Myths and Legends of the Second World War (23 page)

Even as he lies on the field he looks more quietly faithful, more simply steadfast than others, as if he had taken care while he died that there should be no parade in his bearing, no heroics in his posture.

A summary by Philip Gibbs in the
Daily Chronicle
on July 3rd was scarcely more truthful:

And so, after the first day of battle, we may say with thankfulness: All goes well. It is a good day for England and France. It is a day of promise in this war, in which the blood of brave men is poured out upon the sodden fields of Europe.

C.E. Montague, who served first in the trenches, and then as a censor, wrote the following of the myths promulgated by war correspondents in 1922:

The average war correspondent – there were golden exceptions – insensibly acquired a cheerfulness in the face of vicarious torment and danger. In his work it came out at times in a certain jauntiness of tone that roused the fighting troops to fury against the writer. Through his dispatches there ran a brisk implication that the regimental officers and men enjoyed nothing better than ‘going over the top'; that battle was just a rough, jovial picnic; that a fight never went on long enough for the men; that their only fear was lest the war should end on this side of the Rhine. This, the men reflected in helpless anger, was what people at home were offered as faithful accounts of what their friends in the field were thinking and suffering.

Most of the men had, all their lives, been accepting ‘what it says 'ere in the paper' as being presumptively true. They had taken the Press at its word without checking. Bets had been settled by reference to a paper. Now, in the biggest event of their lives, hundreds of thousands of men were able to check for themselves the truth of that workaday Bible. They fought in a battle or raid, and two days after they read, with jeers on their lips, the account of ‘the show' in the papers. They felt they had found the Press out.

All of which was undoubtedly true. However, the idea that the public at home would have demanded an end to the war if faced with the truth is demonstrably false. Although much of the detail of campaigns such as Ypres, Neuve Chapelle, Loos, the Somme and Passchendaele was not widely known in Britain until the 1920s, casualty lists were published at the time, even in those urban centres in the industrial north of England where Pals Battalions were raised and subsequently decimated. The mounting numbers of widows, orphans and Blighty wounded were plain for all to see. The celebrated film by Geoffrey Mallins and J.B. McDowell,
The Battle of the Somme
, was released in cinemas in 1916 and included graphic scenes of trench warfare and dead British soldiers, and even footage of some as they fell. The population became hardened, even coarsened – but not disgusted or pacifist. Between April to September 1917 it was the morale of the French army which broke in spectacular fashion, not that of the British. The shortages caused by the German submarine blockade of Britain, particularly of food, seemed to both Vera Brittain and Siegfried Sassoon to be the main preoccupation of the British public, more so than the fighting in France.

It is a sad fact that the supreme achievement of the British and Commonwealth forces during the Hundred Days in 1918 are often ignored. Once the German offensives of March and April 1918 had stalled, Haig and his generals were able to reap the harvest sown during the previous two years. Between August and November Haig's armies won a series of battles which amounted to nine cumulative victories. After storming the Hindenberg Line they drove the enemy back from the Somme to the Sambre, in the process capturing 158,000 prisoners and 2,275 guns. Marshal Foch wrote that never had the British army achieved such spectacular results as it did during this continuous bodyblow offensive, which lasted 116 days, and was led by much the same generals who were damned as incompetent. An equivalent acknowledgement from Lloyd George was both late and grudging, Haig being congratulated only on October 10th on account of his achievements during ‘the last few days'. The triumphant victories at the Scarpe, the Selle or the Sambre were never adequately acknowledged or conveyed to the public at large, and instead focus settled on the horrors of the Somme and Passchendaele. Simplistic denigration of the Generals and revelling in defeat may be more satisfying for some, and undoubtedly makes for better copy, but it does not tell the whole story of the First World War, or even the true one.

7

The Hidden Hand

Although a certain section of the population remained preoccupied with spy mania and the alien peril throughout the war, following notable peaks during August and September 1914, and again after the sinking of the
Lusitania
in May 1915, the delusion became more limited in its scope. One particular strand began to unravel from the paranoid whole, and to some extent may be seen as a forerunner of the conspiracy theories which we are familiar with today. This myth held that there existed a Hidden (or Unseen or Invisible) Hand, a covert pro-German influence at work in political, commercial and social circles, whose secret objective was to undermine the war effort, and paralyse the collective will of the nation.

During the winter of 1916 a series of meetings were held in London at which the government was denounced for its perceived inaction against this intangible menace. One meeting was called at the Queen's Hall by the Women's Imperial Defence League (WIDL) and was chaired by Frances Parker, sister of the late Lord Horatio Kitchener. Kitchener, architect of the so-called New Armies, had been killed in June 1916 en route to Russia when HMS
Hampshire
struck a mine off the Orkneys, an event which itself gave rise to a rich crop of legend. Some attributed his demise to the activities of highly placed Establishment spies, said to include the wife of Admiral Jellicoe, and riots flared in Islington. Kitchener himself was said to have last been seen in an inappropriate embrace with a subordinate, while on Orkney itself the legend persists that the local lifeboat was ordered not to attend the stricken ship. Mrs Parker was among those not wholly convinced that her brother was dead: one theory ran that he was a prisoner in Germany, another more Arthurian variant was that he was deep in an enchanted asleep in a frozen cave, awaiting his country's next call. At the WIDL rally a resolution was passed which called for the immediate establishment of a Royal Commission to enquire into the activities of the Hidden Hand, coupled with a demand for the dismissal of all British diplomats with any links to Germany. In the Commons the Liberal MP for Cleveland, Herbert Samuel, urged fellow Members to do all in their power to try to dispel the ‘foolish myth', but negatives are notoriously difficult to prove, and the meetings and rallies continued.

Just as the spy mania of 1914 had been fuelled by a sensationalist play,
The Man Who Stayed at Home
, now a patriotic film helped to boost public belief in the reality of an invisible hand. In
It is For England
(later reissued as
The Hidden Hand
) offered up a young army chaplain reincarnated on the battlefield as St George returns to England to harangue the nation on the Teutonic peril. As well as addressing Parliament (a scene in which extras were joined by real MPs), St George also states his case to City businessmen and industrial rebels. Backed by the Navy League, the film also featured many of the mythical spy devices which had made
The Man Who Stayed at Home
such a populist hit.

A measure of the credulous atmosphere in which these popular protests took place was given by the diarist and
Times
journalist Michael McDonagh, writing on December 1st 1916:

The news editor, Gordon Robbins, rushed into the reporting room this morning shouting that he had got a delicious letter in reference to the ‘Hidden Hand' meeting last night … It said: ‘I have to tell you of a discovery we made at our meeting tonight. A German spy was found taking notes of the speeches. When questioned he pretended to be a reporter from
The Times
, and was disguised as a Nonconformist minister. I enclose the card he gave us.'

The card was Jack Turner's, an old member of the reporting staff … His story, as he told it in his serious way, was very funny. He was sitting alone at the Press table, taking notes of the chairman's opening remarks, when a woman in a high state of excitement, leant over his shoulder and looking at his note-book, asked peremptorily what he was writing. ‘Shorthand' was his simply reply. ‘That is not shorthand; I know Pitman; it's German,' the woman exclaimed, snatching the note book. Turner writes in an old system of shorthand, called Taylor's, which at a casual glance might well be mistaken for German characters.

The woman interrupted the proceedings with a loud shout of ‘Mr Chairman, there's a German spy here,' and throwing the note-book to the chairman, added, ‘Look at that!' The chairman and others on the platform examined the note-book, and for a time appeared to be suspicious as to its purpose, but in the end gave it back to Turner in exchange for his card.

Whereas the main focus of spy mania remained aliens and foreigners, enemy or otherwise, the myth of the Hidden Hand tended to throw suspicion on Britons, many of them senior Establishment figures. Somewhere in between these two extremes fell the fantastical ‘poison plot' of 1917, the denouement of which was the trial at the Old Bailey of four highly unlikely individuals charged with conspiring to murder David Lloyd George and his Minister Without Portfolio, Arthur Henderson, by means of darts tipped with curare.

Alice Wheeldon, aged 51, was a dealer in second-hand clothes who lived with her daughter Harriet, a scripture teacher, in the Midlands railway town of Derby. Both were ardent socialists, and prior to the outbreak of war had been active Suffragettes in the Women's Social and Political Union. Both mother and daughter opposed conscription, and Alice Wheeldon's home became a safe haven for conscientious objectors and other fugitives on the run from military service. Indeed her son William was already in custody as a hard-core conscientious objector, having refused to perform national service of any kind. The pair also helped to smuggle evaders abroad to Ireland and America, and had links with various radical groups including the Socialist Labour Party, and far-left union officials deported from Clydeside by governmental decree. The Wheeldons were rank-and-file radicals who displayed a high degree of disaffection, and occupied a lower-middle class milieu in which feminism, socialism and pacifism found common cause.

In December 1916 a man calling himself Alec Gordon sought shelter with the Wheeldons. He claimed to be a fugitive, and having won their confidence introduced the two women to one Comrade Bert, who in turn claimed to be an army deserter and a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. In fact both men were agents employed by a special intelligence section within the Ministry of Munitions, whose activities were later absorbed within the Special Branch and MI5. ‘Alec Gordon' was the false identity of Mr F. Vivian, and ‘Comrade Bert' a more senior agent named Herbert Booth, a former barrister's clerk. Both operatives subsequently laid information that Alice Wheeldon was plotting to assassinate Lloyd George on the grounds that he was the politician behind conscription and the Military Service Acts. To achieve this end Wheeldon had obtained some poisons from her son-in-law, Alfred Mason, a laboratory attendant at Hartley University College in Southampton, thus drawing him and her other daughter Winnie Mason into the plot. Alfred Mason, aged 24, was said to share the views of his relatives on the general conduct of the war, and circumstantial evidence suggests that Alice Wheeldon had made arrangements to secure his passage to America when his call-up came.

The poisons provided by Mason arrived in Derby by post in January 1917, together with directions for use. The four phials contained both strychnine and curare, the latter an unusual poison which is harmless if taken internally, but deadly when introduced into a wound. The toxin was said to operate on the nerves and muscles, causing paralysis, and eventually death, through failure of the respiratory system. The poison came from South American tree bark, where it was used on arrows by Indians. Chief among its advantages was that it left no trace which could be identified by analysis or post mortem examination of the victim. At trial it would be alleged that Alfred Mason was ‘a chemist of very considerable skill' who had made a special study of poisons generally and curare in particular, the qualities of which were known to very few.

Together with Alice Wheeldon and her two daughters, Mason was charged under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 with conspiring to murder Lloyd George and Henderson, and with soliciting Herbert Booth to carry out the killing. The Attorney-General himself appeared for the prosecution, and all four defendants entered pleas of Not Guilty. Of the Ministry agents, only Booth gave evidence at trial. By his account, which was uncorroborated, the Wheeldons were hardened political terrorists who had burned down a church in Breadsall, and tried to kill Reginald McKenna, the Chancellor of the Exchequer between 1915 and 1916, by sending him a skull containing a poisoned needle. Alice Wheeldon was also said to have observed the need to kill Lloyd George:

Lloyd George has been the cause of millions of innocent lives being sacrificed. He shall be killed to stop it. We Suffragettes had a plot before when we spent £300 in trying to poison him. Our idea was to get a position in an hotel where he was staying and drive a nail through his boot that had been dipped in poison; but he went to France.

The evidence offered by Alice Wheeldon was at some variance. By her version, the poison was needed to kill guard dogs at the ‘concentration camps' where conscientious objectors were being held, although for the Crown a Major Kimber stated that nowhere were dogs used for this purpose. Although Alice Wheeldon denied the charges, her words and conduct in court did her defence few favours. On one occasion, the judge, Mr Justice Low, disdainfully noted ‘a considerable amount of levity' in the dock, and instructed defending counsel to caution his clients. In evidence, Alice Wheeldon stated that in sheltering ‘COs' she knew she was breaking the law, but did not mind for she had a perfect right to help circumvent what she considered an iniquitous act: