Myths and Legends of the Second World War (6 page)

Perhaps the most ludicrous spy myths were the broadly conspiratorial type which held that numerous royals, peers, financiers and magnates had been imprisoned in the Tower of London on charges of treason, and even shot. Probably the first such report concerned the Crown Prince, Louis of Battenberg, who was Austrian by birth, but generally supposed to be of German origin. Mountbatten had been appointed First Sea Lord in 1912 after a distinguished career in the navy, but resigned in October 1914 following a spiteful campaign led by a London evening paper, the
Globe
, which hinted darkly that the navy was not playing its expected role in the war. According to Horatio Bottomley in
John Bull
:

Blood is said to be thicker than water; and we doubt whether all the water in the North Sea would obliterate the ties between the Battenbergs and the Hohenzollerns when it comes to a life and death struggle between Germany and ourselves.

Mountbatten nevertheless managed to find some black humour in the fact that he was reported to have been shot at dawn, and no doubt took some comfort in being sworn to the Privy Council by the King. Famously, in 1917 the Royal Family would substitute the name Windsor for Saxe-Coburg.

An equally fantastical report from a newspaper in Pittsburgh in January 1916 held that the founder of the Scout movement, Sir Robert Baden-Powell, had faced a firing squad ‘without a quiver' following a conviction for selling secrets to the enemy. By way of an epitaph, the report offered that England had ‘put into his last sleep one of the bravest soldiers who ever headed her armies into foreign lands' – lines which, according to Baden-Powell's biographer, the Chief Scout considered might make the death penalty his lifetime's achievement. Contrary rumours also circulated that BP was engaged in secret service work in Germany throughout the war. In June 1917 rumours circulated that Admiral Sir John Jellicoe had been court-martialled and shot for losing the Battle of Jutland, and that his wife had also been executed as a spy. Being one of the last people to leave HMS
Hampshire
, the ship on which Lord Kitchener sailed fatefully for Russia in June 1916, his death was said to be traceable to her actions as a spy. Pioneer aviator Claude Graham-White was also falsely reported as shot, a press muddle possibly caused by his having troubled to try to clear the name of his friend Gustav Hamel, who stood accused of defecting to Germany before the outbreak of war. These delusions undoubtedly owed something to the fact that twelve
bona fide
German spies, Carl Lody included, were indeed held in the Tower prior to being executed there.

A related myth concerned supposed high-level imposters. One such story held that a distinguished German field-marshal, August von Mackensen, was actually the British war hero Sir Hector Macdonald (‘Fighting Mac'), who had committed suicide in Paris to escape disgrace following a homosexual scandal. The tale ran that Macdonald had faked his own death in 1903 and entered German service in place of the real von Mackensen, who was terminally ill. Meanwhile Lord Haldane, the Lord Chancellor and Secretary for War, was persistently denounced as pro-German and unfit for office. Prior to the outbreak of war Haldane had vigorously promoted Anglo-German friendship, had once described Germany as his ‘spiritual home', and was widely renowned as a student of German literature and philosophy. As a result, Haldane became the most widely reviled public figure in Britain, and in his autobiography records that:

Every kind of ridiculous legend about me was circulated. I had a German wife; I was the illegitimate brother of the Kaiser; I had been in secret correspondence with the German Government; I had been aware that they intended war and withheld this from my colleagues; I had delayed the dispatch and mobilization of the Expeditionary Force. All these and many other things were circulated … The Harmsworth Press systematically attacked me, and other newspapers besides. Anonymous letters poured in. One day, in response to an appeal in the
Daily Express
, there arrived at the House of Lords no less than 2,600 letters of protest against my supposed disloyalty to the interests of the nation.

It was also said of Haldane that he owned a dog named Kaiser, and that he employed a ‘full-blooded German chauffeur' who regularly drove him to Olympia where he ‘hob-nobbed with the German prisoners and brought them cigarettes'. The hate mail directed at Haldane was so prodigious that his maid was obliged to burn it by the sackful. By his own account he was heckled at public meetings, in constant danger of being assaulted in the street, and even of being shot. Although in May 1915 he was dropped from the government and entered the political wilderness, by the end of the year he was still being cursed so roundly across the nation that
The Times
' military correspondent, Colonel Charles Repington, remarked that one might as well ‘try to stop Niagara with a toothbrush' as attempt to end a dinner-table tirade against the luckless Lord. But Haldane was not alone. Margot Asquith, the wife of the Prime Minister, was popularly supposed to harbour lesbian and pro-German sympathies, as well as a German maid, and was thus held in similar odium, while several ministers and MPs were also denounced as traitors.

The enduring spy mania inspired countless dramatic and literary works of varying quality. During the first two and a half years of the war no fewer than 50 plays concerning spies were submitted to the Lord Chancellor's office, all of which were produced, and during 1917 and 1918 a further 43 spy dramas were performed. One of the first was a popular play,
The Man Who Stayed at Home
, written by Lechmere Worral and Harold Terry, and based squarely on scaremongering rumours. The piece was set in an East Coast boarding house kept by a woman whose first husband was a German general, and whose son was a spy at the Admiralty. The hero, a monocled fop, at one point accepts a white feather from his fiancée, which he puts into his pipe and smokes. He is able to risk doing so because, unbeknownst to his dearly beloved, he is busy breaking up a local spy ring. The play offered an abundance of cliché: there was a naturalized German governess and a Dutch waiter who kept pigeons, each with a map or message tied to its leg. Behind the fireplace lurked a secret wireless set, while a U-boat skulked offshore, awaiting the requisite signal. The play spawned a number of imitators.
In Time of War
offered a German princess-spy, who passed herself off as a nurse while adding poison to the hospital water filters. Even as late as October 1918 yet another melodrama set on the East Coast,
The Female Hun
, climaxed with a British general shooting dead his treacherous wife, less than half an hour after his butler had been shot as a spy.

The writer John Buchan took full advantage of the spy mania, and found a huge audience for his celebrated trilogy of Richard Hannay adventures:
The Thirty-Nine Steps
,
Greenmantle
and
Mr Standfast
. The first of these appeared in 1915, and swiftly elevated Buchan to the front rank of British novelists, although by day Buchan was variously employed as a journalist and propaganda writer. The book's central and complicated chase sequence offered a vivid image of Scottish glens bristling with enemy agents, while the rest is a potent cocktail of derring-do and high intrigue. The central premise on which the trilogy is based is given early in
The Thirty-Nine Steps
: ‘Away behind all the Governments and the armies there was a big subterranean movement going on, engineered by very dangerous people.' At the centre of the web is a sinister master spy who has to be outwitted by Hannay, the heroic colonial adventurer. In
Mr Standfast
, published in 1918, Hannay is ordered to infiltrate a cell of pacifists in the fictional town of Biggleswick, where treason is afoot, and proceeds to ‘sink down deep into the life of the half-baked'. The books were skilfully written, and reinforced the popular myth of the ubiquity and cunning of German espionage networks – ruthless, exploitative, and endlessly wicked.

Arthur Conan Doyle also exploited the spy scare to bring Sherlock Holmes out of retirement for the second and last time. The short story
His Last Bow
was first published in the
Strand Magazine
and
Collier
's in September 1917, and was originally subtitled ‘the war service of Sherlock Holmes'. The story itself is set at the beginning of August 1914 and concerns Von Bork, the chief German spymaster in Britain. On the eve of war Von Bork prepares to return to Germany with a rich haul of stolen documents, while awaiting the arrival of his chief informant, Altamont, who has gained possession of the key to the Royal Navy's signal codes. When Altamont appears, however, he overpowers the German, ties him up, and is revealed as Sherlock Holmes. It transpires that Holmes has also netted all of Von Bork's agents, and ensured that the information previously sent back to Berlin is entirely false. In the epilogue, supplied by the great detective himself, Holmes reveals that he was at first extremely reluctant to return to detection, and had been persuaded to don his deerstalker once more only after a personal intervention by the Prime Minister. Largely because of its overtly propagandistic intent, the book lacks the brilliance of its classic forebears, but proved popular enough in its day.

As the war progressed, the essentially naive spy mania of 1914 hardened into a more pernicious (if no more sophisticated) belief in the existence of a so-called Hidden Hand, involving a network of highly placed establishment figures bent on undermining the Allied war effort. This early form of the conspiracy theory is examined more thoroughly in Chapter Seven, but now a series of entirely harmless myths, which emerged during the first twelve months of the conflict, will be considered – the Russians in England, and the Angel of Mons.

2

The Russians in England

During the first few chaotic weeks of war, even the rampant spy mania was eclipsed by a widespread belief that thousands of Russian troops had landed in Scotland, and were passing through Britain on their way to the Western Front.

The story first entered into circulation during the last week in August, and spread with astonishing speed as eyewitness reports were received from every corner of the country. From the outset the press treated the story with a degree of caution, and so the rumour was spread almost exclusively by word of mouth. The Russians were observed landing at Aberdeen, Leith and Glasgow; they were fed at York, Crewe and Colchester; they were observed smoking cigars in closed carriages and stamping snow from their boots on station platforms. The supposed fount of information was invariably an anonymous railway porter. At Carlisle and Berwick-on-Tweed the Russian troops called hoarsely for vodka, and at Durham even managed to jam a penny-in-the-slot machine with a rouble. Four Russian soldiers were billeted with a lady at Crewe, who described the difficulty of cooking for Slavonic appetites. Rifles and lances were spotted in guards' vans, and waiting transports spotted at Folkestone, destined for Le Havre. By early September the American press had picked up on the story, and the number was variously estimated at between 50,000 and ‘little short of a million'. It was commonly believed that the Russians were bound for the Western Front, although some offered that their allotted task was to seize the Kiel Canal. It was even suggested, less kindly, that the Russians would throw in their lot with the Hun once they had crossed the Channel.

Successive variations on the basic legend, and the manner in which such stories were usually circulated, were recorded by the Reverend Andrew Clark, the rector of the village of Great Leighs in Essex:

Friday 28 August: Report current in Braintree – that a Russian force has been brought to Yorkshire and landed there; and that the East Coast trains have been commandeered to transport them rapidly south en route for the French theatre of war.

Sunday 30 August: On my way to church … Miss Lucy Tritton met me, jumped off her bicycle and told me that her father had heard from someone in the ‘Home' office (she said) that a large Russian force from Archangel had landed in Scotland and was being speeded south by rail to take its place in the theatre of war in Belgium. I mentioned the report of Saturday's evening paper, that a train-load of 200 Russians escaped from Germany into Switzerland and France, had reached England. But Miss Tritton was positive that her information was authentic and correct.

Wednesday 2 September: Dr Young of Braintree told Miss Mildred Clark that on Sunday the Russian troops were fed in Colchester …

Thursday 3 September: Letter from Oxford from my aunt … ‘It was said last Friday that 80,000 Russians passed through here, No-one was allowed to see them. But for several days, only one passenger train was running, and the railway would not send luggage in advance.'

Monday 7 September: Montague Edwards Hughes-Hughes, JP, of Leez Priory told me that an old servant of his had written that from her bedroom window she had watched train after train for hours, passing by night to Bristol. There were no lights in the carriages, but by the light of the cigars and cigarettes they were smoking, the black beards of the Russians could be seen.

In Perthshire, on hearing news that the Russians were passing through Scotland on their way to Belgium, Lady Olave Baden-Powell hastened to the nearest railway station to watch them pass through. Two days later she noted: ‘Russian rumour now denied by General Ewart, who commands Scotland and ought to know.' In the same county one clearly deluded landowner boasted that no fewer than 125,000 Cossacks had crossed his estates. The
South Wales Echo
quoted an engineer named Champion, who vouched that he had sailed with the Russians from Archangel, and had been with the 192nd trainload to pass through York. A correspondent told the
Daily Mail
how more than a million Russians has passed through Stroud in a single night. Sir George Young was converted to belief in the tale by no less a person than Sir Courtenay Ilbert, clerk to the House of Commons, who found the many circumstantial accounts too persuasive to reject.