To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [163]
Buchan and his staff soon saw that despite the tank's embarrassingly ineffective battlefield debut the previous year, the public was hungry for a high-tech wonder weapon. The tracked behemoth was a huge success on the movie screen, attracting a total audience estimated at 20 million to a mid-1917 documentary on tank warfare. Paradoxically, it was only later that year that Britain fought the first real tank battle, at Cambrai, France, where the lumbering machines advanced several miles before the usual bungling set in and a German counterattack regained most of the captured ground.
The tank's greatest victory so far, however, was not on the battlefield but at home. While Cambrai was still raging, a "Trafalgar Square Tank Bank" began doing a booming business selling war bonds. The Cold-stream Guards band played as celebrities addressed the crowd from atop the tank, and hundreds of people lined up to buy bonds through an opening in a side turret. Ninety percent of the visitors, it was claimed, had never bought a war bond before, so tanks were dispatched by train to 168 towns and cities throughout England, Scotland, and Wales. "Tank Banks" altogether sold £300,000,000 (some $17 billion in today's dollars) worth of war bonds, the authorities declared. In impressive testimony to the importance of the new weapon on the home front, some tanks were even recalled from France for this mission.
Although no one could have told it from his work or his public persona, 1917 was a bad year for Buchan, for his younger brother and two close friends were killed in combat within days of one another. Yet his immense productivity never slackened; he seemed to write books with as little effort as other people make dinner-table conversation. His wide circle of readers, he learned, included Grand Duchess Olga of Russia, the oldest daughter of the recently deposed Tsar. The family was now imprisoned in a house in the remote Siberian city of Tobolsk, and from there she wrote to Buchan that she, her sisters, and their father had greatly enjoyed his latest spy novel.
A novel he began writing in mid-1917, Mr. Standfast, was full of the usual secret agents athletically foiling mysterious German plots. But, reflecting a year that had seen strikes, the upheaval in Russia, and a stronger antiwar movement, Buchan had his familiar hero Richard Hannay infiltrate radical trade union circles in Glasgow, where he finds most Scottish workingmen to be loyal imperial patriots. One character in the book is a conscientious objector who, in the end, takes a noncombatant role in the army, and swims a river under heavy fire to deliver a vital message before dying of his wounds.
The same year, another well-known literary protagonist returned to action: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, capitalizing on all the spy paranoia, brought Sherlock Holmes out of retirement. In "His Last Bow," Holmes skillfully infiltrates the spy ring of the sinister Von Bork, Germany's top clandestine agent in England on the eve of the war. Conan Doyle was another of those convinced that, for all its horrors, the conflict was a healthy purgative, a purification by fire. Looking ahead, Holmes says, "There's an east wind coming, Watson.... Some such wind as never blew in England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind, none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared."
In Belgium, the wind was cold and bitter indeed. The total of British dead and wounded at Passchendaele, officially the Third Battle