by Nigel Jones
The Entente, however, was still an informal and loose alliance. Britain continued to rely on its navy as its main weapon to maintain its global empire and protect it from invasion, while its small army acted as a gendarmerie policing the far-flung empire. Almost alone among European nations, Britain scorned to conscript its youth into the army. The same game spirit of amateurism which still dominated its cricket and football teams pervaded its military thinking too. But events in Europe were exercising a magnetic force, pulling Britain along in their wake. Just as far-sighted diplomats awoke to the German threat and made their dispositions with France accordingly, so too did two able and clear-thinking men: one a politician, the other a general.
Richard Burdon Haldane was a ponderous, portly Scottish lawyer whose agile brain belied his elephantine appearance. As secretary of state for war in the multi-talented cabinet of giants that was the 1906–14 Liberal government, Haldane pushed through a thorough-going reform of the army that gave Britain at least the nucleus of a modern, professional fighting force. In 1907–8 Haldane had created the Territorial Army out of the hodge-podge of militia, volunteer and yeomanry units that had formed the army’s reserve since the Napoleonic Wars. The Territorials would learn the soldiering trade at weekend and summer camps.
Haldane, like so many progressives, was a passionate admirer of things Teutonic. (He translated the words of the gloomy German philosopher Schopenhauer, and even described a German philosophy seminar as ‘My spiritual home’.)
But notwithstanding his open sympathies – which would cost him his cabinet job when a hysterical anti-German press campaign drove him from office after the war began – Haldane was a clear-eyed realist who knew that if war came, it would be with his beloved Germany. His Territorials were a first tentative step towards girding Britain for an all-encompassing industrial conflict like none she had seen before.
Despite his unsoldierly appearance and the military top brass’s cheerful contempt for the ‘Frocks’, as they called frock-coated politicians, Haldane worked well with soldiers – especially with his fellow Scot, Douglas Haig, the future commander of the British Army in the war, and with the unlikely figure of Sir Henry Wilson, the gangling, arrogant Irish Unionist who was appointed Director of Military Operations at the War Office in 1910. Wilson’s unprepossessing appearance – not helped by a facial scar that made him reputedly ‘the ugliest man in the Army’ – concealed a shrewd mind and unmatched skills as a backstairs intriguer. Informal ‘conversations’ between the British and French military high commands had been underway since December 1905, shortly after the Entente had come into force. A fervent Francophile, Wilson was determined to upgrade these casual chats into a proper, full-blown military co-operation.
Even more sure than Haldane that a war with Germany was inevitable, Wilson was equally certain where the coming conflict would be fought: on the rolling downs and among the slagheap-strewn coalfields of north- eastern France, and on the flat, featureless polders of Belgian Flanders. To spy out the lie of the land, the incongruous figure of the lanky, snaggle-toothed soldier could often be seen, in the years before 1914, laboriously pedalling a bicycle around the future battlefields. So sure was Wilson that war was coming that he devised a plan to move an army of four divisions, called the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), across the Channel in double- quick time as soon as war was declared, or even looked likely.
The French warmly welcomed the plan for the deployment of what they called ‘L’Armée Wilson’. The French commander, General Joseph Joffre, laid his war plans for resisting a German invasion on the assumption that a strong British force would be deployed on his left wing, guarding the Channel ports. To quell French fears that the BEF would be far too weak to stand up to a German juggernaut numbering nearly a million, Wilson declared that the fighting quality of his troops, with their special skill at rapid musketry, would more than make up for their inferiority in numbers.
If the French were well aware of Wilson’s plans to back them up to the hilt in the coming war, his political masters were not so well-informed. A convinced Conservative politically, Wilson despised the Liberal cabinet as ‘dirty, ignorant curs’, told them as little about his plans as he possibly could, and did what he could to obfuscate and conceal his real bellicose intentions. Only a semi-secret civil-military committee, the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), containing a small core of select ministers, was vouchsafed a hint of the extent of the planned British deployment in France in the event of war. As a result, as the true scale of Britain’s commitment to France became clear when the crisis broke in 1914, it came as a rude shock to the more pacifist or neutral-minded Liberals.
MEN OF WAR: General Sir Henry Wilson (left) with French friends General Ferdinand Foch (centre) and Colonel Victor Huguet, the French military attaché in London, in 1914. Wilson did more than anyone to bring Britain into the war on France’s side.
Britain’s maritime dominance, unchallenged since Trafalgar a decade before Waterloo, was also threatened by a resurgent Germany. In 1907, the year that Haldane proposed his Territorial Army, at least partly in response to Germany’s growing military might, Berlin’s naval supremo, the fierce, fork-bearded Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, had created the High Seas Fleet, a modern force specifically designed to menace the Royal Navy in her own back waters: the North Sea.
Tirpitz was realistic enough to know that his fleet, however powerful, was unlikely to be able to inflict a decisive Trafalgar-style defeat on the all-powerful Royal Navy in its own home waters. However, the existence of the High Seas Fleet, his ‘riskstrategy’ postulated, would compel Britain to keep the bulk of its navy on guard in the North Sea in case of a German sortie and would thus make it impossible to hold the sea lanes to the empire open and safe.
Britain, too, had its own belligerent Tirpitz in the fantastical figure of Admiral ‘Jacky’ Fisher, an ageing, contradictory naval supremo, still fizzing with energy and exuberant ideas and schemes as he entered his seventies, whose sardonic, impassively oriental features barely betrayed the throbbing dynamo within. It was Fisher who, as First Sea Lord, had junked as so much useless scrap many of the ships that had so awed Kipling at the 1897 Spithead review. Utterly unsentimental and as ruthless with ships as he was with men, Fisher had derided the ageing Victorian battle fleet as ‘too weak to fight and too slow to run’. In their place he had introduced in 1906 the Dreadnought – a new class of battleship that packed a knockout punch with ten twelve-inch guns hurling their shells across eight miles of ocean, and which ran on oil rather than coal, unlike the warships of yesteryear. To back up his Dreadnoughts, Fisher introduced another new ship – the battle-cruiser, which gained in speed what it lost in defence. Its thin armour would prove an Achilles heel in the ultimate test of war at Jutland in 1916.
Fisher, like Lloyd George and his young political boss at the Admiralty, Churchill, was a human whirlwind who rightly described himself as ‘ruthless, relentless and remorseless’. Not caring who he annoyed and alienated, he was an arch-modernizer who advocated inflicting a ‘Copenhagen’ on the High Seas Fleet: a pre-emptive knockout, in the manner of his hero Nelson, to blow the Germans out of the water without the formality of a declaration of war. Lacking the fourth ‘R’ in Fisher’s lexicon – recklessness – the government preferred the more cautious, and more expensive, method of simply keeping ahead of the Germans in the great naval race. Pledged to maintain a superiority of at least two to one in warships, and supported by public opinion that was intensely patriotic and naval-minded, even the Liberals, with Lloyd George’s increasingly expensive welfare bill to meet, kept comfortably but not ridiculously ahead in the race.
Nonetheless, suspicion of Germany and her future intentions remained intense, sometimes shading into outright paranoia. One manifestation of such fears was the genre of ‘invasionliterature’ in popular print; another was the equally widespread terror of enemy espionage amounting to a veritable spy fever.
IMAGINED INVADERS AND ENEMIES WITHIN
Invasion literature had come into being as far back as 1871 with the publication of The Battle of Dorking, initially as a serial in the popular Blackwood’s Magazine and subsequently as a novel. Strangely, the author was a serving soldier, Colonel (later Sir George) Chesney, who would end his days a general and Conservative MP for Oxford. Impressed, and not a little frightened, by the speed and overwhelming power of the German conquest of France in the recently concluded Franco-Prussian War (the conquest lasted a matter of weeks), in response Chesney had penned at lightning speed a futuristic fantasy in which he envisaged an enemy power – never named but quite clearly Germany – crushing Britain with the same cruel thoroughness.
In Chesney’s tale, Britain is rendered defenceless by a mysterious, if convenient, wonder weapon which eliminates most of the Royal Navy at a stroke before an invading army from the region of the Netherlands lands on the Essex coast. The British Army, weakened by short-sighted government cuts and absent in India and Ireland, hastily cobbles together a defence with a mixed bag of enthusiastic but poorly trained amateur volunteers. This scratch force is cut to pieces by the invader in a great battle around Dorking in the Surrey hills, and a conquered England is turned into a vassal state of Prussia, and her empire dismembered.
Chesney was a gifted writer, and his story was given extra veracity by being told through the words of a veteran volunteer, looking sadly back on the years of great defeat that followed. The story struck a disturbing chord with the public, not only in Britain but across Europe, where The Battle of Dorking swiftly appeared in translations and inspired many imitative works – notably in France, where a thirst for ‘revanche’ for the defeat of 1871 was a dominant theme. Even in Germany, Admiral Tirpitz used an alarmist nationalist novel Wehrloszur See (‘Defenceless at Sea’, 1900) by a patriot called Gustav Erdmann, which warned of the dire consequences of naval defeat, as propaganda to boost his campaign to build the High Seas Fleet. In the three decades following The Battle of Dorking’s phenomenal publishing success, a whole genre of invasion literature sprang up across the continent – it is estimated that some 400 such titles appeared – proving that fears about future wars and invasions were by no means confined to Britain.
SEA LION: aggressive, opinionated and visionary, as First Sea Lord Admiral ‘Jacky’ Fisher modernized the Royal Navy with his Dreadnought battleships. But when war came he was past his peak and fell out with Churchill.
CASTLE OF STEEL: the original HMSDreadnoughtlaunched in 1906. This class of fast, oil-fired battleships began a new naval era. But Germany was in the race, too – and coming up fast on the inside track.
But it was in Britain that the far-seeing young novelist H. G. Wells, a writer who utilized the huge strides in science and technology of the late Victorian age to fuel his imaginative fiction, took the genre to an entirely new plane when he postulated an invasion, not by Germans or any other earthly enemies, but from outer space. In The War of the Worlds (1898) Wells describes an attack by Martians equipped with a fearsome array of hi-tech weaponry – including heat rays and chemical weapons – as yet undreamed-of by earthlings. Once again, as with The Battle of Dorking, much of the action takes place in Surrey, capital of the London commuter belt, and battles are fought around Woking, home of the novel’s narrator. And again, as in the earlier story, the inter-terrestrial war ends with a complete victory of the invader and Martian rule over the earth.
More earth-bound than Wells, though his fantasies had a Walter Mittyish character, was the journalist and prolific popular novelist William Le Queux– he churned out more than 150 novels. Half-French himself, Le Queux perhaps had a particular animus against the Germans, but his first effort in the invasion literature genre, written when colonial tensions between Britain and France were high, foresaw a coming war with France. In The Great War in England in 1897 (1894), Germany actually comes to Britain’s rescue, joining her in a victorious alliance against Russia and France.
By 1906, with the Entente Cordiale firmly in place, the ever flexible Le Queux had changed his literary tune. In The Invasion of 1910 Le Queux foretells a full-blown invasion of England by Germany across the North Sea. Written in co-operation with – indeed, under the instructions of – Lord Northcliffe, founder and owner of the Daily Mail, the best-selling popular newspaper that had revolutionized the reading habits of the country on its foundation in 1896, the path of Le Queux’s invaders followed no known plan of military strategy, but was dictated by the needs of the Mail’s circulation department, who made sure that large towns where the paper’s circulation required a boost lay directly in the path of the meandering invaders: they travelled to London via destinations as far-flung as Chelmsford, Royston and Sheffield, before finally fetching up at the capital, where the book culminated in a horrific siege of London that recalled the real-life German investment of Paris in 1871.
CHRONICLE OF DEATHS FORETOLD: The Times promotes one of the many alarmist dystopian novels of the era foretelling war and a future invasion of an unprepared England. A self-fulfilling prophecy?
Serialized in the Mail and backed by Britain’s aged military hero Lord Roberts of Kandahar, as part of his National Service League’s campaign for conscription, Le Queux’s fantasy – which sold an extraordinary one million copies – served the triple purpose of increasing the Mail’s already healthy circulation, deliciously terrifying its readers, and putting them in a lather about the presence of German spies in their midst. At the same time it exerted pressure on a reluctant new Liberal government to increase spending on the army – and especially on the navy.
Three years before Le Queux’sInvasion of 1910, a work of infinitely superior literary merit – indeed, the only example of invasion literature that still finds readers today – appeared. The Riddle of the Sands (1903) by Erskine Childers was specifically aimed at arousing an apathetic public to what the author saw as the very real danger of a German seaborne invasion. An intense, tortured Anglo-Irishman, Childers – like his compatriot and contemporary Roger Casement – would eventually change from being an eager servant of the British empire to a bitter opponent of it in the cause of Irish republicanism. Also like Casement, Childers would be executed for his pains. However, in Childers’s case, his executioners would not be England’s hangman, but his fellow Irish republicans, who never fully trusted this once faithful servant of the empire.
Childers was a keen amateur yachtsman who spent all his spare time on leave from his job as a House of Commons clerk sailing not only in Britain’s home waters but also around the treacherous, mist-shrouded islands and sandbanks off the north German coast where he set his enthralling yarn. The Riddle is often regarded as the first modern spy story, but it is also a hymn to the Edwardian Englishman’s love of messing about in boats. In the book Carruthers, a stuffy Foreign Office box-wallah, and his rough-hewn yachtsman chum Davies stumble on and foil a dastardly German plan – aided and abetted by Dollmann, an English traitor – to transport an army across the sea to the Norfolk Wash.
In the years that followed, the drizzle of invasion books became a blizzard, with titles such as Whenthe Eagle Flies Seaward, The Death Trap and The Message (all 1907). Allied to the same basic scenario – a German invasion and conquest of a complacent England – was the increasingly explicit message that such an invasion would be carried out, or at least aided and abetted, by a ‘secretarmy’ of Germans already resident in Britain. There were, in fact, plenty of Germans living in Britain, whose numbers fuelled the flames that were being eagerly fanned by the invasion literature. Although most of the panic surrounding ‘alien’ settlement in the nineteenth century had focused on Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire who had settled in large numbers in London’s impoverished East End, a survey in 1911 revealed that there were more than 53,000 Germans living in Britain, mostly in the capital. (This was the year that Winston Churchill took personal charge of the Siege of Sidney Street, a shoot-out in the East End between the army and police and a cornered group of immigrant Russian
anarchists.)
Like many migrants, their main motivation was economic – German waiters and barbers were particularly prominent – but there was among the genuine refugees a smattering of professional spies and secret agents: the paranoia stoked by the press and the invasion novels had a small kernel of truth. Gradually, as time went by, the invasion literature began to focus on the ‘enemywithin’ who would betray Britain and lay the country open to the marauding invader. In Walter Wood’sThe Enemy In Our Midst (1906) a secret council of Germans meets in London to plot a takeover, while Captain H. Curties’sWhen England Slept (1909) portrayed a hidden army of Germans fiendishly infiltrating England in disguise. The indefatigable Le Queux muscled in on the trend with Spies of the Kaiser (1909) in which he made his many readers’ flesh creep with a vision of a nation honeycombed with German spies living incognito among their English neighbours.
In the same year, the peak of invasion literature, the invasion theme was adapted for the stage when Guy du Maurier’s melodrama An Englishman’s Home became a West End hit. Pseudonymously written by ‘APatriot’, du Maurier’s play depicted an ‘ordinaryEnglishman’ shooting dead a foreign – and clearly German – officer who had dared to violate his home and being executed by the occupiers as a result. Ironically, du Maurier, scion of a famous literary and theatrical family, would die in the Great War.
The same fate would befall another prophet of German invasion, H. H. Munro, who wrote under the pen name ‘Saki’. This sardonic satirist of Edwardian manners and morals penned a bitter warning – When William Came: A Story of London under the Hohenzollerns– in 1913, when invasion literature had apparently passed its peak. The novel’s hero, Murray Yeovil, like Saki himself, returns from the colonies to find a strangely changed England. Conquered by Wilhelm II’s Germany, the country has been deserted by the British royal family and most of the ruling class, who have decamped to Delhi, leaving a new class of collaborators to rule as obedient slaves of the Germans. Continental cafés line Regentstrasse and a sort of soft power keeps an obedient populace quiescent under their new masters. In an eerie way, Saki’s fiction foretells the reality of German occupation of France and French collaboration with the conquerors during the Second World War – a conflict he would not live to see. Saki famously died on the Somme in 1916, killed by a sniper after urgently hissing to a comrade – too late – ‘Put that bloody cigarette out!’