Myths and Legends of the Second World War (2 page)

The most persistent myth of the Great War – that of inept military leadership – only entered into wide circulation several years after the Armistice. In 1927 a junior officer from the Royal Army Service Corps named Peter Thompson published a book titled
Lions Led by Donkeys
, which purported to show ‘how victory in the Great War was achieved by those who made the fewest mistakes'. The book is prefaced by an Apologia, which states that ‘the words that form the title on the cover of this book were used early in the war, at the German Great Headquarters, to denote the English'. Thompson provided no evidence to authenticate this claim, but it is likely that his otherwise obscure book inspired the historian Alan Clark to attribute the phrase ‘lions led by donkeys' to General Ludendorff, the German Chief of General Staff. The pithy appraisal was certainly applied to French commanders after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, but its use by Ludendorff or any other German general is apocryphal at best. However, thanks to Thompson and Clark, the iconography of the Donkeys has stuck fast in modern memory, despite the fact that the simplistic depiction of all British generals as butchers and bunglers, from Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig down, is one of the most damaging falsehoods to emerge from the conflict.

Indeed the longevity of such myths almost beggars belief, and makes a nonsense of Sophocles' dictum that a lie never lives to be old. As long ago as 1928, the author and MP Arthur Ponsonby established beyond reasonable doubt that the Kaiser had never once described the British Expeditionary Force as a ‘contemptible little army', and that the epithet was in fact coined by the British army itself to swell patriotic indignation. In this it succeeded famously. Yet like the apocryphal lions and donkeys, the legend of the Old Contemptibles has batted on in the history books long after time was declared. It became too ingrained, and too attractive, to discard.

Another factor which boosted belief in myths and legends during the First World War was the impact of new technologies on the popular consciousness. Here the Zeppelin provides a paradigm. German airships were known to be capable of remaining in the air at high altitude for over 24 hours, could cover distances of up to 900 miles, and prior to the outbreak of war had carried thousands of passengers. Little wonder, then, that in Britain in 1914 they were the subject of much exaggeration, mystique, sensationalism – and genuine fear. This, the first fully industrialized war, saw the début of new and startling innovations such as poison gas, submarine warfare and tanks, which to the general public seemed like science-fiction made real. With no radio or television, and with newspapers heavily censored until the summer of 1915, basic facts were hard to come by, and so myth and rumour filled the gaps. It is likely, too, that certain ‘innocent' myths and legends represented a conscious, escapist reaction against the scientific and political complexities of the age. Just as the essence of effective propaganda is simplification, so angels, bowmen, protective clouds and white helpers all offered unsophisticated yet unanswerable truths for those who preferred to look backwards to a spiritual Golden Age wherein faith could be placed in older, higher, supernatural powers.

It is ironic that Arthur Machen, the man at once responsible for creating the legend of the Angel of Mons while remaining its most implacable critic, should have continued to find merit in wilfully mystical myth-making. Writing in 1915 he observed:

The war is already a fruitful mother of legends. Some people think there are too many war legends, and a Croydon gentleman – or lady, I am not sure which – wrote to me quite recently telling me that a particular legend, which I will not specify, had become the ‘chief horror of the war.' There may be something to be said for this point of view, but it strikes me as interesting that the old myth-making faculty has survived into these days, a relic of noble, far-off Homeric battles. And after all, what do we know? It does not do to be too sure that this, that, or the other hasn't happened and couldn't have happened.

A rather less noble faculty is the propensity of some to embroider and lie. The following chapters are peppered with barefaced fictions passed off as fact: ordinary soldiers who saw with their own eyes the visions at Mons or the crucified soldier at Ypres, despite being posted elsewhere at the critical time, and civilians who saw the Russian armies traversing England on trains, or spies disembarking from Zeppelins on Hackney Marshes. These accounts are characterised by self-aggrandizement, and a desire to be seen as part of a privileged minority in the know. Officers and gentlemen were no less prone to spreading Big Lies, however, as is clear from the pornographic atrocity fantasies of the deranged Major Arthur Corbett-Smith, Brigadier Morrison's vanishing corpses at Vimy Ridge, and almost anything written or said on the subject by Brigadier-General John Charteris, Haig's former Chief of Intelligence. Others may more charitably be said to have been confused or mistaken, or else were able to satisfy themselves that in the midst of a titanic struggle between good and evil, certain falsehoods were morally true (if not factually so), and therefore beneficial to the Allied cause.

Just as the creation of myths and falsehoods could be seen as fulfilling a legitimate war aim, so too could belief in their reality. Indeed to doubt or deny even the most fantastical story exposed a sceptic to the risk of being condemned as unpatriotic, and even traitorous. Some have characterized this susceptibility as ‘hysterical hallucination' on the part of the feeble-minded, but given the pressures and complexities of wartime life this explanation is overly simplistic. Rather, for the average Briton in 1914, belief in the reality of an infestation of Hun spies, and the need to remain constantly vigilant against the alien menace, gave some small sense of contributing to the war effort.

Ultimately, however, belief in the irrational must for the most part elude rational explanation.

James Hayward

June 2005

1

Spy Mania

In December 1911, during the Kaiser's state visit to London, a senior German naval officer formed the habit of visiting a barber's shop situated at 402A Caledonian Road. The shop was run by a British subject, Karl Gustav Ernst, the son of a German surgical instrument manufacturer who had emigrated to England during the 1860s. Since this somewhat obscure establishment was hardly the kind of place which a high-ranking attaché might normally be expected to frequent, this activity aroused the suspicions of the newly formed British counter-intelligence service, then called MO5 and headed by Captain Vernon Kell.

Kell obtained a warrant from the Home Secretary to intercept all mail sent to and from 402A, and placed the shop under regular observation. These letters revealed that some 22 paid German spies located at Sheerness, Chatham, Portland and elsewhere were communicating with a German handler named Steinhauer (aka Madame Reimers), and as such the shop was revealed as a front for the entire German espionage network in Great Britain. In this way M05 were able to identify every member of the nascent spy ring, and on the morning that war was declared, August 4th 1914, a series of raids were executed by the Special Branch. Ernst was arrested for breaches of the 1911 Official Secrets Act, while swoops elsewhere netted another 21 professional spies. A single man escaped via the port of Hull. The following day another 200 suspected German agents were rounded up under the auspices of the new Aliens Restriction Order, among them several waiters and higher officials from a number of West End hotels and restaurants. After a two-day trial at the Old Bailey in November 1914, Ernst, described disparagingly as a hairdresser, was sentenced to seven years in prison. At a stroke the entire German espionage network in Great Britain had been neutralized, and a curtain cast over the country at the vital moment of mobilization. Although further agents were sent into the field by Germany during the war, the network never really recovered.

The first such operative to arrive after hostilities began, a naval reserve lieutenant named Carl Lody, proved to be an ill-trained amateur. His letters were immediately intercepted, and after a six-week tour that took in Edinburgh, London and Liverpool and during which he travelled in the guise of an American tourist, he was arrested in October at Killarney in Eire. Tried by a court martial held at the Middlesex Guildhall in Westminster at the end of the month, Lody offered no defence, and on November 6th 1914 went down in history as the first man in 150 years to be executed at the Tower of London. Lody's trial, to which the press were allowed access, was widely reported, and did much to fan the flames of an already fierce national obsession. Michael McDonagh of
The Times
recorded:

The prisoner sat in the dock between two Grenadier Guards armed with rifles and fixed bayonets. He was a young man, dark-complexioned and clean-shaven. What was most prominent in his features was his nose, which was remarkably long… . At last this spy business has yielded something sensational and dramatic – and real. Hitherto we have had but the gibbering phantoms of the inventiveness and credulity of disordered minds.

The ‘gibbering phantoms' and mental disorder to which McDonagh alluded was the rampant – yet largely irrational – spy mania, which had gripped the collective popular imagination across Europe even before the outbreak of hostilities. In Britain, fictional and dramatic works such as
The Battle of Dorking
by George Chesney (1871),
The Riddle of the Sands
by Erskine Childers (1903),
The Invasion of 1910
and
Spies of the Kaiser
by William Le Queux (1906 and 1909) and
When William Came
by Saki (1914) had also done much to foster the myth that a veritable army of spies were at large across the country, diligently touring the east coast in motor cars, flashing signals to airships and submarines, and arranging secret landings by aeroplanes in South Wales. Across the Channel in France the trend was, if anything, stronger, where works such as
La Vermine du Monde
furnished faintly absurd accounts of the ubiquity and consummate cunning of the Hidden Hand.

During the first few days of the war, the spy scare in Britain was coloured largely by factual reports of the destruction of the espionage ring run by Karl Ernst. Between August 4th and 10th it was variously reported that in London police had seized a quantity of arms and ammunition from an address in Chancery Lane, and had discovered at the apartment of a waiter named Hammer a Winchester repeater rifle ‘of the thumb trigger model', as well as maps and an atlas. In the City, members of the Stock Exchange were required to disclose the names and addresses of all foreign clerks, and enemy aliens were excluded from the banking business. At Dover a figure seen tampering with a telephone cable was fired on, but managed to escape. A small railway bridge at Guildford was reported as having been blown up on the 5th, and at Conway in Wales two men were arrested after a local claimed to have overheard them discussing a plot to blow up the steel bridge spanning the Menai Straits. Further north, the German Consul in Sunderland was arrested and remanded in Durham Gaol, while the following day all German males resident in the same town ‘capable of bearing arms' were similarly detained, amounting to 60 in all. Like measures were taken in Manchester, Nottingham and Glasgow. In Liverpool, an Austrian cabinet maker named Berger was arrested and charged after being found on the premises of the 8th Battalion, the King's Liverpool Regiment, on suspicion of attempting to gain information likely to be of use to the enemy. More sinister still, at Edenbridge in Kent a troop train was fired upon, and a rifle bullet found in the woodwork of a carriage. The description of the suspect circulated by the local constabulary suggested ‘spy' without actually saying so: ‘tall and dark, with a sallow complexion and a dark moustache'.

The prevailing alarmist mood infected even the police and the armed services. Upon the outbreak of war, the Isle of Wight military warned that there were ‘a number of spies' at large, and counselled the public against the risk of being shot should they be foolish enough to approach defences or military positions after dark. At Berkhamsted the Inns of Court Officer Training Corps (OTC) were called out to block the Great North Road, down which a German armoured car was said to be advancing towards London. On August 11th a Territorial was fatally wounded during a false alarm at Birkenhead, while a fortnight later a sentry from the Royal Field Artillery was shot dead by an unknown assailant while on guard at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. A distinctly ambiguous armed spy scare was noted in Essex near the port of Harwich at the beginning of September:

The inhabitants of Mistley and neighbouring parishes were alarmed at 10.15 on Tuesday night by a quick succession of explosions. Some got out of bed and looked out from their windows, whilst others congregated at street corners discussing the situation, some thinking that German aeroplanes or airships were dropping bombs. It soon transpired that a spy was discovered in the act of approaching the Tendring Hundred Waterworks station at Mistley Street, which is close to the Harwich branch railway and Mistley station, flashing an electric light. The military sentries on duty challenged the man, and getting no answer fired volley after volley and chased him. The man eventually escaped through a wood in the vicinity, and none of the shots apparently stopped his progress.

At nearby Chelmsford, the location of the sensitive Marconi wireless works, a ‘tragic happening' was recorded by a local vicar on November 5th:

At the Marconi station there, one of the sentries was shot dead. It was presumed that this was done by German agents in a motor. Hasty telephones in all directions to the troops to close outlets from Chelmsford. This brought troops in fiery haste from Broomfield to the ash tree at Waltham.

Some have suggested, however, that these stories of shootings were a deliberate invention, intended to keep troops on their toes. Another example of nervous Territorials is drawn from the memoirs of Sir Basil Thomson, who had been made head of CID at Scotland Yard in June of the previous year, and as such also controlled the Special Branch. On August 5th, Thomson records a visit to the War Office for a meeting with a senior intelligence officer, in order to obtain authority to evict a number of alien tenants from leased railway arches: