised human fighting, elaborate headdresses, shiny armour and shields, garish warpaint and costumes were designed to alarm the enemy, like the threat displays of other nonhuman animals. The advance to close quarters of massed units – Roman legionaries in testudo (tortoise) formation, covering themselves in a hard shell of shields, or deep-singing, shield-clashing Zulu impis or British heavy infantry in red coats and bearskin busbies – was intended to strike fear into enemies or panic them into running away. According to Philip Mansel’s book Dressed to Rule, military uniforms spread through Europe between 1650 and 1720, designed, among other things, to instil
discipline, courage and esprit de corps … to impress spectators… to inspire fear in the enemy; and, as innumerable recruiting posters show, to attract young men to enlist.
It was the development of accurate guns that did most to cause exuberant brightly coloured uniforms to give way to the familiar drab tones of the modern soldier. In the late eighteenth century special forward units of scouts, skirmishers and sharpshooters like the American Rangers, the German Jägerbataillon and the British Rifle Corps had already begun to wear some kind of green to maximise their cover. Guns, ‘glorious products of science’, stirred life in remote places from traditional torpor, according to Winston Churchill in My Early Life:
The convenience of the breech-loading, and still more of the magazine, rifle was nowhere more appreciated than in the Indian highlands. A weapon which could kill with accuracy at fifteen hundred yar
ds opened a whole new vista of delights to every family or clan which could acquire it. One could actually remain in one’s own house and fire at one’s neighbour nearly a mile away. One could lie in wait on some high crag, and at hitherto unheard-of ranges hit a horseman far below.
When the British soldier’s white helmet or pipeclay belt became the target of native musketry, ‘Tommy Atkins’ began to stain his accoutrements with chai or tea. Khaki first appeared in the Indian Army and the word is derived from khak, the Urdu and Persian word for ‘dust-coloured’. Harry Lumsden’s famous Corps of Guides, one of the irregular Indian forces raised by the British in the Punjab in 1846 and used for scouting and intelligence gathering, was the first unit to wear khaki-coloured uniforms, though during the hot-weather fighting in India in 1857 many British soldiers began to dye their summer-wear unlined white cotton tunics and trousers with tea, earth and curry powder.
The Indian Mutiny was a key stage in the transformation of European field uniforms from symbolic display to aids to concealment. By 1885 stout twilled cotton khaki drill was universal in the Indian Army and the British Army in India, and in 1896 sandy brown khaki (both in cotton and serge) was approved for British Army foreign service outside Europe. The South African War of 1899–1902 against the Boers, whose own homespun clothing was coloured like the land they fought over, permanently convinced the British that bright pillar-box red was best kept for the parade ground. Muddy field-manoeuvres needed dingier or dungier battledress, though they never got the colours quite right: Kipling described the colour of British WW1 khaki as ‘gassed grass’. After colonial wars in Cuba and the Philippines, the US army similarly adopted khaki in 1902, as did the Japanese fighting the Russians in Manchuria in 1905. The entire Imperial German army turned over to feldgrau, field grey, in 1910. Their Tuch or cloth mixed grey, blue and green fibres.
Solomon took an interest not just in colours for clothing, for in the early days of the war he was carrying on his experiments with screens of dyed muslin and bamboo poles to cover trenches, according to his undated diary:
I sent some of these screens, with drawings, to the War Office – they caught on, and I was asked to make fifty yards of them at Woolwich Dockyard, where materials would be found me as well as a little assistance in preparing them …
Fifty yards of trenches were accordingly dug, and in the presence of large group of officers, including generals, Solomon fixed the screens over one section. An airman was detailed to fly over the scene, and reported he could see the uncovered trenches, but not the one that Solomon had camouflaged. According to Solomon, the officers present were enthusiastic, and his drawings of covered trenches were sent to France. At this stage, the commander-in-chief, Sir John French, turned down Solomon’s ideas. But his time would come.
* When Sir Samuel Montagu, a patron of the arts and benefactor of the Jewish community, received a letter signed ‘S. Solomon’ asking for his help because the writer was in some distress, he hurried to help the young student. He was received, however, by Simeon Solomon, not young Solomon Solomon. Simeon was a superb pre-Raphaelite artist but he was also a gay man who had been arrested in a public lavatory in 1873 and charged with committing buggery, and finally died as an alcoholic indigent in St Giles’s workhouse. After this visit, Montagu sharply advised Solomon to sign his letters Solomon J. Solomon. (Many years later, Solomon’s daughter would marry Montagu’s grandson.)
3
Engineering Opinion
Just as camouflage brought painters, designers and artists into WW1, so the propaganda effort required authors, critics, poets and playwrights to lend a hand. Like ‘camouflage’, the word ‘propaganda’ did not have an entry in the eleventh edition of Encylopaedia Britannica, but everybody knew about it by the end of WW1 when the twelfth edition came out. Of course the concept was not wholly new. As Samuel Johnson observed in the eighteenth century:
Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages … I know not whether more is to be dreaded from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lie.
Arthur Ponsonby, the author of Falsehood in War-Time, recognised that the lie was an extremely useful weapon in warfare, deliberately employed by every country ‘to deceive its own people, to attract neutrals, and to mislead the enemy’. He wrote this book because he thought the ‘authoritative organization of lying’ in wartime was not sufficiently recognised: ‘The deception of whole peoples is not a matter which can be lightly regarded.’ Ponsonby knew that famous writers were better able ‘to clothe the rough tissues of falsehood with phrases of literary merit’ than statesmen.
As early as 2 September 1914, Charles Masterman, a member of Asquith’s cabinet, called a meeting of senior British writers to get together a response to German propaganda leaflets and manifestos. In one room were gathered some impressive names, among them J. M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Gilbert Murray, George Trevelyan, H. G. Wells and Israel Zangwill. Also invited but not able to attend were Arthur Quiller-Couch and Rudyard Kipling.
After a second meeting on 7 September 1914 with writers and editors from the respectable British press (no pacifists or socialists were invited), Charles Masterman set up a War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House, Buckingham Gate, in London. Its mission was to sell the British line and counter the arguments of ‘The Unspeakable Prussian’ to educated elites in Allied and neutral nations, rather than in Britain or Germany and Austria. By June 1915, this discreet clearing house had distributed 2.5 million copies of speeches, booklets and official publications in seventeen different languages. A year later, it was distributing a million illustrated newspapers every fortnight, and had helped publish 300 books and pamphlets.
Anthony Hope Hawkins, author of The Prisoner of Zenda, was the War Propaganda Bureau’s literary adviser. Arnold Toynbee and Lewis Namier were among the historical consultants. William Archer, translator of Ibsen, headed the Scandinavian department. G. K. Chesterton wrote a tract called The Barbarism of Berlin. Arthur Conan Doyle tackled a history of the campaigns in France and Flanders. John Galsworthy wrote articles. The historian G. M. Trevelyan wrote and lectured on the Serbs and the Austrians before leaving for Italy. John Masefield wrote one book on Gallipoli, and another on the Somme. Popular novelist Mrs Humphrey Ward promoted her 1916 paean of praise to the war workers, England’s Effort: Letters to an American Friend, on tour in the United States.
The USA was considered the most crucial country to get on side, and so the War Propaganda Bureau put the Canadian-born romantic novelist Sir Gilbert Parker in charge of the public relations campaign aimed across the Atlantic. The basic propaganda message was that the decent British and their allies were honourably muddling through against the Schrecklichkeit or ‘frightfulness’ of the belligerent Kaiser and his ruthless Huns. The rape of plucky little Belgium was the first atrocity to be cited. The Imperial German army certainly killed at least 5,500 civilians in Belgium, but some of the more imaginative bestialities they were accused of probably owed more to fantasy than truth. ‘War is fought in this fog of falsehood,’ wrote Ponsonby. ‘The fog arises from fear and is fed by panic.’
1915 brought a rich harvest of war atrocity stories from Belgium, most notably the execution of the British nurse Edith Louisa Cavell in October 1915. The matron of the Berkendael Institute in Brussels who stayed at her post when it became a Red Cross hospital after war broke out, Miss Cavell, the 49-year-old unmarried daughter of a Norfolk vicar, was formally tried and shot by German firing-squad in Brussels for the crime of helping Belgian, British and French soldiers escape from German-occupied territory into neutral Holland. The British never denied that she had done this. The Germans incurred a propaganda disaster by prosecuting and executing Edith Cavell for treacherously undermining the German war effort, without pausing for merciful gestures and wi
thout considering the publicity it would generate.
Her execution duly caused outrage in the UK, and in the USA. Killing a nurse in wartime hardly wins public approval, and Edith Cavell’s death was milked by British propagandists as the murder of an angel of mercy. She became the perfect symbol of Belgian martyrdom, and a justification for the war. The War Illustrated (30 October 1915) has a drawing of a glaring-eyed prognathous Prussian approaching a figure lying on the ground. Headlined ‘The murder of Nurse Cavell’, the caption reads:
The ill-fated woman had no strength to face the firing party, and swooned away, whereupon the officer in charge approached the prostrate form, and, drawing a heavy Service pistol, took his murderous aim, while the firing-party looked on.
In March 1920, Queen Alexandra unveiled Cavell’s memorial statue in St Martin’s Place in central London, just north of Trafalgar Square, the heart of the British Empire, between the National Portrait Gallery and the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields.
M. R. D. Foot, once a wartime intelligence officer, pointed out in his book MI9: Escape and Evasion 1939–1945 (written with J. M. Langley) that Norman Crockatt, the head of this secret organisation founded in WW2 to help servicemen get out of enemy territory, traced the rivalry between different British secret services back to Edith Cavell. She had in fact been working for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6), but had been exposed through helping prisoners of war to escape. This was why the older set of spooks, SIS, wanted nothing to do with MI9, because SIS ‘were determined to prevent evaders and escapers from involving them in any way’.
Her secret role was also revealed in Paul Routledge’s Public Servant, Secret Agent: the enigmatic life and violent death of Airey Neave. Foot, reviewing it in the TLS in May 2002, noted
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