Myths and Legends of the First World War

apologies.

Introduction

In July 1917, as a million Allied troops floundered in an ocean of mud on the slopes below Passchendaele, a girl of 16 named Elsie Wright and her ten-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths took photographs of one another playing with fairies. The girls lived in Cottingley on the outskirts of Bradford, and often played together in a small wooded creek behind Elsie’s home. It was here, so they said, that they encountered the fairies, and captured them on film with the aid of a primitive Midg camera.

In due course news of the photographs spread further afield to cause a national sensation, and were championed by the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. However, the powers of deduction and logic invested in his fictional detective were nowhere apparent in his credulous dealings with the Cottingley fairies. The fact that the fairies in the first photograph had been traced from an illustration in the Princess Mary Gift Book passed unnoticed, while the modern hairstyles they sported were accepted without question. When it was pointed out that the head of a hat pin could be seen protruding from the chest of a gnome in one of the pictures, Doyle explained it as evidence of the fairy navel, and offered this as proof that the little people reproduced in the same way as humans. The fairies appeared only when the girls were alone, it was reasoned, because only they had the trust of the fairies.

Widespread belief in the reality of the images endured for another 60 years, until Wright and Griffiths finally admitted to the hoax in 1983, at the ripe old age of 82 and 76 respectively. In 1917, Elsie Wright had been earning money by colouring sepia photographs of troops and wartime scenes, and at the age of 16 displayed a marked talent for manipulating images – and people – far beyond her years. With the benefit of hindsight it scarcely seems credible that at the height of a war of rapidly developing technologies – submarines, aircraft, tanks, chemical warfare, the internal combustion engine – a sizeable percentage of the population was prepared to believe in the reality of winged little people. Then again, the myth set in motion by Elsie Wright has something in common with the equally supernatural appearance of bowmen and angels on the Retreat from Mons in 1914, and a divine white helper on the battlefields of the Western Front the following year.

The myths and legends spawned during the First World War are legion, and several still manage to excite controversy today. More colourful, if not more numerous, than those of the Second World War, they are fascinating both in their own right and when viewed in their wider historical context. In this study, the first of its kind, I have chosen to examine them in approximately chronological order. The earliest of these legends were essentially innocent in nature and intent: the Angel of Mons, the Russians in England and the Comrade in White all retailed attractive, soft propaganda at a time when the conflict was not going well for the Allies. Other early war myths, such as the Europe-wide spy mania and the reports of atrocities in Belgium, affected both sides in equal measure, and in Britain only assumed the darker hue of hate propaganda after the spring of 1915. This followed a run of German ‘frightfulness’ which included the first use of poison gas on April 22nd, the sinking of the Lusitania early in May, and the mythic crucifixion of a Canadian soldier near Ypres. Perhaps the most infamous atrocity myth, which held that Germany had built a corpse rendering factory near Coblenz in order to extract useful fats from dead soldiers, was concocted by British agencies at about the same time, but not released into circulation until two years later.

While 1915 provided a bumper harvest for the myth makers, thereafter no truly new myths and legends emerged. The corpse factory falsehood of 1917 had already been on the shelf for two years, while the appearance of ‘peace angels’ over the Thames at Thurrock in August of the same year was little more than an echo of the visions at Mons. The myth of the Hidden Hand, a direct ancestor of the political conspiracy theories common today, was itself an extension of a particular strand of the general spy mania, and no more rational than the stoning of dachshunds in 1914. Most of the other myths discussed in this book – the charge that all British generals were butchers and bunglers, the notion that tanks won the war – are postwar creations, and as such are discussed in isolation. Plainly folkloric trench tales, such as that of the elusive officer spy, or an outlaw band of deserters in No Man’s Land, have little significance beyond their value as a good yarn, and are mentioned in passing rather than analysed in detail.

Myths are created, and believed, for many different reasons. The Angel of Mons and the Comrade in White contained a strong religious element, and, judging from the variants seen from the spring of 1915 onwards, were clearly promulgated by church-affiliated sources, the message being that God was on the side of the Allies and lending active support. The corollary was that the Germans were Godless and an enemy of Christianity, this being manifest in the alleged crucifixion of Belgian and French civilians in 1914 and a Canadian soldier the following year. Certain serving troops also claimed to have witnessed these various apparitions and events, but few if any were prepared to say so openly, or on oath, and therefore their accounts lack credibility. As the writer Trevor Wilson concluded in The Myriad Faces of War, the craving for the belief that some force, earthly or supernatural, would always be to hand to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat probably underlies the credence attached to the story of the Mons angels, or the Russians in England en route to France with snow on their boots. It may also explain the fanciful but widespread belief that Lord Kitchener had not gone down with HMS Hampshire in June 1916, but was instead removed to a secret hide-out, from where he would devise a masterstroke that would end the war.

A related craving was the desperate need for news from the Front, at a time when wives, mothers and other anxious relatives found scant comfort in the terse platitudes of the Field Service Post Card, and while war reporting in the press was heavily censored. In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that credulity was heightened. This state of affairs was partly responsible for the explosion of interest in spiritualism and clairvoyance, which in turn provided ample opportunity for exploitation of the worst kind. For example, in the case reported as Davis v Curry, a police agent named Gardner exposed the fraudulent practice of a medium named Mary Davis, who worked from premises in Regent Street:

On April 30th 1917, Miss Gardner told Davis that she had been married a few months ago and had been in the habit of hearing every week from her husband, who was in the Essex Regiment, but that, not having heard for the past three weeks, she had been anxious. Davis asked if the witness had been to the War Office, and, hearing that she had not, asked for something which belonged to her supposed husband. Davis then said: ‘I can see him – full of life – rushing on with several others. He’s not exactly good-looking, but has a pleasing face. He falls amongst others.’ Gardner asked: ‘Is he wounded?’ Davis replied: ‘I cannot tell, but he is in bed. I cannot tell where, but it is a pretty place with trees and water; and you will be with him there soon.’ Davis told Gardner that her fee for this interview was ten shillings and sixpence, and this was paid.

Astonishingly, Mr Justice Darling ruled that where a medium could offer evidence which indicated a subjective but honest belief in the reality of their own supernatural powers, and had not intended to deceive, this constituted a valid defence. This perverse decision was reversed three years later, and Darling’s doubtful professional abilities are examined in more detail in Chapter Seven, in the context of the celebrated Pemberton-Billing libel trial. Yet if by October 1917 a senior judge in the King’s Bench Division found it within his gift to dignify crook spiritualism, it is small wonder that a significant percentage of the population at large was credulous regarding angels, fairies, mysterious clouds, secret homosexual conspiracies and a host of other falsehoods.

Hate propaganda gave rise to an entirely different set of myths. The march of the German army through Belgium in August 1914 immediately threw up tales of atrocities on both sides, in which the invaders claimed to have been subject to ‘unlawful’ attacks by civilians and franc-tireurs, while the invaded retailed a catalogue of looting, arson, pillage – and worse. At first, a degree of scepticism prevailed in Britain. In the wake of the veritable epidemic of alleged German ‘frightfulness’ in the spring of 1915, however, the report of the government-appointed Bryce Committee appeared (and has since been described as an atrocity in itself). Published by HMSO, the Report retailed at one penny (the price of a newspaper), and offered the public a lurid litany of bestial rape, sadistic mutilation and violent murder, in which outrages against women and children predominated. The fact that the Bryce Report bore the stamp of official approval meant not only that such falsehoods were now readily accepted by the public worldwide, but also that two years later the world was ready to believe the deliberate fiction of a German corpse rendering factory. Most Allied atrocity propaganda was discredited soon after the end of the war, adding further to a widespread sense of disenchantment with clergy, politicians and the fourth estate – the latter pair memorably described as ‘Junkers’ and ‘Yellow Pressmen’ by the poet Siegfried Sassoon. Nevertheless, the corpse factory myth would not be properly laid to rest by the British Government until 1925.

The most persistent myth of the Great War – that of inept military leadership – only entered into wide circulation several years after the Armistice. In 1927 a junior officer from the Royal Army Service Corps named Peter Thompson published a book titled Lions Led by Donkeys, which purported to show ‘how victory in the Great War was achieved by those who made the fewest mistakes’. The book is prefaced by an Apologia, which states that ‘the words that form the title on the cover of this book were used early in the war, at the German Great Headquarters, to denote the English’. Thompson provided no evidence to authenticate this claim, but it is likely that his otherwise obscure book inspired the historian Alan Clark to attribute the phrase ‘lions led by donkeys’ to General Ludendorff, the German Chief of General Staff. The pithy appraisal was certainly applied to French commanders after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, but its use by Ludendorff or any other German general is apocryphal at best. However, thanks to Thompson and Clark, the iconography of the Donkeys has stuck fast in modern memory, despite the fact that the simplistic depiction of all British generals as butchers and bunglers, from Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig down, is one of the most damaging falsehoods to emerge from the conflict.

Indeed the longevity of such myths almost beggars belief, and makes a nonsense of Sophocles’ dictum that a lie never lives to be old. As long ago as 1928, the author and MP Arthur Ponsonby established beyond reasonable doubt that the Kaiser had never once described the British Expeditionary Force as a ‘contemptible little army’, and that the epithet was in fact coined by the British army itself to swell patriotic indignation. In this it succeeded famously. Yet like the apocryphal lions and donkeys, the legend of the Old Contemptibles has batted on in the history books long after time was declared. It became too ingrained, and too attractive, to discard.

Another factor which boosted belief in myths and legends during the First World War was the impact of new technologies on the popular consciousness. Here the Zeppelin provides a paradigm. German airships were known to be capable of remaining in the air at high altitude for over 24 hours, could cover distances of up to 900 miles, and prior to the outbreak of war had carried thousands of passengers. Little wonder, then, that in Britain in 1914 they were the subject of much exaggeration, mystique, sensationalism – and genuine fear. This, the first fully industrialized war, saw the début of new and startling innovations such as poison gas, submarine warfare and tanks, which to the general public seemed like science-fiction made real. With no radio or television, and with newspapers heavily censored until the summer of 1915, basic facts were hard to come by, and so myth and rumour filled the gaps. It is likely, too, that certain ‘innocent’ myths and legends represented a conscious, escapist reaction against the scientific and political complexities of the age. Just as the essence of effective propaganda is simplification, so angels, bowmen, protective clouds and white helpers all offered unsophisticated yet unanswerable truths for those who preferred to look backwards to a spiritual Golden Age wherein faith could be placed in older, higher, supernatural powers.

It is ironic that Arthur Machen, the man at once responsible for creating the legend of the Angel of Mons while remaining its most implacable critic, should have continued to find merit in wilfully mystical myth-making. Writing in 1915 he observed:

The war is already a fruitful mother of legends. Some people think there are too many war legends, and a Croydon gentleman – or lady, I am not sure which – wrote to me quite recently telling me that a particular legend, which I will not specify, had become the ‘chief horror of the war.’ There may be something to be said for this point of view, but it strikes me as interesting that the old myth-making faculty has survived into these days, a relic of noble, far-off Homeric battles. And after all, what do we know? It does not do to be too sure that this, that, or the other hasn’t happened and couldn’t have happened.

A rather less noble faculty is the propensity of some to embroider and lie. The following chapters are peppered with barefaced fictions passed off as fact: ordinary soldiers who saw with their own eyes the visions at Mons or the crucified soldier at Ypres, despite being posted elsewhere at the critical time, and civilians who saw the Russian armies traversing England on trains, or spies disembarking from Zeppelins on Hackney Marshes. These accounts are characterised by self-aggrandizement, and a desire to be seen as part of a privileged minority in the know. Officers and gentlemen were no less prone to spreading Big Lies, however, as is clear from the pornographic atrocity fantasies of the deranged Major Arthur Corbett-Smith, Brigadier Morrison’s vanishing corpses at Vimy Ridge, and almost anything written or said on the subject by Brigadier-General John Charteris, Haig’s former Chief of Intelligence. Others may more charitably be said to have been confused or mistaken, or else were able to satisfy themselves that in the midst of a titanic struggle between good and evil, certain falsehoods were morally true (if not factually so), and therefore beneficial to the Allied cause.

Just as the creation of myths and falsehoods could be seen as fulfilling a legitimate war aim, so too could belief in their reality. Indeed to doubt or deny even the most fantastical story exposed a sceptic to the risk of being condemned as unpatriotic, and even traitorous. Some have characterized this susceptibility as ‘hysterical hallucination’ on the part of the feeble-minded, but given the pressures and complexities of wartime life this explanation is overly simplistic. Rather, for the average Briton in 1914, belief in the reality of an infestation of Hun spies, and the need to remain constantly vigilant against the alien menace, gave some small sense of contributing to the war effort.

Ultimately, however, belief in the irrational must for the most part elude rational explanation.

James Hayward

June 2005

1

Spy Mania

In December 1911, during the Kaiser’s state visit to London, a senior German naval officer formed the habit of visiting a barber’s shop situated at 402A Caledonian Road. The shop was run by a British subject, Karl Gustav Ernst, the son of a German surgical instrument manufacturer who had emigrated to England during the 1860s. Since this somewhat obscure establishment was hardly the kind of place which a high-ranking attaché might normally be expected to frequent, this activity aroused the suspicions of the newly formed British counter-intelligence service, then called MO5 and headed by Captain Vernon Kell.

Kell obtained a warrant from the Home Secretary to intercept all mail sent to and from 402A, and placed the shop under regular observation. These letters revealed that some 22 paid German spies located at Sheerness, Chatham, Portland and elsewhere were communicating with a German handler named Steinhauer (aka Madame Reimers), and as such the shop was revealed as a front for the entire German espionage network in Great Britain. In this way M05 were able to identify every member of the nascent spy ring, and on the morning that war was declared, August 4th 1914, a series of raids were executed by the Special Branch. Ernst was arrested for breaches of the 1911 Official Secrets Act, while swoops elsewhere netted another 21 professional spies. A single man escaped via the port of Hull. The following day another 200 suspected German agents were rounded up under the auspices of the new Aliens Restriction Order, among them several waiters and higher officials from a number of West End hotels and restaurants. After a two-day trial at the Old Bailey in November 1914, Ernst, described disparagingly as a hairdresser, was sentenced to seven years in prison. At a stroke the entire German espionage network in Great Britain had been neutralized, and a curtain cast over the country at the vital moment of mobilization. Although further agents were sent into the field by Germany during the war, the network never really recovered.

The first such operative to arrive after hostilities began, a naval reserve lieutenant named Carl Lody, proved to be an ill-trained amateur. His letters were immediately intercepted, and after a six-week tour that took in Edinburgh, London and Liverpool and during which he travelled in the guise of an American tourist, he was arrested in October at Killarney in Eire. Tried by a court martial held at the Middlesex Guildhall in Westminster at the end of the month, Lody offered no defence, and on November 6th 1914 went down in history as the first man in 150 years to be executed at the Tower of London. Lody’s trial, to which the press were allowed access, was widely reported, and did much to fan the flames of an already fierce national obsession. Michael McDonagh of The Times recorded:

The prisoner sat in the dock between two Grenadier Guards armed with rifles and fixed bayonets. He was a young man, dark-complexioned and clean-shaven. What was most prominent in his features was his nose, which was remarkably long. . . . At last this spy business has yielded something sensational and dramatic – and real. Hitherto we have had but the gibbering phantoms of the inventiveness and credulity of disordered minds.

The ‘gibbering phantoms’ and mental disorder to which McDonagh alluded was the rampant – yet largely irrational – spy mania, which had gripped the collective popular imagination across Europe even before the outbreak of hostilities. In Britain, fictional and dramatic works such as The Battle of Dorking by George Chesney (1871), The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers (1903), The Invasion of 1910 and Spies of the Kaiser by William Le Queux (1906 and 1909) and When William Came by Saki (1914) had also done much to foster the myth that a veritable army of spies were at large across the country, diligently touring the east coast in motor cars, flashing signals to airships and submarines, and arranging secret landings by aeroplanes in South Wales. Across the Channel in France the trend was, if anything, stronger, where works such as La Vermine du Monde furnished faintly absurd accounts of the ubiquity and consummate cunning of the Hidden Hand.

During the first few days of the war, the spy scare in Britain was coloured largely by factual reports of the destruction of