The Monocled Mutineer

by John Fairley

  8

  When the Germans dropped seven bombs on the American-run hospital for British wounded at Étaples at around 11 p.m. on the night of Tuesday, 3 September, killing one US officer and three other ranks and wounding several other Americans, the blast was felt all over the United States, uniting a deeply divided nation suffering from serious second thoughts about being in the war at all. It was a considerable psychological blunder by the Germans, who had intended the reverse effect. Reports reaching Germany in the summer of 1917 from America showed that the resolve of the United States had weakened greatly since President Wilson’s declaration of war in April.

  The well-organized anti-war factions throughout the US had been gaining a sympathetic audience. Loyalists were losing a serious and bitter internal struggle against what had become widely known as ‘the enemy within’. The German intention was to add weight to the arguments of their supporting millions in America with a show of brutal force which would swing the pendulum further their way and perhaps influence a US withdrawal from the war, even at that late stage. Instead, the pro-war Wilsonites found themselves handed the ideal propaganda bludgeon. At last, they were able to declare, Americans had experienced the ‘barbarity of the Hun’.

  The hospital bombing at Étaples was hailed in the United States as the end of the phoney-war period and the answer to those who had doubted the wisdom of being involved. Because of communications confusion between General Thomson and the remote American military commanders in France, news the American government so desperately wanted to hear dawdled its way across the Atlantic. The story did not break until the morning of Saturday, 8 September, when the New York Tribune ran this leader, headlined ‘THE HUN’:

  The announcement that an American medical officer has been murdered and three others wounded in a German air attack upon an American hospital on the French coast will surprise American people merely because distance has so far served to supplement their faith in human nature and make it impossible for them to believe that even Germany would do the things they have been charged with doing.

  Yet there is nothing new in this German attack upon a hospital far removed from the scene of operations. The truth is that this is the sort of thing the German does. He rapes women, tortures old men, murders children, burns villages, enslaves populations, attacks hospitals, because in the German mind this is a method of making war which promises profit to the German cause.

  The reason why all talk of peace is futile and sometimes approaches sin is that it is impossible for men and women to live at peace with a people who do the things that Germans do. The Canadian people hesitated to believe the French and British accounts of German atrocities until Canadian soldiers reported that some of their wounded had been crucified before Ypres. The British troops hesitated to believe what French rumors told and Belgian reports asserted, with reference to German methods of making war until British soldiers occupied districts in France that had been held by Germans – until they saw what Germans had done to the women and children and the old men of the districts of Artois and Flanders.

  We had our first contact with the German method in the Lusitania. We have not yet had sufficient contact to supply American evidence to the mass of the American people. That is coming. We have thousands of American soldiers in Europe, and we shall go to every corner of the United States, and these letters from the men at the front and in touch with the German will serve to educate the people of the United States as to the kind of thing the German is in the world of today.

  The British call the German a Hun. The French call him a Boche. Both names are the expression of the mingled horror and contempt of a civilized people in presence of the barbarism of a people who do the sort of thing the German does. To the Frenchman a Boche is a kind of animal who does things that the German has done in all the defenceless villages of the North of France. To the Englishman a Hun means a kind of beast who does the things that have been done in Flanders and in Artois under the eyes of the British soldiers.

  We in the United States are going to know the German as he is presently. The voices which now clamor for peace with reconciliation will fall to silence when the Germans have murdered enough of our women nurses and our men physicians and tortured enough of our soldiers to create in America the kind of conviction that similar methods have created in France and in England. The difficulty in the American case has been one of bringing home to the mass of the common people far removed from Europe the plain fact of what the German was doing. To them the war remained a remote struggle between nations. It will not long remain a remote struggle now that the Germans have taken to murdering Americans, now that they have taken to making war upon our hospitals; now that they have adopted toward us the tactics of terribleness familiar to all the big and little nations of Europe. It will not be long now until every American voice is raised in support of a war which strikes at this German peril.

  Different versions of this powerful heady propaganda appeared in newspapers throughout the United States. But what was sauce for the American gander was not necessarily sauce for the British goose. The German attack on the American-manned Étaples hospital, one of six for British wounded in and around the town, was being used to stiffen the US spine. The raid was beginning to boomerang on the Germans from the American viewpoint, but it was having another effect, also not intended. The raid had lowered British morale at Étaples even further, pushing an army nearer still to mutiny.

  It was only a week earlier that most of the tented hospital had been blown down by a wild storm, putting 2,831 beds out of action. The rain-soaked wounded suffered badly, and many had died as a result. And now it was necessary to endure bombing. Several British wounded had also been further injured in the air-raid, but no fuss was being made about that. After all, British troops had been dying daily for years in those hospitals. It was hardly news.

  But the first American casualties of the war did make news – big news. General Thomson’s official record for 2 September at Étaples reads simply: ‘Enemy Aeroplane Raid. Seven bombs dropped in hospital area. Lieutenant W. T. Fitzsimmons USA and three other rank Americans killed.’ This meagre record of a very important moment in history reflected how the significance of the event was lost on Thomson.

  The British Command’s attempts to convey the news to the American Command were likewise leisurely in the extreme, and handicapped by a lack of exact knowledge as to where that command could be located. The American General Officer Commanding, Major-General John J. Pershing, after landing with a token force of several hundred at Saint-Nazaire on 26 June, had set up his headquarters in an unexpected and scarcely strategic spot, Paris. Not that his presence nearer the front would have made much difference.

  America had been so unprepared for war that even the token force she had sent lacked the necessary equipment to take any active part in the fighting. Pershing had made a public speech predicting that America would not be able to have a fighting force at the front before 1918, and was acting accordingly. In this first week of September he was not at the Paris hotel address where he was usually to be found. A hint from the Secretary of State for War, Newton D. Baker, that the French capital was perhaps not the best place from which to conduct the US war effort, meant that he was in the process of shifting his headquarters to the Damremont Barracks at Chaumont behind the Lorraine Front.

  Thomson solved his problem by sending a dispatch to the military attaché at the US Embassy in London, where it did not arrive until the 7th. The names of dead other ranks did not rate a mention in Thomson’s book, so there was more confusion which led to the New York Tribune and the American press generally reporting at first that only Lieutenant Fitzsimmons had been killed, with others wounded. The New York Herald made the most of what it had been given. Its Saturday issue had a seven-column, page 1, headline: ‘Prussians murder and maim Americans in Air Attack on Hospital in France.’ The story went on to state that the Prussians had ‘set a new mark for frightfulness by deliberate attempts to destroy in
stitutions of mercy’.

  Other newspapers also presented the story in a manner calculated to whip up a much-needed, long-overdue public frenzy. The word ‘murder’ was freely used, and the more quaint ‘frightfulness’ much exercised. But then a frightful thing did happen to the Herald itself. On 13 September it wrongly corrected a second agency dispatch it had carried on the 11th stating that Fitzsimmons and three others had died. This second piece of confusion was caused by the US War Department belatedly getting to grips with events at Étaples and issuing a statement giving the names of nine wounded men and nurses in addition to the four dead already reported by the military attaché in London. The Herald understood this statement to be instead of the first, and to mean that no one had been killed after all. It ran a single-column story to this effect on page 11. Undaunted, however, the Herald did find its first dead war hero in the same issue, and a curious story it was, culminating in the first bugles blowing at a military funeral in the heart of the Bronx. The Herald’s exclusive read:

  Private Flynn, of New York, First to Die at Yaphank.

  One-Time Fireman, Physically Perfect, Victim of Acute Indigestion.

  (Special Despatch to the Herald.)

  Camp Upton, Yaphank, L.I.

  Friday: Private Harry E. Flynn, a fireman of hook and ladder truck No. 7 New York City, until he was selected for the National Army, died last night, the first selected man to die in Camp Upton. He had been ill only a few hours, of acute indigestion.

  Military honours will be paid to Flynn when his body is sent to New York tomorrow.

  What the Herald did not give was the background to Private Flynn’s short and undistinguished military career in the Long Island camp fifteen miles from his home. He had never actually worn a uniform because there were no uniforms available. He had paraded and route-marched in his own shoes because there were no army boots. And he had trained and drilled with a broomstick because there were no rifles. Almost the entire US Army was without rifles, but Baker, the War Secretary, had promised them some by Christmas.

  When the bugles stopped blowing at 204 Morris Avenue, the Bronx, that Sunday, the Stars and Stripes was lifted from Harry Flynn’s coffin and – as the US military manual stipulates – presented to his next-of-kin, Uncle Tom, as a symbol of the fact that the deceased had served in the Armed Forces of the United States, and that his country, in conducting part one of his ceremonial interment, had given its final and solemn recognition of the obligation which it owed to a faithful servant. One of America’s first dead war heroes deserved the tribute no less because he had seemingly died of indigestion while briefly serving in the Unarmed Forces of the United States.

  Other newspapers continued to devote columns of space to the first American war dead in the week following the announcement of the ‘Étaples horror’. The Christian Science Monitor revealed that General Pershing had been rebuked by the War Department for being slow off the mark at Étaples. He had been instructed to put casualties at the start of his daily cable message in future. He responded to the call to emphasize the human cost of American participation in the war with a first casualty list showing that Sergeant M. G. Calderwood and Private W. F. Brannigan had been slightly wounded by shell fragments. Engineers Brannigan and Calderwood had been repairing a railway line, and the US press speculated about how close to the front line they had actually been. The New York Times carried one sentence showing British casualties, dead and seriously wounded, during August: 58,811.

  The Étaples dead, First Lieutenant William Fitzsimmons (28), a doctor from Kansas City, and the three medical orderlies Privates Leslie Woods (17), of Streaton, Illinois, Rudolph Rubino (20), of New York, and Oscar Tugo (22), of Boston, had all volunteered for service attached to the Red Cross before the United States entered the war. Obituaries continued to be written about them at great length. Their families were interviewed for quotes about how proud they felt, and at Étaples on 7 September a seven-strong American press corps invaded the area to the great disgust of the British troops, whose wounded were ignored. The reporters sent back stories that the German pilot had not only unleashed bombs. He had showered the ground with German pfennigs, thereby showing Prussian contempt for American capitalism and proving that the Germans had deliberately singled out a hospital where they knew there would be US personnel.

  The British soldiers were further soured the following day when General Thomson instructed a British colonel to show the American journalists round the Bull Ring itself, as though it were some showpiece of British militarism. The truth was that the hospitals should never have been sited close to railway stations like that at Étaples, which were, of course, legitimate bombing targets for the enemy. Day and night the trains conveyed men and guns to the front. Yet four of the hospitals were in a cluster directly alongside the tracks. Indeed, as the soldiers knew, this placing of the hospitals was in direct breach of an international Red Cross agreement.

  A true understanding of the great pandemonium created by the raid could only have been gained by a study of America’s uneasy position on her home front at the time. The truth was that the US looked upon the German bombs as a great blessing. On the one side were anarchists and pacifists, lined up against loyalists and patriots on the other. On 9 September, when the British Army revolted at Étaples, three anarchists were shot dead by police in Milwaukee when they tried to break up a patriotic meeting in the Italian section of the town. Two detectives were wounded. This type of clash occurred frequently.

  Every main American city had at least one German-language newspaper catering for the country’s huge German population. They turned out virulent anti-war propaganda, condemning US entry as capitalistic interference which did not have the support of the people. The Elore, a Hungarian newspaper published in New York, was trumpeting that American capitalistic interests were preparing to sacrifice the life and blood of their people and would go on doing so until the lust for booty was satisfied. All these newspapers were free to publish what they liked.

  There were many telling incidents. In Ohio, a troop-train travelling to an eastern port was fired upon by unknown rebels who wounded three soldiers. The Federal Department of Justice announced its intention of investigating the case of Major William Thomson of New York, who had been making antiwar speeches. The New York Master Bakers at their annual convention on 12 September passed a resolution that they were willing to make bread without profit for the duration of the war. As their president, Maximilian Strasser, explained, no baker would actually do that, but the resolution did express patriotism and the convention would get a big patriotic write-up from the newspapers. And as a demonstration of true patriotism in the face of the massive build-up of anti-war feeling through the country, the former President, Theodore Roosevelt, made a serious offer to President Wilson to personally lead a group of volunteers to fight in France. He was furious to have his offer turned down.

  But Secretary of State Lansing came near to ruining the new prowar spirit being carefully orchestrated in the wake of the Étaples raid by using the period as the launching pad for his own ‘bombshell’.

  Lansing’s ‘revelation’ was made to a nation already in the grip of rising hysteria, and caused Congressmen to literally fight and wrestle with each other on the floor of the House of Representatives in Washington.

  Americans could take in their stride reports of German plots to spread anthrax throughout California, even Federal Court evidence from Oklahoma of plots, aided by the Industrial Workers of the World, to bring down the government with a bloody revolution, but the Lansing expose of the existence of a German ‘slush fund’, used to influence Congressmen to stay out of the war, was too much to stomach.

  At first the fund stated to have been put at the disposal of the former German Ambassador, Von Bernstorff, was given out as being in the region of 50,000 dollars, but this later rose to a figure of 8,000,000 dollars. Immediately there was a gigantic outcry followed by nation-wide demands for a Congressional investigation. Under headlines r
eading ‘Who Got The German Gold?’ newspapers like the New York Tribune paraded their own lists of probable recipients. Desperately, Lansing tried to stem the mounting speculation and scandal with a follow-up statement.

  Weakly, he said that there must have been a misunderstanding. He had not intended to impugn Congressmen. He had not intended to imply that they had willingly submitted to German bribery and corruption, merely, that they had been the innocent victims of German-financed propaganda calling for continued US neutrality. Therefore, there was no need for an inquiry. But his second statement lacked sufficient conviction to stop the hue and cry at that stage.

  Representative Frank Howard of Georgia countered that he thought he could pick out the Congressmen who had got the German gold, adding that they looked a whole lot more prosperous than they ever did before. Representative Thomas Heflin of Alabama proclaimed that he could publicly name thirteen or fourteen men who had acted suspiciously and whose actions warranted expulsion at least. The Tribune advocated a more permanent method of disposing of seditious Americans. ‘Shoot Them’, it trumpeted.

  Heflin further shook the administration with a Washington Post interview locating and detailing the method of bribery at a German-run gambling club in downtown Washington where the dice was always loaded in favour of Congressmen never known to lose on the tables. To cries of, ‘Name them’ in the House, he responded that he would do so in the event of an investigation.

  Three days later Heflin literally got to grips on the floor of the House with Representative Norton of North Dakota, who claimed he had been wrongly identified as one of the guilty thirteen. The two ended an exchange of verbal abuse with a bout of fisticuffs and all-in wrestling as they rolled around on top of each other in the aisle of the Chamber, to shouts of encouragement on both sides.