Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  There is little about his wartime work in his book of reminiscences, Memory Hold-the-Door (1940), but that was much more likely the result of discretion than from any residual feelings of disappointment. He never wavered from his belief that evil was alive in the world and had to be fought with almost every weapon at a country’s disposal; at the same time he recognised that such a fight could take a toll on those who thought themselves on the side of the angels. In his novel The Three Hostages, published in 1924, he has Macgillivray, the Ulster-born policeman from Scotland Yard, say to Hannay: ‘Dick, have you ever considered what a diabolical weapon that [propaganda] 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 also use it to establish the most damnable lies. Happily in the long run it defeats itself, but only after it has sown the world with mischief.’116

  At the end of the war JB summarised the results of German propaganda in neutral countries: eight had declared war on Germany, nine more had severed relations, while in most of the others public opinion had turned against her, according to the Germans themselves. ‘This is not a result of which any propaganda department need be ashamed.’* Adolf Hitler bitterly complained in 1925, in Mein Kampf, of the shortcomings of German propaganda, averring instead that enemy propaganda had been deployed with amazing skill and brilliant calculation. He claimed that he learned a great deal from how the Allies did it.117 In 1935 the American historian James Duane Squires wrote: ‘British propaganda was a real force in winning the World War. It kept the home masses docilely patriotic. It gained, or mightily helped to gain, powerful allies. It was of prime importance in bringing about the disintegration of civilian and military morale in Germany.’118 Although modern historians take a more nuanced view, the central facts hold true, and JB contributed to that success.

  By 1922, the post-war European landscape was already beginning to look quite bleak, thanks to deep divisions over the League of Nations and the distinct unease that honourable people felt about the apparently draconian clauses of the Treaty of Versailles. As JB put it: ‘I realised that we were at the point of contact of a world vanishing and a world arriving, and that such a situation was apt to crush those who had to meet it.’119 It was in this atmosphere that he worked on the revision of Nelson’s History. On their publication, the four volumes of A History of the Great War were widely praised (by, amongst others, King George V, Field Marshal Sir William Robertson and General Sir Ian Hamilton), but there were reservations from some historians, who thought that JB had taken too little account of early post-war historical scholarship, especially as far as naval operations were concerned.

  He concluded the final volume with a romantic peroration that drew letters of commendation from serving men and civilians alike.

  The war was a vindication of the essential greatness of our common nature, for victory was won less by genius in the few than by faithfulness in the many. Every class had its share, and the plain man, born in these latter days of doubt and divided purpose, marched to heights of the heroic unsurpassed in simpler ages. In this revelation democracy found its final justification, and civilisation its truest hope. Mankind may console itself in its hour of depression and failure, and steel itself to new labours with the knowledge that once it has been great…

  The world is poor indeed without them [those who had died], for they were the flower of their race, the straightest of limb, the keenest of brain, the most eager of spirit. In such a mourning each man thinks first of his friends; for each of us has seen his crowded circle become like the stalls of an unpopular play; each has suddenly found the world of time strangely empty and eternity strangely thronged … The youth which died almost before it had gazed on the world, the poets with their songs unsung, the makers and the doers who left their tasks unfinished, found immortal achievement in their death. Their memory will abide so long as men are found to set honour before ease and a nation lives not for its ledgers alone but for some purpose of virtue. They have become, in the fancy of Henry Vaughan, the shining spires of that City to which we travel.*

  These days we recoil from the notion of youth finding its apotheosis in death, but JB was articulating what many people – combatant as well as civilian – believed, or wanted to believe, a century ago. And he was vindicated to the extent that the memory of that youth is still cherished a hundred years on.

  *Influenced by Italian Futurism, a pre-war avant-garde movement that emphasised the speed and energy of modern life, and often depicted machinery and technology.

  **Hew Strachan, when making the Channel 4 television series The First World War, was determined that ‘As far as possible this series should convey the realities of war in phrases uttered at the time, not in the memories of surviving veterans, however powerful. Mediated by the intervening events of the twentieth century, such testimony can create not an immediacy but a distance between us and the First World War.’ Hew Strachan, The First World War, Simon & Schuster, London, 2014, p. 334. JB’s own views were not immune. In Memory Hold-the-Door, written in 1938–9, p. 167, he wrote of the war’s ‘boredom and futility’ in terms that were significantly different from what he said and wrote at the time.

  *One of several Border place-names that JB used for surnames in his novels.

  *Sir Walter Bullivant, in chapter XI of Mr Standfast, wonders whether the genius German villain, ‘Moxon Ivery’, might have visited ‘the Grand Fleet as a distinguished neutral’.

  *The Riddle of the Sands came out in 1903, and was much admired by JB.

  *Alan Bennett, Forty Years On, Faber, London, 1969. Act 2: ‘Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.’

  *Strictly speaking, a pastoral poem, which this is not.

  **The friends were Sir Lionel Curtis, Sir Philip Kerr (later Marquess of Lothian), Sir Alfred Zimmern, Sir Robert Brand, Sir George Craik, Sir Lionel Hichens and Sir Edward Grigg.

  ***Marnie had trained to be a singer, and went out to Australia to stay with her aunt and uncle when the latter, Major-General Sir Reginald Talbot, became Governor of Victoria in 1904. While in Australia she acted as secretary to the famous singer Dame Nellie Melba. She met her future husband, Jeremy Peyton-Jones, an Australian, in Paris and they married in 1916.

  *The Power-House, chapter III, William Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1916. Something of the same feeling is expressed by Kipling in ‘In the House of Suddhoo’:

  A stone’s throw out on either hand

  From that well-ordered road we tread

  And all the world is wild and strange.

  *As far as JB was concerned (and indeed a number of modern historians agree), the success of the push in the late summer in 1918, which ended the war quicker than had been expected, was quite as much Haig’s success as Foch’s.

  **What JB considered a fuller and more accurate account of the two stages of the Somme battle came out as volume XVI of Nelson’s History the following year.

  ***The title of the book echoes Sir Walter Scott, who named a character in Redgauntlet ‘Green Mantle’.

  ****JB was paid £750 as an advance.

  *Robertson Nicoll’s staid, churchy periodical.

  **Founded by the rabble-rouser Horatio Bottomley.

  *Its slogan was ‘To Fight for Right till Right be Won’.

  *A number of other Kindergarten members found senior administrative posts in wartime, among them Leo Amery and Philip Kerr.

  *In October 1918 the Ministry of Information opened a Photographic Bureau, which sold war photographs to the public.

  **The sanctioning of the dissemination in the United States of Louis Raemakers’ vicious (and influential) cartoons against German militarism, for example.

  *Edward Thomas, the poet, also lost his life that day.

  **A quotation from 2 Samuel, chapter 1, v. 2
3: ‘Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.’

  *Expanded and published by Nelson’s in 1936.

  *‘Sweet Argos’ (1916) from Poems Scots and English.

  *There is a persistent, if vague, rumour that JB visited Letchworth Garden City, hotbed of pacifism, to stay with a Captain Stewart at a house like the one in ‘Biggleswick’ described in Mr Standfast.

  *This occurs near ‘Bradfield’, generally thought to be Sheffield. On the moors close to Sheffield can still be found the remains of Great War training trenches, almost certainly known to JB.

  *Except Turkey, and the Near and Middle East, which remained the responsibility of the Ministry of Information.

  *He was called ‘another Voltaire’ by Mario Praz in La Stampa, 15 June 1934.

  *Announced in The Times, 18 December 1918.

  *Quoted in Michael Redley, The John Buchan Journal, no. 47, p. 22. Redley goes on to say: ‘His success in quietly burying nearly all traces of the vast special effort made by the British State was the last, but not the least, of his many contributions to the Allied effort in the Great War.’

  *A near quotation from ‘Joy of my life while left me here’, a poem by the seventeenth-century religious poet Henry Vaughan; the image is that of the saints as beacons, guiding others to Heaven. John Buchan, A History of the Great War, vol. IV, pp. 443–4.

  7

  Elsfield, 1919–1927

  With the war over, the Ministry wound up, and after a short, badly needed rest over Christmas, JB set about tackling some unfinished business from the war. An immediately pressing public issue was the matter of the imprisoned conscientious objectors. This was a cause close to the hearts of the Gilbert Murrays, who enlisted JB’s help in organising a petition to present to the Prime Minister. The Murrays were shocked that, six weeks after the Armistice, there were still 1,500 conscientious objectors in prison, and 700 of those had served more than the maximum of two years. It was a glaring scandal and JB was happy to put his name prominently to a memorandum, which was delivered to Downing Street on the first day of 1919.*

  JB and his colleagues believed that most of the conscientious objectors genuinely acted under the demands of conscience. ‘We urge that men in prison under these conditions should not be kept there during a period of national rejoicing, and that our country should not show itself slow at such a time to carry through an act of just mercy.’1 This memorandum did not on its own do the trick, but it gave ammunition to high-minded politicians, who kept up the campaign in the House of Commons, while the newspapers also carried appeals. Most conscientious objectors were released during the spring.

  JB did not suffer from the post-war debilitating malaise that afflicted some of his friends, although he was certainly no stranger to sorrow and regret. If he felt something of the guilt that very often assails those who have survived some great trauma, he saw it for what it was and, within a few months, had regained much of his optimism and drive. He began to see the war in the same way as Henry James, as a ‘great interruption’:

  I felt like a man recovering from a fever, or like the medieval poet who, going into the fields after his frozen winter’s vigil, abased himself before the miracle of spring.

  He found it strange but comforting that he had found something of the exhilaration of youth. ‘I was forty-three, but I seemed to have “found again my twentieth year”.’2 He could not imagine why, since there was precious little cause for optimism. This rediscovered youth prompted an outpouring of writings, but a number of these were of a memorial nature, which strongly indicates that, despite his later protestations, he was by no means recovered from his grief:

  When the future is uncertain the mind turns naturally to the certainties of the past, and finds comfort in what is beyond the peril of change … I wanted the sense of continuity, the assurance that our contemporary blunders were endemic in human nature, that our new fads were very ancient heresies, that beloved things which were threatened had rocked not less heavily in the past.3

  He was thoroughly put off by what he called ‘the clerisy’, the interpreting classes who influenced opinion and, as far as JB was concerned, ran round their cages in pursuit of their tails. These people, whom he thought arrogant, yet devoid of any creed, had depended on their belief in the steady march of science and reason and the perfectibility of man, which had been thoroughly exploded by the Great War. As a result, ‘they plumed themselves wearily on being hollow men living in a waste land.’4

  After JB’s death, his son Alastair wrote that his father had developed to a high degree what the Greeks called Sophrosyné, an inner harmony which engendered spiritual restraint. From this ‘sprang a force so warm and positive that it charged the air around him. This lack of jealousy and anger, springing not from indifference but conviction, so pervaded the climate of his mind and of his conversation, that in his company one forgot the cheap jibe and the vindictive comment.’5

  Sophrosyné had not been a conspicuous characteristic of the rather conceited imperial administrator in South Africa, nor yet the too loyal member of the pre-Great War ruling class. It was the cataclysm of the war and its aftermath that embedded in him a wise moderation in the face of a brutalised, atomised, inward-looking and fearful world. It is one reason why he refused to join the ranks of the disillusioned intelligentsia after the war, for one of his signal characteristics was his optimism – not a vague Micawberish hope that ‘something will turn up’, but optimism solidly based on his close study of the history of his people, and his experience of enduring happiness. It is true that this optimism led him quite often to underestimate difficulties and overestimate people, especially politicians. But despite the horrible personal setbacks he suffered during the war, and the desolation he saw all around, he continued to believe in the progress of civilisation and the essential greatness of humanity, if only that greatness could be drawn out. The inevitable corollary of such a belief was the dedication of his life to public service. The ivory tower could be no permanent refuge.

  Soon after the war, he wrote a slim volume, entitled These for Remembrance, which contained six short, heartfelt, biographical sketches of some of his closest fallen friends: Tommy Nelson, Cecil Rawling, Basil Blackwood, Jack Stuart-Wortley (Susie’s cousin), Raymond Asquith and Bron Lucas. The latter, Lord Lucas, had been known as Auberon Herbert at Oxford, was a Liberal minister before the war and, despite having only half of one leg, joined the Royal Flying Corps as a pilot and was shot down in late 1916.* In the words of JB’s grandson Toby Tweedsmuir, ‘These are not hagiographies, but like the epitaphs of the classical Greek poets, they bring a recollection and a curious sense of peace to the hollowest of losses.’6 The Chiswick Press printed forty copies of this book, at JB’s expense, in the summer of 1919. It was a beautiful production, hand-bound in full calfskin blocked with gold, and was dedicated to his children, whom he addressed in the Preface:

  Every generation, I know, has the same prejudice; but I am convinced that few men have ever had more lovable, more brilliant, more generous, more gallant friends … I do not want you to be always thinking about the war, for the eyes of youth should be turned forward. But neither do I want you to forget it, since it is a thing for everlasting remembrance and eternal pride … [His friends] propped up the falling heavens and saved the world for you. But most of them died of it. I hope that will never befall you which has befallen me – to look around and find a great emptiness…7

  These for Remembrance initiated a cascade of sorrowful but thankful letters from mothers, wives and friends. He told his mother, ‘I can scarcely re-read it, it makes me so sad … I am well repaid if it gives pleasure to relatives. I am paying for it out of what I got for my little article in the Herald last December. I thought it wise to have it finely printed.’8

  In the spring of 1919, JB also wrote an account of the South African forces in France. He had been asked to write the
book by Jan Smuts and the South African government as early as 1916, but it was impossible to attempt it until the war was over, by which time Smuts and Louis Botha had decided that South Africa could not pay for it. So it became ‘a labour of love’, probably because JB thought the South African actions at Delville Wood in July 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, and Marrières Wood, held by South African soldiers as the Allies retreated in March 1918, were two of the bravest and most stirring of the war, worthy of immortality. The History of the South African Forces in France was published in 1920 and became a school textbook in South Africa.

  He began to take his own advice about looking forward as well as back and, that summer, he published the second of his fictionalised political symposia. This time he collaborated with his wife Susie, and the book, The Island of Sheep, was published by Hodder and Stoughton, under the pseudonyms of ‘Cadmus and Harmonia’, in a small softback edition. Cadmus was the first King of Thebes and was married to Harmonia, the goddess of harmony and concord, a gracious compliment to Susie, which will have passed most people by.

  The Island of Sheep, which must not be confused with JB’s novel of the same name of 1936, is not unlike A Lodge in the Wilderness in that it features a variety of people of both sexes and most political standpoints, who find themselves in a country house, this time soberly discussing difficulties in the post-war world. Although JB claimed that the book was mostly written by his wife, we can discount that, if only because Susie had only recently had a baby. This book contains many of JB’s post-war preoccupations – the need for a League of Nations to abolish further wars born of external aggression and national jealousy, and to ensure that the dead had not died in vain,* the importance of the participation of all classes in the democratic process, and the collapse of Liberalism. It is interesting to note that the humane, socially conscious, anti-authoritarian Toryism, which he espoused, and which came to be known in the 1920s and 1930s as Baldwinism, is represented by a character in the book called George Stanbury Maldwin.