Myths and Legends of the Second World War (26 page)

Spencer went on to state that Margot Asquith and Lord Haldane appeared on the list, but declined to name others. Darling took no effective action to stop these irrelevant smears, on the dubious premise that his own name had already been blackened. Spencer went on to inform the judge that Wilde's play
Salome
was ‘pure sadism', which he defined as the lust for dead bodies.

When cross-examined by prosecuting counsel, Travers Humphreys, Spencer spouted yet more psycho-sexual claptrap:

Elsewhere, Spencer was asked:

Thus ran the defence. The cast of bizarre ‘expert' witnesses paraded by Billing also included Dr John Clarke, who offered that
Salome
should be stored in a museum of sexual pathology, and even then might corrupt medical students. A fashionable Jesuit priest, Father Bernard Vaughan, testified that the play constituted a ‘constructive treason', and even shook Billing's hand as he left the box.

In his lengthy final address to the jury, Billing again warned of the all-pervading influence of the Hidden Hand:

How much more necessary is it that the light of day should be let in? How much more necessary is it that the influence – the mysterious influence – which seems to have dogged our footsteps through the whole conduct of this campaign; the influence which, after three and a half years of war, keeps German banks still open in this country, leaves Germans uninterned in this court at the present minute, the influence which for two and a half years paralysed the Air Service of this country, and prevented us raiding Germany. Is it not time that this influence was removed?

I am a libeller. I have libelled public men for the last two and a half years … Gentlemen of the jury, I assure you that there must be some reason for all the ‘regrettable incidents' of this war … What is the position in France today? It is worse than it was in August 1914. The best of the blood in this country is already spilled; and do you think that I am going to keep quiet in my position as a public man while nine men die in a minute to make a sodomite's holiday?

Billing tarred Maud Allan and
Salome
as part of the ‘mysterious influence' of the Hidden Hand in the following terms:

Such a play … is one that is calculated to deprave, one that is calculated to do more harm, not only to young men and young women, but to all who see it, by undermining them, even more than the German army itself.

Billing sat down to great applause from his numerous supporters in the public gallery, having delivered an undeniably effective emotional harangue to the jury. Little if any of it was relevant to his plea of justification, but no matter: Darling's inept handling of the evidence ensured that PB's ulterior political purpose had been served. From then on until the close of the trial, Maud Allan was observed to be in tears.

On June 4th, amidst scenes of uproar in the courtroom, Billing was acquitted. Hardly ever had a verdict been received in the Central Criminal Court with such unequivocal public approval. The crowd in the gallery sprang to their feet and cheered, as women waved their handkerchiefs and men their hats. On leaving the court in company with Eileen Villiers-Stuart and his wife, Billing received a second thunderous ovation from the crowd outside, where his path was strewn with flowers. Even had Billing been convicted he would have still succeeded in his political object. In the event, although some editors berated Billing for his methods, the ends were generally seen to justify the means, and to represent a famous victory for patriotism, morality and the common man.

But not everyone was as delighted. The diary of Cynthia Asquith for early June well reflects the horrified reaction of the political establishment, and the Asquith family in particular:

One can't imagine a more undignified paragraph in English history: at this juncture, that three-quarters of
The Times
should be taken up with such a farrago of nonsense! … It is monstrous that these maniacs should be vindicated in the eyes of the public … Papa came in and announced that the monster maniac Billing had won his case. Damn him! It is such an awful triumph for the ‘unreasonable', such a tonic to the microbe of suspicion which is spreading through the country, and such a stab in the back to people unprotected from such attacks owing to their best and not their worst points. The fantastic foulness of the insinuations that Neil Primrose and Evelyn de Rothschild were murdered from the rear makes one sick. How miserably conducted a case, both by that contemptible Darling and Hume Williams! Darling insisted on having the case out of rotation.

Billing's famous victory proved short-lived. Although membership of the Vigilante Society swelled dramatically in the wake of the trial, the peace talks were scuppered by the sinking of the hospital ship
Llandovery Castle
at the end of June, and so Billing became surplus to the Generals' requirements. The Enemy Aliens Act was passed in July, while by September it was clear that Germany was exhausted, and that her army was beaten. Billing had been forcibly removed from the Commons after a row on the subject of internment in July, and in 1921 resigned his seat on grounds of ill health. He died in 1948, having devoted much of the rest of his remarkable life to writing, sailing, inventing, and managing a cinema.

The fate of the other leading characters was equally mixed. In September 1918 Eileen Villiers-Stuart was convicted of bigamy, and sentenced to nine months' hard labour. In a sworn statement she admitted that the evidence she had given in the Maud Allan trial was entirely fictitious, and that she had rehearsed it with Billing and Spencer. Spencer returned to the courts in 1921, where he was convicted of libel following the publication of an anti-semitic article in the journal
Plain English
. He was sentenced to six months in gaol, and stripped of his army rank by the War Office. A few months after his release Spencer was convicted of unspecified ‘disgusting behaviour' and fined 40 shillings. Maud Allan went abroad, and did not return to Britain until 1928. By 1939 she was living in comparative poverty in a section of the West Wing, a large mansion on Regent's Park. Curiously she was allowed to remain after the house was requisitioned by the army, and after the house was damaged during the Blitz returned to the USA on the Lisbon clipper flight, a miraculous achievement under wartime conditions. In 1956 she died in obscurity in a Los Angeles nursing home. Suspicions linger that the government sponsored Allan and Grein in their libel action, with the object of ensuring that Billing and his cohorts fell from grace in the immediate aftermath. The whole truth, however, may never be known.

Postscript

Having surveyed the panoply of myths and legends of the First World War, it is striking just how many were repeated or mirrored during the Second World War, two decades later, in many instances down to the last detail.

This is particularly true of several Home Front myths which arose as a result of spy mania and general xenophobia during the opening months of each conflict. In 1940, as in 1914, spies were thought to lurk around every corner, and to be signalling furiously to enemy aircraft and submarines. The Hidden Hand became the Fifth Column, dachshunds appeared in newspaper cartoons with swastikas drawn on their backs, and pigeon fanciers once more fell under suspicion. Shops, restaurants, cafes and ice cream parlours owned by Germans and Italians were boycotted, stoned and looted, while commercial printers sold posters which declared for the benefit of purchasers that ‘This Firm is Entirely British'. Despite the passage of time, and widespread disenchantment following the exposure of many calculated falsehoods in the years after 1918, credulity and spitefulness again held sway over certain sections of the population. Just as the spies of 1915 seemed often to betray their true calling by wearing extravagant hats and capes, so one army subaltern was denounced by a vicar's daughter in London for failing to flush the lavatory at his rectory billet – to her mind, a sure sign of Hunnish
Kultur.

Other second war myths of 1940 differed in form, but not in substance. Kaiser Wilhelm's vaunted insanity became Adolf Hitler's missing testicle, while the Russian troops with snow on their boots were replaced by the multitudinous German corpses washed ashore on the south and east coast in the wake of the Battle of Britain. Indeed the parallels between these two early wish-fulfilling myths is particularly illuminating. For several weeks during September and October 1940, all Britain was gripped by a rumour that an attempted German invasion had been thwarted in the Channel, and that tens of thousands of corpses had arrived at various points between Cornwall and the Wash. As with the Russians a quarter-century earlier, everyone knew someone who had seen the bodies on the beaches, whose numbers grew exponentially with each week that passed, and whose existence was only half-heartedly denied by the War Office. The 1940 rumour gained a second wind when it was added that the sea had been set on fire with burning oil, with the result that the 40,000 corpses now became charred.

As with the elusive Russian horde, the lack of hard evidence or convincing eyewitness accounts of the presence of tens of thousands of foreign bodies on English soil did nothing to damp public enthusiasm for this satisfying yet absurd tale. Both myths appear to have arisen spontaneously, and then to have been adopted by official sources with the object of boosting morale, one in the wake of the Retreat from Mons, the other following disaster at Dunkirk and the fall of France. Although the Bowmen and Angels of Mons have no obvious second war counterpart, the almost supernatural notion that the British were capable of setting the sea on fire perhaps has something in common with the earlier legend inspired by Arthur Machen.