Publishing in the First World War: Essays in Book History

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Publishing in the First World War Essays in Book History

Edited by

Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed

Publishing in the First World War

Also by Mary Hammond READING, PUBLISHING AND THE FORMATION OF LITERARY TASTE IN ENGLAND, 1880–1914 (2006)

Publishing in the First World War Essays in Book History Edited by

Mary Hammond Open University, UK

and

Shafquat Towheed Open University, UK and University of London

Published in association with the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Selection, Introduction and editorial matter © Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed 2007 Individual chapters © their respective contributors 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copying or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–50076–1 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–50076–5 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 16

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For our families

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Contents List of Illustrations

ix

List of Tables

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Acknowledgements

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Notes on Contributors

xii

Introduction Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed

1

Part I

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Profit and Patriotism

1 For Country, Conscience and Commerce: Publishers and Publishing, 1914–18 Jane Potter 2 ‘No such bookselling has ever before taken place in this country’: Propaganda and the Wartime Distribution Practices of W.H. Smith & Son Stephen Colclough 3 Translating Peace: Pacifist Publishing and the Transmission of Foreign Texts Grace Brockington

Part II

Reading and National Consciousness

4 Sepoys, Sahibs and Babus: India, the Great War and Two Colonial Journals Santanu Das 5 The Battle of the Books: Supplying Prisoners of War Rainer Pöppinghege 6 Australian Soldiers and the World of Print During the Great War Amanda Laugesen

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11

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59 61 78

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viii Contents

Part III

Writing the Trenches

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7 The Tuition of Manhood: ‘Sapper’s’ War Stories and the Literature of War Jessica Meyer

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8 British Army Trench Journals and a Geography of Identity John Pegum

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9 ‘A New and Vital Moral Factor’: Cartoon Book Publishing in Britain During the First World War Nicholas Hiley

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Part IV

Enlisted at Home

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10 Translating Propaganda: John Buchan’s Writing During the First World War Kate Macdonald

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11 Making a Text the Fordian Way: Between St Dennis and St George, Propaganda and the First World War Sara Haslam

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12 Depicting the War on the Western Front: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Publication of The British Campaign in France and Flanders Keith Grieves

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Select Bibliography

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Index

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List of Illustrations 2.1 2.2 2.3 5.1

5.2 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7

9.8 9.9 9.10 9.11 9.12 9.13 9.14

W.H. Smith bookstall, December 1913 William Sanders, Germany’s Two Voices (NWAC pamphlet printed by WHS, 1918) Advert for C.A. McCurdy, Guilty! Prince Lichnowsky’s Disclosures The reading room in Göttingen Camp. From: Alexander Backhaus, Die Kriegsgefangenen in Deutschland. Gegen 250 Wirklichkeitsaufnahmen aus deutschen Gefangenenlagern (Montanus: Siegen, Leipzig and Berlin, 1915) The camp library at Ohrdruf. Ibid. The cover of Haselden’s Reflections in War Time, Vol. IX, Daily Mirror, 1916 G.A. Stevens, An English ABC for Little Willie and Others, the Daily News, 1914 Jack Walker, ‘The Kaiser’s Dream: The End of the World’, the Daily Graphic Special War Cartoons No. 2, xi W.J. Evans, ‘The Cure’, October 1914 Fred Pegram, ‘Mother Goose-Step Rhymes’, Punch’s Almanack for 1915, ix Alfred Leete, ‘Schmidt the Spy and His Messages to Berlin’, 1916 Walter Emanuel and John Hassall, ‘At the Bone-breaker’s’, Keep Smiling! More News by Liarless for German Homes, p.11 Illustration by Charles Grave for The Invasion of England: Translation of the Official Huns’ Handbook, p.17 Bairnsfather’s ‘Coiffure in the Trenches’, from Fragments from France, 1916 Raemaekers, ‘Seduction’, 1915 Raemaekers, ‘Germany and the Neutrals’, 1916 Edmund Sullivan, The Kaiser’s Garland – Angel on the Chopping-Block Will Dyson, ‘Wonders of Science!’ Kultur Cartoons ‘Black Cat’ advertisement, The Times, 20 December 1916

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28 39 41

81 81 151 152 153 154 156 158

159 161 165 167 169 170 172 174

List of Tables 2.1 Turnover of newspapers at W.H. Smith bookstalls and ‘B’ shops, 1913/14–1919/20 2.2 Newspapers distributed by W.H. Smith to bookstalls and bookshops, 1915–18 (in Quires) 2.3 Circulation of the Daily Mail, 1915–18 2.4 Circulation of the Daily Express, 1915–18 2.5 Turnover of books at W.H. Smith bookstalls, 1913/14–1919/20 5.1 Percentage of books borrowed by POWs from the Göttingen University library, May 1916–November 1918, by subject 7.1 Number of ‘Sapper’s’ war stories sold per year, 1916–26 7.2 Number of ‘Sapper’s’ reprinted war stories published per year, 1927–39 7.3 Number of Drummond novels published per year, 1921–39 7.4 Number of Drummond novels sold by price to 1939 10.1 John Buchan’s histories of the First World War written and published during the war, and their known translations

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29 30 31 31 32

82 116 117 122 123

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Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank The Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London for permission to reproduce ‘The Battle of Transloy Ridges 1–18 October. A British soldier poses lying reading on an abandoned German stretcher, High Wood,’ Negative No: IWM Q4370, on the cover of this book. We would also like to thank the following for permission to quote material in individual chapters. Mike Thompson, BBC (Chapter 1); The W.H. Smith Archive (Chapter 2); The Society of Authors and the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (Chapter 3); Mirrorpix, Solo Syndication/Associated Newspapers, The British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, the Punch Cartoon Library, Tonie and Valmai Holt Bairnsfather’s biographers, and British American Tobacco (Chapter 9); A.P. Watt Ltd on behalf of The Lord Tweedsmuir and Jean, Lady Tweedsmuir (Chapter 10); Liverpool Record Office, and The Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London (Chapter 12). Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

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Notes on Contributors Grace Brockington is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Clare Hall and the Faculty of English, Cambridge. She is currently preparing a book on pacifism and the arts in Britain, 1900–18, and conducting research into Anglo-European cultural relations at the fin de siècle. Stephen Colclough is a lecturer in English at the University of Wales, Bangor. He is currently working on the distribution, wholesaling and retailing of texts 1830–1919. He has published on the history of reading 1700–1900 and the poetry of John Clare, and is a contributor to the Centre’s History of the Book on Demand Series and the later volumes of the Cambridge History of the Book. Santanu Das has recently joined Queen Mary, University of London as British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, and was formerly Research Fellow at St John’s, Cambridge. His monograph Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature was published in 2005. He has also published in journals such as Modernism/Modernity and Textual Practice. Keith Grieves is Reader in History at Kingston University and has a research interest in the cultural history of Britain in the era of the Great War. His recent publications include Sussex in the First World War (2004) and articles on associational life and commemorative processes in rural communities after the war. He is currently working on the rural library movement and towards a larger study of social change in the countryside after the Great War. Mary Hammond is Lecturer in Book History and Literature at the Open University, UK. She is the author of Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England 1880–1914 (2006) and a number of articles on reading, writing and publishing the literature of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. She is also supervisor at the Open University of the AHRC-funded project ‘The Reading Experience Database 1800–1945’ (RED). Sara Haslam is Lecturer in Literature at the Open University, UK. She is co-founder of the Ford Madox Ford Society, and the author of Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the First World War (2002) as well as a number of articles on Ford, James, Hardy, Conrad and the fiction of the First World War. xii

Notes on Contributors xiii

Nicholas Hiley is a social historian who has published widely on the development of the mass media in Britain from the 1880s to the 1920s. He has previously worked at the Universities of Cambridge and London, and is currently Head of the Centre for the Study of Cartoons and Caricature at the University of Kent. Amanda Laugesen is a lecturer in History and American Studies at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. She is the author of several books, including the lexical monographs Convict Words: Language in Early Colonial Australia (2002) and Diggerspeak: the Language of Australians at War (2005). She is also the author of numerous scholarly articles on aspects of Australian and United States history and has published in journals such as Libraries and Culture, Library Quarterly and Journal of the Australian War Memorial. Her current research focuses on the history of libraries, reading, and the book, in both Australia and the United States, including a project on Australian soldiers’ reading in the First and Second World Wars. Kate Macdonald is a member of staff at the Department of English, University of Ghent, Belgium. She obtained her degrees at the University of Aberdeen and University College, London. She is the editor of the John Buchan Journal, Belgium, of [http://www.johnbuchan.co.uk], and of John Buchan’s Greenmantle for Oxford University Press. Jessica Meyer has recently completed her PhD on ‘The First World War and Narratives of Heroic and Domestic Masculinity in Britain, 1915–37’ at the University of Cambridge. She holds an MPhil in European Studies from the University of Cambridge and a BA from Yale University. Her publications include articles on shell shock, martial masculinity and the experiences of the wives of disabled ex-servicemen. She currently lives in Oxford where she is working on a book on British masculinities during and after the First World War and editing a collection of essays on the First World War and popular culture. John Pegum completed his PhD entitled ‘Foreign Fields: Identity and Location in Soldiers’ Writings of the First World War’ at the University of Cambridge in 2005. Since then he has been teaching TwentiethCentury literature at several Cambridge colleges. He is currently working on a project to digitise the British and Dominion Forces trench journals. Rainer Pöppinghege, Privatdozent Dr phil, is CEO of the Historical Institute at Paderborn University. His 1994 doctoral thesis was about German students during the Weimar Republic. Afterwards he enjoyed a

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vocational training and was appointed Public Relations journalist. He returned to a university career in 1998 when he became assistant for German History. His most recent publications are on communication history of WWI, including staff magazines and POW-newspapers in Germany, Britain and France. Jane Potter is Senior Lecturer in Publishing at Oxford Brookes University, and Assistant to the Archivist at Wolfson College, Oxford. She is the author of Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women’s Literary Responses to the Great War 1914–18 (2005). Shafquat Towheed teaches on the MA in the History of the Book at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, and for the Open University. He was educated at University College, London and at Cambridge and was until recently a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Nottingham. He has written numerous articles on late 19th- and early 20th-century English literature, and is currently writing a study on the intersections of international copyright law and English literature, c.1880–1930 and editing Edith Wharton’s correspondence with the House of Macmillan.

Introduction Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed

The First World War is probably the most misrepresented – as well as the most overrepresented – war in history, endlessly recycled in a way that has cemented its image, if not as apocalypse, then at least as iconoclasm. ‘The Great War was more ironic than any before or since,’ Paul Fussell declared boldly in 1975, ‘it reversed the idea of Progress.’1 The war, Lyn MacDonald was still able to agree 12 years later, was a wind that ‘laid waste a generation and blew up into a hurricane that swept away their safe and ordered world.’2 On one level the enduring myth of a supposedly ahistorical, even anti-historical conflict (‘the war to end all wars’) is understandable. The Great War has become a useful shorthand term for social breakdown, human loss and institutional stupidity, and viewed in the light of our 21st-century obsession with completed chronological periods, there is something very attractive about this particular watershed. How else do we explain the huge social, economic and political changes that occurred after 1918? How else can we account for the rise of modernism and its political concomitant, nationalism? It would be meaningless to argue that the annihilation of millions of people did not constitute a psychological discontinuity between the pre- and post-war periods. But equally we need to account for continuities. The emergence of new academic foci such as feminism and postcolonial studies over the last 20 years have forced us to become increasingly aware of the importance of explaining these continuities in a manner which avoids the simplistic popular teleology of Imperial stasis, military disaster and disillusioned cynicism, with a neat corresponding rupture in culture and in art. As Jay Winter has pointed out, history is rarely so neat, or indeed, so forgiving: ‘To array the past in such a way is to invite distortion by losing a sense of its messiness, its non-linearity, its vigorous and stubbornly visible incompatibilities.’3 1

2 Publishing in the First World War

This messiness is everywhere. For example, the struggle for sexual equality was neither begun nor solved by the war but simply entered into an intensely contentious – if temporary – new phase, visibly demonstrating the lack of congruence between debates about suffrage and the rhetoric of war. Similarly, it is still open to debate whether the conflict bolstered or undermined the entrenched social stratification of British society; many of the visible changes to the class system in the aftermath of the war owed as much to earlier unionised agitation as they did to the myth of ‘lions being led by donkeys’. Recent scholarship no longer concentrates solely on men who served in or wrote about the war (a minority, after all), but also on women and non-combatants.4 Similarly, the idea that the war predominantly concerned the men who, in the idyllic summer before August 1914, ‘lolled outside on a folding canvas chaise, or swam, or walked in the countryside…went on picnics, [and] had tea served from a white wicker table under the trees’ has been systematically challenged; new historicist, Marxist or feminist scholars are interested in the wartime experiences of those who served the tea as well as the King.5 This more nuanced approach to the literary artefacts of the war has accelerated over the last five years, producing stimulating new work on lesser known poets and novelists, on popular as well as élite art forms, and on soldiers’ relationships with each other as well as with their nation states.6 The Great War was a period of intense and unparalleled creative activity. By 1914, as a result of almost half a century of education reform, Britain had a more literate population than ever before, and this potential for expression found many outlets during the four years of the conflict. The need for reassurance, news, understanding, justification, or simply for entertainment, drove most people to read – and write – in ever-greater numbers and ever-increasing numbers of ways. But while scholarly attention has begun to consider the multiplicity of writing produced and consumed by those who experienced the Great War, one crucial area of study has remained surprisingly neglected: few have yet to consider in any sustained, systematic way how this outpouring of words – old and new – was printed and distributed, controlled or got around, to whom it was available and from whom it was withheld. To give just one example of a glaringly missed opportunity, in his important work on propaganda Peter Buitenhuis explains how, in the early years of the war, ‘in countless newspaper articles, pamphlets, and books that were sponsored by Wellington House’ well-known writers promulgated the confident and officially

Introduction 3

sanctioned view that German militarism could be destroyed. ‘Private publishing houses were used for the publication of books and pamphlets,’ he explains, ‘to make it seem that British propaganda was solely the creation of private citizens.’7 This is Buitenhuis’s only reference to private publishing houses, and he completely fails to recognise the contradictory forces at work here (among them profit versus patriotism), or indeed to differentiate between competing publishers whose individual house histories largely determined the form, context and relative success or failure of the Wellington House books. Buitenhuis’s omission is not untypical; while isolated works are increasingly making crucial investigations into the mechanics of print culture in the First World War, much of this research is as yet unpublished, and it has never yet been brought together into a critical dialogue which might be of use to scholars outside literary studies and book history.8 This book seeks to remedy the lack. Taking as its prime focus the production and distribution networks which struggled to cope with new constraints and even newer demands, Publishing in the First World War brings together 12 scholars, both new and established, whose work investigates the movement of information and entertainment across and between bodies and boundaries at a time when both were under extreme duress. The contributors use a range of methods including bibliometric analysis, investigation of previously neglected publishers’ archives, close reading of unpublished correspondence and little-known fiction, and surveys of reading practice. They concentrate on several fronts and a range of ‘reading nations’. In doing so they illuminate – both individually and collectively – some fruitful new areas of enquiry for scholars and students interested, not just in literary history, but also in the social, cultural and political history of this period. As these essays show, the First World War profoundly altered the ways in which readers and writers alike envisaged the uses of print, and thus how they learned, thought about and represented themselves. The picture that emerges from these 12 essays is one of complex social and cultural interactions, of a diversity of responses to the war, and of co-extensive continuities and disruptions across chronological periods. This book will be of value to anyone interested in expanding their understanding of the First World War beyond the neatly rhetorical construction of an irreparable watershed, encouraging the consideration of complex transactions between supply and demand, readers and writers, profit and patriotism, national and transnational ideologies, and individual and collective reading experiences.


The book is organised into four parts, each of three chapters. Part I: Profit and Patriotism explores the issues affecting distribution networks and the print trade in Britain, which was initially profoundly disrupted by war. The total number of books published in 1913 was 12,379, whereas in 1917 it had fallen to 8,131.9 The price of paper almost doubled in the first two weeks of conflict and rationing was quick to follow, and yet somehow the trade was expected to cope with an immediate 25 per cent increase in demand for news.10 The steady personnel drain made it increasingly difficult to continue ‘business as usual’. But the war also impacted in less obvious ways. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the trade journal the Publishers’ Circular echoed the national sentiment in expressing patriotic resignation over the outbreak of hostilities, feeling that the war had been ‘forced on this country by the high-handed action of Germany.’ But it also expressed the regret of an industry that was already profoundly transnational: ‘In view of the very friendly relations which have always existed between the British and German book trades…we are sure that the German book-sellers regret as much as we do this sudden termination of business relations.’11 In fact, relations with Germany were often better than those between rival publishers at home. As Jane Potter demonstrates in the opening chapter, instead of being a cohesive group which easily assimilated Wellington House’s secret ‘war of words’, at the outbreak of war publishing houses in Britain represented a wide diversity of vested interests and opinions. Far from simply promoting the state’s war aims, British publishers during the conflict responded with subtlety, sophistication and sometimes great difficulty to their Government’s unambiguous call to arms. Stephen Colclough explores the public distribution of these conflicting viewpoints in Chapter 2. Analysing the ways in which war affected the business of W.H. Smith & Son and how this conservative stalwart of Edwardian Britain responded to the crisis, Colclough’s examination of previously unexplored archive material demonstrates the profound impact that Smith’s intervention into the battle for hearts and minds – often motivated by patriotism, not profit – had on Britain’s wartime readers. Not all Britain’s publishing output was available at Smith’s, of course. One of the most contentious issues effecting the publishing industry was pacifism, a stance which became increasingly demonised as the war went on through the deliberate confusion of issues of morality, sexuality and non-participation. In 1918, for example, Messrs C.W. Daniel, the publisher of Rose Allatini’s pacifist novel Despised and Rejected, was prosecuted and heavily fined, ostensibly under the

Introduction 5

Defence of the Realm Act but clearly also because of the novel’s homosexual subtext. ‘When I read the MS I remarked upon the unusual character of the pacifist hero,’ an aggrieved Daniel admitted afterwards to the Publishers’ Circular. ‘But the book did not openly avow immoral relations …While the penalties ostensibly cover only the charges under DORA, there is little doubt…that they also cover a charge for which I was not prosecuted and of which I am innocent.’12 Yet despite – or perhaps because of – the controversy it attracted, pacifist publishing was potentially profitable during the war. There was no neat overlap between the political sympathies of publishers and the material they produced; publishers with known pacifist sympathies still worked for Wellington House, and enlisted publishers still attempted to maintain a diversity of opinion on their lists. Some publishers, however, maintained a staunchly pacifist stance which at times challenged their very livelihoods. In Chapter 3 Grace Brockington examines the ways in which a few committed anti-war publishers across Europe sought to disrupt the war effort, helping to ensure the translation and production of a body of dissenting works which existed on the ‘textual borderland between Britain and Europe’ and consistently challenged the outpourings of the pro-war propagandist press. Distribution was not effected merely through the accustomed channels described by Colclough. Nor, as Brockington demonstrates, were the implications of total war upon printing and reading felt only at home. Second-hand book depots were set up from the very start of the war and impromptu lending libraries sprang up in all theatres.13 Part II: Reading and National Consciousness explores the transnational implications of the book trade during the war by looking closely at how soldiers of three different nationalities in various locations acquired, circulated, consumed and in many cases also created print matter, and with it, fashioned a specific sense of community based on reading. Santanu Das demonstrates through an examination of two littleknown Indian war journals how, in a part of the empire which contributed 1.27 million men to the war effort, pro-British patriotism existed in a complex relationship with the struggle for a new national identity. Rainer Pöppinghege examines new archive material relating to prisoners of war, demonstrating not only that varying national policies of censorship and control determined access to print, but that prisoners also used, discovered or created reading material for themselves, formulating their own forms of readerly resistance. Amanda Laugesen explores the experience of Australian soldiers, combing through previously unpublished soldiers’ letters and suggesting ways in which the


front, as well as the wider vexed question of Australian national identity, was constructed by serving men far from home who were not just readers but also became prolific writers. Part III: Writing the Trenches continues this theme, exploring the ways in which the front was imagined and represented by both amateur and professional writers and artists in Britain. Jessica Meyer examines the war stories of ‘Sapper’ for depictions of military masculinity; using an analysis of sales figures she argues that the huge but highly historically specific popularity of these stories is crucial to an understanding of the shaping of male heroism in wartime. John Pegum excavates the hitherto neglected and generically indeterminate world of the trench journal, demonstrating how soldiers wrote and rewrote their war, not only for themselves but also for their families at home. Nicholas Hiley provides a rare focus on the ways in which visual and literary representations may have worked together (or indeed contradicted each other), examining a range of the popular cartoons with which the war abounded and arguing that as the war went on, and even in the face of continued patriotic propaganda, mainstream British publishers adopted a darker, more international cartooning style which better captured the gravity of the situation. Part IV: Enlisted at Home turns to some of the war’s most canonical writers, offering a re-examination of their work which sheds light on the ways in which they negotiated their new roles as writers of propaganda. Kate Macdonald offers new evidence of the ways in which John Buchan’s wartime writing circulated in Flemish translation for Belgian readers, suggesting that the specific local and national impact of his propaganda work had ramifications at home and abroad. Sara Haslam continues this dual approach in examining Ford Madox Ford née Hueffer’s strange and short-lived excursion into propaganda, suggesting that the experience profoundly coloured his later masterwork, The Good Soldier, a quintessential work of modernism which owed a great deal to the wartime experiences of its author. In contrast to this evidence of literary continuities, Keith Grieves places Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing of The British Campaign in France and Flanders in the context of frustrating new wartime strictures on the release of information, and concludes that the writing of hegemonic multi-volume military histories by Edwardian men of letters was one of the casualties of total war. This book is not meant to be a comprehensive account of publishing in the First World War but rather a starting point; a great many areas in the print culture of the conflict are yet to be scrutinised. What, for

Introduction 7

example, were the implications of Arabic propaganda publications for the course of the British campaign against Ottoman Turkey in Mesopotamia? Did Canadian soldiers reading on the Western Front experience the same awakening of national (literary) consciousness seen by their ANZAC comrades? How did Italian publishers meet the rising mood of nationalism in Italy’s conflict with Austria-Hungary? How effective was the iron hand of Tsarist censorship on the Eastern Front? And how did the British and Germans in their colonies ‘read’ the experience of the war in the trenches? These are just some of the topics which we have been unable to cover. Nevertheless, through its general focus on publishing history – by nature an interdisciplinary beast – this book hopes to offer as wide a range as possible of new material and new approaches to the print culture of the war, and thus perhaps to offer new insights into the relationships between human experience and recorded history in this, the most overtly contested and often overwritten of conflicts. Notes 1 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p.8. 2 Lyn MacDonald, 1914: The Days of Hope (London: Penguin, 1987), p.3. 3 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.5. 4 See, for example, Sharon Ouditt’s Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Julie Olin-Ammentorp, Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004) and Grace Brockington, ‘“Above the Battle”: Art for Art’s sake and Pacifism during the First World War’ (University of Oxford DPhil thesis, 2003). 5 Fussell, p.24. 6 See, for example, Michael Paris, Over the Top: The Great War and Juvenile Literature in Britain (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004); Jane Potter, Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women’s Literary Responses to the Great War 1914–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Michael Hammond, The Big Show: British Cinema Culture during the Great War (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2006). 7 Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: British, American and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914–1933 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987), xvi–xvii. 8 One such useful unpublished thesis is Imogen Gassert’s ‘Collaborators and Dissidents: aspects of British literary publishing in the First World War 1914–1919’ (Oxford, 2001). 9 Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers Record [hereafter ‘PC’], 3 January 1914, p.7; PC 5 January 1918, p.8.

8 Publishing in the First World War 10 11 12 13

PC, 15 August 1914, p.153. PC, 8 August 1914, p.127. PC, 19 October 1918, p.327. See, for example, ‘Books for the Wounded in the War’, PC, 19 September 1914, p.251.

Part I Profit and Patriotism


1 For Country, Conscience and Commerce: Publishers and Publishing, 1914–18 Jane Potter

Just days after the start of the war in Iraq in March 2003, the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 aired a short segment by the journalist Mike Thompson entitled ‘War Books’, which highlighted the scramble by publishers for soldiers’ memoirs.1 Hodder & Stoughton’s representative asserted that ‘everybody will want to read about [the war in Iraq]’. Macmillan was touting its potential blockbuster, entitled Task Force Dagger about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. When the Macmillan editorial director was questioned as to whether the book was more fiction than fact, embellished with thrilling action in order to make it sell, she replied, ‘None of us is a charity. It’s not a philanthropic life.’ (A comment she immediately followed with, ‘Oh my God, I am going to get fired!’) Her counterpart at the American firm Simon & Schuster admitted that ‘the bloodier this war turns out to be, the more books it’s likely to sell.’ This attitude is a far cry from that of publishers in the First World War, as the actions and reactions, both personal and professional, of those of 1914–18 show. Of course the idea of war as a literary commodity is not irrelevant to a study of the Great War book trade, for despite the differences in time and intent of these distinct conflicts, it is an apt concern for both. The bloody conflict that was the Great War did sell books, and although publishers in the First World War were also not charities, as they kept their eyes on the market in order to decide the kind and the volume of war books they would publish, theirs was a commitment not only to commerce – to profit – but also to country and their own consciences. It was a commitment borne not just out of practical necessity: general trade difficulties were coupled with individual personal sacrifice and grief. The house histories of various firms provide insights into the enormous challenges with which publishers 11


were confronted on the outbreak of war in 1914. As F.A. Mumby has noted, the Great War ‘shook the book trade, like everything else, to its foundations’.2 The Times Literary Supplement is an invaluable indicator of the contemporary concerns of the trade. Its editorial for December 1914 analysed the situation after three months of war and asserted with relief that the worst fears had not materialised. Whilst the total number of books published was over 800 less than in the previous year of peace, the main slump in numbers ‘occurred during the critical months of suspense in the first phase of the war, August and September. Afterwards the recovery was remarkable.’3 Hopeful that the trade could maintain an even keel, by August 1915 at the first anniversary of the outbreak of war, the TLS reported that fiction continued ‘to hold its own surprisingly well’. More novels than ever before were being published because, the periodical opined, after a year of fighting, ‘people are turning with relief from the war news to fiction especially to the more popular novelists.’4 Fears that the demand for books would plummet were unfounded. The public need for reading material, both on the subject of and as a diversion from the war, was enormous. Those on active service, whether in the trenches or convalescing in hospital, were an especially captive audience: ‘The demand for the novelist who could dispel the boredom of war was limitless.’ 5 The Camps’ Library, aiming to supply books to the fighting forces, was founded in October 1914 by Sir Edward Ward and Dame Eva Anstruther. The War Library handled books for the sick and wounded, as did the YMCA and the Camp Education Department. There was an unprecedented demand for the New Testament, with Oxford University Press 1 alone supplying 4 2 million copies for use in the field. National Book Fortnight was inaugurated in 1915 by British publishers in order to ‘quicken public interest in the use of books for reading solace and instruction as well as to encourage people at home to keep the fighting men well supplied in this respect on all fronts.’ 6 Douglas Haig, in his autumn 1916 message in response to National Book Fortnight, asserted that Those who have not visited our Armies in the field can scarcely realise what books have meant during two years of war to the men in the trenches, in billets, and in hospitals. So I hope that those at home will buy books very freely this autumn, and, having read them, as freely pass them on to the ‘Camps Library’ for circulation among the troops.7

For Country, Conscience and Commerce 13

Of the six million books sent out by the British War Library, Mumby claims that ‘none came back’ all having been lost, worn out or destroyed in the front line. Thus, ‘among these missing millions disappeared many English works which were becoming increasingly rare and in constant or occasional demand among librarians or collectors…the War sent up the price of old books as well as new’.8 Demand for books, therefore, was the least of publishers’ concerns during 1914–18. Paper shortages, production costs, and the loss of staff to the Forces all caused anxiety about their commercial futures. House histories are important codifiers of a firm’s image, written as they are by the founder-owners or loyal employees. Macmillan may have been alone among publishers if, as Charles Morgan argues in his history of the firm, its production ‘continuity’ was ‘unbroken’ by the war.9 Such a confident assertion of stability may owe more to the preferred image his house history (and others) sought to project than to the actual reality of wartime business, for most publishing companies had a different tale to tell. Like everyone else in the country, publishers had to grapple with the enormous practical implications of the War. J.M. Dent, who founded his eponymous firm in 1888 was by 1917 genuinely concerned that despite the fact that ‘everybody is doing his very best here’ the War would force him to ‘shut down’.10 An able workforce and materials such as leather for binding were increasingly difficult to secure. The outbreak of war brought Dent’s Everyman series of classics almost to a standstill. Established in 1906, the 700th volume of the projected 1,000 had been published in 1914, but the final volume was not published until 1956. With war inflation forcing both the production and purchase price up, the gold leaf that was a characteristic feature of the books was replaced by imitation gold: ‘war had literally taken the glitter from the Everyman’s Library, just as it had tarnished everything else.’11 The Collins brothers also found that rising production costs and shortage of paper caused them to stop production of their own series of classics, The Nation’s Library. Yet despite the loss of printers, binders, compositors, and other skilled tradesmen, the firm did manage to devise up-to-date schoolbooks and produce a large number of Bibles for men in the services. It also tailored its children’s fiction to reflect new ‘heroic characters’: ‘It was hardly surprising that elderly peace-time dowagers like Juliette the Mail Carrier yielded place to Hunting the U-Boats, With Beatty in the North Sea and ‘Midst Shot and Shell in Flanders’.12 The Collins brothers themselves had, from the outset of


war, ‘a clear view of their duty’.13 They enlisted along with 275 of their employees and William Collins IV’s Ayrshire home, Grey Gables, was run as a hospital. The directors contributed an equal sum for every £1 raised at home to supply comforts to the Collins employees on active service. Edward Arnold was also committed to the welfare of his staff and promised all who ‘joined the services that he would find them a job after the war – “even if it was window-cleaning”’.14 It was not an easy promise to make. His firm’s output of titles shows the practical effects of wartime shortages and privations. In 1913, his firm published 98 titles, but this number fell in 1914 to 51. A steady decline is noted in 1915 with 45 titles published but the following year the number drops dramatically to 28. The miniscule recovery in 1917 of 29 titles is eclipsed in 1918 by the lowest output since 1890 of 16 titles. Fiction on the Arnold list suffered particularly with only one title being published in 1916, nine in 1917 and none in 1918, but ‘Arnold showed a good publisher’s awareness of the war and its implications and published about 30 books on various aspects of the [conflict]’.15 These included The Zeppelin Raid in West Norfolk, A Surgeon in Belgium, Medical Diseases of War and Struggle in the Air. Equally evocative titles helped to maintain William Heinemann’s list: they included Fighting in Flanders (E. Alexander Powell, 1914), Outwitting the Hun (Lieut. Pat O’Brien, 1918), On Active Service (Major G.P.A. Phillips, 1914), War Nursing (Charles Richet, 1918), The Schemes of the Kaiser (Madame Adam, 1917) and From Dartmouth to the Dardanelles (W.B.C.W. Forester, 1916). Yet he also published the work of those writers who are now associated with a canon of disillusioned or anti-war literature: Enid Bagnold, A Diary without Dates (1918), Robert Graves, Fairies and Fusiliers (1917), and Siegfried Sassoon, The Old Huntsman and Other Poems (1917) and The Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918). Of his book, The Soul of War (1915), Philip Gibbs wrote that William Heinemann took a chance in publishing that book. It would not have been passed by military censorship, and to this day I don’t know how it escaped that inquisition, for it was realistic and unsparing in its revelation of the human agony in time of war by civilians as well as soldiers, and expressed views about war which to say the least of it were not in tune with official propaganda. ‘It’s a dangerous book’, said Heinemann over a dinner table…but he was willing to take the risk because he read it, he said, with extreme interest and emotion.16


There were no untoward consequences either for the author or the publisher, however, and the book was widely praised. The range of texts surely stemmed from Heinemann’s unique personal perspective. German by background and fluent in the language, the publisher happened to be in Leipzig on the eve of the outbreak of war visiting the international exhibition of books and graphic arts for the British Board of Trade. As a result he was able to record his immediate impressions of this momentous period: I left German territory on the second day of mobilization. My experiences were interesting because, in command of their language, I was able to speak to many Germans in different stations of life and to witness conversations in hotels, cafés, etc…Strolling through the crowded streets of Leipzig at night, I noticed a total absence of the military which is usually so prominent a feature in all German towns…in the Grimmaische Strasse there were thousands of people flowing up and down even at midnight, and there were endless little knots and groups – mostly girls and women – eagerly discussing the topic of the hour – all of them grave and concerned. There was a complete absence of laughter and all faces seemed set, either with grim determination or with a curious look of vacant apprehension. I heard no loud words and no music until about one morning when close to my hotel I passed a café from which came the sound of a patriotic song played by an orchestra and sung by many voices.17 In concluding that Germany had gone to war with little enthusiasm or excitement or with any ‘real hatred of her enemies’,18 Heinemann aligns himself with the views of the poets Rupert Brooke and Charles Hamilton Sorley, both of whom also through travel and education, spoke German, had many German friends, and admired many aspects of German culture. Heinemann was especially upset by the jingoism in England that branded Germany as the devil’s own nation. His name, too, caused him problems: the windows and doors of 21 Bedford Street, where the firm had its offices, were not infrequently pelted with cabbage leaves and horse manure. F. Tennyson Jesse, one of his authors, recalled, however, that in an effort not to overstate his Britishness, he sometimes appeared to flaunt his German extraction and she said: ‘he took an almost impish delight in arguing that the Germans were the finest soldiers…although I know no one who took the English reverses in the war more to heart than he did.’19 Heinemann considered changing his German name but rejected the


idea, feeling pride in the fact that it was ‘much respected in the world of letters’20 and ‘his wartime lists also showed clearly where he stood’.21 Yet he was a critic of the ‘mischievous’ government Paper Commission that seemingly refused to try to alleviate the ‘hardships inflicted through a national necessity’. Heinemann wrote in his 1916 report to the Publishers’ Association, that the government ‘failed in distributing evenly the burden of the War on all those concerned in the making and use of paper’.22 His financial situation reached its lowest point in 1916 when the annual turnover amounted only to £1,574. It recovered remarkably by the following year, however, reaching £5,569. Heinemann’s trade colleagues at Hodder & Stoughton seem to have best weathered the economic, practical, and indeed, ideological storms of the War. From the outbreak in 1914, the firm’s director, Ernest Hodder Williams, and its editor and literary advisor, Sir William Robertson Nicoll, both believed ‘their task was to preserve unity and boost morale on the home front: it was a prerequisite of victory [and] they dedicated their minds and energy wholly to the common task with the high spirit of crusaders.’23 This stemmed in part, no doubt, from the fact that both men (Non-Conformist in religion, Liberal in politics) had close personal ties to the corridors of power. Not only were many Hodder & Stoughton authors members of Asquith’s cabinet (among them, Churchill, Haldane, and Grey), but the partners were ‘exceptionally well informed about the progress of events’: Nicoll was actually ‘given early information that Lloyd George would replace Asquith as Prime Minister.’24 Like other firms, Hodder & Stoughton adapted their output to cater to and anticipate public interest. They swiftly organised a War Book Department that produced some of the most profitable and popular books of the War. Hodder & Stoughton raised enormous amounts for charity with Princess Mary’s Gift Book (1914), which sold 600,000 copies in two years, and King Albert’s Book (1914). In May 1915 it announced in its periodical The Bookman that it would donate 25 per cent of its profits accrued during Booksellers Week to the Red Cross. And, during that organisation’s fund-raising drive the following year, the firm handed over three pence in every shilling spent on their books. Hodder & Stoughton’s charitable activities did not diminish their commercial success, as the firm ‘became increasingly identified with reading for entertainment.’25 Although John Attenborough has asserted that the firm’s profits were ‘deliberately reduced since large sections of the…list were devoted to the war charities’, writers such as John


Buchan, Ian Hay, ‘Sapper’ (Herman Cyril McNeile), Ruby M. Ayres, and Berta Ruck helped to assure both the firm’s survival and its brand recognition amongst the reading public.26 Whilst many firms drew on their long-respected reputations, business experience, and cache of dedicated authors to meet the onerous demands of wartime publishing, it is remarkable that the newly-established firm of George Allen & Unwin survived the first year of the war, let alone its duration. Having taken control of the bankrupt firm of George Allen on an extremely inauspicious date, 4 August 1914, the young, entrepreneurial Stanley Unwin found that the value of his assets was immediately reduced by about a third, old stock was rendered unsaleable, and sales of many of the standard publications were reduced by as much as 70 per cent. The rising cost of production and the price of paper, which dogged established firms like Heinemann and Dent, threatened to destroy completely the investment Unwin had just made.27 The practical problems of War were made even more difficult by Unwin’s personal stance. He was from the outset a committed pacifist. To Unwin the War was avoidable, unnecessary, and ‘stupid’.28 Like Heinemann, Unwin was particularly upset by the rabid anti-German propaganda inflamed by newspapers, especially those published by Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe). A believer in an open forum of ideas, he argued against the Defence of the Realm Act and its enforcement of censorship, believing that it curtailed, if not stifled, freedom of speech. As a pacifist, he made pacifist friends and he took on a side of human expression in the books he published that put him in a minority.29 In publishing Bertrand Russell’s The Principles of Social Reconstruction, Unwin risked whatever respectable reputation he was beginning to build, for as Russell wrote, ‘I fear…that you will find too little patriotism in my opinions’.30 Equally controversial was ‘I Appeal unto Caesar’: The Case of the Conscientious Objector by Mrs Henry Hobhouse, which led to questions in Parliament and an ‘uphill fight with the book trade’ to stock the pamphlet. Yet Unwin was wary of prosecution and in this sense he diverged from truly pacifist publishers such as C.W. Daniel, for whom government censure was a continual threat. Unwin refused to publish Rose Allatini’s novel Despised and Rejected on the grounds that its subject matter – of homosexuality and conscientious objection – would surely lead to them being prosecuted ‘in the then state of public opinion’.31 When Allatini asked Unwin to suggest the name of another publisher, he told her that he didn’t think anyone would dare take the novel on except C.W. Daniel: ‘Daniel accepted the novel, was prosecuted for publishing


it, and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment or £460 fine (to which latter, having a guilty conscience for having mentioned his name, I contributed).’32 Whilst he sympathised with conscientious objection – and indeed the pacifist’s right to air his view – Unwin’s own pacifism, like his commitment to the freedom of ideas, did not extend to breaking the law or risking imprisonment. When his exemption from national service ended in 1917, he decided he had ‘to do whatever I could conscientiously do.’33 He served with a London Voluntary Aid Detachment and was called to duty for air raids, the recovery of a downed Zeppelin and hospital work as an orderly. Given Unwin’s outspokenness on the policies associated with the War, particularly in terms of the books he published, it is perhaps surprising that he was among a group of publishers who gave significant support to the government’s propaganda work being undertaken at Wellington House. As Peter Buitenhuis has shown, the government decided early on in the War that Britain required an organisation to counter German propaganda abroad and to convince the neutral nations of the righteousness of Britain’s cause. Charles Masterman was chosen as the head of operations and on 2 September 1914, literary figures met to pledge their support for the War, drafting and signing an ‘Authors’ Manifesto’. Henry Newbolt, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mrs Humphry Ward, May Sinclair, and H.G. Wells were among those who put their signatures to the document that claimed Britain had to join the War or face dishonour. It was printed in the New York Times on 18 September and in the London Times the following month. Masterman and his colleagues pledged only to disseminate information that was accurate and expressed with measured argument. Sobersounding documents such as Why We are at War: Great Britain’s Case by Members of the Oxford Modern History Faculty (1914) and ‘Carry On’: British Women’s Work in War Time (1917) were the order of the day. Mass distribution was to be avoided and a government imprint absent from all texts; it was felt that the reputable public figures and distinguished scholars writing for a government bureau were more likely to be taken seriously if it did not appear they were working for an official agency. To this end Wellington House pamphlets and books were distributed by mainstream publishers. Secrecy was further maintained by having the Stationery Office act as the official purchasing agent and A.S. Watt, the literary agent, carry out negotiations with the publishers on Wellington House’s behalf. Steamship companies, labour organisations and peace societies, the Central Committee for Patriotic


Organisations and even the Religious Tract Society all helped to distribute this material. Masterman acknowledged that there would be objections to such covert methods, but he was determined that the literature get ‘into the hands of those who will read it’ and not ‘to thrust it or force it upon those who resent its gifts, or who will merely treat it as waste paper.’34 Wellington House transactions with publishers fell into two categories. The first was the purchase of books already on the open market and independent of initial Government backing. One example is Ernest Hodder Williams’s memoir of R.J. Davis entitled One Young Man (1917), ‘the simple story of a clerk that enlisted in 1914, fought on the western front for nearly two years, was severely wounded at the Battle of the Somme, and is now on his way back to his desk.’ Wellington House purchased 776 copies of this book from Hodder & Stoughton for distribution. The second type of transaction entailed the ‘purchase’ – or what could be more accurately termed commissioning – of books for which there was a need but which ‘would not appear […] if some support were not forthcoming for them.’35 In this case each publisher was paid five guineas for the use of his imprint and £5 towards the cost of advertising, the ‘5/5/- arrangement’, as it was called. The Schedule of Wellington House Literature, now in the Imperial War Museum (though strictly confidential at the time) shows exactly who these publishers were and what they produced. Hodder & Stoughton published (or provided at ‘the lowest terms’) the most material for the bureau, over 130 pamphlets and books, evidence of how Williams and Nicoll were indeed ‘very close to the central direction of the war’.36 The books included Arthur Conan Doyle’s The German War, Ford Madox Hueffer’s When Blood is their Argument, J’Accuse by A. German, and The Front Line by C.E. Montague with drawings by Muirhead Bone. E.F. Benson authored Deutschland Über Allah (1917) that exposed ‘Prussianism in Turkey’. T. Fisher Unwin, step-uncle of Stanley, lent his imprint to 78 books and pamphlets, while Nelson produced 18 texts. Any concerns William Heinemann and Philip Gibbs held over The Soul of War were perhaps overstated, for both men figure in the Schedule of Wellington House. As well as being appointed as one of five official war correspondents on the Western Front, Gibbs produced The Battle of the Somme for the bureau under the Heinemann imprint, one of nine other texts the firm published under government auspices. Although for Macmillan ‘little of the life of the firm depended on books arising directly from the war’,37 the publisher produced 17 texts


for Wellington House, among them Why India is Heart and Soul with Great Britain by Bhupendranath Basu (1914), Our Russian Ally by Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace (1915), The Attitude of Great Britain in the Present War by James Bryce (1916), and The Pentecost of Calamity by Owen Wister (1917). Oxford University Press, including the Clarendon Press and Humphrey Milford imprints, lent its name to 13 pamphlets, including Why We are at War, which was translated into eight languages. J.M. Dent produced only two: The University of Louvain and its Library and The Destruction of Merchant Ships. Stanley Unwin’s firm, despite all his outward protest against the War, was associated with 13 Wellington House documents, including The Allies’ Prospects of Victory, Dangerous Optimism, The Pan-German Programme, and Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution. Of this last text in particular Wellington House ordered – through the Stationery Office – 200 copies from Unwin. It is not surprising that Hodder & Stoughton published so many tracts for the government – its other novels and memoirs are stridently patriotic, independently of any official sanction. But Stanley Unwin’s involvement with Wellington House raises a number of questions. How can one be both a patriot and speak out against the government in time of war? How can one be a businessman and still follow the call of conscience? How did Unwin, himself a pacifist, justify his complicity and cooperation? If we take at face value the idea of ‘secret’ or covert government publication, then Unwin’s actions are duplicitous. This publisher collaborated in essence, for money or influence, with a government he outwardly criticised. Yet the truth was Unwin was not anti-government. After all, he chose to be a participant in national service and as his rejection of Allatini’s novel demonstrates, he was not one to risk prosecution recklessly either. He did not, like some pacifists such as Mrs Hobhouse’s son Stephen, reject participation of any kind. Unwin made his voice heard on political issues and in 1917 was part of a delegation that included Lord Landsdowne, which advocated opening peace negotiations with Germany in 1917. This made him unpopular with many, including his own brother who would not speak to him for many years afterwards. He was solidly against what we might call hysterical propaganda, such as the demonising of Germans, the persecution of so-called ‘slackers’ or the hyper-nationalism propagated by Lord Northcliffe. He was in favour of reasoned argument and he perhaps justified his involvement with Wellington House because Masterman aimed to be reasonable in his publications. The books and pamphlets


to which Unwin attached his imprint are in keeping with his belief in measured argument. True, Wellington House also published the Bryce Report on Alleged German Atrocities, which later came to be discredited, but the tone and tenor, if not the content, of this document is outwardly sensible. It is to Masterman’s credit (he was later replaced first by John Buchan, then by Lord Beaverbrook) that he convinced such a range of publishers of vastly different outlooks that the work they did on the bureau’s behalf would not stifle debate or affect their abilities to publish as they chose. Unwin and the other publishers did receive some financial support but the ‘5/5/- arrangement’ was hardly a major factor in keeping their businesses afloat. They did not receive a bigger paper ration and Unwin as well as Dent were particularly candid about the worsening situation in terms of paper, production, and people power. Some firms never really recovered. Others like Unwin prospered, but it is clear that this was not solely due to an involvement with the government. When a government inquiry in 1917 questioned the money being spent at Wellington House, H.T. Sheringham, Masterman’s colleague, defended the payment scheme, asserting that the publishers ‘do not make anything out of it.’38 This may seem an understatement, but it is true that firms did not make vast amounts of money from their government work. Hodder & Stoughton, for instance, made far more profit from the sales of Ruby M. Ayres’s Richard Chatterton, V.C. than it did from any of its Wellington House texts.39 Furthermore, the dust jacket of Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution is a good example of how George Allen & Unwin, especially, did not find itself censoring its other, nongovernment-sponsored publications, for it proudly advertises both Russell’s Principles of Social Reconstruction and Mrs Hobhouse’s ‘I Appeal Unto Caesar’. ‘Working for the government’ in this case did not come with any mandate to ‘toe the party line’ in other areas. As T.O. Willson stressed to Unwin in a letter of 1917, Wellington House had ‘no authority either to give or to refuse permission for the publication of any book.’40 Thus, Unwin could remain committed to the ‘open forum’ of ideas whilst answering to some extent the call of country. And if Unwin was able to do so, his more established, more conservative colleagues in the trade were equally free. Sheringham asserted that the work done on behalf of Wellington House reflected ‘a great credit on [the publishers’] feelings for the work and their patriotism.’41 Patriots first or publishers? Patriots, all of these men would have argued. But if we compare the radically different outlook of publishers today, as evidenced from the Iraq war, could we argue that these Great


War publishers were merely deluding themselves – and their readercustomers – as to their true motive, which was profit? We could argue this point, but we would be wrong. At the heart of the debate is the fact that the motives of publishers in 1914–18 were different. And these motives stemmed from quite a distinct difference of experience than that faced by those present at the London Book Fair in 2003. It is the personal sacrifices faced by publishers in the Great War that sets them apart and helps us to understand the actions they took and the attitudes they held about the all-encompassing conflict. J.M. Dent’s professional troubles could not compare to his grief as a father, something he would have shared with his fellow citizens from all walks of life. Two of his youngest sons, who both entered the firm in 1913, joined up soon after the outbreak. One was killed at Neuve Chapelle, the other at Gallipoli. Yet the publisher took comfort from his abiding belief in what he called his ‘country’s stand for righteousness’. On the outbreak of war he was horrified at the prospect of sending his two sons to fight, but he also believed that he ‘could not cheat them of their honour’. With his wife he is proud and glad that they had ‘two such fine stalwarts to give’. Although he published Barbusse’s novel, Under Fire, which is uncompromising in describing the horrors of the War, Dent can still believe that there is perfect joy out of perfect misery and, recalling Wordsworth, his favourite poet, regards his sons as ‘happy warriors’.42 Indeed, ‘death was busy’ among the book trade between 1914 and 1918.43 The worst tragedy of the war for William Heinemann was the death in action at Ypres of his 26-year-old cousin and heir-apparent Captain John Heinemann. Rejected three times due to bad eyesight, John was eventually allowed to enlist and gained a commission within a month. He was shot through the brain while superintending a wiring party and died as he was carried out of the trench. Those who knew William said he never got over John’s death. John Alexander ‘Jack’ Blackie, who died just after Armistice Day 1918, also never fully recovered from the death of his only son, John Stewart Blackie, who was killed on the Somme in 1916. Frederick Longman was killed in action eight weeks into the war. Edward Arnold’s daughter Peggy, who had been nursing in France for nine months, died after two days’ illness in March 1916. Arnold wrote to John Murray: It is a terrible and overwhelming blow, for she was everything that one could wish a daughter to be, but we are very proud of her


having died ‘on active service’ and I like to think that she was able to alleviate many a poor fellow’s suffering.44 He published for private circulation Peggy’s Diary at No. 16 General Hospital (1917). Capt. Tommy Nelson, a partner in the Nelson firm, was killed at the Battle of Arras on the 9th of April 1917. R.C. Jackson, who with Frank Sidgwick published Rupert Brooke’s poems, was also killed on active service, as were 32 of Cassell’s employees. Hodder & Stoughton alone seems to have ‘suffered remarkably few casualties’ among its staff.45 Despite the efforts of the Publishers’ Association, publishing was not classified as a trade of national importance whose employees could be exempted from military service; ‘both in the initial enthusiasm for voluntary recruitment in 1914–15,’ writes John Feather, ‘and in the later conscription to the forces, many good and essential men were lost.’46 Some publishers were fortunate to survive their active service. Col. P.H. Dalbaic, a director of Allen & Unwin, served in France and Salonika, though he suffered the loss of a son in the trenches. Daniel de Mendi Macmillan, who had enlisted in 1914, was invalided out in 1915. William Collins IV served in France as an officer in the Royal Army Service Corps, won the DSO and a Portuguese decoration and rose to the rank of Lt-Col. His brother Godfrey also joined the RASC, served in France, Egypt, India, Gallipoli, and Mesopotamia from 1915–17, and was made a Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George. Robert William Chapman, who succeeded Charles Cannan at the helm of the Clarendon Press, served in Salonika with the Royal Garrison Artillery. But the personnel drain was severe nonetheless. At one point in the War, Heinemann had only two men left, apart from the two partners. He therefore depended more than ever on his female employees, but despite their invaluable work that kept the business afloat between 1914 and 1918, ‘it would be many years before women…began to take their rightful places in the firm’.47 For those who remained behind, the less harrowing but equally significant efforts to hold one’s personal and one’s business life together were the main preoccupations. Indeed, according to Arthur Waugh, managing director of Chapman & Hall, it seemed that ‘work was the only anodyne’ for the anxieties of war.48 The specific upheavals of 1914–18 therefore ranged from the grief of those who lost a son or other family member on the battlefields, through the concomitant sadness of the firms that suffered huge loss of staff on those same battlefields, to the sacrifices of those publishers


who were themselves on active service. Those at home were also faced with practical pressures and personal anxieties as well as the everpresent and very real threat of Zeppelin raids. Unlike recent conflicts in Bosnia, Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, which seem so far removed for the vast majority of the British – and American – populations, the Great War affected everyone. Publishers were close to the conflict in every sense. It was inextricably part of their professional and their personal lives. If they themselves did not suffer the loss of a family member, they certainly experienced the loss of members of their staff and knew friends who were bereaved, sometimes more than once. The lists of casualties in the papers and the sight of wounded on the streets escaped no-one’s attention. This was truly total war. Publishers in the Great War remained businessmen – the profitability of their companies and how the War might help or hinder them could never have been far from their minds. Commerce and profit were important to keep going. But there was also a commitment to the individual conscience, to a sense of public duty, whether it be whole-heartedly in support of the war effort or more censorious about it. This does not absolve them of publishing what may have been half-truths, hyperbolic sentiments or scare-mongering stories either in their work for Wellington House or in those books and pamphlets arising from their own initiative. But it does go some way to understanding how and why so many acted as they did. Contemporary publishers do not have the same concerns over a potential loss of readers and book-buyers in the wake of hostilities; they are not faced with the loss of staff to the forces; and they are not viewing the world from an imperial, Edwardian/Georgian outlook, an outlook that was not as inclined to question authority and the established order as later generations would be. Even with the current explosion of memoirs by soldiers who served in Iraq, today’s publishers, like today’s society in general, operate from a frame of mind conditioned, if not jaundiced, by the horrific wars that followed the First.49 The fundamental difference between early 21st-century publishers and their counterparts of 1914–18 – the intertwining of country, conscience and commerce – was, above all, ensured by the roll call of the dead. Notes 1 M. Thompson, ‘War Books’, Today Programme, BBC Radio 4, 25 March 2003. 2 F.A. Mumby, Publishing and Bookselling (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930), p.370.

For Country, Conscience and Commerce 25 3 Times Literary Supplement, 9 December 1914. 4 TLS, 5 August 1915. 5 J. Attenborough, A Living Memory: Hodder & Stoughton Publishers, 1868–1975 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975), p.78. 6 Mumby, p.374. 7 Quoted in Mumby, p.374. 8 Mumby, p.376. 9 C. Morgan, The House of Macmillan 1843–1943 (London: Macmillan, 1944), pp.209–11. 10 J.M. Dent, The Memoirs of JM Dent (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1928), p.211. 11 Dictionary of British Literary Biography: British Literary Publishing Houses, 1881–1965 (London: Gale, 1981), p.88. 12 D. Keir, The House of Collins: The Story of a Scottish Family of Publishers from 1789 to the Present Day (London: Collins, 1952), p.233. 13 Ibid., p.232. 14 B. Bennett and A. Hamilton, Edward Arnold: 100 Years of Publishing (London: Arnold, 1990), p.41. 15 Ibid., p.41. 16 J. St John, William Heinemann: A Century of Publishing 1890–1990 (London: Heinemann, 1990), p.159. 17 Ibid., p.155. 18 Ibid., p.155. 19 Ibid., p.157. 20 Ibid., p.155. 21 Ibid., p.157. 22 Ibid., p.160. 23 Attenborough, p.76. 24 Ibid., p.78. 25 Ibid., p.78. 26 Ibid., p.81. 27 Unwin remarked that ‘there were times when we paid as much as 1s 7d a pound for paper greatly inferior to what we could have bought at 21⁄4 d before the war’. S. Unwin, The Truth about a Publisher (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960), p.141. 28 Ibid., p.130. 29 J. Potter, Interview with Rayner Unwin, Publishing History, 41 (1997), pp.75–101, p.80. 30 Quoted in Unwin, p.151. 31 Ibid., p.137. 32 Ibid., p.139. 33 Ibid., p.138. 34 Second Report on the Work Conducted for the Government at Wellington House, with introductory remarks by C.F.G. Masterman, 1 February 1916, 6. Imperial War Museum & Public Record Office, London. 35 Notes on a Report on the Purchase and Publication of Books by Robert Donald, PRO INF 4/5, p.1. 36 Attenborough, p.77. 37 Morgan, pp.209–11.

26 Publishing in the First World War 38 Propaganda Inquiry, Report of the Proceedings of a meeting held at Wellington house, 15 November 1917, Statement by H.T. Sheringham, PRO INF 4/11. 39 The initial print-run of 8,000 copies was eclipsed the following year by a further 25,000. 19,000 copies were printed in 1917 and a staggering 34,750 rolled off the presses in 1918. Hodder & Stoughton publishing ledgers, Guildhall Library, MS 16310. 40 T.O. Willson to Stanley Unwin, 22 December 1917, Allen & Unwin Archive, University of Reading. 41 Statement by H.T. Sheringham, PRO INF 4/11. 42 Dent, p.205 43 Mumby, p.378. 44 Bennett and Hamilton, p.42. 45 Attenborough, p.81. 46 J. Feather, A History of British Publishing (London: Routledge, 1988), p.196. 47 St John, p.161. 48 A. Waugh, A Hundred Years of Publishing: Being the Story of Chapman & Hall, Ltd (London: Chapman & Hall, 1930), p.270. 49 Charlotte Abbott, senior editor at Publishers Weekly (New York), commented in an October 2005 interview on National Public Radio that ‘there are about five or six [soldiers’ memoirs] coming out in the next few weeks … and that’s certainly more than we’ve seen in the last couple of years …. We are definitely seeing a crescendo at this point.’ Lynn Neary, the programme presenter, erroneously observed, ‘Gone are the days when the end of the war marked the beginning of the literary reflections. These memoirs are being written even as there’s no foreseeable end to the conflict in Iraq.’ Cultural amnesia about the writing of earlier wars continues, it seems. ‘War Memoirs offer a ground view of Iraq’, Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio, 6 October 2005.

2 ‘No such bookselling has ever before taken place in this country’: Propaganda and the Wartime Distribution Practices of W.H. Smith & Son Stephen Colclough

This chapter examines the wartime distribution practices of one of the great institutions of British print culture, W.H. Smith & Son. It pays particular attention to the way in which the war effected the production and sale of newspapers and books. Both sold particularly well during 1914/15, but as the war dragged on paper shortages and price rises began to change the nature of what was available. Smith’s sold government sponsored and commercially produced propaganda throughout the war. The second part of this chapter concentrates upon their work as the main distributor of National War Aims propaganda throughout England and Wales during its last year, 1918. It concludes that these texts were read, or at least put into the hands of, a truly mass audience, and that Smith’s intervention into the battle for the home front had a huge impact upon the print culture of wartime Britain. One of the major distributors and retailers of books, periodicals and newspapers during the 19th century, Smith’s business had grown rapidly after they opened a large number of railway bookstalls in the 1840s and 50s. These stalls were to remain the core of their retail business for the rest of the century. In 1901 they began to add shops to this network. This move to the high street was greatly accelerated by the loss of two major railway contracts in 1905–06, but on the eve of the First World War the bookstall trade was flourishing. In 1914 Smith & Son (WHS) owned over 1,500 stalls and 223 shops throughout England and Wales and controlled much of the trade on the London Underground. They 27


were also a very important presence in the provincial wholesale market.1 By March 1914 they had 17 provincial wholesale houses and more were added during the war to serve the large numbers of troops passing through ports on the south coast of England.2 Largely independent of head office, these wholesale houses bought texts at the cheapest possible price and were sometimes accused of dictating terms to both ‘the publisher and the retailer’.3 Such was their influence during the pre-war period, it has been argued that ‘it was difficult to launch a new national “title”’ without them.4 As Smith’s were to boast to the Government in 1917, they were particularly well adapted to the distribution of

Figure 2.1

W.H. Smith bookstall, December 1913

No Such Bookselling 29

propaganda because they had ‘practically 2,000 branches and subbranches’ and their ‘wholesale connection’ put them ‘in touch with several thousands of newsagents throughout the country’.5 The photograph of a WHS bookstall taken in December 1913 to promote the Lanston Monotype Corporation (Figure 2.1) shows the diverse range of texts available at many stalls, including newspapers, periodicals, magazines, books, greetings cards, and items of stationery. As WHS informed Lord Derby in 1915, ‘the newspaper business forms the major portion of the firm’s turnover’, and it is clear from their account books that the amount of money generated by newspaper sales increased significantly during the war.6 (See Table 2.1). Of course, much of this increase can be put down to wartime inflation, but 1914 was, by any standards, an exceptional year. The reduction of the price of The Times to 1d in March led to an enormous increase in sales. The 4 August issue, documenting the outbreak of war, sold over 275,000 copies and on 19 December 1914, 600,000 copies of the ‘French Yellow Book Supplement’ edition were produced.7 The Evening News called the circulation of this special edition a ‘triumph of organisation’ and the proprietor of The Times praised Smith’s handling of more than 195,000 copies as ‘a land-mark in newspaper production and distribution’.8 Such numbers were not handled every day, of course, but during the early months of the war people wanted news. This led to ‘newspaper rushes’ at stalls and shops as customers scrambled to get hold of the latest edition. As the clerk in charge of a temporary stall erected at Heaton Park camp noted, even respectable military men were prone to ‘unreasonable rushes’.9 Some of these rushes were caused by a shortfall in the number of copies produced as men involved in the print trade began to volunteer.10 By November 1915, when Lord Derby’s recruitment campaign

Table 2.1 Turnover of newspapers at W.H. Smith bookstalls and ‘B’ shops, 1913/14–1919/20 1913/14: 1914/15: 1915/16: 1916/17: 1917/18: 1918/19: 1919/20:

£1,529,687 £1,727,388 £1,725,625 £1,776,405 £2,215,268 £2,825,256 £2,962,015

Source: WHSA, x135–x141. These figures do not include the 26 ‘A’ shops.


was at its height, 1,200 of Smith’s men had already joined up. Bookstall assistants and newsboys were quickly replaced by female labour, but during this period the firm attempted to protect its experienced male managers by claiming that they were ‘doing their duty to the Country equally with those who are in the fighting line’. Managers were even issued with a letter to this effect that was to be handed to anyone canvassing for recruits.11 More than 3,000 women joined the workforce as more men joined up or were conscripted. These women helped to sell and distribute texts throughout the rest of the war.12 Despite some problems with newspaper production during the early months of the war, circulations continued to grow. As John McEwan has argued, ‘even when every allowance is made for inflated claims on the part of the publishers it remains certain that the popular and tabloid newspapers increased their sales and circulation hugely during the war years’.13 The Daily Express, for example, increased its circulation from 295,485 copies per day in 1914 to 578,832 in 1918. At many other newspapers, however, sales fluctuated as increased production costs forced them to raise prices. Even halfpenny papers such as the Daily Chronicle and the Daily News rose to 1d in the last year of the war.14 By March 1918 The Times was selling for 3d, and its circulation, although still buoyant at 131,000, was reduced to pre-war levels. As the supervisor of 69 WHS bookstalls noted in 1918, any increase in turnover recorded in his annual accounts was ‘automatic, mostly through increased prices’ rather than increased sales.15 Indeed, as accounts for the distribution of London papers suggest, WHS distributed significantly fewer newspapers in August 1918 than in August 1915 (Table 2.2). That McEwan’s figures for the fluctuating sales of the Daily Mail are supported by Smith’s figures suggests that they are an accurate record of newspaper distribution during the war (Table 2.3). The reduction in sales of the Mail in 1917 coincided with a price increase that turned the paper into a 1d daily. Very few papers saw a Table 2.2 Newspapers distributed by W.H. Smith to bookstalls and bookshops, 1915–1918 (in Quires) August 1915: August 1916: August 1917: August 1918:

921,357 958,487 867,763 777,010

Source: WHSA A44: ‘London Daily Papers Number Book’.

No Such Bookselling 31 Table 2.3

Circulation of the Daily Mail, 1915–18

Circulation

Year

Quires distributed by WHS

1,105,214 1,172,245 938,211 973,343

1915 1916 1917 1918

164,311 177,580 123,111 143,132

Source: J.M. McEwan, ‘The National Press During the First World War: Ownership and Circulation’, Journal of Contemporary History Vol.17 (1982), p.482.

Table 2.4

Circulation of the Daily Express, 1915–18

Circulation

Year

Quires distributed by WHS

372,840 433,637 449,827 578,832

1915 1916 1917 1918

89,472 91,815 114,240 100,686

Source: McEwan, p.482.

continuous rise in circulation throughout the war period, but as McEwan’s figures make clear, during 1918 sales of the Daily Express increased despite a significant price rise (Table 2.4). These additional sales were not being handled by Smith’s bookstalls, however, which show a peak of 114,240 quires (a bundle of 24 papers) in August 1917, followed by a significant reduction. At 2d the Express may have become too expensive for the bookstalls, which tended to stock the cheaper papers, but by 1918 Smith’s were also dealing with fewer newspapers because of Government restrictions on returns. In May 1918, after a year’s resistance by the print trade, the Board of Trade’s ‘no returns’ order was made law under the Defence of the Realm Act. The ability to return unsold newspapers to the publishers had traditionally protected retailers against fluctuating sales at the bookstalls. The order was an attempt to stop vital paper resources being wasted on newspapers that were returned to the publisher unread.16 As these figures demonstrate, the newspaper distribution system coped well with the increased number of copies that were being handled during the early years of the war. By 1918, however, the bookstalls were distributing fewer newspapers than in the previous three years. The figures for the turnover of books at the bookstalls show a similar pattern (Table 2.5). During the war the production of both first

32 Publishing in the First World War Table 2.5

Turnover of books at W.H. Smith bookstalls, 1913/14–1919/20 1913/14: 1914/15: 1915/16: 1916/17: 1917/18: 1918/19: 1919/20:

£588,373 £610,982 £602,746 £680,700 £834,923 £1,041,953 £1,214,564

Source: WHSA x135-x140.

editions and reprints was reduced in all subject areas.17 ‘Literature’ appears to have suffered less than other subjects, but far fewer cheap books were being produced.18 Cheap books needed very large print runs in order to be economically viable, and as paper shortages hit, the cheap novel became more expensive. In August 1916 Thomas Nelson’s raised the price of their 7d novels to 9d.19 In September of the following year many publishers raised the price of the shilling novel to 1s 3d; by Christmas they were selling for 1s 6d. There was very little on sale for less than 6d in the spring of 1918. As an advertisement for George Newnes records, however, ‘the shortage of cloth-bound books and the increase in the price of magazines’ was creating ‘booming sales of the sixpenny paper novel’.20 Smith’s stalls had always specialised in cheap texts, especially reprints, and the increased turnover during wartime can, in part, be accounted for by the increased price of the products in which they dealt. As a number of letters to the Publishers’ Circular noted, large retailers such as Smith’s sometimes benefited from price rises that allowed them to sell their old stock, purchased in bulk, at the new price.21 During the first few weeks of the war both the Publishers’ Circular and Smith’s own staff journal, the Newsbasket, thought that the book trade was ‘absolutely dead’, but throughout late 1914 and early 1915 some titles began to sell in record numbers as books directly related to the war effort were produced.22 One of the earliest bestsellers was the 6d war map, but this market was quickly saturated.23 In December 1914 Smith’s handled 120,000 copies of Princess Mary’s Gift Book (a record for a book retailing at 2s 6d) and 150,000 copies of King Alfred’s Book (a record for a 3s book). As the Telegraph declared, ‘we do not hesitate to say that no such bookselling has ever before taken place in this country’.24 These were special books; 1s from the sale of each copy of King Alfred’s Book went to aid occupied Belgium.


During the first few weeks of the war WHS encouraged their staff to exhibit copies of books, both old and new, which had a war theme. The Newsbasket suggested a display of the work of H.G. Wells including his latest novel, The World Set Free, and the cheap edition of The War in the Air. In October 1914 the shop at Reading won praise for its ‘brave display of war literature and illustrations’.25 The following February Smith’s produced a list of bestsellers which revealed that ‘a portion of the enormous value of business’ going through their shops and stalls was ‘effected entirely by the interests of the general public in the great war’. It included Blatchford’s Germany and England (145,000 copies) and a 2s edition of Bernhardi’s How Germany Makes War (30,000 copies). Graves’s Secrets of the German War Office, Usher’s PanGermanism, Cramb’s Germany and England, Baden Powell’s QuickTraining for War and Lucas and Morrow’s satirical adaptation of the Shock-headed Peter legend, Swollen-Headed William, sold more than 10,000 copies each.26 It is, of course, not surprising to find that the bookstalls contained texts that took a pro-war stance, or which recorded German war crimes in Belgium. As Jay Winter has noted, although the government was a very effective distributor of propaganda, images of ‘poor little Belgium’, and the ‘Fight for Right’ were mainly reproduced ‘in civil society and through the market’.27 But even if ‘profit and patriotism’ often went ‘hand-in-hand’, as Winter suggests, it is important to note that during the period 1914–17 a significant number of the texts that appeared in the market would not have been produced without some support from either the Government’s War Propaganda Bureau, better known as Wellington House, or the Department of Information which replaced it in 1917. Indeed, as Peter Buitenhuis has argued, the fact that Wellington House kept quiet about its role in producing these books was problematic because it often led to the assumption that little or no government sponsored propaganda was being produced. This resulted in frequent cabinet and parliamentary enquiries into the work of Wellington House and its successor.28 As a report on the effectiveness of propaganda issued in the winter of that year makes clear, books such as Belgium in War Time (Hodder and Stoughton, 1917), produced with the aid of Wellington House mainly for distribution abroad, were on sale at Smith’s stalls and shops. This report noted that Smith’s main purchasing power lay in the field of cheap fiction, rather than factual propaganda, but there was still profit to be made from books that the Government wanted to see distributed as widely as possible. For books that retailed at a shilling, such as Smuts’s War Time Speeches (Hodder,


1917), WHS paid 7d per copy to the publishers; a 2s book, such as The Irish on the Somme (Hodder, 1917), cost them 1s 21⁄4 d. Belgium in War Time, which was produced on behalf of the Belgian government, was bought from the publishers for 4s. It retailed at 6s, leaving Smith’s a profit of 2s per copy. The report suggested that common terms for books sold at 1s 6d and above were ‘2d in the shilling off, with thirteen counting as twelve, and 5 per cent discount’, but in this instance Smith’s were getting the same deal as Wellington House, which bought them for distribution abroad. This was not always the case. The government paid 1s 11d to Hodder and Stoughton for books retailing at 3s 6d, whereas WHS were charged either 2s 4d or 2s 5d.29 Other books that this report lists as having been bought by Smith’s include Bang’s Hurrah and Hallelujah (1916), Jorgensen’s False Witness (1916), Morkveld’s The German Fury in Belgium (1917), and Somerville’s The Road to Liege: The Path of Crime (1916). As these titles suggest, even in 1917, most Government sponsored propaganda was still dealing with ‘poor little Belgium’ and had little to say about why Britain was continuing to fight the war. Jay Winter has argued that ‘the publishing industry did its “bit” for the war’ through the production of ‘privately initiated and produced items’ that made a profit ‘while affirming the Allied cause and celebrating the men in uniform defending it’.30 However, as the list of texts produced by Hodder and Stoughton under the encouragement of Wellington House makes clear, it is not always easy to distinguish between private initiative and government intervention. These texts were commercially published, and both Hodder and WHS profited from their sale, but the government played an important role in instigating their production. By buying copies for distribution they also guaranteed that the publisher had a market. As the bestsellers of 1914–15 suggest, popular culture broadly coincided with the aims of the government during this period, but a dissenting pacifist literature spread through meetings and the mail, rather than the market, also flourished. By the autumn of 1917 this form of dissent was thought serious enough for the Government to reconsider the way in which propaganda aimed at British citizens was being produced and distributed. During the early part of the war most home front propaganda had been directed by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee (PRC), which aimed to maintain the flow of volunteers. By May 1916 the PRC had supervised the production of 34 million leaflets, 5.5 million pamphlets, 450,000 display cards and 12.5 million posters.31 These posters were frequently displayed at Smith’s bookstalls and a number of managers attested to their effectiveness in making men


volunteer to serve ‘For King and Country’.32 The National War Aims Committee (NWAC) replaced the PRC in the late summer of 1917. Unlike its predecessor, it was designed to monopolise the conduct of official propaganda at home.33 The Committee itself hoped that this new ‘home publicity’ would promote the Government’s war aims and help to ‘counteract and render nugatory the insidious and specious propaganda of the pacifist publications’.34 As Cate Haste has argued, throughout 1916 the campaign against anti-war protesters (such as the National Council Against Conscription) was led by newspapers, including the Daily Express, which dubbed them ‘peace cranks’ or ‘pasty faces’, and encouraged readers to break up their meetings; by 1917, however, the British government had begun to believe that socialist and pacifist agitation was leading to strikes that interrupted essential war work.35 As one NWAC correspondent noted in a private letter to the editor of the Observer, the object of ‘War Aims propaganda’ was ‘to hit the Independent Labour Party which is the one really formidable pacifist body in the country’.36 When the publicity sub-committee met to discuss the forthcoming campaign in September 1917 they agreed that NWAC needed to promote lectures and events and get short articles into the newspapers.37 As a number of letters sent by members of the public to NWAC confirm, this part of their campaign succeeded in securing the distribution of pamphlets and posters by private means. For example, the reproduction of a copy of the poster ‘Red Cross or Iron Cross’ in the Daily Mail led the manager of a firm of gas fitters in Birmingham to apply for ‘two or three of these for use in our works’. Reports of War Aims ‘leaflets’ in both national and local papers also led to a flurry of letters offering to distribute them locally.38 As well as posters and leaflets, the publicity committee aimed to oversee the production and distribution of cartoons, picture postcards, slides for lantern lectures and cinema films. At this meeting they agreed that War Aims propaganda needed to reach a broad audience including working-class readers and took the decision to approach ‘Free libraries, Polytechnics, Mechanics Institutes and any clubs willing to accept pamphlets’. They imagined that the best way of getting ‘original matter’ to these readers was to use the ‘Local War Aims Committees’ because they commanded ‘the machinery of the Party Political organizations in the constituencies’ that was used to distribute literature during a national election.39 As one of the members of the committee noted in a memo to Sir Edward Carson, the new ‘Minister in charge of all propaganda’, War Aims pamphlets needed to be distributed on a national scale, ‘rather


on the lines of the distribution of political literature during a general election’.40 The publicity committee also recorded that W.H. Smith & Son had ‘generously offered to place their immense distributing resources at our disposal free of charge’. Their decision to accept this offer ‘as regards the use of their bookstalls for sale of such literature as may be so disposed of’ (p.4) was approved by the full National War Aims Committee on 25 September 1917.41 Because the NWAC budget was still under discussion in the autumn of 1917, Smith’s were forced to reiterate their offer ‘to assist the Country in regard to its War Aims Propaganda’. In a letter sent to Edward Carson on 22 October 1917 they promised to distribute printed matter ‘throughout England and Wales’ and ‘promote the sale’ of War Aims publications. As this letter also makes clear, however, they had previously ‘undertaken and executed’ propaganda work for the government under the direction of Wallis Myers of Wellington House.42 Indeed, as his letters to WHS attest, they had been selling ‘Photogravure Portraits’ of Allied leaders produced by Wellington House since August 1917. Myers allowed Smith’s to buy copies ‘at cost price’ and ‘retail them in the ordinary way’ because he wanted the portraits to gain ‘as wide a circulation as possible’.43 In October 1917 WHS were sent ‘1,500’ free sets of the ‘second series of inscribed portraits’ for display at their stalls and they went on to order a ‘supply for sale’ via the Stationery Office.44 As this evidence makes clear, Smith & Son had established a working relationship with Wellington House before they made the offer to distribute NWAC pamphlets in September 1917. Carson was quick to respond to their renewed offer ‘to augment your publicity organization with the organization of this Firm’ and on 23 October 1917 it was agreed that they would distribute ‘not less than 100,000 copies of Mr Gosling’s pamphlet Peace: How to Get and Keep it’.45 They again worked with Myers, who had been appointed manager of NWAC’s distribution department.46 The correspondence surrounding this pamphlet gives a better understanding of the way in which propaganda was distributed and sold during this period. As Sanders and Taylor have noted, during the early years of the war home front propaganda was not given away but sold to readers for what they describe as a ‘nominal’ fee of 1d.47 As Myers’s letter of 23 October 1917 makes clear, WHS were to ‘arrange advantageous terms’ with the publishers of Peace: How to Get and Keep it, in order to offer the pamphlet for sale on their bookstalls at 1d. However, as Myers complaint that The Coming Victory was not being displayed at the Charing Cross stall in central London indicates, Smith’s were


already selling at least one NWAC publication.48 This was one of two pamphlets that Hodder and Stoughton were allowed to publish on special terms in October 1917 because NWAC had not yet completed ‘the arrangements for taking such work over’. This meant that ‘Messrs Smith got their copies at half price on sale or return’ rather than the normal terms offered by Wellington House, but the deal that Myers suggested WHS broker with Cassell’s reveals that he envisaged a similar arrangement for Peace: How to Get and Keep It.49 This evidence suggests that during the autumn of 1917, Smith’s were being encouraged to purchase, distribute and retail propaganda in much the same way as any other commercially produced text. As Philip Taylor has argued, during the first part of the war the Government felt that it was wrong to force propaganda leaflets onto the people. If readers chose to buy propaganda, it was assumed that they would choose to act upon it, and this fitted well with the idea that only the most active members of British society needed to be influenced in order to produce national results.50 However, as John Buchan noted, during the autumn of 1917 attitudes towards the distribution of propaganda were beginning to change. He argued that if propaganda was to reach a national audience its distribution could not be undertaken ‘purely on a commercial basis’.51 In order to reach a mass rather than an elite audience NWAC needed to use Smith’s distribution network. This network gave them access to a huge number of independent newsagents, in addition to Smith’s own shops, and allowed texts to be distributed much more rapidly than via the Local Committee system. Perhaps more importantly, using this system also gave NWAC the opportunity to produce texts for sale and for free distribution. As Myers informed WHS in October 1917, ‘we may ask you to make a free distribution, if and when occasion arises, but as far as possible this will be without prejudice to your sales’.52 At the time these decisions were being taken, fears about the pacifist movement were at their height. During the autumn of 1917 both the police and the military made numerous raids on print-works in order to disrupt the publication of pacifist texts and the new Press Bureau legislation was used to suppress the pacifist voice of the Independent Labour Party.53 It is unclear from the surviving material in the Smith’s archive whether they restricted the sale of pacifist publications throughout the war, but on 24 September 1917 the clerk in charge of one of their bookstalls was dismissed for ‘deliberately disregarding the rules of the firm in obtaining and displaying for sale disloyal literature’.54 Gosling’s Peace: How To Get and Keep It was very much a text for


these times. Written by ‘one of the most trusted leaders of English labour’ it argued that the war needed to continue until the ‘tyranny’ of ‘Kaiserism’ was defeated. As Sanders and Taylor have noted, much of the material produced by NWAC was ‘designed as specific counterpropaganda’. Gosling counters both ‘the subversive propaganda spreading the doctrine of peace’ and the pro-Bolshevik propaganda of the socialists.55 Another NWAC pamphlet from this period, Germany’s Two Voices by William Sanders (like Gosling, a noted labour leader) also contains a double-headed attack on socialism and pacifism, but as Figure 2.2 makes clear, it uses a striking image of the duplicitous ‘Hun’ to help get its message across. Such images, frequently used in NWAC publications, are in themselves illustrative of the changed tone of official propaganda. By using Smith’s to sell this kind of propaganda, NWAC not only gained direct access to the vast market served by their bookstalls and shops, but also to the marketing techniques that helped to turn some texts into bestsellers. Smith’s employed all of their marketing techniques to sell Peace: How To Get and Keep It. They ordered 1,250 ‘show-cards’ from Cassell’s for ‘exhibit at all our branches’ and gave the pamphlet itself ‘special prominence’ at both shops and stalls.56 In November 1918, NWAC thanked Smith & Son for ‘the firm’s splendid effort in distributing one-hundred million publications among the people of Great Britain’. 57 Several titles, including General Smuts’s The Commonwealth of Nations had sold over 1,500,000 copies each and WHS were responsible for the weekly distribution of 500,000 copies of the NWAC magazine Reality. The ‘most successful campaign’, an internal memo noted, ‘was in connection with Murder Most Foul. Approximately 7,000,000 copies were asked for by the public – only 4,000,000 copies could be supplied’.58 Written by an American observer on the Western front, this pamphlet documented German crimes under provocative headings such as ‘What the Hideous Hun has Done’. As these figures reveal, Smith’s distribution system was very successful at delivering NWAC’s message to a mass audience. In 1917 John Buchan informed Carson that ‘some of our publications have had very large sales [in America] and may be considered very good commercial ventures’. Robert Donald, who completed a report of the Department of Information’s propaganda work in December 1917, was particularly worried that publishers might be seen to be profiting from the sale of propaganda but during the final year of the war such fears appear to have been overcome by allowing WHS to


Figure 2.2 William Sanders, Germany’s Two Voices (NWAC pamphlet printed by WHS, 1918)


combine sales for profit with texts distributed for free.59 Most propaganda issued before the formation of NWAC was produced in relatively small print runs of 1,000–2,000 copies. Publishers were paid five guineas for their trouble because they were unlikely to make any profit on such limited sales, but NWAC’s need to reach a mass audience meant that penny pamphlets, such as The Commonwealth of Nations, were produced and sold in huge numbers. Such sales must have made propaganda a ‘very good’ commercial venture for publishers and retailers alike. However, as a letter that appeared in The Publishers’ Circular in December 1917 was designed to show, Smith’s were distributing Murder Most Foul for free ‘in the interests of national publicity’ and were even willing to pay the carriage on parcels sent out to anyone who was willing to help in its circulation.60 This ‘free distribution’ initiative was designed to target those ‘engaged in essential industries’, such as miners, dockers, munitions workers, and farm labourers, both in the workplace and at leisure. An internal memorandum sent to all WHS managers in 1918 instructed anyone who was a member of the Volunteer Corps to get written permission to be excused from their duties in order to distribute propaganda to theatres, football crowds, ‘labour conferences’, and ‘tank bank’ meetings. They were told that ‘Propaganda work’ was ‘a duty of considerable National importance’ and bookstall, shop and wholesale house staff were told to ‘collaborate together’ on local campaigns. In order to perform this important ‘Propaganda work’ Smith’s staff were encouraged to meet ‘early workmen’s trains and trams’, persuade factory owners to give out pamphlets with wage packets and use Boy Scouts to hand out propaganda at the factory gates. Managers of wholesale houses were told to get local newsagents to ‘hand (or enclose)’ leaflets ‘with the newspapers sold to the workmen’ at stands outside factories. Farm labourers as well as factory workers were targeted. Large numbers of the pamphlets Murder Most Foul, Devils of the Deep and British War Aims were distributed to breweries, in order that they could be forwarded to village inns. Bookstall clerks were instructed to persuade customers to take pamphlets with them in order to reach villages without shops.61 The title page of most NWAC pamphlets declared that they were official government publications. For example, the imprint of C.A. McCurdy’s Guilty! Prince Lichnowsky’s Disclosures (Figure 2.3) records that it was published by NWAC as part of the ‘German Aims Series’ and that copies could be ‘obtained from’ W.H. Smith & Son and John Menzies.62

41

Figure 2.3

Advert for C.A. McCurdy, Guilty! Prince Lichnowsky’s Disclosures


Before NWAC most propaganda had been published using the imprint of a famous publisher in order to disguise its origins. During 1918 Smith’s published several pamphlets, including Shall We Go On? A Socialist’s Answer, and Negotiate Now? A Business Man’s Answer, under their own imprint. These texts made no reference to NWAC and looked quite different from Government sponsored texts, but they were frequently advertised together (Figure 2.3). Both of these titles were distributed for free but others, including London v. Germany and Kipling’s Message sold for a penny.63 These texts were just as vitriolic as any NWAC pamphlet. Like the ‘official’ texts, they were aimed at working-class readers (especially women) and attacked both pacifism and socialism. Kipling’s Message contains a section on the war aims of the allies, but it concludes with a warning to women and labourers about what will happen if ‘German kultur’ is imposed on Britain. Women will be the mere instrument for continuing the breed: the vessel of man’s lust and man’s cruelty; and labour will become a thing to be knocked on the head if it dares to give trouble, and worked to death if it does not. And from this order of life there will be no appeal, no possibility of escape. This is what the Hun means when he says he intends to impose German kultur – which is the German religion – upon the world.64 As producer, distributor and retailer of these pamphlets, Smith’s must have recouped a great deal of the money invested in the free distribution of pamphlets such as Murder Most Foul. As this process suggests, by this stage in the war the Government was prepared to apply commercial methods to the sale of propaganda if it allowed the wider distribution of the message. As Cate Haste has argued, NWAC was very good at organising local meetings and patriotic rallies and soon after its foundation began to bombard areas of industrial unrest with War Aims propaganda. For example, on 21 September 1918, 250,000 pamphlets were dropped over Birmingham as part of a ‘Win the War Day’ rally.65 However, it was the decision to use Smith’s ‘organisation’ of retail outlets and wholesale houses that allowed NWAC pamphlets to reach a truly mass audience. Previous accounts of government and commercial propaganda have not recognised the importance of this system for the distribution of home front propaganda during the final year of the war. By combining sales with ‘free distribution’ NWAC was able to reach both


an audience that wanted to be informed about the Government’s aims – the traditional market for official propaganda – and a new audience that could either not afford to buy such publications, or which was actively resistant to the continuation of the war. The ‘voluntary’ distribution system set up in late 1917 allowed propaganda to reach the factories, theatres, football crowds and village inns that had remained untouched by earlier campaigns. During the final year of the war WHS also helped to distribute materials for a number of other government campaigns, such as National Food Economy, Household Fuel Economy, the League of National Safety and National War Savings. By the end of the war they had distributed over 200,000 handbills and displayed more than 35,000 posters for the Board of Trade alone.66 Bookstalls and shops were very important advertising spaces, and during the last few months of the war, when paper restrictions made almost all other forms of advertising redundant, they were covered with posters for these campaigns. By reproducing these documents as part of the bookstall or shop they became part of the fabric of everyday life for many British people. Smith’s agreement to distribute NWAC pamphlets had a similar effect upon propaganda. The combination of sales and free distribution helped to insure that the image of ‘the hideous Hun’, already present in market-driven publications, was spread beyond the limits usually reached by texts that circulated as part of popular culture. Notes 1 Charles Wilson, First With the News: the History of W.H. Smith 1792–1972 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985), pp.254–9. 2 W.H. Smith Archive, Swindon (hereafter WHSA) x135. The ‘Plymouth House’ was opened in December 1915, Newsbasket, April 1916, p.79. All references to documents in the WHS archive are reproduced with their permission. 3 ‘The Lancashire Newsagents’ Dispute’, Newspaper World, 2 May 1914, p.15. 4 First With the News, p.233. Wilson suggests that up to one-third of all the wholesale business in England and Wales was dealt with by WHS, p.334. 5 WHSA 135/1: ‘WHS to the Ministry of Food, 5 November 1917’. 6 WHSA 130/10: ‘Re Lord Derby’s Recruiting Scheme’ [November 1915]. 7 History of the Times: The 150th Anniversary and Beyond (London: The Times, 1952), p.155. 8 WHSA 237/1: ‘The Times to WHS, 21 December 1914’. This figure includes the newspapers handled by the provincial wholesale houses. 9 Newsbasket, September 1914, p.211, p.196; October 1914, p.220 and November 1914, p.250. 10 Ibid., October 1914, p.219. 11 WHSA 130/9: ‘WHS to all Bookstall Managers, 11 November 1915’.

44 Publishing in the First World War 12 Newsbasket, September 1916, p.158; February 1917, p.25. 13 J.M. McEwan, ‘The National Press During the First World War: Ownership and Circulation’, Journal of Contemporary History Vol.17 (1982), 459–86 (483). 14 The Daily Chronicle in November 1917, the Daily News in November 1918. 15 WHSA A232: ‘Stalls-District Reports 1917–1918’. 16 Newsbasket, August 1916, p.135. The Newsbasket noted the problem of ‘Excessive Returns’ in an article which records that ‘the news Department is limited now to 5 per cent returns’, July 1916, p.124; National Newsagent, 21 April 1917, p.4; Newsbasket, May 1917, p.75. 17 Joseph McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain 1914–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp.43–6. 18 Simon Eliot, Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing 1800–1919 (London: the Bibliographical Society, 1994), pp.74–5. 19 Publishers’ Circular, 19 August 1916, p.188. 20 Ibid., 8 September 1917, p.1. 21 Ibid., 9 March 1918, p.217. 22 Publishers’ Circular, 15 August 1914; Newsbasket, October 1914, p.223. 23 Newsbasket, September 1914, p.194. 24 Ibid., February 1915, pp.28–9; Daily Telegraph, 7 December 1914. 25 Newsbasket, September 1914, p.194 and October 1914, p.221. 26 Ibid., February 1915, p.28. 27 Jay Winter, ‘Popular Culture in War Time Britain’, in Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites (eds) European Culture and the Great War: the Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.331. 28 Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp.5–34; P. Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda 1914–18 and After (London: B.T. Batsford, 1989), p.131. 29 National Archives, Kew (hereafter cited as NA) INF 4/5- Appendix III, ‘Notes on a report on the Purchase and Publication of Books by Robert Donald’. 30 Winter, ‘Popular Culture in War Time Britain’, p.337. 31 M.L. Sanders and Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda During the First World War, 1914–18 (London: Macmillan, 1982), p.104. 32 The Newsbasket, March 1915, pp.62–3. 33 As Taylor has noted, ‘there is no adequate history of NWAC’, British Propaganda, p.61. 34 NA T102/16: ‘Aims of Home Publicity’ n.d. 35 Cate Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War (London: Allen Lane, 1977), pp.40–2, 152–6. 36 NA T102/10: ‘NWAC to Bell, editor of the Observer, 8 November 1917’. 37 NA T102/16: ‘Report of Sub-Committee on Publicity Campaign’, p.4. This document is undated, but the Sub-Committee was founded on 30 August 1917 and its decisions authorised on 25 September 1917. 38 NA T102/3: This poster is reproduced in Haste, Home Fires, opposite p.102 and in Buitenhuis, The Great War, p.107. 39 NA T102/16: ‘Report of Sub-Committee’, p.2. Further references are given in the text.

No Such Bookselling 45 40 Taylor, British Propaganda, p.21; NA T102/16: ‘John Buchan to Edward Carson. Department of Information, September 1917’. 41 NA T102/16: ‘NWAC Committee Meetings’. 42 WHSA 134/3: ‘Myers to WHS, 22 October 1917’. 43 WHSA 134/1: ‘Myers to WHS, 3 August 1917’. 44 WHSA 134/4: ‘Myers to WHS, 23 October 1917’. 45 WHSA 134/4: Gosling, Peace: How to Get and Keep It (London: Cassell and Co., 1917). 46 NA T1/12108: ‘Minute-Financing of NWAC by Treasury, 16 October 1917’. Myers was also an assistant editor and ‘liaison with Wellington House’. 47 Sanders and Taylor, British Propaganda, p.108. 48 WHSA 134/5: ‘WHS to Myers, 24 October 1917’; The Coming Victory: A Speech Made by General Smuts on 4 October 1917 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1917). 49 NA INF 4/: ‘Appendix III – Notes on a report on the Purchase and Publication of Books by Robert Donald’, p.5 50 Taylor, British Propaganda, pp.35–48. 51 T102/16: ‘Department of Information …September 1917’, p.8. 52 WHSA 134/4: ‘23 October 1917’. 53 Deian Hopkin, ‘Domestic Censorship in the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol.5, No.4 (1970), 151–69 (162–3). 54 WHSA, ‘Staff Service Cards’. 55 Sanders and Taylor, p.150. 56 WHSA 134/5: ‘WHS to Myers, 24 October 1917’; WHS 134/6: ‘Myers to WHS, 26 October 1917’. 57 NA T102/3: ‘NWAC to WHS, 14 November 1918’. 58 WHSA PA110/3: ‘W.H. Smith & Son Shops Department – Propaganda’ (n.d.), p.2; N.D. Hillis, Murder Most Foul! (London: Hayman, Christy & Lilly [1917]). 59 NA T102/16: ‘John Buchan to Edward Carson, September 1917’. 60 Publishers’ Circular, 22 December 1917, p.633. 61 WHSA PA110/3. 62 John Menzies worked for NWAC in Scotland. 63 Shall we Go On? A Socialist’s Answer: Reprinted from The New Age, Feb 28, 1918 (London: W.H. Smith [1918]); Negotiate Now? A Business Man’s AnswerAn Interview with Lord Leverhulme by Harold Begbie (London: W.H. Smith & Son, [1918?]); C.A. Hanson, London v. Germany – The War Effort of the Capital (London: W.H. Smith, [1918]). 64 Rudyard Kipling, Kipling’s Message (London: W.H. Smith & Son, n.d.), p.12. 65 Haste, Keep the Home Fires, p.42. 66 WHSA 134. They were responsible for the sale of ‘nearly half a million’ War Bonds by January 1919.

3 Translating Peace: Pacifist Publishing and the Transmission of Foreign Texts Grace Brockington

War against war The First World War was a total war, consuming lives, land, homes, relationships, resources, occupations and ideals across Europe, America and the European colonies. It was also total in the sense that Britain experienced, for the first time, an extensive war against war, a peace movement which challenged the government’s aims and methods, organised itself into an efficient network, and ran a complex propaganda campaign. British pacifists were an articulate minority, drawing on an increasing range of ideologies – political, religious, moral and cultural – to make the case against war. As well as the traditional pacifism of non-conformist Christian sects like the Quakers, a growing, secular peace movement drew inspiration from socialists, feminists, anarchists, individualists and aesthetes. Often figures of contempt – white-feathered ‘conchies’ – pacifists also became a force to fear. Their opinions threatened to erode popular confidence and raise enemy morale.1 A war of information developed to support the military war against Germany: to prevent the leakage of British intelligence, but also to silence dissenting voices. As the armed combat proliferated, so did the propaganda battles between a government determined to maximise the war effort and an increasingly sophisticated movement for the promotion of peace and civil liberties. For both, publishing was crucial for the dissemination of their arguments. For the Home Office, the control of printed material became a powerful tool against the peace movement. Governmental processes of persuasion and constraint, regulated by the Ministry of Information and the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), have become key to our understanding of conditions on the home 46

Translating Peace 47

front.2 The chapters in this book by Jane Potter, Stephen Colclough and Sara Haslam discuss different ways in which writers, publishers and distributors used books to support the war effort. In contrast, the present chapter examines how publishing could disrupt that effort. It draws attention to a body of pacifist writing, which, though always peripheral and now largely forgotten, was politically subversive, urgent in its idealism, prescient in its reasoning and enduringly persuasive. Many of the pacifist arguments rehearsed during the war anticipated political and cultural developments after 1918, when an expanding peace movement struggled to prevent the Great War from becoming the First World War. More recently, the growth of international networks, and escalations in global violence, have stimulated debates which resonate with pacifist ideas circulating a century ago. The risks involved in publishing those ideas were considerable. Pacifists incurred legal penalties (including imprisonment), physical punishment, economic ruin and social disgrace. Yet they persevered to produce a diverse body of literature – pamphlets, magazines, novels, essays and fine-publishing projects – which amounted to a wartime chorus of dissent. Publishers provided an infrastructure for their written campaign. The processes of editing, production and distribution, often conducted in the face of economic and legal obstacles, complicated the peace protest expressed in the texts.3 Yet until recently, historians have largely ignored these dimensions. Imogen Gassert’s 2001 study of British literary publishing during the war has broken the ground, identifying the main companies involved in pacifist book production, and examining the conditions under which they operated.4 She focuses on four publishers who between them promoted a range of pacifist orientations and degrees of outspokenness. The National Labour Press represented one extreme, publishing literature for the subversive, socialist No-Conscription Fellowship.5 On the other hand, Headley Brothers was sponsored by Quakers, and specialised in voicing the Christian argument against war. George Allen & Unwin maintained a successful balance between intellectual pacifists like Bertrand Russell and Leonard Woolf, and mainstream, commercial publishing. Conversely, C.W. Daniel ran a small, radical business, braving prosecution to support a range of anti-establishment causes.6 These, and other companies, ensured a healthy (or troublesome) pacifist presence amidst the outpouring of printed propaganda, and it is important that we write them into the cultural history of the home front.7 The mass circulation of socialist anti-war pamphlets, for


instance, and the use of popular fiction to promote pacifism, would make fascinating chapters in themselves. However, this chapter concerns itself rather with the textual borderland between Britain and Europe: the transmission of foreign language texts to a small but influential readership through the pacifist press. It examines two instances of such translation, both of which grew out of the interconnected, intellectual circles of the Cambridge Heretics debating society and the Bloomsbury group.8 The first is the foreign press section published in the Cambridge Magazine from October 1915; the second, Roger Fry’s 1915 Omega Workshops edition of Vous êtes des hommes by Pierre Jean Jouve (1887–1976), rendered in English as Men of Europe.9 Despite obstacles imposed by closed borders and xenophobia, British pacifists made an effort to disseminate translations of European texts, and eye-witness accounts of life and opinion on the Continent. Practically and symbolically, such publications were vital to wartime peace campaigning. They maintained the European-wide peace movement that had begun to develop before 1914; sustained the ideal of a common European culture; and mitigated the solipsism of war by offering an alternative perspective on the conflict.10 To take one example: in September 1914, Romain Rolland (1866–1944), the eminent French writer, musicologist and peace campaigner, published a polemic in the Journal de Genève setting out the case against war.11 On 14 November, the article appeared in translation as ‘Above the Battle’ in the Cambridge Magazine, with a preface underlining Rolland’s importance as the intellectual voice of pacifism in Europe.12 Later that month, the Cambridge Heretics debating society published the text as a pamphlet with an introduction by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1862–1932, fellow of King’s College, Cambridge); and then in 1916, C.K. Ogden (1889–1957), editor of the Cambridge Magazine and founder of the Heretics, reissued it in a collection of Rolland’s war essays.13 The reappearance of the article demonstrates the variety of publishing formats used by pacifists, from magazine, through pamphlet, to book; and it highlights a strand of liberal, internationalist pacifism that became increasingly vocal during the war. As Dickinson claims in his introduction, Rolland had identified a fundamental conflict between the ‘ideal of nation, which leads, and leads inevitably to war’, and ‘an international ideal which demands and presupposes peace’.14 Dickinson celebrates the networks overriding national boundaries, the ‘great civilising forces, trade, science, literature, art’, which had fostered a sense of common European community before 1914.15 By publishing and republishing Rolland in English, Ogden, Dickinson, and their circle of liberal,


intellectual dissidents endeavoured to sustain the network, despite the legal restrictions placed on direct communication with foreigners, travel abroad and the expression of pacifist opinion.

The Cambridge Magazine The Cambridge Magazine’s international coverage, and its choice of Rolland as unofficial hero, provoked criticism in the press, parliamentary debate, censorship, economic penalty, but also public declarations of support, and enough private donations to keep the paper financially viable. The pro-war Morning Post led the assault, publishing letters which claimed to expose the Magazine as dangerously pacifist, misleading and only tenuously connected with Cambridge University. In particular, it attacked the regular foreign press survey as biased and even pro-German, ‘a subtle and powerful instrument of Pacifist suggestions’, encouraged by a clique of ‘perversely clever persons’.16 Led by Ogden, a linguist and psychologist educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, these persons included writers such as Siegfried Sassoon, John Masefield, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw and Arnold Bennett; and academics such as Dickinson, Bertrand Russell, Jane Ellen Harrison and Arthur Quiller-Couch. Perverse or otherwise, they lent intellectual weight to Ogden’s campaign against war and the wartime culture of conformity, even if they did not openly support his views. Such imputations as appeared in the Morning Post raised government suspicions. The National War Savings’ Committee withdrew its advertisements for War Loans, inflicting a financial blow, while some Members of Parliament attacked the magazine in the House as a vehicle for pacifist propaganda. Yet others came to its defence, insisting on its value as an impartial source of foreign news, and eminent writers and intellectuals wrote letters of support which Ogden displayed on his front pages.17 The Manchester Guardian summarised the case in favour when it called the Magazine ‘a very valuable detached survey of affairs, and especially of the foreign press, which supplements in a most useful way the necessarily incomplete and popularising extracts which appear in most papers’.18 More than the record of university life which had characterised its beginnings in 1912, this foreign coverage became the Magazine’s trademark. It underpinned the principle of free debate and the practice of promoting peace for which the paper became famous, and, despite the problems inherent in wartime publishing, it made the years 1914–18 its most successful financially, as well as in terms of intellectual prestige. During the war,


the Magazine’s circulation rose to more than 20,000, and in 1917 it moved to King’s Parade in central Cambridge, as well as opening two bookshops.19 Whatever his actual bias, Ogden used a rhetoric of ‘freedom and fairplay’ to justify his coverage of foreign and pacifist opinion.20 Since before the war, his policy as editor had been to publish a range of opinions, without editorial intervention, and after 1914, this meant giving space to pro- as well as anti-war voices, and to Continental perspectives on the war, whether allied, neutral or enemy. For instance, in April and June 1917, two articles appeared presenting differing interpretations of ethnicity in Alsace-Lorraine, while in February, Ogden attacked the English for stereotyping foreign opinion; as he put it, they ‘visualise foreign countries in the plump allegorical figures of Mr Bernard Partridge’s cartoons’.21 Most articles in the wartime magazine, editorial or otherwise, concerned European affairs, and he took care to source his information from foreign newspapers. Correspondence with E.B.F. Wareing, a foreign correspondent and translator who worked as a military censor during the war, shows him obtaining material from Germany, Holland and Switzerland, and worrying about the reliability of the pro-German Swiss press.22 In December 1915, Wareing offered to arrange Ogden a subscription to obtain pacifist papers from Switzerland, and suggested he employ a weekly courier to ferry them over.23 ‘You would be the only people in Europe PUBLISHING this information’, he promised, and the magazine certainly made such a claim, advertising itself as a unique source of material which the national press overlooked, or deliberately omitted.24 However, it was not Ogden himself who obtained, selected and translated the material, but Dorothy F. Buxton (1881–1963), social activist and wife of the left-wing politician C.R. Buxton.25 Beginning in October 1915, their collaboration changed the nature of the Magazine, giving Ogden access to a broader range of European opinion than he could gather alone. Indeed, during university vacations, he turned the paper over entirely to the foreign press survey, making it synonymous with Buxton’s campaign against wartime xenophobia. Her parliamentary connection enabled her to take extraordinary liberties with the censor, and she imported over 100 papers, a quarter of them from enemy countries, via neutral Scandinavia.26 At her home in Golders Green, a small army of translators worked daily to sift the material, compressing it into a résumé which Buxton initially published in leaflet form, before negotiating with Ogden for space in his Magazine.27 The survey made no claim to be comprehensive. It was a


selective synopsis of foreign journalism, divided into themed sections, each of which scrupulously presented both sides of the debate: ‘Reasons for Continuing the War’, ‘Reasons for Not Continuing the War’, and so on; and stipulated the name of the paper quoted, its national origin, and political orientation whether ‘liberal, pro-ally’, ‘extreme militarist’, or ‘popular, anarchist’.28 However, Buxton’s liberal, pacifist convictions ensured that, while military news was largely absent, questions of pacifist disaffection, international organisation, and censorship, dominated her choice of material. The coverage equally justified Ogden’s claim to fair play, and the invectives in the Morning Post. Its preoccupation with freedom makes the foreign press survey a particularly good source on the censoring of foreign and pacifist publications, whether in Britain or Europe. Although its circulation at home was unlimited, the Magazine itself rarely reached subscribers in neutral countries. Ogden’s complaints to the Foreign Office met no reply. Meanwhile, Buxton drew attention to European papers which were faring even worse – eliminated, suspended, or, as Ogden put it in a commentary on the survey, ‘gagged and bound, and emitting only correct and official language’. 29 One survey, entitled ‘The Restriction of Knowledge’, published extracts from the censorship debate in Germany, Austria, America, Holland, Italy and Switzerland, and quoted American criticism of British practice. 30 Buxton and her team paid particular attention to problems in Germany, in the process exposing the potential for pacifist protest in a country which made no provision for conscientious objection, and which the British government preferred to portray as uniformly Prussian. For instance, F. Melian Stawell, one of Mrs Buxton’s translators and a Classics don at Newnham College, wrote at length about the suppression of the pacifist Berliner Tageblatt, while Ogden praised the work of Maximilian Harden, editor of Zukunft, for his ongoing temerity in criticising German military policy.31 It was a temerity which he himself displayed in his witty, but outspoken and persistent attacks on British censorship and propaganda, although he did not feel the consequences until the very end of the war. In October 1917, he felt sufficiently inviolable to joke that ‘DORA is a dear girl, but unless tickled authoritatively she merely smiles’.32 Yet 13 months later, Cambridge revellers celebrated the Armistice by wrecking the premises of the Magazine. Their action was symbolic, a way of attacking Germany in effigy. By publishing foreign and pacifist opinion, Ogden and his paper had, in their eyes, become the enemy.


Men of Europe When, in 1915, Roger Fry (1866–1934) published his version of Pierre Jean Jouve’s Vous êtes des hommes, he admitted that ‘it seems an odd time to do this sort of thing’. Yet in spite of paper shortage and what he called the public’s ‘complete philistinism’, he justified the risk, arguing that ‘it’s as necessary as ever to keep certain things going’.33 Between 1915 and 1919, he published four books: Arthur CluttonBrock’s Simpson’s Choice: An Essay on the Future Life (1915), Men of Europe (1915), Lucretius on Death (1917, an extract from De Rerum Natura, translated by R.C. Trevelyan), and a picture-book, Original Woodcuts by Various Artists (1919). He also made plans for two others: a second extract from Lucretius (titled Lucretius on Origins) and a translation of Chinese poetry by Arthur Waley, which for practical reasons never appeared, but which in outline conveys the cultural basis of Fry’s pacifist politics. His vehicle was the Omega Workshops decorative arts company, which he established in 1913 to employ impecunious artists and brighten the British home with furnishings inspired by modern European art. With the outbreak of war, the Omega took on new importance as a meeting place for London’s beleaguered intellectual community, and provided publicity and a point of focus for the artisticallymotivated pacifism practised by Fry and his Bloomsbury friends.34 As well as precariously maintaining the furnishing business, Fry hosted soirées and performances, employed conscientious objectors as artists and administrators, and made available photographs and magazines from Europe.35 As Clive Bell, his friend and fellow art-critic put it in 1916, he aimed ‘to keep the flag of civilization flying’.36 In 1940, in the midst of another war, Virginia Woolf used the same language to remember the Omega as ‘a centre in which some kind of civilized society might find a lodging’.37 Oddly, she makes no mention of the Omega publishing, despite the precedent it set for her own Hogarth Press, established two years later.38 Possibly Woolf’s omission betrays an anxiety of influence. It certainly set a pattern of critical neglect (of the books themselves, and of their larger ideological significance) which weakens our understanding of pacifist culture in particular, and wartime culture in general.39 Book production was a new departure for the Omega, an anomaly in the history of wartime publishing and the private press which makes sense only in the context of Fry’s commitment to a common, irenical, European civilisation. Historian Judith Collins rightly sums it up as ‘an


attempt, in most difficult times, to satisfy civilised values with esoteric texts and a high standard of technical competence’, but I would argue further that those texts and techniques were carefully chosen to project an internationalist, pacifist version of civilisation, contradicting the insular, militaristic values which Fry felt had invaded Britain since the outbreak of war.40 Fry’s management of the publishing project invoked the recent innovations of the French livres d’artiste, as much as the British tradition of the Book Beautiful.41 As such, it asserted his commitment to pre-war Anglo-French modernism at a time when most critics repudiated it. His eclectic choice of texts, ranging from ancient to contemporary, French to Chinese, demonstrates the inclusiveness of his cultural theory, and the international, diachronic ambition that also underlay his objections to war. Lucretius on Death takes a long historical perspective on conflict, serenely reminding the reader of many other battles which have raged, and been forgotten. It implicitly questions the apocalyptic mood of the war, what Dickinson and Ogden, in their tributes to Rolland, condemned as a failure of commonsense. Likewise, Fry’s unrealised plan to publish Waley’s translations subtly undermines the values of war by juxtaposing them with the more measured philosophy of a distant civilisation. He encouraged friends to read Waley’s work, writing in terms of wistful praise that ‘those old Chinese bureaucrats of the Han and T’ang period were truly civilized. They would be denounced today as sentimental humanitarians’.42 Again, ‘civilized’ here denotes a particular concept of a peaceful, rational society, the antithesis of Britain at war. It was just what the Omega publishing aimed to embody. In Fry’s opinion, Men of Europe improved on the original. As he told his mother, ‘if anything it gains by translation, as English seems to me more suited to that kind of quasi-Biblical form than French’.43 In fact, he transformed Jouve’s collection of war poems, not by taking liberties in the translation – his rendering of the language and syntax is literal – but through strategic omission and reframing. Fry selected five numbers from Jouve’s sequence of 27, veiling Jouve’s enthusiasm for collectivity, and creating a narrative more consistent with his own, individualistic, version of pacifism. As a Unanimiste, Jouve based his pacifism on a belief in a collective soul, and expressed solidarity with the combatants, even if he would not join them.44 In poems such as ‘Paiement’, he blames himself for not sharing the soldiers’ ordeal, while ‘Le beau temps’ describes the war as the best and worst of times, a catastrophe, but also an opportunity for intimacy. ‘Juste vent d’automne’ imagines the wind as a messenger between men, remind-


ing the poet of his common humanity, while ‘Sacrifice’ goes further, rejoicing in self-immolation for the sake of the future.45 All these, and others, Fry left out of the English version, shifting the emphasis from the universality implied by ‘vous êtes des hommes’, to a liberal, British vision of European culture. Jouve’s collection takes the form of a poetic diary, a personal experience which unfolds through six dated sections, giving a sense of temporal development. However, Fry builds an argument against war, reshaping the book into three thematic sections, each taking a different perspective on the conflict. The first, ‘Now in This Time’, speaks of the horror of war, when ‘pain, and evil deeds freely flow forth’, and urges brotherly love.46 Conversely the second section, ‘Voices of Europe’, presents a selection of poems which seem to support the war, though Jouve’s tone overall is not militaristic. It adopts the voice of the belligerent masses, crying for blood, and includes the poem ‘End’, which describes a soldier’s contented and patriotic death, his head ‘mingled with the fraternal mud’ under ‘a vast and fraternal sky’.47 The third section returns to the anti-war perspective, comparing the narrator’s feeling of alienation with the soldier’s sense of patriotic belonging. Like a Bloomsbury manifesto, the poem ‘What Must We Do?’ advocates peace and the restoration of reason. It demands a programme of reform, asking ‘what have we done afresh for the suffering of the world?’, and denounces ‘those who preach obedience, or resistance by violence, /To violence’.48 Undermining the dying soldier’s confident sense of fraternity, it alludes to his ‘black visage abandoned, with eyes consumed by worms’.49 The ‘fraternal mud’ becomes ‘the mud of pain’, a contrast easily missed in Jouve’s longer version, but brought to our attention by Fry’s juxtaposition.50

No-man’s land In 1926, Fry began an essay about book illustration with a powerful image of the artist as warrior. ‘Illustration is a battle ground’, he declared, ‘a no-man’s land raked by alternate fires from the artist and the writer, claimed by both, sometimes nearly conquered by one, but only to be half recaptured by the other’.51 Battles and book production, it seems, were inextricably associated in his mind. Apparently hyperbolic, actually grounded in his personal experience, the analogy eloquently demonstrates the strong though neglected link between Fry’s pacifist convictions, and his Omega books. For him, as for Ogden and Buxton, publishing became a substitute for travel, a way of crossing


no-man’s land at a time when the war had closed borders and reduced foreigners to cartoon characters. Their translations demonstrate how pacifist publishing could work against the printed propaganda produced, or encouraged, by the British government. Though rarely discussed by historians, such internationalism made a key contribution to wartime culture, and to the development of global organisation after 1914. Its dissemination, via magazine, pamphlet and book, effected debate and ideology in ways which few now take into account, but which we must credit for their impact on the practice and perception of war and peace. Notes 1 Useful histories of the modern British peace movement include: Paul Laity, The British Peace Movement, 1870–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001); Martin Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and John Rae, Conscience and Politics: The British Government and the Conscientious Objector to Military Service 1916–1919 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). 2 On 8 August 1914, Parliament passed the Defence of the Realm Act, empowering the government to suppress published criticism, imprison without trial, and commandeer economic resources for the war effort. As the war prolonged itself, these powers were extended and rigorously implemented. See Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda 1914–18 and After (London: B.T. Batsford, 1989); and M.L. Sanders and P.M. Taylor, British Propaganda During the First World War, 1914–18 (London: Macmillan, 1982). 3 For an account of the economic problems facing publishers during the war, see Jane Potter, Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women’s Literary Responses to the Great War 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp.52–87. 4 Imogen Gassert, ‘Collaborators and Dissidents: Aspects of British Literary Publishing in the First World War, 1914–1919’, unpublished D. Phil, Oxford, 2001. For a comparable study of visual pacifist propaganda, see Margaret Glover, ‘Images of Peace in Britain from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Second World War’, unpublished PhD, Reading, 2002. 5 Gassert, 2001, p.18. The National Labour Press also operated under the imprint of Blackfriars Press. As Gassert points out, using different imprints was a way of avoiding police attention, as the publishing operation looked smaller than it really was. An outgrowth of the pacifist Independent Labour Party, the No-Conscription Fellowship was established in November 1914 to resist conscription and represent the interests of conscientious objectors. 6 Gassert, 2001, p.18. Gassert focuses on Daniel, who published Rose Allatini’s Despised and Rejected (1918), banned under DORA because of its pacifist polemic, but notorious for its defence of same-sex relationships. Republished in 1988, the novel, and the story of its publication, have become a focus for feminist recoveries of war writing. For example, Angela Smith, The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp.148–56.

56 Publishing in the First World War 7 Other companies and societies which published pacifist texts included: The Union of Democratic Control; Simpkin, Marshall & Co; and the Pelican Press. 8 Established in 1909, the Heretics met fortnightly to debate recent controversial developments in religion, philosophy and art. Speakers, who included Bertrand Russell and G.B. Shaw, were obliged to forfeit ‘all appeal to Authority’. See W. Terrence Gordon, C.K. Ogden: A Bio-Bibliographical Study (New Jersey & London: Scarecrow Press, 1990). 9 Pierre Jean Jouve, Men of Europe, trans. Roger Fry (London: Omega Workshops, 1915). 10 For the history of the European peace movement see Sandi E. Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on Europe, 1815–1914 (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Douglas J. Newton, British Labour, European Socialism and the Struggle for Peace, 1889–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); and F.S.L. Lyons, Internationalism in Europe, 1815–1914 (Leyden: A.W. Sythoff, 1963). 11 Romain Rolland, ‘Au-dessus de la mêlée’, printed in a one-page, unpaginated supplement to the Journal de Genève, 23 September 1914, No.261, after p.4. 12 Romain Rolland, ‘Above the Battle’, trans. E.K. Bennett, The Cambridge Magazine, 14 November 1914, Vol.4, No.6, pp.114–17. 13 Romain Rolland, ‘Above the Battlefield’, trans. E.K. Bennett (published for the Heretics by Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes; London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd; Glasgow: Jas. MacLehose and Sons, 1914). Romain Rolland, Above the Battle, trans. C.K. Ogden (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1916), pp.37–55; First published in French as Au-dessus de la Mêlée (Paris: Ollendorff, 1915). 14 Rolland, 1914, p.3. 15 Ibid. 16 ‘Insidious Pacifist Propaganda’, The Morning Post, 24 February 1917, p.6. 17 MPs J.G. Butcher and Andrew Bonar Law spoke against the Magazine; J.C. Wedgwood, W.M.R. Pringle and P.A. Harris, for it. See ‘War Loans Advertisement (“Cambridge Magazine”)’, 12 November 1917, column 35; and ‘War Savings Committee (Advertisements)’, 28 November 1917, columns 2004–5, Parliamentary Debates: Official Report, vol.99. On 24 March 1917, the Magazine published a letter supporting its work, the signatories of which included Arnold Bennett, Thomas Hardy, Jerome K. Jerome and Rebecca West (Vol.6, 36th Vacation Number, p.445). 18 ‘Government Advertisements in the “Cambridge Magazine”’, The Manchester Guardian, 17 November 1917, p.6. 19 J.W. Scott and W. Terrence Gordon, ‘Charles Kay Ogden’, Dictionary of National Biography, 2004. Cambridge Magazine, 17 March 1917, Vol.6, 35th Vacation extra number, p.433; 19 May 1917, Vol.6, No.21; 17 November 1917, Vol.7, No.6. 20 Cambridge Magazine, 10 March 1917, Vol.6, No.16, p.405. 21 Louise E. Matthaei presented the case for Germany (‘Alsace-Lorraine and the Nationality Problem’, Cambridge Magazine, 28 April 1917, Vol.6, No.18, pp.546–50); which E. Roudolph rebutted (‘Alsace-Lorraine and the Nationality Problem’, Cambridge Magazine, 28 April 1917, Vol.6,


22

23 24

25 26

27

28 29 30 31

32 33

34

35

36

41st Vacation extra number, p.742). Ogden, ‘Hungary and the War’, Cambridge Magazine, 3 February 1917, Vol.6, No.11, pp.272–4. For instance, on 9 November 1914, Wareing mentioned a report from the Frankfurter Zeitung which he had sent Ogden, and enclosed an article from a Dutch paper (ADD.MS8313/18, University Library, Cambridge). On 6 February 1915, he explained the political sympathies of various Swiss papers and assured him that although the Neue Zürcher Zeitung was pro-German, it would not wilfully have misquoted Rolland (ADD.MS8313/20). The papers were: Vorwärts, the Neue freie Presse and The Leipziger Volkszeitung. E.B.F. Wareing to C.K. Ogden, 19 December 1915, ADD.MS8313/31. Accompanying each issue of the foreign press survey was a summary of material covered by other papers that week. In 1910, C.R. Buxton entered Parliament with the Liberals, but switched to the (anti-war) Independent Labour Party in 1917. Buxton obtained a licence from the Board of Trade to import 26 enemy papers, three Hungarian, the rest German and Austrian. See Francesca M. Wilson, Rebel Daughter of a Country House: The Life of Eglantyne Jebb (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967), pp.168–72. Large numbers were involved in the project. For instance, Dorothy’s sister Eglantyne Jebb, who took charge of the French, Swiss and Italian papers, had 23 people working for her on the French press (Wilson, 1967, p.171). See also Sybil Oldfield, ‘Dorothy Frances Buxton’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2002. Cambridge Magazine, 25 November 1916, Vol.6, No.7. Cambridge Magazine, 4 November 1916, Vol.6, No.4. C.K. Ogden, ‘Literary Casualties’, Cambridge Magazine, 21 October 1916, Vol.6, No.2, p.31. ‘The Restriction of Knowledge’, Cambridge Magazine, 21 October 1916, Vol.6, No.2, pp.38–40. F. Melian Stawell, ‘The Political Situation in Germany’, Cambridge Magazine, 28 October 1916, Vol.6, No.3, pp.65–9. Cambridge Magazine, 20 January 1917, Vol.6, No.9, p.216. Cambridge Magazine, 13 October 1917, Vol.7, No.1, p.209. Roger Fry to Nathaniel Wedd, 28 July 1915, and to Charles Vildrac, 17 February 1916, in Denys Sutton (ed.), Letters of Roger Fry, Vol.2 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972), p.388, p.393. For further discussion of Fry’s pacifism, see Grace Brockington, ‘“Above the Battlefield”: Art for Art’s Sake and Pacifism in the First World War’, unpublished D.Phil (Oxford, 2003); and Christopher Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2004). See Grace Brockington, ‘“Tending the Lamp” or “Minding their own Business”? Bloomsbury Art and Pacifism during World War I’, Immediations: The Research Journal of the Courtauld Institute of Art, Vol.1, Spring 2004, pp.7–19. Clive Bell to Vanessa Bell, 1916, King’s College, Cambridge: CHAX, Box 14, folder 1, letter 18.

58 Publishing in the First World War 37 Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995; first published 1940), p.170. 38 The Omega Workshops were still functioning when the Woolfs began printing in 1917. Fry took over Original Woodcuts by Various Artists (1919), his last book, from the Hogarth, while the Woolfs produced his Twelve Original Woodcuts (1922) as a sequel. 39 Neither Frances Spalding (Roger Fry, Art and Life, London: Granada Publishing, 1980) nor Reed (2004) mention the publishing in their otherwise thorough analyses of the Omega Workshops. Judith Collins (The Omega Workshops, London: Secker & Warburg, 1983) gives a detailed history of the books, but does not place them in the context of the war. 40 Collins, 1983, p.118. War exacerbated the decline of the British private press. See Joanna Selborne, British Wood-Engraved Book Illustration, 1904–1940: A Break with Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p.133. 41 Like French publisher-dealers such as Ambroise Vollard and D.H. Kahnweiler, he favoured woodcut illustrations inspired by modern European art, rather than the medievalism of the Kelmscott Press. 42 Fry to Charles Vildrac, 8 November 1917, Letters of Roger Fry, p.418. Waley’s translations were eventually published as A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (London: Constable, 1918). 43 Roger Fry to Lady Fry, 21 November 1915, Letters of Roger Fry, p.370. 44 Beginning in France around 1908, Unanimism encouraged the belief that a group of people generates a collective spirit more powerful than those of its individual members. For a discussion of Jouve and his Unanimist circle, See Nancy Sloan Goldberg, ‘French Pacifist Poetry of World War I’, Journal of European Studies, Vol.21, No.84, part 4, December 1991, pp.239–58. 45 Pierre Jean Jouve, Vous êtes des hommes, in Jean Starobinski (ed.) Oeuvre. Pierre Jean Jouve, Vol.1 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1987), pp.1510–24. 46 Jouve, 1915, p.1. 47 Ibid., p.7. 48 Ibid., p.13. 49 Ibid., p.10. 50 Ibid., p.14. 51 Roger Fry, ‘Book Illustration and a Modern Example’, Transformations (London: Chatto and Windus, 1926), p.157.

Part II Reading and National Consciousness


4 Sepoys, Sahibs and Babus: India, the Great War and Two Colonial Journals Santanu Das

In the grand European literary narrative of the First World War, Indian literature figures notably on two occasions: both centre round the figure of the Indian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore who was at the time arguably the most celebrated poet in the world. The first instance is Wilfred Owen’s adoration for Tagore: while saying goodbye to his mother for the final time, he quoted a line from Gitanjali – ‘When I go from hence, let this be my parting word’ – and the full poem was copied by him on the back of a message form in early 1917.1 The second instance comes from the German playwright Carl Zuckmayer who had heard the story from a soldier friend in the medical corps. A Gurkha soldier, taken prisoner in the German camp, was severely wounded and an amputation was necessary. The Gurkha had no German or English, and the German medical staff had no Nepali. At this point, the German officer uttered the only Indian words he knew – ‘Rabindranath Tagore! Rabindranath Tagore!’ at which the eyes of the Gurkha soldier lit up and he smiled.2 Poised between high art and general cultural awareness, tragedy and recognition, the two stories reveal not only the astonishing popularity of Tagore in pre-War Europe but the complex and intimate processes of what Harish Trivedi has called ‘colonial transactions’.3 In what has come to be known as the ‘second wave’ of war criticism, ushered in by the comparative, interdisciplinary scholarship of cultural historians and feminist critics, there have been two exciting trends: a diversification of interest with a focus on hitherto marginalised groups such as civilians, women or working-class soldiers, and an emphasis on detail. While it has now become a critical commonplace to say that the main problem with Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory is that it confined war experience to a group of white, middle-class 61


soldiers and ignored the role of women and civilians, the history of war writing and modern memory still remains distressingly Eurocentric. Yet India contributed more than a million men, including 827,000 combatants, of whom 49,000 sepoys were killed; according to Melville Page, some two million Africans saw service in the war as soldiers or labourers; some 100,000 Chinese workers were drafted, while from New Zealand, Maori contingents were sent to places as diverse as Egypt, France and Gallipoli.4 If imperial propaganda and colonial recruitment were the twin forces that drove the international war machine – indeed, it makes us think of the war in terms of global markets, multiracial labour and mass mobilisation – how was the war written about and read in the colonies? The whole cult of ‘officer-poets’ is a uniquely ‘English’ phenomenon, resulting from the conjunction of class politics, literary history and the pattern of civilian conscription. If the idea of the war as the great game was part of the public school ethos, so was the culture of reading and writing. Indeed, Fussell’s evocative chapter ‘Oh What a Literary War’ examines how ‘“literature” dominated the war from beginning to end,’ 5 particularly for the class of officer-writers: thus, in the trenches, Robert Graves read Butler’s Erewhon for the sixth time, Edward Thomas read Frost’s Mountain Interval, while Sassoon prayed that he did not die before finishing Hardy’s The Return of the Native. Any similar attempt to recover the history of reading or writing by the colonial troops comes up against two fundamental problems. First, while there were some highly educated men such as Cambridge-trained Indian doctor Kalyan Sen, or the brilliant Maori anthropologist Te Rangi Hiroa (also known as Sir Peter Buck), most of the colonial troops came from poor, semi-literate backgrounds and did not write regular diaries, memoirs or poems; of the few written records there might have been, even fewer have survived. Thus, there is a split between an oral record of battlefield experiences by the working-class sepoys and the general political and literary consciousness formed by educated middle-class civilians which survives through print. It is the latter category of evidence I shall be discussing, but it is important to have a glimpse into the former, as in the following note by an Indian sepoy, Mausa Ram: The state of affairs here is as follows: the black pepper is finished. Now the red pepper is being used, but, occasionally, the black pepper proves useful. The black pepper is very pungent, and the red pepper is not so strong. This is a secret but you are a wise man.6

Sepoys, Sahibs and Babus 63

‘Black pepper’ refers to Indian soldiers, the ‘red’ to English: a coded message, it was translated into English by the scribes and censored, but ironically these censored bits are all that survive today, giving insights into the subjective world of these one million people. The tantalising nature of Mausa Ram’s message makes us aware of the limits of literate/printed history to encompass war experience, but also urges us to reflect on what kinds of sentiments were allowed to enter the economy of print culture: a print culture which was overtly controlled by colonial ideology and exploited for propaganda purposes. To examine the publishing history of the First World War in India is to move from the working-class sepoys to the educated, middle-class bourgeoisie (‘babus’) and the colonial elite (‘sahibs’). What is astonishing is the enthusiasm and rigour with which these privileged classes addressed, absorbed, debated and wrote about the war in India, resulting in a remarkable array of material published in or about India and the war. Writings by the English range from official commentaries and testimonies such as India and the War introduced by Lord Sydenham (London, 1915), The Postal Office of India in the Great War (Bombay, 1922) edited by H.A. Sams, The Indian Corps in France (London, 1919) by Merewether and Smith, or General Willcock’s With the Indians in France (London, 1920), to more subjective, literary accounts such as Rudyard Kipling’s The Eyes of Asia (New York, 1918) and Edmund Candler’s The Sepoy (London, 1919). Similarly, Indian contributions range from Bhargava’s India’s Services in the War (Allahabad, 1919), Patiala and the Great War (London, 1923), India’s Contributions to the Great War (Calcutta, 1923) or the political writings of Gandhi and Naidu to subjective literary responses such as Svarnakumari Devi’s short story ‘Mutiny’ (originally written in Bengali and later translated into English), poems such as those by Tagore, Naidu and Bonnerjee to Mulk Raj Anand’s Great War novel Across the Black Waters (London, 1940). However, in this article, I shall be concentrating on two works produced in India during the war – the colonial war journal Indian Ink published in Calcutta, and a special edited volume called All About the War: The Indian Review War Book, published in Madras. As opposed to official histories or individual narratives, what we have in these works is the multiplicity of voices – of the English, Indians, men, women, writers, generals, civilians – as well as evidences of the networks between writers, editors, publishers and, in the case of Indian Ink, with established commercial firms. My aim in this chapter is both recuperative and analytic: I wish to recover the wartime consciousness in India, and, through my delimited focus, explore the relationships between


publishing, colonialism and the culture of war. What is the history of the printed voice of the First World War in India? How was it mediated, represented and used? What structures of feeling did it generate, emerging from the conjunction of colonial war ideology, a burgeoning nationalism and an elitist readership?

Indian Ink, 1914–16 Christmas 1914 saw a unique publishing venture in India: a war journal titled Indian Ink: Splashes from Various Pens was launched, edited by Everard Digby and published and printed by Messrs Thacker, Spink and Co. in Calcutta.7 Published annually and priced at Rs.1, it was aimed at ‘the well-to-do and generous classes of India’ and an article ‘A Record of Progress’ in the 1916 volume claimed a readership totalling 20,000. In some ways, Indian Ink was a quintessential colonial enterprise: funded by the leading Anglo-Indian companies, it was a highly entertaining and lavishly produced journal for the leisured classes, comprising short stories, poems, art, advertisements, travelogue, reminiscences and cartoons. Though it carried articles, stories and sketches on the war, it was life in India that was the focus. For us today, it captures the pulse of colonial life where the men write about their Kiplingesque adventures in ‘Sudden Death Lodge’ (‘In the Midst of Life’, 1914, pp.14–20) while their wives write about their visits to Darjeeling (‘The Truth about Darjeeling’, 1915, p.51). Indian Ink was a war journal not by dint of its subject matter but by the fact that it was initiated, as the cover of each of the volumes explicitly states, ‘in aid of the Imperial Reserve Fund.’ Indeed, in the foreword to the first edition, Lady Carmichael states ‘the idea originated with a Committee of ladies who are helping in Bengal to raise funds to relieve the distress caused by the war’ and that ‘it is hoped by the sale of “Indian Ink” to raise a substantial sum for the relief of distress’ (1914, Foreword). The chief beneficiaries were the Prince of Wales’ Fund, the St John’s Ambulance Association and finally the Imperial Indian Relief Fund, and its proceedings were meant not only for the actual combatants but ‘to afford relief to all classes in India suffering from the effects of war’ (1914, opposite p.1). Publication, propaganda and philanthropy come together in Indian Ink as the colonial wives do ‘their bit’ not only for the English Tommies but for the native Indians as well, showing how a humanitarian aspect existed alongside the systematic economic plunder that colonialism entailed.


W. Thacker & Co. had been one of the first booksellers to carve out a substantial name and market for themselves in India. As early as 1835, Emma Roberts, while writing about Calcutta, notes: ‘Next to the jeweller’s shops, the most magnificent establishment in the city is that of the principal bookseller, Thacker & Co.’8 Eighty years later, in an article in the 1915 issue of the Indian Ink recounting the publishing history of Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills, the author notes that ‘everybody in India knows Thacker, Spink & Co., but not so many know of the London house’ (1915, p.4). Although its popularity in India did not match up to that of the House of Macmillan who, by this time, had captured the native Indian market with its textbooks, Messrs Thacker, Spink & Co. was still a major force in Anglo-Indian publishing, producing works such as Twenty-One Days in India: Being the Tour of Sir Ali Baba and Curry and Rice (on Forty Plates). Thus, an advertisement appearing in two successive volumes of the Indian Ink claimed that Thacker, Spink and Co., Calcutta had published ‘the most significant and the most successful works descriptive of life in India’ (1914, xx; 1915, lxiv) while the Bombay wing called itself ‘The Leading Book sellers at the Gate of India’ with departments ranging from bookselling, engraving and printing to picture framing and rubber stamps (1916, n.p.). Moreover, it distinguished itself with its acclaimed ‘War Serials’ from London such as ‘The Times’ Illustrated History of the War, The Great War, The War of Nations, The Illustrated War News and The War Illustrated. Priced between Rupees four and ten, and ‘posted directly from England’, it aimed to present a ‘summary of each week’s doings, not only for present reading, but to keep and to hand down to coming generations’ (1914, xxvi). Given this context, the launch of Indian Ink can be seen as part of a broader commitment to both the cause of the war and of empire, at once aligning the Great European war with colonial history and helping in the imperial war contributions. What makes Indian Ink unique in the history of publishing in India are two features: the lavish use of coloured plates and the number of advertisements, continuing in the 1916 volume to 120 pages: ‘At the beginning of the cold weather of 1914 when “Indian Ink” appeared for the first time, that first appearance marked a point of departure in Indian magazine production’ (1916, ‘A Record of Progress’). Previous Indian magazines had occasionally used coloured pictures in the literary section but Indian Ink ‘was the first to use them on a large and prodigal scale…The coloured plate did not appear as a frontispiece and nothing more, it cropped up everywhere in the book’ (1916, ‘A Record of


Progress’). They included paintings, war cartoons, sketches, and photographs of native people and places and the occasional ‘Indian’ war scene, as in Major Corbett’s ‘Advance for Action’ (1914) depicting a Sikh cavalry charge; furthermore the contributors were both English and Indian artists. Indian Ink was in many ways the antithesis of its contemporary Blast published in London during the war years, but like Blast, it blurred the boundaries between a literary and an art journal. The most enduring visual material came from Indian painters such as Abanendranath Tagore and Nandalal Basu, both of whom tried at once to define and trace a native Indian sensibility and style, often going back to older traditions. Thus, the first issue opens with Abanendranath Tagore’s ‘The End of Journey’ (1914) – a fine, stylised painting of a camel coming to rest against a rich, reddish background with an embroidered border in red and gold, reminiscent of Mughal paintings, while Nandalal Basu in ‘The Worship of Cow’ (1914) falls back ostensibly on a Hindu tradition. Local influences and themes often inform the Anglo-Indian contributions, as in ‘The Toilet’ by B.C. Law (1915) and Gardiner’s ‘At the Doorway’ (1915). Colonial, propagandist and old-fashioned, Indian Ink nonetheless provided a space for an exploration of indigenous themes and styles as well as facilitating cross-cultural exchange. This extensive use of colour prints was made possible by commercial advertising which created, as the 1916 issue claimed, ‘A WORLD RECORD’: This year ‘Indian Ink’ has gone a step further: it has applied the Policy of Colour to its advertising section… In the extent and number of coloured advertising pages [we do] not invite comparison merely with India, but we invite comparison with any periodical published anywhere in the world. We know of no magazine or annual produced in any great capital of Europe or America that contains so large a number of coloured advertisements in a single issue (1916, ‘A Record of Progress’). This issue is marked by 120 pages of advertising and no fewer than 44 pages are in colour. Here, one comes across many of the established Anglo-Indian companies, from ‘Chartered Bank’ and ‘The General Electric Co. (India) Ltd.’ to ‘E.B. Railway’ promising ‘golf, tennis and other pastimes’ in Darjeeling to the ‘Cawnpore Cotton Mills’. Indian Ink was one of the first modern journals at once to understand and exploit the financial link between literary publishing and commercial


advertising: ‘We know of no other country in which the commercial class would have recognised so promptly the advantages of “Indian Ink” as an advertising medium as the great firms of India have done’ (1916, ‘A Record of Progress’). It highlighted not only the capitalist and consumerist forces driving the colonial economy, but also how they could be harnessed in the service of literature and art. At the same time, the advertisements themselves – from double-page glossy pictures of ‘Canadian Ford’ or ‘Chevrolet’ to full-page illustrations of ‘Spencer’s Cigars’, ‘“King George IV” Whisky’, ‘Wright’s Coal Tar Soap – the soap for India – Good for prickly heat’ or tourism advertisements by Indian railways – form a fascinating cultural commentary, providing insights into contemporary fantasies of consumption, elitism and orientalism. While the first volume declared the rates (Rs.100 per page and cover pages at Rs.150), by 1916 its advertising section had become so successful that the 1916 issue could unabashedly flag up its elitist, selfselective bias: ‘In proportion as the readers of this annual comprise the well-to-do and the generous classes in India, so the advertisers comprise the firmly established, the reliable, and the most generous of trading and commercial houses in the country’ (1916, ‘A Record of Progress’). Like the Viceroy’s party or the Tollygunge Club in Calcutta, Indian Ink was clearly the place to be seen while the war took a back seat. If colour and advertising marked out Indian Ink as special, so did its literary production: it was one of the very few multiracial war journals, produced by the colonial rulers but including contributions by Indian writers. The journal remains a classic example of the collaboration and interaction between the ‘babus’ and the ‘sahibs’ – the educated, Bengali upper-middle class and the colonial elite – showing how privileges of class, education and wealth overcame divisions of nation and race. The writings range from poems, stories, anecdotes, travelogues and even the occasional science fiction (like the remarkable ‘Calcutta Fifty Years Hence’ by ‘E.D.’, 1914, pp.23–30), to articles on subjects as diverse as Pathan honour, Tommy Atkins, German atrocities, bridge, suttee and Kipling’s debut in India. It is in this diversity that the appeal of the journal lies, foregrounding its colonial readership and concerns, and giving the impression of a tightly knit community. But how is the First World War mediated and represented? There were of course war poems, from elegies such as ‘The Tirailleur (To The Memory of Rene)’ (1916, p.1), reminiscent of the Jessie Pope school of poetry that Owen ridiculed, through the adaptation of the war to the accents of


Hamlet (‘Now all the World’s a Camp and all men soldiers’, 1914, p.63), to the mock-heroic ‘A Field Day with the C.L.H.’: Out and in round Arakpur: Cossacks posts at Barrackpore: Sentry go at Jadabpur, Hot but very stern. Softly down at Chanderdip, Giving us a pretty slip, Back behind the huts of it Muddy in the rain. (1914, pp.48–9) A prefatory note says that the poem was written ‘at a hand gallop while chasing Squadron B through the jungle’ and that each metrical irregularity ‘marks my passage over a dyke, bund or a sleeping pariahdog’ (p.48). The cavalier assimilation of war realism – Cossack posts, sentries, mud, rain – into a colonial romp through the streets of Calcutta hints at the self-enclosed world of privilege and merriment from which the concerns of war are far away. However, a more common practice by Anglo-Indian writers was the assertion of colonial loyalty through the writing of poems in which they imagined themselves to be the native troops. Thus, Shirley Hodginson writes ‘India to England’ – ‘Proud Rajputs, gallant Gurkhas …/ Thy soldiers are we, England’ (1915, p.12) – something that culminates in Rudyard Kipling’s 1918 essay collection The Eyes of Asia where he imagines himself to be a Pathan soldier in France writing letters to his mother. More progressive, if sentimental, is R.C. Lehmann’s ‘Epitaph’ for an ‘English Soldier and an Indian Soldier buried together in France’ (1915, p.12). Though invalidated by actual facts – Indians were kept segregated, and were not to be allowed to command white troops till late in the war – the conceptualisation of the poem shows that the war had made possible at least a fantasy and vocabulary of interracial integration and brotherhood. The most luminous literary figure in Indian Ink was, however, Rabindranath Tagore, who contributed no less than four poems: ‘The Season’, ‘Verse’, ‘The Trumpet’ and ‘Crossing’. Of these, ‘The Trumpet’, translated from the original Bengali and reprinted in The Times, is perhaps the most powerful, alternating between propaganda, protest


and lament. Tagore was a pacifist by nature, critical at once of colonialism and nationalism. Surprisingly, ‘The Trumpet’ opens with an exhortation to arms ‘Come fighters carrying your flags’ but by the second stanza, the poem moves into a more private space: I was on my way to the temple with my evening’s offerings. Seeking for the heaven of rest after the day’s dusty toil; Hoping my hurts would be healed and stains in my garment washed white When I found thy trumpet lying in the dust. (1914, p.4) The political theorist Partha Chatterjee in The Nation and its Fragments has posited two domains of colonial experience: ‘the material’ associated with science, technology and the West, and an ‘inner’ spiritual realm to which the coloniser is denied entry. 9 This model can be applied to this poem – particularly in its original Bengali version – where the lyric form, rooted in native devotional song, becomes a form of cultural resistance. Unlike the church in England at the time, the images of the ‘temple’ and the ‘evening’s offerings’ are associated within the native context with a feminised and pacifist consciousness, thus fracturing a poem written as part of the imperial war effort by an anti-nationalist poet. And yet, in the final stanzas, the call to arms is renewed, but through a heightened, almost mystic, vocabulary of shame, pain and inevitability: Let hard blows of trouble strike fire into my life Let my heart beat in pain – beating the drum of thy victory My hands shall be utterly emptied to take up thy trumpet. Tagore’s lyric typifies a problem that runs through the war writings of Indian Ink. Written without any immediate experience or any serious political engagement, they become excursions into a world where the soldiers are either subsumed into the abstract, heightened consciousness of the writer, or else occasions for wit, pity or lament for a selfabsorbed, privileged group. The sensuousness and anger that mark the representative First World War literature is absent, and yet Indian Ink remains a fascinating account of how the literary imagination in India – of both the English and the Indians – appropriated the war and adapted it to local concerns.


The Indian Review War Book During the war years, an advertisement began to appear regularly in different journals and books published by G.A. Natesan & Co. for All About the War: The Indian Review War Book: A comprehensive and authentic account of the War with numerous illustrations, portraits, cartoons, maps and diagrams contributed by officers of the Indian Civil, Military and Medical Services, Ministers of Native States, Engineers, Educationalists, Journalists, Lawyers, Publicists and other Specialists. Edited by G.A. Natesan, with an introduction by H.E. Pentland and an appreciation by H.E. Lord Hardinge. Price Rs 4. To Subscribers of the ‘I.R.’ Rs 3. G.A. Natesan & Co., Sunkurama Chetty Street, Madras.10 Based in Madras, G.A. Natesan & Co. was one of the chief publishing houses at the time, famous for its ‘Friends of India’ series which included the lives of Burke, Besant and Macaulay as well as for publishing important works by Indian nationalists such as Gokhale, Vivekananda, Gandhi and Naidu. If Indian Ink was primarily aimed at the ‘sahibs’, The Indian Review War Book (henceforth abbreviated IRWB) was meant for the newly emerging professional and educated classes of Indians.11 The book was mainly a collection of articles on the war which had appeared in former issues of the Indian Review, a monthly journal edited by Natesan with contributions in English by Indians and available at an annual subscription rate of five rupees. It was highly acclaimed by journals such as The Liberty Review, The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal, The Anglo-American Gazette and The Japan Daily Mail. Indian Review was the moderate voice of modern India; representing the educated middle-classes, it was critical of discriminatory policies and argued for greater political autonomy but at the same time with a continuing loyalty towards the British Raj (Natesan himself was a committed nationalist). With its introduction by Lord Pentland, Governor of Madras, and endorsement by Lord Hardinge, the war volume was both pro-war and pro-empire, hinting at the nexus between imperialism, publishing and the system of patronage. At the same time however, it included critiques of colonial policies, as in ‘India’s Opportunity’ by Sir William Wedderburn (p.123, excerpted from the New Statesman) and extracts of speeches from prominent nationalist leaders such as Dr Dadabhai Naoroji, Annie Besant, B.L. Tilak and Gandhi.


The IRWB was perhaps the most compendious contemporary record of the discussions and debates concerning India and the First World War, bringing to the subject the seriousness lacking from Indian Ink. There were official accounts, such as India and the War or more analytic, individual accounts such as Bhargava’s India’s Services in the War but few books of the time could match the rigour and level of engagement with the war that one finds in the articles in the IRWB. With the sketch of a Sikh and English soldier flanking each side of its red cover, totalling 440 pages and priced at Rs.4, the IRWB covers an extremely impressive range of subjects from economics and literature to politics and philosophy, and includes black and white photographs of prominent English and Indian leaders, Indian troops, Indian hospital ships or the Lady Hardinge War Hospital at Bombay. There are two lists of contents: the first, ‘Analytical Contents’ groups the different articles by certain common topics such as ‘The Causes of the War’, ‘War and International Law’, ‘Medical Relief in War’ and ‘Women and War’. The ‘Detailed Contents’, running into eight pages, indicates more fully the scope of the book, giving the sense of the war as being a global rather than a European conflict, with contributions on the war responses of Egypt, Turkey and Newfoundland or reports and pictures of the Indian troops in France. Though written, as Lord Pentland notes in his introduction, ‘from the standpoint of Britain and her allies’ (‘Introduction’), the book does approach the war, true to its claim, from different points of view: thus, we have ‘An Anti-English Poem’ by Prof. Gierke as well as a series of articles on German writers such as Nietzsche and von Bernhardi. The focus of the volume is on India and the First World War. In September 1914, when the King-Emperor sent a message to the ‘Princes and People of My Indian Empire’ and it was decided that Indian troops would be employed against the Germans in France, the native response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. While today, with our postcolonial hindsight, we realise the injustice and the absurdity of the fact that more than a million Indians were drafted to the killing fields of Flanders and France for a war which they neither understood nor particularly cared about – in a way, it is a grotesque inversion of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as native troops sail to Europe to face ‘the horror! The horror!’ – it is important to understand the then contemporary structures of feeling and discourses underlying the decision. While the enthusiasm of the native princes could be understood – dependent on British rule for their position and privileges, they started competing with each other with extravagant offers of money, men and horses –


the support of the professional and educated classes may seem puzzling, especially at a time when the ‘Swadeshi’ movement – the struggle for self-government – had already begun. Indeed, it is this question that Sir P.S. Sivaswami Aiyar addresses in ‘The War and the Educated Classes’. Dismissing ‘the vast majority’ of the Indian population as ignorant and indifferent – ‘their loyalty is of the passive type’ – and arguing for the superiority of the ‘educated Indian’ who, he notes, ‘is the product of British rule’ and ‘the boon of English education’, he goes on to remark: But what be the attitude of the educated classes who were such frequent and severe critics of the administration and who did not hesitate to express freely their grievances and aspirations? …the suspension of all [nationalist] political agitation in the country is proof of the desire of the educated classes to say or do nothing that may cause the least embarrassment to the Government. It is not that the carping critic of Government, the radical Indian doctrinaire, and the political missionary have to use the language of the Times’ History of the War, [but that] these various classes of critics have always realised that any weakening of the British Empire must affect the conditions necessary for the peaceful and steady development of an Indian nation (vi). Notwithstanding the elitist and imperialistic bias of the argument, it is difficult to dismiss it wholly. First, many nationalist leaders including Dadabhai Naoroji, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sarojini Naidu and Surendranath Banerjee were indeed products of English education and were inspired by and would later use the European doctrine of liberty and equality to demand independence for India; second, all these leaders as well as the Indian Nationalist Congress did support India’s contributions to the war, putting the empire’s crisis before their nationalist agenda. What many of the articles in the IRWB reveal is the ambiguous, ambivalent relationship between the educated, upper-middle class Indians who in fact spearheaded the nationalist struggle, and the English ruling class: on one hand, there was resentment against the colonial yoke, and yet, on the other hand, an immersion in English literature and culture, tempered by an adherence to pan-European Enlightenment philosophy. On 12 August, 1914, Dadabhai Naoroji, one of the founding figures of the Indian National Congress, describing himself ‘more of a critic than a simple praiser of the British Rule in India,’ noted: ‘the vast


mass of humanity of India will have but one desire in his heart viz., to support … the British people in their glorious struggle for justice, liberty, honour,’ (opposite ‘Analytical Contents’ page), something reiterated in more strident terms by Bhupendranath Basu in ‘Why India is Heart and Soul with Britain in this War.’ (pp.262–4).12 But at the same time, a number of closely argued articles – ‘The War and Western Civilisation’ (xiv–xv) by Dr Sir R.G. Bhandarkar, ‘The Underlying Causes of War’ by Mr N.M. Mazumdar (pp.11–18) and ‘English, French, German, Italian, Greek and Roman Maxims of War, and War Proverbs’ (pp.421–4) by Mr Abdul Hamid Minhas – show an intimate understanding and engagement with the war, and by extension, with European history and politics, and belie any neat conflation with either the model of colonial mimicry or of forced indoctrination. It is true that the IRWB was a pro-war, imperial publication but the sheer range of the contributors, extracts and quotations shows a widespread support for the war, often from some of the most prominent nationalist leaders such as Gandhi and Naidu. In some ways, the articles may be said to reveal the insidious success of colonialism – the internalisation of the dominant war ideology by the native elite class, in turn paraded in a moderate political journal printed with British patronage. It is possible to detect in some of the pro-war articles by Indians what Ashis Nandy has called the ‘psychological damage’ caused by colonialism.13 For many Indians, curiously, imperial war became a way of salvaging regional honour and military pride, something the British propaganda machine was not slow to exploit, as in the article ‘Indian Troops At the Front’: Hindu and Mahomedan will be fighting side by side with British soldiers and our gallant French allies, and you will be helping to make history. You will be the first soldiers of the King-Emperor to have the honour of showing in Europe that the sons of India have lost none of their ancient martial instincts and that they are worthy of the confidence reposed in them in battle. (p.266) War propaganda and imperial demands are transformed into a vocabulary of national and racial honour, a point demonstrated in the very title of Sir William Wedderburn’s article, ‘India’s Opportunity’ (p.123). Indeed, many Indians believed this, and addressed the idea passionately in a series of war poems: ‘India to England’ by the Indian judge, Nawab Nizamat Jung, ‘The Indian Expeditionary Force’


(p. 258) by K.S. Ramaswami Sastri, ‘Ode to the Indian Army’ (p.259) by M. Krishmachary and finally ‘England’s Cause is Ours’ by A. Madhaviah: Sister! Brothers! Now’s the hour That we prove our worth, – Let who can, go fight and slay, … Prove by all that’s in our power, England’s cause is ours. (p.261) If colonialism is based on the assumption of racial and cultural inferiority, it shows its internalisation by the native class, and the resultant anxiety expresses itself as exaggerated loyalty and enthusiasm. Subjected to the racist ideology corrosive of self-esteem and still smarting under the allegations of betrayal and degradation surrounding the Sepoy Mutiny, fighting alongside the Europeans in this world war becomes an opportunity to ‘prove’ the ‘worth’ of India and redeem the racial slur, as evident in a piece of doggerel verse: ‘Who calls me now a coward base/, And brands my race a coward race?’14 Regional and racial prowess can paradoxically be salvaged through imperial war service. At the same time, it is also modern India’s point of entry into ‘History’: if Europe was the place where history was ‘made’ and histories of the colonies were subsidiary to this grand narrative, the Great War was surely a guarantee of India’s direct participation in its march. Concomitant with these anxieties and insecurities were certain shrewd political calculations. The First World War catches the Indian national consciousness at that fragile point between a continuing (though increasingly qualified) loyalty to the British Raj and the first concerted nationalist movements. The twin impulses are evident in the observations of Mahatma Gandhi: ‘I thought that England’s need should not be turned into our opportunity, and that it was more becoming and far-sighted not to press our demands while the war lasted.’15 Support for the empire at this critical juncture could later be used to press for ‘responsible self-government’ or ‘Swaraj’. This sentiment finds its most succinct expression in the IRWB in an article titled ‘India’s Loyalty and England’s Duty’ by the Irish Theosophist and educationalist Annie Besant who adopted India as her home and championed its right to self-government through her ‘Home Rule’ movement: ‘When the war is over … we cannot doubt that the King-Emperor will, as reward for her glorious defence of the Empire, pin upon her breast


the jewelled medal of Self-Government within the Empire.’ (p.267). In her, we hear most clearly the moderate voice of political reform where the critique of colonialism is articulated within the structure of the empire. Moderation rather than radicalism bore fruit: one of the results of India’s support for the war was the Secretary of State Lord Montagu’s announcement in August 1917 that British policy was aimed at ‘the progressive realisation of responsible government in India.’16 In a country that was at the time marked by widespread illiteracy and poverty, print culture was an elitist discourse; moreover, the publishing industry was largely controlled by colonial ideology. Indian Ink and The Indian Review War Book give voice to the war views of the two most powerful and influential parties on the colonial stage: the English either in India or heavily involved with it, and the educated middle-class Indians. In fact, what both journals testify to is the spirit of intellectual engagement and exchange between these two parties on the issue of war, resulting in two collaborative Anglo-Indian war journals which are unique in the history of publishing in the First World War. Indeed, it is doubtful whether these journals had any counterparts in other colonies as joint ventures between the English on one hand, and the Chinese, Maoris, Jamaicans, Askaris or Senegalese on the other: these two journals might well be key documents for the tangled histories of the First World War, race and print culture. Within each, it is possible to detect a particular bias reflective of its origins, genre and readership – Indian Ink was more ‘white’, literary, elitist, leisurely while IRWB was more ‘brown’, political, middle-class and polemical – but both reveal the existence of a highly complex relationship between war and colonialism rather than a simple narrative of either imperial loyalty or colonial exploitation. Loyalty, resentment, support, anxiety, nationalist aspiration: all these are often fused and confused in the contributions by the Indians, just as imperialism, imperiousness, genuine appreciation of India’s contribution and often sympathy for the colonial troops fed into the writings of the English. What is particularly remarkable is the intimate familiarity of the Indian educated middle-classes with English politics and culture, and their intricate engagement with the war: while their entry into English print culture was enabled by their Anglicisation and their adherence to or moderate stand on colonial ideology, it also helped them to create a space for themselves, subtly reinventing older native styles, as in the paintings of Abanendranath Tagore, or advocating moderate reforms, as in IRWB. The loyalty of Indians to the imperial war


effort and the collection of such responses in a publication by Natesan – who also published pamphlets such as What India Wants: Autonomy within the Empire – bears witness to a particular and important strand in colonial life in India: a spirit of collaborative dialogue and intellectual exchange between the English and the educated middle-class Indians that curiously existed alongside the racist ideology and nationalist demands, and which surfaces during the war years. The Amritsar massacre of 1919 where General Dyer would open fire on a group of peaceful Indians in the enclosed ground of Jallianwallabagh was yet to happen, an incident which would irretrievably change the nature of the Anglo-Indian relationship. Notes 1 Jon Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p.159. 2 Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The MyriadMinded Man (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), pp.2–3. 3 Harish Trivedi, Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1993), p.1. 4 See David Omissi (ed.) Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters 1914–1918 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); Michael Summerskill, China on the Western Front: Britain’s Chinese work force in the First World War (London: M. Summerskill, 1982); Christopher Pugsley, Te Hokowhitu A Tu: The Maori Pioneer Battalion in the First World War (Auckland: Reed, 1995). 5 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p.158. 6 Omissi, p.49. 7 References to the volume year and page number, when available, are indexed within the text. Many of the pages and the paintings in the original text are not numbered. 8 Emma Roberts, Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan with Sketches of Anglo-Indian Society (London: W.H. Allen, 1835), p.8. 9 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p.6. 10 G.A. Natesan (ed.) Speeches on Indian Questions by the Rt. Hon. Mr Montagu (Madras: G.A. Nateson, 1917), back cover. 11 The IRWB bears no date, but 1915 is a likely year of publication. 12 Bhupendranath Basu, ‘Why India is Heart and Soul with Britain in this War’ (London: Macmillan, 1914). Basu’s pamphlet (which retailed for 1d in Britain) was the very first title published by Macmillan under the schedule of Wellington House; in it Basu declared that British government in India ‘was not incompatible with the realisation of national ideas.’ 13 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), p.3. 14 M.L. Bhargava, India’s Services in the War (Lucknow: Standard Press Allahabad, 1919), p.218.

Sepoys, Sahibs and Babus 77 15 M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, trans. Mahadev Desai (1927; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p.317. 16 Natesan, Speeches on Indian Questions, p.1696.

5 The Battle of the Books: Supplying Prisoners of War Rainer Pöppinghege

During the First World War about eight million soldiers were taken prisoner on both sides of the front, and many spent months or years in prisoner-of-war camps.1 About five million of them were captured at the Eastern front. However, this article focuses on the conditions at the Western front. Prisoners on all fronts suffered from poor living conditions, were often used as cheap labour, and – particularly those who did not work and spent all their time in the camps – they also suffered from monotony. Within the camps many tried to overcome their ‘barbed-wire-disease’ (or neurasthenia) by developing different kinds of physical and intellectual activities. Sports, theatre and particularly reading were the most common. But what did they read? What kinds of printed media were accessible to them at a time when military authorities tended to inflict strict measures of censorship? How did they get access to books, newspapers and magazines in their own language? The legal basis of their internment was the Hague Convention of 1907–10 which required all prisoners to be treated like the country’s own army. That simply meant sufficient food and sanitary conditions; beyond these rules about living conditions within the camps there were no hints regarding the POW’s mental activities. Should they be allowed to read anyway? In practice this general decision was up to the combatant states and thus to the camp commandants, and most of them granted permission for newspapers and books which had passed the censor. An exception was France where, particularly in soldiers’ camps, restrictions were frequent: the French military authorities allowed newspapers from member countries of the Entente only in officers’ camps. In a report to the Württemberg War Ministry in 1918, for example, German officer Wilhelm Freiherr von Lersner complained 78

The Battle of the Books 79

about the lack of reading rooms in France. ‘Mental activity together with physical engagement is the only salvation and means of bearing the long years of internment …the German soldier needs this mental work.’2 He surmised that the French government intended to systematically ‘stupefy’ its prisoners. However, the fact that this German officer demanded books by military authors such as Clausewitz might in this case have proved detrimental to the French willingness to concede in the matter of reading material.

Camp libraries On the other hand, most camp commandants were interested in letting their internees read in the belief that this helped to calm down emotions and secure discipline and order. As long as POWs read literature and newspapers which had passed the censor, commandants put up no objections and in most cases readily gave permission. Thus many British, German and some French camps along the Western front were equipped with libraries and reading rooms. Each government supported the camp libraries financially for its own soldiers in the enemy country. On one single occasion the French Government provided 15,000 Francs for various camp libraries in Germany.3 In several cases the camp canteen run by the prisoners themselves contributed its profits to the library budget. But more common were donations from home where individuals or associations collected or bought books for the nation’s prisoners abroad. At Stobs near Hawick in Scotland, the local camp library comprised 2,700 volumes, while the larger civilian internee camp near Knockaloe, Isle of Man offered its German inmates 18,000 volumes. In Germany the camp library at Ohrdruf, Thuringia contained some 2,500 books. The biggest of three camps in Münster, Westphalia had a library of 7,000 books in French, English, Russian, German, Polish, Flemish and even Esperanto to provide for its various nationalities.4 In some cases these libraries were established very early on; the Ingolstadt officers’ camp library, for example, had been founded as early as September 1914, when the first captured officers arrived. The camp in Göttingen, which was chosen as one of several ‘privileged’ camps existing in each of the combatant states, provides an interesting case study. In February 1915 the Prussian War Ministry made provisions for a more active policy of ethnic and national division. It was by no means unusual to separate prisoners according to their nationality in order to influence them or to make them change


sides; the Germans tried – mostly in vain – to mobilise the Irish prisoners against England and the Ukrainians against Russia in the camps of Salzwedel, Rastatt and Wetzlar. The French, on the other hand, took members from ethnic minorities in Germany like the Polish, Danish or prisoners from Alsace-Lorraine to privileged camps like Monistrol sur Loire, St Rambert or Montbrison. In England Feltham was supposed to be a ‘traitors camp’ where the Polish Legion tried to recruit compatriots.5 Göttingen-Ebertal was chosen as just such a ‘privileged’ camp in spring 1915, where Flemish POWs enjoyed better material treatment and a wide range of leisure facilities. Two Göttingen Professors, Konrad Beyerle (History of Law) and Carl Stange (Protestant Theology) were responsible for the implementation of Flamenpolitik within the camp (though the latter had previously been active in the care of prisoners).6 Both made better food one of their primary concerns, and officially supported the Flemish prisoners as regards their cultural activities. Göttingen thus became the centre of pro-German and pro-Flemish separatist propaganda among Flemish prisoners. The Göttingen Fürsorgeausschuss (Welfare Committee) was responsible for all Flemish prisoners in Germany. In particular, Flemish intellectuals were brought from other camps in order to influence the inmates, while those who were thought to be critical and who simply rejected pro-German/Flemish propaganda had to leave Göttingen and were sent to regular non-privileged camps.7 Göttingen camp also served as a turntable: activist prisoners from other camps attended courses here, later returning as well-trained propagandists to their own ‘home’ camps. Among the various institutions founded for the benefit of the Flemish POWs were a camp school which even ran vocational courses, a library with 6,300 volumes, barracks for artists and craftsmen, a department store and close ties to Göttingen University.8 See Figures 5.1 and 5.2. These resulted in outstanding research opportunities for Flemish POW-intellectuals, who were even allowed to borrow books from the renowned Göttingen University library. From May 1916 a small group of perhaps two-dozen POWs made more or less frequent use of this opportunity and borrowed books for a 5-Pfennig fee.9 Between May 1916 and November 1918 they borrowed 1,868 volumes which equals a monthly average of 63 volumes, although as the war approached its end the frequency of borrowing slightly decreased. Furthermore the Göttingen-Ebertal camp library was provided with 220 volumes donated by various professors of Göttingen University. The Flemish prisoners showed particular interest in literature, science and technical topics (see


Figure 5.1

The reading room in Göttingen Camp

Source: Alexander Backhaus, Die Kriegsgefangenen in Deutschland. Gegen 250 Wirklichkeitsaufnahmen aus deutschen Gefangenenlagern (Montanus: Siegen, Leipzig and Berlin, 1915).

Figure 5.2

The camp library at Ohrdruf

Source: Ibid.

Table 5.1). As an analysis of the 478 extant library forms suggests, they also borrowed books relating to their home country, although this should not automatically lead to the conclusion that they enthusiastically supported Flemish nationalism or even separatism, since among

82 Publishing in the First World War Table 5.1 Percentage of books borrowed by POWs from the Göttingen University library, May 1916–November 1918, by subject Subject Biographies Science, Medicine Technical, Architecture Literature, Linguistics Philosophy, Politics, Theology Economy, Banking History Germany Belgium, Flanders, Netherlands World War 1914–18 Law History of Arts Psychology

Books borrowed 6 71 52 102 36 33 16 14 57 17 37 26 11 Total: 478

Percentage 1.30% 14.90% 10.90% 21.30% 7.50% 6.90% 3.30% 2.90% 11.90% 3.60% 7.70% 5.40% 2.30%

Source: Stadtarchiv Göttingen, KGL 47c No.44d.

those books a considerable number dealt with Belgium as a whole. Interestingly enough, though, the prisoners neglected topics relating to Germany almost completely – perhaps a hint at the failure of pro-German propaganda. It is hard to explain the prisoners’ reading preferences. They borrowed classics like Kant, Goethe and Dickens, but also books relating to their personal situation like the text of the Hague Convention or a handbook about ‘Penal law for military staff’. Books on technical or practical subjects may have been of great merit to those attending vocational courses at the Göttingen camp school. While Otto Dornblüth’s book Psychic Neurosis might have had value as regards the prisoners’ neurasthenia, the Text-book of Baby Diseases could hardly have direct relevance to the daily life of a prisoner of war. However, to many of the prisoners reading about topics not related to the daily camp routine might have been a sign of psychological escapism. While everything else focused on the POW’s campexistence they in their imagination often prepared themselves for their future return to a ‘normal’ family life. Perhaps in this case a prisoner had been consulted in a letter by his wife about his baby’s disease. An even more prosaic explanation might be that contacts with female German civilians were more intense than the German camp commandant had expected.


Generally, prisoners of war read what they could get access to – and this was the case in most of the camps all over Europe. Next to novels they borrowed and lent newspapers and magazines sent to them or their comrades by various organisations, clubs and even companies. Thus a permanent, yet censored, communicative link between the so-called home front and the camps was maintained.

Passed by censor The principles of censorship in any combatant nation might have resembled those of the London War Ministry: ‘Books giving expression to hostile sentiment or containing hostile propaganda or books dealing with the present war are not to be delivered to prisoners.’10 In France the État-Major de lÁrmée (5e Bureau, Section du Contrôle) was responsible for censoring reading material.11 In the German Empire, each book sent to any of the 175 POW camps was meant to be checked by the Prussian War Ministry in Berlin. However, this task was largely decentralised so that the regional military authorities took over the Ministry’s part. From 1916 onwards, books for British prisoners were collected or bought by civilian and official committees at home and afterwards sent to Germany. The Danish Red Cross, the prisoners support section of the YMCA and the Christian Students Union in Germany organised transport and communication with the German authorities.12 Censorship was twofold: first, books and newspapers were checked at home in order to avoid crucial information about the country’s military or economic situation and technical inventions being passed to the enemy. The receiving country also applied measures of censorship on possible propagandistic texts. Thus even books addressed to German POWs in neutral countries had to pass through German censorship.13 Any printed material also had to gain permission to be sent to foreign countries. This of course applied to reading material for POWs as well, and the military authorities in all the combatant states created lists of forbidden titles which were not to be distributed publicly. For example, the Foreign Office prohibited the Danish Red Cross from delivering the satirical calendar of the Fliegenden Blätter to German prisoners in BEF camps due to its political content, and the censor’s list of the acting General Commander in Munich in 1916 contained 88 banned books with socialist, pacifist or sexually permissive content. These books were not prevented from being printed, but it was forbidden to advertise or display them in public.


While prisoners read books primarily for entertainment, newspapers were of high informative value. Generally POWs lacked current information about what was going on beyond the barbed wire – letters from home were also censored and took several weeks to arrive. It was thus the daily newspaper which provided POWs with information about current events from the frontline. As we have seen, though, access to daily newspapers varied from country to country. Generally speaking, publications from enemy states were completely forbidden. Newspapers from neutral countries were permitted – apart from POW camps for ordinary soldiers in France – after they had been checked by the censor. In most cases this applied to publications from the country itself, too. In Germany papers in Polish, Russian, Flemish and French from the occupied territories were distributed in the camps, an example being the Gazette des Ardennes, which was published by the German military.14 The Prussian War Ministry listed 83 titles which were regarded as suitable for POWs, although together with the acting General Commanders it also listed publications of presumably antiGerman content which the prisoners were forbidden to read.15 The final decision, though, rested with the camp commandants who for reasons of their own could prevent the distribution of single copies of generally permitted newspapers. In response to the Prussian War Ministry’s demand they also promoted pro-German media and propagandistic publications by distributing free copies. The English-speaking prisoners were supplied with the official Continental Times which could easily be identified as pro-German propaganda. A French POW in his diary described it as a medium of ‘hatred and lies’.16 Within the camps regular German daily newspapers were permitted and sold on a regular basis. This applied both to local and national papers like the Frankfurter Zeitung, the Leipziger Neuesten Nachrichten, and the Kölnische Zeitung.17 In France, as we have seen, the government was more restrictive regarding the supply of newspapers in ordinary camps. It was exceptional for POWs to have access to regular newspapers – even French ones. This prompted the German censorship offices to check parcels addressed to POW camps in France for published material of any sort, thus avoiding the chance that these parcels would be withheld altogether by the French censors.18 In the beginning even officers were forbidden to buy French and allied newspapers; the only papers they had access to were those from neutral countries. Soon, however, the French Government learnt to value the potentially propagandistic effect of allied newspapers on the German officers’ mood and began to allow them, also evidently realising – if a little belatedly – that it


was the international standard to grant access to at least the country’s own newspapers.19 German second lieutenant Paul Klein confirms that in the Barcelonette officers’ camp at the end of 1916 the prisoners received French, English and Italian newspapers. Since English papers contained official German reports, from March 1917 onwards Klein also subscribed to The Times at his own expense.20 With the exception of officers and civilian internees, though, all other POWs still encountered considerable problems in getting hold of current information. This lack of information created an atmosphere where rumours spread easily. ‘Because we are getting little information about things in France, some inventive spirits enjoy substituting the absence of news by the products of their imagination’, a French POW from Stendal, Germany wrote.21 Reading newspapers was thus regarded as ‘nourriture intellectuelle’ or ‘intellectual nourishment,’ vital to the prisoners’ mood and crucial in preventing damaging speculation. It was not merely censorship which reduced the publications available in POW camps; in several cases the military authorities also inflicted ‘reciprocal’ sanctions on the prisoners within their range of power. If reports about unfavourable treatment of prisoners in the enemy country reached the Government this could lead to sanctions in its own camps. In March 1917, for example, the Prussian War Ministry received rumours of bad living conditions for German soldiers in French camps, and it reacted by inflicting sanctions on French POWs in its own camps. For a couple of months – until the situation in France was thought to have improved – the Prussian Ministry felt compelled to pursue a more illiberal course than usual. During this period no French POW-magazines and journals were allowed, canteens were closed and reading opportunities were reduced.

Longing for information – receiving propaganda Several contemporary reports suggest that such sanctions were likely to be keenly felt, as prisoners were particularly hungry for news from the outside world. Of course, they enjoyed receiving parcels and letters and a good book was always valued. In this respect prisoners resembled the average human being. But there was a crucial difference; they did not just want more information, they wanted any news at all, trapped as they were in a situation in which it was hard to come by. Perhaps inevitably, the combatant nations sought to use the prisoners’ longing for information as a way of inflicting propaganda on them.


The military authorities on both sides of the front created a number of periodicals which served both to inform and at the same time manipulate POWs. In Germany, for example, the Prussian War Ministry produced the Russischer Bote (Russian Herald). More than 100,000 copies explaining the German Government’s perspective were sent to Russian POWs twice a week. The paper also served to communicate official circulars and regulations to the Russians. The project’s success was not very convincing. For one thing, literacy among the Russians was comparatively low;22 for another, POWs proved to be particularly suspicious of non-independent publications. Another effort of the Germans was the daily Bulletin pour les prisonniers français et anglais, which appeared 158 times between September 1914 and August 1915. This shows that the military authorities in Germany reacted quite quickly to the incoming masses of foreign prisoners. However, the publication also lacked credibility since it merely published the German and – at least in the beginning – British official army reports.23 The French War Ministry realised that simple propaganda could have adverse effects too. Its Zeitung für die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen (News for the German POWs) was ridiculed by its readers due to its unprofessional translations and clumsy style. Any German native speaker could easily see that French officials were responsible for this publication.24 Accordingly the French Ministry conceded an erreur de psychologie and refrained from any further publication of this kind. Sometimes military authorities chose more sophisticated ways to conceal a paper’s origin. One of the acting General Commanders in Württemberg reported to the Ministry that in the Ellwangen officers’ camp the anti-British propaganda pamphlet ‘The Great Anti-Northcliffe Mail’ was hidden in a pile of newspapers which had already passed the censor, so it looked as if the pamphlet had slipped through and the truthfulness of its content could therefore be trusted25 The German military editors of the Gazette des Ardennes tried a different trick, attempting to make their paper more attractive to French and Belgian readers in occupied northern France in the hope that they would ‘forget’ about the publication’s origins. To this end they supplied the newspaper with lists of French and Belgian POWs in German camps which was particularly interesting to family members. Furthermore, they professionalised the paper’s layout and created an illustrated edition which, it was hoped, would make it more acceptable. Both the daily and the illustrated edition were initially distributed free of charge and later on sold in the camps across Germany. Although figures appear to be moderate, the Gazette did find its readers in the POW camps. In November 1916


there were about 600 subscribers in Sennelager, 50 in Nuremberg, 84 in Würzburg and 80 in Zwickau.26 All in all the number of copies regularly sold in German POW camps was 8,000, while the overall edition which was also sold in occupied Belgium and northern France reached 175,000 by the end of the war.

POW newspapers In common with their comrades in the trenches, the prisoners also created their own reading material and published periodicals themselves.27 French and British soldiers in German camps published the first of these magazines during the years 1914/15. After the early weeks in improvised camps, there emerged more permanent, formalised camp communities which had grown to resemble little cities comprising streets, squares, school, bank, insurance, own camp currency, crafts, theatres and sports grounds. About 100 of these magazines were published in Germany during WWI – fewer in Great Britain and only a couple in France, mostly after the end of the war. Whether one calls them POW newspapers – as contemporaries did – or POW magazines, they are in a category of their own because their main purpose was not to inform or entertain, but to show both relatives at home and the soldiers in the trenches that the time spent in the camps was not completely wasted and that prisoners were still capable of achieving something useful. Even if they couldn’t fight against the enemy any more they tried to comply with the ideal of the tough male soldier. German Reverend Hartmann from Knockaloe Internee Camp pointed out that keeping up one’s morale during internment meant resisting the enemy and his efforts to ‘break’ the prisoner’s character. Thus writing – and reading – these newspapers was a defiant act of selfconscious self-justification. One of the German internees reported in English about these kind of publications in Knockaloe camp: ‘Purpose: Firstly, the promotion of interest in the internal activities, and their record; secondly, to show the relatives abroad that the inmates of the Camp were making the best of circumstances. Issue: Once every month, duly censored (price: 1d); thus 20 issues were published within 26 months. Circulation: On the average 2.500 copies were sold per issue, of which about 1.750 were sent abroad by permission of the War Office.’28 Of course military authorities controlled and censored these publications. But censorship was not as strict as one might expect because even camp commandants were interested in keeping their inmates


content and calm. As an official report from Knockaloe put it: ‘it should not be left unsaid that the articles appearing in the Paper are conscientiously compiled and that they exercise a noticeable effect in Camp, taking well into account the prevailing conditions and effectively balancing the one-sided tendencies of the mental activity accruing therefrom.’29 Furthermore the camp commandants lacked the capacity and competence to censor both the prisoners’ mail and the camp publications at the same time. Sophisticated expressions and slang terms tended to exceed the linguistic capability even of the semiprofessional translators (retired teachers, students, secretaries) in many postal offices of the camps. Furthermore, the bulk of material to be censored could not be effectively managed. In Germany there was one translator for 750 Western prisoners. Each of the POWs was allowed to write about two letters and four postcards per month while the amount of mail he received was even bigger. French POW Charles Gueugnier stated that he had received 50 parcels, 23 postcards and 91 letters in 1916.30 In a camp like Münster, Germany with its more than 60,000 POWs the postal office had to deal with 450,000 parcels in June 1916 alone. It turned out to be an impossibility to read and censor everything produced in the camps as well as what arrived there. Even if each of the postal office staff spent three minutes on reading a single letter or postcard he was occupied for 51⁄2 hours a day – without a single break. Additionally he had to translate during POW interrogations and write reports for superior authorities. At least in the beginning – i.e. the first year of the war – the campnewspapers also tried to provide information about the events at the front. Many of them published translations of the French or German official reports like Le Petit Français in Brandenburg, Germany or LÉphemere from Celle. It was by no means unusual to read the French official report in German papers – after it had passed German censorship. In some cases camp newspapers published translated versions of foreign newspaper articles. Their purpose was to inform about military or political events but they could at the same time serve the purpose of exposing them to ridicule. In the Deutsche Blätter (German Paper) from Dorchester, UK, for example, one could read a translated article from The Times newspaper entitled ‘The war year 1916 in English perspective’, which was about the apparently absurd British hopes of winning the war.31 But this was an exception: most of the POW-papers refrained from political or military topics and reported only events from within the camps. As one of the POW-editors of the Göttingen Wooden City put it: ‘Now, I should like to say a few words about the journal itself. It


will contain no war news of any description and will deal only with our life in camp.’32 Military affairs can only be found in publications which the camp commandants distributed among ‘their’ prisoners for propagandistic reasons.33 However, this kind of publication was hardly read and even less believed in. In the beginning the prisoners were clearly still interested in what was going on beyond the barbed wire, but this was an attitude which changed dramatically as time elapsed. After the POWs had settled themselves within the camp communities and had more access to regular newspapers they started to write and read about their own situation. From 1915 onwards, camp newspapers avoided writing about current news from the front and turned to those various camp activities like sports and cultural events, camp theatre or poems. It would be too much to say that they started to ignore the outside world completely, but their interests were clearly increasingly focused on their own lot. The camp’s barbed wire became the mental border of POWs. It was only in the war’s final months that POWs once again devoured papers to become informed about their nation’s plan to exchange the old and wounded. This interest in current topics arose because all of them hoped the war would be over soon and that they could see what up to then they had only the chance to read about. Publication of camp magazines was widespread: they were read not only within a particular camp itself but were frequently sent to comrades in minor working camps nearby. Furthermore, magazines produced in the camps could be sent home to the POWs’ native country via regular mail. Thus the number of copies produced often exceeded the number of prisoners within one camp; for example about three quarters of the 4,000 copies of the Stobsiade (Hawick/UK) were sent home by the German prisoners to their families while only 900 copies were sold within the camp.34 Three hundred copies of the British Times (Schneidemühl/Germany) were sent to Great Britain.35 In the civilian internment camp of Knockaloe (Isle of Man) one out of ten prisoners bought the camp magazine while 3,000 copies were sent to the prisoners’ families.36 The prevailing conditions differed from camp to camp, making it impossible to draw a general picture. However, in some cases POWs were able to buy printing machines or at least cooperate with a local publisher. In other cases the result was less professional – several magazines were handwritten, copied and sold. The most sophisticated printing office existed in Bando, Japan, where the German prisoners published several magazines, small books and diverse material like programs for the


camp theatre. In any case the camp commandant’s consent was obligatory. But due to the fact that local commandants were generally interested in satisfied prisoners and their multiple activities there were hardly any problems. In Göttingen, British Sergeant Shea pointed out: ‘Little difficulty was found in getting the necessary permission. We had the ready consent of the Commandant, who has promised to let us print his photograph in the first number. This will, I am sure, be greatly appreciated by all British Prisoners of War here.’37 We have only little evidence about the persons who published and wrote the magazines. But these few hints suggest that mostly ‘learned men’ of the middle class were responsible. A 1938 survey among 120 former German editors of POWmagazines proves that teachers, students, public officers and merchants dominated the editorial boards.38 Within the POW-camps of the Great War reading became one of the major occupations of millions of prisoners. Gaining access to books and newspapers not only served to raise the prisoners’ morale and thus became a means of psychic hygiene; reading was also a civilian occupation which represented both a mental and a communicative link to a prisoner’s family. Along with reading, writing seems to have gained more importance. Many POWs, especially those from the lower social classes, were compelled for the first time in their lives to write letters – with all those difficulties an unskilled writer comes across – while the more learned middle-class prisoners made writing one of their favourite pastimes. This not only applied to their private correspondence but also to a wide range of creative activities in poetry and prose. The Great War was not only one of industrial warfare but it was a communicative event of extraordinary quantity and quality. Notes 1 WWI POWs have only recently attracted historians’ interest, while there are several current publications on soldiers’ reading material. See, for example, John G. Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War, 1914–1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France During the First World War (Providence, RI: Berg, 1992); Jean-Pierre Turbergue, Les journaux de Tranchees: 1914–1918 (Paris: Le Grand Livre de Mois, 1999); Rainer Pöppinghege, ‘“Ehrt die Hämmer wie die Schwerter”: Geltungsdrang und Legitimie-rungversuche in Mitarbeiterzeitschriften des Ersten Weltkriegs’, in Krieg und Literatur, Vol.5 (1999), pp.21–36; Anne Lipp, Meinungslenkung im Krieg: Kriegserfahrungen deutscher Soldaten und ihre Deutung 1914–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2003). 2 Württembergisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Stuttgart, M 400/3–5, Report of January 1918. Translation – author.

The Battle of the Books 91 3 Fonds Clemenceau, 6 N 111, ‘Régime des prisonniers des guerre allemands en France.’ 4 LÉcho du Camp de Rennbahn, No.25, 25 November 1916, p.1. 5 Württembergisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, M 77/1–933; Jean-Claude Farcy, Les camps de concentration français de la première guerre mondiale (1914–1920) (Paris: Anthropos, 1995), pp.360–1; Public Record Office, London, FO 383/433. 6 Les Archives du Conseil de Flandre (publiées par la Ligue Nationale Pour L’unité Belge (Bruxelles: Dewarichet 1928), p.XVIII. Carl Stange had been an evangelic theologian and professor at Göttingen university since 1912. 7 According to an official report – probably by Stange – dating early 1917, those Flemish prisoners who were ‘adverse to propagandistic purposes’ were taken to Kassel. Stadtarchiv Göttingen, KGL 14 No.22. 8 Christa Mirwald, ‘Ausländer in Göttingen – von 1914 bis heute’, in 100 Jahre Göttingen und sein Museum, Texte und Materialien zur Ausstellung im Städtischen Museum und im Alten Rathaus 1. Oktober 1989–7. Januar 1990 (Göttingen: Selbstverlag [no publisher], 1989), pp.92–4. Cf. also Rainer Pöppinghege, ‘Das Kriegsgefangenenlager Ebertal als Zentrum flämischer Propaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg’ in Göttinger Jahrbuch n 51, 2003, pp.49–60. 9 Stadtarchiv Göttingen, KGL 47c No.44d. 10 Public Record Office, London, FO 211/448 ‘Prisoners of War’ (Books and Literature), Vol.114, 1917. 11 ‘Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre’, Paris, 6 N 110. Circular from 30 May 1916. 12 Public Record Office, London, FO 211/404. 13 Bundesarchiv Berlin R 1001/4697 ‘Regelung des Presswesens in den Kolonien 1911–1918’, Circular by the War Ministry, 26 December 1917. 14 Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden, Sächsisches Kriegsministerium No.6904, p.267f. 15 Ibid., p.262. 16 Charles Gueugnier, Les carnets de captivité de Charles Gueugnier 1914–1918, Nicole Dabernat-Poitevin (ed.) (Paris: Accord éd. 1998), p.33. 17 Le Journal du Camp dÓhrdruf, No.16, 28 November 1915, p.4; LÉcho du Camp de Rennbahn (Echo No.48, 3 November 1917), p.1. 18 Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden, Sächsisches Kriegsministerium No.6905, Leipziger Tageblatt, 25 January 1918, Morning edition, p.2. 19 Service Historique de lÁrmée de Terre, Paris, 6 N 110, letter of 2 April 1916: ‘Cette interprétation est trop rigoureuse et ne semble pas conforme aux règles admises pou les prisonniers français en Allemagne. Il parfait opportun de permettre, dans une mesure limitée, la circulation dans les dépôts de prisonniers de certains journaux français ou alliés autorisés dans les dépôts d’Officiers.’; cf. ‘Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre’, Paris, 16 N 2732, p.293. 20 Bundesarchiv Koblenz R 1508 No.1256, ‘Berichte über das Lager Barcelonette’, F 1919–1920. 21 Le Sans Fil, No.1, 24 December 1916, p.3. 22 The degree of literacy in the Russian Army used to be lower than in Western armies, although since the 19th century it had also fulfilled educative tasks. Cf. Ben Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture and Popular


23 24 25 26

27

28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Pedagogy, 1861–1914 (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). Münsterischer Anzeiger und Volkszeitung (ed.) Bulletin pour les prisonniers français et anglais, Münster 1914/15. ‘Service Historique de lÁrmée de Terre’, Paris, 6 N 111. Württembergisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Stuttgart, M 77/1–916. Rainer Pöppinghege, Deutsche Auslandspropaganda 1914–1918: Die ‘Gazette des Ardennes’ und ihr Chefredakteur Fritz H. Schnitzer, in: Francia 31/3 (2004) 19th/20th Century, pp.49–64. For general information cf. Rainer Pöppinghege, Im Lager unbesiegt. Deutsche, britische und französische Kriegsgefangenen-Zeitungen im Ersten Weltkrieg (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2006). Manx National Heritage Library, ‘Final Report and Statistical Record on the Internal Administration of the Prisoners of War Camp’ No.IV. 1915–1919. Manx National Heritage Library, ‘Knockaloe Camp’. Official Reports 1915–1919 (B 9845), V. June 1917, 16. Gueugnier, p.152. Deutsche Blätter No.1, 29 March 1916. A translated anti-German speech by Prime Minister Lloyd George from the Frankfurter Zeitung was published in The Freiburg Review No.3, 12 August 1917. The Wooden City, No.1, 1 July 1915. For example the Lagerbote/Copenhagen, No.1, 27 May 1917. Stobsiade, No.24, October/November 1918. The British Times, No.2, 1 March 1918. Lager-Echo, Vol.2, No.1, 1 January 1918. The Wooden City, Nr.1, V.1. Juli 1915, S. 2. Hans Bayer, Das Presse-und Nachrichtenwesen der im Weltkrieg kriegsgefangenen Deutschen (Berlin: Ebeling und Hiehold Verlag, 1939), p.61.

6 Australian Soldiers and the World of Print During the Great War Amanda Laugesen

In the wake of the outbreak of war in August 1914, Australia formed its Australian Imperial Force, the First AIF, to contribute to Britain’s struggle. In 1915, Australian forces first saw action at Gallipoli in Turkey fighting the Turkish Army, and continued to serve in the Middle East for the rest of the war. Australians would also serve in Europe, along the Western Front. Ultimately, 300,000 men would serve, more than 60,000 would be killed and another 156,000 men would be wounded or taken prisoner. Australia’s participation in the Great War is seen within Australian national historiography as a defining moment. Although Australia’s various colonies were brought together in 1901 by Federation, it was only on the battlefields of Gallipoli and France that Australia was defined as a nation. This is the popular mythology, commonly understood as the ‘Anzac’ legend, and in many ways there is a great deal of truth to this interpretation. ANZAC was the acronym for Australia New Zealand Army Corps, but from 1915, the acronym was transformed into a noun applied to Australian soldiers, to the beaches of Gallipoli, and into an adjective that described the Australian soldiers’ spirit of camaraderie, mateship and sacrifice. For Australians, Anzac continues to be a powerful theme within the national identity. Despite the interest in, and acknowledgement of, Anzac as the defining mythos of Australian culture, most studies of Anzac tend to focus on the ways in which Anzac has manifested itself in Australian popular culture, and to examine the various permutations of the Anzac legend over time. All too rarely are the soldiers themselves placed at the centre of study, with soldier culture remaining a field that requires further investigation. Two notable contributions, however, have been the works of David Kent on troop publications produced by Australian 93


soldiers,1 and Graham Seal on the ‘folk culture’ of the Australian ‘Diggers’.2 The work of both these scholars has helped to open up new avenues into understanding the experiences and ‘imaginative worlds’ of the Australians who served. One way of revealing soldiers’ culture is through studying their relationship with print. Soldiers accessed and produced print culture throughout the Great War. This was not, of course, a purely Australian phenomenon. The work of Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, for example, has provided a detailed and sophisticated analysis of the culture and world of French soldiers during the Great War.3 But the Australian soldiers proved to be prolific readers and writers – they read a vast range of printed material, from newspapers and letters from home, to popular novels and scientific textbooks. They produced a variety of troop periodicals with varying degrees of sophistication, many of which showed their creative engagement with print, even in the midst of a horrific war. This essay will attempt to examine a range of ways in which Australian soldiers engaged with print culture, from their motivations for, and responses to, reading, to their attempts to have their own words recorded within the pages of their troop magazines. With death and destruction ever present, words offered many things to soldiers. Reading could offer the solace of religion, the relief of humour, the fantasy of escape, or transport a soldier back home in his mind. Writing creatively could provide an outlet as well as a diversion for soldiers, and perhaps also remind them of who they were as individuals, outside of being soldiers and cogs in the military machine. Exploring such aspects of Australian soldiers’ wartime experience can provide great insights into how ordinary men reacted to, and coped with, the impact of war. Additionally, for our understanding of how reading and print communities form and operate in specific circumstances, Australian soldiers in the Great War provide a fascinating case study. Studying the reader and the formation of reading communities has become an important area of study in the history of the book.4 Rather than focusing on cultural history purely through texts and their content, it is essential to consider the context of such texts, and their reception. Indeed, rather than focusing on the text as the centre of study, this essay places the reader – the individual experience; reading as a cultural and social practice5 – at the centre of study. While it is always necessary to be cautious about drawing too many conclusions based on the individual experience of reading, it can be argued that examining the reading communities formed by Australian soldiers in

Australian Soldiers and the World of Print 95

the context of war, and the perceptions and experiences of the soldier as reader and writer, can provide useful insights into their world and tell us much about the formation and operation of reading communities.

Getting books to the soldiers John Treloar, an Australian officer travelling to France on board a troopship, noted his frustration at finding that his ship had no library: ‘I had relied on there being a library on board so brought no new books. To my disquiet, I found there was no library and that everyone had apparently thought the same as I did about there being one. Any old piece of paper we pick up and read, but even the scraps of paper seem to have run out.’6 Reading was an integral part of most soldiers’ lives. While popular stereotypes would expect soldiers to be interested in card playing, gambling and women (and undoubtedly many soldiers were: Eric Evans, an Australian soldier, noted his difficulty in settling down to read because as he expressed it ‘my mind has been persistently on the topic of women, women, women’)7, they also viewed reading as a vital occupation that, at the very least, could relieve the tedium brought about by the experience of wartime service, if not meet aspirations for imbibing higher culture and knowledge. Literacy rates for Australians at the time of the Great War were relatively high, and most literate people would participate in the activity of reading at higher rates than would be the case later in the century, when other media such as television and radio would compete for people’s attention. Soldiers were prolific diary keepers and letter writers, as the large archives held at institutions such as the Australian War Memorial and the Imperial War Museum attest. They were also regular readers. Martyn Lyons and Lucy Taksa’s study of Australian readers between 1890 and 1930 reveals much about the rates at which Australians participated in reading in this time period. According to their study, 87 per cent of the lower-middle class surveyed and 54.5 per cent of the working class had at least one regular daily newspaper.8 More would have read newspapers on an irregular basis. These rates for newspaper reading suggest a high literacy rate, as well as involvement in the world of the printed word by ordinary Australians; for soldiers far from home and keen to either find out what was going on back home or find out more about the international situation, reading was essential. Reading was thus an activity of great value to the soldiers, and it was not an activity exclusive to a particular group – such as officers –


within the forces. Books and reading material of all kinds were in high demand, more perhaps than even in civilian life. Ella Sykes, a worker in a YMCA hut in France, noted that many men came into her library admitting ‘frankly that they had never read before and wanted something short.’9 The soldiers formed a new reading community within the context of the demands of war, and it was necessary for them to access reading material in any and all ways possible. As Treloar notes, it was expected that a troopship would have a library, and his ship was probably an exception, with many usually having some sort of library for passengers to access. But there was undoubtedly always an element of chance in whether soldiers could find reading material, and what they found to read was also often a matter of luck. One major way for soldiers to get reading material once overseas was from home, family and friends. Soldiers would frequently request particular books, magazines or newspapers from home (or, occasionally, from relatives in Britain). However, home was not always the most reliable source, given the vagaries of the postal system. Authorities, charitable and governmental, recognised the importance of provisioning troops with adequate means for occupying recreational time, and so a variety of organisations took up the task of collecting and distributing printed matter to the troops of all the English-speaking countries. Charity organisations were one of the principle providers of reading material to soldiers both serving on the front lines and those wounded or sick in hospital. These included organisations with international connections such as the Red Cross and the YMCA, as well as more specific organisations formed for the duration of the war by countries, such as the Australian Comforts Fund (ACF). These organisations worked to distribute printed matter to troops, as well as to set up lending libraries and reading rooms. Active collection of reading material both in Australia and Britain (and other Allied nations) was important to keep supplies up, and for the most part, demand usually exceeded supply. The Red Cross in Australia set up a Book Depot to collect books from 1917, with book-collecting bins set up in major railway stations, this endeavour being largely successful according to their reports.10 At the end of the war, the ACF noted that through 1917 to 1919, they had collected some 1,434,000 weekly papers, 34,477 books and 31,674 magazines for distribution to the Australian troops.11 The British-based organisation set up specifically for providing reading material to English-speaking troops was the Camps’ Library run by Dame Eva Anstruther, and a contemporary account notes that the


Camps’ Library needed some 75,000 items per week to meet demand.12 Such organisations saw the provision of reading material as a vital comfort for soldiers, as well as providing an opportunity to try and ‘improve’ the reading habits of soldiers and to distract them from other, less desirable, recreational pursuits. As Australian YMCA worker Frank Grose put it, it was important that the men’s minds be filled with ‘clean, healthy, elevating thought’.13 This is reinforced in the comments on the work of the British Camps’ Library, where ‘[a]ltho the librarians never attempted to force good books on the soldiers, they took pains to have them within reach.’14 The efforts of librarians and charity workers was not surprising, given that up to the First World War, there were public concerns over what was deemed to be acceptable and unacceptable reading. As Mary Hammond has chronicled in her study of libraries in England before the First World War, fiction was regarded with general suspicion, and not only were the guardians of books likely to act as arbiters of acceptable reading, readers themselves were likely to interpret their reading choices through a variety of identifications, including class, taste, nationality and political allegiance.15 During the war, these standards were redefined due to the demands of war and thus while there were still attempts to control the content of reading, it is more valuable in this context to look at the ways in which reading choices and experiences were shaped by a variety of influences, ranging from the dictates of pre-war debates over the nature of reading to the demands and necessities of wartime.

The importance of reading in wartime Reading was important to soldiers for a variety of reasons. Obviously, reading was often motivated by boredom; time needed to be filled in somehow, and options were fairly limited. Reading was also a valued recreational pursuit that could offer some escape from the realities of war. Words could link soldiers to art, creativity, the imagination, a civilisation and world beyond the trenches. Life in the trenches was generally horrific; mud, damp, lice, dirt, constant barrages and the ever-present fear that any day’s ‘stand-to’ would be the day the order for going over the top would be given. The importance of words in this context was clear, as John Gilbert Jacob, an Australian soldier, wrote to his parents in April of 1918, ‘it is only in reading and writing to you that I can keep from seeing the misery of it all.’16 Similarly, Alfred Stewart found comfort in reading and re-reading his mother’s favourite


chapter in the Bible: ‘It took me out of myself for a while’, he wrote, ‘[d]uring those terrible bombardments one can always find comfort in prayer, but the nerve strain is awful.’17 The Bible and religious literature were important to soldiers of all backgrounds, including the Australians. Of all books, the New Testament had the widest circulation. All troops were supplied with a New Testament, and charitable organisations with their religious links tried to ensure that soldiers were kept well supplied with religious literature and could easily find a religious service. While undoubtedly charitable organisations saw the war as a great opportunity to bring God to young men, for many soldiers, religion was an essential consolation that saw them through the experience of war. John Treloar, who served at Gallipoli, noted in his diary in May 1915, that ‘[t]he words of the Bible are indeed a comfort in time of trouble and I am glad to have my New Testament present with me.’18 The very physical presence of the Testament was important; John Gilbert Jacob noted picking up the New Testament of a Scottish soldier and reading the inscription – ‘Be strong and of a good courage for the Lord thy God is with thee whitherso ever thou goest.’19 With the Testament in his pocket, Jacob experienced a bombardment of his trench, ‘the most magnificent barrage I have ever been under’, he observed, ‘but it hardly made me quake, for those words kept sounding in my ears as loud as the approaching gazonkas.’ Jacob was killed in July 1918, three months after he wrote these words in a letter to his family. Favourite books might take on important talismanic significance for some soldiers. Lists of personal effects of soldiers killed often record books amongst their possessions, commonly New Testaments, prayer books and devotional books, but also French textbooks, dictionaries, military textbooks, novels and books of poetry.20 Leslie Chandler carried with him copies of the poetry of William Wordsworth, Henry Kendall (an Australian bush poet of the 19th century), and contemporary Australian favourite, the vernacular poet, C.J. Dennis. He noted in his diary that he re-read them continually, always finding ‘something fresh to dream about.’21 Poetry was always popular with soldiers, both for the verse itself and because of the relative ease of reading poetry compared to continuous prose in the uncertainty of war. The physical nature of books could also determine their popularity or shape the relationship between reader and text. Books that were small and light, and thus easily carried, were often preferred, although not all soldiers did this. Publishers too capitalised on the demand for books that were easier to carry about, with Angus and Robertson, the


major Australian publisher, producing trench editions of the popular verse books of C.J. Dennis. The Pocket Editions for the Trenches measured 53⁄4 by 41⁄2 inches, as compared to the regular edition that measured 71⁄2 by 6 inches. The trench editions also included a special dust jacket wrapper that allowed for family or friends to write an inscription to the soldier they were sending it to. Fiction provided a much-needed element of escapism and solace for soldiers. For the most part, soldiers read the novels of the popular authors of the pre-1914 period. Naturally, the popularity of these authors created the demand. In addition, soldiers did not always have a great deal of choice, and library collections of relief organisations were formed from donations from the public and publishers, which guaranteed that such authors would dominate. Joseph McAleer has noted that there were four clear best-selling authors in Britain before the war: Marie Corelli, Hall Caine, Charles Garvice and Nat Gould.22 Other authors who were favourites with British and Dominion troops included Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Buchan, Charles Dickens, and E. Phillip Oppenheim. American author Jack London was also popular. Australian troops supplemented such favourites with some demand for Australian authors, of which C.J. Dennis was the most desired. The ‘classics’, a staple of many readers in the decades leading up to the Great War, figure prominently also in the reading experiences of Australian soldiers. Classics had enduring value as reading matter for soldiers, and for many, were ‘familiar’ and therefore more likely to be chosen. Their ready availability also added to their continued popularity during the war. The preferred authors listed in relief organisations’ records, soldiers’ letters and diaries, and other sources, suggest much about the imaginative world of the Australian soldiers. Adventure and ‘escapist’ fiction figured prominently, with many authors of these genres often also being identified with a pro-British Empire, jingoistic theme. To what extent Australian soldier-readers took on such views needs to be examined closely, however. As Martyn Lyons has noted, Just because Australian readers grew up with Walter Scott, Dickens and Thackeray, and with European classics, it does not automatically follow that they responded to them exactly as their counterparts did across the globe. They brought their own assumptions and experiences to the act of reading, appropriating their texts in unpredictable ways.23 So, while Australian troops may well have exhibited a loyalty to, and identification with, the British Empire, which was fostered and


reinforced by their reading, there is no simplistic connection to be drawn. Indeed, the records left by the soldiers themselves rarely consciously reflect on the way their reading related to their wartime service. The author of one (published) memoir24 notes that his childhood reading had informed his view of what war would be like; Captain Hugh Knyvett claimed that his experience of the first few months of war was comparable to the Boys’ Own Papers he had read as a boy.25 However, while reading might have informed some of the expectations, and possibly even the experiences, of some soldiers, it is important not to overstate or simplify this connection. Print allowed for much more ambiguous and variable interpretations, and played many different roles for the soldiers. The diverse nature of individual soldiers’ reading experiences and attitudes is illustrated in the diaries of William Slater, who would go on to serve in the Victorian state parliament after the end of the war. His reading reflected his political interests and convictions and also reveals that soldiers could willingly fight without holding simplistic jingoisticpatriotic views. Common staples in his reading were socialist newspapers such as the Ballarat Echo and the Worker. He saw his own views reflected in these papers and noted ‘how different they are from the views of the jingoistic war-mongering press’.26 His diaries reveal that his reading was important in keeping his views open on the war and its consequences for the world, and that he used reading to actively engage with his perceptions and understandings of the war. In March of 1918, he wrote in his diary: ‘Some of the books we are reading afford an insight into some of the causes of the war … How can we honestly claim that it’s Democracy’s war?’27 Australian soldiers’ choices and responses to reading were informed by a variety of cultural and social dynamics, including gender, family background and nationality. But in practice such boundaries and expectations were permeable and open to negotiation. For example, did soldiers exhibit overtly masculine preferences in their reading choices or experiences of reading? Certainly, some of the soldiers’ preferences lay with cheap, mass-produced novels such as those of Nat Gould. Gould authored around 115 novels, mostly aimed at a male audience of a primarily lower middle class or working class background. His novels usually centred on activities such as sports, boxing, and horse racing. A hospital librarian commented in 1916 that ‘a certain man would read nothing except Nat Gould. However ill he was, however suffering and broken, the name of Nat Gould would always bring a smile to his face.’28 Such a comment may be an exaggeration,


but Gould’s popularity was clear, and it reinforced a sense of gendered preferences. If the popularity of Nat Gould suggested that soldiers looked for reading suitable for ‘a man’, however, other authors popular with the soldiers suggested the opposite. Charles Garvice was frequently demanded by soldiers, as was Marie Corelli. Garvice wrote over 150 books, often labelled by scholars as ‘women’s novels’; Corelli was similarly a novelist who is seen to have had an audience of women. However, it is clear that many men enjoyed the work of both these authors. A recent observation on Marie Corelli suggests that her novels offered ‘a literature of assurance in an age of rapid change, especially for women.’29 For soldiers, the first half of that statement may well have been very apt. A further illustration of the above is found with the popularity of the American novelist Jean Webster, the author of two popular novels, Daddy Long Legs and Dear Enemy. Both are mentioned in several Australian soldiers accounts of their wartime reading. One soldier who read Daddy Long Legs chose it because a nursing sister recommended it, but noted that he had apparently developed ‘a morbid appreciation of sentimental novels that I should scorn to read’. ‘Is my taste bad?’, he mused, ‘[p]erhaps there is a redeeming literary interest as well as the frivolous personal interest.’30 Jacob otherwise indulged in Goldsmith, Scott and Shakespeare, yet he mused that he had definitely gained something from reading Webster’s novel, noting that it had taught him not to let the ‘little things’ in life bother him. While Jacob clearly felt a pressure (from social expectations and preconceptions) that ‘sentimental’ novels were inappropriate reading for a well-educated officer, he demonstrates that reading practices often deviated from expectations and norms, and shaped individual readers in many ways. What is becoming apparent here is that while there were certain preconceptions attached to what was appropriate reading depending on class and gender, in practice the boundaries between such reading choices were surprisingly permeable. Family connections and reading traditions played a significant part in determining the reading practices of soldiers. Many soldiers shared their reading experiences with family and friends back home, not only sharing thoughts, but also the reading of particular texts (which were not only recommended, but might also be physically sent between those family members). Corporal Thomas Clair Whiteside shared his experiences of reading with his father, suggesting a family tradition of shared reading. In a letter dated 16 February 1916, Whiteside wrote to


his father, a Presbyterian minister, that he had ‘just finished reading the Koran and will post it to you. Remember you stating that the Mohammedans accepted a great deal of the Old Testament. Found it interesting reading.’31 Reading was always a social practice, not just a cultural practice, and the social context for reading could shape the nature of reading and reception. Sometimes reading could be a means of promoting or demonstrating masculine camaraderie; the archives describe sick soldiers ‘lying in their pyjamas reading The Bulletin and Punch, and swapping lies.’32 Sharing reading material, whether books, magazines or newspapers, created a sense of community between the soldiers. Reading aloud was a means of forging bonds between soldiers; equally, reading aloud could be used in an attempt to shape certain views held by soldiers. Padre Gault of the YMCA described men sitting and smoking in a YMCA hut in Egypt ‘whilst Deeds That Won the Empire by Dr W.H. Fitchett, and patriotic poetry by some of the newer war poets, were read aloud’, and in another instance, an officer read aloud Ian Hay’s The First Hundred Thousand to his men before a battle.33 Reading often served to reflect and reinforce national identity. Australian soldiers looked for Australian material to link themselves to home and to remind them of their identity as Australians. Alfred F. Morrison noted in 1917 that ‘[t]he one thing I do grab at here is a Bulletin. If ever there was an Australian paper written for Australians that is it. Read the Aboriginalities column over here and you can imagine you’re away back on the open dusty plains away out nowhere.’34 The Bulletin, an Australian periodical that incorporated fiction, humour and cartoons, was enormously popular with Australian soldiers. Jack Watson, writing home to his parents to request copies, suggested that ‘it would be advisable to take cover off. The Bulletin is the most popular here and is sought after by about every man.’35 C.J. Dennis’ vernacular poetry was also very popular and attests to the ways in which reading preferences reinforced and possibly helped to create a sense of national identity, separate from the Australian identification with Britain and the British Empire. John Treloar noted in August 1916 that all his clerks ‘have been quoting The Sentimental Bloke, which they have been reading. I remember the time I first read it when I was home on sick leave, but such memories make one rather homesick and it does not always pay to have them recalled, especially when the scene of them is so far away.’36 Reading was a means of maintaining morale, and therefore performed ideological functions. This was partly something consciously


aimed at by authorities, but was also an inevitable consequence of how many soldiers kept their sanity. However, the possibility of subversive reading remained. Accessing politically subversive material was not easy, but certainly possible. In addition, reading the average popular texts might not always have served to keep the soldiers ‘happy’. The soldiers experienced many different feelings in their reading: nostalgia and melancholy, frustration at not being home or getting on with their lives. The world of print was always open to many different responses. Many other reasons for reading are revealed in the many letters and diaries left to us by soldiers. Newspapers and periodicals were often important in linking soldiers to home, and keeping them up to date on what might be happening there. Gathering information was also an important motivation for reading, and the major Australian and British newspapers were usually reasonably accessible to soldiers. The military also produced newspapers specially for the troops, recognising the desire for news. Often such papers included articles relevant to military affairs, as well as summaries of news from home, from the sports results to weather. Horace Parton enjoyed the official Anzac Bulletin for keeping him up to date with the news and felt it was a ‘jolly good idea’.37 However, many soldiers complained about the lack of credible information available to them, and that many newspapers were received long after their printing and hence offered little of interest. Other soldiers were keen to keep up their education on an informal basis, perhaps out of a fear of falling behind in the years being taken from them through war service. One Australian soldier wrote to his family asking them to send him shorthand guides so that his skills would not become rusty; another asked his relatives in England to send him an Inorganic Chemistry textbook and was prepared to carry it around with him despite its size and weight. He observed upon receiving it: ‘It is about the size of a family Bible, but still I can well afford to do without a shirt to carry it. It is the best book on Inorganic chemistry I have yet seen’.38 Books instructing on foreign languages, as well as travel guides, were also very popular. Reading these books performed a variety of functions for the reading community of Australian soldiers, and formed an essential part of their experiences of war, and even helped to shape these experiences.

Soldiers’ own papers: Australian troop periodicals Troop periodicals, produced by and for the soldiers, often under the most challenging of circumstances, formed a central part of soldiers’


culture during the war. Soldiers could contribute prose, poetry, and artwork to these publications, and they thus became significant creative outlets. Troop publications provided a means for soldiers to take on the role of author, critic, artist, and poet. Ordinary soldiers could find their words or drawings in print, a valuable thing in a context where they might not survive; for men with no other means for providing a legacy other than as a soldier within a larger military machine, knowing that their creative efforts, however minor, might be preserved was perhaps a comforting thing. The tedium of war could also be escaped through such creative pursuits. ‘Poets are born in the desert,’ ran a comment in the Kia Ora Coo-ee, ‘many a man, who never wrote a couplet before he donned khaki, is now chasing rhymes o’nights by the dim light of a candle in his bivvy.’39 Such publications helped to develop a common identity for the soldiers serving, one which distinguished them from the ‘top brass’, men stationed in the back lines, and the home front. These publications therefore performed quite a different function from much other reading material. Rather than being a link to another, outside or fantasy world, troop publications helped to mediate a particular version of the soldier’s immediate world, one which emphasised the hard-slog of the soldier, which mocked authority, and which perhaps made killing and death more familiar and acceptable. The first Australian troop publications were produced onboard the troopships heading overseas from Australia, and were published in all areas where Australians fought. Publishing troop magazines and newspapers was difficult in the conditions of the trenches. The Twenty Second’s Echo was printed on a portable printing press, produced near the frontlines of the Western Front and ‘more than once operations were suspended owing to shell fire’.40 Aussie: the Australian Soldier’s Magazine was also produced on the Western Front during the final year of the war, and, like all publications, suffered from the constant paper shortages. Aussie sold many copies, however, and became one of the most popular of the trench publications. Its first issue sold 10,000 copies, although this was much larger than the print run of most trench publications. Yandoo, the magazine of the 7th Field Artillery Brigade, averaged circulation of about 1,200 copies, but it was not printed on a printing press; it was typed on a typewriter and then copied on a duplicator,41 a common way of producing publications in the field. The Red and White Diamond, the field newspaper of the 24th Battalion, was also subject to the demands of being produced on


the frontlines; the printing press on which it was printed was moved to several front-line places, including Cappy, La Chausee-Tirancourt, Nalinnes and Marcinelles.42 Such publications performed many functions for soldiers, not least in giving the soldiers something to read. Oliver Hogue, himself a contributor to a number of troop publications produced in the Middle East, commented on the Gallipoli publications in his semi-fictional account of the Gallipoli experience, Trooper Bluegum at the Dardanelles. An official publication, the Peninsula Press, was, Hogue comments, ‘read and re-read till we could almost repeat all its contents word for word.’ The Peninsula Press provided one of the few channels for war news to the troops. Along with unofficial troop publications, such publications provided much needed distraction. ‘And we were all as jolly as sandboys, having our fun and cracking our jokes,’ Hogue describes, ‘reading the official Peninsula Press and enjoying the unofficial humour of our trench organs, such as the Dinkum Oil News and The Dardanelles Driver. We knew that Death was near, but we laughed in his face.’43 While Hogue was writing to the Anzac legend, undoubtedly he identified a strong aspect of the role of the trench publication: to provide entertainment and distraction in the midst of war. Troop publications were also aimed to provide a souvenir and record of the war experience. Most publications included an opening editorial identifying this as one of their primary purposes. The Kia Ora Coo-ee, published in the Middle East, noted one of its purposes as being ‘[t]o preserve also for time incidents, strange, bizarre, pathetic and historical’.44 The Coo-ee, a magazine produced at the Bishops Knoll Hospital in Bristol, recognised the historical value of such publications: the editors hoped that the magazine would help ‘to place on record personal happenings and experiences of these stirring war times which might otherwise pass into oblivion’ and also commented that ‘[t]he historian will illuminate the broad path of the war with the searchlight of official records; with the help of our soldiers in hospital and training camp we hope to apply the pocket flash-light to side-tracks of individual experience.’45 Another important aspect of the troop publications was that they were often sent back to Australia to give people at home a sense of what life was like on the front. Australian publications such as Aussie and The Anzac Book were popular choices, as were the illustrative compilations of Bruce Bairnsfather, Fragments from France. One soldier from Western Australia sent his sweetheart Geraldine a number of publications that might give her a better (although not necessarily


totally realistic and accurate) idea of his experiences; these included copies of the Anzac Bulletin, Aussie, and a copy of the Anzac Book, which he described as ‘bonzer’.46 Links were forged between the front and home, which was often one of the stated intentions of the editors of the publications. A number of the existing copies of troop publications reflect more poignantly the nature of this fragile connection with home. Copies of The Flotilla Echo held in the Australian War Memorial archives include inscriptions from a soldier named Bert, who wrote in the inside cover of the December issue: ‘Dear Dad, I hope you are keeping well also all at home, I am A1 myself, I will be writing to you as soon as I get some more news. Bert xxx.’47 Bert also supplied a pencilled glossary of some of the slang terms which might be incomprehensible to people back home. Soldiers might also use a publication for other purposes: one soldier wrote on the front cover of a copy of The Homing Aussie: A Souvenir of the Voyage of the TSS Euripides a note to a Miss M. Ross: ‘With compliments from the fair haired blue eyed Anzac of the bronze stalwart type.’48 Aside from bonds to be created between battlefield and home (or prospective girlfriends), troop publications were imagined as creating bonds between soldiers themselves. The Kia Ora Coo-ee was to reflect both Australian and New Zealand work and views, and thus forge ‘better understanding … between the sons of Australia and their brothers from New Zealand.’49 Publications produced on board troopships heading over to the war were often aimed at ‘strengthen[ing] every bond that shall tend to make us even better comrades’50 (and hence ‘better fighters’). Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau has described troop publications as being the ‘mouthpiece of a common culture.’51 Through creating a sense of common identity and community between soldiers, such publications could certainly become such mouthpieces. Audoin-Rouzeau has identified that troop publications could also be a means of expressing complaints; by using humour and caricature, the military authorities and other targets for discontent, such as those serving in the back lines, could be subtly criticised. Troop publications thus could be a means of venting frustration. Some even explicitly addressed this function, acknowledging that this could be useful for officers to identify discontent and address any problems: Lieutenant Colonel L. Dobbin noted in the foreword to the ‘X’ Press, a magazine produced aboard the hospital carrier ‘X’ in March 1918, that a ship’s newspaper ‘provides a means, not only for promulgating information which cannot be inserted in the formal Routine Orders, but also for the


expression of opinions which, to a CO of troops, are, within certain limits, of the utmost value, assisting him to ensure the comfort and welfare of all ranks under his command.’52 Dobbin’s comments suggest an important function of both troop publications and reading in the life of the troops: they provided a means of circumventing the great frustrations and difficulties of warfare. Reading was entertainment and boosted morale; writing into a troop publication vented frustrations and allowed for a humorous perspective on the military life. In this way, words became deeply significant for an army made up largely of volunteers, keeping them largely in support of the war, and preventing discontent from turning into outright rebellion. Escapism and the means of recreation could be deeply ideological. In September 1915, Private Roy Rankin, an Australian soldier fighting at Gallipoli, wrote to his mother. ‘Could you send an old book or novel, or any old thing except papers and war news?’ he wrote. ‘The “Sydney Mail” is very welcome, but a book in which there is no war news would be even more acceptable, as I have not seen a book which had anything beside war news in it since I left Egypt.’53 Rankin was perhaps not typical of many soldier readers in that he was not particularly keen on war news – which many demanded because they felt they had little idea of how their fighting mattered in the larger scheme of the war – but he demonstrates just how valuable print culture was to the average Australian soldier of the Great War, and thus how important it is to write the history of this aspect of the history of Australians at war. Notes 1 D. Kent, From Trench and Troopship: the Experience of the Australian Imperial Force 1914–1919 (Alexandria, New South Wales: Hale and Iremonger, 1999). 2 G. Seal, Inventing Anzac: the Digger and National Mythology (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2004). 3 S. Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War 1914–1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France During the First World War (Providence, RI: Berg Publishers, 1992). 4 See the articles in D. Finkelstein and A. McCleery (eds) The Book History Reader (London: Routledge, 2002). 5 M. Lyons and L. Taksa, Australian Readers Remember: An Oral History of Reading 1890–1930 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992), p.2. 6 J.L. Treloar, An Anzac Diary (Newcastle, New South Wales: Cambridge Press, 1993), diary entry for 14 July 1916, p.260. 7 P. Wilson (ed.) So Far From Home: The Remarkable Diaries of Eric Evans, an Australian Soldier During World War I (New South Wales: Kangaroo Press, 2002), diary entry for 12 February 1917, p.18.

108 Publishing in the First World War 8 Lyons and Taksa, Australian Readers Remember, Appendix C, p.197. 9 E. Sykes, ‘At a YMCA Hut Somewhere in France’, Cornhill Magazine (February 1917), p.211. 10 Sixth Annual Report of the Australian Branch of the British Red Cross Society for 1919–20. Report of the Victorian Division, p.61. 11 S.H. Bowden (ed.) The History of the Australian Comforts Fund (Sydney: Scotow and Presswell, 1922), p.297. 12 T.W. Koch ‘Books in Camp, Trench and Hospital’, reprinted from Library Journal (July, August and October 1917), p.10. 13 F. Grose, A Rough Y.M. Bloke (Melbourne: Specialty Press, n.d.) p.40. 14 Koch, ‘Books in Camp, Trench and Hospital’, p.21. 15 See M. Hammond, ‘“The Great Fiction Bore”: Free Libraries and the Construction of a Reading Public in England, 1880–1914’, Libraries and Culture, Vol.37, No.2 (Spring 2002) especially p.95, p.100, p.105. 16 J.G. Jacob, Home Letters of a Soldier Student (Adelaide: G. Hassell and Son, 1919), letter 14 April 1918, p.90. 17 M. Wilmington (ed.) Alfred Robert Morison Stewart: Diaries of an Unsung Hero (Self-published, 1995), diary entry for 29 July 1916, p.133. 18 Treloar, Anzac Diary, diary entry for 7 May 1915, p.136. 19 Jacob, Home Letters, letter 14 April 1918, p.91. 20 Australian War Memorial collections, AWM 250 – collection of cards of personal effects of Australian soldiers. 21 M.J. Chandler (ed.) ‘Dear Homefolk’ Letters Written by L.G. Chandler During the First World War (Self-published), p.53. 22 J.M. McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p.32. 23 M. Lyons, ‘Reading Practices in Australia’ in M. Lyons and J. Arnold (eds) A History of the Book in Australia 1891–1945 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001), p.343. 24 It is important to note that this was a memoir published in the last year of the war, 1918. Published memoirs tended to promote particular views and interpretations of the war that were shaped by the public discourse of the time, which is often not entirely the same as views in unpublished letters and diaries. Reading experiences are rarely mentioned in published memoirs, no doubt because such experiences were not deemed to be ‘acceptable’ parts of the war experience and were not what audiences wanted to read about. 25 R.H. Knyvett, ‘Over There’ With the Australians (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1918), p.1. 26 H. Slater and D. Widdowson (eds) The War Diaries of William Slater (Strathmore: Astrovisuals, 2000), diary entry for 25 February 1917. 27 Ibid., diary entry for 16 March 1918. 28 Koch, ‘Books in Camp’, pp.20–1. 29 C. Bloom, Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p.116. 30 Jacob, Home Letters, p.34. 31 E. Whiteside (ed.) A Valley in France: Corporal Thomas Clair Whiteside 59th Batt Infantry World War I Letters to parents and sisters 1915–1918 (Beaconsfield: Self-published, 1999), letter to father, 16 February 1916, p.17.

Australian Soldiers and the World of Print 109 32 J.L. Beeston, Five Months at Anzac (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1916), p.47. 33 J.A. Gault, Padre Gault’s Stunt Book (London: Epworth Press, n.d.), p.63; Diary of W.L. Hawkins, Lieutenant 59 Battalion, MS 9609, State Library of Victoria, diary entry for 13 September 1917. 34 G. Morrison (ed.) Letters Home: The Letters Home From Alfred E. Morrison 22–08–1896 to 08–06–1917 (Castlemaine, Victoria: Graffiti Publications, 2005), letter 11 March 1917, p.60. 35 E. Elson (ed.) Dear Annie (Mornington, Victoria: Morningside Printers, 1994), letter from Jack Watson, 30 May 1918, p.71. 36 Treloar, Anzac Diary, 12 August 1916, p.226. 37 T. Parton (ed.) The War Letters of Horace A. Parton (Whittington, Victoria: Self-published, 1992), diary entry for 18 September 1916, p.37. 38 A.E. Coates, The Volunteer: the Diaries and Letters of A.E. Coates No.23–7th Btn, 1st AIF, First World War 1914–1918 (Burwood, Victoria: Self-published, 1995), p.13. 39 Kia Ora Coo-ee, Series 2, No.4 (15 October, 1918), p.1. 40 Letter held in National Library of Australia collection to J.A. Ferguson (librarian/collector) with copy of Twenty-Second’s Echo (1918). 41 Preface to reprint edition of Yandoo, 1 Feb 1920, p.5. 42 The Red and White Diamond: Field Newspaper of the 24th Battalion No.8 (March 1919), p.11. 43 O. Hogue, Trooper Bluegum at the Dardanelles (London: Andrew Melrose, 1916), pp.101, 174–5. 44 D. Kent (ed.) Kia Ora Coo-ee (Reprint of original) (n.p.: Cornstalk Publishing, 1981), No.1 (15 March 1918), p.1. 45 Coo-ee: Journal of the Bishops Knoll Hospital, Bristol Vol.1, No.1, p.1. 46 Boans to the Battlefields: A Collection of Letters Written by Boans Staff and Friends During the First World War 1914–1918 (Como, Western Australia: J.M. Quatermaine, 1995), 26 February 1918, p.134. 47 The Flotilla Echo (December 1917) inside cover of copy held at Australian War Memorial. 48 The Homing Aussie: A Souvenir of the Voyage of the TSS Euripides (September–October 1919) front cover of copy held at Australian War Memorial. 49 Kia Ora Coo-ee No.1 (15 March 1918), p.1. 50 Pitch and Toss: Souvenir of the AIF Reinforcements Printed At Sea (9 September), p.2. 51 Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War 1914–1918, p.34. 52 The “X” Press: a Product of the Troop-Deck, Hospital Carrier “X” (4–15 March 1918). 53 Letters of Private Roy Rankin, MS9656, State Library of Victoria.


Part III Writing the Trenches


7 The Tuition of Manhood: ‘Sapper’s’ War Stories and the Literature of War Jessica Meyer

British combatant authors of the First World War have long laid claim to being the truth-tellers of the war and many historians have used the literary legacy of the war as a source of evidence. Much of this analysis has concentrated on a number of well-known sources, including the poetry of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and biographies and novels such as Goodbye To All That (1929), All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930). The war, however, produced a huge amount of literary expression, including an array of newspaper articles, popular novels, short stories and poems. The recent academic rediscovery of this wealth of literature has complicated the claims to truth-telling that any individual work of literature may make. The literary evidence of the war increasingly provides almost as many ‘truths’ of war as there were writers. As the study of the literature of the First World War has expanded to include more popular and ephemeral forms, so too has our understanding about how the war was experienced by those who participated in it. This essay examines the understanding of war presented in the work of one writer, ‘Sapper’, a Regular officer whose short stories and novels, published initially between 1915 and 1937, dealt with the experience of war. ‘Sapper’s’ work has little aesthetic merit, being stylised, clichéd and often repetitive; however, his fiction sold extremely well both during and after the war. By examining both the publishing records of ‘Sapper’s’ work held in the archives of his publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, and some of the stories and novels themselves, this chapter will argue that his stories are examples of an under-examined literary interpretation of the war, one that cast the war as heroic and purposeful rather than futile. This understanding of the war was immensely popular in the years after, as the extent of the sales of ‘Sapper’s’ work shows. 113


The literature of war Fiction, diaries and letters about the First World War began to be published in Britain almost as soon as the war commenced. Criticism of this literature, however, began slightly later, with the war books controversy of the late 1920s. Books such as Goodbye to All That and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer were criticised by Cyril Falls, Douglas Jerrold and others as unpatriotic, inaccurate and overly individual in their depiction of war experience.1 By the 1960s, however, the idea of a canon of British war literature had developed. Since then, works such as Bernard Bergonzi’s Heroes’ Twilight (1965), Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) and Samuel Hynes’ A War Imagined (1990) have all drawn on a critically established body of work, including the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke and the novels of Richard Aldington, Robert Graves and Frederick Manning, works all noted for their disillusioned, unromantic vision of warfare. In focusing attention on narratives that emphasised disillusionment with the war, these academics helped to enshrine an understanding of war in British culture that was framed by debates over the nostalgic and the mythic. In the literature of disillusion they found evidence of ‘a nostalgic love of rural England, combined with an anguished sense that centuries of British tradition were being overthrown’2 and a failure of ‘a revival of the cultic, the mystical, the sacrificial, the prophetic, the sacramental, and the universally significant’3 in attempts to describe war. This led to the creation of a new myth to give significance to the war, based on descriptive language, realism, irony and the truthfulness of experience.4 Such analyses have helped make dominant the interpretation of war that can be found in a now well-known group of literary artefacts of the war.5 While Hynes expands the parameters of discussion to include popular writers such as H.G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling, much of the work he, Bergonzi and Fussell discuss would have had relatively small circulation among the mass reading public of the interwar period.6 More recently, however, historians such as Rosa Maria Bracco and Stephen Cullen have begun to examine more popular literature such as the ‘middlebrow’ best-sellers that formed both the bulk of book sales in this era. Bracco defines such novels as ‘stories … [that] were written by skilled storytellers to whom the unfolding of a sentimental plot with a moral or social message was more important than an artistic rendering of beauty or refinement of style.’7 These novels present an understanding of the war steeped in wistfulness for a lost rural England but, far

The Tuition of Manhood 115

from treating such emotion with irony, middlebrow authors treated it sentimentally, emphasising a highly conservative world view. Where themes of disillusion are evident, such as in R.C. Sherriff’s highly successful play, Journey’s End (1928), they are presented in terms of individual rather than universal disillusionment. As Cullen argues, ‘Disenchantment in combatant writing is not disenchantment in their own efforts or idealism, which they had dreamed of reasserting in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, but with the England that they felt had emerged during and after the war.’8 The study of the literature of the war has continued to expand to include popular genres such as detective fiction, romance, horror and children’s fiction.9 While some of these studies have explored alternative narratives of war, many have used the disillusionment narrative as a template for interpretation. Michael Paris, for instance, argues that many men writing adventure fiction aimed at boys and young men knew exactly what it meant to serve in the trenches and understood the nature of modern industrial warfare. Yet in their stories we detect no lessening of the romance of war, and only minor changes in the nature of warfare between 1914 and 1919, and in some cases well into the inter-war period. Was this simply a denial of reality, or was it a deliberate distortion for propaganda purposes?10 By labelling these works as distortions or propaganda, Paris denies that authors such as Ian Hay and Percy Westerman can lay claim to telling the truth about their war experience, thereby undermining the validity of their understanding of the war as heroic and worthwhile.11

‘Sapper’s’ War Stories Among the writers Paris includes in his criticism of boys’ adventure literature is ‘Sapper’, most famous as the creator of Hugh ‘Bulldog’ Drummond, the veteran hero of ten thrillers.12 These thrillers, along with the 19 other novels and short story collections that ‘Sapper’ wrote, have tended to be discussed by critics as examples of children’s literature. They were not, however, written for a juvenile audience and many fall into the category of middlebrow literature, having sentimental plot lines and presenting a social message about the condition of England. This is particularly true of Mufti (1919), identified by Cullen as an example of middlebrow ex-combatant fiction, in which the


heroic ex-serviceman Derek Vane loves and loses two women in post-war society. Although Mufti was ‘Sapper’s’ first and least successful novel, it was not his first work of fiction. From 1915 onwards, while serving as an officer with the Royal Engineers, he wrote short stories about the war which were initially published in Blackwood’s Magazine and the Daily Mail, and then by Hodder & Stoughton in five collections entitled Sergeant Michael Cassidy (1915), Men, Women and Guns (1916), The Lieutenant and Others (1916), No Man’s Land (1917) and The Human Touch (1918). During the war these collections sold extremely well. Sergeant Michael Cassidy sold nearly 50,000 copies in its first year of publication and a total of 149,329 by March 1919. The other four books sold equally well: 120,290; 153,494; 34,383 and 15,821 copies respectively.13 All five books continued to be published after the war, although sales declined steadily year on year (see Table 7.1). In 1926, Men, Women and Guns went out of print, Sergeant Michael Cassidy and The Lieutenant and Others having suffered the same fate the previous year and No Man’s Land and The Human Touch some years before. Despite this decline, ‘Sapper’s’ war stories never actually went out of print during the interwar period. In 1927, Hodder & Stoughton brought out two collections of stories entitled Shorty Bill and Jim Brent. Another, called John Walters, was issued in 1928. These three volumes

Table 7.1

1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 Total

Number of ‘Sapper’s’ war stories sold per year, 1916–26 Sergeant Michael Cassidy

The Lieutenant and Others

Men, Women and Guns

No Man’s Land

The Human Touch

49,845 57,707 27,421 14,356 2,642 2,132 888 888 1,152 2,916 – 159,947

52,865 58,983 27,194 14,452 2,842 1,222 1,049 739 1,021 2,065 – 162,432

– 12,356 86,837 21,097 3,339 1,734 1,192 805 1,053 2,851 223 131,487

– – 31,616 2,767 – 168 39 – – – – 34,590

– – 15,821 3,141 766 16 – – – – 19,744

Source: Hodder & Stoughton Profit and Loss Ledger, Ms. 61312, Vol.39, The Guildhall Library, London.


contained a selection of stories reprinted from the earlier collections. ‘Sapper’s’ War Stories, published in 1930, included every war story ‘Sapper’ had ever written, as well as a new introduction by the author. It ran to over 1,000 pages and cost 7s. 6d. The shorter collections sold steadily, particularly in the 2s. editions. By 1936, they had each sold an average of 6,000 copies a year. The complete short stories sold rather less well, a total of 11,487 by 1939, an average of 1,275 copies per year. (See Table 7.2). This can be explained as much by the expense of the volume, that of a first-edition novel, as by any decline in the popularity of the war stories. These figures indicate the continuing popularity of these stories throughout the interwar period. While such popularity was most evident during the war itself, the continuous steady appetite for such stories is equally clear. Indeed, these figures probably underestimate that appetite as they give no indication of the extent of mass circulation of single volumes through the lending libraries where, as Q.D. Leavis noted, ‘Sapper’s’ fictions were extremely popular.14 The reissue of the stories under different titles in the mid-1920s may have been a marketing ploy. By then ‘Sapper’ was a well-established thriller writer, well able to sell a book through the association of his name with it. Indeed, much of the advertising literature concerning

Table 7.2 1927–39

1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 Total

Number of ‘Sapper’s’ reprinted war stories published per year,

Shorty Bill

Jim Brent

John Walters

Sapper’s War Stories

16,086 19,570 12,416 5,873 3,952 2,150 254 – – 3,727 1,894 1,277 655 67,854

11,584 690 28,110 5,796 3,027 798 – – – 3,784 1,784 1,086 681 57,340

– 13,007 19,735 9,970 4,341 2,285 1,929 91 – 3,683 1,692 56 631 57,420

– – – 490 7,360 2,073 1,526 1,791 1,458 1,396 1,184 1,102 877 19,257



his work promoted his books as ‘new novels by “Sapper”’, rather than emphasising the originality or interest of the work itself. The later reprint collections, however, sold well and steadily far beyond their initial release, indicating a public appetite beyond that created by a publisher’s marketing scheme. Despite being written during the war, ‘Sapper’s’ war stories appear to have had continuing relevance to readers in the following decades, and their sustained consumption during this period indicates that they continued to shape post-war understandings and memories of the war. Given their wide availability in British post-war culture, the narrative of war presented by ‘Sapper’s’ war stories is worth examining in detail. Hugh Cecil characterises them as, ‘tough-minded and anti-sentimental, with knockabout comedy relief provided by drunken heroes like Sergeant Michael Cassidy, whose ferocious devotion to England’s cause was supposed to demonstrate the healthy relationship between England and Ireland at the time.’15 Hynes describes the same collection as being ‘realistic in their treatment of the particulars of war: the trenches, the mud, the constant shells, the dead German who hangs on the barbed wire grinning … Nevertheless, [it] is not an anti-war statement; it is rather a celebration of the qualities of the Old Contemptibles.’16 Realism of detail could, therefore, be used in stories that presented a celebratory rather than a disillusioned view of the war. ‘Sapper’, however, was not merely attempting to celebrate AngloIrish relations or the Old Contemptibles in his work. As examinations of the collection that followed Sergeant Michael Cassidy (1915) reveal, his fictions depict a vision of the war as purposeful in its forging of both the national and individual character. This vision, developed out of ‘Sapper’s’ own experiences as a frontline soldier, presented an alternate ‘truth’ of the war for consumption in the interwar period. ‘Sapper’s’ war stories can be divided roughly into two categories: the plot-driven adventure narrative and the atmospheric vignette. The former include stories such as ‘The Song of the Bayonet’, ‘Private Meyrick, Company Idiot’ and ‘The Bridge’. These stories narrate brief episodes characterised by drama, humour, or both, and contain a central figure whose actions drive the plot forward. The latter include ‘A Fortnight in France, May 10 to May 24, 1915’, ‘The Land of Topsy Turvy’ and ‘The Human Touch’. They contain detailed descriptions of trench life and cover long periods of time unstructured by dramatic plot developments. While they may focus on the experience of a particular individual, it is experiences rather than actions that are central. All these stories, however, whether plot-driven or experien-


tial, depict war as a purposeful activity, both for the individual and the nation as a whole. The purposefulness of war is most obvious in the plot-driven stories. By centring on an individual’s actions they emphasise his potential for heroism. Such actions can take the form of blowing up a bridge across which groups of Germans are charging, or escaping from the German lines having taken a German officer captive single-handedly.17 In these stories, the central character does not merely act but acts specifically as a hero. In others such as ‘The Booby-Trap’, where Percy FitzPercy creates a mantrap that captures a choleric general rather than the expected Germans, the actions of the characters are comical rather than heroic.18 As in the more obviously heroic tales, however, such stories present an understanding of warfare that is antithetical to that of the soldier as simply a passive victim. In ‘Sapper’s’ stories, soldiers are men of action, whether such action is dramatic or comical. These actions define them not as victims but as potential or actual heroes. The atmospheric vignettes focus less on the potential for individual heroism. Nonetheless, they clearly present the war as purposeful in that it is depicted as the catalyst for improving the characters of men who participate in it. By examining the development of characters over a period of time, they present the view that war taught individuals how to be ‘proper’ men, even if they do not participate in dramatic action. Thus Gerald’s experience of a bombardment in ‘A Fortnight in France’ teaches him ‘that there were other things besides cocktails and whisky sours and amusing women, and that a new force was at work – the force of Death – which made them all seem very petty.’19 Such experiences mean that when he ‘stopp[ed] one in the shoulder, he went back to England feet first – a man, where before he had been an ass.’20 Similarly, ‘The Education of Bunny Smith’ describes the ‘deliverance’ of a bank clerk who becomes an officer: ‘He had found the things that were worthwhile; he had found his manhood.’21 While the men remain relatively passive in the face of battle and bombardment in these stories, their experiences turn them not into victims but rather into ‘men’. Although this view of the war may be seen as romanticising it by endowing it with a sense of purpose, this ignores the ‘realism’ that Hynes notes in the stories, particularly the vignettes. ‘Sapper’ does not shrink from describing the horrors of the experience of war. Gerald watches the shellshock of some of his companions following a bombardment, while ‘Shrapnel’ describes in detail the emotions of a man under fire. Yet these horrors are presented as being compensated for by the fact that ‘the training, the ideals, the traditions, the morale of the


good British regiment … has produced a growth in character and condition of mind in the men who belong to it which is largely conspicuous by its absence in civil life.’22 In ‘Sapper’s’ view, England prior to the war, ‘was overcrowded with men for whom there was no job; no job, that is, which genteel convention would allow them to take. A few, a very few, broke away … the vast majority sank into the torpid pool of utter mediocrity, and sleep enwrapped them.’23 The experience of war was thus justified, however horrific it might be, because it saved the middle-class young men of Britain from such a fate, awakening them instead to true manhood. Nowhere in ‘Sapper’s’ work is this thesis more clearly spelled out than in ‘Harvest’, an essay describing the benefits that he saw accruing from the experience of war. ‘Sapper’ argued that: In their civilian life … each individual pawn scrambled and snarled as he pushed the next pawn to him under – or went under himself as the case might be – in his frenzied endeavour to better himself, to win a little brief authority! The community was composed of a mass of struggling fighting units, each one all out for himself and only himself. But from the tuition which the manhood of Britain is now undergoing, there must surely be a very different result. Self no longer rules; self is sunk for the good of the cause – for the good of the community. And the community, realising that fact, endeavours, by every means in its power to develop that self to the very maximum of which it is capable, knowing that, in due course, it will reap the benefit. No longer do individual pawns struggle one against the other, but each – developing his own particular gift to the maximum – places it at the disposal of the community who helped him in his development.24 War thus had a purpose not only for the individuals whom it made men, but also for the future of the society that would benefit from them becoming men. This vision of a newly strengthened British manhood that ‘Sapper’ promulgated in his fiction did not come to pass in the manner that he envisaged. He acknowledged this in his 1930 foreword to the collection of complete war stories when he wrote, ‘I laugh now, a little bitterly as I read some of the things I wrote then. One hoped so much that it would endure: that out of the furnace a permanent welding might emerge.’25 He did not, however, express disillusionment with the war itself. While


he acknowledged that, ‘Maybe it was too great a price to pay for the creation of that soul’, he went on to argue that, ‘the terrible thing to my mind is that, having paid the price, we have not been able to save what we brought from the wreck’.26 ‘Sapper’ continued to believed that something was brought from the wreck of the war, even as he regretted that it had been squandered in the following decade of peace. Nor was ‘Sapper’ unsuccessful in communicating his vision to his readers. In its 1916 review of The Lieutenant and Others, The Times Literary Supplement summed up ‘Sapper’s’ thesis as: War is … a damnable business. He sees it with clear eyes, but he proclaims the fact not gloomily but with a matter-of-fact and cheerful courage; and that is the making of the book … The author does not spare us much. The descriptions of the bombardment of a line of trenches is very horrible, and so is the story called ‘The Coward’ – horribly good. But if anyone at home wants to realize what other people are enduring for him abroad, if it be only the cold and the wet and the mud, here is the chance for him. It is not only the horrors of ‘The Coward’ that are praised by the review. ‘The Lieutenant’ is also singled out for praise for its description of how a boy ‘is moulded into a man’.27 The Daily Mail’s reviewer clearly viewed the book as presenting a realistic vision of the war, praising it for the ‘rich harvest of impressions by which the historian of the future, industrious and unprejudiced, shall surely profit’.28 The reprint editions received less attention from the critics, who concentrated on the postwar thrillers. The middle-brow attitude at the time, however, was favourable to an interpretation of the war as a valuable chance at national renewal that had been squandered.29

The post-war thrillers That ‘Sapper’ himself continued to believe in the war’s power to shape men as leaders of the nation can be seen most clearly in his post-war fiction. It infuses the 14 novels and 11 volumes of short stories that he published between 1919 and his death in 1937. While Mufti was the only one of these novels to deal directly with the experiences of an exserviceman as a veteran, most of ‘Sapper’s’ post-war protagonists were ex-servicemen whose actions were shaped by their experiences of the war. This was most obviously true of his most famous protagonist, Hugh ‘Bulldog’ Drummond.


– – – – – – – – 33,111 26,752 46,356 9,795 6,594 6,957 7,372 5,902 4,255 4,577 2,718 154,389

Challenge

– – – – – 28,196 8,581 55,544 43,274 19,032 13,831 7,511 5,564 7,247 7,498 5,870 4,139 4,872 2,926 214,058

Bulldog Drummond at Bay

The Female of the Species

– – – – 26,570 25,069 63,596 21,753 17,032 16,175 11,588 8,690 5,209 6,177 7,129 6,612 4,744 4,635 3,058 228,037

Knock Out

The Final Count

– – 18,900 20,403 35,466 30,084 58,511 21,370 17,562 18,365 13,157 7,714 6,005 7,165 7,812 4,872 3,714 3,700 2,583 277,383

The Return of Bulldog Drummond

The Third Round

9,798 39,052 16,239 32,447 42,056 25,235 64,419 39,377 39,695 23,009 13,126 7,553 6,236 6,757 8,406 7,141 5,548 6,366 3,842 396,302

Temple Tower

The Black Gang

1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 Total

Number of Drummond novels published per year, 1921–39

Bulldog Drummond

Table 7.3

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 35,106 – – – – 21,026 – – – – 30,746 – – – – 6,661 20,782 – – – 6,928 601 18,207 – – 7,323 4,035 12,621 18,161 – 5,811 8,009 22,645 2,338 – 4,082 5,788 5,758 11,460 18,468 4,116 6,128 5,512 20,603 6,693 2,959 3,978 3,287 4,431 12,213 124,758 49,321 68,030 56,993 37,374


As well as being ‘Sapper’s’ best-known character, Drummond was also his most popular creation. Bulldog Drummond (1920), the first Drummond novel, sold 396,302 copies between 1920 and 1939. While only 9,798 copies were sold in the first year, an astonishing 39,052 copies sold in the second year and, by 1939, the total sold comfortably exceeded the 100,000 copies that were the average sales of middlebrow ‘best-sellers’.30 (See Table 7.3). This novel, and those that followed it, sold in a number of formats, ranging from the 8s 6d hardback through editions selling at 4s, 3s 6d, 2s 6d, 2s, 1s, and 9d. This range of prices indicates the breadth of the market that Hodder & Stoughton were aiming at, while the number of editions sold at all but the 4 and 1 shilling price levels indicates their success in doing so. The other Drummond novels fared equally well, particularly The Black Gang which sold 167,128 copies of the 2s edition. (See Tables 7.3 and 7.4.). The immense popularity of the post-war thrillers can be seen as an extension of the popularity enjoyed by his war stories. Certainly, his


8s.6d 7s.6d 4s. 3s.6d 2s.6d 2s. 1s. 9d.

Challenge

Bulldog Drummond at Bay

Knock Out

The Return of Bulldog Drummond

Temple Tower

The Female of the Species

The Final Count

The Third Round

Number of Drummond novels sold by price to 1939

The Black Gang

Bulldog Drummond

Table 7.4

15,211 – – – – – – – – – – 20,938 27,385 10,231 33,603 35,395 20,782 25,502 26,229 20,700 94 883 684 673 728 840 938 762 714 7,858 75,485 63,538 54,960 63,443 43,395 32,684 9,008 10,151 8,429 – 47,768 – – – – – – – – – 150,447 167,128 140,184 112,458 76,377 76,377 17,303 31,049 13,251 8,816 577 539 462 469 357 357 689 460 318 – 84,133 – – – – – – – – –


position as a best-selling writer of war stories allowed ‘Sapper’ to pursue his successful post-war literary career. However, ‘Sapper’ also built on his wartime reputation with stories that interpreted the aftermath of the war in ways that were consistent with his earlier understanding of it. Although ‘Sapper’s’ post-war fictions are set in post-war society, these works were often as indebted to the experience of the war as his earlier stories. Hugh Drummond is a character defined primarily through his war experience. He is first introduced to the reader through an advertisement that describes him as a ‘Demobilized officer [who is] finding peace incredibly tedious.’31 This veteran status gives him the authority to lead through a knowledge of war that informs every story in which he appears. In making his service during the war the central element of Drummond’s character, ‘Sapper’ presented his hero as one shaped by the war into the appropriate post-war protector of the nation. Throughout the novels Drummond commands a small group of men who served with him during the war and consequently ‘acknowledge only two rulers – the King and Hugh Drummond. And they would willingly die for either of them’.32 It is not only other veterans, however, over whom Drummond wields such authority. John Stockton, narrator of The Final Count (1926), comments, ‘one of the strangest things to me is the habit of unquestioning obedience to Drummond into which I dropped at once. If someone tells me to do a thing, my nature as a general rule impels me to do the exact reverse … And yet when Drummond gave an order I never questioned, I never hesitated’.33 The authority learned in war thus comes to have post-war applications.


If Drummond’s authority makes him a leader in the post-war world, it is knowledge of war that ultimately defines Drummond as a hero. In his first adventure it sets him apart from one of the criminals who explains that ‘Unfortunately a bad heart kept me on this side of the water.’34 In all subsequent adventures it is cited as the source of his authority. And in Challenge (1937), the final novel that ‘Sapper’ wrote, it is used as a warning of things to come. In an early scene in a nightclub, Drummond becomes: Conscious of a curious sensation. Suddenly the room seemed strangely unreal: the band, the women, the hum of conversation faded and died. In its place was a deserted cross-roads with the stench of death lying thick like a fetid pall. Against the darkening sky green pencil lines of light shot ceaselessly up, to turn into balls of fire as the flares lobbed softly into no-man’s-land. In the distance the mutter of artillery: the sudden staccato burst of machine-gun, and in the ditch close by, a motionless figure in khaki, with chalk white face and glazed staring eyes, that seemed to be mutely asking why its legs should be lying two yards away being gnawed by rats. ‘A penny, Hugh.’ With a start he glanced up: Alice was looking at him curiously. ‘For the moment I thought of other things,’ he said quietly. ‘I was back across the water, Alice; back in the days of madness….’ ‘You seemed to me, Hugh, to be staring into the future – not the past.’35 This scene, with its premonitions of the war to come as well as memories of the war of the past, given here with the explicit, direct detail associated with ‘truth-telling’, encompasses Drummond’s authority as a veteran. Drummond’s knowledge of the First World War has shaped him into the appropriate hero for the post-war world who, because he has known war, will prevent the horrors of war from occurring again. As we have seen, by 1930 ‘Sapper’ had become disillusioned with the world that followed the war, developing in line with other middlebrow writers who felt that the ideal for which they had fought was lost in the years after the war, rather than during it. 36 Like them he ‘attempted to make sense of the contradictions, ambiguities and conflicts of the war experience’. 37 Unlike middlebrow authors who attempted to reconstruct post-war social order through discovering a sense of purpose in the war, however, the thriller genre that ‘Sapper’ chose to work in demanded a sense of continuing social disruption.


The world in which Drummond existed, therefore, simply became an extension of the war. The threat to society was often the same, whether embodied by ‘those cigarette-smoking, pigeon-chested malingerers … [who] make eyes at a fat woman they dare not kiss for fear she would be after smacking their faces … [and] scream insults at the referee, knowing he is too far away to hit them’ 38 that Sgt. Cassidy inveighed against, or by the ‘nondescript specimens of humanity that … Woodbines their fingers to a brilliant orange … [and] screams insults at a football referee on Saturday afternoons’ 39 who the Black Gang deal with. The thrillers were often as violent as the war stories, if not more so, with Drummond and his companions thrashing, bayoneting and blowing up their enemies in vividly described detail.40 The education of men by war might have been squandered, leaving England little better off than she had been before. The theory of education remained and was to be pursued by those who had learnt their lesson in wartime and might yet bring something from the wreck. In this ‘Sapper’ was being consistent, applying the same solution to the social problems of England after the war that he advocated during it. In this way, his understanding of war as a powerful undertaking remained relevant to his readers long after the Armistice.

Conclusion ‘Sapper’s’ war stories and thrillers present an alternative narrative to that of disillusionment and passivity discussed by Bergonzi, Fussell and Hynes. Instead, they present a narrative much closer to that identified by Bracco and Cullen as appearing in many post-war middlebrow novels. They show the war as constructive rather than simply destructive, as making heroes of men, not just victims. While ‘Sapper’s’ postwar work becomes increasingly disillusioned with the failures of the post-war world, he continues to advocate the values taught by warfare as necessary in its state of social disruption. The post-war thrillers thus form a narrative continuum with the war stories. The war retains its role as a theatre in which masculinity is developed. While this understanding of the war may, as Paris argues, romanticise the war, ‘Sapper’ uses direct description of warfare in Challenge and his own status as a veteran, to give authority to his vision of war. In doing so, he presents his fictions not as propagandistic romances, as Paris suggests, but rather as alternate ‘truths’ to the disillusion of other fictions and memoirs.


It is hard to say with certainty how deeply this narrative penetrated post-war British culture, although during the war his authority as a truth-teller about the war was certainly accepted by critics. The argument can be made that sales of the reissued war stories were helped by ‘Sapper’s’ established popularity as the author of thrillers. Yet the persistence of sales even beyond the initial release would seem to indicate an acceptance of this view of the war. In addition, the thrillers themselves were infused by it, presenting post-war social disruption as an extension of the war. Their popularity indicates a public willingness to consume such a vision of the role of warfare in both wartime and postwar society. A contemporary popular view of the war and its purpose, one that differed significantly from the narratives of high culture, was undoubtedly available to the British public throughout the interwar period and, given the publication figures, enthusiastically consumed. In understanding the culture of the First World War, such alternative visions of the purpose of war must be taken into account, if only because of its popular consumption both during the war and in its aftermath. This understanding of war was, after all, to influence another generation of young men called upon to submerge self in the defence of their nation in war. Notes 1 Esther MacCallum-Stewart, ‘The War Books Controversy’, [http://www.whatalovelywar.co.uk/nojoke.htm], last accessed 20 September 2005. 2 Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War, 2nd edn (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1996), p.167. 3 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p.235. 4 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: The Bodley Head, 1990) and Fussell, pp.7–35. 5 For discussions of the development of a First World War literary canon, see Esther MacCallum-Stewart, ‘The First World War and Popular Literature’ (DPhil diss., University of Sussex, 2005) and Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon and London, 2005). 6 Histories of reception for this period are limited but Joseph McAleer points out that ‘The First World War accelerated the existing trend towards lowerpriced “inferior” fiction’ which was dominated by ‘low-brow’ genre fiction and story magazines. Joseph McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p.54. 7 Rosa Maria Bracco, ‘Betwixt and Between’: Middlebrow Fiction and English Society in the Twenties and Thirties (Parkville: The University of Melbourne, 1990), pp.3–4. 8 Stephen Michael Cullen, ‘Gender and the Great War: British combatants, masculinity and perceptions of women, 1918–1939’ (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 1998), p.340.

The Tuition of Manhood 127 9 Examples of such analyses can be found in Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991); Stacy Gillis, ‘Detecting Fictions: Resistance and Resolution in the Golden Age Detective Novel’ (PhD diss., University of Exeter, 2001); Jay Dixon, Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon, 1909–1990 (London: UCL Press, 1999); and Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). 10 Paris, p.144. 11 Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1997), pp.1–30. Although never explicitly stated, this argument is implicit in Fussell’s work. 12 These ten represent the Drummond novels written by Herman Cyril McNeile, the originator of the ‘Sapper’ pseudonym. Following McNeile’s death in 1937, his friend Gerald Fairlie wrote a further seven novels featuring Drummond using the pseudonym. 13 All figures are calculated from sales figures taken from the profit and loss ledgers of Hodder & Stoughton Publishers (Ms. 61312, Vol.39, Hodder & Stoughton Archive, Guildhall Library, London). Only figures up to 1939 were collected for this paper, although the books continued to be published throughout the Second World War. The lower numbers for No Man’s Land and The Human Touch can be explained by the fact that they were published late enough in the war not to have accumulated very large annual sales by 1919. 14 Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932, reprinted Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), p.22. 15 Hugh Cecil, ‘British War Novelists’, in Hugh Cecil and Peter Liddle (eds) Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced (London: Leo Cooper, 1996), p.802. 16 Hynes, p.48. 17 ‘Sapper’, ‘The Bridge’ in Sapper’s War Stories (London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 1930) and ‘Sapper’, ‘The Awakening of John Walters’ in The Human Touch (London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 1918). 18 ‘Sapper’, ‘The Booby-Trap’ in Sapper’s War Stories. 19 ‘Sapper’, ‘A Fortnight in France’ in Sapper’s War Stories, p.245. 20 Ibid., p.219. 21 ‘Sapper’, ‘The Education of Bunny Smith’ in The Human Touch, p.282. 22 ‘Sapper’, ‘Shorty Bill, Part I’ in Sapper’s War Stories, p.730. 23 Ibid., p.256. This attitude towards pre-war British society was not unique to ‘Sapper’. Hynes identifies it as the ‘condition of England’ thesis which argued that pre-war Britain was morally decadent and that only a war could save the nation’s soul. (Hynes, A War Imagined, pp.10–19). 24 ‘Sapper’, ‘Harvest’ in Sapper’s War Stories, pp.1048–9. 25 ‘Sapper’, Foreword to Sapper’s War Stories, p.10. 26 Ibid., p.11. 27 ‘From the Front’, The Times Literary Supplement, No.729, 6 January 1916, 5. 28 An Englishman, ‘The Letters of an Englishman: Two Books About the War’, The Daily Mail, Saturday, 29 January 1916. 29 Rosa Maria Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Berge, 1993), pp.117–18.

128 Publishing in the First World War 30 Bracco, ‘Betwixt and Between’, p.5. 31 ‘Sapper’, Bulldog Drummond (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1920; reprinted London: Puffin Books, 1988), p.24 (page citations are to reprint edition). 32 Ibid., p.95. 33 ‘Sapper’, The Final Count (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1926; reprinted London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1985), p.33 (page citations are to reprint edition). 35 ‘Sapper, Challenge (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1937), pp.17–18. 36 Cullen, pp.347–8. 37 Bracco, Merchants of Hope, p.205. 38 ‘Sapper’, Sergeant Michael Cassidy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1915), p.53. 39 ‘Sapper’, The Black Gang, p.3. 40 Colin Watson, Snobbery with Violence: Crime Stories and Their Audience (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1971), p.69.

8 British Army Trench Journals and a Geography of Identity John Pegum

The trench journals of the British and Dominion forces of the First World War present the scholar with as many problems as possibilities. Their ability to fascinate is matched only by their current obscurity. Perhaps it is best, therefore, to begin with a brief description of the journals and the details of their production and dissemination. Trench journals are periodical magazines written, edited and illustrated by the soldiers of a particular unit for almost exclusive distribution to the members of that unit. Each journal, however, varies in terms of the professionalism of its production, its official endorsement, its circulation and its longevity. With such a definition, the descriptive title ‘Trench Journals’, though adopted by many editors, seems inadequate and limiting. It is also misleading. For one thing, unlike some produced by French Army units, few of the British and Dominion forces journals could make a claim to have actually been written and printed in the trenches. For another, they were produced by units of almost every branch of the services and on almost every Front. Thus there are magazines representing infantry battalions, artillery batteries, supply and transport bases, air force units, naval bases and ships, military hospitals at home and abroad and training and regimental depots in Britain and throughout the Empire. While the majority of journals originate from units based on the Western Front, they were also created by units in (and even in transit to) Gallipoli, Salonika, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, Britain and Ireland. There was no unanimity, either, in the ways in which the magazines were produced or distributed. The majority were edited by an individual or group of individuals (by no means exclusively officers) who relied on contributions from the members of their unit.1 However, 129


some of the more official journals, such as Aussie: The Australian Soldiers’ Magazine, had a dedicated staff of writers and a small number, such as The Wipers Times, even owned their own printing press. One such fortunate magazine was The Red Feather, journal of the 6th Battalion, The Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. However, this was a mixed blessing in wartime: its editors were only able to publish their sixth issue (after an absence of seven months) when a quantity of paper was salvaged from a bombed-out printer’s workshop. The majority of trench journals relied on printers in Britain to whom they would dispatch their edited manuscript and receive the requested number of copies in return. Most were simply distributed to the soldiers of the unit freely or for a nominal fee sufficient to cover production costs. Some were available to buy in YMCA canteens at the Front and a small number had similar arrangements with shops, predominantly military tailors, in Britain. Depending as they do on the fortunes of their editors and the high cost in time, effort and money of their production, the life of a trench journal was inevitably precarious. Some journals managed to produce a regular issue for the duration of the war, whereas many appeared for the short time that money and manpower permitted. The particulars of each journal’s conception, production and distribution are unique. They are as unique as the unit which created them. In that regard, each journal reflects the particular needs, interests and abilities of the unit to which it belongs. Taken as a whole, the journals represent the perspectives of a multitude of servicemen observing the war, and their part in it, from every facet of the experience. Whatever his circumstances and location, the British soldier had the opportunity to read and write about his experiences for the amusement and enlightenment of his comrades. This chapter will examine one particular literary aspect of the journals’ content: the association the soldiers forge between identity and location. First, however, it will describe how it is that these diverse and ephemeral magazines have come to be preserved and who undertook the task of collecting them.

The collections Considering the unofficial nature of their production and the poor quality of their paper it is a wonder that the trench journals were collected and have survived at all. Early in the war, however, a few institutions, in Britain and abroad, realised that the soldiers would surely

British Army Trench Journals 131

produce, and have produced for them, a vast assortment of ephemeral literature and began to take steps to preserve it. The Bibliothèque du Documentation Internationale Contemporaine at Nanterre now contains a large number of the more numerous French trench magazines and newsletters. The Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte at Stuttgart holds a collection of German army trench journals.2 Stanford’s Hoover Institute holds some American unit magazines and the Bodleian has a very small number of British journals in its John Johnson Collection of ephemeral items (begun in 1923). The British Museum, which also began collecting ephemeral literature during the war, succeeded in having its call for items put through official channels. The War Office issued a General Routine Order in the summer of 1917 to all units requesting items of ephemeral interest to be deposited in the Museum.3 However, the British Museum’s printed collection closed in the 1970s and much of its trench journals were absorbed into the Imperial War Museum’s archives. The Imperial War Museum, though not officially housed until after the war, began to seek items for its collections during the war years.4 However, its holding of nearly 3,000 individual trench journals was largely assembled post-war. Significantly different from both these collections in the earliness of its foundation and in the manner in which it was constructed, is the collection of the University Library Cambridge. The War Reserve Collection at Cambridge was created almost singlehandedly by the University Librarian, Francis Jenkinson (1854–1923). Its archives contain examples of British, French and German propaganda, magazines, rare and privately published books, political and economic documents, regimental Christmas cards, posters and roughly 800 British and Dominion trench journals. Jenkinson’s policy was of an all inclusive ephemeral collection and so there are unusual items such as what is described in the catalogue as a ‘low’ (presumably pornographic) German book apparently found by a British soldier in a captured German machine-gun post, and two balloons that were used to distribute leaflets over the enemy lines. By the outbreak of the First World War, Jenkinson had served as University Librarian for nearly 25 years. His professional interests lay in the study of bibliography, Classical Latin and Low Country quartos and at the time of his death he left unfinished a work on 15th-century books. That this work was unfinished displays not only the sheer scale of his endeavour but also the extent to which Jenkinson became obsessed with the War Collection. His biographer, Hugh Fraser Stewart, credits him with laying aside his own personal interests to ‘plunge into


history in the making … for the sake of posterity’, thus exhibiting his ‘mental alertness, vision, and initiatory genius’.5 However, Jenkinson did not work entirely alone to assemble the Collection and indeed the advertisement announcing the Library’s intentions to found the collection was placed in the Cambridge Magazine not by Jenkinson but by one of his colleagues:6 [T]he Library authorities are particularly anxious to obtain as large a collection as possible of the ephemeral literature of the War, whether it contains Cambridge or not. Such flying pieces as those which are dropped from aeroplanes or posted on hoardings would be particularly welcome. And let nobody imagine that any printed piece is too trivial for acceptance. It has been abundantly proved that a collection of the daily literature of any country is of the greatest value to the historian in after years.7 Jenkinson’s abilities became apparent when material started arriving at the Library. He was the consummate single-minded and thorough collector. He was aided, however, by Library colleagues, such as Bartholomew and Aldis, in the amassing of the Collection. J.H. Rose, it appears from Jenkinson’s diary, was dispatched to France to purchase material on behalf of the Library. Stephen Gaselee, a Marlborough contemporary of Jenkinson’s employed throughout the war at the Foreign Office, mobilised his influential contacts and obtained much material for the Library.8 However, while he was assisted by many people, Jenkinson himself seems to have done the vast majority of the sourcing and acquiring. Stewart, in the typically eulogistic tones of his biography, notes: ‘Nothing came amiss to his net; all the straws on the torrent were diligently salved.’9 An example of this sort of diligence is to be seen in Jenkinson’s correspondence with Colonel J.H. Collett, commanding officer of the 5th Battalion, The Gloucestershire Regiment: I see in the Morning Post reference to the Fifth Gloucester Gazette, and your name is mentioned in connexion with the poems of Lieut. F.W. Harvey. I am making great efforts to get together a War Collection for preservation in this Library, as likely to be interesting hereafter and also useful. I have a certain number of trench magazines, etc., but I have not this. Can you help me get a set? Or pass this on to some one who can and will? So many of these publications will disappear after the war that copies ought to be housed in a few safe places.10


The request was favourably answered, and Jenkinson received issues 13 to 16 and 18 to 25 of the journal. Perhaps what is most interesting about his letter is the vagueness of his statement as to the purpose of the Collection. ‘Interesting’ and ‘useful’ he intones in request after request, and that is an interest and a use that the future, not the contemporary, scholar will discern. As far as he is concerned their interest is in the challenge that they make to the collector. If he could not anticipate the scholarly usefulness of the journals and other ephemeral items, he could at least appreciate the importance of collecting them and indeed the significance of housing the pre-eminent collection of this material in Britain. Jenkinson, and his counterparts in the British Museum and National War Museum, clearly believed that the archives they were forming would prove indispensable to those future scholars. But they were not alone in predicting the importance of creating as full a documentary record of the war as possible. Alongside the very real war that was being fought on the Western Front, there was also a war being waged by the libraries of the combatant nations. This was a war to fully represent and permit future understanding of the war. It was a war that had archival supremacy as its goal. And it was a war that, in May 1916, the British and Jenkinson were losing. In that month, an article documenting a visit made by a Mr Reyer, an American academic, to the Royal Library in Berlin and his meeting with its librarian appeared in Public Opinion: Already in August, 1914, the Royal Library in Berlin had created a new department which was to gather a possibly complete collection of war literature. Fifteen men and women are now occupied entirely with the task of assorting, classifying, and cataloguing the enormous amount of print that comes to the new department daily and the whole machinery of the library … is at the service of the purposes and exigencies of the ambitious department. There are agents abroad gathering and sending in books and papers, or gathering and storing them… There are about ten thousand books in the collection now; eight thousand have been catalogued, and many are accessible… Everywhere those who concern themselves with the collection and storage of literature are awakening to the need of strenuous endeavours to forestall the critical demands of the next generation, and it will be a little humiliating if after the war English writers are at a disadvantage compared with foreign rivals.11


In the terms of this envisaged battle to furnish the future scholar with as complete an arsenal of archival material as possible, the Collection can be seen as a sort of intellectual munitions factory. It was an arms race that Britain, and Cambridge in particular, could not bear to lose. While Cambridge (like Oxford) had provided the army with thousands of recruits, it also (again like Oxford) housed a small but vocal band of pacifists.12 Buitenhuis, however, observes slightly dichotomously, that ‘Oxford men rallied enthusiastically to the cause, while the resisters appeared mostly to have come from Cambridge.’13 Most notable amongst these resisters was Bertrand Russell, who was for a time a Fellow of Trinity College, as was Jenkinson. The University Librarian was certainly aware of the growing association between Cambridge and pacifism, yet noted in his usually introspective diary that it was an association that was misrepresentative; ‘V.C. [Vice-Chancellor] points out that our conscientious objectors are not [as had been reported in the press] 300 but 72.’14 His Collection was thus one emphatic way of redressing the imbalance. As a demonstration of private determination (unlike that of the British Museum), comparable to that displayed by the Cambridge men in the armed forces, Jenkinson hoped that the War Collection would come to embody the spirit of the university in wartime. After the war, items still came into the Library for Jenkinson’s Collection, but following his death in 1923 little was done to expand the Collection or maintain its catalogue. In fact, certain items were dispersed to perhaps more relevant locations within the Library such as the Cambridge Collection or the Periodicals Department. The absence of Jenkinson’s guiding hand inevitably led to the Collection being somewhat neglected. This strengthens the argument that the War Collection was almost entirely the responsibility of Jenkinson alone. Jay Winter, the last editor of the Collection, certainly sees this ‘full documentary record of the war’ as being the product of Jenkinson’s individual and personal ‘vision and stamina’.15 But few ‘future historians’, and no literary critics, have referred to the trench journals in the Collection.16 The importance and usefulness of the trench journals, as outlined by Jenkinson in his letter to Colonel Collett, is just as apt a description of his entire War Collection as the journals within it. It is undoubtedly a valuable collection of ephemeral items, but its certain usefulness has been left largely undiscovered.

Writing the unit identity A principle, and often stated, purpose of a majority of the trench journals is to encourage a sense of esprit de corps, of unit identity. The editors


thus select contributions not necessarily on aesthetic merits, but for their ability to give, or create, a voice to the shared mentality of the unit. C.A. Dawson Scott, reviewing the facsimile reprint of The Wipers Times (1930) clearly identifies the consequence for the civilian reader of this class of editing: ‘It is a paper by experts for experts and much is lost on those who were not playing the game of War.’17 The modern reader is in much the same predicament. He or she may be unable to understand every reference and allusion but s/he has a glimpse into the transient and the common mentality of the British soldier in and out of the trenches. The contents of even a single issue of a journal are so varied in tone and subject that the overall effect is one of ‘an inextricable muddle of propaganda and personal testimony’.18 Some form of categorisation and selection must take place. Both Audoin-Rouzeau and Fuller, writing of the French and the British journals respectively, arrange them in order of hierarchy based on an interpretation of the journals’ ‘authenticity’.19 Those journals produced by infantry regiments in the firing line are given preeminence, whereas those from base hospitals or training units are geographically more distant from the Front, and thus, they believe, less authentic and reliable. However, rather than measuring the distance between the firing line and those areas further in the rear upon a spectrum of authenticity, I would argue that it should be seen as creating an experiential divide that both sides engage with. The no man’s land between the opposing trenches formed an imaginative, as well as a very real, barrier between the armies. Despite the frequent, often nightly, forays from both sides into the barren zone between the trenches it ultimately deserved its title; it was a no man’s land, the property of no-one. The frontline, by contrast, was imaginatively considered by those who lived and fought there as their own exclusive property. Of course, there was an enormous variance in the actual condition of the frontline trench along the whole Western Front. In the chalk of the Somme valley it could be deep and generally dry whereas in the low-lying fields of Flanders it was often nothing more than a series of connected and consolidated waterlogged shellholes. However, the imaginative and literary frontline trench, as boundary of the allies’ territory, was frequently more solid than its real life counterpart. The frontline becomes a potent symbol in the soldiers’ contributions to trench journals, whether they have been there or not. However, before looking at the ways in which the soldiers wrote that Front, it is important to understand how they wrote themselves. The process of transforming a civilian into a soldier is ultimately dependent on the removal of his individuality and its replacement


with dependability, trust and esprit de corps. As Denis Winter states, the aim of training was ‘quite simply to break a man, then to rebuild him in his new army role as a servant; pliant and totally subservient.’20 The first and most apparent signifier of the Army’s depersonalisation of recruits is the donning of uniform. There is much evidence in the trench journals that this losing of civilian status is not looked upon at all negatively. Appearing like a soldier is indeed the initial desire of the anonymous poet writing in The London Scottish Regimental Gazette in the first months of war. His poem, ‘How About It?’, adequately conveys the recruits’ frustration at the delay in receiving their new uniforms: There’s a subject here to which I draw attention Regarding which we feel a trifle warm; We’re slowly growing old and the days are getting cold And here we are without our uniform. Yet day by day we hear the rumours rattle That very shortly we shall get our stuff, We hear these tales with doubt for there are a lot about, And every one of them is bluff O raise a hustle gentle Quarter-master! We don’t like looking like a lot of tramps, We hope to bear our knees and not to go in these, Or we’ll be sent to Isolation Camps! Our much enduring patience is exhausted, Our gingerbread is losing half its gilt, For the girls would see more charms when we presented arms If they observed the owner wore a kilt!21

5

10

15

Without uniforms they are still civilians and not yet soldiers. The smartness of their drilling is reduced by the lack of uniform, or possibly the wearing of the much-hated Kitchener’s Blue uniform. Whichever it is, it is not khaki, and therefore the recruits cannot consider themselves soldiers and thus the prestige of joining the Colours so promptly is losing some of its shine. Wilfred Owen, in ‘Disabled’ (1917), expresses an appreciation of the power of the uniform, particularly that of the Scottish regiments, to draw men into the ranks. Someone had said he’d look a god in kilts, That’s why; and may be, too, to please his Meg;

25


Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts.22 Owen presents the sentiment in a tragic tone which exposes the hollowness of the self-pride derived from the uniform but the earlier poem may justifiably be read as sincere. This anonymous Scot, at least, longed for a uniform to display his enthusiasm and ardour. The public display of commitment is just as ready a source of inspiration for the soldier after having received his uniform. It seems that not only is it important for the new recruit to look like a soldier, but also to feel and act as part of a unit. Esprit de corps was aspired to by unit commanders, but a sense of homogeneity, of a unit identity, is just as desired by the soldiers. Drilling and marching is the greatest demonstration of the new soldiers’ identity being subsumed into that of the unit. Private E.A. Norris, in ‘The Lay of the Recruits’, expresses the joy and joint sense of purpose to be derived from working in a unit. Say! who are those who march along With swinging step and cheerful song, Who tramp the Drill Hall swiftly round, And train upon the Barrack ground, Who march in line – column of route, Do physical drill – form fours and about? … For wives and children, man’s best joys, We now become the Cambridge Boys, King, Country, Home, call us to war, Say, boys, isn’t it worth fighting for? Come, lads, train quickly as we can, Our country needs us to a man.23

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This mentality does not, admittedly, last and it is rare to find a marching poem in a trench journal representing a unit that has joined the Army in the field. But while still in training, the young soldier could look to his unit’s trench journal to provide an easily understood literary interpretation of his new character and identity as part of his regiment. In this regard, the anonymity of the authors enables the identity that they construct to be more readily accepted and adopted. It is just this anonymity that enables the authors to portray themselves, to give themselves up to the unity of the Army. They create the identity they want for themselves, heavily influenced though it may be. The authors’ use of pseudonyms, which disguise their identity, or


initials, which at the very least create ambiguity, emphasises this sense of a shared communal identity. The individual authors disown their personal sense of identity for the larger identity of the unit. The effect of their poetry is perhaps the more potent invisibility as poets. The poems could be written, and should be read as such, by any soldier of the unit. The journals say as much about the unit’s mentality in the anonymity of the contributors as the articles and poems themselves say. As the war dragged on, this sort of unit homogeneity ceased to exist, or at least ceased to be predicated by the same mentality. No longer was a battalion composed solely of recruits from a particular factory, street or district. Unit identity, such as the ‘Cambridge Boys’, could not be based on civilian origins, or shared barrack ground experiences. But a sense of unity was still vital to the soldiers. Later in the war, it begins to be expressed in terms of a shared condition or shared duty, rather than a shared past. In such an inclusive community as the army of the First World War, one unit must search for distinction, for qualities that bind the unit together, while also distinguishing it from all other units. The contributors to journals find this distinction in the occupation and duty of their unit. It is infinitely easier, and indeed more effective, to define oneself and one’s unit by that which it is not. The infantryman is most clearly seen in relief when he describes all those who have chosen not to volunteer as he has (such as conscientious objectors) and also those that are engaged in work that keeps them out of the frontlines. Thus the Army Service Corps, the Royal Army Medical Corps and even the artillery are shown to be lacking the infantryman’s identity and therefore deficient in some way of his ‘authentic’ experience. Those out of danger, the infantryman argues, are too far away to experience the war. The geographical and experiential exclusion of the army behind the army lets the infantry gain some positive value from the hardships and dangers they must experience. But this exclusion that the infantry highlight in their journals arises not from the exclusivity of their unit, but principally from the exclusivity of their location: the trenches.

Tommy in the trenches The infantry soldier did not actually live constantly in the trenches, or write about it, but the character of the soldier was most often pictured in the surroundings of the trenches. The typical cycle of duty for an infantry battalion was four days in the Reserve Line (a trench about 50 to 250 yards behind the Front), then four days in the Firing Line fol-


lowed by another four days in the Reserve Line. Ideally, the battalion would then move out to rest. The rest that was actually achieved depended greatly on the distance from the frontline. If relatively close, the battalion could expect to provide working parties to the Royal Engineers or the Army Service Corps to mend roads, dig trenches or erect wire entanglements. After any length of time from a few hours to a few weeks of Rest, the cycle would begin again.24 This character of ‘Tommy’, adopted and heavily adapted from Kipling, was created by careful and consistent disassociation and exclusion. What the journal contributors did associate the character of the soldier with is not just the conditions of danger and hardships, but, more powerfully, with the trenches themselves. Tommy, as the journals paint him, only truly exists in the trenches. This sense of the soldiers’ ownership of the trenches was one they could hardly avoid, but in time the infantry became quite protective of this exclusive association and turned it to their advantage. As early as October 1915, examples of this association are evident in the journals. With more than a little irony, the anonymous poem ‘My Little Wet Home in the Trench’,25 featured in The Listening Post, proudly states: I’ve a little wet home in the trench Where the rain storms continually drench There’s a dead cow close by, With her hoofs towards the sky And she gives off a beautiful stench. Underneath, in place of a floor There’s a mass of wet mud and some straw And the ‘Jack Johnsons’ tear Thro’ the rain sodden air O’er my little wet home in the trench. There are snipers who keep on the go So you must keep your napper down low And their star shells at night Make a deuce of a light Which causes the language to flow. Then bully and biscuits we chew For its days since we tasted a stew But with shells dropping there There’s no place to compare With my little wet home in the trench.26

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By combining the image of the rotting carcass of a cow with the reference to his dug-out as his home, the poet makes the trench at one and the same time disgusting and familiar. It is easy to read these lines with both inflections, either to the detriment or advantage of the trenches and the soldier’s ‘little wet home’. But neither implication dominates. Thus, the poet suggests that he feels some sense of ownership and pride in the trenches and in himself for enduring the dangers and being capable of picturing the trenches in cosy and everyday terms. Fuller claims that the humour displayed by American soldiers in the Second World War allowed for ‘a safe discharge of dangerous tension.’27 According to him, humour enabled American soldiers to ‘achieve a kind of distance from their threatening experiences.’28 In this context, the poem acts to psychologically distance the soldier-poet from the reality of his surroundings. However, the opposite is at work also. The poet strenuously associates himself with the scene. The discomfort and perils – the ‘dead cow’, the ‘mass of wet mud’ and the ‘snipers who keep on the go’ – are all made light of, but are referred to as being essential and constituent parts of the trench scene. The Front simply wouldn’t be the Front without them, and just as essentially, without the soldier-poet. The association of the soldiers with the frontline is most obvious, and indeed most poignant, when they consider land over which men have fought and died. If the expectation of the soldier is to die, then the land over which he fought or died is treated as his property, his reward. The significance and importance of the Front is felt most by the dead and the soldiers who have fought with those who died; the newcomers simply cannot comprehend the significance this land holds for them. A.P. Herbert, who was to write the novel The Secret Battle (1919) based on his experiences in Gallipoli and on the Western Front, explains this significance in his poem ‘Beaucourt Revisited’ which featured in the first issue of The Mudhook, his divisional magazine, in 1917. Returning to the site of an old battle, Herbert observes the differences in conditions from when he last saw the place: I wandered up to Beaucourt, I took the river track, And saw the lines we lived in before the Bosches went back. But peace was now in Pottage, the front was far ahead, The front was flying Eastward, and only left the dead. And I thought ‘How long we lay there, and watched the wire, While the guns roared round the valley and set the skies afire.’

5


But now there are homes in Hamel, and tents in the Vale of Hell And a camp at Suicide Corner, where half the Regiment fell. The new troops follow after and tread the land we won, To them it is so much hillside, re-wrestled from the Hun. To us ’tis almost sacred, this dreary mile of mud; The shell holes hold our history and half of them our blood.

10

Here at the head of Peche Street ’twas death to show your face, To me it seemed like magic to linger in the place. To me how many spirits hung round the Kentish Caves. But the new men see no spirits – they only see the graves.

15

I found the half-dug ditches we fashioned for the fight. We lost a score of men there – young James was killed that night. I saw the star shells staring, I heard the bullets hail, But the new men pass unheeding – they never heard the tale. I crossed the blood-red ribbon that once was No-Man’s Land; I saw a winter daybreak and a creeping minute hand: And here the lads went over, and there was Harmsworth shot, And here was William lying – but the new men knew him not. And I said ‘There is still the river and still the stiff stark trees To treasure here our story, but there are only these.’ But under the white wood crosses the dead men answered low ‘The new men know not Beaucourt, but we are here – we know.’29

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The frontline has advanced as a result of the attack, and left this former battlefield without the significance of its presence. To the replacements this place is just another bit of desolation, whereas to Herbert, and all those who fought and died here, it is still imbued with an importance due to their sacrifice. The landscape literally and metaphorically signifies the men who lost their lives achieving it. It is theirs. The dead have seeped into, been subsumed by the land. The harshness of the environment is their memorial. The new men are seen as trespassing on sacred ground, not having proved their right to tread with such safety in the footsteps of those men who struggled to achieve the land and died. To recall the names, faces and locations of the men who died, the poet must


reconstruct the scene, the danger, the time when this now quiet area was alive with shell-fire. The only familiarity the poet finds in the landscape is the barest of geographical fixed-points. A corresponding example of the land becoming irrevocably associated with the dead is to be seen in the case of the 9th Battalion, The Devonshire Regiment on the first day of the Somme. The battalion was all but wiped out by a German machine gun post at Mansel Copse. Later in the day, when the land had eventually been captured, 160 of the battalion’s dead were carried back to their old frontline trench. They were buried there and a notice placed over the trench-grave: ‘The Devonshires held this trench. The Devonshires hold it still.’30 Similarly, Herbert is erecting a poetic placard over the dead of his battalion. In memorialising the dead, he inevitably memorialises their location, what it was and what it has become. If the trenches and the frontline with all its accompanying hardships and perils are the strenuously affirmed property of the infantryman, both living and dead, then the back areas, the safer and more comfortable regions, are willingly given over to those who have no place at the Front. The Staff, A.S.C. and R.A.M.C. are thus tainted inevitably by the implications of not only their occupations, but also the areas in which they operate. The antithesis of the frontline is the Base, and both are vague geographical concepts that nonetheless carry much weight and significance as to the identity of those who reside there. The Base as seen from the Front is the repose of those shirkers and slackers who have wangled their way to safety and idleness. When the infantryman is there, either on his way to or from the Front, he gives the impression that he wants nothing more than to leave. The anonymous Lancashire Fusilier whose poem ‘I Want to go Back …’ featured in The Minden Magazine, precedes his poem with a mock apology to the divisional base in which he is temporarily billeted: I want to go back; I want to go back; Right to the firing line, Far away from here; from the base camp cold and drear, I’ll miss the C.O. who told me T.O. Get a shave at 4.o a.m. I’ll miss those endless orders; those pretty flower borders; Nevertheless I want to go back. I want to go back, ’mong my comrades full of cheer, That’s why I want to go, where red tape doesn’t grow, Far, far from here.31

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There is the suggestion that the soldier feels less like a soldier when taken out of the soldiers’ (un)natural habitat of the trenches. Surrounded by ‘pretty flower borders,’ he fears he is not himself, or who he was at the Front. The identity he has as an infantryman is dissolving due not only to his isolation from the rest of his battalion, but primarily to the distance between him and the frontline. Indeed, there is the implication that to stay too long at the Base will lead to the soldier being infected by the comfort, and particularly the identity, of the back areas. As the infantrymen associate themselves with the habitation of the Front, so too do they necessarily associate the Staff and the rest of the army behind the army with the Base. The R.A.M.C., representative of the Base-dwellers, have little option but to acknowledge and accept this ‘time-honoured jest against themselves.’32 Other units though, forced to remain at the Base or in the back areas, resent this association. The anonymous poem ‘What Abaht It?’, featured in Night Lines, the magazine of the 160th Siege Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery, takes one of the few jabs at the infantry contained in a non-infantry journal: Yer can tork abaht yer Infantry and Motor Transport too, Yer can warble all the songs abaht them chaps yer never knew; Yer can tork abaht yer Engineers, wot’s working all the day, But what abaht the bloomin’ R.G.A.? Ho yus! And what abaht the bloomin’ R.G.A.?

5

Yer can tork about the Mons Retreat and all that sort of stuff, Yer can praise the Trenchy blokes and lay the praise on thick and rough; Yer can always tell the story of the blood wot flowed away, But what abaht the bloomin’ R.G.A.? 10 Ho yus! And what abaht the bloomin’ R.G.A.? Yer can praise yer Royal Flying Corps, and Cavalry as well, Yer can spin a yarn of ’ow they charged the Bosche to ’ell; But ’oo prepared the scene before yer charged them where they lay? Well, what abaht the bloomin’ R.G.A.? Ho yus! And what abaht the bloomin’ R.G.A.?

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I allus did believe in giving other blokes their share, And o’ course I ain’t denyin’ that these fellers ’elped us there; But when we come to reckon up who nearly won the day, ’Twas what abaht the bloomin’ R.G.A.? Ho yus! And what abaht the bloomin’ R.G.A.?33

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The poet, and possibly the entire Battery, feels that his significance has been marginalised, forgotten in the obsession with the frontline. However magnanimous he may be in recognising the work of the infantry and other more glorified units, he cannot help but feel overlooked and ill-treated. But this sort of expression is more representative of the typical and traditional type of inter-army rivalry, used to define by exclusion the unit itself, rather than a fear of being associated with the idle Base-dwellers. This gentle jibing of the Base displayed in infantry trench journals, done more to demarcate the infantry than to criticise all others, evoked hardly any response from the journals of back area units. While modestly emphasising their own importance and the extent to which the infantry depended upon them, they chose to write little that attacked the infantry’s assumed preeminence. Indeed, the infantryman’s censure of the back areas carries such weight as a result of his contrasting occupation of the frontline, that all those in the rear in some way measure themselves against the standards and identity of the infantryman in the trenches. He becomes the start point on a line of authenticity that stretches back to the Base and beyond to training camps in Britain. But as has been seen, the infantryman paints that identity onto the landscape of the trenches to such an extent that when he leaves that world, he leaves a large part of his identity behind. It is the landscape then that imbues identity characteristics. All those who remain for any length of time at one of these points on the geographical spectrum of the war zone will be mapped by the characteristics associated with that place, and will by degrees shed the identity they held on arrival. The trench journals with which the Front abounded during the Great War are an invaluable resource for a mapping of this network of shifting identities in the face of the rhetoric of nationalism, and they would repay greater scrutiny. Notes 1 One of the most famous and long-running journals, The Glo’ster Gazette, gained a circulation that exceeded the members of the unit that created it.


2

3

4

5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14

In time, the editors began receiving and printing contributions from members of the Division to which their battalion, the 5th Battalion, The Gloucestershire Regiment, belonged. Christine Beresford, Introduction, The Fifth Gloster Gazette: A Chronicle, Serious and Humorous, of the Battalion while serving with the British Expeditionary Force (Stroud: Sutton, 1993), iii. Both the French and the German trench journals differ in character from the British magazines. The French Army journals generally represent the work of literary-minded individuals writing for their immediate circle of comrades rather than a collection of interested and enthusiastic soldiers writing for their entire unit. It is often the case that one French battalion could have three or four small magazines produced by its members. The German magazines, contrastingly, were more official and less literary. They were used as a means of disseminating news, propaganda even, rather than a means of amusing and diverting. See Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War 1914–1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France During the First World War, trans. Helen McPhail (Providence, RI: Berg, 1992), p.7. The journal of the 33rd R.A.M.C. Field Ambulance, The Wormlet, in its first issue of July 1918 quotes a letter sent by their Commanding Officer to the Principal Librarian of the British Museum. ‘Herewith copy of this unit magazine, “The Wormlet,” which is forwarded to you for filing, in accordance with General Routine Orders No.1857 and 2212.’ The Wormlet. 1 (1918), p.1. In early 1917, Sir Alfred Mond, First Commissioner of Works, put forth a proposal to inaugurate a Memorial Museum which would represent the fullness of the national effort in the war. A committee, with representatives from each branch of the service, was appointed and the plans for a National War Museum (as it was to be called for the duration of the war) gathered pace. The collections amassed were eventually housed and displayed in the Crystal Palace in 1920 and moved permanently to its present Lambeth site in 1936. Hugh Fraser Stewart, Francis Jenkinson: A Memoir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), p.79. Jenkinson noted in his diary on the day that the call for items appeared that ‘Bartholomew has put an appeal for ephemeral war literature in the Cambridge Magazine.’ Of course, that Jenkinson sanctioned the placement of the advertisement, and may have even written it, is undoubted. Francis Jenkinson, ‘Diaries of F.J.H. Jenkinson (1880–1923)’, 30 January 1915. Add. Ms. 7407–47, University of Cambridge. ‘For the Historian of the Future’, Cambridge Magazine, 4 (1915), p.209. See ‘Correspondence Relating to War Collection.’ Add. Ms. 6444, University of Cambridge. Stewart, p.77. Cited in Stewart, p.77. ‘Cambridge Wants a War Library’, Public Opinion 109 (1916), p.494. According to Winter, 13,403 Oxford men served in the armed forces while 13,126 Cambridge men did so. Jay Winter, The Great War and the British People 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003), p.93. Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda 1914–18 and After (London: B.T. Batsford, 1989), p.6. Francis Jenkinson, ‘Diaries’, 17 March 1916.

146 Publishing in the First World War 15 J.M. Winter, The First World War: A Documentary Record. Series One: European War 1914–1919. The War Reserve Collection from Cambridge University Library, 2 parts (Cambridge: Adam Matthew, 1991), p.7. 16 Hitherto, the most comprehensive analysis of the trench journals was conducted by J.G. Fuller in Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Fuller consulted journals in the Imperial War Museum and in Cambridge. Martin Taylor, while working at the Imperial War Museum, wrote an article, ‘“The Open Exhaust” and Some Other Trench Journals of the First World War’ (1990) but only considers a selection of journals from the Museum’s own archives. John Ivelaw-Chapman examined one specific journal, The Wipers Times, in his study, The Riddle of Wipers: An Appreciation of ‘The Wipers Times,’ A Journal of the Trenches (1997), but this journal was reprinted in facsimile reproduction as recently as 1973 (and again in 2006), thus IvelawChapman was not compelled to consult the Cambridge Collection. 17 C.A. Dawson Scott, ‘The Soldier’s Mirror – His Songs and His Humour’, review in the Bookman, 468 (1930), pp.342–3. 18 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War 1914–1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France During the First World War, trans. Helen McPhail (Providence, RI: Berg, 1992), p.20. 19 See Fuller, p.4 and Audoin-Rouzeau, p.2. 20 Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London: Allen Lane, 1978). p.41. 21 ‘How About It?’, The London Scottish Regimental Gazette, 19.227 (1914), p.206. 22 Wilfred Owen. ‘Disabled.’ 1917, The War Poems of Wilfred Owen, John Stallworthy (ed.) (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), p.62. 23 Private E.A. Norris, ‘The Lay of the Recruits’ in the Cambridgeshire Territorial Gazette. 1/1st, 2/1st, 3/1st, 4/1st, 62nd Prov. Battalions, The Cambridgeshire Regiment, 3 (1916), p.53. 24 In practice, the life of an infantry battalion was rarely as regimented as this. Many factors could upset the routine, not least of which was the overall state of hostilities on the battalion’s Front. If the battalion had suffered heavy casualties, a month or two of refitting and assimilation of replacements could be expected. If troops were being relieved to take part in an advance at some other point on the Western Front, the battalion, if not taking part themselves, would be forced to hold a longer stretch of the weakened Front for a longer period of time. For further details about the infantry battalion’s duties, see Denis Winter, Gary Sheffield, Lyn Macdonald and Richard Holmes. 25 This poem is an acknowledged parody of D. Eardley-Wilmot’s ‘My Little Grey Home in the West’. Eardley-Wilmot, a poet of modest fame, served as a nurse at the 3rd London General Hospital, Wandsworth during the war. Coincidentally, the hospital also produced a magazine to which she contributed poetry. 26 ‘My Little Wet Home in the Trench’ in The Listening Post: 7th Canadian Infantry Battalion, 6 (1915), p.3. 27 Fuller, p.144. 28 Ibid.

British Army Trench Journals 147 29 A.P. Herbert, ‘Beaucourt Revisited’ in The Mudhook with which is Incorporated ‘Dardanelles Dug-Out Gossip’ The Journal of the 63rd (R.N.) Division, 1.1 (1917), p.3. 30 Martin Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme: 1 July 1916 (London: Penguin, 2001) p.249. 31 ‘I Want to go Back…’ in The Minden Magazine: 2nd Battalion, The Lancashire Fusiliers, 2 (1915), p.9. 32 ‘Phases of Corps Life’ in The Searchlight: Monthly Publication of the R.A.M.C., T.F. (E. Lancs.), 2nd Western General Hospital, Manchester, 1.1 (1916), p.8. 33 ‘What Abaht It?’ Night Lines. 1.1 (1917), p.4.

9 ‘A New and Vital Moral Factor’: Cartoon Book Publishing in Britain During the First World War Nicholas Hiley

The outbreak of war in August 1914 brought an outpouring of cartoons by British artists. It was accepted without question that the war was an appropriate subject for cartoons, and cartoon books and anthologies became very popular, especially in the early years of the war, before the advent of paper shortages. However, it rapidly became clear that the British cartoon tradition of ironic social comment, and political caricature softened by humour, needed supplementing in wartime with imagery drawn from elsewhere. There were few left-wing or oppositional cartoonists in Britain, and no equivalent to the combative styles of cartooning found in France, Germany, or Russia. As a result, established British cartoonists found it difficult to cope with changing attitudes, and this was largely achieved by recruiting artists from outside this narrow group.1 Initially established cartoonists did very well, and there is little doubt that the most widely-read cartoons drawn in Britain during the war were those of William Kerridge Haselden, cartoonist of the Daily Mirror. Forty-two when the war broke out, he was over the age limit for joining the army. A self-taught artist, Haselden got his job on the Daily Mirror at the end of 1903, when the newly-launched paper was already failing and needed a redesign. Alfred Harmsworth offered Haselden £5 a week to draw single-frame political cartoons, but when, in 1904, the paper dropped its price and went for a more popular market, Haselden began instead to experiment with subdivided images, and light social comment. By 1907 Haselden was using a multi-frame format, usually of six images, and producing cartoons which, as he explained, dealt not with political issues but with the ‘little passing topics of the day.’ These proved very popular, and at the end of that year the Daily Mirror issued 148

A New and Vital Moral Factor 149

the first collection of Haselden’s work, under the title Daily Mirror Reflections. His political cartoons were omitted from this volume, which chose to concentrate instead on the comic drawings, which the introduction hoped would be ‘a perfect cure for the “blues”.’ Daily Mirror Reflections thus became the first volume of non-political cartoons ever issued by a British newspaper. Today Haselden is largely forgotten, but during the First World War he was one of Britain’s best-known cartoonists, and his style was considered sufficiently distinctive to be called ‘Haseldenian’.2 The wartime circulation of the Daily Mirror grew enormously, passing 1.5 million copies a day, and his cartoons were a prominent feature, the paper rightly describing them as ‘the predominant humorous feature of British journalism.’3 It was even claimed that many readers turned first to his cartoon when reading the paper. 4 Towards Christmas each year the Daily Mirror issued a new volume of Reflections, reprinting a selection of Haselden’s social comment cartoons, and these were enormously popular. The first wartime volume was Daily Mirror Reflections of War and Peace, published at the end of 1914, and the series continued throughout the war.5 Soon after the release of Reflections of War and Peace, Haselden had another publishing success, also based on his Daily Mirror cartoons. On 2 October 1914 he produced a cartoon of the German Kaiser and the Crown Prince being frustrated in their attempts to kick the world around. It was intended to begin a series, for it carried the caption ‘Sad Experience of Big and Little Willie No. 1’. Over the next three months Haselden produced more than 50 similar cartoons; it has been claimed that this series pioneered the British newspaper strip, making Big and Little Willie among the first British strip cartoon characters.6 Their adventures were very popular, and in November 1914 it was decided to put some of the originals on display at the Dudley Galleries in London. The Daily Mirror soon reported ‘crowds of people there chuckling at the sad experiences of the Willies’, including a significant number of wounded soldiers.7 The ‘Big and Little Willie’ series was very much in the established tradition of British comic cartooning. The Kaiser and Crown Prince were shown not as hateful or frightening figures, but as spoilt and petulant children, whose desire to dominate Europe was constantly frustrated by the Allies. In January 1915 a selection of Haselden’s cartoons was reprinted as The Sad Experiences of Big and Little Willie During the First 6 Months of the Great War. The introduction claimed that its publication was in response ‘to a very strongly-voiced appeal by the


public’; there is no reason to doubt this.8 The London exhibition was still running, and in February 1915, confirming the popularity of the series, Queen Alexandra paid an official visit.9 Haselden finally produced well over 100 ‘Big and Little Willie’ cartoons, but he also created a number of other very popular stock characters, including ‘Joy Flapperton’, a young girl who was ‘not taking the war seriously enough’, and who first appeared in the Daily Mirror in July 1915. Contemporaries realised that there was something characteristically British in Haselden’s ‘Big and Little Willie’. In July 1916 Chatto and Windus published International Cartoons of the War, edited by the 34-year-old journalist Pearl Adam, whose husband was Paris correspondent of The Times. Writing under her pen name of ‘H. Pearl Adam’, she collected cartoons that seemed to reflect the spirit of the nations at war, and to show their differences. Adam claimed that the British cartoons were ‘as different as possible from both the French and the German’, being characterised throughout by ‘good humour’.10 The British attitude, she observed, was that the Kaiser was a fool and the Crown-Prince ‘an awful silly blighter’; ‘after all, don’t you know,’ she wrote, ‘we’re going to thrash the brutes, but there’s no need to make a fuss about it, hang it all. Let us have our pipe and our grin, and let us keep to those till the end.’11 These attitudes were not exclusive to Haselden. Towards the end of 1914 the Daily News and Star had published An English ABC for Little Willie and Others, with illustrations by The Star’s own cartoonist, G.A. Stevens. The market for this sort of book is difficult to estimate, but it was presumably designed as a patriotic present for Christmas 1914. It was an ephemeral publication typical of the time, whose cartoons of a childish Kaiser were accompanied by patriotic doggerel. The introduction to An English ABC thus included the lines: ‘Now that we’re in we’ve got to stick it/And, scorning things that are not cricket,/Each strive to lend a helping hand,/Till victory crowns our Motherland.’ The format was presumably successful, for in 1915 Stevens also illustrated a volume of Nursery Rhymes for Fighting Times. The Daily Mirror was remarkably successful in reprinting its war cartoons, but it was not the only London daily paper to do so. The Daily Graphic was similar in format to the Daily Mirror, but twice the price and more up-market. It found a ready sale for a series of wartime albums by its cartoonist Jack Walker, who also drew for the Bystander. These small soft-backed books carried the simple title The Daily Graphic Special War Cartoons, and were popular; at least seven volumes were published during 1914 and 1915.12 Walker’s cartoons made a pretty


Figure 9.1 The cover of Haselden’s Reflections in War Time, Vol. IX, Daily Mirror, 1916. This volume was published in December 1915, and carried cartoons from 1914 and 1915. The introduction was supposedly written by ‘Miss Joy Flapperton’, one of Haselden’s characters Source: BCA. By permission of Mirrorpix.


lightweight commentary on the war, showing how John Bull would ultimately triumph over the German Kaiser, who was once again presented as a childlike figure, totally controlled by his passions. To contemporaries these cartoons were both amusing and reassuring.

Figure 9.2 G.A. Stevens, An English ABC for Little Willie and Others, the Daily News, 1914 Source: BCA. By permission of Solo Syndication/Associated Newspapers.


Figure 9.3 Jack Walker, ‘The Kaiser’s Dream: The End of the World’, the Daily Graphic Special War Cartoons No. 2, xi. A cartoon referring back to the representation of Napoleon in James Gillray’s well-known 1805 print ‘The Plum Pudding in Danger’ Source: BCA. By permission of Solo Syndication/Associated Newspapers.

One indication of their popularity is shown by a wartime album in the BCA collection. Political cartoons were not only cut and pasted into scrapbooks, but they were also diligently copied by amateurs, and the ability to draw them was treated as a significant accomplishment. This copy, signed ‘W.J. Evans’, was done in October 1914. The original must have been published some weeks earlier, and the style suggests Jack Walker’s cartoons in the Daily Graphic, although, significantly, this version bears the name of the copyist rather than the cartoonist. The representation of the Kaiser as a child, who is scolded by ‘Dame Europa’ and dosed with ‘Belgian Linseed’, could only have been produced in the opening weeks of the war. Despite the success of Haselden and Walker, for most people the British tradition of cartooning was still personified by Punch. It was


Figure 9.4

W.J. Evans, ‘The Cure’, October 1914

Source: By permission of BCA, University of Kent.

naturally accepted that Punch would devote its attention to the war, and in October 1914 the Fine Art Society in London mounted an exhibition entitled ‘Punch and the Prussian Bully’, to show its long history of cartooning the Germans.13 It was obvious that Germany would indeed remain the focus of cartooning for many months, and in November 1914 one Punch advertisement announced that ‘The Famous Punch Almanack This Year is Entirely Devoted to the Enemy’.14 This annual sixpenny almanac opened with a cartoon by Leonard Raven


Hill, the magazine’s 47-year-old ‘Second Cartoonist’, showing General French scolding a childlike Kaiser, and this set the tone for the whole publication. Punch’s Almanack for 1915 also contained an ‘Alphabet of the War’, illustrated by the 45-year-old George Morrow. This was characteristic of British cartooning, and included: ‘C’s a Crown Prince. While the others keep shooting/He very unselfishly sees to the looting.’ This childish theme continued with a group of limericks entitled ‘Mother GooseStep Rhymes’, introduced with a full-page drawing by Fred Pegram, who was 44 when war broke out, and had been contributing to Punch for 20 years. The whole charade ended with an allegorical cartoon by Bernard Partridge, the magazine’s 53-year-old ‘Cartoonist’ – as Punch called its chief artist – in which the infant 1915 heralded the arrival of Victory, bearing the flags of the Allies. The age of enlistment for Kitchener’s New Armies had now been raised to 35, but this still left these Punch cartoonists safely above the limit. However, even if they could not enlist to defend the nation, they were at least able to champion its cause and support its morale. The message of Punch’s Almanack for 1915 was clear: the war would be won not by fierce emotion, but by the calm assertion of Britishness, and in this the nation’s unique sense of humour would play a significant part. Contemporaries firmly believed that the tradition of ridiculing the enemy, not hating him, was quintessentially British. However, opinion was divided on whether other nations could appreciate this sort of humour. Some felt that ridicule was a universal phenomenon, and during the Christmas truce of 1914 one Irish officer gave several copies of the Daily Mirror to German soldiers, and ‘took care to point out Haselden’s cartoons about “the Willies.”’ 15 Another British soldier found the Germans he encountered during the truce rather boastful, so he showed them some of Haselden’s cartoons. ‘The Germans had a good laugh over the antics of the “Willies”,’ he recalled, ‘and a corporal from Brighton, who had an English wife, admitted it was very good.’ 16 In January 1915 it was even claimed that German troops were shouting greetings across no-man’s land, and asking for copies of the Daily Mirror so they could read Haselden’s latest cartoons.17 However, others argued that the enemy simply could not appreciate the British sense of humour, and that this was indeed one reason the country would triumph. ‘Germany’, ‘H. Pearl Adam’ claimed, ‘reads Punch with stupefaction.’18 This may not have been the case with ‘the


Figure 9.5 1915, ix

Fred Pegram, ‘Mother Goose-Step Rhymes’, Punch’s Almanack for

Source: BCA. By permission of the Punch cartoon library.

Willies’, but it was apparently true of another popular wartime cartoon series entitled Schmidt the Spy. A surviving letter from the trenches by


the writer Norman Ellison, dated July 1915, used this series to illustrate the essential difference between the British and the Germans: There is fun to be had even out of this rotten game. You may remember the humorous drawings of Alfred Leete in London Opinion called ‘The Adventures of Schmidt the Spy’. Well, we threw over a copy into the Jerry lines – at this spot they are only ten yards distant – and he got frightfully annoyed and lobbed a few bombs back, without damage luckily.19 ‘Schmidt the Spy’ had been created in 1914 by Alfred Leete, a freelance cartoonist who was 32 when war broke out, and thus at the top end of recruitment age. Leete’s most famous drawing was undoubtedly the London Opinion cover of Lord Kitchener pointing at the reader, which was later reissued as a recruiting poster. However, his ‘Schmidt’ cartoons were sufficiently successful to be republished in book form in 1916 as Schmidt the Spy and His Messages to Berlin.20 The cartoons were a fantasy of frustrated cunning, in which Schmidt is shipped to London in a crate labelled ‘Dutch Cheese’, and afterwards spends his time wandering the capital, misunderstanding everything he sees, and sending wildly misleading reports to his masters in Berlin. Schmidt is naturally mystified by the British attitude to the war. He reports factory chimneys as anti-Zeppelin guns, women fighting over sale bargains as the outbreak of revolution, and the sound of a bagpipe band as ‘the squeals of the recruits as they are driven to drill’. The message is that Londoners are fundamentally unshaken by the war, but that the Germans cannot appreciate this, as they see themselves as so frightening that Britain must be on the edge of collapse. The ‘Schmidt’ series now looks remarkably dull, but contemporaries obviously enjoyed this comic irony, and found something reassuring in Leete’s assertion of Britishness. The book was released in two separate versions, and the cartoon series was so successful that in 1916 it was made into a film. Leete was not the only cartoonist to present the Germans and their Kaiser as pompous and self-deluded, constantly failing to understand British stoicism, and keeping up their morale with lies. This was the idea behind Keep Smiling!, another Christmas cartoon book published in November 1914. Subtitled ‘More News by Liarless for German Homes’, it was written by Walter Emanuel, a regular contributor to Punch, and illustrated by John Hassall, a well-established commercial artist. Both were above the age of enlistment – Emanuel was 44 and


Figure 9.6

Alfred Leete, ‘Schmidt the Spy and His Messages to Berlin’, 1916

Source: BCA.

Hassall 46 when war broke out – and their book was very similar to Leete’s in depicting the Germans as wholly unable to understand the British refusal to change their habits just because of the war. Hassall’s cartoons depict the lies the Germans are forced to tell themselves about men of military age ‘flocking … to doctors who make a speciality of breaking a leg’, of people hiding in the London Under-


ground for fear of Zeppelins, and of the lions in London zoo being trained to attack ‘dummies of German soldiers filled with sausages’. The message is that, whatever the danger, British stoicism will ultimately prevail over the more ‘romantic’ Germans. Hassall’s final cartoon was

Figure 9.7 Walter Emanuel and John Hassall, ‘At the Bone-breaker’s’, Keep Smiling! More News by Liarless for German Homes, p.11 Source: BCA.


entitled ‘The Hideous Doubt’, and depicted a beer-drinking German civilian reading the war news, whose domestic peace has been brutally shattered by a British shell bursting above him. ‘Gott in Himmel! Vot vas dat?’ he declares as his home is bombarded, ‘Is it, den, perhaps not all true?’ Quite why German civilians were being shelled by the British is not clear. However badly the war might be going for the Allies, it seemed difficult for British cartoonists to shake off the idea that the Germans were essentially bungling and harmless. In 1915 a German-English phrasebook, apparently taken from a German prisoner of war, was turned into a cartoon book, and published in at least two different editions by the Daily Chronicle and its sister paper the Echo & Evening Chronicle. The Huns’ Handbook – For the Invasion of England was published at threepence, whilst the cheaper version, entitled The Invasion of England, was priced at a penny.21 They were both illustrated with cartoons by Charles Grave, a freelance who had been contributing to Punch for a couple of years. He was younger than most established cartoonists, being 28 in 1914, but he did not join the army until later in the war. By the time that Grave drew these cartoons, the British public had been preoccupied with German invasion for 10 years. Sections of the text were highlighted, to emphasise sinister phrases such as ‘Any resistance will be severely punished’, ‘The village will be razed’, and ‘The mayor will certainly be shot’. But far from offering a picture of the devastation brought by an invading German army, Grave’s cartoons were once again a comic portrayal of a bumbling enemy, watched by bemused British civilians still going about their normal lives. The conclusion to be drawn from these images was apparently that the Germans were so humourless and lacking in irony, that even shortterm exposure to British culture would fatally undermine their resolve, before British humour delivered the coup de grace. It is difficult in retrospect to bridge the enormous gulf between the actual conditions under which the war was being fought, and these cartoon representations of it. This is particularly true of the work of William Heath Robinson, who was 44 when the war broke out. A wellknown comic and advertising artist, he had been producing full-page comic drawings for the Sketch since 1906. Realising the change in demand from publishers, Heath Robinson quickly turned to comic military inventions, and in 1915 Duckworth published an album of his war cartoons from the Sketch and Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, under the ironic title Some Frightful War Pictures. This was followed in


Figure 9.8 Illustration by Charles Grave for The Invasion of England: Translation of the Official Huns’ Handbook, p.17 Source: BCA. By permission of Solo Syndication/Associated Newspapers.

1916 by a second collection, called Hunlikely! As Heath Robinson later recalled, lampooning the supposedly efficient German army ‘gave me one of the best opportunities I ever enjoyed.’22


Heath Robinson’s cartoons were hailed as ‘typical of the irresponsible sense of fun which English People seem able to retain even in wartime’, but to modern eyes the word ‘irresponsible’ carries a heavier weight of meaning.23 Cartoons showing ‘Count Zeppelin’s Evening Classes for Bomb-droppers’, ‘The Screw-stopperer for Plugging the Muzzles of the Enemy’s Rifles’, or ‘Germans training Wasps to sting Highlanders in Flanders’, seem far removed from the actual experiences of modern warfare. Their sheer absurdity, however, made them as popular with soldiers as civilians. Heath Robinson recalled getting ‘an immense correspondence from all ranks’ – in one case from ‘Observation Post Heath Robinson’ in the frontline – and the idea of Germans training wasps in fact came to him in a letter from a Lieutenant-Colonel.24 In November 1916 another serving officer wrote to tell him that: Your ‘Some Frightful War Pictures’ has just reached our mess within the last few days & you can have no idea how much your illustrations are appreciated out here. All members of this mess have been ‘at it’ since the very beginning so your sketches in the various magazines etc. have always been a source of great amusement to us … Thank you … and trusting to hear, at an early date, that your second volume of ‘Frightful’ is in the hands of the printers.25 There is no doubt that the cartoons of Haselden, Heath Robinson, and Punch remained popular throughout the war. But from 1916 onwards it became increasingly apparent that many aspects of the conflict could only be understood by those actually involved in the fighting, and this demanded a new approach. Most established cartoonists were over military age, but in Bruce Bairnsfather the public discovered a young cartoonist who, whilst still within the British tradition, appeared to represent the feelings of the fighting soldier. Bairnsfather was 27 when war broke out; he was not a professional cartoonist, and had in fact served in the army before resigning in 1907 to study art under John Hassall. Bairnsfather returned to his regiment on the outbreak of war, and in September 1914 received a commission. Sent to France soon afterwards, his first attempt at a wartime cartoon – ‘Where did that one go to?’ – was published in The Bystander for January 1915, while Bairnsfather was in hospital with shell shock. The magazine added the explanation: A Sketch From the Front A reproduction of a sketch sent home to us from the Front by an officer of the 1st Royal Warwicks. ‘I have drawn it’, he writes, ‘as


well as I can under somewhat difficult circumstances, and, I may say, from first hand impressions.’26 After printing a second drawing in April 1915, The Bystander received so many letters that it commissioned Bairnsfather to draw a weekly cartoon. These were so popular that in February 1916 The Bystander republished 41 of his drawings of soldiers under the title Fragments from France. The volume rapidly sold out, was reprinted, and repeatedly sold out, until more than 250,000 copies had been issued. By the time that More Fragments from France was published later in the year, it was possible to buy Bairnsfather’s cartoons as postcards, or as coloured reproductions, or even in a ‘De Luxe Edition’ that was ‘suitable for framing’.27 The Bystander continued to issue volumes of Fragments from France throughout the war, until Bairnsfather’s work was better known from these reprints than from the original magazine. Bairnsfather was self-conscious about the word ‘cartoonist’, and preferred to call his work ‘pictures’ or ‘drawings’.28 But his work was clearly in the British cartoon tradition. As the introduction to More Fragments from France explained, Bairnsfather used cartoons to make fun of the war, however hard it might be for Britain’s ‘scowling enemies’ to understand his approach.29 His depictions of ragged and world-weary frontline soldiers, characterised as Alf, Bert, and Old Bill, did nothing to demonise the Germans. ‘‘Ave a squint through these ‘ere, Bill’, says a soldier with binoculars in one 1916 cartoon, ‘you can see one of the ——’s eatin’ a sausage as clear as anythin’. Bairnsfather’s cartoons did not even criticise the war, treating it instead as almost a natural phenomenon, like bad weather, that had to be endured with stoicism, as it might conceivably go on forever. The enormous popularity of Bairnsfather’s work is confirmed by another set of amateur copies at the BCA made by Frank Hornby, who served in the Royal Navy during the war, and spent much of his spare time redrawing cartoons from newspapers and magazines. 30 Hornby copied many of Bairnsfather’s cartoons, probably from Fragments from France, faithfully reproducing every detail of the original drawing, including the caption. It was clearly a homage to someone whose work he admired; the only detail he omitted was Bairnsfather’s signature, signing all the copies in his own name. The skill involved in copying was considered sufficient to justify this reattribution. Not everyone approved of Bairnsfather’s depictions of the common soldier. In December 1916 Captain Steuart Wilson, who had volunteered for the army at the start of the war, reviewed Bairnsfather’s


cartoons for the Times Literary Supplement, and was very critical. Wilson had been wounded in France; now working for the War Office, to him Fragments From France seemed less a morale-booster than a threat to military efficiency. Wilson argued that the series had become so universally known that British soldiers were modelling themselves on its characters. ‘Bairnsfather’s Alf and Bert are disgusting,’ he wrote, ‘because they are so possible’: Nothing so quickly lowers moral as slovenliness, and nothing is more difficult to check than the gradual degeneration due to trench life: and yet here we have an Army officer who invariably depicts his men … as the very type which the Army is anxious to suppress. Can it be wondered at that young soldiers try to look like a ‘Bairnsfather type’?31 Wilson felt that Bairnsfather’s work ‘standardizes – almost idealizes – a degraded type of face’, but luckily his opinions were not shared throughout the War Office.32 The propaganda value of popular culture had already been realised by MI7(b), the branch of Military Intelligence handling press propaganda, and in May 1916 it had begun to recruit writers and artists from within the services. In August 1916 a circular went round the officers’ messes in Home Commands, inviting those with literary experience to apply for propaganda work.33 Bairnsfather, who had been sent home sick and put in the Special Reserve, was among the first to respond to this call, and later that month he was interviewed by Lord Onslow of MI7(b).34 During the interview Bairnsfather revealed that his fans were sending him ‘one hundred letters and more a week from all parts of the world’.35 Onslow was obviously very impressed by this, and MI7(b) quickly recruited Bairnsfather as an ‘Officer Cartoonist’, dispatching him to France to draw cartoons of the French troops.36 He was afterwards sent to the Italian Front, and for the remainder of the war did similar official work for MI7(b), including a tour drawing American troops in France early in 1918. MI7(b) certainly worked him hard, and, ‘when anything specific was required’, lent him to other departments, such as the Ministry of Information, created in February 1918. In September 1918 Bairnsfather set sail for Australia, on another official mission, but illness forced him to abandon the trip once he reached America.37 A significant part of Bairnsfather’s popularity came from the knowledge that he was, or had been, a serving soldier who had experienced


Figure 9.9 Bairnsfather’s ‘Coiffure in the Trenches’, from Fragments from France, 1916. This was one of the cartoons issued in a coloured version in 1916, for one shilling Source: BCA. By permission of Tonie and Valmai Holt Bairnsfather’s biographers.


war at first hand. In 1917 the introduction to Still More Bystander Fragments from France declared enthusiastically that ‘Captain Bairnsfather’s pictures are “the real thing”.’38 Fragments from France eventually ran to eight volumes, the final one being published after the Armistice. Yet whilst Bairnsfather’s work grew in popularity, a new and quite different type of cartoon representation of the war began to appear in Britain. This owed as much to book illustration, and to continental European styles of cartooning, as to the British tradition of comic irony. The new style of representation was particularly associated with the Dutch cartoonist Louis Raemaekers. The son of a provincial newspaper editor, Raemaekers was 45 when war broke out. His background was largely as a landscape and portrait painter, but in 1912 he had begun contributing political cartoons to the Dutch paper De Telegraaf, and on the outbreak of war he began producing a series of fiercely anti-German cartoons. It was 18 months before Raemaekers’ work had any impact in Britain, but that came eventually through publicity from Lord Northcliffe’s paper, The Times. This was clearly a carefully coordinated campaign, for although Raemaekers was virtually unknown when he first visited London in November 1915, The Times nevertheless gave him its full backing, and hailed him as ‘the great cartoonist of the war’.39 When an exhibition of 150 of Raemaekers’ cartoons opened at the Fine Art Society’s gallery in London the following month, the public seemed sated with war drawings, but The Times nevertheless continued its enthusiastic coverage, and the exhibition became crowded with visitors.40 For a British audience, the most striking aspect of Raemaekers’ cartoons was the fact that they offered no refuge in humour. In December 1915 the art critic of The Times tried to come to terms with this discrepancy, noting that Raemaekers’ cartoons nevertheless ‘have a point like a good joke’, that they ‘would make you laugh at the mere aptness of them, if it were not for their subject-matter.’ His article even carried the headline ‘Comedy Dealing With Tragedy’, but this attempt to pretend that Raemaekers treated the Germans ‘comically’ foundered on the chosen examples. It was after all hard to link the British comic tradition with a cartoon entitled ‘Seduction’, in which a German soldier with a gun leered at a Belgian woman on her knees, gagged and chained to a post.41 Raemaekers himself realised that there was considerable distance between himself and the British comic tradition. In December 1915 he spoke at a lunch held in his honour by London journalists, including


Figure 9.10 Raemaekers, ‘Seduction’ – First exhibited in London in December 1915, and reprinted in March 1916 in Part 3 of ‘The Land and Water’ Edition of Raemaekers’ Cartoons, p.79 Source: BCA.

Haselden and Hassall. Raemaekers admitted that he had previously been puzzled that, despite German military successes, ‘England kept on smiling’: ‘This I did not understand, and I was very angry with you (hear, hear, and laughter) – yes, very. (Renewed laughter.) I did not


believe you were taking the war seriously enough.’42 Raemaekers claimed to have gained a better understanding of the British sense of humour since visiting London, but it is clear that Northcliffe and others regarded his very distance from the British tradition as vital to rousing the nation to greater efforts. Raemaekers agreed to work for the British government, which understood the power of his cartoons among neutral nations.43 He had powerful support, and on 2 December 1915 lunched with the Director of Naval Intelligence, the private secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Foreign Secretary’s private secretary, and the Assistant Commissioner in charge of the Special Branch.44 However, the next stage of the domestic campaign was handled by James Murray Allison, advertisement manager of The Times. Murray Allison owned a controlling interest in the periodical Land and Water, and now acquired the rights to Raemaekers’ cartoons, publishing them from January 1916 onwards. In the following month Land and Water began reprinting them as a part of 26 fortnightly instalments, declaring them ‘a new and vital moral factor affecting the issues of the war.’45 In his introduction to the first instalment, Francis Stopford, the editor of Land and Water, explained the lack of ironic distance in Raemaekers’ cartoons by the fact that his country was much closer than Britain to the fighting. ‘Our caricaturists only see the outside of things’, he noted: ‘We still keep the idea that certain things “are not done”.’46 However, it seems there were still some people who could not appreciate the stark images of looting, raping, and killing that characterised Raemaekers’ work. When the second instalment of The ‘Land and Water’ Edition appeared in March 1916, it included a flyer in which Stopford insisted that the cruelty of Raemaekers’ cartoons arose from ‘the abominable methods of German warfare’: ‘They, who object to the horror of these pictures, must not overlook that they are not one-thousandth part as horrible as the events which they record.’47 This disclaimer did not entirely explain the bestial and erotic elements in Raemaekers’ work, in which the Allied nations often appeared as naked or scantily-dressed young women, bound, dominated, raped, and murdered by apes or ape-like Germans. In fact Raemaekers’ cartoons were part of what might be called the pornography of war. The existence of such pornography was not acknowledged by contemporaries, but it is clear in retrospect that it was only permissible for British newspapers and magazines to include drawings of naked bodies if they were being assaulted by the enemy. Violent attacks on naked flesh were a strong and characteristic element of his work, which set it apart from


Figure 9.11 Raemaekers, ‘Germany and the Neutrals’ – Reprinted in September 1916 in Part 15 of ‘The Land and Water’ Edition of Raemaekers’ Cartoons, p.45 Source: BCA.

most other popular illustrators, though it was also present in the work of Edmund Sullivan, whose first wartime book coincided with the first appearance of Raemaekers’ work in Britain. Sullivan was an established book illustrator, who was 45 when the war broke out.48 He had worked on the staff of the Graphic, the Daily Graphic, and the Pall Mall Budget, and in November 1915 a series of his beautifully-drawn but grotesque images was published as a Christmas


book, entitled The Kaiser’s Garland. The Germans frequently appeared in Sullivan’s cartoons as beasts, particularly hogs, goats, and apes, but

Figure 9.12 Edmund Sullivan, The Kaiser’s Garland – Angel on the Chopping-Block Source: BCA.


one of his most striking recurring images was of the naked child-angel. To Sullivan this presumably represented peace and innocence, but in his cartoons this childlike figure was constantly violated. He showed it ripped by the teeth of a giant crocodile, crucified, pierced with a bayonet, and, in one gruesome image, laid alive on the chopping block of a giant ape. These cartoons were presumably acceptable because they were dressed in allegory, and that allegory could be blamed on a demonised enemy. Yet it was a type of imagery that was otherwise taboo. The bestial violence in the work of Raemaekers and Sullivan had echoes in the cartoons of Will Dyson, a contributor to the left-wing Daily Herald. The Australian-born Dyson was 34 when war broke out, and had been working for the Herald since 1912. Like many socialists, Dyson found the war aroused a patriotism in him that conflicted with his internationalism, and his Herald cartoons began to show anti-German as well as anti-capitalist sentiments. The new style found support, and in January 1915 Stanley Paul published a selection as Kultur Cartoons, coinciding with an exhibition of Dyson’s ‘War Satires’ at the Leicester Galleries in London.49 In his introduction to Kultur Cartoons, H.G. Wells noted the bestial elements in Dyson’s attack on Germany: His devil is a gross beast, with small brain-case and huge belly and loins – a disgusting beast of a devil … and as the work of this clumsy devil to whom Europe has given herself over, look at his caricature of apes in an aeroplane dropping bombs, or of Kultur being told to fetch the warrior’s boots.50 The cartoon ‘Wonders of Science!’ indeed parodied military technology by showing it in the hands of apes, as they bombed an undefended city from the air, and it created a lasting impression. When Lord Northcliffe saw the original cartoon in the Herald, he was so impressed that he reprinted it across the back page of his Daily Mail, on 1 January 1915, claiming that it had ‘a larger space than any cartoon has ever before been given in a British newspaper.’51 Kultur Cartoons was a selective collection, which played down Dyson’s socialism and emphasised his patriotism, in order to reach a wider audience. Not surprisingly the Herald itself was unenthusiastic, commenting of ‘Wonders of Science!’ in particular that ‘it is not the Germans alone who drop bombs’.52 However, in September 1915 the Herald published an equally selective collection of Dyson’s work, entitled ‘Conscript ‘Em!’ As the cover announced, it was ‘A collection of


Figure 9.13

Will Dyson, ‘Wonders of Science!’ Kultur Cartoons

Source: BCA. By permission of Mirrorpix.

Will Dyson’s striking cartoons sent forth by “The Herald” to assist in combating the vicious conscriptionist campaign.’53 The cartoons were a sustained attack on the bellicose arguments used by those, such as Northcliffe, who supported compulsory military service. The message was that British and German militarism were fundamentally indistin-


guishable – one cartoon, entitled ‘Leaders of the People’, showing a newspaper proprietor ordering his staff to ‘castigate all Prussian Methods, and – er – prove that we shall be ruined if we don’t imitate ‘em!’ However, Dyson felt equally misrepresented by this selection, and soon afterwards parted company with the Herald.54 Despite Sullivan and Dyson, it was Raemaekers who came to personify the new style of visceral, emotive cartooning. The fortnightly issues of Raemaekers’ cartoons continued to be issued at a shilling each, but cheaper editions were also published, and Northcliffe’s Daily Mail ran them very prominently, having acquired the British newspaper rights. Murray Allison later surveyed the huge range of different forms in which these images were being circulated. ‘Raemaekers is cartoonist to half a hundred newspapers,’ he noted, ‘and literally thousands of different publications have reproduced his pictures’: In book form his work exists already in a dozen editions, from the sumptuous edition-de-luxe at ten guineas to the popular pamphlet at 2d. Post-card editions of the cartoons run into many millions; his cartoons have been filmed, exist as lantern-slides, and have been reproduced on the stage in the form of tableaux.55 He might have mentioned that the cigarette company Carreras had also reprinted 140 of Raemaekers’ cartoons as cigarette cards, for inclusion with their ‘Black Cat’ brand, which was very popular in the army. In 1916 the company had advertised the ‘enormous cost’ of clearing the rights to these images, but Murray Allison may have thought this venture a little too commercial to include in his list.56 Raemaekers’ cartoons were thus very widely seen in different contexts in Britain. They do seem to have struck a chord with the public, but unlike Bairnsfather he was never imitated by cartoonists, or copied by amateurs, as though his tradition of cartooning, like this style of warfare, was essentially un-British. The British cartoon-book boom was largely confined to the first half of the war. After 1916 paper shortages made it difficult to publish books in the same numbers, but by then the pattern had already been established. Against a background of traditional British cartooning, represented by Punch and by Haselden’s cartoons from the Daily Mirror, there developed two new styles peculiar to the war, represented by Bairnsfather and Raemaekers. Their cartoons undermined the traditional ironic distance of British cartooning, in the case of Bairnsfather because they were drawn by a participant in the fighting, and in the


Figure 9.14

‘Black Cat’ advertisement, The Times, 20 December 1916

Source: BCA. By permission of British American Tobacco.


case of Raemaekers because of his intense emotional involvement with the subject. These new styles, pioneered by a young outsider and a foreigner, enabled British cartooning to respond to the war, without fundamentally affecting the mainstream cartoonists. Contemporaries continued to regard cartooning as important to the British experience of the war. In January 1919 the new Imperial War Museum announced that it would be collecting ‘cartoons from both sides of the Atlantic’ as part of its commemoration of the conflict, and a number of publishers issue their own commemorative anthologies.57 In May 1919 the editor of the London Opinion, Lincoln Springfield, issued One Hundred War Cartoons, featuring the work of the magazine’s cartoonists Bert Thomas and Wilton Williams.58 In July 1919 Bruce Bairnsfather began editing a new magazine called Fragments, aimed at ex-servicemen, and Punch produced Mr. Punch’s History of the Great War.59 Within a year the Punch volume had run to ten impressions, demonstrating the continuing strength of its traditional style. By contrast the work of Raemaekers declined in popularity with the coming of peace. In June 1919 Murray Allison issued yet another Raemaekers book, entitled Raemaekers’s Cartoon History of the War. Subtitled ‘Vol.1 – The First Twelve Months’, it was to have been the first of a series, but the public appetite was sated, and it was also the last. Notes 1 This chapter draws upon the resources of the British Cartoon Archive (BCA), established in 1973 as the national collection of political and social cartoons. It archives more than 110,000 original cartoons and strips, representing the work of more than 350 British cartoonists, plus a library and a cuttings collection of 85,000 items. Some 113,000 cartoons (including over 2,000 from 1914–18) from the BCA collection have been digitised and catalogued, and are freely available online at [htpp://www.kent.ac.uk/cartoons]. 2 ‘H. Pearl Adam’ (ed.) International Cartoons of the War (London: Chatto and Windus, 1916), cartoon No.V. 3 The Times, 30 December 1915, p.6. 4 W.K. Haselden, The Sad Adventures of Big and Little Willie (London: Chatto and Windus, 1915), iii. 5 BCA has almost 6,700 original Haselden cartoons, 5,700 of which are in the online catalogue. These include more than 1,000 of his wartime cartoons. 6 Denis Gifford, Stap Me: The British Newspaper Strip (Aylesbury: Shire Publications, 1971), pp.2–3. 7 ‘This morning’s Gossip’, Daily Mirror, 23 November 1914, p.12. 8 Haselden, Sad Adventures, iii. 9 ‘Royal Visit to the “Willies”’, Daily Mirror, 6 February 1915, p.2. 10 ‘H. Pearl Adam’, International Cartoons, x. 11 Ibid., x–xi.

176 Publishing in the First World War 12 Jack Walker ‘The Daily Graphic’ Special War Cartoons No.1–No.7 (London: Daily Graphic, 1914–15). 13 ‘“Punch” and the Prussians’, The Times, 3 October 1914, p.11. 14 Walter Emanuel and John Hassall, Keep Smiling! More News by Liarless for German Homes (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1914), ii. 15 ‘This Morning’s Gossip’, Daily Mirror, 5 January 1915, p.12. 16 Ibid., 25 January 1915, p.12. 17 Ibid., 28 January 1915, p.10; Haselden, Sad Adventures, iii. 18 ‘H. Pearl Adam’, International Cartoons, xi. 19 Letter from Ypres, 3 July 1915 in David R. Lewis (ed.) Remembrances of Hell: The First World War Diary of Naturalist, Writer and Broadcaster Norman F. Ellison (Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1997), p.62. 20 Alfred Leete, Schmidt the Spy and His Messages to Berlin (London: Duckworth & Co., 1916). 21 Charles Grave (illustrator), The Huns’ Handbook for the Invasion of England (London: Echo & Evening Chronicle, 1915) and The Invasion of England (London: Daily Chronicle, 1915). 22 W. Heath Robinson, My Line of Life (London: Blackie & Son, 1938), p.146. 23 ‘H. Pearl Adam’, International Cartoons, cartoon No.VII. 24 Robinson, My Line of Life, pp.147–8. 25 Geoffrey Beare, ‘Heath Robinson: The Illustrator’, in The Inventive Comic Genius of Our Age: W. Heath Robinson 1872–1944 (London: Chris Beetles Ltd, 1987), p.23. 26 Tonie and Valmai Holt, In Search of the Better ‘Ole: The Life, the Works and the Collectibles of Bruce Bairnsfather (Horndean: Milestone Publications, 1985), p.39. 27 Bruce Bairnsfather, More Fragments from France (London: The Bystander, 1916), p.42. 28 Holt, In Search of the Better ‘Ole, p.40. 29 Bairnsfather, More Fragments, p.4. 30 BCA, Frank Hornby Collection, letter from F.T. Hornby, 22 June 2000. 31 James Steuart Wilson, ‘The Soldier Who Made the Empire Laugh’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 December 1916, p.621. 32 Ibid., p.621. 33 The National Archives, London [TNA], INF 4/1B, ‘History of MI7(b) (March 1916–December 1918)’ (1920), pp.1–2. 34 TNA, WO 339/21237, memorandum by Lord Onslow, MI7(b), 22 August 1916. 35 Ibid., and Onslow to Miles Lampson, FO, 25 August 1916. MI7(b) even cooked up a scheme for Bairnsfather to include propagandist messages in his replies to fans, but there is no evidence that this was ever carried out. 36 Holt, In Search of the Better ‘Ole, pp.53–4. 37 TNA, INF 4/1B, ‘History of MI7(b) (March 1916–December 1918)’ (1920), p.5; Holt, In Search of the Better ‘Ole, pp.46–8, 64–6, 71–4. 38 Bruce Bairnsfather, Still More Bystander Fragments from France (London: The Bystander, 1917), p.4. 39 ‘The Cartoonist Of The War. A Dutchman’s Genius’, The Times, 18 November 1915, p.11.

A New and Vital Moral Factor 177 40 ‘Mr. Raemaekers’s War Cartoons. Comedy Dealing With Tragedy’, The Times, 2 December 1915, p.11; J. Murray Allison, Raemaekers’ Cartoon History of the War (London: John Lane, 1919), viii. 41 ‘Mr. Raemaekers’s War Cartoons. Comedy Dealing With Tragedy’, The Times, 2 December 1915, p.11. 42 ‘The Cheerful Smile/Famous Cartoonist on the British Way’, The Times, 9 December 1915, p.5. 43 ‘A Great Friend of the Allies’, The Times, 8 April 1919, p.4. 44 Basil Thomson, The Scene Changes (London: Collins, 1939), pp.256–7. 45 ‘Land & Water’, advert in The Times, 4 February 1916, p.4. 46 Francis Stopford, ‘Introduction’ to Part 1 of The ‘Land and Water’ Edition of Raemaekers’ Cartoons (London: Land and Water, 1916), iv. 47 BCA, flyer headed ‘Portfolio II. Raemaekers’ Cartoons/Editorial Note’, March 1916. 48 ‘Obituaries: Mr E.J. Sullivan’, The Times, 18 April 1933, p.12. 49 Will Dyson, Kultur Cartoons (London: Stanley Paul, 1915). 50 Ibid., iii–iv. 51 Ross McMullin, Will Dyson: Cartoonist, etcher and Australia’s finest war artist (London: Angus & Robertson, 1984), p.113. 52 Ibid., p.115. 53 Will Dyson, ‘Conscript ’Em!’ (London: The Herald, 1915). 54 McMullin, p.124. 55 Allison, xi. 56 ‘Black Cat’ cigarette advertisement, The Times, 20 October 1916, p.12. 57 ‘Mementoes of the War’, The Times, 11 January 1919, p.11. 58 Bert Thomas and Wilton Williams, One Hundred War Cartoons from London Opinion (London: London Opinion, 1919). 59 Mr Punch’s History of the Great War (London: Cassell and Company, 1919).


Part IV Enlisted at Home


10 Translating Propaganda: John Buchan’s Writing During the First World War Kate Macdonald

John Buchan (1875–1940) is now best known as a novelist, particularly for inventing the modern thriller. He wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), his eighth novel, at the outbreak of the First World War, when he was a publisher and literary advisor to the Edinburgh firm Thomas Nelson and Sons. His career had also encompassed journalism (contributor to and deputy editor of The Spectator and editor of The Scottish Review), the civil service (working for Lord Milner in South Africa after the Boer War), and the law (he had practised briefly as a barrister).1 The war directed Buchan away from commercial publishing towards government censorship and propaganda. After a year in the Intelligence Corps under General Sir Douglas Haig he moved to the Foreign Office, and ended the war as Director of Information for the Ministry of Information, and a Lieutenant Colonel. Buchan’s reputation as an authority on the history of the war, high at the time, is now routinely shredded. This chapter re-evaluates his wartime writing chronologically in the belief that its importance has been underestimated. Recently discovered magazine articles dating from the early months of the war, and written in parallel with the Nelson’s History of the War, show the process of change in Buchan’s position as a civilian commentator on the war and anticipate his later decision to accept military authority. The translations of Buchan’s war histories illustrate questions of control and targeting, while the unique Flemish translation of parts of the Nelson’s History can be seen as a local response to Buchan’s writing about a European war.

Writing about war in The War When war broke out in August 1914, Nelson’s immediate concern was how to secure the business. The managers expected an immediate drop 181


in sales, and their correspondence in the first days of the war discussed what would sell and how to sell it in these new circumstances. Although they published several other wartime serials, Nelson’s biggest success was the Nelson’s History of the War (1914–19) in 24 volumes issued at regular intervals. Buchan wrote the Nelson’s History because none of the big names Nelson wanted were available. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was too busy.2 Hilaire Belloc came close to accepting, but claimed that his contract to write articles for Land and Water prevented him from writing war history for another publisher.3 However, by October 1914 not one but two Nelson’s histories were being produced: the lavish A General Sketch of the European War (1915, 1916) by Belloc, and the cheaper Nelson’s History by Buchan himself. Buchan has been described as an amateur historian ‘who … tried to write general histories before an official model was available; when documentary sources were scarce and bureaucratic obstruction pronounced; and when patriotic Victorian convictions proved a severe handicap to a realistic depiction of the war’.4 Whatever later scholars might see as his shortcomings as a historian, though, at the time his authority was unquestioned. He did all the proofreading and caption checking himself and kept a sharp eye on marketing and sales, lobbying for each volume to be issued at a shilling each.5 In fact he had been thinking along wartime lines for some time. In July 1914 he had been reading manuscripts of war novels, and had been considering translations of ‘foreign war books’.6 On 4 August 1914 he wrote to George Brown, the Nelson’s director in Edinburgh, predicting ‘a bad slump in the business. I earnestly hope it will be possible to keep going at half power so as not to throw too many of our people out of work … will it not be possible to do something to fill the gap? Special War publications, for example, or a concentration upon American and South American business.’7 Two days later he wrote to George Brown again: I think your idea of a weekly quite excellent. It is more or less what I have been working on myself. My notion is a sort of budget of war news, articles and illustrations, sold at 3d, a miscellany on the lines of the French Lectures pour tous. If you like I will edit it. It might succeed and be the basis for future magazine work. In any case I think it would pay its way and help to keep our staff going.8 Brown replied: If it seems feasible, we may bring out a 2d Weekly of pictures and articles. If it goes well, other War publications might follow … In

Translating Propaganda 183

addition to the schemes for War Publications outlined above, we might go on (if the Picture Weekly succeeds) to a War Magazine Monthly, at 7d. I think it would be very easy to fill it up with Pictures and Articles on aspects of the present War, and general naval and military topics. I am very much afraid, however, that we shall not be able to bring off any of these schemes when we come to consider the difficulties we would have in dealing with newsagents, in getting raw material, in finding pictures, and in delivering publications.9 Despite the anticipated difficulties the matter was settled, and a week later Brown reported that the dummy for the new magazine was being improved.10 On 22 August the first issue of The War came out. It ran for 29 weeks, ceasing publication on 6 March 1915. George Brown’s predictions had been correct. His complaints about newsagents failing to stock it increased in the early part of 1915; it was up against significant competition. At least eight other war magazines were fighting for the public’s money,11 and The War was struggling from early on. No daily newspaper would take it on as a supplement, a sure sign of an unsaleable commodity, and as early as 3 January 1915 George Brown wanted to stop publication. The reason given to the public for The War’s discontinuation in March was that it had served its purpose of keeping the printing presses in work,12 but it can also be assumed that if The War had made money, Nelson’s would have published it until the war ended. While negotiations over a writer for the History were dragging on, Buchan was writing The War’s two-page leader each week. In all, he wrote 26 two- or three-page articles for The War under his own name. Nearly 40 additional unsigned articles can be attributed to him from their style and content, or from documentary evidence in the Nelson’s archives. For the first three months of war this work was carried out from his sickbed, where he was recovering from illness.13 None of these articles have since been collected, or, indeed, credited to Buchan, because The War itself disappeared into oblivion as soon as it disappeared from newsagents’ shelves. The only documentary evidence for its existence, apart from forgotten copies in some library archives, is in the Nelson’s correspondence. These letters have been confused until now with correspondence about the Nelson’s History, thus obscuring the existence of an important episode of Buchan’s wartime writing, and the last sustained sequence of articles for periodical publication that he would write. The letters are fragments of what must have been a continual discussion between Buchan and Brown for seven months


over the simultaneous production of The War and the History of the War. What remains is a rich mix of sales figures, advertising ideas, proofreading queries, cross-checking and distribution grumbles. Five or six letters a day were dictated, typed and posted from the London and Edinburgh offices and Buchan’s home, often crossing each other, often with pencilled additions as the situation changed, or a telegram arrived. Buchan’s War articles were quite different to his chapters for the Nelson’s History. The articles were weekly reports on the war, written as soon as information became available. Their tone is urgent, with a sense of immediacy. The History was a more measured account with a long-term view, published several months, rather than days, after events. On The War, Buchan was in charge of the broad historical sweep, and was the authority on political and military history. Other writers contributed short pieces, on war cartoons and the story of the ‘Marseillaise’, for example, and Captain Atteridge drew maps and technical diagrams. The magazine’s quality diminished over time, in the sense that, apart from Buchan’s obliviously highbrow pieces on current war events, the other writers were reduced to scraping together articles on ‘The life of the French soldier’ (21 November 1914) and ‘Our future admirals’ (28 November 1914). After midDecember Buchan reduced his weekly articles from a minimum of three to a maximum of two. By January 1915 the magazine was considerably thinner, and had begun to print fiction to keep the readers’ interest. The increasing entreaties for subscriptions gave a sense of desperation to its struggle for survival. In his first article on 22 August 1914 Buchan had railed, moderately, against the restrictions in news from the fronts. His frustration at the blockages in information flow was palpable. We are beginning to realize the meaning of ‘the fog of war’. Three weeks ago our Fleet disappeared, and not a man of us knows its position today. The doings of our Expeditionary Force have been wrapped in a mystery as deep … The official Press Bureau dribbles out information in discreet doses, and a foreign embassy occasionally supplements it … now the day of the war correspondent is over. No more spirited dashes for first news, no more brilliant accounts of charges and counterstrokes; he must languish in a hotel miles from the firing line, and accept thankfully the gossip of the cafes and the rare official announcements. We shall be told the results of fighting when our masters think it desirable.14


This outrage at government interference is also Buchan the romantic, mourning the loss of the stuff of journalistic legends. On 5 September he was again openly critical: The French offensive in the south has failed and, and the German offensive in the north has so far succeeded … It is foolish to criticize half-finished work, and it is possible that the desperate fighting on the left wing may be part of General Joffre’s plan of campaign. But it looks as if the French Generalissimo had miscalculated the enemy’s line of attack … it seems pretty clear that we underestimated the strength of the attack through Belgium. It would have been better, perhaps, never to have entered that country at all.15 In late September, an anonymous article in The War, ‘The suppression of war news’, argued that censorship was necessary because the excellence of British newspapers made them too efficient in inadvertently transmitting news to the enemy. Internal evidence, from the writing style and a characteristic use of historical parallels, strongly suggests that Buchan was the author. In the 24 October issue, in ‘The wheel to the sea’ Buchan explicitly distanced himself from ‘armchair’ critics of the war’s progress. ‘It would be a thousand pities if at this hour of national crisis the spirit of uninformed amateur criticism should get abroad’.16 Here Buchan was quashing questions from the uninformed and the uninvolved. This infers that he saw himself as a non-amateur, and, only eight weeks after publicly disparaging the Allied efforts, was beginning to align himself more closely with the government’s handling of the war. The timing may also be significant. On 6 August 1914 the Press Bureau had been formed, establishing government control over the content of wartime publishing. Press censorship was voluntary, but the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) gave a basis for editorial decisions. Regulation 18 made it an offence to publish material that might ‘be directly or indirectly useful to the enemy’, and Regulation 27 prohibited published writing ‘likely to cause disaffection’ or ‘likely to prejudice recruiting’.17 DORA was passed on 8 August, amended on 28 August, consolidated on 27 November and further extended the government’s censorship powers on 16 March 1915. Taking this into account, it seems surprising that Buchan published anything critical of the government at all. But in February 1915 he again put his head over the parapet in The War. ‘There seems to be a foolish tendency abroad to suspect the Admiralty of withholding


unpleasant news, because of the concealment of the loss of a battleship off the Irish coast last October.’ But he was mollifying. ‘For that there were no doubt good reasons of policy, and it is only fair to say that our Admiralty have in other respects been very prompt and candid.’18 This could also be read as Buchan backing off. He had access to restricted documents and high-ranking individuals by virtue of his contacts as a journalist and as a developing war authority. He may have felt, or have had it put to him, that his privileged position gave him greater responsibilities to toe the line, and not question those in authority. It is clear from his letters, speeches and articles that Buchan supported the war. But his articles in The War chart his changing attitudes, from initial affront at the muzzling of the war correspondent, to an awareness of the damage that could be done by the increasingly more rapid distribution of information. He was adjusting, publicly, as many commentators must have done, to a new way of reporting war that now impinged on the right of the public to know. Although Buchan had changed his mind about criticising the government, hints of frustration at now being muzzled himself did emerge. An early, unsigned, article in The War on ‘The Spy Peril’ (12 September 1914), which can be attributed to Buchan,19 is unexpectedly exaggerated, far looser than the style he used under his own name. The same could be said of ‘Why the German fleet is hiding’ (16 January 1915). Unsigned, it cannot be proven to be Buchan, yet the tone and language are very similar to his. The content is still consistent with his public opinions, but the tone is angrier, less controlled. Although he was now committed to a magisterial style and a longer view in The War and the Nelson’s History, Buchan was able to print his more passionate assertions elsewhere.20 In mid-July, after The War had ceased publication, Buchan was criticising the government in his Preface to The Achievement of France (1915), a collection of his articles as The Times’ special correspondent at the Western Front: The extravagant and often injudicious exercise has done much to render such a [true perspective of the war] very difficult. We have been favoured with accounts of particular incidents, while others of equal and of greater interest and importance have been passed over in silence, or consigned to a bald sentence in the course of a hurried dispatch. The results have been to present us with a picture which has often been blurred, sometimes mutilated, and always inadequate. Above all, the relations of the different incidents to each other and to the whole system of operations have been obscured, or


presented to us in a distorted and misleading shape. We have been led to think of isolated links in the chain instead of fastening our minds upon the chain itself.21 In this, Buchan was speaking as a frustrated historian as well as a journalist.

Nelson’s History of the War The Nelson’s History has been described as ‘nationalistic and triumphalist’.22 On the other hand, while acknowledging that the History was a ‘sentimentalized treatment of the horrors of war in which heroic actions and chivalric content was [sic] highlighted’, it has also been recognised that the History ‘was no temporary propagandist mode designed deliberately to suit the exigencies of war. In [Buchan’s] words it was not a “government book” and was “written with complete knowledge”. It was barely influenced by institutional pressures and represented an independent output in which Buchan’s personal agenda was to the fore.’23 Buchan’s historical writing ‘mythologized war, but [he] wrote as [he] felt, and … did not consciously propagate myths’.24 The first two volumes of Nelson’s History of the War were written at the same time as Buchan’s articles in The War and, broadly, cover the same historical events. What seems to have been ignored by modern commentators, however, is that the Nelson’s History was written and published in monthly to two-monthly parts. The later 4-volume edition of 1921–22 may have muddied the waters for later readers, since by revising his text Buchan produced a work of conscious propaganda in support of the government’s conduct of the war, and in general the condensed version was criticised.25 But Buchan’s commentary in the original edition, particularly in the early volumes, was far less influenced by official requirements, and more congruent with contemporary reactions to the progress of the war, month by month. Some modern criticisms are not realistic. ‘His entire History of the War is a work of propaganda,’ Peter Buitenhuis claims, ‘consistently giving the most positive slant to the news from all fronts of the war’.26 The tone of the History is indisputably pro-Allied. But Buchan was able to describe failure too. In January 1915, four months after his initial response to the Battle of Namur in The War, discussed above, he summarised it bluntly again: ‘Namur, it is now clear, was one gigantic mistake’.27 His change of mind about how and what he reported had not altered his opinion of what had happened. Three years later, concerning Passchendaele, he


wrote: ‘The great struggle which we have described was strategically a British failure. We did not come within measurable distance of our major purpose.’28 Hew Strachan considers that Buchan made an honourable assessment, separating his History from his War Office work. ‘Buchan may have gone on to blame the weather rather than the generals, but his overall verdict – written, let it be remembered, during the war itself and at a time when Buchan was engaged in propaganda production – was harsh, if accurate.’29 Volume One of the History sold thousands of copies, and was reprinted only a month after publication.30 A year later the cumulative success of the History’s volumes was so marked that rival publishers were copying even its cover. ‘Do you see that Hodder & Stoughton have most shamelessly imitated the get-up of my History in the new book by Sir Max Aitken?’ Buchan wrote to Brown, ‘It is really a matter for protest. Of course they have done it very badly.’31 In March 1915 Brown was planning a French translation of the History, which Buchan agreed to undertake himself with a collaborator,32 but although he mentioned having signed ‘the French agreement’ a week later,33 nothing further seems to have been done. By 21 May Buchan was at the Front as a war correspondent.34 By mid-July he was ‘up to the neck in Foreign Office business’,35 and the French translation of the History was never made. However, by the end of the year it seems that Buchan had given permission for another translation, this time into Dutch.

Telling war stories When he had time to spare out of the office, Buchan continued his increasingly lucrative relaxation of writing adventure fiction. The Thirty-Nine Steps became a rocketing success in 1915.36 Its spy-hunting hero, Richard Hannay, was presented again to the public as a fullblown war hero in the sequels Greenmantle (1916)37 and Mr Standfast (1919).38 Buchan also wrote a number of war-based short stories. ‘The King of Ypres’,39 a sentimental story of a Glaswegian Fusilier who finds his calling in restoring civilian order to a devastated Ypres, was written in late 1917. Sharing a wartime setting but written post-bellum, ‘The Shut Door’ (on lost chances) came out in 1926, ‘The Loathly Opposite’ (code-cracking) and ‘Tendebant Manus’ (wish fulfillment) appeared in 1927 and ‘Dr Lartius’ (covert propaganda) was published in 1928. Samuel Hynes has suggested that: ‘[Buchan’s] greatest influence on the way Englishmen thought and felt about the war was through the


Hannay novels, which made the war both a moral melodrama and a history lesson for Englishmen’. 40 Buchan’s themes in all his fiction certainly concerned justice and the restoring of balance, as well as his life-long fascination with the thin line that lay between civilisation and the forces of anarchy and war. Buchan’s justice extended to the enemy: his sympathetic portrayal of the Kaiser in Greenmantle is well known, as should be his compassionate depiction of a German peasant family who shelter the disguised hero in the same novel. These were remarkable departures from the norm of popular fiction in the war, which rarely allowed Germans to be objects for sympathy in any way. As well as caricature German villains (such as von Stumm in Greenmantle), Buchan demonstrated that he was able to draw enemies who happened to be German or pro-German but, more importantly, were anarchic and stateless, desiring only to create chaos (Mr Standfast). As even Buitenhuis admits, ‘The novels also gave Buchan a chance – not taken too often – to state his own view of the conduct of the war instead of the official one. The personae of his characters allowed him to evade responsibility for his critical remarks.’ 41 Greenmantle, for example, directly criticises the General Staff through the mouth of an American secret agent, and the hero does not contradict this. Contrast this with the passage in Mr Standfast (1919) where the hero meets ‘the greatest British commander’, 42 which has been acknowledged as an adulatory portrait of General Haig, at the time Buchan’s former superior, at ‘the low point of Haig’s career’.43 Buchan’s war poetry, although not discussed fully here, needs to be noted for its existence as another form of Buchan’s literary response to war. Published in 1917, his Poems Scots and English was a compilation of poems written over 20 years. The series ‘Inter Arma’ contains six poems written in Scots during 1916–17. A later edition of this collection included a 1917 poem written in memory of his younger brother Alastair, killed at the Battle of Arras in that year. In addition, Buchan commemorated other deaths in the war of close friends in private memoirs. He also gave public speeches, one of which was reprinted by the Fight for Right Movement in June 1916. In 1915 and 1916 he wrote newspaper reports for The Times, Land & Water and the Chicago Daily News.44 These were written on commission when he had become a war correspondent, and so reflect the ‘official’ view. By late 1916 the earlier, questioning Buchan had been quenched by khaki.


Into uniformed service In early 1915 Buchan was commissioned by The Times and The Daily News as a war correspondent.45 In late May 1915 he was one of five journalists sent to France after Asquith’s coalition government gave in to pressure from the British press to allow direct access to the trenches to journalists. Buchan’s inclusion in the group was most probably due to his then high profile as an authority on the war, and the ‘correspondent’ status arising from his years of contributions to The Spectator would have been boosted by his more recent months of writing for The War. He wrote ebulliently to George Brown on his return: ‘I have just got back from the Front, exceedingly well, after the most interesting of possible experiences. I have done in detail the second battle of Ypres, having visited every battalion which was engaged. I had two nights in the trenches, and had numerous adventures.’ Buchan’s tone ‘reflects the hopes which could still be held in 1915 about a quick end to the war, and his own high spirits at no longer feeling himself cut off from his active service friends’.46 A hand-written addition to this letter indicates that he had more private feelings about the loss of a close friend: ‘We are all very much knocked up by Francis Grenfell’s death’.47 Four months later the government ordered Buchan to go to France again, where he reported on the Battle of Loos (25–28 September 1915) in uniform as a Lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps.48 By mid-1916 Buchan was a Staff Captain at GHQ. Buchan’s appointment to General Haig’s staff by the War Office caused a bit of a stir. He had been working under General Charteris in the Intelligence Corps on and off throughout the first half of 1916. After he accepted a post on Haig’s staff he seemed to be working for both the Foreign Office and War Office, as a writer of official reports and material for propaganda. Volume 12 of his History of the War was published in June 1916, and, under new orders, Buchan had to warn Nelson’s that he might not be allowed to finish the series: I am afraid there are going to be difficulties about my History. The Foreign Office would like me to continue it, as they think it is very useful for propaganda work. GHQ agree that it would be useful, but they think that if I wrote it now it would make it official and they don’t want that. I have said that I cannot decide on such a case, and that [Sir Edward] Grey [of the Foreign Office] must settle it with Haig. I should of course go on writing it and be ready for the end of the war, but it would mean the cessation of the monthly volumes. I


will let you know as soon as anything is settled. It is a great disappointment to me, but of course I am under authority now and must do as I am told.49 But Buchan was allowed to continue writing the History, and he continued his unexpected career under military command. It is not the purpose of this chapter to discuss the accuracy of Buchan’s military history, but the context in which he was writing has strong implications for the veracity of his future work. The political implications of Buchan’s role in military and, later, civilian propaganda cannot be dealt with here since they concern political, not publishing, history. What is more relevant here is the effect on Buchan of having to write what he was told. In accepting a military and government authority Buchan was given increased information, but was now simultaneously censored more than he had been as a civilian by what he had then felt to be his patriotic duty. Working for the War Office, he was obliged to only permit a part of what he saw to reach the public: ‘my difficulty was that I now knew too much and was often perplexed as to what I could print’.50 His writing skills were needed to broadcast the news selectively, and, as an essentially honourable man, this new duty must have been psychologically very hard. He was no longer allowed to tell the truth. What Buitenhuis has called ‘the strain of duplicity’51 may have manifested itself physically, exacerbating Buchan’s already grumbling duodenal ulcer to the extent of putting him into a Casualty Clearing Station. He endured an operation on his stomach in 1917, but the condition caused him intermittent pain for the rest of his life. Buchan’s War Office productions, weekly digests of war news sent to agencies to feed into local newspapers worldwide, are untraceable. It is possible to match chance cross-references in the War Office papers, but almost all the texts of these articles have been lost. His weekly summaries were noted as being of less value to the War Office than those by a Captain Butler. The impression from the correspondence in this particular War Office file is that Buchan saw himself as a hack writer doing his duty.52 The government’s official historian of the war, Sir James Edmonds, later reported, possibly with mischievous intent, that the War Office writers, particularly Buchan, had been deliberately led astray. ‘Many of us went out of our way to mislead him [Buchan]. He and Philip Gibbs were the most gullible of the publicists.’53 But Buchan was clearly doing the right thing at the right time. ‘His rise within the ranks in France, coupled with the forced return home


because of illness, ensured that Buchan was both visible and available whenever decision-makers were scouting about for talent’.54 The change of British government in late 1916 reshuffled the pieces in the British propaganda service, and Buchan was appointed as Director of the new Department of Information. He remained at the head of this department, later within a Ministry, for the remainder of the war.

‘A pamphlet by me’ In August 1916 Buchan wrote to Brown, asking for an estimate for printing ‘a pamphlet by me on the battle of Jutland … you had better estimate for 100,000 … [and] a book which we should sell at some price not more than 1/- on the recent offensive … there will be translations of both in three or four languages, which we should also like you to do, and of these we will order large quantities … Time is very important. The Jutland thing is ready, and the other should be ready in a fortnight’.55 The translation and distribution of these books, The Battle of Jutland and The Battle of the Somme, First Phase, drove their production. On 12 August 1916 Buchan wrote to Brown: The Stationery department want to print them themselves as they have to be translated into a good many languages at once, and they say it will be quicker if they can have proofs to give out to the translators piecemeal as they are ready. The War Office again, would prefer that the thing on the Somme should not be circulated in this country for the present, but only in foreign countries. Mr Balfour wants the battle of Jutland pamphlet circulated in this country.56 Nelson’s published The Battle of Jutland in October 1916, and The Battle of the Somme, First Phase came out a month later (see Table 10.1). In all, Buchan published nine works of war history under his own name between 1915 and 1919.57 At least one other book, A History of the British Navy (Nelson’s, 1918), adapted by H.C. O’Neill, a staff member in the Department of Information, originated from the Nelson’s History. Of the nine Buchan titles, five were translated into other languages, in one case into seven, for propaganda purposes. The number of languages may seem ambitious, but was not exceptional. Another War Office pamphlet, The Murder of Captain Fryatt (1916), was translated into nine languages and ‘circulated over a quarter of a million’.58

Translating Propaganda 193 Table 10.1 John Buchan’s histories of the First World War written and published during the war, and their known translations Date of Publisher publication

Title

1915–19

Thomas Nelson’s Nelson & History of Son London the War

February 1915

Oxford Britain’s University War by Press Oxford Land

26 July 1915

Methuen London

October 1916

Thomas The Battle Nelson & of Jutland Son London

November Ministry of 1916 Propaganda London

Translation

Date

Publisher

Yper. De Dutch May militaire trans 1916 gebeurtenissen A. Callewaert van October 1914 tot Mei 1916

BergerLevrault Paris

La Bataille du Jutland La batalla de Jutlandia

Darling & Son London Thomas Nelson & Son London Copenhagen

The Achievement of France

The British Front in the West, November 1916

November Thomas The Battle 1916 Nelson & of the Son London Somme, First Phase

French

1916

Spanish

1916

Slaget ved Danish Jylland. Officiel trans Beretnung Otto Wadsted De Zeeslag Dutch bij Jutland

1916

Le front britannique occidental

French

1916

De Strijd aan de Somme, Eerste Phase

Dutch trans Willem de Veer *

1916

La Bataille French de la Somme (1 juillet 1916) Somme-Slaget. Danish Forste Afsnit Die Schlacht German an der Somme, erstes Stadium, mit amtlichen Bildern und Karten

1916

1917

1917

Darling & Son London

Thomas Nelson & Son London & Cape Town Thomas Nelson & Son Edinburgh Pios Boghandel Copenhagen Harrison London

194 Publishing in the First World War Table 10.1 John Buchan’s histories of the First World War written and published during the war, and their known translations – continued Date of publication

Publisher

Title

Translation

La Batalla del Somme – Primera Fase February 1917

Eyre & Spottiswode

The British Front in the West, February 1917

(before May) 1917

Nelson’s

The Battle De Strijd aan of the Somme, de Somme: Second Phase De Tweede Phase La Bataille de la Somme, seconde phase Somme-Slaget, andet afsnit A batalha do Somme. Segunda phase La batalla del Somme, segunda fase

Date

Publisher

Spanish

1917

Thomas Nelson London

Dutch trans Willem de Veer French

1917? Thomas Nelson & Son London

Danish 1917 trans Otto Wadsted Portuguese 1917

Spanish

Slaget vid Swedish Somme. Bemynd. overs. fran engelskan. 1:a-2:a Die Schlacht German an der Somme, Zweite Phase May 19 1917

George H Doran New York

The Battle of the Somme

1918

Thomas Nelson & Son London

A History of the British navy during the war, adapted from Col. John Buchan’s History of the War

1917

R Clay London Copenhagen

Paris

1917? Thomas Nelson & Son Paris, New York 1917 Stockholm

1917

* Willem de Veer worked extensively as a translator for British publishers during the First World War, particularly for Thomas Nelson & Son, Eyre & Spottiswode and Darling. Sources: Robert G. Blanchard (The First Editions of John Buchan, Archon Books, 1981), Archibald Hanna (John Buchan: A Bibliography, Shoe String Press, 1953), and national library catalogues.


Buchan’s Britain’s War by Land, ‘originally written as an article for translation into Russian and publication in the Russian press … revised and enlarged by the author at the instance of the Clarendon Press’,59 was no. 66 in the Oxford Pamphlets series from Oxford University Press. The Battle of Jutland is slim – only 45 pages long – with many crude black and white photographs. A straight, rather simplistic account of the battle, it was translated almost immediately into French, Spanish and Danish. The British Front in the West, November 1916 is only four pages long and was openly published by the ‘Ministry of Propaganda’. Its sequel, The British Front in the West, February 1917, was more covertly produced, and published by Eyre and Spottiswode. The texts are unremarkable. Only the 1916 variant was translated, into French. As well as the Nelson’s History, Buchan’s reputation for wartime history writing also rests on his volumes on the Battle of the Somme (1 July 1916–13 November 1916). The first part, The Battle of the Somme: First Phase, came out in November 1916, and was translated into Dutch, French, Danish and German. The Second Phase was out by May 1917, and added Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish to the original four languages to make seven translations. A single volume on the Somme was printed for the American market by George Doran Company in 1917, based, ‘for propagandist purposes’ on volume XVI of the Nelson’s History.60 In March 1917 Buchan and Brown were discussing an illustrated edition of the one-volume version of The Battle of the Somme for sale abroad. ‘Unless there is a very strong reason against doing this I should like to put it in hand at the beginning of next week, as there is no time to be lost, and it is essential to get the thing published in America before the new big operations commence at the front.’61 No copy of this has been found, and it must be assumed that the project was superseded by other events of the war. Buchan’s account of the Somme, now routinely vilified for its avoidance of saying how many had been killed for no gain, seems to have been seminal in propagating war myths. A recent study of the battle analysed the first day of the Somme as reported in contemporary war histories and first-hand accounts, and concluded that Buchan’s account, in the main, was responsible for creating the enduring image of the lines of British infantrymen walking slowly into German machine-gun fire. The authors show that such a scene was not documented, and that many different contemporary accounts refute any such possibility.62 Faced with such evidence, the question of Buchan’s veracity has to be re-examined, but it cannot now be answered conclusively. There


have been too many political interpretations of history for it to be possible for a single truth to emerge, but Buchan’s histories have an important validity. As contemporaneous documents their value lies in showing that he believed enough in what he wrote to allow it to go out under his name, which had gained weight and popular recognition through the Nelson’s History and his Hannay best-sellers. It is important to stress that the War Office also considered his account to say what they wanted the British, and overseas, public to believe. The question of whether what Buchan wrote actually happened is in some ways no longer relevant: it is more important to understand what those responsible for propaganda wanted to be believed.

A Flemish intervention In May 1916, a small book titled Yper. De militaire gebeurtenissen van October 1914 tot Mei 1915 (‘Ypres. The military events from October 1914 until May 1915’), bound in mustard yellow, was produced by the French publishing house Berger-Levrault. It was a translation by A. Callewaert ‘naar het Engelsch van M. John Buchan’ (‘from the English by John Buchan’). For a French firm to publish a British propaganda text in Dutch raises interesting questions about who was directing the publisher’s operations. The book begins with a short two-page introduction by the translator, on why he (or she) had made the translation. This states that the book aimed to show the Flemish people how much had been sacrificed by British soldiers for the freedom of the Flemish land. ‘Little had been published on the military events in the southern part of West Flanders … Buchan’s chapter on the Second Battle of Ypres has been called a masterpiece by French military writers’.63 Clearly someone had felt it was time that the Flemish had their own record of the fighting around Ypres. Reading the translation against the History shows that it was taken from various chapters in volumes VI, V and VII concerning the fighting around Ypres. This makes the Callewaert text a far freer translation than those of the Somme volumes in Dutch, for instance, which are, by and large, a faithful line-by-line transposition of the English. Callewaert made considerable numbers of translation decisions throughout the text by, for instance, omitting passages irrelevant to Ypres, such as allusions to the French national character or details of military units. The changes occur at all levels, from deleting a phrase, a sentence, a passage, to whole pages, depending on the content. The


overall intent would seem to have been to produce a description of the fighting solely as it concerned the inhabitants of West Flanders. The language used is also revealing, since it identifies the translator as Flemish, rather than from the Netherlands, most probably from the West Flanders region. Specific West-Vlaamse dialect words are used in preference to standard Dutch, and the translator shows his/her familiarity with the region by giving precise names for places which the British knew by their own nick-names: Shelltrap Farm, for instance, is translated as ‘Vanheule’s hofstede’ [farm].64 As to why the Callewaert translation was published by a French firm, rather than a British or Dutch publisher, evidence is scant. There is no mention of Callewaert in the Nelson’s correspondence, which presumably owned the copyright to the History. So far no reference to the translation has emerged from the British War Office or Foreign Office papers. The book does not appear to have been officially sanctioned, but Buchan was thanked in Callewaert’s introduction for having given his permission for the translation to be made. Since Berger-Levrault were the official publishers to the Belgian government in exile at Le Havre, there may have been a Belgian government impetus behind the Callewaert translation. Berger-Levrault regularly printed Dutch as well as French propaganda and administrative material for the Belgian authorities throughout the war. But the Berger-Levrault archives show clearly what was ordered by the Belgian ministries, and the Callewaert translation is recorded separately, as an order from the Flemish printers Sansen-Vanneste in November 1916 to print 3,000 copies for 2,158.25 francs.65 If the Belgian government was behind Callewaert, it didn’t want its printers to know. The impact of the book is unknown, but stamps on one copy show that it was owned by a unit of the Belgian army during or immediately after the war. Belgian army officers were all Francophone, but it can be assumed that for the ordinary Belgian soldier, of whom 60–80 per cent were Flemish (many only spoke Dutch),66 this description in Dutch of the First and Second Battles of Ypres would have been an unusually accessible account of the war in their region. More research is needed on the translation of British propaganda in general, to determine its impact on the societies at which it was aimed. For now, the Callewaert translation is a unique example of how Buchan’s history writing was disseminated to the people most concerned with the subject, the inhabitants of the land over which the war was being fought. Callewaert’s translation decisions were independent, it would appear, of government direction, and so the translation is also


important evidence of what the Flemish wanted from a British interpretation of the war.

Conclusion Thomas Nelson’s did well out of the war. After 1915 their connection with Buchan brought them lucrative government printing and publishing contracts for propaganda, and their own publications, on the whole, sold well. Buchan worked relentlessly throughout the war and emerged, in poor health but alive, as a Lieutenant Colonel, his popular reputation made by his three best-selling thrillers, and as the recipient of a medal from King Albert of Belgium. Buchan had been made an Officer of the Order de la Couronne on 8 September 1917 in his capacity as Director of Information.67 This medal is a Belgian national honour rather than a military award, and was awarded to those who had distinguished themselves with their literary merit.68 Buchan’s first medal was thus given with a hidden caveat. As David Cannadine has said, ‘the great irony of Buchan’s life… is that he wanted to be recognized and remembered as a man of affairs who wrote novels in his spare time, whereas in fact he was recognized and is remembered as a novelist who was a man of affairs in his spare time’.69 To be given a medal by a king is no small thing. Buchan would have relished it, and the notice in the London Gazette that went with it, and he proposed himself for further honours after the war from his own king and government.70 Whether Buchan knew that King Albert had honoured him for his writing, and not for his sterling service in intelligence and propaganda for Belgium, is not known. But the medal is not mentioned in Buchan’s autobiography. Notes 1 The principal biographies of John Buchan are Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), and Andrew Lownie, John Buchan, The Presbyterian Cavalier (London: Constable, 1995). The standard bibliography is Robert G. Blanchard, The First Editions of John Buchan (North Haven, CT: Archon Books, 1981). 2 Thomas Nelson’s letters, Edinburgh University Library Special Collections (hereafter EULSC), Gen 1728, B/5/73, John Buchan (JB) to George Brown (GB), 14 August 1914. 3 Ibid.; B/5/93, JB to GB, 2 September 1914. 4 B. Bond, ‘Introduction’, in B. Bond (ed.) The First World War and British Military History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p.3. 5 EULSC, Gen 1728, B/5/151, JB to GB, 26 November 1914. 6 EULSC, Gen 1728, B/5/66a, JB to GB, 14 July 1914.

Translating Propaganda 199 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

EULSC, Gen 1728, B/5/68, JB to GB, 4 August 1914. EULSC, Gen 1728, B/5/69, JB to GB, 6 August 1914. EULSC, Gen 1728, B/5/70, GB to JB, 7 August 1914. EULSC, Gen 1728, B/5/71, GB to JB, 13 August 1914. These were The Illustrated War News, The War Illustrated (from 1915), The Penny War Weekly, The War Budget, The Graphic, The Great War. The Sphere and The Illustrated London News were already in existence, but remained strong competitors to The War. The War, 6 March 1915, issue 29, p.11. Buchan, Memory Hold-the-Door: the Autobiography of John Buchan (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1940), p.164. Buchan, ‘The great shadow’, The War, 22 August 1914, p.1. Buchan, ‘The fight against time’, The War, 5 September 1914, p.3. Buchan, ‘The wheel to the sea’, The War, 24 October 1914, p.4. C. Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War (London: Allen Lane, 1977), pp.30–1. Buchan, ‘Birthday celebrations’, The War, 6 February 1915, p.4. EULSC, Gen 1728, B/5/90, JB to GB, 28 August 1914. In 1917 Buchan wrote an introduction to an English translation of a book about the German army’s atrocities in Belgium by a Dutch journalist, Lambertus Mokveld (De overweldiging van België, W.L. & J. Busse, Rotterdam, 1916), which again was more extreme than his own publications. See Buchan, ‘Introduction’, in L. Mokveld, The German Fury in Belgium (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1917). Buchan, ‘Preface’, The Achievement of France (London: Methuen, 1916), p.6. A. Green, Writing the Great War: Sir James Edmonds and the Official Histories 1915–1948 (London: Frank Cass, 2003), p.199. K. Grieves, summary of conference paper, in Social History Society Newsletter, 16:1 (1991), 10. Grieves, ‘Early historical responses to the Great War: Fortescue, Conan Doyle and Buchan’, in Bond (ed.) The First World War and British Military History, p.38. Adam Smith, pp.229–30. P. Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: British, American and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914–1933 (Vancouver: University of British Colombia Press, 1987), p.93. Buchan, Nelson’s History of the War: From the Beginning of the War to the Fall of Namur, Vol.I (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1915), p.215. Ibid., Vol.XX (1918), p.113. H. Strachan, ‘John Buchan, Douglas Haig and military genius’, The Foundation Journal, 1 (2005), p.28. EULSC, 99 GMB letters, Jan–April 1915, GB to Scheurmier, 10 February 1915. EULSC, Gen 1728, B/6/31, JB to GB, 1 February 1916. EULSC, Gen 1728, B/5/274, GB to JB, 1 March 1915; Gen 1728, B/5/238, JB to GB, 3 March 1915. EULSC, Gen 1728, B/5/292, JB to GB, 8 March 1915. EULSC, Gen 1728, B/5/358, GB to Miss Alcock (Buchan’s secretary), 21 May 1915.

200 Publishing in the First World War 35 EULSC, Gen 1728, B/6/134, JB to GB, 5 July 1916. 36 The Thirty-Nine Steps was first printed in June and July 1915 as a serial in the American pulp magazine All-Story Weekly (Vol.45, No.52, and Vol.46, No.1), and in Blackwood’s Magazine in the UK from July to September 1915 (Vol.198, Nos. 1197–9). 37 Greenmantle first appeared in Land and Water magazine (Vol.62, No.2826 to Vol.68, No.2844), in July to November 1916. 38 Mr Standfast appeared first in The Popular Magazine in January and February 1919 (Vol.51, Nos. 2–5). 39 ‘The King of Ypres’ was initially published in the American edition of Buchan’s short story collection The Watcher by the Threshold in 1918. 40 S. Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990), p.45. 41 Buitenhuis, p.110. 42 Buchan, Mr Standfast (1919; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp.197–8. 43 Strachan, p.28. 44 Blanchard, pp.186–7. 45 Lownie, p.123. 46 Adam Smith, p.196. 47 EULSC, Gen 1728, B/5/363, JB to GB, 31 May 1915. 48 EULSC, Gen 1728, B/5/370, JB to GB, 15 September 1915; Adam Smith, p.196. 49 EULSC, Gen 1728, B/6/134, JB to GB, 5 July 1916. 50 Buchan, Memory Hold-the-Door, p.167. 51 Buitenhuis, p.98. 52 National Archives, Kew, FO395/53, General Files 132464–146297, July 8 1916. 53 J.F. Williams, Anzacs, the Media and the Great War (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1999), p.3. I am grateful to Dr Stephen Badsey for finding me this reference. 54 G. Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p.89. 55 EULSC, Gen 1728, B/6/175, JB to GB, 9 August 1916. 56 EULSC, Gen 1728, B/6/178, JB to GB, 12 August 1916. 57 A tenth, The Battle of Picardy, exists as a pamphlet in the National Archives, but does not appear to have been published: information from Lownie, p.125. 58 Memorandum from JB to Sir Edward Carson, 1917, National Archives, Kew, INF 4/1B, section B, p.8. 59 Note at front of Oxford Pamphlets 1914–1915, Vol.15. 60 EULSC, Gen 1728, B/7/14, JB to GB, 16 January 1917. 61 EULSC, Gen 1728, B/7/64, JB to GB, 9 March 1917. 62 R. Prior and T. Wilson, The Somme (London: Yale University Press, 2005), pp.111–18. 63 A. Callewaert, Yper. De gebeurtissenen van October 1914 tot Mei 1915 (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1916), v–vi. 64 Ibid., p.135; Buchan, Nelson’s History of the War, vol.VII, From the Second Battle of Ypres to the Beginning of the Italian Campaign, p.43. I am grateful to


65 66 67 68 69 70

Dr Frank Mertens, University of Ghent, for help with Flemish and Belgian matters. B-L 57 J 3 art 48, p.126, Fonds Berger-Levrault, des Archives Meurtheet-Moselle, Nancy. E.H. Kossman, The Low Countries 1780–1940 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p.543. London Gazette, 21 September 1917, 30302; information from the Service Public Fédéral Affaires Etrangères, Belgium. Andre Charles Borné, Distinctions Honorifiques de la Belgique 1830–1985 (Brussels: Servis-Creatif, 1987), p.261. D. Cannadine, ‘John Buchan: A life at the margins’, American Scholar, Vol.67, No.3 (1998), p.89. Lownie, pp.151–2.

11 Making a Text the Fordian Way: Between St Dennis and St George, Propaganda and the First World War Sara Haslam

Ford Madox Ford is well known for his books about the First World War. To William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Bradbury, and Sam Hynes, the Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–28) is the best British text about the conflict. More widely read still is The Good Soldier (1915). Despite the title, this novel does not take the war as its explicit subject, but Ford wanted to map its tale of degeneration, death and chaos onto the wider European narrative and he used 4 August to do so. No less than five key events occur on this date, including the suicide of the narrator’s wife.1 Ford also published short stories, like ‘The Scaremonger: a Tale of the War Times’ (1914), and poetry; his poem ‘Antwerp’ was ‘the only good poem’ T.S. Eliot had met with on the subject.2 A fair amount of material about the war, then, but none of it can be described as propaganda. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, for Ford was the son of a gifted English painter, and a German music critic who championed Wagner in the early years, when others were calling him a ‘priest of Dagon’, and his compositions ‘hateful fungi’.3 In addition, Ford had a great fondness for the concept of an international ‘Republic of Letters’. Characteristic of behaviour in the republic was the dedicated support of young writers,4 but he also ‘always stressed the importance of the relationship between European and trans-European literatures’.5 The arts in his republic were to: make you understand your fellow human being …[I]n the train of comprehension come sympathy and tolerance and after subjecting yourself for some time to the influence of the arts you become less of a brute beast.6 As propaganda would not find a natural home alongside ‘sympathy and tolerance’, I want initially to question the generic affiliation of 202

Making a Text the Fordian Way 203

Ford’s two 1915 texts, When Blood is their Argument: an Analysis of Prussian Culture, and Between St Dennis and St George: a Sketch of Three Civilisations.7 Perhaps they might more accurately be described as cultural criticism rather than as propaganda? The Fordian cultural critic works with mirrors; primarily it is, after all, ‘to make you see’.8 He shifts and reflects the light of observation, establishing in narrative a concomitant map. Ford writes in Mightier than the Sword (1938) that, in addition, the ‘artist is almost always an expatriate and almost always writes about the past. He must [Ford’s emphasis], in order to get perspective, retire in both space and time from the model upon which he is at work’.9 David Trotter outlines the difficulty Ford must have experienced in 1915 as a result of his own imperative to retire in space and time. From what, and to where, during a war between Britain and Germany, was such a figure to retire?10 This is not just about the fact that his father was German. Ford was a confirmed Francophile trying to make a literary living in England. His name at that point was still, and remained until 1919, Ford Hermann Hueffer, signifying his German roots, the Anglicisation of those roots, and his birth into the family of a painter – Ford Madox Brown – notorious for his stance against the Royal Academy of Art. ‘Hueffer tried to get out of English society’, Trotter writes, ‘as well as in; and his foreignness was no less bogus than his Englishness.’11 Alan Judd conjures with Ford’s ‘joint inheritance’, from father and mother, ‘of being multilingual and cosmopolitan. Ford learned to breathe’, he says, ‘in an atmosphere of truly European civilisation’.12 Bearing Ford’s own definition in mind, all this may help to establish why Ford did not, in fact, publish two books of cultural criticism in 1915. In the remainder of this chapter I am going to explore why Ford published propaganda instead – which is perhaps more surprising given the context thus far – and the unusual form in which he presented it. My comments will be focused upon the later of the two texts. In a letter from the pre-embarkation position of the Welch Regiment, Ford wrote in August 1915 of his increasing certainty that Between St Dennis and St George was the more ‘valuable’ work.13 Shakespeare gave Ford his title for the book. Worthy of generic note is the fact it is the history play, Henry V, which provides him with his handle. In this play, of course, the heroic English fight what has been called the ‘ancestral’, and was still to many in 1914, the more natural enemy, France. At the end of the play, hostilities over, Henry talks with Katherine of the child they shall have: ‘a boy, half French, half English, that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard’.14 Their


union, which is of course political and geographical rather than personal, is thus imagined to cause further bloodshed, a fact which probably spurred Ford in his choice. Why did he write it? The most important reason is because he was encouraged by a pillar of the English political establishment to do so. C.F.G. Masterman, Liberal politician, (short lived) member of Asquith’s Cabinet, and acute social observer, was ‘in charge of British propaganda’.15 He also knew Ford well, and was a writer himself. From his office at Wellington House, Masterman co-ordinated the War Propaganda Bureau from September 1914. It was in this month that the famous meeting of members of the literary establishment occurred. Hardy, Bennett, Masefield, Chesterton, Buchan, Wells, Barrie, and George Trevelyan, amongst others, were there, ‘uncritically united behind the Allied cause’.16 ‘It is practically impossible to exaggerate the literary power which was assembled in one room,’ writes Gary Messinger,17 and the marshalling of such power represented the first steps taken to ‘co-ordinate an active British propaganda’.18 Ford’s contributions formed part of a later wave, in 1915. First World War propaganda is defined by historian Trevor Wilson as ‘any form of communication, from private letter to film, that dealt with the war in such a way as to propagate the cause of one side and discredit that of its opponents’.19 It’s a fittingly broad definition because propaganda was manifested in many ways. Ford castigates those he calls ‘intellectual fictionists’ (George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell and H.N. Brailsford)20 in Between St Dennis and St George for their tendency to deal in untruths regarding key political figures of the time, but this is how propaganda itself can work. Indeed, many critics focus less on the ‘propagation of a cause’, and more on the way propaganda mutates into falsification and rumour (or atrocity) mongering. Although Gary Messinger’s account of Great War propaganda provides a nuanced approach, Trudi Tate takes a more dramatic line. Tate writes that the Great War was the first to organise propaganda in a ‘scientific manner’; here it means ‘bogus statistics, inaccurate news reports, and … false atrocity stories’.21 She certainly has a point. Wilson states that ‘the first half of 1915’, when Ford was writing his propaganda, ‘was a special time of hate in Britain’.22 It was at this time that atrocity mongering reached its peak, and it did succeed in replenishing the queues at the recruiting offices. Considering this, Ford begins oddly. He is aiming, he tells us, at disinterring the ‘historian and the historian’s methods’ from the pile of obfuscatory and unverifiable newspaper cant that amassed between


1914 and 1915 (p.3). The American press, particularly, he thought, though later in the war, had dangerous tendencies as ‘excitants and energizers’ of ‘war-like feelings’.23 He cites gossip as one of his main foes in the attempt to achieve clarity of vision in his text (p.13). But gossip is relied on by propaganda as a seminal means of transmission. His narrative reveals a perhaps not fully conscious awareness of these tensions and paradoxes. It does also notably manage, in ways that I shall go on to discuss, to be both propaganda and history. Messinger’s analysis of propaganda will prove central here, as will Ford’s definition of history. Masterman knew Ford’s background; Max Saunders writes that Masterman sought his ‘expertise’ in his propaganda.24 What expertise? As an atrocity-monger? In part, despite what Ford said about ‘fictionists’, the answer must be yes. Though Gringoire, Ford’s narrator/ alter-ego in No Enemy (1929) states that ‘I simply do not believe in atrocities’, he relates the torpedoing of the Lusitania in May 1915 with the loss of 1,200 civilians, and, more significantly, the horrific possibility of German sailors filming the deaths of women and children as it sank.25 Gringoire doesn’t quite accept the idea of the film. But in Between St Dennis and St George, the use by the Germans of a ‘cinematograph machine’ to film the deaths is reported by Ford as if it were historical fact. In an undisguised call to arms, Ford states that this is ‘the future which Germany offers to humanity upon the waters’ (p.111). Everybody wrote about the sinking of the Lusitania, the papers often with ‘outraged commentary about German barbarism.’26 No Enemy wasn’t published until 1929; the opportunity for reflection produced a new attitude, perhaps. The shift may also have been a result of the publication in 1928 of Arthur Ponsonby’s Falsehood in War-Time, which detailed the propaganda campaigns of the Lusitania. But citation of atrocity stories, overall, is rare in Between St Dennis and St George, though Wellington House did not baulk at releasing them. It published Lord Bryce’s ‘Report on Alleged German Outrages’ in early 1915, which was based, according to Buitenhuis, on ‘lurid, largely undocumented and unsworn evidence’,27 and 11 pamphlets on German atrocities in Belgium between 1914 and 1918.28 If not principally as an atrocity-monger, where did Ford’s expertise lie? Certainly in his German identity, his ability to see both sides of the coin, but it is also about his ability to complicate this duality with a broader European vision. ‘I like the French so much; I like so much the South Germans and the Austrians’, Ford wrote in August 1914, ‘whichever side wins in the end – my own heart is certain to be


mangled in either case.’29 Ford claims in Between St Dennis and St George much ‘first-hand evidence’ (p.29) and talks of his residences both in Germany and France. This was potentially dangerous at the time, especially given the relatively benign and impressionistic material that Masterman must have predicted Ford would produce.30 On 2 January 1915, as a result of anti-German feeling, Ford had been ordered by the chief constable of West Sussex to leave the county. Though the order was revoked, Ford remained anxious, and this may well be a further reason why he both wrote the books of propaganda, and patriotically declined payment for the first despite being in need of the cash.31 After the sinking of the Lusitania, several Stock Exchanges decided to expel German members, and in London crowds attacked individuals suspected of German birth and their property. The victims of these riots, rather than the perpetrators, were interned by Asquith’s government, though it stopped short of imprisoning people who had taken out British naturalisation.32 Ford was worried by the comparative complexity of his approach to what necessarily would be seen by others as a case of simple black and white allegiances. He writes at the outset, in an important call to the discerning reader, that it seems lamentable that ‘popular judgements of history’ must be formed without reference to each man’s status as ‘homo duplex’ (p.24). Ford also wrote these texts because he was committed to the subject, though recently so. The German invasion of Belgium meant the Liberal government did not fall due to resignations, and went to war almost united instead. Whilst in September 1914 Ford was to write that ‘I cannot believe any single thing that I have read about this war. And I do not want to believe so much of it,’33 he engaged with the subject to the extent that he wrote his poem ‘Antwerp’ after the city surrendered to the Germans in October 1914. By January 1915 there had been a yet more significant shift: Three months ago, I remember – and it seems as if it were a dream of another age on this planet – I wrote that I wished the war could be conducted in terms of ‘the gallant enemy’. Now I should thank God to know that a million Germans were killed; and my gentle companion would have thanked God, and every soul in that building would have uttered words of gratitude to that Most High, Who presumably made the Germans as well as ourselves.34 What was this shift about? If Ford was not finally persuaded by the more virulent and ubiquitous forms of propaganda, a historical


approach may have effected this change. Ferguson argues that the German army did in fact commit ‘atrocities’ in Belgium in 1914: ‘all the advancing German armies executed civilians, including women and priests […] The Germans also used civilians as human shields and razed numerous villages to the ground.’35 It is hard to know how much Ford would have known about such facts, due to rigorous war-time censorship, but the historical approach ties in more with Masterman’s use of propaganda than it would have done with that of, say, Lord Northcliffe, who became head of a new propaganda agency at Crewe House towards the end of the war.36 In his governmental capacity, Ferguson asserts, Masterman ‘worked hard to avoid providing any official assistance to the circulation of rumours’.37 Despite any such efforts, sales of the jingoistic press like the Daily Mail, ripe with such stories, increased steadily in 1914–16.38 This serves to introduce another of the reasons why Ford wrote propaganda in 1915: there was a market for it. Though its mass tastes would not have sought or recognised Ford’s comparative subtlety, Masterman’s approach had still meant the generation of 2.5 million books, pamphlets and speeches by June 1915.39 I have been unable to trace the exact relationship between Ford, Masterman, and Hodder and Stoughton concerning the publishing of Ford’s propaganda (see note 31 in respect of payment, for example). There was a contemporary effort to cover these tracks; most of the records of Wellington House were ‘scattered and destroyed at war’s end’,40 and the authors who had worked for the Government in this capacity kept quiet until 1935.41 However, Masterman probably did broker the agreement between Ford and Hodder and Stoughton, as part of the attempt to disguise and disperse official propaganda. Evidence does remain indicating that the extent of the publishing operation at Wellington House was kept secret largely by its distribution amongst commercial publishing houses. A 1917 parliamentary enquiry heard from a senior employee that Wellington House paid five guineas to use an imprint; prime amongst these was Hodder and Stoughton’s.42 Both the politics of this house and the contacts of its senior figures help to suggest why. Formed by two staunch Nonconformists in 1868, its religious list initially made its name. Thomas Stoughton also enjoyed prominent establishment connections, however, and by the time of the 1902 Education Act Hodder and Stoughton’s British Weekly had become ‘the accepted and acknowledged voice of Nonconformity’.43 As such its influence could only increase with the Liberal landslide in the election of 1906. Sir William Robertson Nicoll had joined the house in the early


days, and launched The British Weekly as editor. His complacency in public about the European situation took a striking turn throughout 1914. It is said that, prior to the declaration of war, Nicoll’s friend Sir George Riddell (owner of the News of the World – circulation of which also increased impressively during the war) showed Lloyd George Nicoll’s leading article on the subject. John Attenborough puts it more strongly in his history of the firm: ‘certainly the Cabinet’s decision [on war] was made in the knowledge of the line that The British Weekly would take.’44 Nicoll and the head of the firm, Ernest Hodder Williams, had agreed that ‘war in Europe would be a righteous and necessary war from which the nation could not shrink’. A likely position on propaganda is made more clear by the shared conviction that ‘their supreme duty was to rally all Nonconformists […] to their country’s call’.45 On 7 September 1914 Nicoll attended the second of the initial meetings called by Masterman as the new head of British propaganda, this one devoted to publicists and representatives of the press.46 Elements of Hodder’s fiction list clearly reflected the views of its bosses. John Buchan was a Hodder author (as was J.M. Barrie – both were present at Masterman’s first 1914 meeting). Ferguson argues that Buchan ‘played an important role in British propaganda’ 47 – he was employed by Wellington House to write an account of the battle of the Somme which ‘turned that defeat into a glowing victory’48 – and Buchan also believed, incidentally, that ‘the war could not have been fought for one month without its newspapers’.49 There could be few more natural publishers than Hodder and Stoughton for Ford’s propaganda. In addition to these political forces, there is another important way of tracing the development of the relationship between Ford and Hodder. Drivers in this respect are Ford’s agent, and Ford himself. To John Feather, J.B. Pinker was one of the few early notable agents; he had become Ford’s agent in 1901.50 Ford had not published with Hodder before, but Pinker had taken Arnold Bennett there in 1912, and it is possible he edged Ford in the same direction. Ford may not have needed edging, however. He often had very clear ideas about publishers, and used his letters to Pinker to set out his instructions as to who he had in mind.51 In February 1913 he pointed out to Pinker that Hodder ‘ought to be inclined to me’, because Nicoll himself had boomed him, writing about him, and here Ford gets carried away in his delight at the idea: ‘as if I were Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, and God almighty rolled into one.’52 This ties in well with the timing for Between St Dennis and St George, though the war began in the interim.


All this suggests the nature of the ‘why’ of Ford’s 1915 propaganda. I would like now to move to consider the ‘how’, for it is here that the specific relationship of writer, publisher, and historical moment is seen to combine in a unique fashion. Ford may have been a Hodder author, and committed to his project, but he was also in no way a convincing atrocity-monger, as we have seen. So what did he write? He wrote in pursuit of the historian and the historian’s methods; he sought, ‘direct evidence of fact’ (Between St Dennis and St George, p.228). Objective truth is always a problematic issue, more than usual for this modernist, impressionist author, but the pitch was queered even further by the fact that Britain was at war. Ford knew that the most fanciful information was disseminated by the press. His story ‘The Scaremonger’ is partly about this,53 and he says more about it in the first pages of Between St Dennis and St George. To represent his facts, and probably also to comment on general contemporary relations with facts, he decided to do something different and unusual. In Between St Dennis and St George, Ford takes on mis-information and lack of knowledge in three ingenious formal ways, the first of which will serve to re-introduce the notion of a ‘Republic of Letters’. A significant proportion of the text is formed by the words of others; at times, Ford disappears entirely. In the first edition, it numbers 285 pages, including the appendices. More than a third of these pages are substantially (often entirely) covered with footnotes and/or quotations that force the reader to engage with an irregular, awkward, narrative, as well as with a great variety of perspective. Quotations are often long and sometimes unglossed. He is usually scrupulous with the bibliographical details for his sources, which adds to their intertextual weight. When he is less scrupulous, this causes a different kind of interruption. Ford claims that ‘German public life is a sea of scandals, of corruption, and of affairs incredibly filthy. No sooner does one scandal cease to occupy the papers then another fills them’ (p.143). He then proceeds to fill two pages of text with a list of unreferenced details of public scandals that serve to animate Berlin bankers, police commissaries, schoolmasters and lieutenants, and set them all quivering in the text. Although Ford only rarely seems to be anti-war (e.g. pp.11–12), or pro-Germany, he ensures that Between St Dennis and St George often becomes a near riot of alternative voices, opinions, languages (including German and French) and discourses. In this way the text represents a forum for debate, in which extracts from many diverse sources are forced into uneasy proximity to one another, and held there. In one


radical authorial technique Ford splits a page into two vertical columns. On one side he places a lengthy quotation from a Bertrand Russell article in the International Journal of Ethics (1915); on the other, mirroring it, are extracts from diaries of German soldiers in Belgium and France. The one acts as an original conceptual challenge to the other from source. The effect is spoiled somewhat, but not completely negated, when the footnote reveals that the diary extracts are part of an official British committee report into alleged German outrages, and are thus clearly chosen to help condemn German actions. But in a nice touch, the same footnote provides his translation of the German (he perhaps considered that demanding German language skills from his readers would have alienated them); his German identity finds its own place here. The appendices offer the second formal methodology for consideration. They fill 60 pages. The first of these deals with pamphlets by what Ford terms ‘Anglo-Prussian Apologists’, and, again quoting extensively (and thus facilitating a material, dissenting presence), he rebuffs much argument by figures such as Brailsford and Ponsonby. The second is a more detailed, sentence by sentence refutation of G.B. Shaw’s article, ‘Common Sense about the War’, a piece of polemic that is also dismissed by Niall Ferguson as ‘ludicrous’,54 but sold 25,000 copies.55 Buried in the middle of this appendix is the section of the entire text that Ford describes as its ‘crux’. The heart of the text is thus outside its main body, resisting its authority and, visibly, manifesting a challenge to its coherence and intent. It becomes in some clever, formal way, autonomous, and it is notable that Ford’s authorial voice is almost completely silent here. It gives way instead to individually spoken and constructed history. In this section, the reader witnesses nearly 100 exquisitely researched other voices, German voices, making statements for the glory, necessity and moral imperative of war. The voices belong to Generals, philosophers, historians, royalty, journalists, the Conference of Liberal Women; they are mostly contemporary, though Ford also consults Kant and Hegel. Again they are scrupulously sourced. This remarkably postmodernist attention to the form and design of a text foregrounds issues to do with instability and interpretation; there is more than one author here, as there is more than one experience and construction of ‘history’ (it is even more remarkable considering that it is propaganda). In the final appendix, Ford translates a speech given in the Prussian Reichstag in January 1914. He uses it to disprove what he calls Shaw’s ‘fictitious image’ of a Junker, and simultaneously draws subtextual attention once more to his German affiliations.


Finally, as a question less perhaps of form than of approach, Ford also sidesteps the lack of objective information by calling on impressionism. The fan or scholar of Ford may well have been confused by his initial battle-cries against gossip (he saw the novel partly as a replacement for vital gossip over garden fences),56 his call for the printed document to be the source material of choice and his deriding of Shaw et al as ‘fictionists’. But by page 30 that reader will be back in more familiar territory; by then Ford has admitted that his subject will be the psychology of England, France and Germany, and he asserts that his ‘recorded impression’ is equivalent to printed documentation as evidence of national character. Impressionism is designed to privilege the reader, to make him or her see with the eyes of the imagination.57 It is an intensely egalitarian and pluralistic technique. Allied to impressionism is his experimentation with the conventions of history and propaganda, and often self-contradiction undercuts his own narrative drive. This is a text that problematises many accepted notions of propaganda, written by a man of broad roots. Ford’s difficulties in writing it – because he does admit to difficulty – can work as microcosmic illustration of the European issue. Unwilling or unable to retire to a singular position from which to write about Britain’s wartime enemy, he closes by writing mostly about England and France. Historians of the period emphasise the difficulty with which the British population came to terms with the idea of Germany as ‘the enemy’ (due particularly to contemporary cultural and royal Anglo-German links),58 but Ford does consider that the answer to Europe’s problems is the ‘dismemberment of a Germany under the hegemony of Prussia’ (pp.180–1). The evidence he has amassed has brought him to this conclusion, along with those other elements of the context in 1915 that I have considered in this chapter. To present that evidence he also creates a text that could be said in some ways – related to form rather than content – to belong to a ‘Republic of Letters’. He states at the end of the book that he has not, in fact, wanted to choose one side over the other. Typically, he has managed to produce something less comforting, and more stimulating, instead. Ford’s book is unusual propaganda, and it does not feature on the Hodder list of notable sellers for 1915. One title that does is George Adam Smith’s Atlas of the Historical Geography of the Holy Land, not surprisingly, as it is a revised edition that was used by the military in the Palestine Campaign. Another is Ian Hay’s The First Hundred Thousand. In Sam Hynes’ view, Hay’s book was popular as it found a voice for the


war, a first-person, present tense voice, full of ‘realistic-sounding dialogue’.59 It was also one-dimensional, giving a ‘cheerful imaginative reality’ to the ‘lives of the young men who had volunteered’ [his emphasis]. Despite this, the Spectator review praised it for its ‘true and memorable record’.60 It is a record that Between St Dennis and St George could qualify, and challenge. Perhaps it was not terribly successful at doing so, in market terms. But Hay’s ‘record’ would later be set straight, in fiction, and in market terms too, by Ford’s Parade’s End.61 Notes 1 See Vincent J. Cheng’s essay in The Good Soldier, Martin Stannard (ed.) (New York & London: Norton, 1995), pp.384–8. 2 Quoted in Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, Vol.1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p.473. 3 Rupert Christiansen, The Visitors: Culture Shock in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000), p.58. 4 Such support was practised by Ford as editor, and proselytised upon too; a 1914 letter to R.A. Scott-James, who had just founded the New Weekly, tells him he can only trust ‘les jeunes’. Richard M. Ludwig (ed.) Letters of Ford Madox Ford (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), p.59. 5 Vita Fortunati, introduction to Vita Fortunati and Elena Lamberti (eds), Ford Madox Ford and the Republic of Letters (Bologna: CLUEB, 2002), x. 6 Fortunati, xi. 7 Both texts were published by Hodder & Stoughton in London. Page references throughout are to the first edition. 8 This phrase is one coined by Ford and Joseph Conrad to sum up their impressionistic processes. Ford sets this out in more detail in several places, including in his book on Conrad, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924) (New York: Ecco Press, 1989), p.175. 9 Ford Madox Ford, Mightier Than the Sword (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), p.207. 10 David Trotter, The English Novel in History 1895–1920 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p.163. 11 Ibid., p.163. 12 Alan Judd, Ford Madox Ford (London: Flamingo, 1991), p.13. 13 Letters, p.62. 14 William Shakespeare, The Life of Henry V (London: The New English Library), V: ii, 215–17. 15 Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), p.183. 16 Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: British, American, and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction 1914–1933 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987), xv. 17 Gary S. Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p.34. 18 Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Harmondsworth, 1998), p.223. 19 Wilson, p.731.

Making a Text the Fordian Way 213 20 Henry Noel Brailsford was an English socialist author whose books include Shelley, Godwin and their Circle (1913) and The War of Steel and Gold (1914), and political journalist. He joined the Independent Labour Party in 1907, and edited the New Leader. 21 Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p.41. 22 Wilson, p.182. 23 Ford Madox Ford, On ‘Preparedness’ in Max Saunders (ed.) Ford Madox Ford: War Prose (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999), p.70. This essay was first published in the New York Herald Tribune, for which Ford was a visiting critic, in November 1927. 24 Saunders, A Dual Life, Vol.I, p.470. 25 Ford Madox Ford, No Enemy (1929) (New York: Ecco Press, 1984), p.108. 26 Tate, p.18. Even now historians don’t necessarily publish details of the fact that, for example, the German Embassy warned the morning the Lusitania sailed that ‘all ships entering the war zone were likely to be attacked’ (Tate, p.17). Ferguson doesn’t mention this; nor does Wilson. 27 Buitenhuis, xvi. 28 Ferguson, p.232. 29 Saunders, A Dual Life, Vol.I, p.468. 30 This is not an assessment with which Buitenhuis would agree. He calls Ford’s text a ‘racist argument in which the inflated virtues of France and England are pitted against the exaggerated vices of Prussia’ (p.46). 31 Many writers donated their payment for writing propaganda to war charities. Ford did ask Masterman for payment for the first, but ‘probably didn’t get it’ (Saunders, A Dual Life, Vol.I, p.474). Lack of evidence around this arrangement is something I investigate in detail later in the essay. 32 Wilson, p.160. 33 Saunders (ed.), War Prose, p.209. 34 Ibid., p.210. 35 Ferguson, p.246. 36 H.G. Wells resigned from this agency in July 1918 due to Northcliffe’s ‘savage attacks on the German people’ (Buitenhuis, p.138). 37 Ferguson, p.46. 38 Circulation rose from 946,000 before the war to 1.4 million in June 1916 (Ferguson, p.241). 39 Messinger, p.40. 40 Buitenhuis, p.15. 41 J.D. Squires published his story of British propaganda in this year (see Buitenhuis, p.15). 42 Others included Methuen, Blackwood and Sons and John Murray (see Buitenhuis, pp.15–16). The employee was H.T. Sheringham, in charge of publications. 43 John Attenborough, A Living Memory: Hodder and Stoughton Publishers 1868–1975 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975), pp.17, 48. 44 Ibid., p.75. 45 Ibid., p.75. 46 Messinger, p.36. 47 Ferguson, p.213.

214 Publishing in the First World War 48 Buitenhuis, xvi. 49 Ferguson, p.213. 50 John Feather, A History of British Publishing (1988) (London: Routledge, 2000), p.177. 51 ‘Can you approach [John] Lane about [No Enemy]?’, he writes in January 1920, though he ‘meant it to go, eventually, to Duckworth’. Quoted in Sondra Stang (ed.) The Ford Madox Ford Reader (London: Paladin, 1987). 52 Ibid., p.475. Ford returns the compliment and calls Nicoll a ‘Literary Pope’ in Return to Yesterday (1931; Manchester: Carcanet, 1999), p.137. 53 This dramatic tale of a paranoid country Squire has been republished in Trudi Tate (ed.) Women, Men and the Great War: An Anthology of Stories (New York and Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). ‘At the opening of the war the papers had struck him with a wave of panic’, Ford writes of the protagonist. ‘You have to imagine how a daily paper of the first days of war must appear to a dilettante Latinist who had not looked at such a sheet for at least fifteen years. In the last fifteen years the papers have, you know, made much progress in the conveying of excitements’ (p.269). 54 Ferguson, xxvii. 55 ‘Wellington House also used its writers to ridicule and discredit the voices of protest, like Shaw and Russell, and the statesman Lord Landsdowne’, writes Peter Buitenhuis (xvii). 56 Chapter 1 of The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad (1930) (Manchester: Carcanet, 1983), pp.1–28. 57 See Ford’s essay, ‘On Impressionism’. This essay, which dates from 1914, is published in full in Martin Stannard’s edition of The Good Soldier (pp.257–74). 58 Ferguson details the large amount of contemporary ‘war fiction’, some of which did fantasise about an Anglo-German war. However, he concludes that hardly any pre-1900 works in the genre predicted a war would be between Germany and England (p.4). He also traces the existence of healthy amounts of Germanophilia on the political left in Britain, in Oxbridge society, and amongst writers and composers (many of whom had German roots), in the first decade of the 20th century and beyond (pp.23–5). Lyn MacDonald states that even ‘twenty years earlier, the idea of war between Great Britain and Germany would have been unthinkable’ (in 1914, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989, p.7) and Trevor Wilson makes a similar point (p.17). 59 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: the First World War and English Culture (London: Pimlico, 1992), p.49. 60 Spectator, Vol.115 (25 December 1915), 919. 61 Money and critical acclaim came to Ford in New York in the late twenties as the tetralogy was completed. To William Carlos Williams the Tietjens novels ‘constitute the English prose masterpiece of their time’ (quoted in Saunders, A Dual Life, Vol.II, p.280).

12 Depicting the War on the Western Front: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Publication of The British Campaign in France and Flanders Keith Grieves

In March 1919 Hodder and Stoughton’s display advertisement in The Times drew attention to a remarkable six volume publication, headlined as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s History of the War (but actually The British Campaign in France and Flanders) and declared that ‘these books will never be superseded. They must be kept at hand for constant consultation by every student of the war’.1 Two years before the first volume of the Official History of the War was published, this six volume ‘true account of the most wonderful story in the world’ was almost complete, and by this date, the first volume had been reprinted three times, the following two volumes were in second editions, the fourth volume was about to appear and the final two volumes, both on 1918, would be ‘ready shortly’.2 Retailing at 6s (rising to 7s 6d by the end of the war), Conan Doyle’s instant serial histories of the Great War enjoyed Hodder and Stoughton’s confidence as its foremost contribution to war history.3 From the earliest weeks of the war Arthur Conan Doyle understood the need for ‘men of letters’ to become propagandists; he attended the meeting of eminent authors on 2 September 1914 at Wellington House and subsequently wrote four pamphlets, which were discreetly printed and distributed by private publishing houses in neutral countries, especially the United States.4 His popularity as a writer of detective fiction made him a formidable pamphleteer in the service of the state, a role that he had played earlier during the Boer War with The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, which presented ‘a statement of the British case to our Continental Critics’; in 1915, Conan Doyle had himself suggested that the ‘Boer War [had] prepared us for the Great 215


War’.5 In his classification of different writings in Memories and Adventures, Conan Doyle separated war propaganda from his work as the historian of the British army in France and Flanders; the detective novelist, civic leader and amateur soldier had became a ‘chronicler’, inviting notions of a constructed register of events, ordered and officially endorsed as a permanent record.6 But as the multi-volume account unfolded, his role became far more complicated, with the government regarding the enormous undertaking with suspicion, despite its conservative and nationalist historiography. Armed with the approval of Prime Minister Asquith and the Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, General Sir John French, Conan Doyle sought, and received, privileged access to participants and sources, including an ‘absolute official sanction’ to request documents from divisional and army commanders; however, war diaries, memoranda and letters were denied to him.7 His exasperation was clear in his report of an interview with French after the Battle of Loos: ‘If you want any point looked up for your history, mind you let me know and I will see that it is done’. This sounded very nice to me, who was in a perpetual state of wanting to know; but as a matter of fact I took it as a mere empty phrase, and so it proved when a week or so later I put it to the test.8 French refused to let him dedicate the first volume 1914 to him, and he subsequently wrote his own account of that year; in retrospect Conan Doyle ruefully noted, ‘I had no help but only hindrance from the War Office, and everything I got was by means which were equally open to anyone else who took the trouble to organise them’.9 As a result, a remarkable project of private scholarship unfolded amid suspicion that any such undertaking should be allowed in total war. In 1915 the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, finally committed to the compilation of official history rather than commissioning an independent author to write war histories. With document retrieval the priority, the Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence systematically retrieved war diaries from the front for the period to December 1914.10 In August 1915 this position was formalised with the declaration that ‘an authoritative popular account of the Military Operations on the Continent should be issued at the earliest moment after the war in order to forestall the publication of inaccurate or distorted accounts’.11 J.W. Fortescue, historian of the British

Depicting the War on the Western Front 217

army in the last great European war was appointed; Maurice Hankey, as Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, recognised that the new conditions of total warfare involved the state in the writing of history, and specifically in secrecy, censorship, rapid communications, the military education of staff officers and preparation for the next war. For these reasons, regimental records from the Western Front were lodged in a repository where ‘public writers’ were denied ‘indiscriminate access’.12 Throughout the war and after, this Treasury-led debate failed to reconcile the needs of the general reader, starved of news in wartime, with the expectation of detailed staff histories for post-war use in military education. Unfolding discussions in Whitehall during 1915–22 often implied criticism of contemporary histories of the war by private scholars who sought to interpret the wartime news void, especially The British Campaign in France and Flanders.13 Throughout the war Conan Doyle appealed for written sources and interviews with officers ready to recollect events or comment on portions of text; his known correspondents included some 47 generals. As a contributor, he regularly received summary accounts from the Daily Chronicle’s sources, and yet Conan Doyle often encountered distrust because he suggested that news transactions should be conducted in secrecy; the unofficial process of rescuing facts by an individual author was becoming contentious. Approaching Major-General Hugh Jeudwine, commanding the 55th Division, for papers on the Guillemont operations, he stated that ‘I should have preferred to meet you because I could, I am sure, have made it clear to you, how utterly confidential my sources are’. He continued, I am not sure of my post and think on the whole that it would be wiser not to send anything direct to me, as some busy body at the base is always capable of making trouble. On the other hand if anything were sent to your own family with instructions that I might see it, that would be absolutely safe. I would ask you however to keep the matter between ourselves, for if you refer it for advice or permission, to any higher authority then it becomes official, filters back to the War Office and there is the chance of some annoyance’14 This letter was met with puzzlement, and despite Conan Doyle solicitude, Jeudwine was adamant: ‘I sent him nothing nor did I meet him – not liking round the corner ways’.15 Conversely, Conan Doyle’s openness to participant observation was welcomed by many military officers (at divisional, brigade and


battalion levels) who recognised the importance of accuracy and proportion in a contemporaneous military history, and would immediately communicate the tribulations and achievements of the British army in lieu of an official history. Visiting wounded officers in convalescent homes or on home leave, he obtained anonymous quotations which emphasised the authenticity, provenance and reliability of the novelist’s history. In his preface to the first volume, Conan Doyle explained his historical method: I have built up my narrative from the hand or lips of men who have been soldiers in our armies, the deeds of which it was my ambition to understand and to chronicle. In many cases I have been privileged to submit my descriptions of the principal incidents to prominent actors in them, and to receive their corrections or endorsement. I can say with certainty, therefore, that a great deal of this work is not only accurate, but that it is very precisely correct in its detail.16 He told officers to whom he appealed for information that his facts were ‘correct for they have been endorsed by many who took part in the proceedings’.17 In his lecture ‘Great Battles of the War’ at the Queens Hall in March 1915, Conan Doyle made the same point regarding his ‘possession of a good deal of information which had not yet found its way into print and was unknown to the public’.18 Information was gleaned socially from his network of acquaintances, including Colonel Repington (military correspondent of the Morning Post), Conservative peers, regimental officers from the Household Division and American officers. In such company he watched Jimmy Wilde, light-weight boxing champion defend his title at the National Sporting Club on 29 April 1918.19 Conan Doyle’s quest for factual accuracy found particular expression in his familiarity with the order of battle (battalions, brigades and divisions were correctly sequenced throughout the British line); outside the blue-pencilled sphere of military authority, he placed much emphasis on the need to ‘rescue facts’ which, he argued erroneously, would be lost ‘for our generation’.20 He took great pride in this literary accomplishment, reconstructed from drawing-room, hospital ward and café lunch meetings as a memorial tribute to the British armies in France, and this meant that there was less room for tales of supply and logistics; the key components of the order of battle – time and date, location, units, event – were carefully positioned and reflected


19th-century practices in writing military history.21 In The British Campaign in France and Flanders these micro-histories of the line loomed larger than the significance of strategic direction. Conan Doyle’s insistent chronology of events, in sections of the frontline, strove to convey stories of simultaneous and contingently linked events, rendered piecemeal in a compartmentalised narrative; points were linked mechanically, for example, ‘this small chronicle of huge events has now brought the southern half of the Third Army to the same date already reached in the previous chapter by the northern half’.22 Elsewhere the reader might be asked to recall ‘the general situation upon March 27’ or the details of an incomplete phase, and be propelled to another portion of the line.23 Problematically in this war, military outcomes were rarely available at the day’s end in specific portions of the line. As this ‘German war’ became a world war and advances and retreats degenerated into static campaigns of attrition, the traditional battle narrative was tested to destruction. From the home front, civilian writers faced profound challenges in representing the meaning and scale of modern battles, which quickly outgrew reference points from 19th-century wars of colonial expansion, such as Conan Doyle’s The Great Boer War.24 In his depiction of supply arrangements during the Mons retreat Conan Doyle wrote anachronistically of the ‘Chief of Commissariat’, General Sir William Robertson. He was contacted by Conan Doyle in September 1916 and drew attention to ‘the very capable, hard working and loyal subordinates who carried out my general instructions’.25 This remark found resonance in the volume, where Doyle observed that Robertson appreciated ‘the work of his subordinates who, wet or fine, through rainfall or shell-fall, passed the food forward to the weary men at the front’.26 Soon afterwards Conan Doyle sought Robertson’s permission to dedicate his ‘History of the War’ to him, which was granted. Conan Doyle again emphasised his meticulous approach, while also hinting at obstacles which disrupted his publication schedule: The first volume 1914 appears in November. I think it will be a worthy history for I have taken great pains, tho’ with every possible difficulty to get the facts right. Then 1915 and 1916 will follow in order. The former is practically done. The latter involves the very intricate Somme Battle where my difficulty will be the composition of the divisions & dates of their coming into action, but in time I shall no doubt be able to get it right.27


Inevitably Conan Doyle’s work was ‘bowdlerized and blue-pencilled’; censorship delayed the publication of the 1914 volume. BrigadierGeneral John Charteris, Chief of Intelligence at General Headquarters, demanded changes in the draft of the 1915 volume, declaring that ‘it contained a very great deal of stuff which would be of help to the German Intelligence’.28 The vigorous blue-pencilling extended to depictions of ‘heroic resistance’, such as the iconic L Battery Action on 1 September 1914. Conan Doyle questioned the War Office’s suspicions of such descriptions, urging that units be named to encourage recognition of specific regimental deeds and thereby support recruiting.29 He tenaciously pursued this in numerous letters to the press despite reminders of ‘official reticence’. The War Office finally lifted objections to the identification of units and battalion commanders for the 1917 volume, and subsequent editions of the earlier volumes named specific units.30 Personal courage, heroism, steadfast loyalty and dutiful leadership in the frontline was a leitmotif of The British Campaign In France and Flanders, especially regarding the German offensive in March 1918. For example, Doyle observed that Colonel Dimmer of the Berkshires ‘who had won the V.C. in the early days of the war, was shot through the head leading his men on horseback to the very lip of a trench full of Germans. Horse and groom fell before the same volley’.31 Describing the battle raging around the HQ of the 7th Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, Conan Doyle saw ‘Colonel Impey, revolver in hand’ turning ‘the tide of fighting like some leader of old’.32 Heroic acts of selfsacrifice in defending ‘redoubts’, a term which overstated the defensive qualities of isolated posts in March 1918, were reconstructed using available documents or observed accounts from surviving participants. Of the 7th Buffs he wrote: Little is known of their fate save the pregnant facts that the front was screened all day, that repeated messages for help were received up to 8.30 in the evening, and that rifle-fire was heard from their posts till midnight. Bald words – and yet to him who can see they convey a sure picture of fading light, dwindling cartridges, and desperate men, baited from all sides and dying with clenched teeth amid the ever-flowing German hordes.33 Displaying the unity of action and purpose of leaders and led, Conan Doyle’s vignettes explicitly stated the didactic moral purpose of the volumes; in each volume, he staked a claim for martial valour and


inspirational leadership, depicted in reassuringly high diction, in a war of vast and almost unimaginable attrition. His moral, micro-historical approach emphasised personal resilience, and consequently, overwhelmed other crucial aspects of understanding the conflict (such as planning at GHQ) from which he had been, as a non-combatant, so resolutely excluded. In these enactments of soldierly duty those who watched and waited at home read scripts of exemplarity. Geoffrey Cubitt’s definition is pertinent; ‘the transmissibility of moral or ethical qualities from one existence to another, not through abstraction and theorisation but through the pedagogic force of practical example’.34 Conan Doyle’s depiction of General ‘Boy’ Bradford exemplified this notion of natural leadership. ‘This young soldier who at the age of twenty-five commanded one of the brigades of the Sixty-second Division, was one of the great natural leaders disclosed by the war’, he wrote; it was ‘a cruel fate which took him away between full promise and full performance’.35 Conan Doyle’s fictional writing was similarly imbued with the expectation that disorder in society could be overcome through the action of leaders, such as Sherlock Holmes. Alongside individual exemplary lives, his depiction of brigades and divisions also emphasised corporate and national constancy, despite the effects of relentless wastage, so that by 1918 infantry battalions were far removed from the circumstances of their creation. The depiction of platoon, company and battalion level incidents created a mosaic of military encounters, which were not signified by commensurate coverage at the level of strategic direction. After a fulsome unfolding of the Battle of Cambrai, Conan Doyle’s summary of the overall situation by December 1917, lacking links to the home front and contextual regard for deteriorating civil-military relations, reflected the limitations of his history. It was also relentlessly optimistic: The year 1917 had been a very glorious one both to the French and to the British armies, which, pursuing their system of the limited objective, had hardly met with a single repulse in a long campaign. The victories of Arras, Messines, Langemarck, Passchendaele, and Cambrai were added to the great record of Sir Douglas Haig and his men, while the French, save for the losses incurred in their great April attack, had an unbroken record of success.36 Conan Doyle admired Haig and hoped that the third Battle of Ypres in 1917 would become a classical feature of British military history;


unfortunately, he lived to see the Passchendaele campaign become an early example of contested historiography, much of it beyond his comprehension.37 Refusing to deviate from Haig’s account, he noted that Haig ‘described in so lucid and detailed a despatch that the weary chronicler has the rare experience of finding history adequately recorded by the same brain which planned it’.38 Conan Doyle’s knowledge of Haig’s perspective was assisted by direct receipt of influential testimony. In December 1914 he collected a copy of his diary from Lady Haig, proof that he was one of very few admirers trusted with access to this important record; he was also one of eight recipients of Haig’s ‘Memorandum on Operations on the Western Front, 1916–18’, but only on condition that quotations from it would not appear in his history.39 One of the copies of the memorandum was deposited at the British Museum in 1920, with the instruction that it should not be published before 1940.40 Haig responded warmly to Conan Doyle’s work as he had a sophisticated appreciation of the plurality of authoritative accounts that emerged as early reconstructions of wartime events; similarly, Conan Doyle’s volumes display effusive admiration for Haig, in contrast with the constrained tone adopted in depicting French.41 As a civilian with access to the press, Conan Doyle wrote imaginatively (and sometimes unrealistically) about solutions to technological and organisational problems.42 In 1917, for example, he wrote that the morning of 21 November marked a glorious moment in the ‘enterprise and brain-power of the British inventor and engineer’ because of the tank:43 The long line of tanks, magnified to monstrous size in the dim light of early dawn, the columns of infantry with fixed bayonets who followed them, all advancing in silent order, formed a spectacle which none who took part in it could ever forget. Everything went without a hitch, and in a few minutes the whole Hindenburg Line with its amazed occupants was in the hands of the assailants.44 Conan Doyle relished the exchange of information with like-minded outsiders whose approach was distrusted at the War Office; on 22 November 1917 he wrote to Colonel Stern informing him that ‘I think your tactical ideas have been brilliantly vindicated by this battle and that you should have warm congratulation from all who know the facts’.45 His correspondence with Winston Churchill suggests their agreement on the development of ‘caterpillars’; later


Churchill formally recognised the accuracy of the novelist’s account of the Mons retreat.46 However, the publication of the 1917 volume was fiercely attacked in the Times Literary Supplement by J.W. Fortescue, who criticised the absence of a strategic overview amid details about each localised portion of line.47 The prevalence of hand-to-hand encounters in Conan Doyle’s narrative indicated to Fortescue that he knew much about events, but his dependence upon unofficial sources precluded a fuller view. Fortescue suggested that these flaws arose from the piecemeal collation of primary sources from interested participants, the lack of personal knowledge of the terrain and the predilection for manoeuvrist ‘break out’ scenarios. In fact, Fortescue had raised the conundrum of writing a modern battle narrative: can it be written by a civilian looking on from afar? Conan Doyle was incensed by this review. ‘From the beginning a series of unflattering and anonymous articles have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement,’ he fumed, ‘commenting adversely upon each volume in turn, and picking out the pettiest details for animadversion’.48 Benefiting from privileged access to records as an official historian, the Spectator acknowledged Fortescue’s position as a critic of histories of the war, forcing Conan Doyle to remonstrate that a ‘large question of literary etiquette’ was at issue.49 Despite Conan Doyle’s assiduous quest for first hand accounts, the methodological gap between sanctioned work on the official history of the war and his own private research and public writing on the subject created fertile conditions for conflicting perspectives in the early historiography of the war. Unlike Conan Doyle, official historians had access to 12 million sheets of documents and 368 cabinet drawers containing 60,000 maps; despite anti-waste campaigns, the state-endorsed Interim History of the War was undertaken in the post-war years as a direct antidote to unofficial, multi-volume war histories.50 The position of the Historical Section was robustly stated in 1922: The necessity for an account founded on official documents, elaborated by statements and private records of officers and German information, has become more and more apparent. Many complaints have been heard and received with regard to the garbled and misleading accounts given in their books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Buchan and others. The writers were of course so glad to get anything to fill their pages, and accepted statements from officers who had been sent home as failures, and from those who


wished to advertise their units, while others who were doing the fighting in the various theatres of war refused them information when applied to.51 In the immediate aftermath of the war, ostensibly conformist battle narratives with an overtly nationalist conviction reflecting, as Conan Doyle suggested, the ‘passion and pain of those hard days’, competed with the new officially sanctioned histories, and later, with major narratives of disenchantment.52 By 1919 Conan Doyle had a well-established reputation as a public controversialist; for example, in the volume January to July 1918 he attempted to rehabilitate the reputation of the Fifth Army and its commander, General Sir Hubert Gough. Unlike previous volumes of The British Campaign in France and Flanders which rarely discussed the politics of high command, this one was dominated by descriptions of the over-extended line, the insufficiency of reserves and the inevitability of overrun fortifications. Adopting an accusatory tone, he argued forcibly that Gough was ‘sacrificed without any enquiry as to the dominant force which he had to face, or as to the methods by which he mitigated what might have been a really crushing disaster’.53 His depiction of the defence of the frontline against overwhelming odds in the days following 21 March 1918, reconstructed in many hours of interviews, was an explicit rebuttal of the ‘injustice’ of Gough’s recall.54 Conan Doyle was too implicated in his subjects to be merely a chronicler; he participated in the representation of military reputations forged (and dismantled) in the heat of battle. In the partisan and selfless defence of his friend’s reputation, he wrote to MajorGeneral Sir Frederick Maurice that it was ‘the view of all four of Gough’s Corps Commanders that he did miracles in saving the situation by his tenacity when if his line had given way there was no one between him and the high road to Paris’. 55 In this instance, Conan Doyle did not depict Carey’s force as an improvised defence force holding the line at a critical juncture, but as an effort that had been ‘pre-arranged by the wise foresight of General Gough’. 56 Over two decades later, Gough publicly returned this support in the preface to Adrian Conan Doyle’s biography of his father.57 Conan Doyle viewed army and corps commanders as men of wide experience and sympathy who upheld the professionalism and honour of the regular army, and he conceded that this may have coloured his judgement: ‘a narrative written at the time reflects the warm emotions which these events aroused amongst us more clearly than the more measured


story of the future historian can do’.58 This admission acknowledged the limitations of objectivist historiography. Any expectation that controversy could be banished by official histories was dismissed shortly after Fortescue’s review in the Times Literary Supplement; his drafts of the campaign up to 12 September 1914 drew acrimonious debate in the Historical Section and led to his departure in August 1919. The historical method of using dispatches from GHQ supplemented by corps and divisional reports did not eradicate contention; the arrival of documents from the old frontline and voluminous German sources provided no greater prospect of scientific truth, and its watchwords, reliability and impartiality.59 Instead, the official definition of an authoritative history emphasised that criticism of government, and by extension GHQ, should be avoided. A feature of preparations for the first volume, published in April 1921, was the criticism of portions of text by senior military officers; intriguingly, it was compiled by BrigadierGeneral J.E. Edmonds, who had regarded Conan Doyle’s initial request for information with such suspicion in 1915, and had accepted the task of ‘avoiding all but implied criticism’ while consulting participants.60 It was the official selection of the despatch, report or entry as the compiler’s first record, which ensured that the frame of reference was officially sanctioned and that it yielded only in detail when shared with participant officers. In composition and purpose, the official history utterly opposed the serial histories, especially that undertaken by Conan Doyle. Deeply immersed in sentimental nationalism, Conan Doyle ignored the operational significance of advances and retreats; ironically, this coincided with a shift in historiography away from overt patriotism and towards rationalist methodology. His own admiration of martial values and espousal of ‘all-out’ war subverted his ostensible intention to ‘rescue facts’ and offer a definitive representation of British forces on the Western Front. For a celebrated author who considered it a ‘privilege to be their chronicler’, the refusal of British high command to support his historical enterprise was saddening. Consequently, the last two volumes occupied an increasingly peripheral space, with individual anecdotal tales of valour, endurance and sacrifice predominating. If anything, Conan Doyle glanced at a central hazard of contemporary historiography and acknowledged that even memorial volumes could be contentious. This shift of emphasis was acknowledged in an interview with Lloyd George in 1917; ‘he was interested to hear how I had worked upon my history, and remarked that it was probably better come from direct


human documents than from filed papers’, Doyle conceded.61 Discussing the exploits of the Welsh Division at Mametz Wood, Lloyd George endorsed Conan Doyle’s personal and anecdotal approach: ‘He listened with interest to an account which I was able to give him of some incidents in that fight, and said that it was a beautiful story’.62 Despite everything, Conan Doyle retained a deep sense of the authenticity of his war history during the 1920s. Of The British Campaign in France and Flanders, he wrote that he would consider it to be the ‘greatest and most undeserved literary disappointment of my life if I did not know that the end is not yet and that it may mirror those great times to those who are to come’.63 His response to the official history conveyed the lack of temporary propagandist intent in his own writing; ‘I have since read the official account so far as it has gone’, he observed, and ‘find little to change in my own, though the German and French records are now available to broaden the picture’.64 In 1929 he advised Edmonds that the draft of the battle of Loos for the official history was ‘too vivid’ and argued that descriptions of panic in one division should be avoided in order to prevent sensationalist journalism.65 Ten years after the war, different motivations still separated him from the official historians. Revised and republished as the single volume The British Campaigns in Europe 1914–1918 at 10s 6d in 1928, Conan Doyle’s history now included accounts of the Italian and Salonica fronts; it was described by the military historian Cyril Falls as a ‘remarkable useful work of its kind’ and was reprinted in the Second World War.66 Surviving library date stamps on the fifth volume indicate it was borrowed from a Surrey branch library six times in 1944, and a further ten times from 1963 to 2005, suggesting an unexpected longevity. Similarly, the 1914 volume was issued on 13 occasions from a Surrey branch library during the period 1970–75; this copy was not transferred to the reserve until the 1990s. In 1994 the television film The Somme: A hell on earth was accompanied by a booklet which contained extracts from the 1916 volume, again suggesting that Conan Doyle’s instant history remained available (and read) in county libraries throughout the 20th century.67 Like many patriotic war historians, Conan Doyle brought his pre-war advocacy of national efficiency and imperialism to bear in arguing for the redemptive quality of war. In His Last Bow (1917), Sherlock Holmes declared that ‘a cleaner, better, stronger land will be in the sunshine when the storm has cleared’.68 This regenerative aspect to The British Campaigns in Europe reflected the private sacrifice of Conan Doyle’s own household, which by his own admission ‘suffered terribly in the


war’.69 His wife’s brother and two nephews were killed on active service, as were relations from his first marriage. In 1918 both his son Kingsley, and his brother Innes (a divisional adjutant general) died of pneumonia. Three brothers of Miss Loder Symonds, who lived with the family at Crowborough, were killed and the fourth was wounded. The history became a memorial tribute to his fallen son and brother, from whom he had learned much about the frontline. At the end of the revised history a spiritualistic exhortation was evident in reflections on the impact of war on individuals and those they knew, ‘Strong men are shaken to the soul with the hysteria of weaklings, and balanced brains are dulled into vacancy or worse by the dreadful sustained shock of it’.70 As he continued work on the final volumes in 1919 Conan Doyle gained solace from bereavement by attending séances; in lectures (published as The New Revelation) he described his psychic experiences. Facing the difficulty of accepting death on such a scale, Conan Doyle became an energetic advocate for the spiritualist movement.71 At a meeting of the Spiritualists National Union at the Albert Hall on 27 April 1919 he reported from a séance that ‘the spirits of the fallen were depressed by the note of sadness introduced into memorial services’.72 Sir Henry Rider Haggard attended his lecture at Hastings on 12 January 1919 and noted that Conan Doyle ‘preaches a most comfortable doctrine, so earnestly indeed that he travels all over England giving these lectures in order to make converts to the creed’.73 Conan Doyle believed that the gates to the dead ‘are not shut, but only ajar, if one does show earnestness in the quest. Of all those that I have mentioned, there is but one from whom I have been unable to obtain clear proof of posthumous existence’.74 In his declining years Conan Doyle worked tirelessly on his war histories alongside his writings and extensive speaking tours on spiritualism; both were forms of public service as non-profit making prose memorials in remembrance of the fallen.75 In contrast, Sherlock Holmes, having secured the safety of the fleet in 1914, remained in retirement on the South Downs during the war. His Last Bow was a late contribution to the invasion scare genre in which Holmes successfully stops the Kaiser’s secret agent Von Bork; ‘It would brighten my declining years’ Holmes declared, ‘to see a German cruiser navigating the Solent according to the minefield plans which I have furnished’.76 This piece of Holmesian magic might have reassured the French general who asked Conan Doyle, on a visit to the Western Front, ‘Sherlock Holmes, est ce qu’il est un soldat dans l’armée Anglaise?’77 Despite


demands from the front, the rheumatoid Holmes was not remobilised to bring detective succour or facilitate the redemption of society in total war.78 Instead, Conan Doyle offered his readers a history of the conflict overlaid by the personal drama associated with the fate of the British Expeditionary Force.79 Shortly before he died, Conan Doyle arranged for the sale of his Criminological Library at Sotheby’s, which included many manuscripts of Sherlock Holmes stories; in disbelief, the literary trustees assumed that the books must have been stolen and the Metropolitan Police mounted a transatlantic enquiry in co-operation with the FBI.80 Fortescue’s evaluation that the final volume of The British Campaign in France and Flanders would ‘share the fate of Entick’s “History of the Seven Years War”; and if the reader has never heard of Entick we shall say no more’ was undoubtedly harsh.81 At the forefront of Hodder and Stoughton’s selected great books on the war, it did not become the cornerstone of ‘the most wonderful story in the world’; Conan Doyle admitted that his passionately and unofficially resourced instant serial history had encountered the problem of maintaining an ‘accurate and historical proportion while writing contemporary history’.82 Dutifully self-mobilised and disappointed not to be in high public office (he wore the uniform of the Deputy Lieutenant of Surrey on his visit to the Western Front), Conan Doyle’s depictions of the frontline attempted to reassure readers that the ‘German war’ and its outcome were not substantially different from previous conflicts, and yet, his multi-volume effort implicitly and repeatedly drew attention to the conflicted nature of First World War historiography. The bitter antagonisms of contemporary history writing and publishing had driven Conan Doyle to the limit. In a copy of the 1916 volume he inscribed, ‘Query Will I finish this book or will this book finish me?’83 Notes 1 The Times, 14 March 1919. 2 Ibid., 14 September 1917. 3 Ibid., 6 December 1918, 21 November 1916, 23 March 1917, 14 September 1917, 18 September 1917. 4 National Archives (NA) INF 4/5 Second Report on the work conducted for the Government at Wellington House, C.F.G. Masterman, 1 February 1916. It includes a schedule of literature, pamphlets and books, which lists works by Conan Doyle, p.57; M.S. Sanders and P.M. Taylor, British Propaganda during the First World War, 1914–18 (London: Macmillan, 1982), p.107; G.S. Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) p.35; and P. Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda 1914–18 and After (London: Batsford, 1989), p.14.

Depicting the War on the Western Front 229 5 J.M. Gibson and R.L. Green, The Unknown Conan Doyle: Letters to the Press (London: Secker and Warburg, 1986); The Times, 11 April 1902, pp.88–9; John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p.64; and The Times, 17 April 1915, 3 December 1915. 6 See Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures (London: Greenhill books, 1988), p.412. Hereafter abbreviated as MA. 7 Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, Kings College London (LHCMA) Edmonds mss. II/2/61, ACD to J.E. Edmonds [JEE], 4 May 1915; G. Robb, British Culture and the First World War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p.132; and C. Higham, The Adventures of Conan Doyle: The Life of the Creator of Sherlock Holmes (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976), p.245. 8 Doyle, MA, p.339; H. Pearson, Conan Doyle. His Life and Art (London: Methuen, 1943), p.169. 9 Viscount French, 1914 (London: Constable, 1919); Doyle, MA, p.335. 10 National Archives (NA) CAB 103/1 1st Report on the Work of the Historical Section, C.T. Atkinson, 12 May 1915; A. Green, Writing the Great War: Sir James Edmonds and the Official histories 1915–1948 (London: Frank Cass, 2003), pp.5–20. 11 NA CAB 103/68 M. Hankey [MH] to H.H. Asquith, [HHA] 23 December 1915. 12 Ibid.; D. French, ‘Sir James Edmonds and the Official History: France and Belgium’ in B. Bond (ed.) The First World War and British Military History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp.69–75. 13 ‘Like no previous public event, the Great War began to be turned into history almost as soon as the first shot was fired’: S. Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990), p.47. On instant histories see also Subject Index of the Books Relating to the European War, 1914–1918, Acquired by the British Museum, 1914–1920 (London: British Museum, 1922); J. Buchan, Nelson’s history of the war (London: Nelson, 1915–1919), 24 volumes; H. Belloc, A general sketch of the European War (London: Nelson, 1916), 2 volumes; The Times History of the War (London: The Times, 1914–20), 22 volumes; K. Grieves, ‘Nelson’s History of the War: John Buchan as a contemporary military historian 1915–1922’, Journal of Contemporary History 28:3 (July 1993), 535–51; H. Hall, British Archives and the Sources for the History of the World War (London: Humphrey Milford, 1925), p.26 and S. Sillars, Art and Survival in First World War Britain (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987), p.50. At Hodder and Stoughton, Conan Doyle’s work was complemented by E. Dane’s British Campaign in Africa and the Pacific (1919). 14 Liverpool Record Office (LRO) 356FIF(43) ACD to H. Jeudwine, [HJ] 30 March 1917; 356FIF (43) HJ to ACD, 11 April 1917. 15 LRO 356FIF(43) ACD to HJ, 30 March 1917 with emendation by HJ, dated 17 April 1917. 16 Doyle, The British Campaign in France and Flanders 1914 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1916), viii. Hereafter BCFF. 17 LHCMA Edmonds MSS. II/2/61, ACD to JEE, 4 May 1915. 18 The Times, 22 March 1915. 19 C. a Court Repington, The First World War 1914–1918 (London: Constable, 1920) 29 April 1918, p.292. 20 LRO 356FIF (43), ACD to HJ, 30 March 1917.

230 Publishing in the First World War 21 D.E. Graves, ‘“Naked Truths for the Asking”: Twentieth-Century Military Historians and the Battlefield Narrative’ in D.A. Charters, M. Milner and J. Brent Wilson (eds) Military History and the Military Profession (London: Praeger, 1992), pp.45–55; Doyle, The True Conan Doyle (New York: CowardMcCann, 1946) p.18; Spectator, 20 September 1919. 22 Doyle, BCFF January to July 1918 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1919), p.75. 23 Ibid., pp.70, 73. 24 Doyle, The Great Boer War (London: Nelson, 1903), preface to the final edition. 25 LHCMA Robertson MSS. 8/4/32, W. Robertson [WR] to ACD, 26 September 1916. 26 Doyle, BCFF 1914, p.134. 27 LHCMA, Robertson MSS. 8/4/33, ACD to WR, 29 September 1916. 28 J. Charteris, At GHQ (London: Cassell, 1931), 20 January 1917, p.191. 29 Doyle, BCFF 1914, p.130. Doyle referred to raising the ‘veil of secrecy’ on p.51 and specified the composition of the BEF on p.52. 30 See his letter to The Times, 18 November 1914 in Gibson and Green (eds) The Unknown Conan Doyle, p.212. For an example of a reply, see Col. R.H. Forman in The Times, 20 November 1914. 31 Doyle, BCFF January to July 1918, p.99. 32 Ibid., p.68. 33 Ibid., p.109. See also Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp.161–79. 34 G. Cubitt ‘Introduction: heroic reputations and exemplary lives’, in G. Cubitt and A. Warren (eds) Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) p.10. 35 Doyle, BCFF 1917 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1919), pp.267–8. 36 Doyle BCFF 1917, p.299. 37 Ibid., p.232. 38 Ibid., pp.237, 255. 39 Doyle, MA, p.339 and D. Winter, Haig’s Command: A Reassessment (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), pp.234–5. 40 Winter, Haig’s Command, pp.229–30. 41 Doyle, BCFF 1914, p.55. 42 See for example his letter to The Times, 27 July 1915. 43 Doyle, BCFF 1917, p.252. 44 Ibid., pp.242–3. 45 LHCMA, KCL Stern MSS. 1/17/76, ACD to Col. A. Stern, 22 November 1917. 46 Nordon, Conan Doyle (London: John Murray, 1966), pp.94–5. 47 Times Literary Supplement, 27 March 1919. 48 Doyle, BCFF January to July 1918, vi, dated 1 May 1919. See also his response to the review of the 1915 volume in Gibson and Green (eds) The Unknown Conan Doyle, p.252. 49 Doyle, BCFF January to July 1918, v, 1 May 1919. 50 NA CAB 27/212 Memorandum by the Secretary of the Historical Section, MH, prepared by E.Y. Daniels, 14 July 1922. 51 NA CAB 103/1 30.6.19 Note on the state of the historical section, Military Branch, 30 June 1919.

Depicting the War on the Western Front 231 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76

77 78

Doyle, MA, p.335. Doyle, BCFF January to July 1918, p.200. Ibid., v–vi; Spectator, 20 September 1919. LHCMA, Maurice MSS. 4/4/2, ACD to F. Maurice, 7 May 1918. Doyle, BCFF January to July 1918, p.150. H. Gough, preface in Adrian Conan Doyle, The True Conan Doyle (New York: Coward-McCann, 1946). Doyle, BCFF 1914, viii. NA CAB 103/1 Report on the state of the Military Branch, 30 June 1919. LHCMA Edmonds MSS. VII/II Experiences gained in compiling the official history of 1914–18, typescript, JEE, 1931 and NA CAB 27/212, Notes on Interim History, 1922. See also C.E.W. Bean ‘The Technique of a Contemporary War Historian’ Historical Studies [Australia and New Zealand] Vol.2, No.6 (1942), 65–77. Doyle, MA, p.383; Nordon, Conan Doyle, p.97. Doyle, MA, pp.382–3. Ibid., p.335. Ibid., p.335. LHCMA Edmonds MSS. II/2/204, ACD to JEE, 6 December 1929 and Edmonds MSS. II/2/203, ACD to JEE, 4 December 1929. Cyril Falls, War Books: An annotated bibliography of books about the Great War (London: Greenhill Books, 1989). The British Campaigns in Europe 1914–1918 was published by Geoffrey Bles and reprinted in 1941. G. Gliddon, Legacy of the Somme: The battle in fact, film and fiction (Stroud, Gloucs.: Sutton Publishing, 1996), p.178. Doyle, His Last Bow: Some reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (London: John Murray, 1950), p.305. Doyle, MA, p.243. Nordon, Conan Doyle, p.103. J. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European cultural history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp.58–9; Robb, British Culture and the First World War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) pp.210–11; S. Audoin-Rouzeau and A. Becker, 1914–1918 Understanding the Great War (London: Profile Books, 2002), p.218. The Times, 28 April 1919. D.S. Higgins (ed.) The Private Diaries of Sir H. Rider Haggard (London: Cassell, 1980), p.160. Doyle, MA, p.343; Higham, The Adventures of Conan Doyle, p.251. See review article by Colin McInnes ‘Peculiar Patriot’ in Spectator 9 December 1966, located in LHCMA Liddell Hart MSS. 15/6/5/3. Doyle, His Last Bow: Some reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes, p.298. The first edition appeared in October 1917 and the fourth impression in April 1919; Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words, pp.110–11. A. Conan Doyle, A Visit to Three Fronts June 1916 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1916), p.72. Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, p.8; A. Mylett, Arnold Bennett: The Evening Standard Years. Books and Persons (London: Chatto and Windus, 1974) p.375; Australian troops were reported as expressing much interest in ACD on his visit to Bellicourt; The Times, 2 October 1918.

232 Publishing in the First World War 79 Doyle, BCFF 1914, pp.50–1. 80 NA MEPO3/2764 Sotheby’s Catalogue, including sale of the Criminological library of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 16 June 1930 and three days following; newspaper extract, Saturday Evening Post, 1 October 1932. 81 Times Literary Supplement, 11 March 1920. This criticism occurred in Fortescue’s review of the last two volumes. 82 Doyle, BCFF January to July 1918, preface; Hodder and Stoughton display advertisement, The Times, 14 September 1917. 83 Inscribed on Doyle’s BCFF 1916, read at a book fair in Dorking 27 November 2005.

Select Bibliography Attenborough, John. A Living Memory: Hodder and Stoughton Publishers 1868–1975 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975). Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane. Men at War 1914–1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France During the First World War, trans. Helen McPhail (Providence, RI: Berg, 1992). Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane and A. Becker. 1914–1918 Understanding the Great War (London: Profile Books, 2002). Bayer, Hans. Das Presse- und Nachrichtenwesen der im Weltkrieg kriegsgefangenen Deutschen (Berlin: Ebeling und Hiehold Verlag, 1939). Bergonzi, Bernard. Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War, 2nd edn (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1996). Blanchard, Robert G. The First Editions of John Buchan (North Haven, CT: Archon Books, 1981). Bond, B. (ed.) The First World War and British Military History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Borné, Andre Charles. Distinctions Honorifiques de la Belgique 1830–1985 (Brussels: Servis-Creatif, 1987). Bracco, Rosa Maria. ‘Betwixt and Between’: Middlebrow Fiction and English Society in the Twenties and Thirties (Parkville: The University of Melbourne, 1990). Bracco, Rosa Maria. Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Berge, 1993). Buchan, John. Memory Hold-the-Door: the Autobiography of John Buchan (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1940). Buitenhuis, Peter. The Great War of Words: British, American, and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction 1914–1933 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987). Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). Ceadel, Martin. Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Charters, D.A., M. Milner and J. Brent Wilson (eds) Military History and the Military Profession (London: Praeger, 1992). Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Christiansen, Rupert. The Visitors: Culture Shock in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000). Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur. Memories and Adventures (London: Greenhill Books, 1988). Dictionary of British Literary Biography: British Literary Publishing Houses, 1881–1965 (London: Gale, 1981). Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson. Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (London: Bloomsbury, 1995).

233

234 Select Bibliography Eliot, Simon. Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing 1800–1919 (London: the Bibliographical Society, 1994). Feather, John. A History of British Publishing (1988; London: Routledge, 2000). Ferguson, Niall. The Pity of War (London: Harmondsworth, 1998). Fuller, John G. Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Gibson, J.M. and R.L. Green (eds) The Unknown Conan Doyle: Letters to the Press (London: Secker and Warburg, 1986). Gliddon, G. Legacy of the Somme: The battle in fact, film and fiction (Stroud, Gloucs.: Sutton Publishing, 1996). Green, A. Writing the Great War: Sir James Edmonds and the Official Histories 1915–1948 (London: Frank Cass, 2003). Haste, Cate. Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War (London: Allen Lane, 1977). Higgins, D.S. (ed.) The Private Diaries of Sir H. Rider Haggard (London: Cassell, 1980). Higham, C. The Adventures of Conan Doyle: The Life of the Creator of Sherlock Holmes (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976). Holt, Tonie and Valmai. In Search of the Better ‘Ole: The Life, the Works and the Collectibles of Bruce Bairnsfather (Horndean: Milestone Publications, 1985). Hynes, Samuel. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990). Hynes, Samuel. The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1997). Judd, Alan. Ford Madox Ford (London: Flamingo, 1991). Kent, D. From Trench and Troopship: the Experience of the Australian Imperial Force 1914–1919 (Alexandria, New South Wales: Hale and Iremonger, 1999). Laity, Paul. The British Peace Movement, 1870–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). Lewis, David R. (ed.) Remembrances of Hell: The First World War Diary of Naturalist, Writer and Broadcaster Norman F. Ellison (Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1997). Lownie, Andrew. John Buchan, The Presbyterian Cavalier (London: Constable, 1995). Ludwig, Richard M. (ed.) Letters of Ford Madox Ford (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965). Lyons, M. and L. Taksa. Australian Readers Remember: An Oral History of Reading 1890–1930 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992). MacDonald, Lyn. 1914: The Days of Hope (London: Penguin, 1987). McAleer, Joseph. Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). McMullin, Ross. Will Dyson: Cartoonist, etcher and Australia’s finest war artist (London: Angus & Robertson, 1984). Messinger, Gary S. British Propaganda and the State in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). Middlebrook, Martin. The First Day on the Somme: 1 July 1916 (London: Penguin, 2001).

Select Bibliography 235 Mylett, A. Arnold Bennett: The Evening Standard Years. Books and Persons (London: Chatto and Windus, 1974). Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). Omissi, David (ed.) Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters 1914–1918 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). Paris, Michael. Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). Prior, R. and T. Wilson. The Somme (London: Yale University Press, 2005). Pugsley, Christopher. Te Hokowhitu A Tu: The Maori Pioneer Battalion in the First World War (Auckland: Reed, 1995). Rae, John. Conscience and Politics: The British Government and the Conscientious Objector to Military Service 1916–1919 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). Robb, G. British Culture and the First World War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Roshwald, Aviel and Richard Stites (eds) European Culture and the Great War: the Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Sanders, M.L. and Philip M. Taylor. British Propaganda During the First World War, 1914–18 (London: Macmillan, 1982). Saunders, Max. Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, Vol.1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Saunders, Max (ed.) Ford Madox Ford: War Prose (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999). Seal, G. Inventing Anzac: the Digger and National Mythology (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2004). Sillars, S. Art and Survival in First World War Britain (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987). Smith, Angela. The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War (Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2000). Smith, Janet A. John Buchan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). St John, John. William Heinemann: A Century of Publishing 1890–1990 (London: Heinemann, 1990). Stallworthy, Jon. Wilfred Owen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). Summerskill, Michael. China on the Western Front: Britain’s Chinese work force in the First World War (London: M. Summerskill, 1982). Tate, Trudi (ed.) Women, Men and the Great War: An Anthology of Stories (New York and Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Tate, Trudi. Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). Taylor, Philip M. British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). Todman, Dan. The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon and London, 2005). Trivedi, Harish. Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1993). Trotter, David. The English Novel in History 1895–1920 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). Turbergue, Jean-Pierre. Les journaux de Tranchees: 1914–1918 (Paris: Le Grand Livre de Mois, 1999).

236 Select Bibliography Warren, A. (ed.) Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Williams, J.F. Anzacs, the Media and the Great War (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1999). Wilson, Charles. First With the News: the History of W.H. Smith 1792–1972 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985). Wilson, Trevor. The Myriad Faces of War (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). Winter, Denis. Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London: Allen Lane, 1978). Winter, Denis. Haig’s Command: A Reassessment (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Winter, Jay. The Great War and the British People, 2nd edn. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003).

Index Key: References to tables and illustrations are in bold. References to footnotes are followed by ‘n’. Adam, H. Pearl, 150, 155 Aitken, Max, 188 see also Lord Beaverbrook Allatini, Rose, 4, 17, 20, 55n All About the War: the Indian Review War Book, 63, 70–5 An English ABC for Little Willie and Others, 150, 152 Anand, Mulk Raj, 63 Angus and Robertson, 98 Anstruther, Dame Eva, 12, 96 ANZAC (Australia New Zealand Army Corps), 7, 93, 105, 106 Anzac Book, The, 105, 106 Anzac Bulletin, The, 103, 106 Army Service Corps, 23, 138, 139, 142, 143 Arnold, Edward, 14, 22 see also Edward Arnold (publisher) Arras, 23, 189, 221 Asquith, Sir Herbert, 16, 190, 204, 206, 216 Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane, 94, 106, 135, 145n Aussie: the Australian Soldiers’ Magazine, 104, 106, 130 Australian Comforts Fund, 96 Australian War Memorial, 95 Ayres, Ruby M., 17, 21 Bairnsfather, Bruce, 105, 162–6, 173, 175 Barrie, J.M., 204, 208 Basu, Bhupendranath, 20, 73, 76n Basu, Nandalal, 66 Beaverbrook, Lord, 21 see also Max Aitken Bell, Clive, 52 Belloc, Hilaire, 182 Bennett, Arnold, 49, 204, 208 Besant, Annie, 70, 74

Between St Dennis and St George: a Sketch of Three Civilizations, 203–12 Bible, The, 98, 103 see also New Testament, The and Old Testament, The ‘Black Cat’ cigarettes, 173, 174 Black Gang, The, 122, 125 Blackwood’s Magazine, 116 Blast, 66 Bloomsbury Group, the, 52 Boer War, the, 181, 215, 219 Bookman, The, 16 Boys’ Own Paper, The, 100 Bracco, Rosa Maria, 114, 125 Britain’s War by Land, 193, 195 British Campaign in France and Flanders, The, 6, 215–26, 228 British Museum, 131, 133, 222 British Times, The, 89 British War Library, 13 Brooke, Rupert, 15, 23, 113, 114 Bryce Report on Alleged German Atrocities, the, 21, 205 Bulldog Drummond, 115, 121–5 Bulletin pour les prisonniers français et anglais, 86 Bulletin, The, 102 Buchan, John, 6, 17, 21, 37, 38, 99, 181–201, 204, 208, 223 Buitenhuis, Peter, 2, 3, 7n, 18, 33, 55n, 134, 187, 189, 191, 205, 213n, 214n Buxton, Dorothy, 50–1, 54, 57n Bystander, The, 162, 163 Caine, Sir Thomas Henry Hall, 99 Callewaert, A., 193, 196, 197 Cambrai, 221 Cambridge Magazine, The, 48, 49–51, 132 237

238 Index camps, prisoner of war and internment Barcelonette, 85 Ellwangen, 86 Feltham, 80 Göttingen-Ebertal, 79, 80, 81, 82, 88, 90 Ingolstadt, 79 Knockaloe, 79, 87, 88, 89 Monistrol sur Loire, 80 Montbrison, 80 Münster, 79, 88 Nuremberg, 87 Ohrdruf, 79, 81 Rastatt, 80 St Rambert, 80 Salzwedel, 80 Schneidemühl, 89 Sennelager, 87 Stendal, 85 Stobs, 79, 89 Wetzlar, 80 Würzburg, 87 Zwickau, 87 Camp Education Department, 12 Camps Library, 12, 96, 97 Cassell, 23 censorship, 5, 79, 83–5, 88, 220 Challenge, 122, 123, 124, 125 Chapman & Hall, 23 Chatto & Windus, 150 Chicago Daily News, The, 189 Christian Students Union, 83 Churchill, Winston, 16, 222, 223 Clarendon Press, 20, 23, 195 see also Oxford University Press Collins, 13–14 Coo-ee, The, 105 see also Kia Ora Coo-ee, The Corelli, Marie, 99, 101 Cullen, Stephen, 114, 115, 125

Daily News and Star, The, 30, 150, 190 Daniel, C.W., 4, 17, 47 Dennis, C.J., 98, 99, 102 Dent, J.M., 13, 20, 21, 22 see also Everyman’s Library Despised and Rejected, 4, 17, 55n Deutscher Blätter, 88 Devi, Swarnakumari, 63 Dickens, Charles, 82, 99 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes, 48, 49, 53 DORA (Defence of the Realm Act), 5, 17, 31, 46, 51, 55n, 185 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 6, 18, 19, 99, 182, 215–32 Dyson, Will, 171, 172, 173

Daily Chronicle, The, 30, 160, 217 Daily Express, The, 30, 31, 35 Daily Graphic, The, 150, 153, 169 Daily Herald, The, 171, 173 Daily Mail, The, 30, 31, 35, 116, 121, 171, 173, 207 Daily Mirror, The, 148, 149, 151, 155, 173

G.A. Natesan and Co. (publisher), 70 Gallipoli, 22, 23, 62, 93, 98, 105, 107, 129, 140 Gandhi, M.K., 63, 70, 73, 74 Garvice, Charles, 99, 101 Gassert, Imogen, 7, 47, 55n George Allen & Unwin, 17, 21, 23, 47 Gibbs, Philip, 19, 191

Echo and Evening Chronicle, The, 160 Edward Arnold (publisher), 14 Ellison, Norman, 157 Emmanuel, Walter, 158, 159 Evening News, The, 29 Everyman’s Library, 13 see also Dent., J.M. Eyre & Spottiswode, 194, 195 Falls, Cyril, 114, 226 Feather, John, 23, 208 First Hundred Thousand, The, 102, 211 see also Hay, Ian Final Count, The, 122, 123 Flanders, 71, 135, 196, 216 Flotilla Echo, The, 106 Ford, Ford Madox, 6, 19, 202–14 Fragments from France, 105, 163–6 French, Sir John, 216, 222 Fry, Roger, 48, 52, 53, 54 Foreign Office, 51, 83, 132, 181, 188, 190, 197 Fussell, Paul, 1, 61, 62, 114, 125

Index 239 Glo’ster Gazette, The, 144n, 145n Good Soldier, The, 6, 202 Gould, Nat, 99, 100 Grave, Charles, 160, 161 Graves, Robert, 14, 33, 62, 114 Greenmantle, 188, 189 Hague Convention (1907–10), 78, 82 Haig, Douglas, 12, 181, 189, 190, 221, 222 Hardy, Thomas, 49, 62, 204 Harmsworth, Alfred, 17, 148 see also Lord Northcliffe Harrison, Jane Ellen, 49 Heath Robinson, William, 160, 161, 162 Haselden, William Kerridge, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 155, 162, 167, 173, 175n Hassall, John, 157, 158, 159, 167 Haste, Cate, 35, 42 Hay, Ian, 17, 102, 115, 211, 212 Headley Brothers, 47 Heinemann, William 14, 15, 17, 19, 22 see also William Heinemann (publisher) Herbert, A.P., 140 Hobhouse, Mrs Henry, 17, 20, 21 Hodder & Stoughton, 11, 16–17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 33, 34, 37, 113, 116, 122, 127n, 187, 207, 209, 215, 228 Hogarth Press, 52 Hornby, Frank, 163 Hueffer, Ford Madox see Ford, Ford Madox Human Touch, The, 116 Huns’ Handbook – for the Invasion of England, The, 160, 161 Hynes, Samuel, 114, 118, 125, 188, 202, 211 Imperial War Museum, 19, 95, 131, 175 Indian Ink: Splashes From Various Pens, 63–70, 71, 75 Indian Review, The, 70 Indian Review War Book, The, see All About the War: the Indian Review War Book

Information, Department of, 38, 191 Intelligence Corps, 190 Jesse, F. Tennyson, 15 Jim Brent, 116, 117 John Walters, 116, 117 Journal de Genève, 48 Jouve, Pierre Jean, 48, 52–4 Jutland, 191, 193, 195 Keep Smiling!, 157 Kia-Ora Coo-ee, The, 104, 105, 106 see also, Coo-ee, The Kitchener, Lord, 136, 155, 157, 216 see also War Office Kipling, Rudyard, 42, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 99, 114, 139 Koran, the, 102 Labour Party, 35, 37 Land and Water, 167, 168, 169, 182, 189 Langemarck, 221 Leavis, Q.D., 117 Leete, Alfred, 157, 158 libraries, 5, 12, 35, 79, 80, 95, 96, 97, 100, 117, 131–4, 183, 226 see also Camps Library Lieutenant and Others, The, 116, 121 Listening Post, The, 139 literacy, 2, 86, 91n, 95 London Scottish Regimental Gazette, The, 136, 198 London Voluntary Aid Detachment, 18 Loos, 190, 216, 226 Lusitania, sinking of, 205, 206 Macmillan, 11, 13, 19, 65 MacDonald, Lyn, 1, 7n Manchester Guardian, The, 49 Masefield, John, 49, 204 Masterman, Charles, 18–19, 20, 21, 204, 205, 207, 208 see also Wellington House Men, Women and Guns, 116 Messines, 221 MI7 (b), 164 middlebrow fiction, 114, 115

240 Index Mightier Than the Sword, 203 militarism, 3, 172 Minden Magazine, 142 Ministry of Information, 164, 181, 191 Mons, 219, 223 Morrow, George, 155 Mr Standfast, 188, 189 Morning Post, The, 49, 51, 218 Mudhook, The, 140 Mufti, 115, 116, 121 Mumby, F.A., 12, 13 Murray, John, 22 Naidu, Sarojini, 63, 70, 72 Namur, 187 Nandy, Ashis, 73 Naoroji, Dadabhai, 72 Natesan, G.A., 76 Nation’s Library, 13 National Council Against Conscription, 35 National Labour Press, 47 National War Aims Committee, 27, 35–8, 40–3 Nehru, Jawarharlal, 72 Nelson’s History of the War, 181–8, 190, 191, 193, 195, 196 Neuve Chappelle, 22 New Testament, The, 12, 98 see also Bible, The, New York Times, The, 18 Newnes, George, 32 Newsbasket, The, 32, 33 Nicoll, William Robertson, 16, 19, 207, 208 Night Lines, 143 No Man’s Land, 116 Northcliffe, Lord, 17, 20, 86, 166, 168, 171, 172, 173, 207 see also Alfred Harmsworth Observer, The, 35 Ogden, C.K., 48, 49, 50–1, 53, 54 Old Testament, The, 102, 118 see also Bible, The Omega Workshops, 48, 52–4 Owen, Wilfred, 61, 67, 113, 114, 136, 137

Oxford University Press, 12, 20, 193, 195 see also Clarendon Press pacifism, 17–18, 34–5, 37–8, 83, 134 pamphlets, 47, 48, 55, 195 Parade’s End, 202 Paris, Michael, 115 Partridge, Bernard, 50, 155 Passchendaele, 187, 221, 222 Pegram, Fred, 155, 156 Peninsula Press, The, 105 Pinker, J.B., 208 pornography, 131, 168 POWs, Belgian, 86 British, 83, 86, 87, 89, 90 Danish, 80 Flemish, 79, 80, 84 French, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88 German, 78–80, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89 Irish, 80 Italian, 85 Polish, 80, 84 Russian, 84, 85 Ukranian, 80 see also camps propaganda, 5, 6, 27 Publishers’ Association, 16, 23 Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record, The, 4, 5, 32, 40 Punch, 102, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 162, 173, 175 Quiller-Couch, Arthur, 49 Raemakers, Louis, 166–75 Ram, Mausa, 62, 63 Red Cross, The, 16, 83, 96 Red and White Diamond, The, 104 Red Feather, The, 130 Religious Tract Society, 19 ‘Republic of Letters’, 202, 209 Rolland, Romain, 48, 49, 53 Royal Army Medical Corps, 138, 142 Royal Engineers, 116, 138 Royal Garrison Artillery, 23, 143–4 Ruck, Berta, 17

Index 241 Russell, Bertrand, 17, 21, 47, 49, 134, 204, 210

Trevelyan, George, 204 Twenty-Second’s Echo, The, 104

Salonika, 23, 129, 226 ‘Sapper’ (Herman Cyril McNeile), 6, 17, 127n, 113–28 ‘Sapper’s’ War Stories, 117 Sassoon, Siegfried, 14, 49, 62, 113, 114 ‘Schmidt the Spy’, 156, 157, 158 Scott, Sir Walter, 99, 101 Scottish Review, The, 181 Sherriff, R.C., 115 Sergeant Michael Cassidy, 116, 118 Shakespeare, William, 68, 101, 203, 208 Shaw, George Bernard, 49, 204, 210, 211 Sherlock Holmes, 221, 227, 228 Sinclair, May, 18 Somme, 19, 22, 135, 142, 191, 195, 208, 219, 226 Sorley, Charles Hamilton, 15 Spectator, The, 181, 189, 212, 223 spiritualism, 227 Stationary Office, the, 18, 20 Stevens, G.A., 150, 152 Sullivan, Edmund, 169, 170, 171, 173

Unwin, Stanley, 17–18, 19, 20, 21, 25n see also George Allen & Unwin

Tagore, Abanendranath, 66 Tagore, Rabindranath, 61, 68–9 Thacker, Spink & Co., 64, 65 Thackeray, W.M., 99 Thirty-Nine Steps, The, 181, 188 Thomas Nelson & Sons, 19, 22, 32, 181, 182, 193, 198 Times Literary Supplement, The, 12, 121, 164, 223, 225 Times, The, 18, 29, 30, 65, 68, 72, 150, 166, 168, 186, 189, 190 translation, 5, 6, 88, 188, 210 trench journals, 6 see also individual titles

von Clausewitz, Carl, 79 Walker, Jack, 150, 153 War Office, the, 164, 188, 190, 191, 196, 197, 216, 217, 220, 222 War Reserve Collection, 131 War, The, 183–7, 190 Ward, Mrs Humphry, 18 Ward, Sir Edward, 12 Watt, A.S., 18 Wellington House, 2, 3, 4, 5, 18–21, 24, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 204, 205, 207, 208, 215 see also propaganda Wells, H.G., 18, 33, 114, 171, 204 W.H. Smith & Son, 4 When Blood is Their Argument: an Analysis of Prussian Culture, 203 William Heinemann (publisher), 14–16, 19, 23 see also Heinemann, William Williams, Ernest Hodder, 16, 19 Winter, Denis, 136 Winter, Jay, 1, 33, 34 Wiper’s Times, The, 130, 135, 146n Woolf, Leonard, 47 Woolf, Virginia, 52 Wormlet, The, 145n ‘X’ Press, The, 106 Yandoo, 104 YMCA, 12, 83, 96, 97, 102, 130 Ypres, 22, 188, 190, 196, 197, 221 Zuckmeyer, Carl, 61

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