Churchill's Wizards (12 page)

Winston Churchill gained experience both in and out of the trenches with the Grenadier Guards, sporting his newest headgear, a blue steel helmet given him by a French general on 5 December, in order to safeguard his ‘valuable cranium'. In 1915 the French had not only pioneered camouflage but also protective helmets for infantry. This started because General Adrian met a
poilu
or ordinary French soldier who had survived a potentially fatal head wound because he happened to keep his metal food bowl under his forage cap. The first attempt, steel skullcaps, did not give quite enough cover from shrapnel, so more depth and narrow brims were added. French helmets (which required seventy operations to manufacture) had a central ridge because they were adapted from the existing dies to make helmets for
pompiers
(firemen) and
cuirassiers
(cavalrymen). G. M. Trevelyan, serving with the Red Cross in Italy, noticed how the ‘shrapnel helmet' was gradually adopted there in the spring and summer of 1916. The first models were French, stamped ‘R.F.' for
République Française
.

The British-made, green-painted ‘Helmet, steel, Mark 1', known as a ‘tin hat' by soldiers or a ‘battle bowler' by officers, was copied in mid-1915 by its designer John L. Brodie from the ‘chapel' helmet once worn by pikemen in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. George Coppard of the Machine Gun Corps tested the resistance of the steel helmets that littered the battlefield later in the war by hitting them with a pickaxe as hard as he could:

Churchill's battalion at the front received its first 500 ‘Brodie' steel helmets on 24 January 1916. The Brodie was adopted by the US Army when it came into the war in 1917, and continued in American service until after Pearl Harbor.

The distinctive ‘coal scuttle' German Stahlhelm weighed 2½ pounds and was probably the best-designed helmet, with two integral lugs for protective visors. German machine-gunners wore specially padded, thickly armoured versions that weighed 13¼ pounds and could resist all service ammunition. (However, George Coppard claimed German helmets were easier to hole with a pickaxe. Perhaps he hit them harder.) German helmets were also in 1917 the first to be painted in disruptive camouflage patterns of brown, green and black.

When Sir John French was replaced by Sir Douglas Haig as commander-in-chief on 19 December 1915, Churchill had to accept that the brigade of 5,000 men that French had promised would be reduced to a battalion of 1,000. Field Marshal Haig signed another letter from GHQ dated 31 December 1915:

Solomon's unique promotion was probably unmatched in WW1. Going, overnight, from a private in the United Arts Rifles to lieutenant colonel in the Royal Engineers meant hurried visits to military tailors and bootmakers. On 15 January 1916 Solomon wrote to Privy Purse Ponsonby:

Ponsonby replied from York Cottage, Sandringham:

On 18 January 1916, the historic first party of British
camoufleurs
crossed the English Channel to Boulogne. Oliver Bernard gloomily remembered the torpedoing of the
Lusitania
, but Solomon was excited. It was ten years and a week since he had become a Royal Academician, and now, in another year with a lucky six, he was a lieutenant colonel leaving ‘good old England' on his way to war. Ominously, the army-commandeered London bus that met them on the quay broke down halfway to St Omer. It was a chilly night, and when they met Major General George Fowke they did not look very soldierly in their new and ill-fitting uniforms. Solomon pushed forward Paget to do the military blarney. Fowke did not know much about art or opera but he used to go to fancy dress balls at Covent Garden. ‘Is Willie Clarkson still alive?' he asked Oliver Bernard. ‘I used to get my fancy costumes from him.' ‘Bunny' Bernard, grateful to be in the forces at all and therefore more ready to adapt to his new hosts, realised quite soon that there was a great gap between Solomon and the military.

Solomon had the artistic vision to point the way to the use of military camouflage, but he had no understanding of the human and material organisation required to achieve it. There was already a class divide among the group: Solomon tended to huddle with the artists Paget, Russell and Symington and leave out the craftsmen Bernard, Harker and Holmes. His recent dealings with upper echelons – kings, generals and so on – had exacerbated a tendency towards grandiosity. Oliver Bernard disliked ‘this royal academy of camouflage, all talk of what soldiers can do, damn all to show what artists can do'. He thought Solomon was making enemies by being a know-all of theory, without the humility to find out what the military actually did and how they went about getting what they needed. Solomon dismissed all official channels of supply as ‘red tape'. Trouble started when he began blithely shopping in Boulogne instead of going via Ordnance or Royal Engineer (RE) stores. Oliver Bernard's mundane skills made Solomon call him ‘my business man'.

The first week they spent at Amiens, studying the camouflage and paintwork that the French had been doing for a year, combined with their use of
blindages
, or hardened steel plates, to protect observation
posts. The leader of the French
camoufleurs
, Guirand de Scévola, was an impressive figure, always smartly dressed, with white kid gloves. He lent nine of his
camoufleurs
to the British, who now aimed to set up their own industry and start producing materials. The first temporary workshop was a barn found by the mayor of Poperinghe; Oliver Bernard went to Paris to get special supplies of paint and cloth. (The Director of Works, J. E. Edmonds, the future official historian, refused to pay the 468 francs Bernard spent on taxis, saying he was not authorised to use such a conveyance.)

General Fowke, meanwhile, took Solomon to Wimereux near Boulogne and showed him an abandoned feldspar factory near the golf-links, 200 yards from the cliff-edge. It stood in six acres surrounded by a ten-foot wall, on a railway branch line, with an old locomotive parked by the
atelier
. The sounds of hammering came from fifteen workmen levelling the concrete floors inside. This building would become the centre of the Special Works Park, RE, Wimereux, but it would not be ready for six weeks.

Solomon's imagination, not for the last time, got out of hand. Because the building had once been leased by Germans, he decided that the railway must have been intended to bring to the factory's raised floor a long-range giant gun which could have shelled all the shipping between Boulogne and Cap Gris Nez. When practical Oliver Bernard came to explore the building, he had no such fantasies. He mapped out where the carpenters' benches would go, the machine shop, the sawmill, the paintroom, the drying room and so on, and ordered tool chests from Army Ordnance Depot, fuel from the Army Service Corps, timber from Boulogne. He got on well with Captain Foote, in charge of RE Works at Boulogne, who was mechanically minded like him, and Lieutenant Colonel Crofton Sankey, who was amused by the fanciful ‘artist officers'.

Solomon came down with a general to Ploegsteert, where Churchill was in the line, to look for a site for the observation post trees he had made in England. He tramped through muddy trenches, up ‘Strand', as they had renamed it, towards ‘Charing Cross' and the wood. Near ‘German House' a shattered oak looked like a good possibility, because it was taller than the seven-foot-high parapet of sandbags surrounding the
bois
. Peering through a glass periscope, Solomon reckoned it was only seventy yards away from the German front trench.

Then Solomon was summoned to GHQ to meet the commander-in-chief himself, Sir Douglas Haig, at a lawyer's house in the middle of St Omer. Solomon was pleased to get a handshake rather than a salute because it felt more like a social introduction. Solomon thought Haig was a well-groomed, handsome man who was rather shy, and later painted his portrait for his alma mater, Clifton College. Haig walked over to a huge map on the wall and pointed out where they needed better observation posts. ‘Is there anything I can do for you?' Haig asked solicitously. Solomon explained their art was in its infancy but he would like a field somewhere near St Omer where they could experiment on concealing guns and trenches from the air, and where staff officers could easily come and see the results.

Solomon was very full of himself when he got back, repeating to the engineer-in-chief what the commander-in-chief had said to him: ‘You go to General — and get what you want.' But Fowke the future adjutant general was not pleased at all. His face went as red as a lobster and he shouted angrily: ‘Everything has to go through me!'

Solomon was amazed. He simply could not understand bureaucracy. But it was how the administrative system worked. When F. E. Smith, the Attorney General of HM government, came to visit Churchill at Ploegsteert around this time, he was locked up for not having the correct military pass. (A flaming row then ensued between HMG and the office of the adjutant general, responsible for martial and military law, who finally offered a stiff apology.)

No one said sorry to Solomon. He felt further thwarted and aggrieved when his first ideas about covering the trenches leading towards camouflaged trees with mackintosh groundsheets were rejected by Fowke and Edmonds. Trenches soon filled with water and if you used mackintosh groundsheets the water pooled in them. Moreover, you could never quite match the smooth texture painted on the painted mackintosh to the natural surroundings. Solomon then tried making a cat's cradle of string, linking the groundsheet eyelets, into which small bundles of hay could be tied. This was not really satisfactory and the civilian prop-man Holmes, looking at it, said he would make something
to place over the groundsheet. In a couple of hours he had woven together a square yard of netting. Eureka, thought Solomon:

A correspondent in
The Times
of 3 August 1927 said that early in the war Solomon had ‘extended his work to trench protection and introduced string network interwoven with branches and leaves for overhead cover'. Solomon is usually credited as the first to think of using fishing nets instead of canvas to stretch tautly over props and poles to cover guns, stores, dumps, trenches, etc. These nets, with an average size of thirty square feet, could be threaded with strips of canvas, rags of hessian, bunches of dyed raffia, and local vegetation (‘plaited leafy twigs through meshes' as Seamus Heaney puts it) and then pegged at low angles to throw less shadow.

The flat-top net garnished with raffia is also claimed as a French invention. In April 1913 at Saint-Cyr, Major Anatole Kopenhague demonstrated its successful use to hide a platoon of men from a low-flying aeroplane. Unfortunately, Kopenhague's idea was formally rejected as ‘lacking practical application' by the bureaucrats of the French Ministry of War (in August 1914, of all months).

Whoever invented camouflage fish netting – Holmes, Kopenhague or Solomon – nearly seven and a half million square yards of the stuff, tufted with plant products, outdid six million square yards of wire netting and a mere million square yards of painted canvas sheets to become the most used screening of WW1.

At the end of February 1916, the
blindages
that Solomon had ordered from the Holborn firm arrived. The steel was lighter than that of the French models and Solomon reckoned the oval sections could be fitted together and carried in one piece. If seven hundredweight were in a cradle hoisted by a dozen men, each man still had to heft sixty-three pounds. On 1 March he informed Lord Cavan, General Officer Commanding (GOC) 14th Army Corps in Fifth Army, that the tree was ready and he wanted to come out to the Ypres Salient.

At 3 a.m. on 5 March 1916, Solomon set out in a car with Generals
Gathorne-Hardy and Wauchope to check out the tree site. They drove towards the Yser canal with the lights out and parked behind the ruined walls of the Moulin Rouge estaminet. The duckboards of Coney Street communication trench took them into the Ypres Salient leading towards the mushroom pillbox on Pilckem Ridge. Over the canal, Solomon intended to sketch and measure a willow tree and to trace where the sap should be dug. It was muddy and cold; their breath plumed. Solomon was crossing a fallen tree when he slipped and fell into the pond below. ‘That's bad!' said the general. The artist waded out laughing, thinking how his children would have enjoyed seeing their old dad in this plight. His coat had kept his body dry but his rubber boots were sloshing full and icy water had gone up his sleeves and down his neck. Sleet blew in blizzardy gusts. At long last, the chauffeur emptied his boots. Covered up in the back of the car, Solomon worried about pneumonia. He went to bed with ‘quinine tabloids and a good nip of whiskey'.