Myths and Legends of the First World War

by James Hayward

  Conspiratorial notions of a double bluff meant that the story remained current until well into October, as the Reverend Clark recorded:

  Saturday 3 October: Popular belief in the passage of the Russians – Archangel: Scotland ports: English railways: Cardiff and Bristol – continues. The latest explanation of absence of news of them is that their guns went down in the wreck of the ‘Oceanic’ off the Scotch coast. They cannot get to work till fresh artillery is got for them from Archangel.

  Commenting on the myth in his memoir Queer People, Scotland Yard CID Chief Basil Thomson observed:

  There was nothing to be done but let the delusion burn itself out. I have often wondered since whether some self-effacing patriot did not circulate this story in order to put heart into his fellow-countrymen at a time when depression would have been the most disastrous.

  According to the account by Brigadier-General John Charteris, the rumour also entered into wide circulation among troops at the front. Charteris served as chief intelligence officer at GHQ until December 1917, and in 1931 published his wartime journal. In mid-September 1914 Charteris recorded of one of his fellow officers:

  M is full of stories of Russians passing through London; says his sister saw them, and when I said I didn’t believe it, retorted, ‘Do you mean to say my sister is a liar!’ So that ended that discussion. I asked at GHQ about the Russians, and was told, of course, that it was rubbish. They could not get there and would have nowhere to go, if they did. But a lot of men here have got hold of the idea – all from home letters.

  On November 18th the story was denied in Parliament by the Under-Secretary of State for War, Harold Tennant, in response to a question from a back-bench MP

  Tennant: I am uncertain whether it will gratify or displease my honourable friend to learn that no Russian troops have been conveyed through Great Britain to the Western area of the European War.

  The origin of the myth remained inscrutable, even to those who searched diligently at the time. A variety of explanations have been offered over the years, some of them more credible than others. According to Charteris, in February 1915:

  The Russians in England (whom poor M’s sister saw!) were undoubtedly the Territorial units moving through Great Britain on their way to ports of embarkation for the East. One youth here adds the embellishment that at a wayside station one bearded warrior, asked where he came from, said truthfully enough, Ross-shire, which sounded like Russia. Even without this embellishment, the explanation is adequate. We shall have may more such rumours before the war ends. A wise scepticism seems called for with regard to all unlikely rumours. Intelligence work teaches scepticism, if it teaches nothing else.

  The Ross-shire version, also endorsed by Basil Thomson in 1922, was fleshed out by Lord Lovat in 1978. According to Lovat, the event which triggered the tale was the transfer by rail of the Highland Mounted Brigade (or Lovat Scouts) from Blairgowrie to Huntingdon in August 1914:

  This started the rumour that a force of Russians had landed in the north of Scotland, and were on their way south. The fantastic story, which spread like wildfire, had some foundation, for it fitted in remarkably well with the movements of the Highland Brigade. More than a dozen troop trains had passed through Newcastle and York, travelling in succession during the hours of darkness. Many of the men on board were reported to speak a foreign language, wear curious headgear, and be uncommunicative and shy in manner. When asked from whence they came by benevolent ladies staffing a canteen on York platform, they could only murmur, ‘Roscha’ (Ross-shire). Those who have witnessed the hysteria of non-combatants in big cities will not be surprised that witnesses were soon prepared to swear that the strangers had snow on their boots, while others, even better informed, had learned from high officials the exact numbers in the Russian Expeditionary Force. Those who disbelieved such bunkum were suspected of being pro-German.

  Various other explanations were offered at the time. One held that a food wholesaler in London had received a telegram announcing that 200,000 ‘Russians’ were being despatched via Archangel, with reference to eggs rather than soldiers. Interestingly, MI5 files declassified in 1997 reveal ‘eggs’ to have been the codeword for troops used by prewar German spies. Another explanation told of an excited French officer with an imperfect grasp of English who went about near the front, demanding ‘Where are ze rations?’ From Paris, Lord Bertie offered that a ship had been due to leave Archangel for Britain with gold worth £8 million, and a number of British warships detailed to escort it, a precaution which might have aroused suspicion. It is also said that a few Russian officers had appeared in Scotland to take up staff positions and purchase munitions, but ultimately the unfamiliar garb and accent of the Lovat Scouts may be the most credible explanation. If so, as Liddell Hart noted, a statue in Whitehall to the Unknown Railway Porter may be long overdue.

  Two curious sidelights are worthy of mention. In his definitive study Falsehood in Wartime, Arthur Ponsonby records that General Sukhomlinoff, the Russian Minister of War, stated in his memoirs that the British Ambassador to Russia, Sir George Buchanan, actually went so far as to request the despatch of ‘a complete Russian army corps’ to Britain, and that British transports were to be brought to Archangel to give effect to the proposal. The Russian general staff, he adds, came to the conclusion that Buchanan had lost his reason. In his lengthy account, The World Crisis, published in 1923, Winston Churchill offered, in similar vein, that on August 28th he had written to Lord Kitchener to propose that ‘a couple of Russian Corps d’Armée’ be transported from Archangel to Ostend to ‘strike at the German communications in a very effective manner’, although the idea did not proceed.

  Still more curiously, some sources hold that the phantom Russian horde might actually have had some material effect on the conduct of the war. At the end of August, on the suggestion of Winston Churchill, 3,000 British troops from the Royal Marine Brigade were landed at Ostend to bolster the crumbling Belgian line. One of the officers attached to the Brigade was a colonel named George Aston, who later recalled:

  The outstanding occurrences which were most helpful were the ‘Russian troops rumour’ (about mysterious Russians arriving in Scottish ports and travelling southward by night) and the news that the Belgian division, driven out of Namur, was embarking at Havre and coming round to Ostend. The Russian troops rumour, told me by the correspondent of The Times, was very useful. My marines were dressed in blue, with round caps and no peaks. They might easily be taken for Russians by German spies. Crowds of civilians were travelling through Ostend for the south, and spying was very easy. I hoisted my huge Union Jack in the railway station for them to report, and I took care that the Russian troops rumour was told as a strict secret to as many people as possible. That is the best way to make sure of wide publicity; but although I heard afterwards that the rumour was believed by vast numbers of people in England, I thought at the time that it was almost too much to hope for its belief by experts in the German General Staff.

  Aston could not have known that Churchill had announced the arrival of the Royal Marine force at Ostend to the House of Commons on August 27th, and that photographs appeared in the press the following day – a fact of which enemy intelligence sources must have been aware. However, even if Germany was aware that at least some of the reinforcements on the Belgian coast were British troops, other sources hold that the fiction of Russians in the same vicinity greatly worried the enemy. Writing in 1930, Liddell Hart records that reports of a Russian force on the Belgian coast may have caused the Germans to withdraw precious reserves from the Battle of the Marne in the south:

  On September 5th, the day when the French troops were moving forward to strike at Kluck, Colonel Hentsch, the representative of the Supreme Command, came to the threatened army with this ominous and despairing warning: ‘The news is bad. The VII and VI armies are blocked. The IV and V are meeting with strong resistance . . . The English are embarking fresh troops continuously on the Belgian coast. There are repo
rts of a Russian expeditionary force in the same parts. A withdrawal is becoming inevitable.’ We know from other sources that the 30,000 marines had grown in the German Command’s imagination to 40,000 and that the Russians were said to be 80,000. Thus the German flank army was left to face its ordeal with the belief that their rear was seriously menaced.

  In addition, the official British war history, edited by Brigadier-General J.E. Edmonds and published in 14 volumes between 1922 and 1949, attributes the following to an insider at the German High Command:

  At this time (August 30th) there was no lack of alarming reports at General Headquarters. Ostend and Antwerp took a prominent role in them. One day countless British troops were said to have landed at Ostend and to be marching on Antwerp; on another that there were to be great sorties from Antwerp. Even landings of Russian troops, 80,000 men, at Ostend were mentioned.

  The rumour also appears to have been fed to the enemy by the luckless German spy Carl Lody (aka Charles Inglis), whose brief career and ultimate fate were described at the beginning of the preceding chapter. Basil Thomson, the Head of CID at Scotland Yard in 1914, records that prior to his arrest in Ireland on October 22nd, all Lody’s letters and telegrams to his controller in neutral Sweden were intercepted with ease:

  He wrote all his letters both in English and German in ordinary ink, without any disguise. His information would have been of comparatively little value even if it had reached the Germans, which it did not. The only report that was allowed to go through was the famous story of the Russian troops passing through England.

  The letter in question had been posted from Edinburgh on September 4th and was intercepted by MI5. Written in German, it read in English:

  Will you kindly communicate with Berlin at once by wire (code or whatever system at your disposal) and inform them that on September 3rd great masses of Russian soldiers have passed through Edinburgh on their way to London and France. Although it must be expected that Berlin has knowledge of these movements, which probably took its start at Archangel, it may be well to forward this information. It is estimated that 60,000 men have passed, number which seems greatly exaggerated. I went to the depot [station] and noticed trains passing through at high speed, blinds down. The landing in Scotland took place at Aberdeen. Yours truly, Charles.

  At his trial in October, Lody explained how he came by this information:

  In Edinburgh everybody was speaking about it. I heard it in the boarding-house and I heard it in the barber’s shop. If I may say so I heard it in the store where I bought my shirt; he was absolutely sure. He said he had got it from a friend and he had got his – well, from his intimate friend at the North British Depot, the station – and he says that he walked up to them that particular Sunday and I said, ‘Well now you tell me about those Russians’, something like that. Well I took the matter rather serious. I took it for granted one night, and I said in the boarding-house – I am not sure whether Mrs Brown will remember – we were chatting as usual and talking about the war and other matters, and I met Mr Brown. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘It sounds so ridiculous that Russia should pass here and you do not hear anything in the papers: you do not hear in France?’ He said, ‘It is an absolute fact – there are 102 trains passed through it: I know it is an absolute fact they have passed through Edinburgh.’ I knew it as rumours.

  The only detail Lody missed was the presence of snow on their boots. But while it is possible that this scrap of disinformation reached the German High Command, it must necessarily have done so some time after the alarms recorded by Edmonds and Liddell Hart. Indeed in his 1969 study, British Secret Service, author Richard Deacon extends supposition regarding Lody and the Russians too far. For according to Deacon:

  Despite all his failures and blunders Lody, ironically enough, was taken more seriously by the Germans on the subject of his most foolish report, the arrival of the Russians. On the strength of this news received from Sweden the Germans detached two divisions to guard the Belgian coast against the possible invasion by the Russians. The loss of these two divisions from the main Western Front probably cost the Germans the vital Battle of the Marne.

  Officially the use the Secret Service made of the porter’s story about the Russians has been denied. It was denied for a very good reason: intelligence services have long been aware that the Germans are apt to believe the most fantastic rumours, and to admit that this penchant had ever been exploited by the British could have done untold harm.

  While it is undoubtedly true that so-called ‘black’ propaganda should be unavowable in order to be effective, whether the legend of the Russians in England paved the way for the French victory on the Marne in September must remain a moot point.

  3

  Mysterious Visions and Clouds

  In August 1914 the Imperial German Army deployed one and a half million men grouped in seven armies against the Allies on the Western Front. Their task under the Schlieffen Plan was to defeat the opposing French armies as swiftly as possible, before turning east to conquer Russia. On August 3rd the Kaiser declared war on France, and on the following morning advance elements of his army crossed the border into neutral Belgium, thereafter proceeding to subdue the country in brutal fashion.

  Attempts by the French to counter-attack in the south resulted in a series of costly reverses. The small British Expeditionary Force (BEF), consisting of just 100,000 men, grouped into one cavalry and four infantry divisions, arrived in France in the middle of August, and on the 21st began to concentrate around the small Belgian mining town of Mons. The BEF engaged the enemy for the first time along the Mons-Condé Canal on August 23rd, and inflicted a severe check on the Germans by virtue of sustained and accurate rifle fire. Meanwhile, to the east of the British line, the French were driven back into full retreat. Unable to secure either of its flanks, the BEF was also obliged to retire, much to the chagrin of the ‘Old Contemptibles’, who believed that they had won the day. Thus the BEF commenced its epic fighting retreat from Mons, slipping quietly away under cover of night. These men faced a gruelling ordeal of long, forced marches south on unmade or rough cobbled roads, with little food or rest, interspersed with fierce rearguard actions to hold off the relentless advance of the Germans, most notably at Le Cateau on the 26th. The exhausting strategic withdrawal continued until September 6th, when the Allied forces finally halted and dug in east of Paris. For many it had lasted fully twelve days and covered some 100 miles, with the BEF sustaining approximately 15,000 casualties en route. The Allied advance to the Marne began later in September, and was followed by the onset of trench warfare on the Aisne.

  As Chief Intelligence Officer at GHQ, and a personal friend of General Sir Douglas Haig, Brigadier-General John Charteris was well-placed to comment on the dramatic events of August and September 1914. Indeed, Charteris recorded his observations in a series of detailed letters, which in 1931 were published in book form as At GHQ. An oft-quoted entry for September 5th 1914 records the following:

  Then there is the story of the ‘Angels of Mons’ going strong through the 2nd Corps, of how the angel of the Lord on the traditional white horse, and clad all in white with flaming sword, faced the advancing Germans at Mons and forbade their further progress. Men’s nerves and imagination play weird pranks in these strenuous times. All the same the angel at Mons interests me. I cannot find out how the legend arose.

  The answer, perhaps, was simple exhaustion. Of the retreat from Le Cateau on August 27th, Private Frank Richards of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers recalled:

  If any angels were seen on the Retirement . . . they were seen that night. March, march, for hour after hour, without a halt; we were now breaking into the fifth day of continuous marching with practically no sleep in between . . . Stevens said: ‘There’s a fine castle there, see?’ pointing to one side of the road. But there was nothing there. Very nearly everyone was seeing things, we were all so dead beat.

  A similar experience from the retreat, this time from a young officer, was related to
Mabel Collins, author of The Crucible (1915):

  I had the most amazing hallucinations marching at night, so I was fast asleep, I think. Everyone was reeling about the road and seeing things . . . I saw all sorts of things, enormous men walking towards me and lights and chairs and things in the road.

  A more explicitly supernatural account, from an anonymous Lieutenant-Colonel also present at Le Cateau, was reported in the Daily Mail:

  We came into action at dawn, and fought till dusk. We were heavily shelled by the German artillery during the day, and in common with the rest of the division had a bad time of it. Our division, however, retired in good order. We were on the march all night of the 26th, and on the 27th, with only about two hours’ rest. The brigade to which I belonged was rearguard to the division, and during the 27th we were all absolutely worn out with fatigue – both bodily and mental fatigue. No doubt we also suffered to a certain extent from shock, but the retirement still continued in excellent order, and I feel sure that our mental faculties were still . . . in good working condition.

  On the night of the 27th I was riding along in the column with two other officers. We had been talking and doing our best to keep from falling asleep on our horses. As we rode along I became conscious of the fact that, in the fields on both sides of the road along which we were marching, I could see a very large body of horsemen. These horsemen had the appearance of squadrons of cavalry, and they seemed to be riding across the fields and going in the same direction as we were going, and keeping level with us . . .

  I did not say a word about it at first, but I watched them for about 20 minutes. The other two officers had stopped talking. At last one of them asked me if I saw anything in the fields. I told them what I had seen. The third officer then confessed that he too had been watching these horsemen for the last 20 minutes. So convinced were we that they were real cavalry that, at the next halt, one of the officers took a party of men out to reconnoitre, and found no-one there. The night grew darker, and we saw no more.