Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (78 page)

Lloyd George made a significant contribution to the war effort through a speech, one of the most powerful of his career, delivered on 19 September at London’s Queen’s Hall. In it, he promulgated a doctrine that became a popular article of faith: that Britain was now engaged in a war to end wars, a crusade ‘for the emancipation of Europe from the thraldom of a military caste … The people will gain more from this struggle in all lands than they comprehend at the present moment … The great flood of luxury and sloth which had submerged the land is receding and a new Britain is appearing.’ His words made a profound inspirational impact, but would later reap a bitter harvest. When Lloyd George’s vision, that the war would secure both a national moral regeneration and a radical political
settlement, went conspicuously unfulfilled in 1918, the disillusionment of the British people was very great. Many recoiled in anger not merely from the trench experience – which was inevitable – but also from the false bill of goods sold to them by Lloyd George and his political kin. The Chancellor, who became Britain’s prime minister in December 1916, could justly argue that other nations’ politicians peddled similar falsehoods, but he would have done better to try to explain the truth to the British people back in 1914: that they, like the French, must pay a terrible price in blood and treasure for a victory from which they could aspire to no measurable advantage save acquisition of a few new colonies of questionable value; but that such a sacrifice must be borne, to avert much worse things if Germany triumphed.

God continued to be passionately invoked in both causes. The Archbishop of York declared fervently in October: ‘every man who respects his conscience must stand to his place until the war is ended. There can be no peace until this German spirit of militarism is crushed.’ In the same spirit, though for the opposing cause, Germany’s churches were packed for every service. The pastor of Bremen’s Unser Lieben Frauen church addressed the men of the city’s reserve battalion in a farewell sermon before their entrainment for the front: ‘It is a hard task that you are called upon to undertake, but one that is essential to your people’s salvation. Even amid death and destruction you can become wonderful evangelists for idealism if you keep your consciences clear, even in the face of the enemy. The path you must take is so dark that none of you can be assured of returning home.’ On that point at least, the pastor displayed prescience.

2 NEWS AND ABUSE

On 5 September Britain’s prime minister wrote with his accustomed levity to the First Lord of the Admiralty: ‘My dear Winston, The papers are complaining, not without reason, that we keep them on a starvation diet. I think the time has come for you to … let them have thro’ the [Press] Bureau an “appreciation” of the events of the week; with such a seasoning of condiments as your well-skilled hand can supply. For all that the public knows, they might as well be living in the days of the prophet Isaiah, whose idea of battle was “confused noise & garments rolled in blood”.’

A German priest observed: ‘If before the war the newspaper was the friend of the house, now it is its ruler, for it determines the content of almost every conversation among family and friends.’ The consequence of
the public addiction to news, in the new age of the mass-circulation press, was that every government strove ruthlessly to manipulate presentation, through the written and spoken word, songs and the newly invented newsreel – by 1918 the French army had produced more than six hundred movies for public consumption. In several Paris music halls, including the Moulin Rouge, cinema performances supplanted live shows.

All the belligerents recognised the importance of American support, and embarked upon a vigorous contest to secure this.
The Times
editorialised smugly in August: ‘it is with profound satisfaction that the British people have taken note that the cause in which they are fighting has the sympathy, the virtually unqualified sympathy, of their American kinsmen’. In truth, matters were more complicated. An Indiana editor wrote with a disdain widely echoed across the continent: ‘We never appreciated so keenly as now the foresight exercised by our forefathers in emigrating from Europe.’ President Woodrow Wilson, unfailingly moralistic, believed that the German and Austro-Hungarian systems of government required radical change, while declining to attribute sole responsibility for the war to the Germans. US industrialists identified, privately at least, a strong interest in an outcome that weakened global competition from Germany. Their country from the outset leaned towards the Entente, and some important Americans offered endorsements, notable among them ex-president Theodore Roosevelt. He emphasised the rights of small nations, especially Belgium, although until the 1915 sinking of the
Lusitania
he favoured armed neutrality rather than American belligerence. But the Central Powers also commanded significant support, especially in German ethnic communities. A German information bureau opened in the United States on 14 August, and the allies followed suit soon afterwards.

In France on 19 September, in the wake of battlefield crisis censorship was drastically tightened: editorial comment was banned that made ‘intemperate attacks on the government or on the army high command’, as were ‘articles encouraging the termination or suspension of hostilities’. Early in October Clemenceau’s newspaper
l’Homme libre
was shut down for a week, as a penalty for its exposure of the scandalous neglect of treatment for wounded soldiers. Ministers urged all titles to stop printing casualty lists. In Germany curbs on newspaper comment became rigorously enforced only in 1915, but after a Berlin central censorship office was established in October 1914, all discussion of military setbacks or defeats was officially banned, as were criticism of high policy, discussion of war aims, and dissent about the merits of the struggle.

At this early phase of the war, in all countries there was widespread support for ruthless news management. The writer Hilaire Belloc urged that bad tidings as well as military secrets should be suppressed: ‘It is … wise to keep the mass of people in ignorance of disaster that may be immediately repaired, or of follies or even vices in government which may be repressed before they become dangerous.’ Belloc later wrote to G.K. Chesterton: ‘It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation.’ But the relationship between Britain’s government and press was poisoned by the draconian manner in which censorship was implemented in the first months of war, and by suppression even of items of news about events at the front that were well known to the enemy.

All the belligerents sought to mobilise their sharpest and most elegant pens to make the case for their causes. Anatole France denounced not merely the Kaiser’s regime, but also German culture, history and even wine. The composer Camille Saint-Saëns railed against Wagner. Some writers professed to have discovered that killing was virtuous. In an essay on war and literature, published in the early autumn of 1914, Edmund Gosse characterised war as a ‘great scavenger of thought’. He likened the red stream of blood to a fluid the function of which was to ‘clean out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of intellect’. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, argued in the pamphlet ‘To Arms!’: ‘Happy the man who can die with the thought that in this greatest crisis of all he had served his country to the uttermost.’

On 18 October, fifty-four literary panjandrums jointly put their names to an article in the
New York Times
headed ‘Famous British Authors Defend England’s War’. Facsimile signatures of the named writers were printed at the foot of the piece. One of them, Arnold Bennett, produced more than three hundred propaganda articles in the course of the war. He confided in a letter to his American publisher that he had penned his first pamphlet – ‘Liberty: A Statement of the British Case’, published in October 1914 – because he feared that ‘pacifist and financial influences’ in Britain and the US might ‘force a peace too soon’ – before German militarism was decisively smashed. When a writer in the
New Statesman
questioned the credentials of novelists to pontificate about the issues of peace and war, Bennett responded somewhat pompously: ‘As war is pre-eminently an affair of human nature, a triumph of instinct over reason, it seems to me not improper that serious novelists (who are supposed to know a little about human nature …) should be permitted to express themselves concerning the phenomenon of a nation at war without being insulted.’
More pragmatically, Bennett found the government shilling useful; he and Ford Madox Ford were among writers who accepted substantial cheques for their services from the government propaganda bureau established at Wellington House.

In Germany, an academic noted in September that forty-three of the nation’s sixty-nine history professors were labouring on articles about the war. Rudolf Eucken, a philosophy professor at Jena and a Nobel laureate, made thirty-six propaganda speeches in 1914. Berlin philosopher Alois Riehl exulted in print that ‘our first victory … has been the victory over ourselves. Never was a people so united as in those early, unforgettable August days … Each of us felt that we lived for the whole and that the whole lived in all of us.’ Among the most notorious betrayals of academic integrity was the so-called ‘Manifesto of the Intellectuals of Germany’, signed in October by ninety-three names headed by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, protesting at the ‘lies and calumnies’ of the allies, who were ‘endeavouring to stain the honour of Germany in her hard struggle for existence – a struggle which has been forced upon her’.

The violence of competing rhetoric and printed broadsides intensified rapidly. The destruction of Louvain and the bombardment of Reims cathedral became formidable weapons in promoting the allies’ case that they were defending civilised values against Germanic barbarism. In France especially, where before the war divisions between Catholics and secularists ran deep, revulsion towards all things German proved a unifying force. In Britain, Wellington House published a report compiled by Lord Bryce’s ‘Committee to Investigate Alleged German Outrages’ in Belgium and France, a document magisterial in language but sensationalist in content.

Several French writers claimed to identify significant physical distinctions between their own people and those of the Kaiser. A distinguished historian, Augustin Cochin, asserted in apparent earnest that there was a uniquely German smell – ‘very strong and impossible to get rid of’ – as well as an explicitly German species of flea, allegedly larger than those that afflicted French soldiers. It was such excesses as this that caused thoughtful and rational people to recoil in disgust from propaganda. As the war advanced and its horrors increased, some went further, succumbing to cynicism about the merits of all purported evidence and arguments in support of their own national causes.

Those who suppose the modern media uniquely prone to hyperbole, fantasy and deceit should consider the madness of rumour and invention
that overtook the world’s press in 1914. The
Daily Mail
published a detailed account of an entirely fictional naval victory. ‘If damaging rumours start,’ wrote Dr Eugen Lampe in Ljubljana early in September 1914, ‘they spread at immense speed. If two people meet on the street, they ask each other: Any news? Nobody knows anything. But there are people who always choose to believe and broadcast the worst. For a week, the atmosphere has been extremely tense. Families, whose husbands and sons are in the army, mourn, pray and tremble. They fight to get at newspapers. Then they whisper: there are none of our casualties on the list of wounded. They do not want to tell us! There are so many that they cannot record all of them!’

Few of the journalists called upon to write about the war had any knowledge of military matters, and their ignorance showed. The introduction of trench warfare was at first greeted in the French press as a cowardly innovation by the Germans, who were mocked as ‘moles’. Many papers talked up the enemy’s weakness, flagging morale and food shortages. Austrian cities were said to be pleading with the Italians to save them from looming famine, while Germany was allegedly struggling in vain to recruit Italians to replace mobilised factory workers. Late in September
The Times
produced a wildly exaggerated calculation, based on the casualty lists, showing that the BEF had lost 40 per cent of its officers in a month of fighting. Ludwig Wittgenstein, aboard a Vistula picket boat, wrote on 25 October: ‘Yesterday evening a silly report came that Paris had fallen. At first I was delighted, until I realised the story could not be true. These fantasy reports are always a bad sign. If there was genuine good news, such nonsenses would not be necessary.’ Five days later, he eagerly scanned a German newspaper, and feared the worst after recognising the vacuity of its content: ‘No good news – which means the same as bad news!’

Meanwhile in France, on 19 August
l’Eclaireur
of Nice announced a fictitious clash between the Royal Navy and the High Seas Fleet in the North Sea, in which the British had allegedly lost sixteen dreadnoughts including
Iron Duke
,
Lion
and
Superb
. French newspapers were especially enthusiastic about publishing reports concerning the German Crown Prince, an army commander in the field. On 5 August he was the victim of an assassination attempt in Berlin; on the 15th seriously wounded on the French front and removed to hospital; on the 24th subject to another assassination attempt; on 4 September he committed suicide, though he was resurrected on 18 October to be wounded again; on the 20th his wife was watching over his death bed; but on 3 November
he was certified insane. None of these stories contained the smallest element of truth.

L’Action française
informed the public that the Maggi dairies and Kub shop chains were in reality intelligence centres manned by Prussian officers who had become naturalised Frenchmen in anticipation of war; radio transmitters were concealed in every dairy, and Maggi milk was infused with poison. These reports caused mobs to storm the premises of these perfectly innocent, though foreign-owned, businesses. Among the most preposterous myths to be widely broadcast was that of ‘
turpinite
’, a new super-explosive supposedly invented by the chemist Eugène Turpin, which would effortlessly extinguish German troops in their trenches. The French satirical magazine
Le Canard enchaîné
was founded at around this time, as a reaction to the deceits perpetrated in the traditional press.