Churchill's Wizards (7 page)

The
Lusitania
incident not only destroyed German propaganda hopes in America, but fitted right into the War Propaganda Bureau aim of demonising the Germans. There was no shortage of material that month. On 15 May 1915,
The Times
added more details to a completely untrue story it had run on 10 May about a Canadian soldier being crucified by German bayonets on a barn wall in Belgium. This was just a gobbet of tainted meat to add to the ghoulish feast of the official Bryce Report into the Alleged German Outrages in Belgium, published on 13 May 1915 and distributed by Wellington House to almost every important newspaper in America and in twenty-seven languages to many countries around the world. Its author, James Bryce, was a distinguished jurist, member of the House of Lords and former ambassador to Washington DC, who had helped Roger Casement to expose the involvement of British-owned companies in atrocious exploitation of rubber-tappers in the Amazon in 1907. But his Royal Commission report on Belgium is naïvely credulous, luridly recounting ‘witness' stories of mass rape, amputation and baby-bayoneting, collected without any cross-examination or corroboration.

‘Your report has swept America,' Charles Masterman wrote to Lord Bryce, ‘As you probably know even the most sceptical declare themselves converted, just because it is signed by you!' War Propaganda Bureau operatives in America told Masterman: ‘Even in papers hostile to the Allies, there is not the slightest attempt to impugn the correctness of the facts alleged. Lord Bryce's prestige in America puts scepticism out of the question.'

Some sceptics did want to spoil the horror stories, including a furious Roger Casement, but he was just a cranky, homosexual Irish nationalist who would soon be hanged for high treason in Pentonville prison on 3 August 1916. The US lawyer Clarence Darrow went to France later in 1915 and could not find any of Bryce's eyewitnesses, though he offered $1,000 to meet any Belgian child amputee. The Pope, the Italian Prime Minister and David Lloyd George also had diligent inquiries made, but no one ever found the supposed handless kiddies. The atrocity stories were designed to unite people against the foe.

But not everyone in Britain shared these views. The brilliant, gentle cartoons of William Heath Robinson, born into a family of illustrators in 1872, are a wonderful deflation of both sides in the combat. He said that ‘the much advertised frightfulness of the German army' gave him one of his best opportunities as an artist, and in such books as
Some
‘
Frightful' War Pictures
(1915),
Hunlikely!
(1916) and
The Saintly
Hun: a Book of German Virtues
(1917), he ridiculed the demonisation of the enemy by accusing Germans of minute failures of sporting etiquette but also showing them in improbable acts of saintliness. German aeronauts protect the modesty of a young Englishwoman in her attic; an enormously fat, be-helmeted Prussian general withstands the tempting aroma of a pie carried by a starving child, and another ‘benignant Boche returning good for evil' offers a cigar to a British soldier as the latter impales him with a bayonet. Heath Robinson was a good advertisement for British amateurishness and larkishness, and an antidote to the over-serious simplicities of propaganda.

John Buchan was not well known enough to attend Charles Masterman's first meeting of writers in Whitehall on 2 September 1914, but he later became the master of propaganda in journalism, fiction and history. Buchan wrote many books for Masterman's War Propaganda Bureau, and in February 1917 he became Masterman's
boss when the Prime Minister appointed him director of the Department of Information, charged with coordinating all British propaganda.

Buchan was the son of a Church of Scotland minister and understood that effective propaganda was linked to deep belief. The word ‘propaganda' is religious in origin, coming from the Roman Catholic Church's
congregatio de propaganda fide
, ‘congregation for propagation of the faith', a body set up to aid the missionary work of the Church. But Buchan links propaganda to less orthodox spirituality in his novel
The Three Hostages
, published in 1924, the era when Lenin, Stalin and Hitler emerged:

In March 1918, Lord Beaverbrook took over the Ministry of Information, and John Buchan was renamed director of Intelligence for the last eight months of the war. Anthony Masters, in
Literary
Agents: The Novelist as Spy
, says Buchan's work then is ‘shrouded in mystery', but some idea may be gathered from Anthony Clayton's
Forearmed: A History of the Intelligence Corps
(1993):

Other clues are in his fiction. John Buchan was a classical scholar who energised a new literary genre, the paranoid spy-thriller, for popular consumption in the early twentieth century. The story is often a sinister plot that threatens England. John Buchan was fascinated by deception and ‘the veiled prophets who are behind the scenes in a crisis'. His adventures often involve joining up disconnected pieces of information to reveal a picture of the problem or danger which then has to be resolved by decisive, heroic action. Such popular books have upbeat endings because the hero always prevails and restores order,
but they also articulate in an interesting way the anxieties and prejudices of the author's group.

Buchan's new hero first appeared in October 1915 in his ‘shocker',
The Thirty-Nine Steps
, which sold 25,000 copies by Christmas. This hero, Richard ‘Dick' Hannay, is first encountered as a rough-and-ready mining engineer from Rhodesia, bored in London in May 1914 until he gets caught up in a fast-moving adventure of murder and escape that eventually unravels a German spy ring called the Black Stone,
Der
Schwarzestein
. In chapter V, Hannay remembers Peter Pienaar, an old Boer scout in Rhodesia, telling him that the secret of playing a part was to think yourself into it. ‘You could never keep it up, he said, unless you could manage to convince yourself you were it.' In chapter X, Hannay recalls Pienaar's advice that the secret of effective disguise was to blend fully into your surroundings. Hannay then remembers hunting a dun-coloured rhebok with his dog in the Pali Hills in Rhodesia:

The leader of the German Black Stone spy ring is a master of disguise who successfully impersonates the British First Sea Lord in front of his military colleagues, precisely because they are expecting to see him and so take him for granted. ‘If it had been anybody else you might have looked more closely, but it was natural for him to be here and that put you all to sleep.'

In the final chapter, Hannay realises the ruthless German spy ring has also managed to camouflage itself into ‘the great, comfortable, satisfied middle-class world, the folk that live in villas and suburbs'. Hannay remembers the old scout's theory of ‘atmosphere' in matching your surroundings: ‘A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the same and is different.'

In Buchan's second Richard Hannay adventure novel,
Greenmantle
, Hannay pretends to be an anti-British, pro-German Boer called Cornelius Brand in order to travel deep into the Kaiser's Germany. This exploit is modelled on the true story of John Buchan's friend and fellow Scot, Edmund Ironside, the future Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS). As a young officer in 1903, Ironside went undercover in
German South-West Africa (now Namibia) to investigate German activities during the revolt by the Herero people. The Intelligence Department helped disguise the burly Ironside as a Boer ox-cart driver in battered hat and veldskoens. He grew a beard, smoked Boer tobacco in a foul pipe, and spoke authentic colloquial Cape Dutch. He was soon accepted, but was horrified one day to see his white bull terrier proudly trotting alongside his wagon in a bright collar proclaiming his owner's name: ‘Lt. Ironside: Royal Artillery'. Nevertheless, Ironside managed to bluff his way through and even got a German medal (which he later displayed to Adolf Hitler).

Greenmantle
was Buchan's tenth novel and thirtieth book and remains one of the finest novels of the imperial ‘Great Game', perhaps second only to Rudyard Kipling's 1901 novel
Kim
. There is an allusion to the fact that Kim, the boy spy, worked with a red-bearded Afghan horse-trader called Mahbub Ali when the fictional head of the Secret Service in
Greenmantle
, Sir Walter Bullivant, says:

The classic opening chapter of
Greenmantle
, ‘A Mission Is Proposed', was chosen by Graham Greene and Hugh Greene to open their 1957 anthology,
The Spy's Bedside Book
, in tribute to the author whose memoirs
Memory Hold-The-Door
recorded that one side of his WW1 duties ‘brought me into touch with the queer subterranean world of the Secret Service'.

‘You Britishers haven't any notion how wide-awake your Intelligence Service is,' the American agent John S. Blenkiron flatteringly says in
Greenmantle
, adding, ‘If I had a big proposition to handle and could have my pick of helpers I'd plump for the Intelligence Department of the British Admiralty.' From November 1914 on, British Naval Intelligence had as its director Admiral W. Reginald Hall, who had commanded the battle cruiser HMS
Queen Mary
at the Battle of Heligoland Bight, and inherited OB40, the cryptographic department led by Sir Alfred Ewing, which cracked German military and diplomatic codes. ‘Hall is one genius the war has developed,' the American
ambassador in London wrote to US President Wilson. ‘Neither in fiction nor in fact can you find any such man to match him.'

John Buchan's character Sir Walter Bullivant, the spymaster in
Greenmantle
, was very like Admiral Sir Reginald Hall. Though small, Hall was the archetypal forceful naval officer, from the dome of his bald head to the cleft in his clean-shaven chin. His eyes glared out under bushy eyebrows above a great hooked beak of a nose. This look of an alert peregrine falcon, with a disconcerting eyelid twitch, earned Hall the nickname ‘Blinker'. Hall wielded his power ‘vigorously', according to F. H. Hinsley, the historian of British Intelligence, ‘building up his own espionage system, deciding for himself when and how to release intelligence to other departments, and acting on intelligence independently of other departments in matters of policy that lay beyond the concerns of the Admiralty'. Translating from the bureaucratic, that means he was a ruthless and cunning rogue elephant. His biographer, Admiral Sir William James, said: ‘There was nothing Hall enjoyed more than planning ruses to deceive the Germans.'

‘Blinker' Hall had a genius for picking people. He hired civilians whose professional work was analytical, like academics, bankers, lawyers, scientists, and mixed them with the artistic: actors, authors, designers, dilettantes, etc. He also employed clever women at a time when that was unusual, like the formidable, cigar-smoking Lady Hambro who marshalled the secretaries.

John Buchan knew Reginald Hall well, and
Greenmantle
can be read as a novel about an imaginary British intelligence operation involving disguise and deception, that uses insider knowledge of other operations. It begins a year on from the end of
The Thirty-Nine Steps
: Major Richard Hannay of the (fictional) Lennox Highlanders is back in England recuperating from wounds received in the real Battle of Loos in late September 1915. ‘Loos was no picnic,' says Hannay, in a typical stiff-upper-lip understatement of the catastrophe which left 8,000 dead. Loos was the big attack in the grimy Belgian colliery district where the British first used their own chlorine gas, 140 tons of it, five months after the Germans used gas at Ypres. The 6th battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, which lost three-quarters of its officers and half its other ranks there, got its new commanding officer in France early in 1916: Lieutenant Colonel Winston S. Churchill.

John Buchan begins
Greenmantle
with Richard Hannay convalescing from Loos in the same Hampshire country house as his friend and brother officer who has just saved his life, ‘Sandy' Arbuthnot, the second son of Lord Clanroyden. Arbuthnot is a man with a ‘passion for queer company' – in the old sense. In London, we learn, you get news of Sandy Arbuthnot from ‘lean brown men from the ends of the earth … in creased clothes, walking with the light outland step, slinking into clubs as if they could not remember whether or not they belonged to them'. Sandy Arbuthnot is a creature of romantic imperial fantasy: