Churchill's Wizards (22 page)

At Chalons, a German big gun began firing every ten minutes and everyone trooped down into the cellars. The Fête de la République, 14 July, was on a Sunday so the Germans enlivened the party with a big attack. Solomon's weekend ran into his usual problem: a grudging acceptance by the French of some points, but rejection of his idea that the Allies had been fooled for three years. Their attitude boiled down to ‘the French are cleverer than the Boche, so how could they do anything better?'

Tired from lack of sleep, and having failed to persuade Captain De Bissy, Solomon began the long rail journeys back to Paris. Dirty and bedraggled, he got a twelve-franc room at the Hotel Terminus. His luggage had been lost; he had to buy a barber-shop shave and a clean collar. While waiting around, he wrote more letters and went to see people who were often out. Lying in bed on Thursday night, Solomon heard an air-raid warning, the sirens ‘like a spider's web of sound throughout the city', but nothing happened. The Ministère de la Guerre sent him on to the Section de Camouflage et Inventions at 23, rue de l'Université.

The next Sunday Lieutenant Colonel Solomon J. Solomon, the first British
camoufleur
, had lunch at Chantilly with Captain Guirand de Scévola, the first French
camoufleur
. In the sunny garden afterwards, Solomon explained to de Scévola and his staff the photographs and models that he had brought with him. There is an over-insistent note in Solomon's report:

Solomon saw more generals and their aides as he tried to get
permission to go to the Belgian front to prove his theory. He wanted planes to bomb the area, and another aircraft to photograph the results. In early August he was at Rouen where Walter Russell took him to a Special Works factory at Marowne. Solomon thought that Royal Engineers camouflage was now run by staff who knew nothing. At Abbéville he breakfasted with Lyndsay Symington and asked him what he thought of the camouflage being made in France; Symington said that in his opinion 75 per cent of the stuff made was utterly wasted, through lack of knowledge and too much standardisation of the product.

From Boulogne, Solomon returned to the Special Works Park at Wimereux, where he had begun two years before. He was shown around by Major F. J. C Wyatt, who had supplanted him. Solomon was appalled by the monotony of the production: standard flat-top camouflage nets of one familiar pattern without regard to terrain. These factories were boring – without artistry, inspiration or grasp of the function of camouflage. Wyatt must have found him the most galling of visitors.

At the Officers' Rest Club in Boulogne, Solomon wrote letters to officials and badgered other guests with his models and photos. He spent the morning on the beach, and slept in the afternoon. Tapping his feet to Boulogne bandstand music, he sketched disguised aerodromes. He telephoned the British Mission: there was no news of the summons to Belgium he was imminently expecting.

Like a prophet, Solomon railed at the kings in command. The man had a burning vision that no one could see. How could people who did not even understand the meaning of strategic camouflage recognise it right before their very eyes? Back at Wimereux he received a letter from his wife that persuaded him to go home. Paget drove Solomon to Boulogne and endured photo analysis for an intense few minutes before the departure of the 2.30 ferry for Folkestone.

By 20 August Solomon was sitting in Hampstead Hospital with his photographs of St Pierre Capelle and Sparappelhoek, sharing them with his kite-balloonist nephew Joseph Hubert Solomon who had obtained the originals while serving in Belgium. Solomon's reading of the photos was ‘a revelation' to the young observer. His uncle explained that the reason he had never seen any traffic along a two-kilometre stretch of the St Pierre Capelle–Nieuport road was because it was camouflaged. Solomon then wrote another letter to Lord
Milner, the Secretary of State for War, urging him to direct some artillery fire on this road – this despite the fact that Milner had already told Solomon that in his opinion the absence of traffic was because it was travelling only at night, and moreover there was no reason why the Germans should make vast hangars the size of fields – think of the labour and the cost!

Soon after, the commandant of the Camouflage School in Hyde Park, John Rhodes, brought a Captain Lejeune to Solomon's studio to examine his evidence. Solomon thought Lejeune was ‘perhaps the most intelligent of all the readers and while at the studio he could find no crab in my reading. It was the first time that any official had thoroughly gone into the matter and he left, as I thought, impressed, but Rhodes afterwards told me he was still not convinced.'

Now Solomon began feeling paranoid. ‘I was smiled at as a troublesome lunatic.' He felt that ‘English gentlemen' were acting with ‘sinister promptings', and that there were people ‘behind the scenes making insinuations'. There is no hint from Solomon that any of this is anti-Semitic.

At first, however, the commandant of the Camouflage School certainly tried to give Solomon J. Solomon a fair crack of the whip. On 5 September 1918, John Rhodes wrote a letter to GHQ in Great Britain, enclosing a map reference, an enlarged photograph and an attached transparency marking the key features, and headed ‘Suspected use of artificial area Camouflage by the Germans'.

An unnamed Brigadier from MI3 at the War Office replied for GHQ Intelligence on 20 September 1918.

In September 1918, John Rhodes was in France, visiting Special Works
Parks. This time he discussed Solomon's theories about Sparappelhoek and St Pierre Capelle with GHQ in France. Just before going on eighteen days' leave, he wrote to Solomon:

Back from leave, however, Rhodes wrote to Wyatt, Officer Commanding the Camouflage Park at Wimereux, regarding ‘Suspected use of artificial area Camouflage by the Germans':

MI3 wrote again to Rhodes on 27 October:

A copy of this was also sent to Solomon who wrote back on 5 November defending himself to the General Staff. Dropping the names of Marshal Foch, General Weygand, the Secretary of State for War and the Prime Minister, he now shifted tack, pointing to new evidence further south

When the Armistice came, Winston Churchill was in the Hotel Metropole on Northumberland Avenue, waiting for Big Ben to chime eleven, ending fifty-two months of war. The war ended for Philip Gibbs where it had begun for the British Army in 1914, at Mons in Belgium. It seemed a miraculous coincidence. At 11 o'clock on 11 November 1918 the batteries stopped firing. ‘No more men were to be killed, no more to be mangled, no more to be blinded.' As the sun went down into a peaceful night, Philip Gibbs felt the fires of hell had been put out. He heard people talking happily, voices singing, bands playing.

The end of the war saw the appearance of one of its greatest parodies, Charlie Chaplin's film
Shoulder Arms
, released in October 1918. The strangest sequence is the six minutes that Charlie Chaplin spends camouflaged as a tree, running around in California's eucalypt-filled version of no-man's-land, knocking out big Germans with his sticking-out branched arms. Historically, this marked a change in the public consciousness of camouflage. What had been an official secret a few years before was now an open joke. Light-hearted Charlie Chaplin was getting laughs while Solomon Solomon was becoming more and more intense.

On 13 November 1918, two days after the Armistice that ended ‘the war to end wars', an experienced British camouflage officer arrived to survey the area of Belgium indicated by Solomon as heavily camouflaged. Taking along a photographer, this Royal Engineer camouflage officer visited a series of Flemish villages: Thourout, Ostend, Sparappelhoek, Middlekerke, Slype, St Pierre Capelle, Leke, Beerst, Vladsloo, Dixmude, Essen, Zarren, Staden and Roulers. This is the moment when Solomon's theories would either be vindicated or vanquished, because only an expert
camoufleur
had the power to pass judgement. In fact, the man who had been selected to make the judgement was Solomon's old protégé and rival, Oliver Bernard.

Bernard found some roadside brushwood screening, ‘wooden frames roughly 5' x 5' strung together, with brushwood applied vertically about 7' high', used to mask junctions and crossroads under observation, but these were not German tunnels or ‘arched road covers'. Bernard also pointed out:

Oliver Bernard could find no officer who had entered the area soon after evacuation, nor were any photographs taken: ‘there appeared to be nothing worth recording in evidence of or against the question raised in this matter.' Signing his damning report of 14/11/18, ‘O. P. Bernard, Major RE, Army Camouflage Officer, 2nd Army', the scenic artist finally squashed the portrait painter, and the practical ‘business man' had the last word:

But Solomon was unable to give up now. He made his own way to St Pierre Capelle which was largely destroyed, and to the house with no shadow. Nailed on a green board under the eaves he found a scrap of tarred brown paper which he was sure must have made up the surface of the sloping fake field. He found more paper in the rubble, some grey felt, a hardened bag of plaster of Paris, some squares of canvas over wire, but he was convinced the Germans had tried to destroy the most incriminating evidence.

It was enough for Solomon to keep his campaign going. John Rhodes became more and exasperated by what he came to call ‘the wisdom of Solomon'. Everyone had taken a great deal of trouble to consider his claims, but there were limits. ‘I consider his letter', Rhodes had written to GHQ on 10 November 1918, ‘besides being quite unjustified by the facts, to be a gross and unwarrantable reflection on the integrity, intelligence and capacity of the officers to whom he refers. I recommend that he ceases to act as honorary adviser to the Camouflage School.'

When Solomon's book
Strategic Camouflage
was published in 1920, John Rhodes's anonymous and devastating critique appeared in the right-wing
Morning Post
under the headline ‘Camouflage Gone Mad'.

As the Armistice of 11 November 1918 approached, war propaganda turned into political jockeying. Northcliffe, increasingly grandiose, wrote his own ‘Peace Propaganda Policy' of unconditional surrender
and demanded a seat at the Paris Peace Conference, while setting on his newspaper, the
Daily Mail
, to attack Lord Milner at the War Office.

On 7 November, the Ulsterman and QC Sir Edward Carson had stood up in the House of Commons. The man who once destroyed Oscar Wilde in cross-examination now turned his forensic attention on the newspaper tycoon: