Churchill's Wizards (19 page)

Delicate jobs were not easy. The special works sappers might have to work for sixteen nights in a conspicuous, elevated position only a few hundred yards from the German lines. They had to try not to be seen or heard as they gouged and hacked two channels in the tough oak, deep enough to accommodate ten-foot lengths of periscope in bulletproof casing, which was then sealed up flush with hammered sheet iron treated to look like weathered wood. Every time a star shell or Verey light went up in the darkness they froze. There was no talking. And yet the rest of the British Army remained amazingly noisy. Lorries came roaring up to the trench tramway to the skeleton mill and then dumped engineering supplies with the kind of din that drew down enemy gunfire. Oliver Bernard sometimes reflected bitterly that there were three kinds of military clients for his camouflage: the very few who believed in making things difficult for the enemy; a greater number who believed in making things difficult for everybody but the enemy; and a great lump of rigid intractables who thought that any form of concealment was somehow a breach of King's Regulations. These idiots were facing German enemies who did not hesitate to copy all camouflage ideas from the French and British.

But Lieutenant Bernard came from the theatre, where the show must always go on. Early one summer morning in 1916 the job at the windmill was done. On the campbed in his hut, a few hours later, Bernard was woken from the sleep of the just by the general and his brigade major. ‘The mill is finished,' they said. He agreed it had been
completed at 2.30 a.m. ‘No, the mill is
finished
,' they said. ‘The Boche finished it.' After the German artillery blitz, all Bernard could do was collect the object glasses and eyepieces of the bent periscopes, and curse the fortunes of war.

The little wizard got around the Salient unscathed, until a place called Vormazalee. There, on 4 August 1916, the day after his brother Bruce was killed with the New Zealanders, a machine-gun bullet hit Oliver Bernard just below the left kneecap. After a spell in hospital at Wimereux, he was shipped back to England. ‘I'm not from the Somme,' he said to the lady who pushed a basket of fruit into his ambulance at Charing Cross Station. Major Rhodes got Bernard into the efficient Clock House hospital on Chelsea Embankment.

One day, Bernard hirpled out on crutches to see Solomon J. Solomon at Hyde Park Gate. At the front door he hesitated, wondering whether the artist would appreciate his old ‘business man' dropping in, but Solomon was genial and friendly, inviting Bernard into his studio and settling him down to paint his portrait. Beneath the affable conversation, Bernard could sense that Solomon was hurt and disappointed by what had happened to him in the army. The cynical and worldly Bernard had always wondered what motivated Solomon. Was his energy fuelled by ambition or greed? Now, as Bernard talked to him in his studio, Solomon ‘revealed a man with the heart of an irrepressible child, gifted, generous, spoiled, unaccustomed to hard knocks and opposition which are the common enemy of all pioneers'. In Bernard's opinion, although Solomon was not fitted to run a military unit and his political tactics were unwise, he had been the first person to grasp the potential of the new French idea and to press it energetically on the authorities. Solomon would have received more recognition had he been prepared to advise rather than dictate.

In France, deceptive camouflage work continued as the two sides shelled each other over no-man's-land. Early in 1917, Oliver Bernard limped back to his post, sporting a wound stripe next to his Military Cross. He dug Oh Pip observation posts into chalk near Vimy Ridge, and behind brick walls by Mount Kemmel. A few days before Easter in April 1917, aged just 36, Bernard became the camouflage officer of IX Corps in Sir Herbert Plumer's Second Army. This force was preparing and training for a massive assault on the Messines-Wijtschate
Ridge overlooking the Ypres Salient from the south. Sappers and gunners paved the way for the infantry: British, Australian and Canadian tunnellers were secretly digging through the clay to place twenty-one giant mines under the German positions, listening through microphones to the ordinary sounds of enemy life that would soon be cut short. At a place the British called the Bluff, the tunnellers had bravely dug underneath waterfilled craters. Now the
camoufleurs
assisted by poking up disguised periscopes only seventy yards from the German lines. Meanwhile, over 2,200 howitzers and big guns were assembled, and coordinated with 400 heavy mortars and 700 heavy machine guns. The Second Army also had air superiority: eight tethered observation balloons were backed up by II Brigade Royal Flying Corps whose 300 aircraft were already attacking airfields, railways and German reserve camps as well as patrolling and photographing the enemy lines. An enormous scale model of Messines Ridge and its defences, the size of two croquet lawns, was constructed in detail from RFC reconnaissance evidence. Officers studied the model from scaffolding built up around it.

When Bernard was summoned to tell his corps commander, Lieutenant General Sir Alexander Hamilton Gordon, about camouflage, he took some aerial photographs with him. Gordon's lugubrious disposition had earned him the ironic nickname ‘Sunny Jim' but Bernard really did feel ‘as if a ray of sunshine had unexpectedly penetrated the unhappiest depths of his weary but persevering soul' as he at last was able to explain what he thought was going wrong to somebody who could do something about it. Camouflage had to be a forethought, not an afterthought, said Bernard; built-in from the beginning. If the enemy spotted your first diggings for an ammunition dump or an artillery emplacement, all later attempts to hide it would only advertise its importance the more. The wrong sort of camouflage was worse than none, Bernard added, showing Hamilton the aerial photographs of gun-pits being prepared in the open and then covered with extraordinary wigwams, square tents of hessian and light green canvas with sloping sides that were as conspicuous as block houses. ‘What damn fools we all are!' exclaimed the corps commander. (Those sites were left in place as excellent decoys when they quietly relocated the guns.)

The subsequent assault on Messines or Mesen Ridge was perhaps the greatest British success so far in the stalemated, deadlocked war. At
3.10 am on 7 June 1917, nineteen of the twenty-one mines buried by the tunnellers under the German lines went off in a rolling sequence that lasted an appalling twenty-eight seconds. Great pillars of flame reached up to the sky and then collapsed in dirt and debris and smoke. Philip Gibbs said it was ‘as though the fires of hell had risen'. A million pounds of explosive produced a shockwave that could be heard and felt on the other side of the English Channel by the sleepless lying awake in London. Huge craters, 250 feet across, punctured the blasted landscape. Perhaps 8,000 German soldiers perished immediately in their shattered bunkers and trenches. Walking behind a massive creeping barrage of artillery, mortars and machine guns, 80,000 British and Anzac infantry moved forward, took the entire ridge and moved down the other side. More than 7,000 dazed Germans surrendered. Philip Gibbs noticed the camouflage sacking on the helmets of the Germans as well as their complete ignorance of how much Germany was hated. After four days' fighting, half of the 25,000 British killed and wounded were Anzacs.

After June 1917, when the Anzacs took over the Canadian sector of the Ypres Salient, camouflage stepped up from retail to wholesale. The First Australian Division, who had fought at Gallipoli, asked Special Works if all visible roads from Poperinghe to Ypres could be screened from German observation balloons. They did not want to lose more men, equipment and transport through visual carelessness. From this date onwards, there is photographic evidence of banners of hessian, ranked in arches across roads, forming overlapping layers against a distant observer. Production of road screening materials shot up to 25,000 square yards in June and July, from nil in May. By Christmas 1917, 112,000 square yards were flapping in the wind.

Only very slowly was the BEF beginning to understand that the key idea of camouflage was deception, not just concealment. But new ideas were slowly getting through. Bernard was moved up to the coast near Dunkirk to help camouflage naval guns in sand for a major coastal attack in July 1917 which in the event was thwarted by a massive German pre-emptive strike, using mustard gas. Part of Bernard's duties involved disguising an RFC airfield. He managed to persuade an RFC officer not to build any new huts, but instead to occupy existing farm buildings, neither altering the grounds nor making new tracks. ‘Damn good idea, and better than any camouflage,' said the squadron
commander. ‘Not at all, that is camouflage,' replied Bernard. When Plumer was sent to northern Italy in November 1917 to prop up the flagging Italian Allies against the Austrians, Bernard went along as camouflage officer.

Of course, the enemy was using camouflage, too. Bernard wrote of his ‘magnificently trained and perfectly equipped opponents who designed the most scientific means for protecting and concealing themselves in and behind their own lines throughout the western front'. In April 1917, after the Germans withdrew from Adinfer Wood to the Hindenburg Line, Captain J. C. Dunn recorded how they made use of the whole wood:

By 1917, the Special Works Parks in France were not only using their French female workers to produce screening and netting but also artistically creating a wide range of realistic hollow dummies as hides: trees, walls, dead horses, human corpses. In July 1917, when King George V and the Prince of Wales came up from Cassel to visit the Special Works Park on the Wormhout–Wylder road, the
Daily Mail
reported: ‘The King saw all the latest Protean tricks for concealing or, as we all say now, for ‘camouflaging' guns, snipers, observers.'
The Times
special correspondent also followed that ten-day tour of the Western Front:

Lloyd George was a Liberal, but his manoeuvrings brought down the last Liberal government that Britain would ever have. After the press helped to get rid of Asquith and to bring him to power in December 1916, Lloyd George rewarded the great press barons by giving them jobs in government and changing the whole publicity machine. Under this Prime Minister, propaganda became mass-market.

A crucial figure in presenting the right stories and managing public perceptions was that genius of British newspapers, Lord Northcliffe, who was born Alfred Harmsworth in 1865 in Chapelizod, Dublin. He was self-educated, working as a freelance journalist to support his mother, brothers and sisters after his barrister father declined into alcoholism. He learned from George Newnes's publication
Tit-Bits
in the 1880s that the newly literate classes wanted information made accessible and entertaining. Emotionally impulsive himself, Harms-worth had a knack for understanding people's crazes and curiosities, and so excelled at popular journalism. ‘Smiling pictures make people smile,' he said. ‘People like to read about profiteering. Most of them would like to be profiteers if they had the chance.' He started with
Bicycling News
, and his stable of popular magazines, including
Comic
Cuts
and
Marvel
, was selling a million copies a week by 1892.

The first daily newspaper Harmsworth acquired was the ailing
London Evening News
in 1894. He turned around its fortunes by changing the format, simplifying the reporting (stressing human interest), making the subbing and headlines snappier, and adding a woman's column. On 4 May 1896, he launched an entirely new paper, the
Daily Mail
, priced at only half a penny. The first issue sold nearly 400,000 copies, almost as many as all the penny papers combined. Skilful use of Britain's railway network pushed its distribution right across the country, and made the
Daily Mail
the first truly national
mass-market newspaper, more attractive than the stodgy broadsheets. Although Lord Salisbury snobbishly complained that the new rag was ‘run by office boys for other office boys', it had bright short paragraphs that made things simple and clear.

Patriotism and imperialism sold papers, and Harmsworth harnessed propaganda to profit. The
Daily Mail
's jingoistic coverage of the Boer War brought daily sales to nearly a million, the highest circulation in the world. Throughout the early years of the twentieth century, Harmsworth beat the drum in the
Daily Mail
for a bigger navy, a larger army, and stronger defences, playing up invasion scares and the menace of foreigners. In 1903, Harmsworth launched the tabloid Daily
Mirror
, aimed at the ‘New Woman', with an all-female staff, and in 1908 acquired
The Times
, the newspaper of the British establishment, which he modernised, attracting more advertising. He paid his hacks well and encouraged the infant National Union of Journalists. In March 1914, he dropped the news-stand price of
The
Times
from threepence to a penny and tripled its circulation to nearly 150,000.

By WW1, Harmsworth had his peerage, and the new Lord Northcliffe was eager to play the part of tribune of the people, challenging governments and vested interests. Now he threw himself into the Allied cause, splashing German atrocities over his pages, fighting censorship, championing the common soldier, yelling for more recruits and better munitions, applauding conscription. His papers trumpeted Kitchener as saviour in 1914, then blamed him for the shells crisis in May 1915. He persecuted Lord Haldane for being a Germanophile largely because the two men had a pre-war quarrel about the future of air power, and hounded Churchill over the debacle of the Dardanelles. Northcliffe, wrote Churchill, ‘wielded power without official responsibility, enjoyed secret knowledge without the general view, and disturbed the fortunes of national leaders without being willing to bear their burdens'. By the end of 1916, Northcliffe had become fed up with the wily and idle Asquith (who hated and distrusted him in return) and helped to elevate Lloyd George. The increasingly megalomaniac press lord was triumphant when Asquith's government fell. A full page of the
Daily Mail
on Saturday, 9 December 1916, was headlined ‘The Passing of the Failures'.

Lloyd George would have liked Churchill to join his administration
but the kingmaker Lord Northcliffe made it clear via the
Daily Mail
and
The Times
that Churchill still carried the black spot. Moreover, an inquiry into the Dardanelles and Churchill's role in the adventure was still
sub judice
. Churchill felt betrayed when he was not at once brought back into government, but six months later, when Northcliffe was away in North America, Lloyd George asked Churchill to come back, first as chairman of the Air Board, and then as the vital Minister of Munitions.

On 12 June 1917, Lord Northcliffe was having breakfast at the Hotel Gotham, New York City, when an energetic young Canadian called Campbell Stuart came to see him. Northcliffe had just become chairman of the British War Mission to the United States, and faced an enormous task. The UK had already spent £3.71 billion on the war so far, and needed food from the USA as well as immediate loans of $200 million a month. Campbell Stuart was appointed military secretary to the British War Mission, and soon became the attaché, secretary and fixer for the press baron in his crusade to persuade America to commit itself to winning the war against Germany. Stuart was with him in Kansas City on 25 October 1917 when Northcliffe met the cream of the newspapermen of the Middle West, ‘in which every shade of opinion was represented', and later told how:

Lloyd George had offered Lord Northcliffe the directorship of a proposed new Department of Information to coordinate propaganda, but he turned it down. This is how John Buchan, after a busy war writing his
History of the War
and other books and also working for General Haig's chief of intelligence, Brigadier John Charteris, got the top job in February 1917.

Buchan's new Department of Information brought together foreign propaganda and war publicity, but they were still scattered in different places. The department was still a provisional organisation, a ‘mushroom ministry' always in danger of being wolfed by bigger, historic centres of government power. ‘The only real war was in Whitehall,' wrote the novelist Arnold Bennett, then employed in
propaganda work. ‘The war in Flanders and France was merely a game, a sort of bloody football.' Charles Masterman continued to run the Production section from Wellington House, which was responsible for books and pamphlets, as well as photographs and paintings. Its Pictorial Propaganda Committee selected the first ‘Official' war artists, including Augustus John, Muirhead Bone, Wyndham Lewis, C. R. W. Nevinson and William Orpen.

The Press and Cinema section was based in the Lord Chancellor's Office in the House of Lords. Buchan wanted a well-informed press using true stories, and he encouraged the film-makers towards authenticity. This section also dealt with cables and wireless, and Buchan brought in the chief executive of Reuters news agency, Roderick Jones, as an unpaid part-time adviser. (After Baron Herbert de Reuter committed suicide in April 1915, leaving Reuters news agency financially weakened, Jones had done a deal with the British government. Using a £550,000 loan arranged by Herbert Asquith's brother-in-law, Jones bought out Reuters, became its chief shareholder and ensured that its wartime news-gathering was presented ‘through British eyes' and that its worldwide distribution network was available to the British government.)

The Intelligence section of the Department of Information in Victoria Street replaced the old Neutral Press Committee, and was meant to get good news out of various branches of government as swiftly as possible. The Administrative section where Buchan himself sat was based in the Foreign Office. Buchan had to keep in touch with the King at Buckingham Palace and to report to the Prime Minister in Downing Street, though Lloyd George preferred to hobnob with other press cronies.

The war hit John Buchan personally very hard. Herbert Asquith's son Raymond was the first of his Oxford friends to be killed, then Bron Lucas, an airman with the RFC, was shot down in November 1916. The worst blow fell on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917, when Buchan lost his best friend, Tommy Nelson, his partner in the publishing house, and his youngest brother, Alastair. Both were killed in France, half a mile from each other, in the Battle of Arras.

Soon after becoming Prime Minister in December 1916, Lloyd George had told a suspicious Labour and Socialist deputation: ‘I hate war; I
abominate it. I sometimes think “Am I dreaming? Is it a nightmare? It cannot be fact.” But … once you are in it you have to go grimly through it, otherwise the causes which hang upon a successful issue will all perish …' By the end of the war, the polemical Irish Socialist, dramatist and pamphleteer, George Bernard Shaw, shared Lloyd George's view that war is hell, but you still have to win it. Shaw was 60 when he went off to France in 1917 to visit the trenches and write up his conclusions in a daily newspaper. Major General George Macdonogh, the director of Military Intelligence who ran the propaganda unit M17b, had asked Philip Gibbs to recommend a writer to visit the Front ‘who might produce something good about the life and heroism of our men'. Gibbs replied, half in jest, ‘What about Bernard Shaw?' The response was laughter. ‘Good heavens, what an idea!'

Winston Churchill called Bernard Shaw a ‘double-headed chameleon', and described him as a ‘bright, nimble, fierce, and comprehending being'. In the cold, snow-bright January of 1917 Shaw came out to the trenches, ‘with his beard blowing in the wind of France and Flanders'. He had tackled the idea of it in drama –
Major
Barbara
's arms-dealing millionaire Andrew Undershaft calls himself ‘a profiteer in mutilation and murder' – but now the playwright was within the force field of real war. Undershaft also said, ‘The more destructive war becomes the more fascinating we find it,' and Shaw repeatedly uses the word ‘fascination' to describe war's hypnotic appeal. Shaw wrote that great war correspondents ‘like Philip Gibbs, finely sensitive to the miseries of the troops' were ‘fascinated by the spirit which drives men to endure and defy so much outrageous mischief and danger'.

Philip Gibbs was with Shaw at places like Ypres, Vimy and Arras, and enjoyed his wit. A general at luncheon once asked Shaw when he thought the war would be over. Shaw replied, ‘Well, General, we're all anxious for an early and dishonourable peace.' The general did not laugh, but his junior staff officers did. Philip Gibbs also records Shaw recommending ‘parallel lines of thought' about the war. ‘One of them is that it is a complete degradation of all that we mean by civilisation. The other is, my dear Gibbs, that we've got to beat the Boche.'

Philip Gibbs, John Buchan and the other early war correspondents had been guided in their visits to the front by Hesketh Prichard, but by 1917 visitors were being escorted by the white-haired Captain Charles
Montague, formerly a leader writer and theatre critic on the
Manchester Guardian
. Montague had dyed his silver hair yellow in order to get into Kitchener's ‘New Armies' as a private soldier, at the age of 47, and rose to sergeant through merit before accepting a commission in Intelligence. Montague kept cheerful at war: ‘I have found a hobby in bomb-throwing,' he wrote home, ‘which unites the joy of bowling googlies and playing with fireworks.' Ethically, war was incompatible with Montague's Christianity, and he had been passionately opposed to the Boer War, but he saw WW1 as a necessary vileness to be got over as quickly and efficiently as possible, without ‘slacking and shirking and boozing'. C. E. Montague described how the New Armies lost their illusions in
Disenchantment
(1922), one of the great books of WW1.

Impervious to fear and elated by shelling, Montague escorted his journalistic charges as close to danger as possible. In January 1917 he took George Bernard Shaw around the devastated, shell-pocked landscape for a week. Shaw was in khaki camouflage uniform like everyone else. But Flanders was white with snow in January 1917, and a Romanian general in a dove-coloured cape was invisible while Shaw's khaki was so glaringly conspicuous that the playwright felt he might as well have worn a medieval herald's bright tabard. The three pieces that Shaw wrote about his experiences in France appeared in the
Daily Chronicle
in March 1917, collectively entitled ‘Joy-Riding at the Front'. Gibbs says that the title and tone deeply offended people at home, who thought it heartless and mocking. But ninety years on, it seems as fresh as paint. ‘Joy-Riding at the Front' is full of ironies: gunners industriously shell trenches that the enemy has already abandoned, and there are inept demonstrations of fire, flame and gas that make friendly French villagers cough and senior staff officers scuttle away. Shaw's second article, ‘The Technique of War', analyses the imprecision of artillery and aerial bombardment, but also aims to reassure anxious readers at home that most projectiles miss their loved ones at the front, and he turns the extravagant wastefulness of war – ‘It burns the house to roast the pig' – to propaganda effect: ‘Therefore, my tax-payer, resign yourself to this: that we may fight bravely, fight hard, fight long, fight cunningly, fight recklessly, fight in a hundred and fifty ways, but we cannot fight cheaply.'

In war, Shaw says, keeping a cool head is better than seeing red:
‘Hatred is one of the things you can do better at home. And you generally stay at home to do it.' This idea may have come out of his talks with C. E. Montague, who observed in
Disenchantment
: ‘Hell hath no fury like a non-combatant.' Serving soldiers understood that the morality of war was different from the morality of peace, ‘just as the morality of an interview with a tiger in the jungle is distinct from the morality of an interview with a missionary.' Shaw was not a pacifist, and he saw that people went to fight out of solidarity, not selfishness: ‘It is not that you must defend yourself or perish: many a man would be too proud to fight on those terms. You must defend your neighbour or betray him: that is what gets you …'