Churchill's Wizards (6 page)

He was certainly jovial and clubbable. A stalwart of the convivial Savage Club, he was also a member of the New English Art Club, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the Art-Workers' Guild and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and later became President of the Royal Society of British Artists, saying: ‘I feel I ought to accept because I am a Jew.' He was a good singer and dancer, a canoeist and an avid horseman.

A convinced Zionist, he was the first president of the Order of Maccabeans, an association of English Jewish professional men, as well as a member of the Jewish Territorial Organization, which was dedicated to finding a homeland for the Jewish people after the first scheme to settle them in Uganda had failed. And yet Solomon embraced Englishness. In 1906, one of his lucky years with a six in it, the artistic establishment of the Royal Academy elected him Academician. Solomon was ‘R. A.' d in all his glory' after painting a picture of England's national saint, St George.

Approaching his fifty-fourth birthday at the time WW1 broke out, Solomon was a well-established and ambitious painter beginning to get portrait commissions from the rich and powerful, and from large institutions like the Houses of Parliament. He had recently been to Buckingham Palace in July 1914 to paint oil-on-panel preliminary portraits of King George V, Queen Mary and Edward, Duke of Windsor for a huge canvas depicting the 1910 Coronation Luncheon held at the Guildhall.

When war broke out, Solomon signed up as a private soldier in one of the first volunteer corps for home defence, formed from older men in the arts world who could not join the Regulars or the Territorials. The United Arts Rifles had the playwright Sir Arthur Pinero as their chairman and were nicknamed ‘The Unshrinkables' from the white jerseys that were their first drill uniforms. Solomon designed their badge, a dove flaring on to a sabre (which the irreverent dubbed ‘the duck and skewer'), and got them permission to drill in the courtyard
at Burlington House in Piccadilly, as well as the right to use half of the galleries at the Royal Academy. The refreshment room doubled as the United Arts Rifles' mess and the store for their elderly Japanese rifles, although they were forbidden to leave ammunition on site.

Solomon first staked a public claim to the as-yet-unnamed field of camouflage by the very English expedient of writing a pompous letter to
The Times
. It appeared on Wednesday, 27 January 1915, under the headline ‘Uniform and colour':

Solomon had clearly read Abbott Thayer on counter-shading because his letter criticises the sameness of uniforms: ‘ … the khaki tunic is good in summer – in winter it is too yellow – but the same colour cloth clads the whole man. Here a knowledge of light and shade comes in.'

Solomon suggested darkening soldiers' caps and shoulders and lightening their trousers and gaiters, and questioned why uniforms had to be so uniform. If in each section the colour of the tunic or coat varied between the excellent winter blue of the Guards' greatcoat, a grey-green, and the present khaki, a broken effect of colouring would be obtained with advantage. He warned of the danger of shape and shadow: ‘The cap now worn detaches the men in this way from almost any setting and affords a most excellent target for the enemy marksman.'

He suggested new forms of colour assimilation:

He ended by proposing that painters and artists, ‘the makers of the arts of peace', could be useful to ‘the designers of the munitions of war'.

From the earliest days of organised human fighting, elaborate headdresses, shiny armour and shields, garish warpaint and costumes were designed to alarm the enemy, like the threat displays of other nonhuman animals. The advance to close quarters of massed units – Roman legionaries in
testudo
(tortoise) formation, covering themselves in a hard shell of shields, or deep-singing, shield-clashing Zulu impis or British heavy infantry in red coats and bearskin busbies – was intended to strike fear into enemies or panic them into running away. According to Philip Mansel's book
Dressed to Rule
, military uniforms spread through Europe between 1650 and 1720, designed, among other things, to instil

It was the development of accurate guns that did most to cause exuberant brightly coloured uniforms to give way to the familiar drab tones of the modern soldier. In the late eighteenth century special forward units of scouts, skirmishers and sharpshooters like the American Rangers, the German
Jägerbataillon
and the British Rifle Corps had already begun to wear some kind of green to maximise their cover. Guns, ‘glorious products of science', stirred life in remote places from traditional torpor, according to Winston Churchill in
My Early Life
:

When the British soldier's white helmet or pipeclay belt became the target of native musketry, ‘Tommy Atkins' began to stain his accoutrements with
chai
or tea. Khaki first appeared in the Indian Army and the word is derived from
khak
, the Urdu and Persian word for ‘dust-
coloured'. Harry Lumsden's famous Corps of Guides, one of the irregular Indian forces raised by the British in the Punjab in 1846 and used for scouting and intelligence gathering, was the first unit to wear khaki-coloured uniforms, though during the hot-weather fighting in India in 1857 many British soldiers began to dye their summer-wear unlined white cotton tunics and trousers with tea, earth and curry powder.

The Indian Mutiny was a key stage in the transformation of European field uniforms from symbolic display to aids to concealment. By 1885 stout twilled cotton khaki drill was universal in the Indian Army and the British Army in India, and in 1896 sandy brown khaki (both in cotton and serge) was approved for British Army foreign service outside Europe. The South African War of 1899–1902 against the Boers, whose own homespun clothing was coloured like the land they fought over, permanently convinced the British that bright pillar-box red was best kept for the parade ground. Muddy field-manoeuvres needed dingier or dungier battledress, though they never got the colours quite right: Kipling described the colour of British WW1 khaki as ‘gassed grass'. After colonial wars in Cuba and the Philippines, the US army similarly adopted khaki in 1902, as did the Japanese fighting the Russians in Manchuria in 1905. The entire Imperial German army turned over to
feldgrau
, field grey, in 1910. Their
Tuch
or cloth mixed grey, blue and green fibres.

Solomon took an interest not just in colours for clothing, for in the early days of the war he was carrying on his experiments with screens of dyed muslin and bamboo poles to cover trenches, according to his undated diary:

Fifty yards of trenches were accordingly dug, and in the presence of large group of officers, including generals, Solomon fixed the screens over one section. An airman was detailed to fly over the scene, and reported he could see the uncovered trenches, but not the one that Solomon had camouflaged. According to Solomon, the officers present were enthusiastic, and his drawings of covered trenches were sent to France. At this stage, the commander-in-chief, Sir John French, turned down Solomon's ideas. But his time would come.

Just as camouflage brought painters, designers and artists into WW1, so the propaganda effort required authors, critics, poets and playwrights to lend a hand. Like ‘camouflage', the word ‘propaganda' did not have an entry in the eleventh edition of
Encylopaedia Britannica
, but everybody knew about it by the end of WW1 when the twelfth edition came out. Of course the concept was not wholly new. As Samuel Johnson observed in the eighteenth century:

Arthur Ponsonby, the author of
Falsehood in War-Time
, recognised that the lie was an extremely useful weapon in warfare, deliberately employed by every country ‘to deceive its own people, to attract neutrals, and to mislead the enemy'. He wrote this book because he thought the ‘authoritative organization of lying' in wartime was not sufficiently recognised: ‘The deception of whole peoples is not a matter which can be lightly regarded.' Ponsonby knew that famous writers were better able ‘to clothe the rough tissues of falsehood with phrases of literary merit' than statesmen.

As early as 2 September 1914, Charles Masterman, a member of Asquith's cabinet, called a meeting of senior British writers to get together a response to German propaganda leaflets and manifestos. In one room were gathered some impressive names, among them J. M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Gilbert Murray, George Trevelyan, H. G. Wells and Israel Zangwill. Also invited but not able to attend were Arthur Quiller-Couch and Rudyard Kipling.

After a second meeting on 7 September 1914 with writers and editors from the respectable British press (no pacifists or socialists were invited), Charles Masterman set up a War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House, Buckingham Gate, in London. Its mission was to sell the British line and counter the arguments of ‘The Unspeakable Prussian' to educated elites in Allied and neutral nations, rather than in Britain or Germany and Austria. By June 1915, this discreet clearing house had distributed 2.5 million copies of speeches, booklets and official publications in seventeen different languages. A year later, it was distributing a million illustrated newspapers every fortnight, and had helped publish 300 books and pamphlets.

Anthony Hope Hawkins, author of
The Prisoner of Zenda
, was the War Propaganda Bureau's literary adviser. Arnold Toynbee and Lewis Namier were among the historical consultants. William Archer, translator of Ibsen, headed the Scandinavian department. G. K. Chesterton wrote a tract called
The Barbarism of Berlin
. Arthur Conan Doyle tackled a history of the campaigns in France and Flanders. John Galsworthy wrote articles. The historian G. M. Trevelyan wrote and lectured on the Serbs and the Austrians before leaving for Italy. John Masefield wrote one book on Gallipoli, and another on the Somme. Popular novelist Mrs Humphrey Ward promoted her 1916 paean of praise to the war workers,
England's
Effort: Letters to an American Friend
, on tour in the United States.

The USA was considered the most crucial country to get on side, and so the War Propaganda Bureau put the Canadian-born romantic novelist Sir Gilbert Parker in charge of the public relations campaign aimed across the Atlantic. The basic propaganda message was that the decent British and their allies were honourably muddling through against the
Schrecklichkeit
or ‘frightfulness' of the belligerent Kaiser and his ruthless Huns. The rape of plucky little Belgium was the first atrocity to be cited. The Imperial German army certainly killed at least 5,500 civilians in Belgium, but some of the more imaginative bestialities they were accused of probably owed more to fantasy than truth. ‘War is fought in this fog of falsehood,' wrote Ponsonby. ‘The fog arises from fear and is fed by panic.'

1915 brought a rich harvest of war atrocity stories from Belgium, most notably the execution of the British nurse Edith Louisa Cavell in October 1915. The matron of the Berkendael Institute in Brussels who
stayed at her post when it became a Red Cross hospital after war broke out, Miss Cavell, the 49-year-old unmarried daughter of a Norfolk vicar, was formally tried and shot by German firing-squad in Brussels for the crime of helping Belgian, British and French soldiers escape from German-occupied territory into neutral Holland. The British never denied that she had done this. The Germans incurred a propaganda disaster by prosecuting and executing Edith Cavell for treacherously undermining the German war effort, without pausing for merciful gestures and without considering the publicity it would generate.

Her execution duly caused outrage in the UK, and in the USA. Killing a nurse in wartime hardly wins public approval, and Edith Cavell's death was milked by British propagandists as the murder of an angel of mercy. She became the perfect symbol of Belgian martyrdom, and a justification for the war.
The War Illustrated
(30 October 1915) has a drawing of a glaring-eyed prognathous Prussian approaching a figure lying on the ground. Headlined ‘The murder of Nurse Cavell', the caption reads:

In March 1920, Queen Alexandra unveiled Cavell's memorial statue in St Martin's Place in central London, just north of Trafalgar Square, the heart of the British Empire, between the National Portrait Gallery and the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields.

M. R. D. Foot, once a wartime intelligence officer, pointed out in his book
MI9: Escape and Evasion 1939–1945
(written with J. M. Langley) that Norman Crockatt, the head of this secret organisation founded in WW2 to help servicemen get out of enemy territory, traced the rivalry between different British secret services back to Edith Cavell. She had in fact been working for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6), but had been exposed through helping prisoners of war to escape. This was why the older set of spooks, SIS, wanted nothing to do with MI9, because SIS ‘were determined to prevent evaders and escapers from involving them in any way'.

Her secret role was also revealed in Paul Routledge's
Public Servant,
Secret Agent: the enigmatic life and violent death of Airey Neave
. Foot, reviewing it in the
TLS
in May 2002, noted

Cavell's work could not be acknowledged for the usual reason: the secret services have to stay secret in order to be effective. She probably also suffered because of her sex and the popular view of it in the media. Women did not have the vote then and they did not serve in the armed forces; feminine heroism was mostly framed in terms of self-sacrifice. Thus to call nurse Edith Cavell anything like a ‘spy' (with all its lurid connotations then) would mean sliding her down the scale of female achievement, away from worthies like Florence Nightingale towards houris like Mata Hari. Compromising her virtue might have diminished her propaganda value. When the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, included Edith Cavell in his book
Courage: Eight
Portraits
in June 2007, he also made no mention of her secret service activities.

Perhaps the major
cause célèbre
of WW1 propaganda was the sinking of the Cunard passenger liner RMS
Lusitania
, torpedoed by
U-20
off Ireland on 7 May 1915. One hundred and twenty-eight American lives were lost, and the incident outraged the USA, whose government protested that such an attack on a passenger ship was a flagrant breach of the rules of war and, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy F. D. Roosevelt put it, ‘piracy on a vaster scale of murder than old-time pirates ever practised'. In short, it was an act of ‘terrorism'.

The German government's defence was that the
Lusitania
was an armed merchantman built with British government funds, mounted with hidden guns and quite prepared to ram submarines, and that she was carrying Canadian troops for the Western Front as well as thousands of crates of illicit munitions (which, they said, the torpedo caused to explode, thus sinking the ship in eighteen minutes). They added that this was a war zone in wartime and that the Imperial German ambassador in Washington DC, Count Bernstorff, had placed
notices in US newspapers stating that British and allied vessels might be attacked, so there was fair warning.

Some of these arguments are not true. The
Lusitania
was unarmed and had no hidden guns, and there was only one Canadian soldier on board, running off with his mistress. Others are half true: the
Lusitania
was indeed carrying four million rounds of.303 rifle ammunition and 5,000 3.3-inch Bethlehem Steel shrapnel shells not yet filled with explosive, but marine archaeology does not suggest the ammunition blew up. Certainly the British government was not anxious to publicise the existence of munitions on a passenger ship, which would have undermined their righteous indignation. In any case, the German justifications could never carry as much emotional weight in world public opinion as the distressingly horrible deaths of 1,200 innocent people, including many women and nearly a hundred children, a third of them babies. This was one of the great shock-horror stories for newspaper front-page headlines: ‘The Huns Sink the
Lusitania
' said
The Daily Sketch
on 8 May; ‘Full Story of the Great Murder', ‘
Lusitania
Survivors' Terrible Stories'.

When the
Lusitania
sailed on her last voyage the passenger list included a small, deaf, angry designer called Oliver Percy Bernard. The immediate outlet for his rage on board the Cunard liner was British caste and class snobbery, but the fires of his anger had been long stoked by the frustrations of life.

Born among ‘vague and violent people' in Lambeth, where his father boxed with bare knuckles, Oliver ‘Bunny' Bernard had been sent as a 13-year-old orphan to learn backstage theatrical arts in Manchester, where he taught himself to draw by paying attention to trees, carefully drawing their boles, branches and bark. From a lonely adolescence, Oliver Bernard grew into an outsider who liked the theatre but was cold-eyed about

By 1915 he was a successful stage architect and scenic artist. Oliver Bernard loved the effects that music and drama could achieve but loathed the ‘consecrated humbug' of grand opera in London, Boston
and New York, so often a world of ‘beasts and bitches', charlatans and frauds. Unloved, unhappy in love, resentful of the rich lording it on board, ashamed to be a non-combatant in wartime, and remembering how ‘deafness and discriminating methods of muddled recruitment had prevented him from becoming cannon fodder in 1914', it was a rather disgruntled and acerbic ‘Bunny' Bernard who paced the deck of the
Lusitania
as her sirens hooted into the Atlantic fog.

On the sixth day out, the sun was shining off the south-west of Ireland, and the passengers' mood on board the floating luxury hotel brightened. After lunch, around 2.15 p.m., Bernard went up on deck. The smooth, still sea was like ‘an opaque sheet of polished indigo' and the horizon was undisturbed by the smoke or sails of any other vessel. Bernard's reverie was interrupted by ‘a frothy track snaking up … like an express'. The torpedo was nearly seven metres long and weighed over a ton: it carried 160 kilos of high explosive in its nose, and was travelling at over 80 kph towards the ship.

Oliver Bernard felt a slight shock through the deck, as though a tugboat had run into the giant liner. Then there was a terrific explosion. A column of white water rose high in the air, followed by an eruption of debris. Lumps of coal bounced on the deck. He was no longer alone. Fellow passengers in the floating hotel appeared from everywhere in a rush of trampling feet, wails and cries. Bernard dutifully went down to B deck to fetch his lifebelt from his cabin. The lights were all out. He fell down tilting stairs; could not balance; reeled in darkened corridors to his cabin. Back on the crowded deck, a woman demented with fear snatched his lifebelt from him. No one knew what to do, and there was no loudspeaker system to tell anyone. Passengers had no lifejackets or put them on wrongly. As the ship canted more to starboard and dipped down forward, Bernard began taking off his clothes, methodically folding his coat, waistcoat, collar and tie, carefully putting his tie-pin in his trouser-pocket like a man about to have a wash. But ‘Bunny' could not swim. He slid down the steep sloping deck and in ‘a wild lucky splash' scrambled into a lifeboat that had to be hacked away from its bow davit. By rowing frantically they only narrowly missed engulfment by a huge smokestack as the ship slid sideways under the waters. From the boat they watched the triumphant sea pouring into the funnel's steaming black maw, and then the
Lusitania
's mastheads disappearing.

‘All that remained was a boiling wilderness that rose up as if a volcanic disturbance had occurred beneath a placid sea.'

Public anger burned long on the fuel of the
Lusitania
story. Gruesome horrors lasted for weeks: the morgues and mass graves at Queenstown; the bloated corpses with seagull-pecked faces washing up on Irish beaches; the pathetic stories; the private griefs. The propaganda press feasted on it in words and graphics. Rioting mobs in Liverpool and London sacked shops with Germanic names. That emotional barometer, D. H. Lawrence, said, ‘I am mad with rage myself. I would like to kill a million Germans – two millions.' The Liberal government in Britain ordered the arrest and internment of up to 30,000 ‘enemy alien' males.