by Mark Rowe
A house had artillery, ready for invaders to fire, according to one story; in another house, foreigners had made poisons. As the north London weekly spotted, the original ‘panic mongers’ hoarding food were turning to rumours, one after another, to voice their witless fears. Poisons were a favourite, because they were hard to disprove, and yet could be anywhere. George Thorp, the Hull architect, likewise understood that rumours were symptoms, passed on by the fearful and received by the willing. In his diary, when noting the first battles of August 24 and 25 by British troops, he wrote of ‘foolish rumours’ of spies poisoning springs and water:
I can see that it wants very little to put this population into a panic, they or a section of them believe anything. Our ex-Mayor’s youngest son aged 22 was shot by a sentry at Saltburn last Friday at midnight, he was with his brother in a motorcycle, and did not hear or heed the repeated challenge - verdict ‘accidently shot’. This makes the fifth innocent person killed by sentries since the war began.
In the summer of 1940, too, guards on roads in case of enemy invasion shot dead civilians, without punishment.
As in 1940, unknown people (never ones to give interviews to newspapers, write memoirs or leave their diaries to public archives) were spreading tales, that respectable-seeming figures were, in fact, German. Their motives may have been commercial jealousy, or spite. In mid-August, for instance, a motor engineer with the English-enough sounding name of George Lakeman put a notice in the Newmarket Journal, to deny ‘malicious rumours’ that he was a German. Clearly stung, he said his father was from Cornwall, and his mother from Berkshire; he was born in Derbyshire, and had always lived in England. Whoever started that story might have resented Lakeman as an incomer; or may genuinely (though ignorantly) have doubted that such a man, maybe with an out-of-town accent, was truly one of them.
Rumours flourished where they sounded believable. Thus the seaside town of Clacton, according to the Essex County Standard in mid-August, deplored ‘wild stories’ of the beach and visitor attractions closed, the pier destroyed by bombs, and the place near-deserted. That was bad for business, but unless you saw the town for yourself, you had no way of knowing the truth.
August 1914 lacked one panic that the summer of 1940 had: only in 1940 did villages, even small towns, mobilise after false alarms of a German landing. All 1914 had were the likes of the homeless ‘aged labourer’ Henry Oakden, stopped on an Ashbourne road by a police constable Pell on Wednesday August 19. Oakden was waving a stick and shouting ‘the Germans are coming’. When PC Pell spoke to him, Oakden said ‘be careful, or they will have both of us’. The town’s magistrates a week later laughed; and fined Oakden for being drunk.
II
That little story shows that the gap between rich and poor, the respectable and rough, was often also one of intellect - maybe the widest gap of all and thus the most cherished by some; the educated were able to look down on the stupid and credulous. However, the rumour of a Russian army in Britain found many learned people wanting.
One of its earliest sightings came in George Thorp’s diary on August 28:
A very curious and persistent rumour has been circulated in Hull, coming from numerous very reliable people, none of whom however have it at first hand, that bodies of Russian troops had landed in Scotland for the purpose of proceeding to the Belgian frontier by way of Boulogne. Most circumstantial accounts have been given as to ordinary trains have been side tracked, while unheard of quantities of Russian troops in from anything from 36 to 16 trains have passed by.
Thorp named four people ‘who knew it for certain’, but noted that the official press bureau called it a ‘pure fabrication’. As shrewd - though admittedly it was in his memoir well after the event - was Sir Almeric Fitzroy, the permanent head of Liberal minister Lord Morley’s department (at least until Morley resigned because of the war). Sir Almeric noted the Russians had ‘appeared’ as far apart as Bath, Reading and Southampton; or rather, no-one saw the Russians inside the trains, because their carriages had drawn blinds. To the believers, this was proof; the movement of troops was a secret. Sir Almeric wrote: “I very nearly forfeited Lord Haversham’s good opinion by venturing to doubt the grounds of his confidence ... the paucity of authentic news is perhaps responsible for the avidity with which fiction is devoured,” he added wisely.
Another lord fell for it. Writing from Wiltshire on August 29, St Aldwyn told his son: “... what a splendid stroke it is to have got Russians around this way, it seems to be true and it will be a nice surprise to those barbarians of Germans to meet them unexpectedly.” So it went on. In Essex at the end of August, the Burnham-on-Crouch shopkeeper Robert Bull wrote in his diary that 70 train-loads of Russians went through the county town of Chelmsford in the previous week, from Aberdeen on their way to the Continent. The story persisted, or cropped up in different regions later, because in his letter to the King of Siam on September 11, the Gloucestershire civic leader M W Colchester-Wemyss said the rumour had been ‘on everyone’s lips for some days’. He had asked scores of people about it, but had not found anybody who had seen Russians. A lord said he had asked a cabinet minister, who said it was untrue. The lord then asked another lord, who said it was true. Colchester-Wemyss came down on the side of believing it: “If it is not true it is a remarkable incident of how an invented story can obtain widespread belief.” That, at least, was correct.
The question plainly gripped Britain in late August 1914. We can no more get to the bottom of it than the diarists at the time could. Where and when did the story start? How did it spread - did many people have the same idea at once, or only one? The French, even more than the English, willed the Russians to come; as an English holiday-maker, a Miss Laura Partridge, a girls’ school teacher from Brondesbury, told her local north London paper on her return from Interlaken. Changing trains at Montgaris before Paris, and seeking news, an excited Frenchman in a blue smock told her: “Tout va bien, et ils viennens les Russes.”
All was going well, the Russians were coming. It might be more than coincidence that the British rumour seems to have begun in the days of the first news of the BEF on the Continent; which only left people anxious for more news. Indeed, after Lord St Aldwyn wrote of the Russians, he next fretted about the British losses. Imagining Russians - 80,000 according to Colchester-Wemyss - was the most a gossiper could do, to help the BEF. It was, besides, wishful thinking; that the Russians would share the fighting (and the deaths) in western Europe. This reflected a deeper, geopolitical hope among the rulers of Britain and France, that Russia would do some, maybe much, of the hard work of beating the Germans, just as Russia from 1812 had broken Napoleon.
As for the truth of the rumour, it was a beauty. The rumour-makers and spreaders could impress people with what they knew. However you tried to disprove it, the gossipers could give an answer. If Britain’s ally was sending thousands of troops, why didn’t the government give out this good news, or ask people to welcome the visitors? Because (as St Aldwyn spotted) it was to be a surprise for the Germans. Yet could thousands of foreigners cross hundreds of miles from Aberdeen (and Hull and other ports, according to Colchester-Wemyss) and not stop once, not speak to someone? Stop for a smoke and something to eat? Wouldn’t someone - a locomotive driver, a liaison officer - have a story to tell? As with the persistent stories that Germans did land on the English coast in 1940, but were thrown back - burned by a secret weapon, some said - and all traces removed, you had to ask in the end: where were the photographs? Some evidence?
The fact that Russians did not show in France was proof; eventually. Meanwhile, you had to manage with argument: why would Russia send soldiers abroad - when presumably it wanted every man it had on its own frontiers? Wasn’t the story as unlikely as Britain and France sending an army to Russia? If anyone knew of a Russian shipment, it was Winston Churchill at the Admiralty, whose navy would have to escort the ships to British ports. In a letter to the Minister
of War, Lord Kitchener, on August 28, Churchill did have that very idea: a Russian corps going from Archangel to Ostend, “though I dare say it would not greatly commend itself to the Russians”, he added. As so often in life, if you wanted something done, you had to do it yourself.
Chapter 18
First returns
The population of this country had been schooled in the glories of the British Empire and the deeds of her victorious armies, and, of course, the British Navy, the greatest navy of all time .... Oh! What a shock we got! Oh God! What a shock we got!
Years of Change: Autobiography of a Hackney Shoemaker, by Arthur Newton (1974)
I
As the Bristol Times daily put it mildly enough on September 3, the country would welcome news from the front; ‘practically none has come’. As the newspaper was sharp enough to suggest, it might not be that the authorities were keeping news from the people; maybe the War Office had no news, either?
The previous day, the first returners - wounded from the port of Southampton - arrived at Bristol Temple Meads station. Hundreds of wounded went north, to London, Birmingham and Sheffield, generally cheered on arrival, fed and waved at, and taken to hospitals. On the railway platforms, and later on wards, newspaper reporters (with official permission) sought the soldiers’ stories.
This was a first in British history; witnesses of a battle asked for and giving their accounts, fresh from the battlefield. Some had made what must have been a bewildering round trip: one unnamed artilleryman from the Totterdown district of Bristol left home, was wounded in France, and returned to the city within ten days. In previous centuries, a free press (or any printing press), and a literate mass market for news, had not existed. After the last war, in 1902, men took weeks or months to come home from South Africa; by that time memories (and newspaper readers’ interest) had faded.
We remember the soldiers of the 1914-18 war (if at all) as men who suffered doubly: first, because of what they went through; then, once home, civilians did not want to hear about what the soldiers suffered. August 1914 was the exception, if only because it was early days, before anyone could become disillusioned; and before the authorities enforced censorship, in case anything bad disheartened the public. Newspapers printed what the wounded told them, and carried the plentiful letters (few enough compared with the 100,000 men in the BEF, but plentiful compared with later years of the war) sent by men on the road to the front line, and after the first shock of battle. In later years, soldiers might no more want to put upsetting things on paper than people at home wanted to read about it. In 1914 as in any war, a soldier might want to shield his wife or mother from the worst. “There were some awful sights to be seen, things you will never hear of in the papers, I cannot describe them in a letter ...” wrote William Thomas Simpson, to his family in Ashbourne from Netley Hospital near Southampton. An artilleryman, he was wounded on Monday August 24, the second day of fighting. Simpson indeed did not go into details; some similarly wounded men did, and their families passed the letters to their local newspapers, which printed them.
Just as some men plainly felt a need to get their experiences out of their system and onto paper, so families, and newspapers on behalf of society generally, had curiosity about war. After all, as the papers kept repeating, the 200-mile, two-million-man battlefront of northern France was the greatest in history, by far - greater than any in the wars against Napoleon, the American Civil War, the 1870-1 war between France and Prussia, even the 1904-5 war between Russia and Japan. (That Russia and Austria and Germany might put even more men into the battlefields on their side of Europe went unsaid.)
To sum up, the newspaper reports of soldier testimony of August 1914 - from interviews, and letters home passed to the papers - are a rare and full source, for the 1914-18 or indeed any war. Decades later, a new generation of oral historians asked the veterans, in old age, for their stories; they asked too late for many of the men of August 1914, dead long before then.
II
Not that the men off the train at Temple Meads were much help. To be fair to them, they had not come home to bear witness, but to have their bodies repaired. “All the men told practically the same story, which differs little if at all from the accounts of the battle that have already appeared in the newspapers,” the Bristol Times reported. Possibly the wounded, having a few days on their journey to compare experiences, unconsciously trimmed their stories so that nothing sounded too out of the ordinary, or unpatriotic; maybe they, too, had read the first accounts in newspapers, and did not want to sound peculiar.
Some news from the front arrived even more direct - on dirty scraps of paper, to a Colonel Lang in Wiltshire from his son, dated August 30, and read by Lang to a recruiting meeting at Pewsey on September 2. The younger Lang, presumably, handed it to a wounded man on his way to England - and so avoided any army censorship or other delays. Even this most authentic account, written or spoken, gave an ant’s view; whether of the most junior, or a slightly more senior, ant. The weapons of war had come on but the British soldier at Mons was the same as his forefather at Waterloo, or indeed at Hastings; he only knew about the 200 yards (or 20) of battle-line that he could see and influence, besides any chance news (maybe out of date, misheard in the stress of battle, or jumbled by tired minds) learned from comrades bumped into. Few had the data to give them the larger landscape; perhaps even the commander could not grasp the whole battle.
The returning wounded at least had time to order their thoughts, about the most extreme experience of their lives (worse than anything in South Africa, the veterans of the Boer War agreed). While they did not want to talk themselves into trouble, they felt above all a duty to their comrades, still in battle. It’s striking how many of the wounded men spoke of wanting to go back, as soon as they could. Their listeners may have wanted to hear something as patriotic as that. Yet men in other wars said the same; that they felt they had to help their mates; they felt guilty for being out of danger. The least they could do was to be true to themselves, and their fellows, by saying what the battle was like.
The army did not let this honesty last long. The fighting men soon felt the censor, and not only at the front. Officially, according to the Field Service Pocket Book, printed by the War Office in 1914, censorship was a ‘necessity’, criticism ‘forbidden’. The book detailed what military things you could not write about. G C Harper, a cadet who left Devonport on the brink of war for HMS Endymion, summed up censorship, when told about it, on August 7:
We were not to mention in our letters the name of any ship not even the one we were in. We were not to mention war or anything about it, nor anything about the navy. We were not to mention our ranks or anybody else’s or any place we had been in or were going to ... so the letters were restricted to about two lines, a date and a signature.
That made sense, as any facts if captured might help the enemy. It made less sense far away in Sudan. There, as early as August 11, Frank Balfour wrote to the woman in England he was trying to woo, Irene Lawley: “It would be a charity if you wrote some of the home gossip - bearing in mind that it will probably be read by the censor in Cairo - as also this - I raise my hat to him.” Balfour’s warning, and his droll acknowledgement of the unknown censor, were elegant. In plainer English, but just as effective, was the undated letter from Dick Wallis in camp in Essex to ‘Mother and Dad’ in Leek: “They will not allow any of us to go home unless there is some one ill, so when I want to come I will let you know and you can send a wire to say someone very ill, come at once. But do not send until I tell you.” This letter’s envelope, unlike other letters he sent home, did not have a red ‘passed by censor’ envelope. Wallis had evidently put the letter about his dodge in a civilian postbox (not available to sailors at sea).
The Field Service Pocket Book said nothing about it, but evidently the army read all the letters it could, to watch out for any wrong-doing or rebellion. After the rush simply to put
an army into the field in August 1914, and clothe and arm the recruits, the army enforced its discipline; and civilians learned to obey. For the time being, plenty of newspapers - presumably in ignorance rather than seeking to defy the army - printed the forbidden ranks, names of places passed through, and the shocking, bloody stories, of what happened after men marched out of town and sight.
III
Whether in England or even further from the battlefield, the first casualty totals from the continent, even if sketchy or sensationalised, told everyone what war meant. In his letter to his son on August 29, Lord St Aldwyn quoted an estimate of 12,000 British casualties, “and even half that number is frightful and so dreadful for people waiting to hear of their relations; I think it is a good move to arrange for some public meetings to explain the reason for the war etc.” In other words, once people heard that war killed people, they would need more convincing that war was worth the cost. Writing from Sudan on August 28, Frank Balfour felt once more far from the centre of affairs: “It’s pretty rotten reading of British losses of 2000, knowing that one will see no names for three weeks at least.” Sure enough, not until September 21 did the casualty list dated September 3 arrive with the mail, ‘and it makes unhappy reading’. What was the nature of this war, taking so many lives so soon? And what was it like for the soldiers in the middle of it?
Part Three
War Abroad
Chapter 19
Going
It is impossible now after the bitter experience of two world wars to recapture the spirit of this country in August, 1914. As I marched through those cheering crowds I felt like a king among men.
A Full Life, by Lieutenant-General Sir Brian Horrocks (1960)
We have already been sceptical about the cheering crowds in London and other capitals at the outbreak of war; we can be kinder towards the well-wishers waving off the then 18-year-old Lieutenant Horrocks from Chatham, with 95 men of the Middlesex Regiment. Towns such as Chatham with a military tradition would want to do right by such men. Even if you knew none of the men leaving, the march to war was the event of the year, like an overturned tram or a factory fire; and cheering, like gawping, was free. For anyone who did know the men marching away, marchers and watchers alike would want to put on a brave face. Any farewell tears were best cried in private, before the procession, or after your son or brother left. Besides, even if they might not have wanted to upset family by admitting it, some departing young men, like Albert Batty, enjoyed the prospect of something more thrilling than everyday life:
