Patriotism and imperialism sold papers, and Harmsworth harnessed propaganda to profit. The Daily Mail’s jingoistic coverage of the Boer War brought daily sales to nearly a million, the highest circulation in the world. Throughout the early years of the twentieth century, Harmsworth beat the drum in the Daily Mail for a bigger navy, a larger army, and stronger defences, playing up invasion scares and the menace of foreigners. In 1903, Harmsworth launched the tabloid Daily Mirror, aimed at the ‘New Woman’, with an all-female staff, and in 1908 acquired The Times, the newspaper of the British establishment, which he modernised, attracting more advertising. He paid his hacks well and encouraged the infant National Union of Journalists. In March 1914, he dropped the news-stand price of The Times from threepence to a penny and tripled its circulation to nearly 150,000.
By WW1, Harmsworth had his peerage, and the new Lord Northcliffe was eager to play the part of tribune of the people, challenging governments and vested interests. Now he threw himself into the Allied cause, splashing German atrocities over his pages, fighting censorship, championing the common soldier, yelling for more recruits and better munitions, applauding conscription. His papers trumpeted Kitchener as saviour in 1914, then blamed him for the shells crisis in May 1915. He persecuted Lord Haldane for being a Germanophile largely because the two men had a pre-war quarrel about the future of air power, and hounded Churchill over the debacle of the Dardanelles. Northcliffe, wrote Churchill, ‘wielded power without official responsibility, enjoyed secret knowledge without the general view, and disturbed the fortunes of national leaders without being willing to bear their burdens’. By the end of 1916, Northcliffe had become fed up with the wily and idle Asquith (who hated and distrusted him in return) and helped to elevate Lloyd George. The increasingly megalomaniac press lord was triumphant when Asquith’s government fell. A full page of the Daily Mail on Saturday, 9 December 1916, was headlined ‘The Passing of the Failures’.
Lloyd George would have liked Churchill to join his administration but the kingmaker Lord Northcliffe made it clear via the Daily Mail and The Times that Churchill still carried the black spot. Moreover, an inquiry into the Dardanelles and Churchill’s role in the adventure was still sub judice. Churchill felt betrayed when he was not at once brought back into government, but six months later, when Northcliffe was away in North America, Lloyd George asked Churchill to come back, first as chairman of the Air Board, and then as the vital Minister of Munitions.
On 12 June 1917, Lord Northcliffe was having breakfast at the Hotel Gotham, New York City, when an energetic young Canadian called Campbell Stuart came to see him. Northcliffe had just become chairman of the British War Mission to the United States, and faced an enormous task. The UK had already spent £3.71 billion on the war so far, and needed food from the USA as well as immediate loans of $200 million a month. Campbell Stuart was appointed military secretary to the British War Mission, and soon became the attaché, secretary and fixer for the press baron in his crusade to persuade America to commit itself to winning the war against Germany. Stuart was with him in Kansas City on 25 October 1917 when Northcliffe met the cream of the newspapermen of the Middle West, ‘in which every shade of opinion was represented’, and later told how:
Northcliffe talked to these men with extraordinary frankness about their isolationist tendencies, their provincialism, their ignorance, and so on, as I doubt any other Englishman at that time could have done, and his words had an enormous effect.
Sir Campbell Stuart Opportunity Knocks Once (1952)
Lloyd George had offered Lord Northcliffe the directorship of a proposed new Department of Information to coordinate propaganda, but he turned it down. This is how John Buchan, after a busy war writing his History of the War and other books and also working for General Haig’s chief of intelligence, Brigadier John Charteris, got the top job in February 1917.
Buchan’s new Department of Information brought together foreign propaganda and war publicity, but they were still scattered in different places. The department was still a provisional organisation, a ‘mushroom ministry’ always in danger of being wolfed by bigger, historic centres of government power. ‘The only real war was in Whitehall,’ wrote the novelist Arnold Bennett, then employed in propaganda work. ‘The war in Flanders and France was merely a game, a sort of bloody football.’ Charles Masterman continued to run the Production section from Wellington House, which was responsible for books and pamphlets, as well as photographs and paintings. Its Pictorial Propaganda Committee selected the first ‘Official’ war artists, including Augustus John, Muirhead Bone, Wyndham Lewis, C. R. W. Nevinson and William Orpen.
The Press and Cinema section was based in the Lord Chancellor’s Office in the House of Lords. Buchan wanted a well-informed press using true stories, and he encouraged the film-makers towards authenticity. This section also dealt with cables and wireless, and Buchan brought in the chief executive of Reuters news agency, Roderick Jones, as an unpaid part-time adviser. (After Baron Herbert de Reuter committed suicide in April 1915, leaving Reuters news agency financially weakened, Jones had done a deal with the British government. Using a £550,000 loan arranged by Herbert Asquith’s brother-in-law, Jones bought out Reuters, became its chief shareholder and ensured that its wartime news-gathering was presented ‘through British eyes’ and that its worldwide distribution network was available to the British government.)
The Intelligence section of the Department of Information in Victoria Street replaced the old Neutral Press Committee, and was meant to get good news out of various branches of government as swiftly as possible. The Administrative section where Buchan himself sat was based in the Foreign Office. Buchan had to keep in touch with the King at Buckingham Palace and to report to the Prime Minister in Downing Street, though Lloyd George preferred to hobnob with other press cronies.
The war hit John Buchan personally very hard. Herbert Asquith’s son Raymond was the first of his Oxford friends to be killed, then Bron Lucas, an airman with the RFC, was shot down in November 1916. The worst blow fell on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917, when Buchan lost his best friend, Tommy Nelson, his partner in the publishing house, and his youngest brother, Alastair. Both were killed in France, half a mile from each other, in the Battle of Arras.
Soon after becoming Prime Minister in December 1916, Lloyd George had told a suspicious Labour and Socialist deputation: ‘I hate war; I abominate it. I sometimes think “Am I dreaming? Is it a nightmare? It cannot be fact.” But … once you are in it you have to go grimly through it, otherwise the causes which hang upon a successful issue will all perish …’ By the end of the war, the polemical Irish Socialist, dramatist and pamphleteer, George Bernard Shaw, shared Lloyd George’s view that war is hell, but you still have to win it. Shaw was 60 when he went off to France in 1917 to visit the trenches and write up his conclusions in a daily newspaper. Major General George Macdonogh, the director of Military Intelligence who ran the propaganda unit M17b, had asked Philip Gibbs to recommend a writer to visit the Front ‘who might produce something good about the life and heroism of our men’. Gibbs replied, half in jest, ‘What about Bernard Shaw?’ The response was laughter. ‘Good heavens, what an idea!’
Winston Churchill called Bernard Shaw a ‘double-headed chameleon’, and described him as a ‘bright, nimble, fierce, and comprehending being’. In the cold, snow-bright January of 1917 Shaw came out to the trenches, ‘with his beard blowing in the wind of France and Flanders’. He had tackled the idea of it in drama – Major Barbara’s arms-dealing millionaire Andrew Undershaft calls himself ‘a profiteer in mutilation and murder’ – but now the playwright was within the force field of real war. Undershaft also said, ‘The more destructive war becomes the more fascinating we find it,’ and Shaw repeatedly uses the word ‘fascination’ to describe war’s hypnotic appeal. Shaw wrote that great war correspondents ‘like Philip Gibbs, finely sensitive to the miseries of the troops’ were ‘fascinated by the spirit which drives men to endure and defy so much ou
trageous mischief and danger’.
Philip Gibbs was with Shaw at places like Ypres, Vimy and Arras, and enjoyed his wit. A general at luncheon once asked Shaw when he thought the war would be over. Shaw replied, ‘Well, General, we’re all anxious for an early and dishonourable peace.’ The general did not laugh, but his junior staff officers did. Philip Gibbs also records Shaw recommending ‘parallel lines of thought’ about the war. ‘One of them is that it is a complete degradation of all that we mean by civilisation. The other is, my dear Gibbs, that we’ve got to beat the Boche.’
Philip Gibbs, John Buchan and the other early war correspondents had been guided in their visits to the front by Hesketh Prichard, but by 1917 visitors were being escorted by the white-haired Captain Charles Montague, formerly a leader writer and theatre critic on the Manchester Guardian. Montague had dyed his silver hair yellow in order to get into Kitchener’s ‘New Armies’ as a private soldier, at the age of 47, and rose to sergeant through merit before accepting a commission in Intelligence. Montague kept cheerful at war: ‘I have found a hobby in bomb-throwing,’ he wrote home, ‘which unites the joy of bowling googlies and playing with fireworks.’ Ethically, war was incompatible with Montague’s Christianity, and he had been passionately opposed to the Boer War, but he saw WW1 as a necessary vileness to be got over as quickly and efficiently as possible, without ‘slacking and shirking and boozing’. C. E. Montague described how the New Armies lost their illusions in Disenchantment (1922), one of the great books of WW1.
Impervious to fear and elated by shelling, Montague escorted his journalistic charges as close to danger as possible. In January 1917 he took George Bernard Shaw around the devastated, shell-pocked landscape for a week. Shaw was in khaki camouflage uniform like everyone else. But Flanders was white with snow in January 1917, and a Romanian general in a dove-coloured cape was invisible while Shaw’s khaki was so glaringly conspicuous that the playwright felt he might as well have worn a medieval herald’s bright tabard. The three pieces that Shaw wrote about his experiences in France appeared in the Daily Chronicle in March 1917, collectively entitled ‘Joy-Riding at the Front’. Gibbs says that the title and tone deeply offended people at home, who thought it heartless and mocking. But ninety years on, it seems as fresh as paint. ‘Joy-Riding at the Front’ is full of ironies: gunners industriously shell trenches that the enemy has already abandoned, and there are inept demonstrations of fire, flame and gas that make friendly French villagers cough and senior staff officers scuttle away. Shaw’s second article, ‘The Technique of War’, analyses the imprecision of artillery and aerial bombardment, but also aims to reassure anxious readers at home that most projectiles miss their loved ones at the front, and he turns the extravagant wastefulness of war – ‘It burns the house to roast the pig’ – to propaganda effect: ‘Therefore, my tax-payer, resign yourself to this: that we may fight bravely, fight hard, fight long, fight cunningly, fight recklessly, fight in a hundred and fifty ways, but we cannot fight cheaply.’
In war, Shaw says, keeping a cool head is better than seeing red: ‘Hatred is one of the things you can do better at home. And you generally stay at home to do it.’ This idea may have come out of his talks with C. E. Montague, who observed in Disenchantment: ‘Hell hath no fury like a non-combatant.’ Serving soldiers understood that the morality of war was different from the morality of peace, ‘just as the morality of an interview with a tiger in the jungle is distinct from the morality of an interview with a missionary.’ Shaw was not a pacifist, and he saw that people went to fight out of solidarity, not selfishness: ‘It is not that you must defend yourself or perish: many a man would be too proud to fight on those terms. You must defend your neighbour or betray him: that is what gets you …’
George Orwell said that for the ‘enlightened’ of his generation, ‘1914–18 was written off as a meaningless slaughter’, and some writers like Wilfred Owen tend to pity the soldiers of WW1 as passive victims, ‘those who die as cattle’. Shaw, however, saw it as his patriotic duty to report more encouraging news in ‘Joy-Riding at The Front’. For all his clear sight, he was not above putting a favourable gloss on things: ‘Men torn from civil life of the most prosperous and comfortable kind, and engaged in the most perilous service … say without affectation that they have never been so happy…’
‘The Duty of Lying’, an interesting chapter in C. E. Montague’s Disenchantment, begins:
To fool the other side has always been fair in a game. Every fencer or boxer mayfeint … In cricket a bowler is justly valued the more for masking his action.
In war your licence to lead the other fellow astray is yet more ample … For war, though it may be good sport to some men, is not a mere sport … A good spy will lie to the last, and in war a prisoner may lie like a saint and hero … Even the Wooden Horse of the Greeks has long ceased to raise moral questions … Ruses of war and war lies are as ancient as war itself, and as respectable.
Montague saw the press as a perfect weapon for deception. Enemy intelligence read everything in the newspapers:
… worrying out what it means and which of the things that it seems to let out are the traps and which are the real … priceless slips made in unwariness.
Here is a game, Montague suggests, to exercise the rat-like cunning of the intelligence officer: sniffing out real crumbs of information from poisoned bait.
Montague, in peacetime a Guardian journalist, would have known many of the secrets of the Western Front. He suggests that the use of ‘camouflage stories’ in the press was never fully exploited by either side, but what little he reveals of the practice is intriguing. A popular science journal he does not name, late in the war, gave ‘a recklessly full description’ of the ‘listening sets’ used by the British to eavesdrop on German telephone calls in the field. This article was actually ‘a camouflage’, planted by GHQ as ‘the last thrust in a long duel’.
The Germans had been listening to British field telephone conversations from the very beginning of trench warfare. In early February 1915, the day after the Life Guards had replaced a French regiment near Ypres, secretly, at night, with all their identifying badges removed, Captain Stewart Menzies, future head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), was astonished to get a message in a bottle lobbed over the wire from an Alsace regiment in the German trenches opposite welcoming ‘the English cavalry’ to their section of the line.
Observation Posts were linked by telephone lines to gun batteries further back, but these forward lines were often leaky. The British did not realise until July 1916 how good the Germans were at intercepting traffic on British field telephones. Fernsprech Truppen (‘Telephone Troops’) tapped Allied calls either by directly attaching a cable to the line, or by earth induction from any lines that were not wholly metallic, picking up the electrical signals as they went through the ground (this could be done from up to 3.3 km away), then amplifying and monitoring them on Moritz listening sets. Thus careless British talk cost more lives than sinister ‘foreign spies’. Idle trench chatter helped German intelligence to build up the complete British order of battle, and often let them know when and where attacks were coming so they could prepare their machine guns and artillery. Montague points out that the British did not grasp the extent of what was going on until the Battle of the Somme:
When the war opened the Germans had a good apparatus for telephonic eavesdropping. We had, as usual, nothing to speak of. The most distinctly traceable result was the annihilation of our first attack at Ovillers, near Albert, early in July 1916. At the instant fixed for the attack our front at the spot was smothered under a bombardment which left us with no men to make it. A few days after, when we took Ovillers, we found the piece of paper on which the man with the German ‘listening set’ had put down, word for word, our orders for the first assault. Then we got to work. We drew our own telephones back, and we perfected our own ‘listening sets’ till the enemy drew back his, further and further, giving up more and more ease and rapidity of communic
ation in order to be safe.
In truth, pettifogging British staff bureaucracy meant that nearly two years were wasted shuffling files between different (and jealous) departments before the signals problem could finally be brought under control. It was only late in the war that the British started using other media to mislead the Germans. Hence an apparently indiscreet article in a rather out-of-the-way wireless journal in which, according to Montague, ‘the reach of our electric ears was, to say the least of it, not understated. Few people in England might notice the article. The enemy could be trusted to do so.’
Montague also writes about the deception plan that accompanied the expanded British Fifth Army’s attack on Pilckem Ridge, north-east of Ypres, on 31 July 1917, which turned into the notorious Battle of Passchendaele by the time it petered out exhausted in November. Under the overall command of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the initial push tried to employ the sort of deceptions successfully used by Plumer’s Second Army, taking Messines in June, and by the Canadians, capturing Vimy Ridge in April. Canadian soldiers had surprised the Germans by a brilliant coup de théâtre, emerging in the middle of no-man’s-land from tunnels dug through the chalk. They had also disassembled, transported and reassembled a church steeple so the Germans wasted shells bombarding the wrong place. As had happened before the Messines assault, replicas of the ground and models of the defences were now used for training near Ypres while the big guns were got into place. The British did an elaborate feint, a ‘Chinese attack’, much further south at Lens, to make the Germans think the push was coming there rather than further north:
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