To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [85]
From the beginning, key British officials had grasped that this war would require propaganda of unprecedented sophistication and scope—something all the more important in a country where, without conscription, attracting the necessary millions of army recruits depended on public enthusiasm. Until now, nations had not seen the need for government bureaus or departments devoted to stoking popular emotions. To supervise this novel and delicate task, the prime minister turned to Charles Masterman, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, an ancient title that had come to mean, in effect, cabinet minister without portfolio. And so, on a sunny September day only a month after Britain entered the war, Masterman secretly brought together, around a large blue conference table in an inconspicuous health insurance office, some two dozen of the nation's most prominent authors, including Thomas Hardy, James Barrie, John Galsworthy, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells. For the creators of figures as varied as Peter Pan and Sherlock Holmes it was a rare experience to be asked to serve their country with their pens, and they all quickly agreed to do so. They spoke to colleagues, and within days 52 writers had signed an open letter calling on "all the English-speaking race" to fight for the "ideals of Western Europe against the rule of 'Blood and Iron.'" One of the few major authors not to sign was Bertrand Russell.
Dissenters like him were rare. Far more common were those like the biographer, critic, and poet Sir Edmund Gosse. War, he wrote, "is the sovereign disinfectant, and its red stream of blood is the Condy's Fluid [a popular antiseptic and deodorant] that cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect." Many authors were enlisted by the new War Propaganda Bureau, which launched a flood of books, pamphlets, newspapers, posters, postcards, slide shows, and films for consumption in Britain and abroad—since the government wanted to win over public opinion in neutral nations, especially the powerful United States. The bureau was never identified as the source of this material, and Parliament had little idea what it was doing. Pamphlets and books bore the imprimatur of well-known publishing houses, and the government secretly agreed in advance to buy copies, which it then distributed for free.
The initial focus of the campaign was German atrocities in occupied Belgium. The actual killings and destruction carried out by the Germans were by no means enough for the newborn propaganda mill. Instead, every thirdhand story or wisp of rumor was treated as the truth, and articles, books, and an influential official report spoke in shocked tones about German troops bayoneting babies, hacking off people's hands, and crucifying Belgian peasants by nailing them to the doors of their cottages. Cartoons, drawings or posters showed a giant German soldier with children speared on his bayonet, the Kaiser cavorting with a skeleton, and three pigs in spiked helmets laughing over a woman's body.
A star of the literary war effort was the novelist John Buchan, who had gained a wide public following since his days in Milner's South African Kindergarten. For Thomas Nelson, an Edinburgh publisher, he put his agile pen to work writing a series of short books that constituted an instant history of the war as it was unfolding. They downplayed British reverses, emphasized acts of heroism, evoked famous battlefield triumphs of times past, scoffed at pacifists, predicted early victory, and overestimated German losses. The first installment of Nelson's