Abstract
In this chapter the spotlight is directed towards the representation of the Battle of the Somme by three officially accredited British journalists. The journalists’ accounts of the battle have been traditionally dismissed as the epitome of servile war propaganda. This chapter challenges this standpoint and examines how the texts of William Beach Thomas, Basil Clarke, and Harry Perry Robinson may be interpreted as evidence of a liminal experience as the authors attempt to adapt antiquated patterns of war representation to the new realities of mechanised warfare. Their books describe what everybody expected to be the “turning point” of the war and provide clear evidence of the rhetorical struggle in which the reporters were involved, at a time when the paradigm of war representation was shifting radically.
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Notes
- 1.
The catastrophic result of the “Big Push” would lead soldiers to end up naming this offensive as the “Great Fuck-Up” (Fussell 2000, p. 12).
- 2.
- 3.
The first accredited correspondents to join the British Army at the British General Headquarters were John Buchan , Philip Gibbs, Percival Phillips , Herbert Russell , and Valentine Williams . This group would change from time to time when any of the correspondents fell ill or when they left the front to give lectures in Britain, the United States, or other neutral countries (see Farrar 1998 and Knightley 1982 for further information).
- 4.
The treatment they had received until they obtained their “official accreditation” suffered a drastic change. War reporters now became attached to the military: they were given an officer’s uniform, wore no badge or insignia, and carried a green band on the right arm. Correspondents still needed permission to go anywhere outside the Headquarters, they were not allowed to state any personal opinions, and all their war articles and books were submitted to the censor (Knightley 1982, p. 80). In the opinion of the War Office , the ideal correspondent “would write what he was told was the truth and not ask questions” (Farrar 1998, p. 68).
- 5.
A fourth accredited correspondent, Philip Gibbs, published The Battles of the Somme in 1917. Gibbs did not make any substantial changes to the dispatches he had published in the Daily Chronicle and other newspapers from July to November 1916. As opposed to The Soul of the War, his book on the Somme is more journalistic than narrative; for this reason it has been left out of consideration in this chapter. Nevertheless, I will occasionally refer to The Battles of the Somme to further illustrate some of the aspects under discussion.
- 6.
As Victor Turner explains, “the passivity of neophytes to their instructors, their malleability, which is increased by submission to ordeal, their reduction to a uniform condition, are signs of the process whereby they are ground down to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to cope with their new stations in life” (1967, p. 51).
- 7.
Part of his papers and personal correspondence can be found in the repository of the News UK Archive. Catalogue reference: NRA 19359. The Times.
- 8.
From 1915 on, different regiments began to create their own journals and magazines, both for the soldiers’ own entertainment and as an alternative source of information for the audience at home. Hundreds of newspapers were produced by combatants; some of them were professionally printed with printers they found in abandoned villages, while others were hand-written. The journals appeared in different fronts, although the most popular ones were published in the Western Front. Such is the case of The Wipers Times, which owes its name to the soldiers’ mispronunciation of “Ypres,” published for the first time in early 1916. The Wipers Times mocked the work of war journalists and propagandists like William Beach Thomas or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle’s famous character, Sherlock Holmes, was turned into Herlock Sholmes. (see Bak 2016; Coperías Aguilar 2015; Fuller 1990 for further information on trench journals).
- 9.
Beach Thomas was sent to promote the war in the United States and to inform American readers on life at the front in 1918. When the war was over, he stayed in Germany until May 1919, and three years later he made a tour around the world. His articles on these events were published in the Daily Mail and The Times. He wrote two autobiographies, A Traveller in News (1925), which I shall address in Chap. 6, and The Way of a Countryman (1944). He also wrote The Story of the ‘Spectator’: 1828–1928 (1928) on the newspaper’s centenary. Beach Thomas continued writing about country matters for the Observer and in books such as A Letter to my Dog (1931), Hunting England: A Survey of the Sport, and its Chief Grounds (1936), and The Way of a Dog (1948) (Hudson 2004; Simkin 1997a).
- 10.
As the war progressed, photography and film began to take over in the propaganda campaign at home. Photographs and films provided an “illusion of reality at a time when it was generally believed that the camera could not lie” (Sanders and Taylor 1982, p. 155). Once the authorities became aware of the power of the image in the mobilisation of the masses, the film became an essential weapon in British propaganda. The British government created a War Office Cinematograph Committee and the first short film on the war, Britain Prepared, was released in December 1915 and distributed worldwide in March 1916 (Reeves 1986, p. 56). The most well-known film from the period, The Battle of the Somme, released in the summer of 1916, became an enormous box-office success. It was understood by the public as “a necessary experience of reality” (Hynes 1992, p. 123). Ironically, the film’s only representation of death in battle was not reality, but an illusion. The Battle of the Somme changed the image of the war in the civilians’ mind-set and, for the first time, they perceived war “not as a matter of individual voluntary acts, but of masses of men and materials, moving randomly through a dead, ruined world towards no identifiable objective; it is aimless violence and passive suffering, without either a beginning or an end—not a crusade, but a terrible destiny” (p. 125).
- 11.
The term “fog of war” had started to be used in the late nineteenth century to describe the disorientation experienced by combatants in military operations (Dubbs 2017, p. 21); however, the term would become a common expression during the First World War to refer to the censorship and lack of knowledge in relation to the events unfolding in the battlefield.
- 12.
Beach Thomas’s use of Wordsworth ’s poem differs markedly from the use that the war poet Herbert Read made of the same poem. In his second collection of poems Naked Warriors (1919), he includes a poem called “The Happy Warrior” that deconstructs and questions all the attributes—virtue, courage, reason—present in Wordsworth’s description of the warrior.
- 13.
- 14.
Only twenty-five out of forty-two tanks succeeded in their initial advance from the start lines, and seventeen out of those twenty-five were destroyed or damaged (MacDonald 1993, p. 283).
- 15.
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Prieto, S. (2018). The Turning Point? Journalists at the Somme. In: Reporting the First World War in the Liminal Zone. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68594-6_4
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