Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  His propaganda work was grievously difficult. At the beginning of his Directorship, he had acceded, most unwillingly, to Lloyd George’s demand that he consult an advisory committee, made up of four senior newspapermen, a recommendation that came from Robert Donald of the Daily Chronicle. This was to prove an enduring headache, since the men chosen all thought they could do the job far better than he. They were the ever-duplicitous Donald, C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian, Lord Burnham of the Daily Telegraph, and Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of both The Times and the Daily Mail who, when he went to the United States, was replaced by Lord Beaverbrook (of the Express newspapers).

  JB divined that Lloyd George thought that membership of this committee would neutralise their public criticisms of government policy, but he could all too clearly see the dangers of populist-minded newspapermen running the propaganda operation, since they were far less scrupulous over facts and impressions than he or Masterman. For the first four months of his tenure, he did not convene the committee once, the ostensible reason being that the Prime Minister had not yet set the terms of reference. This was, in retrospect, a serious mistake, for in early June the committee members complained bitterly to Lloyd George. JB was summoned to Downing Street and carpeted by the Prime Minister, who told him that there must be weekly meetings, with an agenda, and that this committee should be his ‘Cabinet’, discussing all matters of policy. JB had to bow to this pressure and promise that matters that did not have to be ‘decided in a violent hurry’ would be discussed at these meetings.

  Regular meetings did not entirely solve the problem, however, and the rows rumbled on, from time to time, throughout the summer, to the point where JB several times contemplated resignation. He wrote to his mother on 19 July: ‘I am having a controversy with my Committee of Editors (an idiotic business which the P.M. forced upon me owing to his fear of the Press). I don’t intend to give way, so if the P.M. doesn’t support me, I shall resign on the spot. So I may have a little leisure after all. I have discovered that in this world it is very easy to be strong, but very difficult to be urbane at the same time. It is my business to avoid friction, but at the same time there is a limit.’89

  The next day he wrote to Anna: ‘I faced all my Committee of Editors … telling them that either they must resign or me. The funny thing is that I kept my temper and we parted in perfect amity. I hate talking about resignation, which is mainly a cheap and rather cowardly trick, but in this case I had no choice. The P.M. is in such a funk about the Press that he probably won’t let them resign, so I may get a holiday after all. I am very much ennuied with the whole business.’90 Three days later he had still not heard from Lloyd George, so he didn’t know whether to resign or not. ‘I will slave to every extent in the public service, but I must have a free hand. I am not a hack politician, who is miserable out of office.’91

  Lord Burnham met the Prime Minister at the end of July, when the latter told him that Buchan wasn’t the right man for the job, ‘in which we all agree’.92 This was perfidious of the Prime Minister, since if he had really thought that, he should have sacked him long ago; instead, he repeatedly refused to meet him. Eventually, Milner felt moved to intervene, and JB was left to carry on. He was later to compare popular newspapers, and by inference their proprietors and editors, during the war to an eighteenth-century mob who, when things went wrong, hunted perseveringly for scapegoats. Moreover, ‘They underestimated the complexity of government and hugely overrated their own infallibility…93 Small wonder he didn’t get on with this committee.

  Late in August he went to France, to inspect a château commandeered by his Department to provide facilities for American journalists and other visitors. He took the opportunity to try to find out exactly what had happened to Alastair. He didn’t succeed, since Alastair’s battalion were in the middle of a battle elsewhere. Nevertheless, in a sentimental journey, he motored to all the places where he had seen his brother, then visited the spot where he died (now deathly quiet), and put roses and dahlias out of the GHQ château’s garden on his grave at Duisans.

  Appropriately for JB in this elegiac mood, his Poems Scots and English were published that summer by the Nelson subsidiary, T. C. and E. C. Jack. There are fewer than one hundred extant poems of his, of which about two-thirds were published in his lifetime or soon afterwards. They encompass a number of different verse forms, they are influenced by a wide range of other poets, and several, such as ‘Fisher Jamie’ and ‘Fratri Dilectissimo’, have been anthologised a number of times. The dedications to some of his best-known novels are in poetic form. Yet, curiously, he did not choose to mention his poetry in Memory Hold-the-Door, and only recently have scholars developed an interest in this side of his literary output.

  His poems show that he was as happy, if not happier, writing in what he called ‘guid Scots’ when he felt strongly about something or wished to convey the thoughts and feelings of ordinary Scots people. This is particularly true of his First World War poetry. In the preface, he wrote that Scots had never been a book-tongue for him. ‘I could always speak it more easily than I could write it; and I dare to hope that the faults of my verses, great as they are, are not those of an antiquarian exercise.’94 Not surprisingly, the poems reveal the private man rather more clearly than can be discerned in the fiction. As importantly, they challenge the criticism sometimes made of him that he had sympathy for his fellow men, but lacked the capacity to get inside their heads.

  There are seven war poems that can be positively attributed to him, since all but one appear in Poems Scots and English,* and the seventh is ‘A.E.B.’, his poem about Alastair. He wrote in the first person, as if he were a private soldier from the Borders, and the homely Scots cadences were so bred in his bone that these poems are strangely convincing, in places wryly amusing and often moving. ‘On Leave’, for example, is about a soldier coming home to the Borders to discover a child has just died while he’s been away, and he has to climb up into the hills in order to make his peace with God.

  He shows in ‘Sweet Argos’ what sympathy he had for the ordinary British Tommy:

  For sax weeks hunkerin’ in a hole

  We’d kenned the warst a man can thole –

  Nae skirlin’ dash frae goal to goal

  Yellin’ like wud,

  But the lang stell that wechts the soul

  And tooms the bluid.*

  The most touching poem is ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’ in which a soldier, having read in the newspapers that soldiers won’t be able to settle happily at home after the war, disputes it, looking forward to a comfortable and pleasant life as a shopkeeper once more, with ‘cracks’ with his friend Davie. Except that Davie is dead.

  The fact that he wrote these poems in Scots dialect suggests strongly that he was more concerned with relieving his own feelings than having an eye on his reputation. Poems Scots and English is dedicated to Alastair with a quotation from The Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘I am come from him whom thou hast loved and followed; and my message is to tell thee that he expects thee at his table to sup with him in his kingdom the next day after Easter.’ Alastair had died on Easter Monday.

  Almost the most remarkable feature of that hectic summer of 1917 was that JB found time to begin his third Hannay story, Mr Standfast. Although he always maintained that he thought out the plots of his novels before committing them to paper, this book’s climax concerns General Ludendorff’s all-out, but ultimately failed, offensive in late March 1918. We shall never know what ending he had first envisaged.

  Mr Standfast was more than a welcome relaxation in a hustled life; it was another part of his war effort. The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle had been conspicuous successes, both in the trenches and at home, and JB saw the next novel as a way of influencing home opinion, in particular, which was becoming shaky in the summer of 1917 and all the way through the 3rd Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) that autumn. Civilians were understandably tired and frightened; the casualty lists continued to appal; food was b
ecoming short as the German U-boat blockade intensified; the revolution in Russia, after the abdication of the Tsar in March, had destabilised industrial relations; and London and other cities were subject to attack by Zeppelins and Gotha bombers. (Indeed, in May, JB had finally come round to Donald’s view, and suggested to Lloyd George that ‘direct propaganda’ be aimed at Britain itself, to help fend off the real threat of war-weariness; the result was the all-party National War Aims Committee, which organised patriotic meetings and film shows throughout the country. JB sat on its executive committee but it was a separate organisation.)

  It is only necessary to list the ‘subjects’ dealt with in the episodic Mr Standfast to gauge JB’s purpose: war aims (which, unhelpfully, were not explicitly laid out by Lloyd George until January 1918) and the growing influence of the peace party; the naiveté and spiritual pride of secular conscientious objectors, in danger of being exploited by German spies;* political agitation and attendant labour strife in the large industrial cities, but the essential patriotism of most working-class Socialists; the beastliness of the German High Command and the right-headedness and courage of the Americans and the French; the qualities of Field-Marshal Haig; the invincible humour and endurance of ordinary soldiers, their lack of hatred for their German counterparts, and their amazing courage during the orderly retreat towards Amiens.

  JB believed that Germany had become ‘de-civilised’, which was one reason why it was necessary to prosecute the war to defend civilisation, but he saw the risk that Britain and the Empire might themselves become de-civilised in the process. In the light of that, it is instructive that Richard Hannay refuses to shoot the evil German genius, von Schwabing, when he has the opportunity, because the man has his back to him.

  Mr Standfast had to be written at odd moments, usually at weekends and sometimes during air raids. It took about a year to finish – far longer than usual. It was published in serial form before the end of the war in The British Weekly (also published by Hodder and Stoughton), so it did not come out as a book until May 1919. However, even in peacetime it still had a role to play in reassuring the British public, civilian and military, that their sacrifices had been worthwhile and their fears understood. There is no doubt that JB used his wartime novels to say things that simply could not find a place in Nelson’s History or The Times. In particular, one of the most interesting and well-realised characters in Mr Standfast is a conscientious objector. He also sympathetically describes the sufferings of a shell-shock victim.

  Events were unfolding as he wrote Mr Standfast, beginning with the capture of the Messines ridge in early June, which Hannay mentions very early on. JB made good use of knowledge acquired from his work, such as the description of the filming, for propaganda purposes, of a mock-battle on a Yorkshire moor, to which Hannay brings total confusion.* But he also fictionalised an incident that affected Susie. On Saturday, 7 July 1917 the Germans bombed London for the first time in daylight. Gotha bombers arrived ‘like a flock of birds’ and JB went to an upper window in the Foreign Office building to watch their leisurely, and initially unhindered, progress over the city. He was gravely anxious when it looked as if they might drop a bomb on Portland Place, but discovered later that Susie had been on a bus in the Brompton Road when they came over, and had hurriedly left it for the safety of an Underground station. She was badly frightened and the incident found its way into Mr Standfast. Hannay discovers Moxon Ivery (a.k.a. the Graf von Schwabing) sheltering in a Tube station, and realises that this supremely competent and impressive evil mastermind has a weakness; he is a physical coward.

  Mr Standfast sold well, but not as well as the two earlier Hannay books. JB received a generous 25 per cent royalty for it (he had got 30 per cent for Greenmantle), something he was never to achieve again.

  One major problem for the Department of Information was that, because most of its work was of necessity secret, there was no informed debate about the ethics, parameters or methods of propaganda, either inside the Houses of Parliament or elsewhere. The War Cabinet of five men set policy, which the Department of Information tried to carry out, but the ignorance of almost everyone else about it was profound.

  A leader, which appeared in The Times in early August 1917, pointed up some of the problems with which JB had to contend. After first inveighing against the muddle and delay of censorship, and the multifarious nature of ‘publicity’ across several departments, it went on to say that there were too many government departments concerned with publicity but no central authority with full responsibility. The Times had had high hopes of JB, apparently, but thought he was virtually a subordinate of the Foreign Office, and his rank of Lieutenant-Colonel made him a comparatively humble member of the military hierarchy. ‘His work, we are sure, is of the greatest national importance. The point is that it is merely that of an addition to the existing “publicity” departments, not that of a supreme co-ordinating agency.’95 JB put a brave face on things for his mother: ‘There is a very good leader in the “Times” today, setting out the disadvantages I labour under. The original idea of the Department of Information has never been carried out, owing to the [indecipherable but undoubtedly uncomplimentary] of a small gang of London editors and the jealousy of minor officials in the War Office.’96

  He had become convinced that he needed a champion in the War Cabinet and he spoke about that on a number of occasions to his old friends, Lord Robert Cecil and Lord Milner. As a result, Sir Edward Carson, an Ulster Protestant barrister and politician (famous for destroying Oscar Wilde’s reputation during a libel trial), who had recently joined the Cabinet, was detailed first to supervise home propaganda by heading the National War Aims Committee and then to be de facto head of the Department of Information as well. JB was mightily relieved that at last someone would speak up for it in Cabinet, and to whom he had immediate access. Carson had told him that he could trust him to fight his battles. JB told Susie, ‘I have now got a chief who will defend me through thick and thin. I am going to give the W. Cabinet a weekly report.’97

  He spoke much too soon. Although he admired Carson and enjoyed his company, he soon discovered that, in this regard, the man was a broken reed. He did not fight his battles, except over money; indeed he seemed scarcely able to keep his mind on the job when there was such ferment in Ireland. As late as 1 December, JB presented a memorandum to him to explain exactly the lines of command in the Department, and indeed also what he (JB) meant by the word ‘propaganda’. He also took this opportunity to explain why British propaganda had failed to have any effect in Russia, which was racked again by revolution that November:

  In the first place it [propaganda] is a matter of infinite small details, and involves an hour-to-hour study of foreign opinion … It resembles an election campaign, where seed must be sown broadcast, regardless of the fact that much must fall on unsuitable ground … In the second place the Department must work to a large extent secretly, and as far as possible through unofficial channels. Camouflage of the right kind is a vital necessity. It can advertise its wares, but it dare not advertise the vendor. [My underlining] Popular opinion in every country is so delicate an instrument that attempts to play upon it in the name of a foreign Government are certain to be resented, and not only lose their value, but become positively injurious to our cause … We frequently receive complaints that the Government is doing nothing, and our attention is called to publications, exhibitions, &c., with the comment that it is shameful that such matters should be left to private enterprise. In nearly every case the things referred to have been the work of the Department.

  … Finally, propaganda cannot work miracles. Its aim is to state honestly and fully the different aspects of Britain’s achievement in the war, to inculcate in the popular mind the main principles of the Allied policy and its justification, and to inform the world accurately of the atrocities and claims of our opponents. [JB’s underlining] But it is a perpetual struggle. We have to break down in neutral countries the prejudice against Britain
caused by their economic sufferings. In Allied countries we have often to contend with a stubborn and jealous particularism. And always we have to fight against the lavish German effort which has had a start of forty years. The most active propaganda cannot undo the effect of an enemy victory or explain away an Allied check. No propaganda of ours can really counteract Socialist and pacifist appeals in a country where the Government itself makes no attempt to counteract or suppress them. If the powerful war parties in Italy and Russia failed to stem the tide of anti-war propaganda it is hard to see how the efforts of a foreign Government could have succeeded.98

  This was meant to give Carson ammunition in the War Cabinet, after the Prime Minister asked Donald to look into the workings of the Department in late October, since criticisms concerning duplication, lack of coordination and centralisation would not go away. (Although it is hard to see how explaining a nation’s cause, both to other nations and its own citizens, could ever be confined to one department.) However, the instructions Lloyd George gave to Donald were guaranteed to offend the Director and members of the Department: he had full authority to call for documents and reports and examine officials, to ask for a list of all officials employed, their remuneration and conditions of service, as well as the volunteers, and to analyse the expenditure. Pembroke Wicks, Assistant Secretary to the War Cabinet, wrote to Carson: ‘The trouble is, I think, that B.[uchan] despises Donald and the feeling is reciprocated … the P.M. is “delivering him into the hands of his enemy”, and all the other men of the Department have a poor opinion of Donald. If B. goes, I think we shall be landed, because he has everything at his fingers’ end and it is not like an ordinary Department where you have the permanent officials to carry on, and in addition, I expect he is popular in the Department and I should not be surprised if others resign out of loyalty, though he has not suggested anything of this to me.’99