by Jack Beatty
At a ceremony marking the sixty-fifth anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, French president Nicolas Sarkozy spoke of “the infernal cycle of vengeance” that had doomed Europe to centuries of war. The journey of a railway car tracks the twentieth-century cycle. The 1918 Armistice was signed in a wagon-lit in a clearing in a forest at Rethondes. In June 1940, German engineers freed the wagon-lit from the museum to which it had been annexed and returned it to the clearing. When, on June 22, the French generals arrived to sign the armistice with Adolf Hitler that ended hostilities between France and Germany, they found it covered by a Nazi flag. “The cycle of revenge could not be more complete.” But it had one more turn yet. Spirited to Berlin, the wagon-lit was “destroyed in an RAF raid.”46
8
HOME FRONTS I
Finished at forty!
—Winston Churchill
Nineteen fourteen ended with the war not yet biting deep into British life. The mobilization of economic production, the draft, food queues three thousand people long, “Government Bread” admixed with potato flour, the woman fined for feeding beefsteak to her Pekingese, invitees to dinner parties bringing potatoes instead of flowers—these indices of “total war” lay in the future.1
The war was only days old when the chancellor of the exchequer, Lloyd George, reassured the “City,” London’s Wall Street, that “the Great War” would not interfere with “business as usual.” Certainly that was the motto of professional football, which drew three million fans during the fall season. “This is no time for football,” the Tory Evening News complained. “This nation, the Empire, has got to occupy itself with more serious business.” While nearly half the men of working age would be in uniform by 1918, in 1914 women were just beginning to replace men in shops, banks, and factories. But rejection awaited both the woman who told a recruiter, “Take myself, an able-bodied woman, aged 27, sound in health, and fond of a scrap” and the pioneering Scottish doctor Elsie Inglis who, on petitioning the War Department to form “her own ambulance unit,” was told, “My good lady, go home and sit still.”2
Denied the chance to enlist, young women still wanted “their share” of the war, “and the easiest way to gain this was the ownership of a soldier-lover,” the author of Women’s Wild Oats noted. To prevent “khaki fever” from plunging girls into “grave moral danger,” older middle-class women from the Women’s Patrols and the Women Police Service kept nocturnal watch over couples in cinemas and public parks, especially in towns with large military camps.3
In the war’s first months, khaki fever also took a surprisingly respectable form: “The Bishop of London went into khaki, and vicars went into khaki, and seemed to imagine puttees were episcopal gaiters,” a journalist recalled. God was enlisted to do his bit for king and country, high churchmen stoking hatred for the hun. This would mount with the casualties and the years and the propaganda, but already in August–September 1914 the Daily Mail featured boxed messages like this: REFUSE TO BE SERVED BY AN AUSTRIAN OR GERMAN WAITER. IF YOUR WAITER SAYS HE IS SWISS, ASK TO SEE HIS PASSPORT. And it’s doubtful if a notice a Kentish barber put in his window—THIS IS A INGELISCHE SCHOPP—protected the glass.4
The greatest story in history was unfolding in Flanders, but the Times still devoted its front-page to advertisements and announcements. At first glance these appear to be business as usual. As in March so in December lovers wooed and quarreled in the Personals column: “Please understand that were we the last two persons on earth, and I found myself on the same continent that contained you, I should—emigrate.” To which, two days later, came the reply: “DWM—If you are the author of Tuesday’s message and it is addressed to me, I do assure you most sincerely that the sentiment is cordially reciprocated—only more so. James J. A.” But in March Wanted ads like this one were inconceivable: “Death’s Head Hussar’s helmet wanted by a lady.” And the war dominates the entries under Marriage: “A marriage took place very quietly at St. Judes Church, S. W., between Captain Donald Knox Anderson and Miss Mary Annabella Sandiland. No invitations were issued owing to mourning in the bridegroom’s family.” Such notices, along with Tablets of Honor listing (but not numbering) the dead, wounded, and missing were the one wholly honest connection between the front and the home front to appear in print. Otherwise, censorship amounting to a press blackout kept the experience of those who served from those left behind.5
The “press lords” suppressed bad news without being asked. In October 1915, for example, C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, received a letter from an “educated” corporal wounded at Loos that, as he wrote a friend, was “too damaging for publication,” for “it appears that in that engagement we again shelled our own men and that we lost hill 70 after winning it in just that way … P.S. Just heard from Lloyd George. Shall be lunching with him tomorrow.”
How to Hate the Hun
Such figures as Scott, Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of the Times and the Daily Mirror (known to the troops as the Daily Prevaricator), and Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, of the Daily Express could be counted on by their cabinet friends to sacrifice scoops to keep secrets. “Social ostracism apparently meant more to the newsmen than their professional duty to inform the public,” one historian concludes. Then, too, discretion could yield honors. A commoner could rise to a baronet, a baron to a privy councilor, a privy to a viscount by telling the people only what the government wanted them to know. Thus Britons did not learn until after the war of Allied catastrophes like the loss of three hundred thousand French soldiers in August 1914 nor of the annihilation of three Russian army corps at Tannenberg in East Prussia in September, nor, in real time, of alternatives to endless war like Lord Landsdowne’s peace plan, which was debated by the cabinet in late 1916 but not published until November 1917, when he surfaced it in a letter to the Daily Telegraph. The Defence of the Realm Act, which banned the publication of information useful to the enemy, including weather reports and chess problems, was superfluous. As Sir George Riddell, chairman of the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association, testified after the war, “The secrecy imposed upon the press was in no case violated.”6
Significantly, C. P. Scott’s informant about the friendly fire at Loos was a soldier, not a war correspondent. The Daily Chronicle’s man at the front, Philip Gibbs, conceded in a postwar memoir that “There was no need of censorship of our dispatches. We were our own censors.” Patriotism did not require “conscious falsehood,” only selective truth, the leaving out of “horrors.” Gibbs felt he “had to spare the feelings of the men and women who have sons and husbands still fighting in France.” Gibbs and the five other correspondents from the major dailies embedded with the chateau soldiers of General Headquarters could anticipate knighthoods—if their copy pleased the generals. And what pleased the generals was work infused with “a certain jauntiness of tone … a brisk implication that the men enjoyed nothing better than ‘going over the top,’ ” according to C. E. Montague, a Manchester Guardian editor turned soldier. The “cheerfulness in the face of vicarious torment and danger” that marked the war reporting the soldiers read on leave or wiped their arses on in the trenches “roused the fighting troops to fury.”7
The correspondents had to conform to the war policy of their papers. At the Times that was “to increase the flow of recruits …, an aim that would get little help from accounts of what happened to recruits once they became soldiers,” the paper wrote in its official history. The editors and war correspondents believed they served the country, but their real master was the war.8
“The First Searchlights at Charing Cross” (1914) by C. R. W. Nevinson. An American sailor recalled that as the Zeppelins approached bobbies bicycled through London’s streets shouting, “Tike cover! Tike cover!”
Gibbs had to be broken to the war’s service. When he tried to expose the Loos scandal a military censor, acting “in defence of the High Command and its tragic blundering,” cut forty pages from his report. Gibbs learned his lesson. Sixty thousa
nd British soldiers were killed or wounded on the first day of the Somme. Yet Daily Chronicle readers gained no clue of this massacre from Gibbs’s dispatch, which began, “It is, on balance, a good day for the British and French.” July 1, 1916, was the worst day in the history of the British army.9
At a London dinner honoring him in December 1917, Gibbs spoke freely to a company that included the prime minister. It was “the most impressive and moving description” of the war that he had heard, Lloyd George wrote to his friend C. P. Scott. “Even an audience of hardened politicians and journalists was strongly affected,” he noted. “The thing is horrible and beyond human nature to bear … If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and they can’t know. The correspondents don’t write and the censors would not print the truth.” If people really knew—but the British, French and German people did not know, and the war did not stop.10*
The historian John Keegan ends his history of the First World War with this question: “Why, when the hope of bringing the conflict to a quick and decisive conclusion was everywhere dashed to the ground within months of its outbreak, did the combatants decide nevertheless to persist in their military effort, to mobilize for total war and eventually to commit the totality of their young manhood to mutual and essentially pointless slaughter?” Lloyd George’s commentary answers for his war and the wars since.11
The public was not told about the war, and the public did not want to know. Many still clung to “the image of war as a fundamentally clean and decent, if rather hazardous, activity.” Had soldiers, pressed for the truth, been willing to tell, words might have failed them. More profoundly than censorship, language kept the war’s secrets. The era’s “high diction” construed the facts of industrialized mass slaughter through the prism of war as a school of character. To dip into Paul Fussell’s inspired list in The Great War and Modern Memory, in the Georgian English of 1914:
The enemy is
the foe
The front is
the field
Danger is
peril
To attack is
to assail
One’s chest is one’s
breast
To be stolidly brave is to be
staunch
To be cheerfully brave is to be
plucky
Bravery considered after the fact is
valor
The legs and arms of young men are
limbs
To die is
to perish
The dead are
the fallen12
Trench warfare was incommunicable in this language, still favored by press and pulpit, setters of cultural tone. Frederick Henry, an American volunteer ambulance driver serving with the Italian army during its death struggle with the Austrians in Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms, suggests how it sounded to soldiers. When an officer asserts of the men lost during the campaigning season, “What has been done this summer cannot have been in vain,” Henry reflects: “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain … There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity … Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of regiments, and the dates.” Using abstractions to wrest meaning from “sacrifices [that] were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat,” civilians spoke a different language from soldiers. If you knew what we suffered, soldiers thought, you would force the politicians to stop the war. But you don’t know, and we can’t tell you. Not in words you would understand. Civilian innocence kept the war going. Soldiers resented it, and wished the war would come home.13
“They hated the smiling women in the streets,” Philip Gibbs wrote of soldiers on leave. “They loathed the old men … They prayed God to get the Germans to send Zeppelins to England—to make the people know what war meant.”* God did not release the Zeppelins until January 1915. However, the German navy answered Gibbs’s prayer on December 16, 1914, with the first foreign attack on the British Isles since John Paul Jones in 1778.14
Clausewitz’s “fog of war” suggests a parallel concept, the fortuity of war, for the moments when events obey what Frederick the Great called “His Majesty, Chance.” In late August 1914 in the Baltic Sea, chance handed the Allies their “principal war-winning weapon,” according to Churchill. In thick fog, at night, with Russian warships nearby, the German cruiser Magdeburg ran aground on a Russian island in the Gulf of Bothnia. With his ship in shallow water—at daylight pebbles were visible on the Baltic bottom—the captain ordered the signalman to row the ship’s dingy out to deeper water in order to throw overboard the Magdeburg’s lead-lined signal book. But, before he could get away, shells tore into the Magdeburg and a few hours later, in Churchill’s words, “The body of a drowned German under-officer was picked up by the Russians … and clasped in his bosom, by arms rigid in death, were the cipher and signal books of the German Navy.” The Russians offered these to the Royal Navy and on an October afternoon at the Admiralty in London, Churchill “received from the hands of our loyal ally these sea-stained priceless documents.” Priceless because they enabled the Admiralty to crack the German naval and diplomatic code.15
“War Profiteers” (1917) by C. R. W. Nevinson. Soldiers bitterly resented “business as usual” at home. Newspapers, with their patriotic falsification of the war, they hated.
To master the code took weeks of work by an ill-sorted band of cryptanalysts, mathematicians, Egyptologists, and professors of German gathered in Room 40 of the Old Admiralty Building—and even then, to fill a lacuna in the code, they needed a fisherman to turn up at the Admiralty with a parcel of German books netted in the North Sea. But, finally, on December 14, 1914, Room 40 achieved a breakthrough. It confidently reported that five German battle cruisers were leaving their protected base on Germany’s North Sea coast on the fifteenth to raid the Yorkshire coast of England on the morning of the sixteenth. Here for the taking, in Churchill’s still-excited postwar prose, was “this tremendous prize—the German battle cruiser squadron whose loss would fatally mutilate the whole German Navy.” The navy mobilized four battle cruisers from Cromarty, a flotilla of cruisers and destroyers from Rosyth and Scapa, eight submarines, and a squadron of six super-dreadnought battleships to bar the exits from the minefields sown by both sides in those waters and sink the enemy battle cruisers. The trap was set, the weather was clear, the Germans were ignorant.16
The Admiralty made no effort to alert the people living along the coast, they were the British bait. The battle cruisers were the German bait. Their mission was to attract a sizeable portion of Britain’s Grand Fleet and, exploiting their twenty-six-knot speed, lead their pursuers on a chase across the North Sea into the waiting guns and torpedoes of Germany’s nearly entire High Sea Fleet. Room 40 had failed to detect this feature of the German plan.17
At dawn on December 16 on the eastern edge of the Dogger Bank, destroyers and cruisers from the High Sea Fleet collided with their opposite numbers from Britain’s Battle Squadron. The Naval Staff Monograph sets the scene: “A few miles away on the port bow of the High Sea Fleet, isolated and several hours’ steaming from home, was the most powerful homogenous squadron of [our] Grand Fleet, the destruction of which would at one blow have … placed the British and German fleets on a precisely even footing … a condition for which the Germans had been striving since the outbreak of the war.” Six British dreadnoughts against twenty German—Room 40 had baited the wrong hook. In the first of a skein of reversals of fortune, however, the fog of war clouded the mind of the German admiral. Minutes from victory, thinking he had encountered the destroyer screen of the twenty-five dreadnought Grand Fleet itself, and mindful of the kaiser’s warning that no harm must befall what Churchill derided as Germany’s “luxury fleet,” he turned away and sailed for home, leaving the five German b
attle cruisers to shift for themselves.18
After the raid: the Scarborough Coastguard Station
At around seven A.M., a few miles off the resort town of Scarborough, British fishermen were startled as, slicing past them at high speed, black warships made toward the coast. The battle cruisers divided: Derfflinger and Von der Tann to bombard Scarborough and Whitby while Sedlitz, Blücher, and Moltke would attack Hartlepool. Article 1 of the Hague Conference of 1907 prohibited “the bombardment by naval forces of undefended ports, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings.” Scarborough and Whitby were such towns; Hartlepool was defended by a battery of three six-inch guns on the seafront.19
The war came home to Scarborough at about eight A.M. A postman was putting letters through the mail slot of a house a street or two back from the coast when he was decapitated by a high-explosive shell, which also killed the woman behind the door waiting for her mail to drop. A baby in its sleep, a maid mailing a letter, Mrs. Duffield on her walk, a wife in her kitchen, her husband at his shop—all were killed “when engaged in the ordinary activities of life,” as the Times, with the anthropological clarity of first observation, prophetically described war’s reach in the age of Guernica, Coventry, Hamburg, Hiroshima, Hanoi, and New York. With teutonic patience, the cruisers fired broadsides from one side, then came about to exercise the guns facing seaward on the first pass, firing from six hundred yards. The shelling knocked down rows of houses, punched holes in the Grand Hotel above Scarborough beach, gored roofs, tumbled chimneys, and smashed windows. “In one small shop,” the Times reported, “the window of which had been blow out, a placard bearing the words, ‘Business as Usual,’ was displaced.” Is that thunder? a woman near the Scarborough train station, startled by the noise, asked a passing soldier. No, he replied, “being familiar with the sound.”20