Joseph Gray's Camouflage

by Mary Horlock

  I hold on tight to my grandmother as tears well in her eyes. She sniffs them away quickly.

  ‘You must’ve been proud,’ I tell her.

  ‘People come here and stare at it for hours,’ says the guide. ‘There’s so much to look at. And then of course there’s the key.’ She points to the sign under the painting. ‘It’s nice to know the names, I mean the people who really fought. It’s all so true to life.’

  I stare once more at the painting. The background is alive whilst the men themselves are still and solemn, their drab and ragged uniforms blending with the landscape. There’s a rippling tension between light and shade; apart from dashes of yellow and white, the palette is mostly greens and browns. The colours, I note, of camouflage.

  Khaki is an Urdu word from the Persian word ‘khak’ meaning dust. In 1846, in the Punjab region of Northern India, a British officer by the name of Harry Lumsden raised a unit of troops – the Corps of Guides – from local tribesmen. Following orders to have his recruits comfortably and suitably clad, Lumsden kitted his men out in smocks and wide pyjama trousers made of coarse homespun material, a cotton turban and jerkins of sheepskin. All the cotton was dyed locally with the product of a dwarf palm, mazari, which turned the white cloth a dullish grey. Leather was stained with mulberry juice, which produced a yellowy drab shade. This was the first unit in a European army to wear a khaki uniform.

  A decade later, during the Indian Mutiny, British soldiers abandoned their red tunics in favour of the light-weight white clothes they wore in camp. During the fighting these clothes became dirty and some soldiers dyed them with tea or curry powder, thus improvising their own khaki-coloured uniforms. Then, during the Second Boer War, the British forces became known as Khakis because of their uniforms, and many European armies adopted more subdued colours. While Britain went with khakis and browns, the Germans dropped Prussian blue in favour of field grey.

  But it wasn’t easy, the abandoning of military splendour. In 1911 a proposal to replace the French infantry’s blue tunics and red pantaloons with something less striking was greeted with outrage.

  ‘Abolish red trousers?’ the French war minister magnificently scoffed. ‘France is red trousers!’1

  It was only once the First World War began that attitudes had to change. For the first wave of troops who faced the front-line trenches, the expectation of a brief battle fought like heroes was quickly dispelled. This was going to be a slow war of attrition, and the advent of the machine gun and the siege-style skirmishes of the trenches meant invisibility was everything.

  It happened almost naturally. After a few weeks exposed to the rain and the cold, thigh-deep in mud, soldiers were merging with their backgrounds – balaclava-clad, a battered greatcoat padded with various quiltings, canvas hoods and earth-coloured oilskins wrapped tight around their heads, puttees protecting their legs. One of Joe’s pen-and-ink drawings shows a private of the Black Watch swaddled from head to toe. His kilt is shredded, his legs are covered in stained rags. ‘The “4th” looked like a regiment of tramps – weary, battered tramps at that.’2

  Joe quickly learned to blend with his background. He picked up tips from other soldiers, blackening his face and hands with burnt cork, swathing rags around his legs and head. This was his highly personal version of camouflage, often hastily improvised and adapted to each terrain.

  But camouflage would happen by design as much as by accident. Back in England fellow artist Solomon J. Solomon wrote to The Times just two months before the Battle of Neuve Chapelle with concerns over the question of ‘Uniforms and Colour’.

  The protection afforded animate creatures by Nature’s gift of colour assimilation to their environment might provide a lesson to those who equip an army. To be invisible to the enemy is to be non-existent for him . . . A knowledge of light and shade and its effect on the landscape is a necessary aid to the imagination of a designer of the uniform in particular.

  For instance, the khaki tunic is good in summer – in winter it is too yellow – but the same colour cloth clads the whole man. Here a knowledge of light and shade comes in. The planes parallel to the source of light are the lightest, and they darken as they recede from that light source . . . To obviate these adverse changes of tone it becomes necessary to clothe the lower limbs in a much lighter stuff than the body, and the cap and shoulders – the shoulder straps would suffice – in a darker, taking the tunic to be the normal tone aimed at.3

  In response ‘an artist and big-game shot’ wrote in, agreeing with Solomon’s points but adding to this the importance of breaking up the outline. ‘However well the tone of the clothing of a man is made to agree with its surroundings, the outline of the man is apt to show . . . I have found that if the waistcoat is one colour, the coat another, the leg coverings another, &c., its outline is less easy to make out.’4

  This echoes the advice of experienced hunters like Reginald Ryves, whose essay on ‘Skulking and Scouting’ had first appeared in the Field magazine back in 1905 and was reprinted to incorporate his war experiences. ‘It is worthwhile dividing the man visually. A jester in motley clothes would be far better dressed for scouting than men in some “sober” uniforms.’5 Ryves suggested using faded rags of different colours, as perfected by the ‘Ghillie suit’, a ragged cape first used by ghillies and gamekeepers on Scottish estates. This shrubby overcoat allowed the wearer to blend into the undergrowth and functioned like a portable hide. It was latterly adapted to warfare when these same men were recruited into the Lovat Scouts, a regiment revered for their skill at stalking, hiding, blending and watching.

  ‘The step between war and hunting is but a very small one,’6 wrote Major Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard, a crack shot on the Western Front who was appalled by the poor standards of the British military. Prichard established the First Army School of Sniping, Observing and Scouting in an attempt to remedy this, and his curriculum included everything from map-reading and compass work, to the importance of camouflage. For sniper and obsever alike it was better ‘to obtain safety by concealment rather than by cover from fire’.7

  Joe was never given formal instruction, as Prichard’s men would be, on the importance of ‘protective colouring and the choice of backgrounds’,8 but the best snipers and scouts shared the steely focus of the artist. Prichard believed a sniper had to be like an artist in love with his work, and even used artist–instructors, commending the Slade-educated Ernest Blaikley, who proved adept at teaching map-reading and drawing techniques, as well as demonstrating how to read aerial photographs.

  ‘Lectures on aeroplane photographs were another side of our work, and one which was undoubtedly very necessary,’ noted Hesketh-Prichard.9

  Yes, hiding from the sniper at ground level was crucial, but a fresh threat came from above – from aerial reconaissance and the bombing airman. There were three major innovations of this war: the machine gun, the tank and the aeroplane. The latter meant large-scale covers would be needed to hide not just concentrations of men, but all their new machinery. Solomon J. Solomon understood this. Before he’d written to The Times on the subject of uniforms, he’d read reports of ‘German airmen dropping bombs on our trenches’.10 Taking the initiative, he set to work inventing covers of his own.

  In August 1914, my family and I were spending the summer months with my mother-in-law, who had taken a house with large grounds on the outskirts of St Albans, and I was scouring the town for all the butter muslin, dyes and bamboo canes I could afford. Amid the laughter of the rest of the house party, I littered the lawns and hung on the tennis net to dry, the canvas that I had dyed.11

  The popular image of the artist as a romantic visonary, a singleminded idealist, sits well with Solomon. It is easy to picture this portly figure with his sleeves rolled up, painting canvas rags in earthy shades and knotting them to muslin, draping them over improvised trench lines and examining the effect.

  For Joe in the trenches, camouflage was an impromptu scramble for personal survival. For Solomon bac
k in St Albans, it was an extension of art theory. He noted how objects became blurred under different screens and in different light. As in an Impressionist painting, figure could merge with ground. Solomon excitedly wrote up his discoveries to submit to the War Office and after time and persistence was able to demonstrate his ideas at Woolwich dockyards for assembled military personnel. Although his proposals weren’t immediately taken on, towards the end of 1915 he was invited by the War Office to go to France.

  The French were already ahead in the camouflage game, and again it was artists who were taking the lead. That February, they had established their own ‘service de camouflage’, headed by Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola, another well-respected realist painter. The story goes that Guirand de Scévola had been working as a telephone operator for an artillery unit near Metz when he realised the Germans were picking off men and machines with shocking accuracy. ‘It was from this moment that, in a vague form at first, then in a more and more precise one, was born in me the idea of camouflage. There must be, I thought, a practical way to conceal not only our artillery . . . but also the men who served it. My first thought was to make the equipment manifestly less visible, if not invisible, in its form and colour.’12

  Guirand de Scévola began painting large canvases with earthy colours, dressing artillery men in smocks streaked with paint, and covering cannons similarly. Although early attempts yielded mixed results, he knew all the right people to curry favour, and the pressing need for effective camouflage meant he was soon able to form his own unit. He began by recruiting painters who were exempt from active service – André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Louis Abel-Truchet and Jean-Louis Forain to name but a few – and this soon expanded to include professional house-painters, decorators and carpenters. Although camouflage remained top secret, the Graphic saw fit to praise French initiatives early in 1915, with a spread entitled ‘Campaigning Under Cover’ and showing a photograph of ‘masking one of the Famous French 75s’ and another of men building huts made from a timber frame, draped in undergrowth: ‘A home from home on the battlefield – some of the ingenious war villas erected by the French at Woevre.’13

  From the outset the French saw camouflage as an art form, with handbooks and memos citing Corot and Delacroix. Artist–camoufleurs were respected and valued, and were soon extending their skills beyond the painting of artillery, uniforms and vehicles to the concealment of transport routes, the construction of false war materials and the all-important observation posts, so crucial to scout and sniper alike.

  But this was all a long way from life in the trenches, where the cold and the rats were constant companions. This was the life that Joe knew, and by the spring of 1916 it had taken its toll. He was badly deaf from the constant shelling and he’d suffered repeated bouts of rheumatic fever. Worse still, he had finally been seen. A German sniper had caught Joe as he was setting out across No Man’s Land. He had managed to fling himself forward and avoid serious injury, but had flashed enough of his pale backside to warrant a bullet there. A good lesson in camouflage, he would joke.

  Just as Joe returned from France, Solomon was creating his own little ‘royal academy of camouflage’14, settling into an old factory at Wimereux. His unit was given the mysterious title ‘Special Works, RE’ and fell under the control of the Royal Engineers, because ‘they have materials for making replicas and deception targets’, and ‘engineers look at landscapes with a more understanding eye than most other soldiers do’.15 Inevitably Solomon disagreed: ‘The camoufleur is, of course, an artist, preferably one who paints or sculpts imaginative subjects, with some deductive faculties.’16

  Solomon felt his experience as a volumetric painter meant he understood exactly what was required of camouflage. It is by variations of light and shadow, often very delicate, that one recognises how an object is a solid and detached from its background. Solomon’s mission was to eliminate telltale shadows and so create an ideal screen: essentially fishing nets threaded with canvas and hessian rags with bunches of dried raffia. ‘It could be stretched over guns – dumps, trenches, and over quite large areas; it would make no appreciable shadow on the ground – it was in fact the scientific solution to most of our camouflage problems.’17

  The balancing of light and shade was the essence of Joe’s life now, too. Concentrating on large works, he planned for weeks, first covering the whole surface of the canvas, and then sketching in his figures and building up the foreground. He’d do close work for days and then refocus on the background, adding shadows to deepen the perspective. He knew when to take a step back to see how tones blended into one another, where shadows or highlights were needed, and then he’d blend some more. Back and forth he went, pulling in close, then stepping back. It was a delicate dance, playing light against shade, foreground against background. Joe was determined to create something seamless, harmonious and entirely ‘realistic’.

  ‘Who says the painter can’t organise?’ asked Solomon. ‘This seemed to be a military prejudice. When an artist is composing an imaginative picture his organising faculties are at full stretch.’18 Soon his nets and screens were in widespread production, becoming a ‘universal camouflage’ material for the French and British, of which some 7 million square yards were used by the end of the war. But despite Solomon’s considerable contribution, he couldn’t adapt to the Army’s way of doing things. ‘Solomon was obstinately and sincerely convinced that the Army had everything to learn from him, and that he and his colleagues had nothing to learn from the Army; he was out to teach a new language in warfare without knowing a thing about the common language of his potential pupils.’19 He was thus soon replaced as head of the camouflage section by the ‘cheerfully derisive’20 Colonel Francis Wyatt, a trained engineer and committed pragmatist.

  Bruised but not beaten, Solomon returned to England and created a camouflage school in Kensington Gardens. He also went to Scotland to advise on camouflage in the Firths of Forth and Tay, and to Hull after it had been bombed by Zeppelins. These experiences confirmed for him the growing threat of aerial warfare and the need for large-scale camouflage.

  ‘Great armies and all their movements are now overlooked as are ants crawling about on the ground, the mass of them attacked far behind the fighting line by bombing airmen, or by shells fired from distances varying from one to twenty miles or more. Those who consider defensive concealment unchivalrous can never have visualised the conditions of modern war.’21

  Solomon had long worried what the Germans were up to, and after poring over air reconnaissance photographs taken by his nephew, Gilbert, he thought he had found the answer. His artist’s eyes detected inconsistencies in the landscapes – how the shadows seemed to be wrong in relation to the sun, how certain fields looked odd for the time of year. This seemed to him to reveal the clues of German schemes: that the enemy had shrouded vast areas with camouflage covers that imitated both fields and farms in an attempt to hide the build-up of machinery and men.

  Paranoia or prophecy? It was fiendishly hard to prove – after all, the most effective camouflage by its very nature evaded detection – and Solomon didn’t help himself by persistently badgering all in the military about his great ‘discoveries’. The war was finally drawing to an end, as perhaps was his field of influence. That he pushed ahead and published his findings is testament to his grandiose ideas, and he was widely ridiculed in the press. (‘Camouflage Gone Mad’22 ran a critique in the Morning Post, while the Times Literary Supplement concluded that ‘His illustrations . . . will provoke the mirth of expert air photograph readers.’23)

  But laying aside its more extreme claims, Solomon’s Strategic Camouflage made the point that the science of the interpretation of aerial photography was going to be the eye of the command for all future wars, and in this he was quite right. This war had ushered in a time of huge change, and the use of the camera was a central innovation. The camera essentially meant everything and everyone could now be represented, and in a world where everything could be represen
ted, the struggle for control would be crucial.

  Notes

  CAB = Cabinet Papers

  CD, TC, CDTC = Camouglage Development and Training Centre

  HO= Home Office

  IWM = Imperial War Museum

  PREM = Prime Minister’s Office Records

  TNA = The National Archives

  WO = War Office

  Jack Sayer, ‘The Camouflage Game’, refers to his unpublished, hand-written memoir, courtesy of Gillian Ward.

  To avoid repetition, the majority of quotes from Joseph’s letters to Mary are not noted. Unless stated otherwise, they form part of the Barclay family archive. Similarly, images reproduced form part of this archive, except where credited otherwise.

  1 Quoted in Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August, Dell Publishing, New York, 1971, p. 55

  2 Gray, ‘The Fourth Black Watch’, 19 December 1917, p. 7

  3 Letters to the editor, The Times, 27 January 1915, p. 9

  4 Ibid., 29 January 1915, p. 9

  5 Reginald Ryves, The Principles of Camouflage, comprising ‘The Optics of Skulking and Scouting’. First appeared in The Field, 16 September 1905. To which is added: ‘Notes From My War Experience’, July 1920 (printed for private distribution 1921), p. 7

  6 Major H. Hesketh-Prichard, Sniping in France, Hutchinson & Co., London, 1920, p. 124

  7 Ibid., p. 157

  8 Ibid.

  9 Ibid., p. 156

  10 Olga Somech Phillips, Solomon J. Solomon: A Memoir of Peace and War, Herbert Joseph, London, 1933, p. 118

  11 Ibid., p. 117

  12 Guirand de Scévola, Souvenirs de Camouflage (1914–18), La Revue, Christmas 1950, pp. 719–20, quoted in Elisabeth Kahn, The Neglected Majority – Les Camoufleurs, Art History and World War One, University Press of America, 1984, p. 14