That autumn and winter were, not surprisingly, difficult for the firm. The over-ambitious The War weekly sold less well than was hoped, and was discontinued early in 1915, because of distribution and advertising difficulties. Moreover, the firm could no longer obtain parts for their German machines and the commercial relationship with Tauchnitz in Germany came to an abrupt halt ‘for the duration’. Then JB was finally diagnosed by Sir Bertrand Dawson with a duodenal ulcer and advised to have absolute rest in bed for six weeks, which would delay the publication of the History, since he knew he must proofread it carefully and he was forbidden from writing in bed. Despite that, he kept up with his correspondence, Lilian Alcock visiting him daily to take dictation at his bedside. It was agreed that the History would be best placed in Nelson’s ‘Shilling Library’, since that would give much-needed work to the ‘New Factory’ (the one built in 1907), and would not clash with the much more expensive war history (A General Sketch of the European War, First Phase) that Hilaire Belloc had agreed to write.
The stresses imposed on him were substantial and almost certainly made his delicate digestion worse. The symptoms that he suffered were stomach pain, especially in the mornings, as well as before and after meals, together with nausea and bouts of gastritis, especially when under pressure. There must have been times when he felt absolutely wretched and certainly exhausted, both because vitamins and minerals were not properly absorbed but also because abdominal pain probably disturbed his sleep.
In 1915, when writing Greenmantle, he gave duodenal trouble to his American businessman turned spy, John S. Blenkiron. It is possible to learn something of JB’s diet in the early years of his affliction from the pages of that novel. Blenkiron offers Richard Hannay luncheon on their first meeting but says he cannot enjoy the food, since he suffers from duodenal dyspepsia. ‘It gets me two hours after a meal and gives me hell just below the breastbone. So I am obliged to adopt a diet. My nourishment is fish, sir, and boiled milk and a little dry toast.’57 This was to be JB’s regime for much of the rest of his life.
*First in Blackwood’s Magazine in January 1911 and then in The Moon Endureth, a collection of ‘tales and fancies’ published by Blackwood’s in April 1912.
*Called ‘The Black General’ when serialised beforehand in The Captain magazine.
*His son, also Donald, spied for the Soviet Union, and defected in 1951.
*Alasdair Macdonald, Montrose’s confederate.
*The work of recent historians seems to suggest that JB’s view may be enjoying greater popularity these days: for example, Margaret MacMillan’s History’s People: Personalities and the Past.
**Speech in the House of Commons by George Canning against the Addington Ministry, 1801.
*There are also, of course, Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, to which the Church of England adheres, and St Paul submitted to thirty-nine lashes (2 Corinthians, chapter 11, v. 24). Thirty-nine is a very suggestive number.
*That was the decent thing for a company to do, although it is unlikely that all did so since servicemen were paid a wage, in the case of the private soldier usually a minimum of 1s 2d a day.
6
The Great War, 1914–1918
The first volume of Nelson’s History of the War was well received. The Spectator, for example, pointed out that, importantly, unlike other similar works, it was the work of one man.1 The books were ‘crown octavo’ size, bound in red cloth, with the spine details picked out in gold leaf – until the autumn of 1917, when gold leaf became too expensive. The original price was 1 shilling, although the increasing scarcity of paper meant that in 1916 a volume cost 1s 3d, and by the end of the war 2s 6d. Nelson’s History was not government-sponsored, indeed JB categorically did not want it to be. However, after June 1916, he did have the tacit support of the Foreign Office and also, grudgingly, GHQ in France.
The geographical ground that JB covered was vast: as well as the main theatres of the Western Front, the Eastern Front and the Ottoman territories, he also included fighting in the European powers’ colonies, for example writing of skirmishes in south-west Africa, German losses in the Pacific and a sea battle near the Falkland Islands.
During the war Nelson’s History sold more than 700,000 copies. And, although it was not published separately in the United States, it had a wide circulation there and JB later maintained the series had ‘a far reaching influence’ in America. It was praised for its range and lack of bias by the opinion-formers’ newspaper, the New York Times, and at least one historian believes that the History shaped positive perceptions of Britain’s role in the war in neutral states, including the United States.2
Modern assessment of Nelson’s History of the War has to be approached with care. As with all JB’s writing during the war, he did not pretend to be a neutral observer and was transparently dedicated to Allied victory. Plainly, it could not be considered ‘history’ as the word is understood in the context of academic study, years after the events, when analysis is possible of all the available material, from the full range of participants. It was, in fact, well-informed reportage, a first draft, as it were, of history. JB likened his task to that of Thucydides, chronicling, as well as taking part in, the Peloponnesian War.
The History was sharply criticised in the 1930s by David Lloyd George, a man who could nurse a grudge as if it were a dear relation. Although JB wrote many admiring things about him, Lloyd George seems to have picked up only on criticisms and he strongly objected to JB’s description3 of his enthusiastic reaction to the plan of the French commander-in-chief, Robert Nivelle, in January 1917, to break through on the Western Front – a plan that failed miserably. He also disliked JB’s criticism of journalists and politicians at the time of Passchendaele.
In his War Memoirs, published fifteen years after the end of the war, Lloyd George wrote that JB had lapsed into his fictional mode in the History: ‘When a brilliant novelist assumes the unaccustomed role of a historian it is inevitable that he should now and again forget that he is no longer writing fiction, but that he is engaged on a literary enterprise where narration is limited in its scope by the rigid bounds of fact…4 When Lloyd George was admonished by Captain Basil Liddell Hart, the journalist and military historian, for rubbing JB’s nose in the dust, he replied that he was ‘a pagan. I like fighting, and love to flatten out my assailants.’5
More recently, JB has been accused of ‘falsifying the whole military situation on the Western Front’, of ‘covering up for failures of the military leaders’,6 and, more generally, of ‘jingoism’.7 These accusations require examination.
There is, today, a pervasive narrative of the First World War as a futile, bloody hecatomb, during which millions were sent to their deaths by incompetent, callous upper-class dolts who were unwilling or unable to learn from their lethal mistakes. JB’s wartime writing has been viewed through this lens. So stubbornly persistent is this idea that it is hard to keep in mind how recently it took hold and became almost universal; only since the 1960s in fact.8 The stereotype encourages the idea that the generally steadfast public opinion during the war can be explained by the population being actively deceived by JB, among others.
However, the scale of death and injury could scarcely be concealed. The newspapers published frequent casualty lists. The crutches and empty sleeves of those too severely wounded to return to the front were there to be seen. The grief of families and friends was shared in those times of general community solidarity. Not all servicemen or nurses returning home on leave found it impossible to discuss their experiences. In September 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, the artist C. R. W. Nevinson held a highly successful exhibition, at the Leicester Galleries in London, of drawings and paintings he had made on the Western Front, when a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps. The work was harshly Futuristic* in style and included La Mitrailleuse, a bleak depiction of a brutalised machine-gun crew, impassively sharing a trench with a dead comrade. Nevinson became an official war artist in 1917, in a process
encouraged by JB, by then Director of Information. Furthermore, the now (and rightly) celebrated ‘War Poets’ were not entirely representative of their comrades. There were other poets who did not shrink from describing the horrors of the trenches but nonetheless believed the cause was just – for example, the poet, composer and crack shot Ivor Gurney, whose Severn and Somme was published in November 1917.9 No collection of Wilfred Owen’s poems was published until 1920. Between then and 1929 fewer than 1,430 copies were sold. In the same period, the comparable figure for the collected works of Rupert Brooke was about 300,000.10
Of course, the war and its conduct were the subject of serious, reasoned criticism from the outset. But the conflict and its prosecution was always contested. This was especially the case while so many who had directly experienced the war were still alive to contribute to the controversy.** The development of public perception has been the subject of close scholarly research.11 However, the ‘lions-led-by-donkeys-in-a-completely-pointless-war’ stereotype has proved, in the public eye, remarkably impervious to the work of a number of modern military historians, such as Professor Sir Hew Strachan and Professor Gary Sheffield. It is not necessary, here, to arbitrate between competing experts, merely to point out that JB’s wartime writing should be read with a lively sense of the existence of a wide range of expert, nuanced opinion, which is at odds with simplistic popular myth.
A fair assessment of Nelson’s History of the War has been made by, for example, Professor William Philpott, who has written that JB ‘would strike a judicious balance between morale-boosting and vérité reportage, telling the story of the war in a romantic, adventurous spirit but not glossing over the horrors of the modern battlefield’.12 Similar support comes from Professor Keith Grieves, when considering JB’s four-volume revision of the History, published in 1921 and 1922: ‘Buchan was writing a highly engaged form of history which was utterly clear and steadfast in its judgements. The conclusions which first emerged in 1915, were still intact in 1921, and were clearly not specifically designed to respond to state policy.’13
It cannot be denied that, to the modern mind, JB’s language can seem almost absurdly florid. To take one example, he wrote of the Battle of Jutland, ‘it may confidently be said that not even at Trafalgar did the spirit of [Britain’s] seamen shine more brightly’.14 His euphemisms can jar badly: of the first day of the Somme, 1 July 1916, he wrote, ‘minute by minute the ordered lines melted away under the deluge of high-explosive, shrapnel, rifle, and machine-gun fire’.15 However, he also wrote, bluntly, that the British attack north of Albert that day failed,16 nor did he leave the reader in any doubt about the scale of the battle, the grim nature of the fighting, and the colossal number of casualties.
He did not believe that all Germans were evil; indeed, he repeatedly went out of his way in the History to praise the German serviceman (though not his commanders and never his cause). The charge of jingoism is hardly consistent with the final words of this massive, multi-volume endeavour:
The world had suffered a purgation by pity and terror. It had made solemn sacrifice, and the sacrifice was mainly of the innocent and the young. This was true of every side. Most men who fell died for honourable things. Perversities of national policy were changed in the case of the rank and file, both of the Allies and their opponents, into the eternal sanctities – love of country and home, comradeship, loyalty to manly virtues, the indomitable questing of youth. Against such a spirit the gates of death cannot prevail. Innocence does not perish in vain. We may dare to hope that the seed sown in sacrifice and pain will yet quicken and bear fruit to the amelioration of the world, and in this confidence await the decrees of that Omnipotence to whom a thousand years are as one day.17
War conditions meant that JB’s constituency work was in abeyance, but the History brought him to the attention of the government and, in the spring of 1915, he was asked to give a set of three public lectures, to raise money for war charities. He accepted, both because it was war work and because he thought it would help sales of the History. The first lecture, on 22 March, in the Bechstein Hall on Wigmore Street, was chaired by the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey.
JB spoke about official control of information concerning the war and the problems this caused to journalists: ‘Newspaper reports are only accurate by accident; it could hardly be otherwise when they have no accredited correspondents at the front; and our Press Bureau has views which are all its own about what constitutes desirable information for the public. The result is that great events have happened of which we knew nothing till many weeks after.’18
His comments chimed with the thinking of both the owner of The Times, Lord Northcliffe, and its editor Geoffrey Robinson (later Dawson), and the following month he was asked to go out to France for a few weeks as a special correspondent for the newspaper to cover what became known as the Second Battle of Ypres. Journalists had initially been banned from the battlefields, but that diktat was relaxed in April 1915 to allow five accredited journalists to operate on the Western Front, provided that they submitted to having their copy reviewed by the censors at General Headquarters. JB eagerly accepted the invitation, since not only was it a challenge that he relished, but to see the battlefields for himself would make his History more credible to the general public.
He travelled out to the British Expeditionary Force’s General Headquarters at St Omer in mid-May. He was given a car and a driver and allowed to go almost anywhere he liked. His first Times despatch, ‘On a Flemish Hill’, was published on 17 May. It was full of typical Buchan tropes: the linking with military history (from Caesar through to Marlborough), the descriptions of landscape and topography, then the rural nature of the scene, followed by the contrast close to the fighting: ‘Brown scars, which are not heather or bracken, line the woods, zig-zag across the meadows, and stand out red and raw on the further slopes. A neat château shows in a gap of forest, but the glass reveals it as a riddled husk.’19
Five days later he described the destruction of the town of Ypres: ‘The [main] street lies white and empty in the sun, and over all reigns a deathly stillness. There is not a human being to be seen in all its length, and the houses which contain it are skeletons.’20 He recounted what a shock it was to see the graves of men whom he had known in the pride of youth and strength. He also told the probably mythical story of the soldier who, being left behind by his comrades the November before because he was asleep, restored order to a lawless Ypres for a week and became known as ‘le Roi d’Ypres’. Although based on a false premise, that the Allies had abandoned Ypres, this tale was too good for a fiction writer to miss and he turned it into a short story about a Scots soldier, called ‘The King of Ypres’, which was published in December 1915 in the Illustrated London News.
He was given remarkable access to senior generals – French, Plumer, Allenby, Haig and Byng – as well as Henderson of the Flying Corps, and also heads of the railway and transport departments. In The Times he described the Battle of Festubert, in which his partner at Nelson’s, Ian Nelson, had distinguished himself with the 4th Cameron Highlanders. This was a desperate struggle over streams and flooded ditches and he turned it into a stirring story, even telling his readers that the men, mainly drawn from Skye and the Highlands, reminded him of ‘their seventeenth-century forbears, slipping on a moonlight night through the Lochaber Passes’.21
After JB arrived home, he went back to Paternoster Row when he could, Nelson’s being so hard-pressed. (The firm was converted into a Company in December that year, with the partners becoming directors, ‘because of the special circumstances’.) At about the same time a valued political friend and his son’s godfather, Lord Robert Cecil, MP for Hitchin and third son of the Victorian Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, became Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, responsible for propaganda. Most likely it was he who invited JB to join him there. By the end of the year, JB had become a senior member of staff in the News Department of the Foreign Office.
&nbs
p; One of his tasks was to work on suitable propaganda for the United States; this endeavour was considered vitally important but thorny in the extreme. He set about getting to know the London correspondents of American newspapers, using his charm and tact to gain their respect and trust, and transmitting, through them, news stories to counteract the vigorous propaganda coming out of Germany. His time was now roughly divided between the Foreign Office, Paternoster Row and trips to the front.
‘I have never been so hustled in my life,’ he told Gilbert Murray that July: ‘Two of my partners and 67% of our male employees are with the colours. My remaining partner, most of our managers and some more of our men are with the Munitions Department. So I have the whole business on my hands, besides a lot of Foreign Office work … Still it is a good thing to be very busy at a time like this, when most of one’s friends have fallen. It prevents brooding.’22 By July 1915, Francis and Riversdale Grenfell were both dead, as were their cousins Billy and Julian, the poet, as well as Gilbert Talbot, a connection of Susie’s. JB was prone to exaggeration in his correspondence; death had by no means finished with his friends.
Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps Page 21
