Wakefield in the Great War, page 11
Terrible as the genuine atrocities like Louvain were, the British public were ever eager for more. At all levels of society, pornographic stories about the rape, torture and murder of women and children in Belgium circulated and were accepted without question. Lord Bryce, former Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, Professor of Jurisprudence at Manchester and a historian respected for his work on the Holy Roman Empire, was commissioned to investigate ‘Alleged German Outrages’, and his report, published in 1915, was based on 1,200 unsworn depositions from unidentified Belgian refugees. None of the committee actually interviewed any of the supposed witnesses themselves and hearsay evidence was accepted as fact. Bryce himself was aware even before the report was published that much of what was in it was unreliable but the government hoped that his reputation as a scholar would make up for any concerns about the actual content, and the report was widely circulated and quoted in American newspapers.
In Britain Lord Northcliffe, owner of the best selling Daily Mail, had offered £200 for any genuine photograph of a mutilated refugee, but the prize was never claimed and American correspondent William Shepherd of United Press later recalled: ‘I was in Belgium when the first atrocity stories went out. I hunted and hunted for atrocities during the first days of the atrocity scare. I couldn’t find atrocities. I couldn’t find people who had seen them. I travelled on trains with Belgians who had fled from the German lines and I spent much time amongst Belgian refugees. I offered sums of money for photographs of children whose hands had been cut off or who had been wounded or injured in other ways. I never found a first-hand Belgian atrocity story; and when I ran down second-hand stories they all petered out.’
The story of a Scottish nurse from Dumfries, 23-year-old Grace Hume, was widely reported. Under headlines of ‘fiendish attack on Scottish nurse’, ‘fiendish brutality’ and ‘Germans mutilate Scottish nurse’, they told of how nurse Hume had left home to help in a Belgian hospital at the start of the war. By September she was said to have carried a wounded man from the battlefield, shooting a German soldier dead as he tried to stop her. On 6 September, it was reported that German troops had overrun her hospital and embarked on a rampage, murdering and beheading the wounded men. When nurse Hume attempted to defend her patients, she was tortured and her breasts cut off before they left her to die in agony. A second nurse named Millard wrote of how Hume had shot a German who attacked her patients and for almost two weeks the story ran in several papers until The Times revealed that not only did Nurse Millard not exist, but that Grace Hume had never left the country and was, in fact, working in Huddersfield. The whole story had been made up by her 17-year-old sister, Kate, who made headlines herself when she was arrested for the hoax.
At the end of August, the Hull Daily Mail reported that ‘a very curious and persistent rumour has been circulated in Hull, coming from numerous very reliable people, none of whom, however, have it at first hand, that bodies of Russian troops have landed in Scotland for the purpose of proceeding to Belgium …’. The story quickly took on its own momentum around the entire country. Almost 200 trains full of Russians had passed through York. A Scottish landowner boasted that 125,000 Cossacks had crossed his land. The Daily Mail quoted a reliable source who claimed a million Russians had travelled through Stroud in a single night. Reverend Andrew Clark, of Great Leighs, in Essex, recorded in his diary that there was a 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 …’. He also noted how a magistrate friend had told him ‘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…’.
Reverend Clark did not feel the need to question just how bright the cigarettes must have been for an elderly servant to be able to make out the smoker’s beard on a darkened train at some distance and in the middle of the night, but as the story grew, ‘witnesses’ told their incredulous audiences how the Russians, after days aboard ships from Archangel and long journeys on trains in the heat of an English summer, had boarded ships at the Channel ports with snow still on their boots. No matter how far fetched the story might seem when the facts were examined, there were always at least a few people willing to believe it and pass it on. Finally, after weeks of speculation, the Under Secretary of State for War, Harold Tennant, was forced to explain to the House of Commons that ‘I am uncertain whether it will gratify or displease my honourable friend to learn that no Russian troops have been conveyed through Great Britain to the Western Front area of the European War.’
On 29 September 1914, Welsh author Arthur Machen published a short story entitled ‘The Bowmen’ in the London Evening News inspired by accounts that he had read of the fighting at Mons and an idea he had had soon after the battle. Machen had already written a number of factual articles on the war and set his story at the time of the retreat from the Battle of Mons in August, describing how phantom bowmen from the Battle of Agincourt had appeared after a British soldier called on St George to help his unit survive a German attack. It was written from the view of the soldier himself and seemed as though it was an actual report. Unfortunately, the paper did not say the story was fiction and ran another short fiction piece in the same edition. Machen was soon approached by people asking for more details and requests to reprint the story in parish magazines. Machen made it clear that the story was completely made up but one priest told him that he was mistaken, the ‘facts’ of the story must be true and all Machen had done was to elaborate on a real account. As Machen later said: ‘It seemed that my light fiction had been accepted by the congregation of this particular church as the solidest of facts; and it was then that it began to dawn on me that if I had failed in the art of letters, I had succeeded, unwittingly, in the art of deceit. This happened, I should think, some time in April, and the snowball of rumour that was then set rolling has been rolling ever since, growing bigger and bigger, till it is now swollen to a monstrous size.’
In the following months, more and more accounts of the ‘Angels of Mons’ appeared and more details were added, including reports of Germans found dead with arrow wounds on their bodies. Despite Machen’s best efforts, the story took on a life of its own. Reverend Boddy, of Sunderland, spent two months travelling around France and reported that ‘the evidence, though not always direct, is remarkably cumulative and came through channels which were entitled to respect’. These channels were always what modern folklorists call ‘a friend of a friend’ – an unnamed nurse at an unspecified military hospital was treating an unidentified soldier when she heard the story. ‘Eyewitness’ accounts were published using letters from soldiers who had not even been in France at the time the events were claimed to have happened and Mr Blackburn of Keighley appealed for accounts by men who were at Mons to send their stories of the angels to him ‘as this vision surely could not have been invented’. Machen would spend the rest of his career trying to get people to believe him when he said he had made it up.
The real news from France was less encouraging. The tiny British army was in full retreat and in very real danger of being overwhelmed by the German onslaught. On Monday, 24 August, the day after the disaster at Mons, Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, visited Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. As the two men most responsible for Britain’s defence, they read an alarming telegram from the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, General French. He reported that the heavily fortified Belgian city of Namur – the key to defending Belgium – had fallen, a general retreat had been ordered and in French’s opinion ‘immediate attention should be directed to the defence of Le Havre.’ The Allies were supposed to be halting the German advance at the French border; Le Havre was 210 miles away on the French coast. It looked as though a disaster was unfolding.
The Times of Wednesday, 26 August, reported that ‘the Allies have fallen back, but their resistance has cost Germany very dear. The battle has begun; yet its first days rank it, according to past standards, as one of the greatest in its history.’ But, it warned, ‘their losses have been considerable. They are estimated by the Field Marshal in command at over 2,000. No details have yet been received.’ The next day, it told readers there was little information available about the great battle going on in France: ‘Though we know that the British Army acquitted itself with distinction at Mons, we still know very little more. Even the casualty lists are not yet made public.’
On Friday, a report from Rouen described the arrival of the wounded: ‘These were not the worst of the wounded, for the worst cases are still up country. Some had only bad feet, broken by heavy marching; others had bullet or shrapnel wounds in feet, or hands or head; a small percentage of the 500 had the stomach wounds which every seasoned soldier dreads; only one went through the pains of death upon the station.’
The authorities were not keen that the public should read that sort of account so the arrival of the wounded in Britain was brief and to the point. ‘Special trains were in readiness at the quayside, and the men, it is believed, were hurried away to [the large military hospital at] Netley. The public were excluded from the docks and the greatest secrecy was maintained.’ Such secrecy did nothing to inspire public confidence. In Whitehall, politicians argued about how much people should be told. Some argued that releasing the truth about the retreat in France would be bad for morale but others thought that it could be used to encourage recruiting by making the public aware of the increasingly real possibility of an invasion. As one put it, ‘the time is past when a great and free and enlightened democracy can go to war in the dark’.
By Saturday, The Times explained: ‘Our soldiers have fought as men of the British race have ever fought, but it would serve no useful purpose now to hide the heaviness of the price of their bravery.’ The next day, a special edition broke with tradition by putting a news story on the front page, under the headline ‘Fiercest Fight in History: Heavy Losses of British Troops’, it presented the latest war news as passed by the government’s press censors. A sub-heading of ‘Broken British Regiments’ spoke of ‘a bitter tale’ of a ‘retreating and broken army … battered with marching’, and of ‘grievously injured regiments’, with nearly all their officers lost. It caused an immediate uproar with the paper accused of being irresponsible and sensationalist with a more positive version quickly being sent out to newspapers by government sources, but the story was out. As some had noted, it had the potential to act as a powerful recruiting agent. On Wednesday, 2 September, The Times noted, ‘The men of London and the Provinces have evidently realised since Sunday that the success of Great Britain and her Allies against Germany can only be ensured by large additions to the British forces in the field. No one doubted that as soon as this was really understood recruits would come forward in abundance. Monday saw more men joining the colours than any day since the war began, and yesterday easily eclipsed Monday’s record.’ In the six days between 30 August and 5 September 174,901 men enlisted compared with 100,000 who had done so in the three weeks between the 4th and the 22nd of August.
One way of getting around censorship and reporting the war was by publishing stories about letters received from local men on active service to add colour to the bland official communiques. Many of these letters, originally intended only for the reader, were hardly calculated to ease the fears of families at home and spoke openly of death and discomfort but they were eagerly read by civilians trying to find out what was going on. In 1914, the Post Office was the biggest single employer in the world with over 250,000 staff handling an estimated 6 billion items of mail per year as well as the telephone system and running branch post offices and savings banks. Soon after war broke out, it had lost around 11,000 staff to the forces as reservists went back to their units. Supported by union leaders, Post Office management sent every male employee a letter encouraging him to enlist and by December 1914 28,000 had done so. Although services were reduced as a result, it remained a very busy organisation.
A special Army Postal Service staffed by former Post Office employees operated to manage mail to and from those serving overseas and to maintain communications between front line units and in the weeks before Christmas 1917, around 19,000 mailbags – approximately 1 million letters – crossed the Channel every day. By the end of 1914, the London Home Depot covered 5 acres and was said to be the biggest wooden building in the world. In all, its staff of 2,500 women had processed around 2 billion letters and 114 million parcels destined for the forces. The static nature of the war meant that a network of deliveries could be set up that meant a letter from Wakefield could often reach someone in a front line trench faster than a letter could be sent to a civilian in the UK.
A ‘quick firer’ from France.
A postcard home from France. Note the censor has scratched out the name of the cathedral.
As a result, soldiers were able to write home regularly, but for many, letter writing was a new art. For those who found it difficult or had no time to write, Army Form A2042, the Field Service Postcard, was available and known to the men as a ‘quick firer’. Other than the address and the man’s name, nothing could be added to the postcard, which was pre-printed with a few sentences about his health and whether he had received mail from home. All the man had to do was cross out the bits that didn’t apply. Behind the lines, ordinary tourist postcards were available and later special wartime cards showing battle-damaged tourist attractions were sold by French civilians or through service canteens at base camps. Enterprising photographers produced portrait postcards and a soldier’s war service could be documented by a series of these postcards. More elaborate embroidered silk cards were also available, often showing the regimental badge or patriotic messages. Longer letters were supposed to be read and censored by the man’s officer before they could be posted but a special green envelope was available for more personal mail. To avoid the embarrassment of having his officer read personal letters to his wife or sweetheart a soldier could sometimes get hold of the special envelope and sign a declaration that it contained no information about military matters. It might still be censored at a base camp to the rear but would generally pass through unhindered.
At home, censorship meant that there was little in the way of real news about the war but editors quickly found that reporting on the arrival of letters from the front allowed them to get around the restrictions. Soon, family, friends and employers began bringing letters in so that a short story could be put together about it or, if several letters had been received, it was possible to piece together some idea of what was really going on.
One of the first letters from the front appeared in the Wakefield Express on 12 September when George Woodhead wrote to his wife at Portobello Road. George was serving aboard HMS Crecy when it took on German prisoners following the sinking of the German light cruiser SMS Mainz in the first naval battle of the war, at Heligoland Bight. In the letter he explained that as he understood it, the crew of the German ship had been in a state of mutiny and that its captain and officers had begun shooting their own men, claiming that the prisoners had not eaten for several days and were desperately in need of food. Given that the Mainz had single-handedly fought a British fleet of four cruisers and six destroyers for almost 2 hours, inflicting heavy damage on several British ships until one by one the German guns were blasted away and the ship sunk by torpedoes, the suggestion that they were near mutiny seems a bit unlikely and prompted perhaps more by the general propaganda being spread about an easy victory than the reality of the situation.
More letters appeared from other local men. In October, motor engineer Walter Judge received letters from three of his employees who had gone out to France with the first of the BEF. Foreman F.H. Harris wrote that ‘I don’t think that up to last night I had twelve hours sleep in five days. The worst of it is that we have had a lot of rain and no change of clothes … I have been talking to a German officer who, along with thirty of his men, have been taken prisoners and I can tell you that they are very glad to be prisoners. This officer, who had eight wounds, could talk good English.’ In November 1914, Private Frank Barnes, a Sheffield man serving with the 2nd Battalion, Warwickshire Regiment, wrote home. His unit had been involved in hard fighting and he described the shock of finding British soldiers who had been murdered after surrendering during the retreat from Mons. His unit counter-attacked to take their objective at bayonet point. He was amongst those detailed to round up any remaining enemy: ‘Presently I got another shock. I was standing near a party of fifteen Germans when all at once one turned round and said in excellent English: “Excuse me, but is there anyone here who comes from Sheffield?” Well, you can fancy how I felt, as I was the only man from Sheffield as all the other chaps came from Brum. After I had recovered my breath I got into conversation with him. He was not so old, and told me as much about Sheffield as I knew myself. “Damned fighting”, he said, “let me get back to England and my wife and children. I have been trying to get captured for several days and have only just succeeded”.’
Gunner Alfred Gravett of the Royal Garrison Artillery kept a record of his war service through the postcards he sent to his sister in Plumpton, showing his progress through training and out to France with his group of friends. It even included cards produced when he was wounded. (Courtesy of Richard Knowles)
From Gunner Gravett’s collection of souvenir postcards, an image of his mates in training. (Courtesy of Richard Knowles)
