a story on which I have had to sit for a generation: that Edith Cavell, shot by the Germans in Brussels in 1915 for having helped scores of British soldiers to escape into Holland, had, in fact, been an exceptionally well placed spy, despised in the Secret Service for having turned aside from her duty as a spy to perform a work of mercy.
Cavell’s work could not be acknowledged for the usual reason: the secret services have to stay secret in order to be effective. She probably also suffered because of her sex and the popular view of it in the media. Women did not have the vote then and they did not serve in the armed forces; feminine heroism was mostly framed in terms of self-sacrifice. Thus to call nurse Edith Cavell anything like a ‘spy’ (with all its lurid connotations then) would mean sliding her down the scale of female achievement, away from worthies like Florence Nightingale towards houris like Mata Hari. Compromising her virtue might have diminished her propaganda value. When the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, included Edith Cavell in his book Courage: Eight Portraits in June 2007, he also made no mention of her secret service activities.
Perhaps the major cause célèbre of WW1 propaganda was the sinking of the Cunard passenger liner RMS Lusitania, torpedoed by U-20 off Ireland on 7 May 1915. One hundred and twenty-eight American lives were lost, and the incident outraged the USA, whose government protested that such an attack on a passenger ship was a flagrant breach of the rules of war and, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy F. D. Roosevelt put it, ‘piracy on a vaster scale of murder than old-time pirates ever practised’. In short, it was an act of ‘terrorism’.
The German government’s defence was that the Lusitania was an armed merchantman built with British government funds, mounted with hidden guns and quite prepared to ram submarines, and that she was carrying Canadian troops for the Western Front as well as thousands of crates of illicit munitions (which, they said, the torpedo caused to explode, thus sinking the ship in eighteen minutes). They added that this was a war zone in wartime and that the Imperial German ambassador in Washington DC, Count Bernstorff, had placed notices in US newspapers stating that British and allied vessels might be attacked, so there was fair warning.
Some of these arguments are not true. The Lusitania was unarmed and had no hidden guns, and there was only one Canadian soldier on board, running off with his mistress. Others are half true: the Lusitania was indeed carrying four million rounds of.303 rifle ammunition and 5,000 3.3-inch Bethlehem Steel shrapnel shells not yet filled with explosive, but marine archaeology does not suggest the ammunition blew up. Certainly the British government was not anxious to publicise the existence of munitions on a passenger ship, which would have undermined their righteous indignation. In any case, the German justifications could never carry as much emotional weight in world public opinion as the distressingly horrible deaths of 1,200 innocent people, including many women and nearly a hundred children, a third of them babies. This was one of the great shock-horror stories for newspaper front-page headlines: ‘The Huns Sink the Lusitania’ said The Daily Sketch on 8 May; ‘Full Story of the Great Murder’, ‘Lusitania Survivors’ Terrible Stories’.
When the Lusitania sailed on her last voyage the passenger list included a small, deaf, angry designer called Oliver Percy Bernard. The immediate outlet for his rage on board the Cunard liner was British caste and class snobbery, but the fires of his anger had been long stoked by the frustrations of life.
Born among ‘vague and violent people’ in Lambeth, where his father boxed with bare knuckles, Oliver ‘Bunny’ Bernard had been sent as a 13-year-old orphan to learn backstage theatrical arts in Manchester, where he taught himself to draw by paying attention to trees, carefully drawing their boles, branches and bark. From a lonely adolescence, Oliver Bernard grew into an outsider who liked the theatre but was cold-eyed about
the tiresome vanity of successful actors, the emotional insincerity of favourite actresses … those who practise deception are most deeply deceived; those who excel in the simulations of grief are most early reduced to tears; the liar falls most completely for the lie.
By 1915 he was a successful stage architect and scenic artist. Oliver Bernard loved the effects that music and drama could achieve but loathed the ‘consecrated humbug’ of grand opera in London, Boston and New York, so often a world of ‘beasts and bitches’, charlatans and frauds. Unloved, unhappy in love, resentful of the rich lording it on board, ashamed to be a non-combatant in wartime, and remembering how ‘deafness and discriminating methods of muddled recruitment had prevented him from becoming cannon fodder in 1914’, it was a rather disgruntled and acerbic ‘Bunny’ Bernard who paced the deck of the Lusitania as her sirens hooted into the Atlantic fog.
On the sixth day out, the sun was shining off the south-west of Ireland, and the passengers’ mood on board the floating luxury hotel brightened. After lunch, around 2.15 p.m., Bernard went up on deck. The smooth, still sea was like ‘an opaque sheet of polished indigo’ and the horizon was undisturbed by the smoke or sails of any other vessel. Bernard’s reverie was interrupted by ‘a frothy track snaking up … like an express’. The torpedo was nearly seven metres long and weighed over a ton: it carried 160 kilos of high explosive in its nose, and was travelling at over 80 kph towards the ship.
Oliver Bernard felt a slight shock through the deck, as though a tugboat had run into the giant liner. Then there was a terrific explosion. A column of white water rose high in the air, followed by an eruption of debris. Lumps of coal bounced on the deck. He was no longer alone. Fellow passengers in the floating hotel appeared from everywhere in a rush of trampling feet, wails and cries. Bernard dutifully went down to B deck to fetch his lifebelt from his cabin. The lights were all out. He fell down tilting stairs; could not balance; reeled in darkened corridors to his cabin. Back on the crowded deck, a woman demented with fear snatched his lifebelt from him. No one knew what to do, and there was no loudspeaker system to tell anyone. Passengers had no lifejackets or put them on wrongly. As the ship canted more to starboard and dipped down forward, Bernard began taking off his clothes, methodically folding his coat, waistcoat, collar and tie, carefully putting his tie-pin in his trouser-pocket like a man about to have a wash. But ‘Bunny’ could not swim. He slid down the steep sloping deck and in ‘a wild lucky splash’ scrambled into a lifeboat that had to be hacked away from its bow davit. By rowing frantically they only narrowly missed engulfment by a huge smokestack as the ship slid sideways under the waters. From the boat they watched the triumphant sea pouring into the funnel’s steaming black maw, and then the Lusitania’s mastheads disappearing.
‘All that remained was a boiling wilderness that rose up as if a volcanic disturbance had occurred beneath a placid sea.’
Public anger burned long on the fuel of the Lusitania story. Gruesome horrors lasted for weeks: the morgues and mass graves at Queenstown; the bloated corpses with seagull-pecked faces washing up on Irish beaches; the pathetic stories; the private griefs. The propaganda press feasted on it in words and graphics. Rioting mobs in Liverpool and London sacked shops with Germanic names. That emotional barometer, D. H. Lawrence, said, ‘I am mad with rage myself. I would like to kill a million Germans – two millions.’ The Liberal government in Britain ordered the arrest and internment of up to 30,000 ‘enemy alien’ males.
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 Ho
use 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.
They are masters of propaganda, you know. Dick, have you ever considered what a diabolical weapon that can be – using all the channels of modern publicity to poison and warp men’s minds? It is the most dangerous thing on earth. You can use it cleanly – as I think on the whole we did in the War – but you can use it to establish the most damnable lies.
John Buchan, The Three Hostages (1924)
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:
The true wizard is the man who works by spirit on spirit. We are only beginning to realize the strange crannies of the human soul. The real magician, if he turned up today, wouldn’t bother about drugs and dopes … The great offensives of the future would be psychological, and … the most deadly weapon in the world was the power of mass-persuasion …
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):
John Buchan, later Lord Tweedsmuir, was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps in 1915 to assist with the communiqués for, and later for an official account of, the Battle of the Somme … Deception plans and misleading information were used by GHQ Intelligence on occasions – false reports being given to the Press or drafted into carefully prepared political speeches.
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:
That buck simply leaked out of the landscape … Against the grey rocks of the kopjes it showed no more than a crow against a thundercloud. It didn’t need to run away, all it had to do was to stand still and melt into the background.
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 hi
s 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:
I have reports from agents everywhere – pedlars in South Russia, Afghan horse-dealers, Turcoman merchants, pilgrims on the road to Mecca, sheikhs in North Africa, sailors on the Black Sea coasters, sheep-skinned Mongols, Hindu fakirs, Greek traders in the Gulf, as well as respectable Consuls who use cyphers.
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.’
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