Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps
Page 23
Charteris wrote in his diary on 27 June 1916: ‘Newton’s emissary, John Buchan, arrived this morning. I have sent him on, meantime, with the Press people, but have told him he can do exactly as he wishes, and go where he pleases. I have written to ask for him to be given a commission at once. He has not got uniform at present, and runs some risk of being arrested and suffering some measure of inconvenience if he leaves the Press.’45 JB was immediately commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps.
The Foreign Office permitted him to continue the History, since they considered it useful propaganda, but GHQ had misgivings, since they didn’t want it to appear to have the army’s official imprimatur. Charteris argued that ‘critical words should not come from anyone who has access to such papers as we propose to show Buchan’.46 In the end, Charteris gave in, provided that the Western Front chapters were submitted first to the Chief of the General Staff and not published until at least five months after the events described. This JB considered ‘exceedingly nice and reasonable’,47 since he knew it was the quid pro quo for the extraordinary amount of access that he had been given. No one seems to have worried much about all the other theatres of war covered in Nelson’s History.
He arrived at GHQ, which by now had moved to the École Militaire at Montreuil, in time to witness the beginning of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July, from a hilltop above Albert. His life resolved into a pattern of several days spent in France every three weeks, escorting journalists, press barons or politicians, gathering material for official summaries, communiqués and press releases to go to the War Office, the press or the clandestine propagandists at Wellington House. His duodenal ulcer gave him periodic problems, which was not unexpected, considering the irregular, unsuitable meals, jolting drives over terrible roads and uncomfortable quarters. Alfred Noyes, the poet, who worked in the Foreign Office News Department in 1916 recalled: ‘He [JB] would turn up in uniform at the FO, looking tired and grey after some mysterious expedition to the front, in which I could picture him playing the part of Richard Hannay. [That is precisely what he couldn’t do.] He was one of the sincerest men I ever knew, and there was something in his bearing which made one think of the young Caesar … Buchan realised more fully than most of his contemporaries the gravity of the world situation, in which the war was merely an irruptional symptom of a far wider and deeper disorder.’48
When in London, he continued to make speeches for the government or war charities, and organised tours for neutral journalists and dignitaries. He did work for Nelson’s, whenever he could, while Lilian Killick deputised heroically when he was away, checking Atteridge’s maps and even sometimes reading manuscripts.
In September, concern about the quality and tone of official communiqués issued from GHQ in France prompted Generals Haig and Charteris to ask JB to take over the task until the end of 1916. JB needed little persuasion, though it meant he had to be in France almost full-time. He found himself warming to Haig, a fellow Borderer, alumnus of Brasenose College and devout Presbyterian. He admired him for his professionalism, moral courage, fortitude, patience, sobriety and what he called ‘balance of temper’. In JB’s opinion, Haig was not a visionary, and was slow to learn lessons, but he did learn in the end.*
JB spent his time visiting Army, Corps and Division headquarters – ‘a life of most inglorious security’49 – but managed also to work most days on his History, now running about six months behind the events described. He provided reports for the propagandists working for Charles Masterman at Wellington House and also wrote a separate account of the Battle of the Somme, gleaned mainly from the Army War Diaries, which was translated into foreign languages for propaganda abroad and, as an afterthought, came out in Britain in two volumes in November 1916 and May 1917 respectively. These were published by Nelson’s, and printed on the big rotary presses, for speed, and sold at 1 shilling.50 He told George Brown that ‘It looks as if the Govt. was going to make a mess of my Battle of the Somme. It is a pity, for it might have been a nice little book.’51 He may be referring to the fact that the maps, prepared by ‘a Government Department’,52 were inaccurate or else that the information the book contained was ham-fistedly censored.** (Curiously, The Battle of the Somme exists in miniature form in the Queen’s Dolls’ House at Windsor Castle.)
In October 1916, Greenmantle,*** which JB had written between February and June that year, was published in hardcover by Hodder and Stoughton (in a print run of 37,000, selling at 5 shillings), having been serialised first in Land and Water.**** In the dedication to his mother-in-law, Mrs Grosvenor, he wrote that it had amused him to write it and he forestalled criticisms of his use of coincidence, which were made about The Thirty-Nine Steps and would continue to be made about his other adventure novels:
Coincidence, like some new Briarcus, stretches a hundred long arms hourly across the earth.53
It is salutary in this connection to recall the account by his son Johnnie54 of a day in August 1939 spent fishing with his father on the remote Lake Maligne in the Jasper National Park in Alberta. They saw, but did not meet, a trail rider who brought his pony down to the edge to drink. Eight months later, this same man, Tommy Waitt, arrived with Canadian forces at Aldershot in England and was detailed to be Johnnie’s batman. Three years later, he saved Johnnie’s life in Sicily, when the latter was badly wounded by a mortar bomb, carrying him out of danger in the face of sustained German machine-gun fire. Even JB might have had qualms about inventing such a far-fetched and – importantly – meaningful wartime coincidence. Had he lived to know it, he would have called it the work of Providence.
In Greenmantle, Hannay is hauled out of the line by Sir Walter Bullivant of the Foreign Office (where of course JB was working at this time), to do some special secret work. Unlike The Thirty-Nine Steps, where he is alone for much of the book, Hannay acquires associates, who are as appealing, but certainly very different: Sandy Arbuthnot, scion of a noble Scottish house but a wild dreamer, master of disguise and ‘blood-brother to every kind of Albanian bandit’;55 John S. Blenkiron, the canny and rich American engineer/businessman/spy, who speaks in scriptural metaphors and shares JB’s digestive problems and love of the card game, Patience; and the Boer tracker and hunter, Peter Pienaar. JB said that Sandy Arbuthnot was based on his Oxford friend, the charismatic Aubrey Herbert, who had travelled widely, knew a number of languages, and had taken up the cause of an independent Albania, but turned down the offer of its throne in 1914. He had escaped from German captivity after the Battle of Mons in August that year. John S. Blenkiron was introduced to interest Americans in the book, which was published in the United States in November 1916, five months before the country entered the war. Blenkiron makes it clear that Americans are not interested in saving the British Empire, but some individuals are doing clandestine work for the Allies because ‘there’s a skunk been let loose in the world … we’ve got to take a hand in disinfecting the planet’.56
In Greenmantle, very ingeniously, JB integrated fictional happenings into a factual context, the Russian advance in eastern Turkey in early 1916. Richard Hannay’s task is to investigate and, if possible, foil the potential threat of a Muslim jihad against the Allies, under the leadership of a holy man known as ‘Greenmantle’. Passions are being stirred up by the Germans, allied with Enver Pasha and the Young Turks, to use for their own advantage – particularly against the Russians, who are on the Allied side – as well as to promote German influence generally in the Near and Middle East. Indeed, something of the kind was indeed happening, with a rumour abounding that the Kaiser had actually been converted to Islam. Wilhelm II certainly fomented trouble by supporting the jihad in Syria in 1915 and the Senussi, a Sufi sect, against the British in Egypt in 1916 and 1917. JB did not know as much about this as T. E. Lawrence, say, and probably no more than anyone who read the newspapers carefully, but he knew enough to harness it plausibly to his fiction. Lawrence told Robert Graves that ‘Greenmantle has more than a flavour of truth’.57
JB relied for colour and verisimilitude in the book on his visit to Constantinople in 1910, which he had very much enjoyed. He had written then to Charlie Dick: ‘My experiences varied from lunching in state with the Sultan’s brother and dining at Embassies to chaffering with Kurds for carpets in a sort of underground Bazaar. I don’t know any place where one feels history more vividly.’59
The reaction to the book was immediate and very positive. JB was pleased and flattered to be compared, in one review, to Sir Walter Scott. His friends wrote to congratulate him, although Arthur Balfour questioned ‘How you can find time and strength to interpolate these parerga into the middle of your other labours I cannot imagine.’60 But the truth was that he saw Greenmantle as part of his war work, just as much as those elegantly phrased communiqués or Nelson’s History.
JB wanted to write a thrilling story for the ‘war-torn man in his dirty dug-out at the front’61 but one with a subliminal message. Greenmantle is notable – counterintuitively – both for the good press given to the Turks, who were ‘victims simultaneously of forty years of British neglect and German aggression’,62 in the words of one historian, Professor David S. Katz, as well as for its sympathetic portraits of two Germans; one an engineer called Gaudian, who turns up again in 1936 to help Hannay in The Island of Sheep, and the other, more startling in the context of the time, the Kaiser. As Professor Katz puts it, Greenmantle was ‘a novel about historical events only nine months in the past, which not only entertained but also helped educate its readers through the most subtle form of propaganda, novelized instant history’.63 JB was ‘transforming shockers into shock troops’.64 Lloyd George was completely wrong: JB was not a novelist trying to write history but an historian writing fiction when it suited his purposes.
The readership for Greenmantle was surprisingly far-flung for wartime. In 1917, JB’s publishers received a letter from the Grand Duchess Olga, daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, in exile at Tobolsk in the Urals, saying that she and her sisters and father had been greatly cheered and comforted by Greenmantle. ‘It is an odd fate for me to cheer the prison of the Tsar,’ JB told his mother.65
During October in France, JB kept to a strict diet, but still his insides gave him trouble. He wrote to his wife: ‘In my present condition I am a nuisance to others and a misery to myself … I shall write a denunciatory ode on my duodenum. I don’t think Blenkiron’s was as troublesome, do you?’66 That day he collapsed, in his otherwise empty billet, suffering acute agony, and it took him hours to crawl to call a sentry for help. He was taken to a casualty clearing station, where he spent three days until he recovered, resisting the efforts of the doctors to send him to hospital or home to England. ‘I hope you haven’t been worrying. It is an experience that I wouldn’t have missed for a great deal,’ he told Susie. He wrote of the company, even of the seriously wounded, being ‘such jolly, plucky chaps’.67 He managed to get back to GHQ, existing mainly on Benger’s liquid food until he could go home.
Nothing like the full story of his difficulties appeared until the publication of Memory Hold-the-Door in 1940. He fully acknowledged that he ‘had but a small share in the dangers of campaigning’ (although he did occasionally come under German machine-gun fire or shelling),68 but that he had a full measure of its discomforts, for he was almost continuously unwell. He wrote that he was reduced ‘to such a state of physical wretchedness that even today a kind of nausea seizes me when some smell recalls the festering odour of the front line, made up of incinerators, latrines and mud’.69
One thing that work at GHQ afforded him was the opportunity and privilege – denied to almost all British servicemen outside their own units – of being able to foregather with friends. At one point he caught up with Tommy Nelson, and they snatched the chance to talk business. Tommy told him he loathed the war and wanted to join the Royal Flying Corps, but JB succeeded in dissuading him and he joined the Tank Corps instead. ‘It was very nice seeing the beloved old fellow.’70 The following day he told Susie that he would be escorting Arthur Balfour round the battlefield. ‘I won’t take him within a mile of a shell; he is too precious. Had it been certain other politicians we wot of, I should have had them at the Schwaben Redoubt and given Providence a chance.’71
Alastair, recovered from his wound, was back out in France in October 1916, serving with the 6th and 7th Royal Scots Fusiliers, and billeted quite close to GHQ. ‘A and B Coys are together in a hut,’ he wrote to his family. ‘At present we are trying to light a fire, a difficult operation as the fuel is damp. Perhaps it won’t go because we are using The British Weekly* as paper. Browning suggests something inflammatory like John Bull,** and someone else says Greenmantle!’72 The brothers met each other one November afternoon, when JB went to the village where he knew the battalion were resting, having just come out of the line, and again on New Year’s Day 1917, when JB and Sandy Gillon managed to find him, and they all dined together in the mess on turkey, haggis, plum pudding and Mackie’s cakes to the sound of the bagpipes. The battalion had just come out of the trenches after a very bad time, but Alastair’s rosy face and broad smile struck Sandy as being about the cheeriest sight he’d seen at the front.
Shortly after this, JB’s diverse attempts at promoting the public image of Britain at war coalesced, when he was appointed Director of Information, in charge of the nation’s propaganda efforts. Propaganda is a word that has become freighted with such negative meaning that it is hard to clear our minds and imagine a time, a hundred years ago, when it was considered to be information put out mainly by organisations or individuals rather than by government, and was not necessarily more than simple truthful communication or bland advertising. In other words, it was certainly intended to affect opinion, but not to brainwash a nation for evil purposes as in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia in the 1930s. At the beginning of the First World War information of all kinds was communicated mainly by (usually) high-minded books, pamphlets and public lectures or, for immediacy, newspapers and periodicals, which were not so high-minded, although they would seem so in modern terms. Few people had a radio set at home, there were no televisions, even the telephone was only something the middle and upper classes owned. Any attempt to influence public opinion was ad hoc, disorganised and small-scale, mainly carried out by patriotic organisations such as Fight for Right, founded by the explorer, Francis Younghusband, and of which JB and other writers like Thomas Hardy were members.* As the war progressed, matters changed radically: the main techniques and avenues by which propaganda was propagated were established, the ethics of it debated, and the government had finally taken charge, with all the constitutional challenges that that implied.
In 1914 the Cabinet was made aware that the Germans were concertedly spreading misleading, even mendacious, information in a number of neutral countries, including the United States, and that this was damaging to the Allies and needed to be speedily and energetically countered. As early as the end of August 1914, David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, ‘urged the importance of setting on foot an organisation to inform and influence public opinion abroad and to confute German mis-statements and sophistries’.73
Lloyd George turned to his friend, Charles Masterman, a brilliant, idealistic, intensely loyal, melancholic, Liberal politician and journalist, who was chairman of the National Health Insurance Commission, with offices in Wellington House near Buckingham Palace. The mission of Master
man’s War Propaganda Bureau, as it came to be called (although not, it seems, by those who worked in it), envisioned by the Cabinet, was to direct propaganda specifically at Allied and neutral countries, but not at either the enemy or the Home Front. Its task was to provide publications of every sort, which Masterman’s associates would write, translate if necessary, publish and distribute. (The News Department of the Foreign Office, where JB was working, supplied news – after censorship – to the newspapers.)
From the start, Masterman and his colleagues, operating behind the front of the National Health Insurance Commission, were convinced that their work must remain secret, since information would be less persuasive, or even counter-productive, if it were known to derive from an ‘official’ source. Moreover, they believed, at least initially, that propaganda should be aimed principally at opinion-formers. So successful was ‘Wellington House’ in keeping its activities under wraps that most politicians, outside the inner circle, did not know the War Propaganda Bureau existed.
Masterman would countenance no fabrications or outright lies, although he was not against the selective use of facts that showed Britain in a good light.74 He did not, for example, give credence to some of the wilder stories of German atrocities in Belgium, or the disgraceful report that appeared in The Times in May 1917 that the Germans were boiling down their own dead soldiers to make fertiliser and glycerine – and nor did JB.
Masterman was able to draw on some notable talent for the organisation, which of course was outside the ambit of the civil service: Ernest Gowers (later the author of Plain Words); Anthony Hope Hawkins, of The Prisoner of Zenda fame; A. S. Watt, the literary agent; Sir Gilbert Parker, a Canadian who was both a writer and a Member of Parliament; and the historian Arnold Toynbee, who was Gilbert Murray’s son-in-law. A number of well-known writers, such as John Masefield, Arnold Bennett, Gilbert Murray, G. M. Trevelyan and H. G. Wells, helped write the ‘literature’.