Myths and Legends of the Second World War (7 page)

Yet another clutch of Russian rumours was recorded by Vera Brittain, whose diary formed the basis of her celebrated memoir
Testament of Youth
. Entries in early September record:

Only that day I had heard from my dentist that a hundred thousand Russians had landed in England; ‘a whole trainful of them,' I reported, ‘is said to have passed through Stoke, so that is why the Staffordshire people are so wise.' But when I returned to Buxton I learnt that a similar contingent had been seen in Manchester, and for a few days the astonishing ubiquitousness of the invisible Russians formed a topic of absorbing interest at every tea-table throughout the country. By the time, however, that we started believing in Russians, England had become almost accustomed to the War.

Two decades later, the writer and journalist Arthur Machen offered an interesting parallel with his own legend of bowmen and angels at Mons:

Some people may remember that England had an earlier source of comfort and consolation. I should say assurance, for I think it was almost in the first days of the war … that everybody was talking of ‘the Russians.' ‘300,000 Rooshians,' as Jos Sedley assured his sister, Amelia, were coming to our assistance. Their trains had been observed passing with drawn blinds, through Ealing, Moreton-on-the-Marsh, Rugby Junction – through any station and every station. There were myriad on myriads of them – and your friends got extremely cross if you hinted a doubt.

But the Russian hosts faded gently away, and the British army was left to fight its own battles at Ypres and elsewhere. And the Bowmen, who had turned into Angels, took the place of the forces of the Czar. Great numbers of people made up their minds that the story was true from beginning to end.

News of the Russians was spread by some who should have known better. Lord Wester Wemyss, then the Rear-Admiral commanding the Channel-based 12th Cruiser Squadron, recorded the following in his diary:

In letters from various friends I had heard many rumours of the presence of vast hordes of Russian troops in England on their way to the battlefields of France, but I could not bring myself to believe in the story. If indeed they were being embarked at Archangel, why not disembark them at Brest? But I received on September 3rd a letter from a very old friend, Commander Gerald Digby, who had retired many years ago but was now working at the Admiralty, telling me as a fact that 80,000 Russian troops were embarking at Southampton, truly a marvel.

One can only guess at the reasons why so ‘stolid' a man as Commander Digby succumbed to such fevered enthusiasm, unless the Admiralty were deliberately spreading the rumour to bolster morale. The point about Brest is well made, and in the main the British press held the story at arm's length. Of the nationals, only the
Daily Mail
and
Evening News
published articles, which were respectively satirical and sceptical. The myth in its various forms was also gently derided by Michael McDonagh of
The Times
, who recorded on September 8th that:

There is being circulated everywhere a story that an immense force of Russian soldiers – little short of a million, it is said – have passed, or are still passing, through England on their way to France. They are being brought from Archangel – just in time before that port was closed by ice – landed at Leith, and carried at night in hundreds of trains straight to ports on the south coast. This great news is vouched by people likely to be well informed, but is being kept secret by the authorities – not a word about it is allowed in the newspapers – until all the Russians have arrived at the Western Front. It is said in confirmation that belated wayfarers at railway stations throughout the country saw long train after long train running through with blinds down, but still allowing glimpses of carriages packed with fierce-looking bearded fellows in fur hats.

What a surprise in store for the Germans when they find themselves faced on the west with hordes of Russians, while other hordes are pressing on them from the east.

Lord Bertie, the British Ambassador to France, noted the rumour in Paris on the same date:

Many people here will have it that 50,000 Russians have landed in England, en route for France; they do not say how they got to England! A Regent of the Bank of France was quoted to me as a good authority; my answer was that there are foolish Regents … Bob Vyner saw the Russians at Victoria Station! There is hardly anything that people will not believe or invent.

Since the rumour had a measure of military and propaganda value, at first the Press Bureau took no steps to deny it. Indeed when a telegram from Rome on September 9th appeared to give official confirmation of the presence of 250,000 Russian troops in France, the response given by the Bureau was suitably ambiguous: there could be no confirmation of the statements contained in the message, yet no objection to them being published. As a result the papers became more open in reporting the story, for example the
Daily News
for September 9th published the following:

The official sanction to the publication of the above (the telegram from Rome) removes the newspaper reserve with regard to the rumours which for the last fortnight have coursed with such astonishing persistency through the length and breadth of England. Whatever be the unvarnished truth about the Russian forces in the West, so extraordinary has been the ubiquity of the rumours in question, that they are almost more amazing if they are false than if they are true. Either a baseless rumour had obtained a currency and a credence perhaps unprecedented in history, or, incredible as it may appear, it is a fact that Russian troops, whatever the number may be, have been disembarked and passed through this country, while not one man in ten thousand was able to say with certainty whether their very existence was not a myth.

Five days later, on September 14th, the same paper displayed less caution when running a curious dispatch filed by P.J. Philip, its special correspondent in France. According to the
News
, his report served to prove ‘the correctness of the general impression that Russian troops have been moved through England', although precisely who or what Philip saw with his own eyes remains unclear.

Tonight, in an evening paper, I find the statement ‘de bonne source' that the German Army in Belgium has been cut … by the Belgian Army reinforced by Russian troops. The last phrase unseals my pen. For two days I have been on a long trek looking for the Russians, and now I have found them – where and how it would not be discreet to tell, but the published statement that they are here is sufficient, and of my own knowledge I can answer for their presence.

That same day, September 14th, and with the Battle of the Marne now won, the story was officially and firmly denied by the Press Bureau, which stated:

There is no truth whatever in the rumours that Russian soldiers have either landed in or passed through Great Britain on their way to France or Belgium. The statement that Russian troops are now on Belgian or French soil may also be discredited.

The next day the
Evening News
met this bulletin with a compendium of typical reports:

All roads lead to Rome, and the railroad from Archangel led everywhere. The Cossacks were seen – though the blinds were always down – at Peckham, at Chichester, at York, at Bristol, at Ealing, at Darlington, on Ludgate Hill Bridge, at Evesham, at Peterborough. A grey cloud of fierce, whiskered men went rolling down to Cheltenham, at Euston their passing closed the station for 36 hours; at Rugby they drank great draughts of coffee. In the East End children playing by the railway embankment were gladdened with showers of Russian money thrown to them from a passing train. Cossacks swarmed at Southampton, and a London milkman, clattering his cans to salute the dawn, saw the myriads of the north march past him in the silent, awful streets …

Of course, there was always this suspicious circumstance; you never met a man who had seen the Russians. You met a man who knew a man who had seen the Russians; and this should have aroused our suspicions.

Naturally enough, not everyone was prepared to accept that the ‘fierce-looking fellows' sporting beards, cigars and fur hats were a fiction, as McDonagh noted in his journal on September 15th:

London is depressed today. The flower of our fondest hope has been suddenly blighted. The Press Bureau has issued an absolute denial of the rumour so widely credited a few days ago that an immense force of Russians had reached the Western Front through this country. Like everybody else. I kept the ball a-rolling, and the only excuse that can be offered is that it was a case of the wish being father to the thought. Indeed, looking back on the rumour now, the wonder is how it ever came to be believed in. Why, it not only invited suspicion but shouted for it. The story of railway porters at Edinburgh having had to sweep the snow out of the carriages of the trains conveying the Russians ought to have been sufficient to damn the rumour.

Still, there are people so happily constituted that their faith in the story is strengthened rather than shaken by the official denial. ‘Believe you me,' they say with a delightful air of confidence, ‘the contradiction is meant to deceive the Germans. The Russian Army is on the Western Front all right.'

Conspiratorial notions of a double bluff meant that the story remained current until well into October, as the Reverend Clark recorded:

Saturday 3 October: Popular belief in the passage of the Russians – Archangel: Scotland ports: English railways: Cardiff and Bristol – continues. The latest explanation of absence of news of them is that their guns went down in the wreck of the ‘Oceanic' off the Scotch coast. They cannot get to work till fresh artillery is got for them from Archangel.

Commenting on the myth in his memoir
Queer People
, Scotland Yard CID Chief Basil Thomson observed:

There was nothing to be done but let the delusion burn itself out. I have often wondered since whether some self-effacing patriot did not circulate this story in order to put heart into his fellow-countrymen at a time when depression would have been the most disastrous.

According to the account by Brigadier-General John Charteris, the rumour also entered into wide circulation among troops at the front. Charteris served as chief intelligence officer at GHQ until December 1917, and in 1931 published his wartime journal. In mid-September 1914 Charteris recorded of one of his fellow officers:

M is full of stories of Russians passing through London; says his sister saw them, and when I said I didn't believe it, retorted, ‘Do you mean to say my sister is a liar!' So that ended that discussion. I asked at GHQ about the Russians, and was told, of course, that it was rubbish. They could not get there and would have nowhere to go, if they did. But a lot of men here have got hold of the idea – all from home letters.

On November 18th the story was denied in Parliament by the Under-Secretary of State for War, Harold Tennant, in response to a question from a back-bench MP

Tennant: 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 area of the European War.

The origin of the myth remained inscrutable, even to those who searched diligently at the time. A variety of explanations have been offered over the years, some of them more credible than others. According to Charteris, in February 1915:

The Russians in England (whom poor M's sister saw!) were undoubtedly the Territorial units moving through Great Britain on their way to ports of embarkation for the East. One youth here adds the embellishment that at a wayside station one bearded warrior, asked where he came from, said truthfully enough, Ross-shire, which sounded like Russia. Even without this embellishment, the explanation is adequate. We shall have may more such rumours before the war ends. A wise scepticism seems called for with regard to all unlikely rumours. Intelligence work teaches scepticism, if it teaches nothing else.

The Ross-shire version, also endorsed by Basil Thomson in 1922, was fleshed out by Lord Lovat in 1978. According to Lovat, the event which triggered the tale was the transfer by rail of the Highland Mounted Brigade (or Lovat Scouts) from Blairgowrie to Huntingdon in August 1914:

This started the rumour that a force of Russians had landed in the north of Scotland, and were on their way south. The fantastic story, which spread like wildfire, had some foundation, for it fitted in remarkably well with the movements of the Highland Brigade. More than a dozen troop trains had passed through Newcastle and York, travelling in succession during the hours of darkness. Many of the men on board were reported to speak a foreign language, wear curious headgear, and be uncommunicative and shy in manner. When asked from whence they came by benevolent ladies staffing a canteen on York platform, they could only murmur, ‘Roscha' (Ross-shire). Those who have witnessed the hysteria of non-combatants in big cities will not be surprised that witnesses were soon prepared to swear that the strangers had snow on their boots, while others, even better informed, had learned from high officials the exact numbers in the Russian Expeditionary Force. Those who disbelieved such bunkum were suspected of being pro-German.

Various other explanations were offered at the time. One held that a food wholesaler in London had received a telegram announcing that 200,000 ‘Russians' were being despatched via Archangel, with reference to eggs rather than soldiers. Interestingly, MI5 files declassified in 1997 reveal ‘eggs' to have been the codeword for troops used by prewar German spies. Another explanation told of an excited French officer with an imperfect grasp of English who went about near the front, demanding ‘Where are ze rations?' From Paris, Lord Bertie offered that a ship had been due to leave Archangel for Britain with gold worth £8 million, and a number of British warships detailed to escort it, a precaution which might have aroused suspicion. It is also said that a few Russian officers had appeared in Scotland to take up staff positions and purchase munitions, but ultimately the unfamiliar garb and accent of the Lovat Scouts may be the most credible explanation. If so, as Liddell Hart noted, a statue in Whitehall to the Unknown Railway Porter may be long overdue.