Extract from Keep the Home Fires Burning
Propaganda in the First World War
Getting the Troops
The Recruitment campaign was the most concerted propaganda exercise of the first half of the war. In the initial euphoria, thousands joined up. Far from having to use persuasion, the War Office recruiting stands were inundated with people already persuaded of their duty to fight. But as the hopes of a short war faded, the supply of recruits dwindled, while the demands of the war machine for an unlimited number of men increased.
Women were the target of a great deal of moral pressure to send their men to fight. Women’s organisations which were actively involved in the recruitment drive included Emmeline and Christobel Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union and Mrs Fawcett’s National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. The Pankhursts argued that the active participation of women in the ‘national emergency’ would further their campaign for the vote and women’s equality. They supported the recruitment campaign and the war. ‘Everything that we women have been fighting for and treasure’, argued Christobel Pankhurst, ‘Would disappear in the event of a German victory. The Germans are playing the part of savages, over-riding every principle of humanity and morality.’ In 1916 their magazine the Suffragist was renamed Britannia as a sign of their patriotic allegiance.
The Football Association put its facilities at the disposal of recruitment bodies, which thereby gained access to vast working class audiences. Grounds were used for drilling and offices for army storage, and well known speakers addressed the crowds before matches. Footballers set the lead by volunteering in front of the crowd. By the end of 1914 an estimated 500,000 men had joined via footballing organisations, and crowds had diminished considerably.
Other unofficial recruiters were motivated by a craving for self-publicity, and by the opportunity which the most popular cause of the war provided for making money. Horatio Bottomley was the most famous unofficial recruiting officer of the war. Before the war he was known as the most colourful swindler and bankrupt in Britain and was complimented by counsel at one of his bankruptcy trials as ‘the cleverest thief in Europe.’ He was a former MP for South Hackney and editor of the scurrilous magazine John Bull. In both roles he masqueraded as the champion of the little man’, which earned him enormous popularity. When war broke out, he turned his extravagant rhetorical talents to the cause of patriotism.
Bottomley was a businessman. His political platform was for a ‘Businessman’s Government’. It was as a businessman that he strayed onto the stage of recruitment propaganda, where he remained fixed throughout the war.
Patriotism paid. He described himself as ‘an oratorical courtesan. I sell myself to the man with the most money.’ His speeches varied according to the fee. He could command up to £1000 for a week at the Glasgow Pavilion. He was always entertaining. In Bournemouth he played prosecuting counsel against the Kaiser and the German nation on the charge of wilful murder of civilisation – for the sum of £200.
As the facts of war became clear, the question of sustaining morale assumed increasing importance. The glorification persisted, because the worst aspects of war were left out of published reports. Newspaper proprietors knew this, correspondents developed a style which was essentially optimistic, and the soldiers themselves felt constrained to keep their experiences locked away from civilian view.
Newspaper proprietors were aware that that distortion of the truth was going on but had a duty to keep up morale. As Lord Rothermere once commented to J.L Garvin [editor of the Observer] ‘You and I, Garvin, we haven’t he pluck of these young lieutenants who go over the top. We’re telling lies, we know we’re telling lies, we daren’t tell the public the truth, that we’re losing more officers than the Germans, and that it’s impossible to get through on the Western Front. You’ve seen the correspondents shepherded by Charteris, they don’t know the truth, they don’t speak the truth and we know they don’t.’
Correspondents selected information for their dispatches, excluding the worst. As Philip Gibbs of the Daily Chronicle explained: ‘My dispatches tell the truth. There is not one word, I vow, of conscious falsehood in them.... But they do not tell all the truth. I have had to spare the feelings of the men and women who have sons and husbands still fighting in France. I have not told all there is to tell about the agonies of this war, nor given in full realism the horrors that are inevitable in such fighting.’
The soldiers found that they, too, were incapable of exposing the civilians to the shock of warfare. ‘This isn’t a war as the world understands it’, wrote one soldier, ‘the truth of the matter is that everyone out here considers it only fair to one’s womankind to hush up the worst side of the war and make light of it.’ Poet Siegfried Sassoon recorded ‘an inability to reveal anything crudely horrifying to civilian sensibilities’ and found himself suppressing all unpalatable facts about the ear. By this subtle process of exclusion, the image of the heroic soldier persisted in civilian minds. As one private in the West Kents recalled: ‘Some people wondered how it was that I was not a happy slayer of Germans, as I told them on most occasions it was a case of seeing the enemy didn’t get us, let alone trying to kill him. People at home thought all the time that we were continually fighting hand-to hand from morn till night.’
Siegfried Sassoon noted the contract bitterly in 1916: ‘Bellicose politicians and journalists were fond of using the word “crusade”. But the “chivalry” (which I’d seen in epitome in the Army School) had been mown down and blown up in July, August and September [Battle of the Somme] and its remnant had finished the year’s “crusade” in a morass of torment and frustration.’
The idealism of the soldiers in 1914 could not withstand the reality of trench warfare. It drained away with the blood of so many comrades. The complexity of the situation, and the sheer discomfort and horror of the conditions gave the lie to the clear-cut, black and white image of war which prevailed at home. More complex emotions replaced exhilaration for the soldiers in the ‘zone of human havoc.’....
Though many soldiers did believe the war was being fought to prevent the ‘Huns’ ever starting another war, Hun-hating evaporated when the soldiers faced the enemy daily, sometimes only twenty yards away. The difficulty of breaking through the German lines induced something akin to respect for the military prowess and endurance of the enemy. ‘As we lost our friends and pals’, wrote one private, ‘the desire to destroy the enemy grew less, and we began to be more cautious and to respect the enemy more’.
The image of the enemy as a devil faded somewhat when, as Montague described, if you took over his trench, ‘Incarnate Evil had left its bit of food half-cooked, and the muddy straw, where it lay last, was pressed into a hollow by Incarnate Evil’s back as by a cat’s.’ And if you went over its pockets, ‘they never contained the right things – no poison to put in our wells, no practical hints for crucifying Canadians; only the usual stuffing of all soldiers’ pockets – photographs and tobacco and bits of string and the wife’s letters.’