Passchendaele
Page 30
The rich and upper middle classes were rarely seen queuing; their income was able to absorb the black-market food prices. In fact, the well-off ‘remained conspicuous consumers’, notes Trevor Wilson.57 London’s butchers were fully stocked, according to one visitor, but only the wealthy could afford meat. Nor would the aristocracy let the war curb their demand for luxury goods, the trade of which the government exempted from higher taxes. ‘New hats,’ complained Auckland Geddes, in late 1917, ‘alone absorb the work of millions of fingers, and whatever effect they may have, that effect certainly does not include helping to beat the enemy.’58 The government defended the trade in luxury goods as economically beneficial, ignoring the fact that satiating the tastes of the members of the House of Lords and their ilk locked up labour that might have worked for the war effort. Yet surely there was nothing wrong in throwing a good party? One Lady Scott attended a lavish dinner at the Berkeley in May 1917, where, to her shock, champagne and strawberries were served, followed by the theatre.59
Nobody in Britain starved. Ration cards ensured a fairer distribution of scarce foodstuffs. And British food stocks were holding up very well. The Royal Navy’s convoy system had protected merchant shipping. German Deputy Matthias Erzberger admitted as much in a speech to the Main Committee of the Reichstag on 6 July 1917. ‘[T]he submarine war,’ he declared, ‘was perfectly hopeless and it was quite impossible for us to win the war at all’. His words infuriated Ludendorff and the armed forces.60 But Erzberger was right: German submarines had inflicted little damage on British food stocks, and had only seriously affected sugar, supplies of which were down by a third because they were wholly imported. True, the Germans were producing eight subs a month, the War Cabinet heard on 24 September,61 but German success at sea ‘had not been commensurate with their increased numbers’.62 Indeed, on 21 September, the press announced the British victory over the German U-boats. ‘[T]he submarine is defeated,’ reported The Dundee Courier and other papers. ‘If the public knew what we know,’ a ‘high naval authority’ had leaked to the Press Association, ‘they would not have the slightest anxiety [about the U-boat] …’63
In sum, Haig’s original strategic justification for Third Ypres – to destroy the U-boat bases on the Belgian coast – had ceased to exist. But nobody in the War Cabinet saw fit to ask: why persist with an offensive that is killing tens of thousands of men for an objective that no longer threatens us? Or for one that is no longer urgent enough, surely, to justify such heavy losses?
If the rich and middle classes were well fed and content – many women had jobs for the first time – the British workers were disenchanted. The inequity infuriated the poor. The perception that the wealthy were gorging themselves while the poor went hungry caused ‘more discontent and dissatisfaction to the people of East London than anything we have known since the war started’, noted the East London Advertiser.64
The unions were flexing their muscles, and thousands were going on strike: 1917 would prove the worst year for British industrial action since the war began, with 688 strikes and trade disputes, involving 860,000 workers.65 An especially bad week ending on 26 September (the day of the battle of Polygon Wood) recorded 75 strikes, many against food shortages.66
Though disruptive, these were hardly the beginnings of an insurrection. British workers were not radicalised to the extent of the Russian proletariat, of course, who would soon dismember the ruling class in the coming October Revolution. Nor would the British worker find the enthusiasm to imitate the anti-war German Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, then being formed to seize power from the Prussian-controlled state.
The British workers’ patriotism, love of country over class, and psychological affinity with subjection – of ‘knowing one’s place’ – trumped their anger at food prices, poor factory conditions, wartime profiteering and even the extension of income tax to low-wage earners. They protested and went on strike, and then submitted, as so often, to their economic overlords.
In one respect, the salaried and working classes’ feelings were indeed hardening – against the war. ‘[M]uch of the early enthusiasm’ for military service had ‘evaporated’, claimed one report on the British recruitment situation, in July 1917: ‘the voluntary system having exhausted most of those who were keen to fight, the later drafts under conscription consist mainly of men averse to doing so’. For this, the authors blamed the ‘governing classes’, who had ‘forgotten … the ideals which were in men’s hearts in the first months of the war’; and the ‘military authorities’ for not treating conscripts ‘with human sympathy and consideration’.67 The authors failed to see that the army’s job was not to sympathise with soldiers but to train them to fight. The more likely cause of a lad’s reluctance to enlist in 1917 was his very real fear of losing his life or part of his body. By then, crippled and deformed veterans were commonplace in European cities.
One of the great myths about the Great War is that people hated it, and wished it would end. On the contrary, countless civilians, safe in their urban redoubts, revelled in the stories of great victories and huge armies on the march. Even in 1917, the anti-war movement made little impact on the war-approving majority. Fewer men may have wanted to fight it, but they did not openly oppose it. A small minority saw the tragedy as a catastrophe for civilisation, for which every European nation bore a measure of responsibility. The rest seemed to bear out some truth in Graham Greene’s later observation: ‘Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.’68
Returning to this alien world, the soldier felt a jolt of estrangement, of dislocation, sharpened by the perception that so few at home seemed aware of, interested in or able to comprehend his experience in Flanders. Was anyone truly conscious of the scale of his sacrifice?
The newspaper version of the war struck the returning soldiers as the most glaring offender. The papers were wilfully blind. Government propaganda twisted the first casualty of war into an unrecognisable story of derring-do, a boisterous enfilade of jolly good news about a patriotic romp through Flanders in which our boys would skewer the Hun and return victorious. Lord Beaverbrook’s Express Group was the loudest and most obscene offender, but Lord Northcliffe’s The Times sometimes matched the Daily Mirror’s standards of wilful misinformation. ‘Are we downhearted? – No’ claimed the Times headline over a staged photo of troops waving their helmets on their way to the front on 8 August 1917, captioned, ‘Cheering as they go forward’.69 Away from the cameras, the soldiers were downcast and sullen, possibly at the thought of the huge losses of the battle of Pilckem Ridge their comrades had just fought.
The accredited journalists of the Press Section, the ‘chateaux warriors’ recumbent in their lavish French and Belgian billets, were made to understand that they should not report ‘the truth’, or the truth as they found it. Their dispatches were to provide a ‘steadying’ influence on the home population, in the view of Brigadier General John Charteris, whose Intelligence Section at GHQ controlled their activities. In Haig’s view, the reporter had a slightly less demeaning purpose: to promote the justice of the British cause and impress upon the people the case for a long and costly campaign – in other words, to defend his strategy of attrition. Critical articles and facts that got in the way of the official line were censored.
Lloyd George would recall the residual press coverage with contempt, drawn from his conviction that Lord Northcliffe ‘had, ever since 1916, been the mere kettledrum of Sir Douglas Haig, and the mouth organ of Sir William Robertson’. The Times’s reports were ‘therefore ecstatic’.70 After the September battles, the paper reported that ‘we advanced about a thousand yards’ and ‘our losses were heavy’. Despite these meagre gains, the enemy’s elaborate defensive system had been crushed, under the headline, ‘GERMAN DEFENCE BROKEN’.71 Later reports, after more terrible losses, referred to ‘a smashing blow, the most smashing defeat we have inflicted on the enemy,
a complete victory’, concluding, ‘We have him beat.’72
The media’s misreporting was more a question of emphasis and omission than one of brazen lies. The censors filleted out any bad news. According to one study of the press coverage of Passchendaele, ‘Military censorship, or the absence of news, had become the shock-troops of propaganda. As a result the media record was nothing like “reality”, but rather an illusion of reality …’73
The most meretricious reports were the result of official, government-approved lies, such as the ridiculous stories of bayoneted babies, mutilated corpses and Berlin’s alleged Corpse Conversion Factory, which boiled down soldiers’ bodies to extract scarce soaps and lubricating oils. This nonsense was predicated on the idea that the British blockade had been so successful as to deny cleansing agents to the German people.
The succession of stories of British victories over the Huns bore out the guiding principle of Charteris, as he put it: ‘to make armies go on killing one another it is necessary to invent lies about the enemy’.74 Years later, it surprised nobody who knew him to learn that Charteris had made up the Corpse Factory story, to rally neutral nations behind the war effort.
So, during one of the most terrible conflicts on the Western Front, when Allied morale fathomed the lowest circles, the people at home learned that the British and Empire armies were ‘in the best of spirits’ (The Times, 28 September 1917); enjoying ‘Complete Success’ (Daily Mirror, 22 September 1917, in a report about ‘the Battle of the Pill Boxes’ – a verdict the paper reversed two days later); and delivering a series of ‘smashing blows’ or striking ‘another blow’ (Daily Mirror, 6 October 1917). The Germans were cast as savages who would bayonet your daughter, or as pathetic specimens, miserable, despondent, broken – a mirror of Haig’s view. The Germans were neither; they were simply young men, like their British and Dominion counterparts, trying to survive the holocaust their governments had unleashed on the world.
There were jewels of journalistic excellence, splinters of clarity that broke through the official whitewash. Philip Gibbs, of The Daily Telegraph and Daily Chronicle, is often cited as the finest of the Great War correspondents, but Charles Bean, who later made his name as Australia’s official historian, shared that accolade. Both sent vivid and arresting reports during Third Ypres, some of which survived the censors. Some correspondents tried to interpret the war, even if they erred in defence of Haig’s strategy. Perry Robinson, in the Daily News and Leader, 20 September 1917, grasped the point of bite and hold: ‘For a long time [the German wires] sought to represent each of our attacks as “an attempt to breakthrough”. We have never attempted to break through. It is not that kind of war.’75
Of course, the German press were similarly manipulated to peddle myths about British barbarity (they had a point in the case of the naval blockade). All governments use the Fourth Estate as a launch pad for psychological warfare, and the press offensives of 1917 seem positively quaint by the totalitarian standards of the mid-twentieth century. Yet the propaganda campaigns were extremely effective, and won millions of people over to the war. In this light, it is absurd to suggest that the war went on simply ‘because the peoples of Europe willed it so’.76 Governments were not merely reacting to mass enthusiasm for war. The war ‘the people’ were supposedly willing had little to do with the reality of Third Ypres and the incessant ‘wastage’ of young men. In any case, the ‘people’, if represented by their ability to vote, ignored half the population: women. And from the summer of 1917, the people’s enthusiasm began to collapse: workers were on the march against the war, families were distraught, and governments who counted on their support were experiencing a loss of nerve.
‘We are losing the flower of our Army, and to what purpose,’ Lloyd George confided in a colleague on 6 August.77 Something had to be done to win back popular enthusiasm for the war, the Cabinet decided. Lloyd George set out to answer his own question: as Third Ypres began, he announced the formation of the National War Aims Committee, set up to sell the war to the people afresh. The committee subjected audiences around the country to fiery pro-war speakers such as Horatio Bottomley, instructed to put the bark back into the British bulldog: 889 meetings were held around Britain between 25 September and 10 October, promoting the ‘good fight’ during some of the worst battles of Passchendaele. The speakers made no reference, of course, to the war of mechanised slaughter then about to enter its most dreadful phase.
Towards the end of 1917, nothing could deflect public horror at the dreadful harvest of war: the ranks of the wounded inhabiting the cities and villages of Europe. Forty thousand British, hundreds of thousands of French and about half a million German soldiers would undergo amputations by the war’s end, spurring the development of dozens of kinds of prosthetic arms and legs.78
The home front tried to normalise the horror. In British shires, for example, cricket matches were arranged between full-bodied local teams and ‘Arms & Legs’ sides, in which the local bowlers were told to bowl easily against one-legged or one-armed batsmen. Soldiers with severe facial wounds presented a terrible spectacle to the home front. Many men had lost their noses, ears, eyes or entire jaws, leaving ghastly scars and twisted flesh. ‘Hideous is the only word for these smashed faces,’ observed one hospital orderly. ‘The socket with some twisted, moist slit, with a lash or two adhering feebly, which is all that is traceable of the forfeited eye.’79 There were no mirrors and very few visitors in the wards set aside for the dreadfully deformed – the ‘chambers of horrors’, as they were known in the hospitals. If the patient returned to the community, he tended to shut himself away, rather than endure public revulsion at his appearance – as would the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 28 years later.80 For such men, ‘becoming a cinema projectionist was the ideal job’81 – or a night worker.
Some cases were beyond surgery, and monstrous to the point of offending the public. For such men, in Britain, France and Germany, masks were moulded out of plaster, copper, wire and hair, to disguise what remained of the soldier’s face. The masks gave a freakish, vaudeville appearance to the wearer, many of whom discarded them the instant they left hospital.
Hope for these men arose in the summer of 1917, when Professor Harold Gillies, a pioneering plastic surgeon, established a specialist hospital in a stately home in Kent where he conducted the world’s first plastic surgical operations. Gillies had spent the war trying to find a surgical response to ‘men without half their faces’.82 In time, he would build the world’s finest plastic surgical team, and make great advances in the reconstruction of human noses, jaw lines, cheeks and chins. A lot of good came out of his spirited reaction to the war.
Returning soldiers gazed in wonder at the strangeness of the cities and the people. ‘In London the war is a very real thing,’ the Australian medical officer Major George Alexander Birnie wrote to his parents in October 1917. Frequent air raids were a constant reminder:
A huge bomb in Piccadilly the other night killed about 30 people and wounded some hundreds besides breaking every pane of glass within ¼ of a mile. The cost of living is enormous, practically no sugar is obtainable, very little tea … but rationing is not far off. The wounded are everywhere and the Hospitals are crowded. But still the shops are full of beautiful and costly things, the theatres are full and there is no lack of food in the restaurants. There is no mourning in England though, and though nearly everyone had lost someone, there is no parade of it, which is one thing in which we are superior to the French, I think, who are all in black.83
Some returning soldiers sensed a want of spine among the people. Colonel Wilkinson arrived in London in September, soon after an air raid. A few days earlier, he had witnessed the death or wounding of thousands of men in battle, and the media’s disproportionate coverage of the air raids disgusted him. He wrote to his father:
[T]o judge from the papers, the majority of people appear to be entirely demoralised. After there has been an air raid over London it is difficult to believ
e that there is still a war on out here. Columns and columns of what we consider to be entire nonsense are written on the subject … & there is an entire omission of any other war news. One reporter had the impertinence to say that ‘under the circumstances cheerfulness would have been as offensive as panic’! He should see the British soldier undergoing a nice bombardment … Such drivel I have seldom read … Seeing what the soldier, not so long ago himself a civilian, has to put up with, we think that the people at home might show a little more fortitude when they get a mild insight into the realities of war. For the women and children I am very sorry, but there are many women whom it will not harm to realise that this war is not quite the joke they thought it was.84
Neville Hind got closer to the truth about the soldiers’ feelings on his return home. He wrote of civilians who ‘cannot even approach comprehension’ and whose ‘glib commonplaces’ and ‘cheap sympathy’ he found ‘hideously exasperating’:
Perhaps you are tempted to give them a picture of a leprous earth, scattered with the swollen and blackening corpses of hundreds of young men. The appalling stench of rotting carrion … of flies and bluebottles clustering on pits of offal. Wounded men lying in the shell holes among decaying corpses; helpless under the scorching sun and bitter nights, under repeated shelling. Men with bowels dropping out, lungs shot away, with blinded, smashed faces, or limbs blown into space. Men screaming and gibbering. Wounded men hanging in agony on the barbed wire, until a friendly spout of liquid fire shrivels them up like a fly in a candle. But these are only words and probably only convey a fraction of their meaning to the hearers. They shudder, and it is forgotten … 85
On leave, Hind resolved never to talk about such things.
The British people were far better off than their German counterparts. The British blockade had inflicted a great deal more suffering on the Germans than unlimited submarine warfare had on the British.