Myths and Legends of the Second World War by James Hayward Read Free Book Online Page B

the founder of the Scout movement, Sir Robert Baden-Powell, had faced a firing squad ‘without a quiver’ following a conviction for selling secrets to the enemy. By way of an epitaph, the report offered that England had ‘put into his last sleep one of the bravest soldiers who ever headed her armies into foreign lands’ – lines which, according to Baden-Powell’s biographer, the Chief Scout considered might make the death penalty his lifetime’s achievement. Contrary rumours also circulated that BP was engaged in secret service work in Germany throughout the war. In June 1917 rumours circulated that Admiral Sir John Jellicoe had been court-martialled and shot for losing the Battle of Jutland, and that his wife had also been executed as a spy. Being one of the last people to leave HMS Hampshire , the ship on which Lord Kitchener sailed fatefully for Russia in June 1916, his death was said to be traceable to her actions as a spy. Pioneer aviator Claude Graham-White was also falsely reported as shot, a press muddle possibly caused by his having troubled to try to clear the name of his friend Gustav Hamel, who stood accused of defecting to Germany before the outbreak of war. These delusions undoubtedly owed something to the fact that twelve bona fide German spies, Carl Lody included, were indeed held in the Tower prior to being executed there.
    A related myth concerned supposed high-level imposters. One such story held that a distinguished German field-marshal, August von Mackensen, was actually the British war hero Sir Hector Macdonald (‘Fighting Mac’), who had committed suicide in Paris to escape disgrace following a homosexual scandal. The tale ran that Macdonald had faked his own death in 1903 and entered German service in place of the real von Mackensen, who was terminally ill. Meanwhile Lord Haldane, the Lord Chancellor and Secretary for War, was persistently denounced as pro-German and unfit for office. Prior to the outbreak of war Haldane had vigorously promoted Anglo-German friendship, had once described Germany as his ‘spiritual home’, and was widely renowned as a student of German literature and philosophy. As a result, Haldane became the most widely reviled public figure in Britain, and in his autobiography records that:
    Every kind of ridiculous legend about me was circulated. I had a German wife; I was the illegitimate brother of the Kaiser; I had been in secret correspondence with the German Government; I had been aware that they intended war and withheld this from my colleagues; I had delayed the dispatch and mobilization of the Expeditionary Force. All these and many other things were circulated … The Harmsworth Press systematically attacked me, and other newspapers besides. Anonymous letters poured in. One day, in response to an appeal in the Daily Express , there arrived at the House of Lords no less than 2,600 letters of protest against my supposed disloyalty to the interests of the nation.
    It was also said of Haldane that he owned a dog named Kaiser, and that he employed a ‘full-blooded German chauffeur’ who regularly drove him to Olympia where he ‘hob-nobbed with the German prisoners and brought them cigarettes’. The hate mail directed at Haldane was so prodigious that his maid was obliged to burn it by the sackful. By his own account he was heckled at public meetings, in constant danger of being assaulted in the street, and even of being shot. Although in May 1915 he was dropped from the government and entered the political wilderness, by the end of the year he was still being cursed so roundly across the nation that The Times ’ military correspondent, Colonel Charles Repington, remarked that one might as well ‘try to stop Niagara with a toothbrush’ as attempt to end a dinner-table tirade against the luckless Lord. But Haldane was not alone. Margot Asquith, the wife of the Prime Minister, was popularly supposed to