Secret Warriors

by Taylor Downing

  Audiences were stunned at some of the sequences. For the shot of the huge mine exploding at the Hawthorn Redoubt, the musical instructions were that a drummer should play a quiet roll, building up to a crash and roll at the explosion itself. In cinemas up and down the country people would cry out with a spontaneous Ooh’ in awe at this moment. But it was the staged scene of the men going over the top that attracted most attention. Almost everyone who saw the film was affected by the sequence. In one London cinema, the orchestra went silent during the scene, and as the soldiers fell a young woman screamed out in the audience, Oh god, they’re dead’ The sixty-year-old novelist Henry Rider Haggard wrote in his diary after seeing the film, ‘There is something appalling about the instantaneous change from fierce activity to supine death … War has always been dreadful, but never, I suppose, more dreadful than today.’30 Frances Stevenson, Lloyd George’s secretary and mistress, was in her twenties and had just lost her brother, Paul. After seeing the film she wrote, ‘I am glad to have seen the sort of thing our men have to go through, even to the sortie from the trench, and the falling in the barbed wire... It reminded me of what Paul’s last hours were. I have often tried to imagine to myself what he went through, but now I know: and I shall never forget.’31 A man wrote to The Times, ‘I have lost one son, and have a second home wounded... I have been twice to see these films and was profoundly struck by the emotion and almost reverence, with which they were followed.’32

  Later in the film there is a shot held for some time in which men can actually be seen moving forward across no man’s land in a genuine attack. It was filmed from a trench to one side of the advance, probably through a periscope raised above the parapet. Limited to the 50mm lens, however, Malins could reveal no detail, and although it is fascinating to see an authentic 1 July assault today, it had at the time no impact on audiences who probably could not discern clearly what was happening on the screen. In addition to the poignancy of the comments about the ‘over the top’ scene, therefore, there is great irony as well. Although most of the footage in the film is totally authentic, the scene that caused the greatest impact was one that had been faked.

  The Battle of the Somme raised ethical questions for viewers in 1916 that are as relevant to combat filming today as they were one hundred years ago. These include questions not only as to what is real and how legitimate it is to stage sequences, but also about how much death it is fair to show. It was quite likely that certain members of audiences would have recognised in the film their own husband, son, brother or boyfriend marching up to the front, but by the time they saw the film, they would already have received a telegram informing them of his death. Another issue the film raises is the extent to which it is reasonable to show images of the dead and the dying, even if, as in this film, those images are of the enemy.

  These issues were keenly debated. Ts it right to let us see brave men dying?’ asked the reviewer in The Star, though he answered his own question with a ‘Yes’ and went on, ‘Is it a sacrilege? No. These pictures are good for us.’ Even the pages of The Times were filled with debate about the morality of showing the film, until a leader concluded, ‘The War Office has set the public an example. It had given the cinematograph a golden opportunity and the cinematograph has used it well … In the ages before the invention of this machine it was impossible to convey so clear and full an idea of warfare as anyone may now see for a few pence.’33 However, the manager of the Broadway in Hammersmith took a very different view and, unusually, decided not to show the film at all. He put up a notice, “This is a Place of Amusement, not a Chamber of Horrors.’34

  The Battle of the Somme is an extraordinary film document. Its success at the time was unprecedented. No one knows how many millions saw it during its run, but it was still being screened in November 1917, so it is possible that in the region of 20 million Britons (out of a population of 43 million) saw the film.35 Even a majority of children polled in two schools in Holborn and St Paneras the year after the film’s release named it as their favourite.36 But the film does not have the makings of an obvious hit. It has a structure but no narrative. There is no sense of a plan for the battle and no footage of Haig or Rawlinson or GHQ. The only general who appears is an anonymous figure on a horse riding past his men. Only occasionally can officers be picked out. There are scenes of cheerful men waving at the camera marching to the front and of wounded men hobbling back. The climax of the film, the advance over the top, comes just after its halfway point. How the film should end must have exercised those who put it together, but after many scenes of the wounded, of prisoners and of German dead, it closes with a group of British soldiers cheerfully going up the line for the next phase of the battle.

  One or two scenes have obvious propaganda intent. Shots showing the supplies of shells going forward to keep the guns blazing, for instance, would have helped to motivate the munitions workers at home who saw the film. And yet the inter-titles create no drama or uplift, occasionally naming the men who are about to be seen simply as ‘Lancashire Fusiliers’, ‘The Manchesters’ or ‘The Royal Field Artillery’, but creating no closer affinity with any particular group. The film lacked the sense of jolly patriotic optimism so characteristic of later film propaganda. Nor is any part of it particularly anti-German. The extraordinary success of The Battle of the Somme was no doubt at the time very much due to the fact that although the war had been going on for two years, people at home had never seen such images before. Audiences and critics believed it was so real because they had nothing else to judge it by. And, without doubt, its presentation from the point of view of the ordinary soldier, going about his everyday duties and taking part in a great battle, strengthened its impact. There was no obvious message or explanation of the strategy of the battle, and that very much contributed to its appeal.

  Today, we can be far more critical of the film’s production and clear about what is real and what is faked than could audiences at the time. But it still has a mesmeric, haunting effect. Somehow its images have come to epitomise our understanding of what the Western Front looked and felt like. Its footage, one hundred years later, has attained almost iconic status. In 1916 it was recommended that a jaunty cavalry march should be played during the Over the top’ sequence. After all, the battle was still being fought and, as far as most people were concerned, being won. Today, there appears nothing heroic about these scenes and the images of the front line are melancholic in the extreme. They have become enduring symbols of the sacrifice and futility of the Great War.

  The Battle of the Somme had been edited with contemporary overseas audiences as well the home audience in mind. And it was shown in eighteen countries – in western Europe, in all the Dominions and as far away as China, Iceland and Peru. In the United States there were problems, as there had been with Britain Prepared. The International Film Corporation offered to buy the rights. However, as the company was owned by William Randolph Hearst, who was known to be pro-German, it was feared that he intended to purchase the film simply in order to suppress it and that he would never show it. Instead another pro-British group distributed the film, while Charles Urban re-edited it for America and it was shown among a variety of other attractions within cinema programmes. Urban later claimed that by the end of 1917, 65 million Americans had seen the film, although this figure seems highly exaggerated, probably to build up Urban’s success back in London.37

  The film was also taken to Russia. Captain Bromhead, working for Wellington House, had successfully shown Britain Prepared to the imperial royal family and to an estimated 100,000 Russian soldiers, and he now took The Battle of the Somme on tour, showing it to huge crowds of soldiers in mass open-air screenings behind the lines. Sometimes more than 5000 men saw it at a single showing. At first Bromhead wrote back saying how successful the screenings had been in showing the Russians how much pressure Britain was putting on Germany on the Western Front. However, as Russia went through its first revolution in February 1917, the soldiers’ view seemed t
o change, with unexpected consequences. As the poorly equipped and provisioned Russian troops watched images of well-armed and well-fed British soldiers, the film began to encourage disaffection within the ranks. Robert Bruce Lockhart, British vice consul in St Petersburg, noted that screenings were being followed by mass desertions, which had clearly not been the film-makers’ intention. Events were running out of the propagandists’ control and after the second revolution in November, led by the Bolsheviks, Bromhead and his cinema team were called home.38

  The German cinema industry jealously followed the huge success of The Battle of the Somme and soon attempted to emulate it. The trouble was that no cameraman had been filming on the German side of the lines until much later in 1916. So a half-hour documentary was put together using authentic material of British prisoners, coupled with a lot of faked material of German soldiers under bombardment from the British, who were clearly painted as the aggressors. Released in January 1917, Bex unseren Helden an der Somme (With Our Heroes on the Somme) was billed as ‘the greatest cinematic document of this terrible war’. However, the public were not fooled and the film had no significant impact in Germany, nor was it ever shown abroad.39

  Production of The Battle of the Somme had marked a new phase in British film propaganda. In November 1916, partly as result of the film’s success and partly as a consequence of further pressure from the War Office, a new organisation called the War Office Cinematographic Committee took over from the Topical committee. Sir Max Aitken (created Lord Beaverbrook in January 1917), who had been running the Canadian military propaganda operation since early in the war, became chairman and there were only two other members: Sir Reginald Brade represented the War Office and William Jury the cinema industry. The new committee continued to produce feature-length films. The Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of the Tanks, which followed the second part of the Battle of the Somme in September-October, was released at the beginning of 1917. Both the Daily Mail and the Evening News preferred it even to the Somme film and called it ‘all real, all unrehearsed’ and ‘the greatest war picture yet produced’.40 The German Retreat and the Battle of Arras, the third and last of the ‘Battle’ films, was released in June 1917.

  Beaverbrook was keen to move into new areas of film propaganda and launched a twice-weekly official newsreel, produced by the Topical Company. From May 1917 it was called the War Office Topical Budget, changing its name later to the Pictorial News (Official). There followed a rapid increase in the amount of film-making. Hundreds of short films were made for the Home Front in 1918, many featuring not just scenes from the front line but about work and attitudes at home, illustrating how important the concept of the Home Front had become. A Day in the Life of a Munitions Worker provided a glamorised view of working in a munitions factory, intended to encourage more women to sign up to the war factories. Mrs John Bull Prepared was aimed at changing the attitude of men who were reluctant to allow their wives or daughters to do war work, and showed the multitude of roles taken by women, from driving trams to running post offices, from working as welders to toiling on the land.41 There were short films intended to encourage healthier eating, to avoid waste and to show how the new state bureaucracies were bringing a fairer distribution of resources to everyone. Much of this set a precedent for what would be achieved with tremendous effect in the official films of the Second World War.

  Film was also shot and edited into documentaries of the campaigns in Italy, Egypt, Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq). Frank Hurley, for instance, who had filmed Sir Ernest Shackleton’s epic expedition to Antarctica, worked as an official Australian film cameraman, taking some powerful images of the Battle of Passchendaele and then recording General Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem in December 1917. But there was never more than a handful of film cameramen on the Western Front. Geoffrey Malins went on filming in 1917 until he had to withdraw, suffering from battle fatigue and a form of shell shock. He later returned to the front to work for Beaverbrook and the Canadians, but finally opted out in early 1918. He was awarded the OBE for his services. J.B. McDowell stayed on as an official film cameraman for the rest of the war and was awarded an MC for his outstanding work. William Jury, who had given up commercial work in order to concentrate on the war effort, eventually became head of the Cinema Division in 1918 and was knighted. Charles Urban, the American who had helped to start it all, received nothing and resented Jury’s elevation. The film propaganda campaign had ultimately shown how outside professionals could successfully be brought into the war effort. But this had only been possible after the opposition by the armed services to any sort of joint venture with the commercial ‘picture men’ had been overcome.

  When the United States entered the war, American film-makers brought their own unique approach and skills to the conflict. Unlike the simple recruiting films shown in Britain, often little more than screen versions of the successful posters, stars turned out en masse in the American films to exhort audiences to join up, to buy war bonds or to give to the Red Cross. Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, William S. Hart and producers like Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffith all contributed. The war offered an opportunity for the development of new ideas in film advertising. With the soldiers arriving in Europe came a special film unit of the US Army Signal Corps, and for some months they concentrated on producing short films about training and collaboration with the armies of France and Britain. But by 1918, the American cameramen were trying to create heroes by following small groups of soldiers in actions supposedly recorded at the front – although most were of necessity shot well behind the lines. And in their captions, the American films were far more overtly political and anti-German. After the end of the war, with much of the European film industry in ruins, the American industry based in Hollywood was to emerge as the leading cinematic and cultural force, selling its output throughout the world.

  Visual coverage of the war was not limited to film and photographs. In Britain, Charles Masterman at Wellington House had also come up with the idea of sending war artists to the front. The first to go, in May 1916, was sketcher Muirhead Bone, who was given permission to travel up and down the front making sketches. The results were published in December 1916 in an anthology called The Western Front and formed part of a very successful exhibition the following year. Portraitist Francis Dodd was then asked to paint a series of portraits of ‘Generals of the British Army’ and ‘Admirals of the British Navy’. Although this early work had some propagandist intent, it seems that the briefs given to the artists allowed them considerable freedom. One artist, Christopher Nevinson, asked before leaving if there was any subject he should avoid. ‘No, no,’ said Masterman with a wave of his hand. ‘Paint anything you please.’42

  Max Aitken was also keen to encourage war artists to visit the front and make their own personal interpretations of what they saw. And established and ‘safe’ artists were not the only ones to paint for the propaganda bureau; several radical young artists of the day were sent to France as well. Paul Nash had been invalided home from the infantry in early 1917, but when Masterman asked him to return to the Western Front later that year he produced many memorable paintings, including The Menin Road and The Ypres Salient at Night. Stanley Spencer, then part of the avant-garde Vorticist movement, had served in an ambulance unit in Macedonia when he was asked to work as an official artist. Commissioned to produce work that would in some way symbolise Anglo-American sacrifice, American painter John Singer Sargent painted one of the most famous artworks of the war, Gassed, in which a long and tragic line of blindfolded soldiers with their hands on the shoulder of the man in front are depicted being led along a series of duckboards by a medical orderly while other wounded soldiers lie in agony around the line of wounded men. Several of these paintings were exhibited in the final year of the war and caused much controversy. However, the work of these artists has helped shape our vision of mud, barbed wire, trenches, and life and death on the Western Front.43 And, the precedent having been
set, official war artists have accompanied British units on most subsequent military campaigns.

  Many of these images have since contributed to our perception of the Great War. However, nothing compares to the success of The Battle of the Somme. Truly pioneering and completely exceptional at the time, it lives on today in that almost every television documentary made about the First World War uses clips from it. The footage of Malins and McDowell, the editing of William Jury, is to be seen somewhere on television most nights of the week. And the men who marched, cheering, up to the front, who went over the top and were carried back on stretchers, are ghosts on the screen, reminders of the horrors of battle and the power of film propaganda.

  The summer of 1916 marked an even deeper transformation of Britain. Day after day, appallingly long lists of the dead and wounded appeared in the newspapers. In some cities whole districts went into mourning if a local regiment or Pals Battalion had gone over the top. Accrington in Lancashire, Belfast in Northern Ireland, Sheffield, Barnsley, Bradford and many other towns and cities were hit hard by the losses. But, even when city dwellers across the country witnessed the packed trains bringing the horribly maimed and wounded back from France to hospitals at home, the support of the British people for the war did not collapse. The Battle of the Somme had proved a turning point in many ways. It had led to the slaughter of the men who eagerly flocked to join up in 1914–15, ‘Kitchener’s volunteers’, and would leave a scar across an entire generation. But it had marked an acceptance that strict censorship was no longer a possibility. It had created the realisation that in order to run a modern, industrial war, the government and the military would need the support of workers and civilians at home. It helped to define what was needed to sustain morale on the Home Front. And it turned the conflict into the first ever mass media war.44