To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [98]
In breaks from writing his multivolume history of the war and from sending optimistic dispatches to the Times from the Western Front, John Buchan lent a helping hand to the spy mania. In October 1915, just after Loos, he published what became his best-known book (later brought to the screen by Alfred Hitchcock), The Thirty-Nine Steps. In this novel and its sequels, Buchan essentially invented the most popular form of the modern spy story: a daring, athletic hero, chase scenes, friends who turn out to be enemies, enemies who turn out to be friends, coded messages, and grand conspiracies that will destroy everything if the hero cannot escape from a castle dungeon in time. With Britain's soldiers dug in below ground on a front that barely moved month after bloody month, the public was relieved and delighted to read stories like these, in which individual feats of boldness carried the day.
In The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan's hero, Richard Hannay, foils the machinations of a whole network of German spies. Hannay is a colonial who has returned from various adventures in southern Africa just in time to help the "Old Country" in its hour of need. Significantly, the Old Country is not an industrialized nation of drab, crowded urban tenements and factories belching coal smoke, but a serene, pastoral landscape of moors and hills. Pursued by the evil Germans, Hannay races "through little old thatched villages and over peaceful lowland streams, and past gardens blazing with hawthorn and yellow laburnum. The land was so deep in peace that I could scarcely believe that somewhere behind me were those who sought my life; ay, and that in a month's time, unless I had the almightiest of luck ... men would be lying dead in English fields." In the novel's happy ending, Hannay, of course, nabs the spies just before they can spirit away stolen military plans on their yacht. The book, which sold more than a million copies in Buchan's lifetime, contributed to an upsurge of volunteers to become special police constables—a job in which many a middle-aged Briton too old for the trenches could still imagine himself catching a German spy.
No spies or conspiracies could explain the British failure at Loos, however, so the commander in chief was doomed. As French had predicted, they changed the bowler. To save face, he was given command of the Home Forces—all troops in Britain and Ireland, who were mainly in training—which was a bitter comedown. When the prime minister's emissary tried to soften the blow by telling him he would be ennobled as well, French wryly suggested he could become "Lord Sent-Homer." In recognition of his role in withstanding the German attacks at Ypres and of his Irish ancestry, he was made Viscount of Ypres and of High Lake, County Roscommon. But because Ypres became associated with so much lost British blood, the name never fully stuck, and contemporaries as well as later writers generally continued to refer to him as Sir John French. He remained popular with British troops, thousands of whom lined the road, cheering wildly, when he left his headquarters for the last time in December. At the dockside in Boulogne, there were more cheers from his old regiment, the 19th Hussars. For French, it was farewell to this front, but, as it would happen, the play was not over; one major act was yet to come.
His successor, of course, was Haig, who was fully confident that he could succeed where the capricious French had failed. "DH never shines at dinner," recorded an officer on his staff at this