Churchill's Wizards (3 page)

Sometimes the reporters had to carry their own copy back to Fleet Street, staying a few hours before crossing the Channel again to France. They wore civilian clothes, had no military passports, and carried bags of money to hire cars at exorbitant prices, to live in hotels and to bribe doorkeepers in the ante-chambers of war. They were still threatened with being shot as traitors. ‘Many [journalists] were arrested, put into prison, let out, caught again in forbidden places, re-arrested and expelled from France.' Gibbs was himself arrested five times.

The forward thrust of the German forces caused the Belgian, French and British armies to retreat in the first four weeks. German brutalities panicked thousands of civilians into becoming refugees on the roads, or fighting their way on to trains. H. R. Knickerbocker commented:

But the journalists did good work. Lloyd George says in his
War
Memoirs
that Kitchener's military briefings were terse almost to the point of unintelligibility, so the first clear news the British Cabinet itself got about the desperate fighting retreat of the British army was from Arthur Moore's report in a special Sunday edition of
The Times
on 30 August ‘that had escaped the censor'. The contagion of fear from the war zone was palpable. ‘The shadow of its looming terror crept across the fields of France,' wrote Gibbs in 1914, ‘though they lay golden in the sunlight of the harvest month.'

In contrast the Germans wanted both their own and foreign newspapers to trumpet their awesome advance. When the veteran American war correspondent Richard Harding Davis witnessed the
German army marching unopposed into Brussels on 20 August 1914, he noticed the disconcerting power of their uniforms to deceive and disguise. Feldgrau (‘field grey') ‘held the mystery and menace of fog rolling toward you across the sea':

Nothing galvanises the British quite like being despised by Germans. A canny staff officer at British GHQ put the British Expeditionary Force on their mettle by telling them (untruthfully) that Kaiser Wilhelm II had called them ‘General French's contemptible little army'. The title ‘Old Contemptible' became a badge of honour.

My mother's father, Geoffrey Page, was in that BEF and went off to France with them in August 1914. Second Lieutenant Page, son of the vicar of Mountfield in Sussex and not long out of Sandhurst, was proud, at the age of 20, to be leading fifty or so men of No. 3 platoon, A company, 2nd Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers. When he disembarked in France in 1914 it was his first time abroad and he had never heard a shot fired in anger. For a modern reader, two themes emerge from the diary that he should not have kept: the shock of the new, powerful technologies of twentieth-century warfare – aeroplanes, artillery and machine guns – and the men's need to find shelter from them.

Early on the morning of 26 August, his platoon had barely scraped lying-down trenches in the stubble and stooks of a wheat field north of Longsart Farm near Esnes when German shrapnel broke over their heads, and machine-gun bullets began chopping up their parapets of dirt and straw. His platoon made their stand at the extreme left of the five-mile British line at the Battle of Le Cateau, from which only nine escaped. In the continuing retreat from Mons to the Marne, Geoffrey Page's diary shows an obsession with spies, because being seen and spotted brings down violent retribution.

John Buchan's fiction caught the zeitgeist of 1914, the spy mania and invasion paranoia that marked the start of the Great War, especially along the North Sea coastline between Cromer and Dover. About 120 miles away from the gunfire of Le Cateau, across the English Channel in the seaside town of Broadstairs in Kent, Wednesday, 26 August 1914 was also Buchan's thirty-ninth birthday. He was recuperating from an attack of duodenal ulcers and writing a fast-paced yarn about the secret forces and hidden hands behind political events, a book which incorporated his own age into its title,
The Thirty-Nine Steps
.

John Buchan had entered
Who's Who
as an undergraduate at Oxford, been an elite administrator in South Africa, written short stories, essays, poems, history and biography, deputy-edited
The
Spectator
, and was now the prospective Unionist candidate for the Parliamentary seat of Peeblesshire and Selkirk. Since 1907 he had also been the literary adviser to the Scottish publishing house of Thomas Nelson and Sons. To keep the presses running, he had agreed to edit and write a weekly illustrated magazine called
The War
(which folded after six months) as well as almost single-handedly researching and writing a monthly partwork,
Nelson's History of the War
, more than a million words of contemporaneous narrative history which ended up as twenty-four red volumes. Buchan (who gave all his profits and royalties from it to war charities) compared himself to Thucydides writing the
History of the Peloponnesian War
in which he himself was taking part.

In this new thriller, his eighteenth book, the real Broadstairs was transmogrified into ‘Bradgate' for the dramatic climax. Further up the east coast of England, genteel Frinton-on-Sea in Essex was also in a state of high excitement in early August 1914 when a 15-year-old public-schoolboy called Dudley Wrangel Clarke came back home from the Charterhouse Officer Training Corps summer camp in Staffordshire. Already determined to become a professional soldier, he had not yet developed the talents he would later show as the genius of British deception in WW2. For now the boy was delighted to see soldiers digging up the front for defences and naval destroyers aggressively patrolling the sea, in face of a supposed ‘threatened hostile landing' in East Anglia. Further north, Great Yarmouth was full of journalists eager to scoop the story of barges imminently expected from the Frisian Islands, packed with pointy-helmeted Huns, grinding on to British summer holiday beaches.

The Royal Academician Solomon J. Solomon, author of
The
Practice of Oil Painting and Drawing
, and a still vigorous and enthusiastic man in his fifties, was spending the summer on the outskirts of St Albans in Hertfordshire. The war fever of that hot August prompted him to consider how art and painting could help hide things from the eyes of enemy Zeppelins in the skies. In his mother-in-law's large garden Solomon began furiously experimenting. He used paints and dyes he had bought as well as mud-pies and crushed leaves, staining sheets of butter muslin that he dried on the lawn and the tennis net. Then he hung the results between plants and shrubs or draped them over bamboo canes by trees and hedges, looking down from upstairs at their colours and shadows as the light slowly changed.

In September 1914 Winston Churchill was caught up in his own espionage drama in north-west Scotland. In ‘My Spy-Story', published in
Thoughts and Adventures
in 1932, Churchill relates how he went north by special train to the Highlands and was travelling west by car to visit the fleet when the flotilla commodore, who was in the back with the director of Naval Intelligence, pointed out a large searchlight mounted on the turreted roof of a Scottish baronial castle in a deer-forest near Achnasheen. As the car sped on into Wester Ross, they all tried to puzzle out what the device might actually be used for.

The Admiralty officials discussed the means by which such intelligence might get back to Germany. Submarines were causing much anxiety. After the light cruiser HMS
Birmingham
had sliced through the German submarine
U-15
on 9 August, hundreds of miles from the nearest German naval base, the Royal Navy began to understand these vessels had greater range than anyone had realised. Churchill was anxious that U-boats could be picking up wireless messages:

At lunch on Admiral Sir John Jellicoe's flagship HMS
Iron Duke
the subject came up again. Rumours about that shooting estate, involving foreigners and aeroplanes, made Churchill even more determined to investigate. He requisitioned four pistols from the battleship's armoury, just in case ‘the searchlight was an enemy signal and a Scotch shooting-lodge a nest of desperate German spies'.

Churchill led an armed and uniformed naval party back to Lochrosque Lodge, and summoned its owner. The former Liberal Unionist MP and Carlton Club member Sir Arthur Bignold was surprised to be called from his dinner to explain that he actually kept a 24-inch searchlight on the battlements only because its beam picked up the gleaming green eyes of the deer on the braes at night so the ghillies and stalkers could locate them more easily the next day for the shooting parties. Churchill found this hard to believe, although it was quite true.

Whatever the cause, the anxiety was quite understandable. No one knew the U-boats' range, and no protective defences against them were ready in harbours like Scapa Flow in Orkney. If anyone had any lingering doubts about the vulnerability of very big ships to torpedoes, the Germans scotched them dramatically in the North Sea on 22 September 1914 when Kapitänleutnant Otto Weddingen in
U-9
sank three British armoured cruisers,
Aboukir, Hogue
and
Cressey
, with the loss of 1,460 lives.

From November 1914, Churchill encouraged the development of armed Decoy Ships, ‘mystery ships' or ‘Q-Boats', to help counter the
menace of German submarines on the high seas. The deception was based on observation of their practice. Because the Germans thriftily saved their torpedoes for larger armed vessels, U-boats attacking merchant shipping would usually surface, force the merchant seamen crew to evacuate in their lifeboats and then sink the ship by holing the water line with 37 mm gunfire. Churchill's ‘Q-ships' accordingly looked like merchant navy vessels, dingy cargo ships, coasters, colliers or trawlers. They had scruffy civilian crews and they flew the Red (merchant navy) Ensign, but they also carried concealed guns ‘which by a pantomime trick of trap doors and shutters could suddenly come into action', as Churchill wrote in
The World Crisis
.

Over 300 Q-ships had gone out by November 1918, and although they claimed only eleven of the 182 German submarines sunk in WW1, their dramatic exploits stirred the British imagination that liked pirate stories.
The Wonder Book of Daring Deeds
, a typical 1930s volume of cheery British imperial propaganda, told how Lieutenant Stuart and Seaman Williams won VCs to match the one their captain, Gordon Campbell, had already won, when their Q-ship
Pargust
was torpedoed by a U-boat off Ireland on 2 June 1917. The ‘panic party' rowed away from the ship, but when the enemy submarine surfaced, screens dropped to reveal hidden guns that opened fire.

‘Deception, however, was not a British monopoly' says Edwyn A. Gray, completing the story in his book
The U-Boat War 1914–1918
:

The twentieth-century surge in camouflage and deception was not just a response to the machinery of new weapons on land, at sea and in the air, but also to the new information technologies which in time of war became dangerous. The secret war therefore aimed from the beginning to destroy or disrupt enemy communications.

Early on 5 August 1914, the crew of the British cable ship
Telconia
, offshore from Emden on the German–Dutch coastline, dealt with five German telegraph cables that ran down the English Channel to France, Spain, Africa and the Americas, grappling them, hauling them up, and
chopping the bright wires through their slimy gutta-percha sheathing.

The electromagnetic telegraph had been born in the USA in 1846, but the British Empire was the first to get wired. In 1866, Brunel's ship the
Great Eastern
laid the successful transAtlantic cable that made use of Samuel Morse's code of dots and dashes. By 1870 the UK was linked to Bombay, and the line was extended via Dutch Java to Australia in 1871. The Pacific Cable Board was set up at the beginning of the twentieth century by the governments of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to provide telegraphy within the British Empire.