Churchill's Wizards (8 page)

Buchan based Sandy Arbuthnot on a real-life crusader for small nations, the Honourable Aubrey Herbert, second son of the Earl of Carnarvon. Semi-blind at Eton, reckless at Oxford, Herbert had nevertheless got a First in History, joined the diplomatic service as an honorary attaché and was an MP for seven years. At the start of the war he had had an officer's uniform made by a military tailor and slipped into the ranks of the Irish Guards as they left for France. Smuggled on to a troopship in Southampton by officer friends, he went off to war with the BEF as an interpreter. Within a month he was wounded, captured, freed, sent home.

In Salonika, Aubrey Herbert had acquired a ferocious Albanian bodyguard called Kiazim who sprouted daggers and pistols and took him to hashish dens. He learned fluent Turkish in Constantinople, and like his fictional counterpart travelled widely. Herbert's only known comment on the character that Buchan based on him was ‘He brings in my nerves all right, doesn't he?'

Greenmantle
ends at the fall of Erzerum, in Turkey, in 1916. This is where the daring deception is finally revealed. In real life, Britain and Russia were fighting Germany and Turkey, and in Buchan's novel, a British deceiver manages to infiltrate the German-inspired Islamist revolt. Richard Hannay, the Boer scout Peter Pienaar and the
American John Blenkiron help their Russian allies to find the weak link in the Turkish defences, and join the grey-clad Cossack cavalry in the final ride across the snow. Ahead of them, in the van of the charge, is one man …

The radical ‘Islamic' prophet, Greenmantle, turns out to be a British intelligence officer in camouflage: Sandy Arbuthnot. But he also looks and sounds exactly like Lawrence of Arabia, pursuing British policy in native disguise. T. E. Lawrence, that master of dressing up, was impressed by Buchan's ‘clean-lined, speedy, breathless' books. In 1933, he wrote perceptively to Edward Garnett about John Buchan's novels:

John Buchan's adventures are the premier novels of twentieth-century camouflage and deception. Their villains pass as fine gentlemen at ease in society, and their heroes are also disguised. ‘For men who live so dangerously, they are oddly conventional,' observed Graham Greene. Buchan's constant theme is shamming, pretence, tactical deception.

The subliminal effect of the Richard Hannay adventures on the generation that fought in WW2 was immense. As boys or young men, all
of them had read Buchan. Their coeval George Orwell speaks for them:

Richard Usborne wrote
Clubland Heroes
, a study of the fictions of John Buchan, Dornford Yates and Sapper, and was himself in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), set up by Winston Churchill on 19 July 1940 ‘to co-ordinate all action by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas'. Usborne said that almost every single SOE officer he ever met in WW2 pictured himself as Richard Hannay or Sandy Arbuthnot.

John Buchan's Dick Hannay novels also exemplify the British success in deception in both World Wars:

When he first saw it from a distance in May 1915, John Buchan thought that the Flanders wool town Ypres ‘looked a gracious and delicate little city in its cincture of green'. By day, in the spring sunshine with the birds singing, the wartime world was not immediately apparent. But as he walked into its dusty pale centre, he thought an earthquake had hit the place and driven everyone away. Ypres was being hard fought-over. The houses of a once-rich town were skeletal, disembowelled by shells that had ripped open their fronts, exposing middle-class furniture and fancy fittings to raw weather.

The British section of the front line bulged eastward from Boesinghe round to St Eloi to protect Ypres in its low basin. The bag of soggy marshland this bulge enclosed was known as the Ypres Salient, and from the winter of 1914 through to the spring of 1915 the sodden earth was often too wet to dig deep slit-trenches, so soldiers had to build parapets and revetments up in order to get what shelter they could from enemy artillery fire.

In Second Army, Archibald Wavell of the Black Watch was brigade major of the 9th Infantry Brigade at Hooge. He was the best kind of staff officer, who insisted on visiting every part of his front line when he was in the Ypres Salient from November 1914 to June 1915, and he deplored the irrational way in which the command automatically valued trenches, the holes in the ground that someone had dug somewhere, without considering whether the place where they happened to be was any good or not, whether the ground was wet or dry, protected or concealed. It might make better tactical sense to move the line yards eastwards to more solid chalk, but the obsessive refusal to yield an inch meant it could not be done, or not officially. So men died because ordered to hold, at all costs, unsheltered and enfiladed terrain, which became their own muddy grave.

Winston Churchill showed his practical good sense when he wrote to the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith on 7 January 1915: ‘Ought we not to get into a more comfortable, dry, habitable line, even if we have to retire a few miles? Our troops are rotting.' Wavell once found the whole garrison of a trench perched on the parapet above it, preferring to risk bullets rather than endure the freezing swampy gruel. His brigade soon started a factory for duckboards, mudscoops, sandbags and revetting material. In the months and years to come, this construction became industrial.

On 16 June 1915 Wavell's brigade attacked three lines of trenches near Bellewarde Lake at the eastern tip of the Ypres Salient. It was one of those minor attacks on a narrow front that was meant to ‘support' other British and French attacks miles away to the south, but the whole assault could be easily observed by the enemy and fired on from three sides. Despite meticulous plans, on the day it turned into a muddle, and the division lost 3,500 men. Continuous accurate German shelling turned two-thirds of the 9th Brigade into casualties, including 73 of the 96 officers. One of them was big Archie Wavell. A piece of shrapnel or a bullet destroyed his left eye. When his unbandaged right eye also closed and he could only open it with both hands he thought he ought to walk back to the dressing station. He was given morphine and woke up in a ward of the Rawalpindi General Hospital at Wimereux, near Boulogne. The stupidity of orthodox military tactics in WW1 impressed on Wavell the need for new ways of waging war, including deceptive stratagems, to avoid mass slaughter. We will meet him again, with a glass eye, in the Middle East.

By June 1915 the position of journalists at the front had finally been regularised by authority. Pressure from the three principal newspaper proprietors in London had forced Lord Kitchener to concede a role to selected war correspondents, replacing the single official spokesman Major Ernest Swinton, whose hundred or so articles, bylined ‘Eyewitness' (‘Eyewash' to critics), had been vetted by Kitchener himself. From March 1915, these newly accredited journalists wore the khaki of British Army officers with a green band on the right arm and held the honorary rank of captain, but they were still civilians at heart, trying to tell the people back home what their menfolk were going through.

Philip Gibbs, representing the
Daily Chronicle
and the
Daily
Telegraph
, was one of the six British correspondents, along with Percival Phillips of the
Morning Post
, William Beach Thomas of the
Daily Mail
, H. Perry Robinson of
The Times
, Herbert Russell of Reuters news agency and Basil Clarke of the Amalgamated Press. The reporters started work in a spiral-staircased chateau at Tatinghem, not far from GHQ at St Omer, where the stuffier staff officers resented their presence and tried to waste their time. The correspondents always had to be escorted by military officers and every word they wrote had to pass a military censor.

One of the first escort/censors was a tall Assistant Press Officer called Hesketh Prichard. He was the Indian-born son of a popular officer in the 24th Punjabis, who had died of typhoid six weeks before his son was born. By the time war came in 1914, 37-year-old Prichard had written books about his travels in Haiti (
Where Black Rules
White
), South America (
Through the Heart of Patagonia
, seventy years before Bruce Chatwin) and Canada (
Through Trackless Labrador
). His big-game-shooting adventures in Hunting Camps in Wood and
Wilderness
(1910) were admired by Teddy Roosevelt.

Hesketh Prichard was best known as a cricketer, a notable right-arm fast bowler for Hampshire from 1900–13, good enough to be picked three times for the ‘Gentlemen' team of Marylebone Cricket Club or MCC. He was also a good marksman. A hunting companion once said that he never missed a crucial shot: ‘H. P.' would always get the last hope of food, even at distance in fading light. As others became shaky, he grew steadier.

When John Buchan came out to write a series of articles for
The
Times
in May 1915, his escort at the front was Hesketh Prichard, who told him about the enemy snipers, ‘forest rangers from South Germany'. Buchan's first piece, on Monday, 17 May, points up the contrast between the calm-looking countryside and ‘this secret warfare, hidden in the earth and the crooks of hills. There is something desperate in its secrecy, something deadly in its silence.'

Later the next month, Prichard escorted H. M. Tomlinson of the
Daily News
, not the kind of man he was used to, a self-described working-class Socialist with trade union connections, agreeing with the radical views expressed by George Bernard Shaw in November 1914 in the
New Statesman
: ‘Both armies should shoot their officers
and go home to gather in their harvests in the villages and make a revolution in the towns.'

But Prichard and Tomlinson liked each other. In cautious walks very near the front, tall Prichard confided to tiny Tomlinson ‘that he thought he was not doing enough. He was not killing Germans. But the German snipers were doing our men a lot of harm. He wanted rifles with telescopic sights and men trained in stalking and sniping.' The escort officer could not do much about the horrors of shelling or chlorine gas, but he decided to use his personal skills and his hunter's craft to stop other friends of his from being shot through the head. Hesketh Prichard determined to take on the snipers.

Prichard had already brought over from England several hunting rifles with telescopic sights, and regularly carried them with him on his duty trips or lent them to units in the line. He was also spending hours watching the German lines through a telescope and making his earliest attempts at shooting back. It was fitting that a sportsman take on the job. ‘Sniping' had begun as an amateur sport in the colonies, the skilful shooting of long-billed bleating marsh birds that fly fast in zigzags.

The Germans dominated the sniping war between the trenches from the beginning of 1915. The poet Robert Graves and the courtier Alan Lascelles both had their trench periscopes neatly drilled through by a sniper's bullet; the poet Siegfried Sassoon was shot through the chest by one, and the future BBC leader John Reith through the cheek; the famous white hunter Frederick Courtney Selous and the sardonic writer ‘Saki' (H. H. Munro) were both killed by snipers. ‘Take me over the sea,' the soldiers sang in the 1915 song
I Want To Go Home
, ‘Where the snipers they can't snipe at me. Oh my, I don't want to die, I want to go home.' Sniping helped drive soldiers below ground and made them troglodytic, cautious, and eventually camouflage-minded.

German snipers were better equipped because scientific Germany was more advanced than Britain in making optical instruments. By the end of 1914 the Germans already had 20,000 telescope sights, made by companies like Carl Zeiss, for their Mauser Gewehr 98 rifles. German and Austrian
Scharfschützen
or sharpshooters, who came from a long tradition of hunting, also carried two-foot by three-foot steel plates, strong enough to resist a British .303 bullet, with a loophole in the middle through which they shot. At this stage of the war, the Germans were also ahead in the camouflage game. They had
better-disguised loopholes set in their deliberately ‘untidy', irregular trenches. These had revetments made of differently coloured sandbags, blue, yellow, red, green, black, pink, striped, amid a litter of corrugated iron, old biscuit tins, drainpipes and dummy plates, all of which confused the eye, so hidden riflemen were harder to spot.

It took time and many deaths for the tidy-minded British regulars to begin to understand that excessive smartness could be fatal. Neatly flattening the top row of sandbags by banging them with a spade in order to make a crisp revetment or straight parapet was only making the enemy sniper's job easier by underlining the gleaming half-moon of a soldier's hat, which as Solomon J. Solomon pointed out, made ‘a most excellent target'.

Snipers had a bad effect on morale. Sudden violent death with horrible injuries induced many emotions in onlookers, including fear and shock. An angry reaction of leaping straight up to shoot back would all too often just produce another casualty. Tall men were regularly picked off because they forgot to stoop. Others were shot as they shat. ‘Many a poor Tommy met his end in a latrine sap,' wrote George Coppard. In early 1915, one battalion lost eighteen men in a single day to snipers, but lower daily figures, week in, week out, month after month, all along the line, added up to thousands of Allied casualties.

This attrition continued the lesson that the British had been taught by the Boers in the South African War. Henry Charles Bosman's classic short story
The Rooinek
opens with two ragged Boers lying in hiding, shooting with smokeless Mausers at smart British officers riding out openly on horseback. The last British regiment ever raised by a Highland clan chief, the Lovat Scouts, were formed in response to such guerrilla marksmen in South Africa.

The original draft of the Lovat Scouts was formed in 1900 by Simon Fraser, 14th Lord Lovat and 41st chief of Clan Fraser. It comprised 150 stalkers and ghillies recruited from game estates in Scotland (where Fraser's family owned over 180,000 acres), all men with the fieldcraft to take on the Boer Commandos. These crack shots who had spent their lives outdoors spotting stags for rich Victorians adapted well to the job of scouting, observing, signalling, guiding and sniping in South Africa, the only drawback being that few of their Anglicised officers spoke the Gaelic.

Hesketh Prichard considered the Lovat Scouts Sharpshooters were
the best battle observers and scouts in the British Army in WW1, saying that:

The Lovat Scouts were superb ‘glassmen'. Like Hesketh Prichard, they used brass sliding telescopes made by Ross of London that they brought out with them (always preferring a spyglass to the binoculars that became so popular with officers on both sides in WW1). With a telescope they could read a cap badge or cockade at 140 yards or even identify a shoulder flash seen upside down through the enemy's own trench-top periscope. Years of crawling through heather, gauging wind, observing tiny movements, and counting the points on distant stags, paid off. ‘The Lovats never let one down,' wrote Hesketh Prichard. ‘If they reported a thing, it was as they reported it.'

Lord Lovat's Scouts were a re-invention, exactly a hundred years later, of the British Colonel Coote Manningham's experimental Corps of Riflemen which later evolved into the famous 95th Rifles. The Riflemen dressed in bottle green and black, used ground and cover to best advantage, and went forward as scouts to observe and report but also to inflict serious damage on the enemy with their short, grooved Ezekiel Baker rifles. These mobile marksmen were trained by humane officers like Sir John Moore to be ‘intelligent, handy and active', rather than just mindless cannon-fodder.

The sharpshooting rifleman evolved into the sniper. Visible signs of status began disappearing from military officers in the field after keen-eyed, well-hidden riflemen began singling out badges of rank. Germans shot at ‘thin legs' during WW1 advances because officers had better-cut trousers. The job of military snipers, who often work in pairs, alternating spotting and shooting, is precisely to pick off enemy leaders, officers and NCOs, artillery and mortar crews, forward observation officers, reconnaissance scouts and other snipers, to cause maximum damage for minimum effort, and to be ‘force-multipliers'.

After the Boer War and defeats like Magersfontein in 1899, British infantry shooting was radically improved by the Musketry School at Hythe in Kent. Its chief instructor from 1901–3 and commandant from 1903–7 was the South African veteran Sir Charles Carmichael
Monro. Thanks to his ideas of training troops for battle conditions rather than competitive target-shooting, the Germans mistook British infantry rifle fire for massed machine guns at Mons in 1914. Monro linked firepower to tactical movement forward. New tactics, making use of ground while shooting fast and accurately, seemed more interesting and competitive to junior leaders. By 1911, ‘the Monro doctrine' was accepted throughout the British Army.