A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (78 page)

Lloyd George was won over. He invited Nivelle to travel to London and meet with the British war cabinet on January 15. There again Nivelle proved irresistible, winning over British politicians who had been steeped in skepticism by the failures of 1915 and 1916. The only difficulty was the question of timing. Nivelle wanted to start quickly—as early as February. Haig, not happy about what amounted to a rejection of his Flanders offensive, was suggesting May. The result was compromise: what would go down in history as the Nivelle offensive was approved for April 1. It was only two weeks later that Ludendorff learned of it and ordered completion of the Hindenburg Line to proceed.

When the Entente leaders met again at Calais on February 26, they made it clear to Haig that he was expected to be ready at the beginning of April, and that he was to cooperate fully with Nivelle. In letters written after the conference, Haig referred to a proposal that Lloyd George had rejected out of hand. “The French put forward a terrible scheme for putting the British under a French commander in chief,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. “Thank God even Lloyd George thought it went too far.” This incident requires note because of Haig’s later claim, made after the war and long widely believed, that Lloyd George had himself suggested putting the BEF under Nivelle and had been stopped only by the threat of Haig, Robertson, and other British generals to resign or face courts-martial rather than agree. Though required to attack at Arras rather than in Flanders, in all matters tactical Haig retained control of the BEF. He was explicitly given the right, if in disagreement with Nivelle, to appeal directly to London. He left Calais with the further assurance that Nivelle’s campaign would be ended if it did not lead quickly to a breakthrough, and that the BEF would then be free to resume preparations for an offensive in Flanders.

Nivelle remained supremely confident. He moved his headquarters to a magnificent château that had once been the property of Marie Antoinette. He took his wine cellar with him—took all the appointments appropriate to a generalissimo, along with the favorites (“Butcher” Mangin prominent among them) who had been with him at Verdun. Those he did not favor found themselves sidelined. Foch was banished to the dormant front near Switzerland. Pétain, Castelnau, and others found that they too no longer mattered. No one mattered but Nivelle. In his lofty and splendid isolation, he proceeded with arrangements for a Napoleonic stroke that was now just weeks in the future.

But a problem emerged: several of France’s most proven commanders were convinced that the Nivelle plan had no chance of success. The reluctance of Haig and his generals might be written off as sour grapes, but Pétain, Foch, Franchet d’Esperey, and even General Alfred Micheler (who had been given command of Nivelle’s Mass of Maneuver) all were soon arguing that Nivelle was preparing to do the wrong thing in the wrong place and was headed for disaster. No one wanted to listen: not Lloyd George, not the president or premier of France.

Late in 1916 France’s most brilliant colonial soldier, a onetime protégé of Gallieni’s named Louis Lyautey, had been brought back from Morocco for what would prove to be a short tour of duty as minister of war. When he learned what Nivelle was planning, this future Marshal of France was incredulous. “This is a plan for the army of the Duchess of Gerolstein,” he exclaimed, making reference to a popular operetta. But still no one would listen. When in March Paul Painlevé became minister of war (the Briand government had fallen because Lyautey refused to share military secrets with other members of the government), he tried strenuously to persuade Nivelle to make his attack more limited, less ambitious, less risky. No one in a position to make a difference would listen.

Background

HEARTS AND MINDS

BY 1917 MORALE HAD BECOME A CRITICAL PROBLEM BOTH
in the armies of the great powers and among their home-front populations. As the level of sacrifice being demanded of people in and out of uniform came to seem almost insupportable, and as the death and deprivation seemed to be achieving practically nothing, the enthusiasm that had marked the beginning of the war fell ever closer to the vanishing point. Soldiers wanted to go home and wanted to know why they couldn’t. Their families wanted them home and wondered what their sons were dying for. All of them wanted a return to what had been lost.

Governments responded in a variety of ways. They became harsher in suppressing dissent. They increased their emphasis on propaganda, on bolstering the loyalty of people whose suffering had not yet turned them into dissenters. The control and manipulation of information that all the warring nations had been practicing since August 1914 became more systematic, more sophisticated, and farther-reaching. It came to be an essential function of government.

Inevitably, to the extent that the propaganda was effective, it made an end to the fighting more difficult to achieve. “However the world pretends to divide itself,” the English writer Rudyard Kipling declared in a London newspaper, “there are only two divisions in the world today—human beings and Germans.” Similar things were being said about the British by writers in Berlin. People everywhere were being told that this war was no continuation of politics by other means, no traditional struggle for limited objectives. It was a fight to the death with the forces of evil, and the stakes were survival and civilization itself. It is no simple thing to make people believe such things and later persuade them to accept a settlement based on compromise.

Control of public opinion was made possible by the same economic and technological developments that had made Europe capable of fighting such a war. In all the belligerent countries, the most developed of them especially, industrialization had drawn millions of people from traditional, predominantly rural ways of life into fast-growing urban centers. It created a need for the education of these people—for a literate workforce—while slashing the cost of producing newspapers. Both an enormous new reading public and new means of reaching that public came into existence. London alone had sixteen daily papers by 1914, and the largest were selling nearly a million copies a day. Germany had four thousand newspapers—half of them dailies—with a huge total circulation.

If the readers of these newspapers were not necessarily well informed, they were certainly receiving information of a kind that their ancestors had rarely seen. The strains and pressures and opportunities of modern life were politicizing them as never before. People understood that they had a stake in the issues of the day, they formed opinions on those issues, and increasingly they felt entitled to express themselves and be heard. As the war made their lives darker and harder, governments found it increasingly necessary to persuade them to endure.

The war’s first propaganda fell into place almost effortlessly. As invariably happens at the start of a war, people everywhere were swept up into ecstasies of patriotism. Almost everything they heard and read assured them that their glorious armies would soon be victorious, that their cause was a noble one, and that the enemy was wicked in ways rarely seen in history. Formal censorship of the press was scarcely necessary; many newspaper owners were themselves caught up in the general frenzy, and few of those who had doubts found it convenient to express them. There were exceptions in all countries—the Manchester Guardian said Britain was entering “a war in which we risk everything of which we are proud, and in which we stand to gain nothing”—but they rapidly grew rare.

British public opinion had been particularly well prepared for the conflict. Throughout the two decades leading up to the war, Germany’s growing economic strength and emergence as a naval power provoked cries of alarm in many of the most influential newspapers. The Rupert Murdoch of the day, Alfred Harmsworth (more famous as Lord Northcliffe after he was elevated to the peerage), owned a number of important papers aimed at different segments of the public. He used all of them to alert his readers to what he saw as the German menace, fostering, one of his competitors complained, “an anti-German frame of mind that takes no account of the facts.” When war came and no correspondents were allowed near the front, neither Northcliffe nor his competitors complained about having to depend on official sources for information about what was happening there. Nor did they see reason for complaint. Many saw it as their mission not to inform the public (which long remained ignorant of the realities of the war) but to do their bit to keep morale high.

A Press Bureau was established in August 1914 (by Winston Churchill, ready as always to take the broadest possible view of his responsibilities) to determine what should and should not be published. Soon thereafter a Defense of the Realm Act made it unlawful to print anything “of such a nature as is calculated to be or might be directly or indirectly useful to the enemy.” At about the same time a new Secret War Propaganda Bureau was given responsibility for assisting the foreign office in wooing neutral nations. Where the home front was concerned, the propaganda machinery remained fairly primitive. It placed less emphasis on actively manipulating public opinion than on preventing the publication of anything that might limit confidence in the success or heroism of the BEF. The task was simplified by a general absence of people prepared to publicly question the cause.

The French government began by leaving the management of war news in the hands of General Joffre and his staff. Throughout the first half of the war this simple system worked about as well as Britain’s, and for similar reasons: the newspapers tended to be content to get their information from the military, and few people with a voice in public life wished to question or complain. The Germans entered the war with probably the world’s most fully developed information-and-propaganda system, but it was directed not at the home front but at other countries—the United States especially—and was crippled when the British navy cut the only cable connecting Germany with the Western Hemisphere. From the beginning, the Berlin government was even less sophisticated than the British and the French in trying to shape the opinions of its own people. Like so many other problems that would grow worse for the Germans as the war dragged on, this one arose at least in part from the peculiarities of German society. The Junker elite loathed and feared the urban masses, wanted nothing from them but acquiescence and obedience, and was loath to do anything to indicate that public opinion mattered.

For two years all three countries relied primarily on a strict but easily maintained press censorship (often banning publications that refused to cooperate), on assuring their populations that the war was being won, and on depicting the enemy as evil incarnate. Their methods were predictable and in retrospect sometimes seem ridiculous. The German story line was that the Reich was fighting a defensive war against a cabal of unscrupulous enemies determined to destroy it. The British and French followed an exactly opposite script, one in which they were defending civilization against Huns who wanted to rule the world. Even the atrocity stories that were staples in the newspapers of the Entente were mirrored in those of the Central Powers. The Germans were reported to be cutting off the hands of French boys so they could never become soldiers, to be raping children and bayoneting infants. The German public was told that the Russians were poisoning the lakes of East Prussia and cutting off the limbs of captured German soldiers, and that the French and Belgians made a specialty of gouging out prisoners’ eyes. Lying was epidemic—newspapers ran old photographs of Russian pogroms against Jews as evidence of Germany’s “rape of Belgium”—and officials with access to the facts were not immune. David Lloyd George, long before he became prime minister, was declaring in public that “the new philosophy of Germany is to destroy Christianity.”

This state of affairs began to change, and to change in ominous ways, as the war entered its third year. The British government, alarmed by spreading strikes and protests, singled out pacifists and conscientious objectors for blame. Pacifist leaders (many of them socialists who had remained silent earlier) were arrested if they attempted to address assemblies of workers. As labor unrest became commonplace everywhere (British munitions production was briefly brought almost to a stop in May 1917), the governments of Britain, France, and Germany all tried to ignore the real causes: rising living costs, long hours working under harsh conditions, and shortages of food. In all three countries strikers were accused of treason, and governments increased their efforts to make the public agree.

Nineteen-seventeen was the turning point. In February of that year Lloyd George established a Department of Information to tighten control over what the public was told. Four months later he created a National War Aims Committee, with former prime minister Asquith as its president. Despite its name, the committee’s purpose was not to articulate the nation’s war aims (which were intentionally kept vague so as not to bring political divisions to the surface), not to respond to German propaganda, but to neutralize domestic dissent. The unprecedented sum of £240,000 was appropriated to finance its activities, which were focused on blanketing areas of labor unrest with gruesome (and generally fabricated) tales of German atrocities. The committee’s aim was to persuade workers that there could be no negotiated peace with such a barbaric foe.

France created a new propaganda agency, a Maison de la Presse that was part of the ministry of foreign affairs but aimed at the home front. It too focused on atrocity stories, on the war as a crusade to save justice and liberty, and on what it depicted as the essentially spiritual character of the struggle. Ludendorff followed suit by starting a program of “patriotic instruction.” Its purpose, inevitably, was to remind an increasingly disheartened German public that it was involved in a struggle to save civilization. “Good propaganda must keep well ahead of actual political events,” said Ludendorff. “It must act as pacemaker to policy and mold public opinion without appearing to do so. Before political aims are translated into action, the world has to be convinced of their necessity and moral justification.” He was becoming a thoroughly modern general, an innovator not just in battlefield tactics but in the uses of PR.