WAR CRIMES
During the early months of 1915 the war spirit seized upon all classes.
New Scotland Yard was often mistaken for the recruiting office in
Scotland Yard, and the policeman at the door was kept busy directing
callers to their proper destination. All day long the flower of the
nation might be seen marching down Whitehall in mufti on their way
to the station. The saddest part of the business was that in those
early days we were sacrificing in the trenches what would have been
magnificent material for officers of the conscripted army later on, but
the sacrifice was not in vain if example counts for anything.
My old friend, Sir Schomberg M’Donnell, was working at this time as
Intelligence Officer to the Home Forces. He was past fifty. I found
out quite by chance that he was spending his spare time at Wellington
Barracks learning his drill, and one morning he came to say ‘Good-bye.’
He had taken a commission and was going to the Front. Not many weeks
afterwards came the news that he had been killed in action.
They tell a story of a certain artistic dilettante well known in
London who, when he was offered a commission, said, ‘Look at me.
Could I lead men? I have never done anything yet but sit and sew.’
(He excelled at embroidery.) He insisted upon going out as a private,
and when the commissariat broke down in bad weather and the nerves of
his comrades were all on edge, he kept them cheerful and contented
by a never-failing flow of good spirits. He said he had enlisted
because, being ‘the greatest rotter in London,’ he thought that if he
went others less rotten would have to go too. They relate that when an
ill-conditioned N.C.O., addressing him with ill-disguised contempt,
said, ‘And what was your line?’ he replied, ‘Well, they say that I was
best at embroidery.’ He returned badly wounded in the hand, and when a
sympathetic old lady saw him at his own door fumbling with his latchkey
and fluttered up to help, saying, ‘Oh, you are wounded!’ he replied,
‘Oh no, madam, I fell off a ’bus when I was drunk.’
It is strange now to think that in March 1915 Russia was thought in
England to be breathing a new inspiration to the West. It was said
that the Crusader spirit was alive again; that the whole Russian
nation was inspired with a determination to rescue Constantinople for
Christianity, and to win again the Holy Sepulchre; that when she came
into the War Russia was busy with her own evolution, not revolution,
and that vodka was prohibited with the unanimous approval of the
nation, who had tried prohibition for a month, and then approved it as
a permanency; that crime had almost disappeared among the peasants, who
were now investing in the savings bank the money which they used to
spend upon liquor. If they were successful in the War they were told
that there would come a struggle between their religious idealism and
their high ethical instincts and the monster of Western materialism
from which, so far, they had kept themselves clean. All this was
honestly believed by persons who thought they knew Russia: now, after a
short six years, their voices are heard no more.
In the early days of May 1915 the Germans torpedoed an American
oil-tanker called the _Gulflight_ and killed the captain. The body
was landed in the Scilly Islands. It occurred to a person gifted with
imagination that if the body were embalmed and sent over to the United
States for burial the effect might be far-reaching, because as long as
the submarine attacks upon harmless merchant vessels resulted in the
death of Englishmen the real horrors of submarine warfare would never
come home to the great mass of Americans. I was asked to find out a
man who would consent to go down to the Scilly Islands to embalm the
body, but on the very day when the arrangements were completed--7th
May 1915--at about 3 o’clock I received a telephone message announcing
that the _Lusitania_ had been sunk. After that, of course, the sinking
of the _Gulflight_ became insignificant. Of all the many mistakes made
by the Germans, the sinking of the _Lusitania_ was the greatest. It
split the German-American sympathies from top to bottom, and ranged
the native American very strongly upon the side of the Allies. I could
scarcely believe that the Germans had struck a medal in commemoration
of this outrage until I received an actual specimen of it. From that
moment every person in England with a German name who entertained his
friends was accused of drinking to the sinking of the _Lusitania_. I
can never ascertain that any such accusation was well founded; on the
contrary, I believe that many persons of German origin definitely cast
off all sympathy with their country from that date. After that they
were ready to believe any infamy of which the Germans were accused.
[Illustration: HAMBONE WITH PARACHUTE DROPPED FROM AIRCRAFT IN WROTHAM
PARK, BARNET, 8TH SEPTEMBER, 1915.]
I remember very well the Zeppelin raid on London on 31st May 1915.
I was dining with a certain Cabinet Minister to meet the new Home
Secretary and the new Lord Chancellor, together with Sir Edward Henry,
the Commissioner of Police, and several Heads of Departments.
I was discussing with Sir John Simon a question that was exercising us
very much at the time, namely, the denaturalisation of former aliens
who were believed to be hostile to this country, but against whom there
was no definite evidence of acts of espionage.
Our conversation was interrupted dramatically. Our host came in from
the telephone room, crying, ‘Zeppelins!’ He had been rung up from
the Admiralty and told that Zeppelins were coming up the Thames. Our
hostess’s first thought was for her small children. Were they to be
taken to the cellar? The whole party trooped into the telephone room
and grouped itself round the instrument in a wide circle. As one of the
guests remarked, it was exactly like the second act of a melodrama.
A secretary sat impassive at the instrument and, having got through
to Scotland Yard, handed the receiver to Sir Edward Henry, who said
very quietly, ‘Dropped bombs at Whitechapel, four or five killed, many
injured; then turned north, now dropping bombs on Stoke Newington.
Any fires? Oh, a good many fires. Thank you,’ and he rang off. We
stood no longer on ceremony. Our hostess and one of the guests ran
upstairs to bring the children down, and the rest of us trooped off
to Scotland Yard, where the telephone room would give us information
at first hand. I walked home across the Park. It was a lovely, clear
night, but there was not a sign or sound of Zeppelins, and the police
in Kensington had not even heard of the raid at 11.30. So huge a city
is London! I learned afterwards that no one in London saw the airships.
Altogether, ninety-two bombs were found, of which thirty were high
explosive, generally of small size, with a little propeller attached
which turned during the descent and unscrewed the fuse. Attached to
each of these was a piece of stuff like a stocking-leg. A good many
had failed to explode, but two of them had killed children. Three very
large high-explosive bombs had been dropped. One had made a huge crater
in Kingsland Road, one was found in a garden unexploded at a depth of
8 feet, and another had gone through the roof and floor of a stable,
and was found embedded at a depth of 7 feet. This one weighed 150
pounds, it was 36 inches in circumference, and would have done great
damage had it exploded. It appeared that the Zeppelin had followed the
Great Eastern line as far as Bishopsgate Station, where it dropped a
bomb, and had then followed the branch line towards Waltham Abbey. From
Waltham Abbey it turned east towards the coast, and was not heard of
again, until we learned long afterwards that she was the LZ 38, and
that a few days after her return to her hangar near Brussels she was
destroyed in her shed by an English airman. She could climb 10,000 feet
with a cargo of one and a half tons of bombs.
The business of the police was now to organise bomb shelters, a very
difficult business in a city such as London. It was unfortunate that
the East End, where the houses are small and unprovided with cellars,
should always be the first to suffer from Zeppelin attacks, and the
danger of improvising shelters was that unless the roof was absolutely
proof against penetration the shelter might well become a death-trap.
This actually happened in Dunkirk, where a house was demolished by a
high-explosive shell fired from a distance of twenty-five miles, when
the cellar was packed with people. The cellars in Dunkirk were covered
with a skin-thick brick arch, which would scarcely resist the impact
even of a small bomb. Though people worked heroically far into the
night to dig out those entombed in the cellar, when they reached them,
all, to the number of more than forty, were found dead of suffocation.
The object of the Germans in making Zeppelin raids on London was to
produce panic and a cry for peace. It did neither. Even in the East
End, though there was great alarm, there was no panic. A few months
ago, when discussing the War with a highly-placed German, he said, ‘No
one but a person who knew nothing about national psychology would have
thought that one could terrorise a Northern nation like the British by
Zeppelin raids. If you had retaliated by air-raids on Berlin you would
only have succeeded in stiffening our war spirit. It may be different
with the Latin races. There we might have produced panic, but with a
Northern race the idea was so futile that no one but a Prussian General
would have conceived it.’
But while there was no panic there were great hardships, as a visit
to any of the Tube stations in the East of London on the night of an
air-raid would have shown--the stairs crowded with half-awakened and
hungry children, the platforms so packed with humanity that there was
not a vacant square foot. I used to wonder how many of these children
would feel the permanent effects. On the whole, however, young children
between five and thirteen really seemed to enjoy air-raid nights. They
were full of excitement, and you would take them out of bed wrapped
in blankets and give them unexpected meals. It was a little grim when
one knew the reality to hear from infant lips, ‘Oh, Daddy, I do hope
there’ll be an air-raid to-night.’
One incident in connection with the Zeppelin that was brought down
at Cuffley was never quite cleared up. As the airship approached the
ground the crew began to tear up their papers and throw them out of
the car, and two fields were so littered with the fragments that they
looked as if there had been a local snow-storm. As soon as the news
spread spectators in every kind of vehicle overran the place, and
among the fragments of paper collected by the Air Service with a view
to piecing them together was found the name of a Belgian woman with
an address in London. The woman was sent for, and it was found that
she had moved to that address only ten days before. It transpired,
however, that she was in the habit of giving her name and address to
strangers in the street. On the face of it, an address obtained during
the last ten days and found among the papers of a German Zeppelin was
disturbing, for it implied that a German officer had been in London a
few days before the attack. I think the explanation was that one of the
spectators had brought the address with him and had dropped it in the
field with the other fragments.
It was a humorist who commanded the aircraft that came over on 8th
September 1915. When over Wrotham Park, Barnet, he dropped a hambone
attached to a small parachute inscribed with a fancy portrait of Sir
Edward Grey, on whose devoted head a bomb is in the act of falling. It
was inscribed in German, ‘Edwert Grey, poor devil, what am I to do?’
and on the reverse, ‘In remembrance of starved-out Germany.’
There were many jokes about the anti-aircraft defences in the early
days. It was alleged, for example, that one of the guns posted near
the Admiralty was in charge of a librarian, and that one of the first
executive orders of the new First Lord had been, ‘Stop the librarian
from firing off that gun.’
Early in 1916 there were curious stories about the German foreknowledge
of the weather conditions in this country which they could have
acquired only from spies. It was said that after the raid in October
a conversation was overheard in a café in Rotterdam, in which a full
description of the damage done by bombs in London the night before
was given, and that of three places named as having been hit by bombs
two were correct. This conversation took place about noon, and the
news could have reached Rotterdam only by cable or wireless. It was
suggested that the wireless operators on some of the neutral boats
began sending messages as soon as they cleared from England, but though
most careful investigations were made we were never able to discover
that there was any leakage of this kind.
General von Hoeppner has told us the German side of the air-raids. At
first the enemy hoped to cause panic; then to keep our airmen away from
the Western Front, which they think was accomplished. But by the end
of 1916 they recognised that the Zeppelin attacks were a failure. The
Allied airmen were so successful in bombing the hangars in Belgium that
the Zeppelins were withdrawn to the Rhine stations, and the distance
they had to cover was then too great even for the newest airships. They
were then turned over to the navy for scouting purposes. The daylight
air-raid on London on 13th June 1917, under Captain Brandenburg, filled
them with joy because all the machines returned safely owing to our
shells bursting too high and our machines never really having got into
touch. The attacks on favourable nights in the winter of 1917-1918 were
maintained, he says, with the object of keeping our airmen away from
the Western Front.
In January 1915 the Germans produced a propaganda film for the
edification of neutral countries. An American who was carrying it to
the United States consented to show it to diplomatists and officials
at the Ambassadors’ Theatre. The film displayed the usual German
ignorance of the psychology of other peoples. Part of it was not
‘faked.’ We had the Kaiser standing beside a road with his staff,
while picked troops marched past. His hair was quite grey, and there
was a hollow shadow in his cheek. His movements were nervous and
jerky. At one point he had been told to look at the camera, which he
did stiffly and gravely before getting into a car and driving off.
There were pictures of engineers carrying out sapper operations at
high speed; reviews before the Kings of Saxony and Bavaria; the huge
monument erected to Hindenburg in Berlin; a mass meeting; diplomatic
presentations to the Sultan, with Enver Pasha in the foreground; the
Sultan sitting under an awning receiving Balkan diplomatists; several
spools of the Danish army and navy manœuvres intended to give the
impression that Denmark was on the German side and was mobilising.
Then came the ‘fake’ spools. You saw German soldiers feeding hordes of
Belgian and French children under the title, ‘Barbarians feeding the
Hungry,’ and there were rows of colossal grinning German soldiers, with
the title, ‘Sehen Barbaren _so_ aus?’ (Do Barbarians look like this?),
which provoked the comment that no barbarian had ever looked quite
so unattractive. Then there were English prisoners grinning all over
with delight while they worked for the Germans under the stern eye of
Prussian soldiers. It was propaganda laid on with a trowel.
One of the great dangers at the beginning of the War was the form of
the first Treasury Notes. It was recognised that if these were forged
in any quantities public confidence in the currency would be shaken,
and people might refuse to accept our paper money as legal tender. In
1915 the expected forgeries began to appear. It was reported that a
considerable quantity of the ‘G’ series of £1 and 10s. Treasury Notes
was being circulated in London. The method was that a man would go down
a street calling at small shops, buying some inexpensive trifle, and
tendering a note, for which he took the change in silver. Specimens
of the notes showed the forgery to be remarkably good. No one but an
expert could have detected the imposition, especially at dusk, which
was the time of day usually chosen for passing the notes. We felt that
we were on our mettle. After a week or two information reached us, no
matter how, that an ex-convict E---- was the distributor, though not
the printer, of the notes, for which his price was half the face value.
At this price he was prepared to sell any number to persons whom he
could trust. It was his practice to make the sales on Saturdays, for on
Fridays he disappeared to some mysterious rendezvous whence he obtained
the notes. Now E---- could have been arrested at any moment, but it was
no good arresting him while the printer remained undiscovered, for a
man who could reproduce a watermark that would almost pass muster by
daylight would most certainly not discontinue his operations because
a minor confederate had been arrested. All our efforts, therefore,
were turned towards the discovery of the printer. One of our own
men bought some of the counterfeits and, in order to convince the
forgers of his good faith, it was necessary that he should pass them.
It was impossible, of course, that he should pass counterfeits, and
therefore the counterfeits had to be exchanged for genuine notes,
a very expensive proceeding when it extended over several weeks.
But the matter was growing serious. It was computed that at least
£60,000 worth of false treasury notes had been put into circulation,
and it was necessary to spend a considerable sum in unearthing the
conspiracy. A free hand was given to me, and then events began to go
a little quicker. It was found that E---- used to meet a few other
choice spirits for card-playing at a little office in Jermyn Street.
He had been traced one Friday to a paper merchant, where he bought
the very best kind of typewriting paper, and the samples we obtained
showed that such paper had been used in the forgeries after the false
watermark had been impressed upon it. We knew also when he had left his
flat in a taxi with the paper, but further inquiries showed that this
taxi did not carry him to any particular destination: it was stopped
in mid-street and paid off, and from that moment all trace of E----
was lost. But that evening there he was at the card-party, and there,
too, was our man. As the evening wore on, a few friends dropped in, and
among them a young man who lost his stakes and always paid in little
sums that suggested change for a 10s. note; it was also noticed when he
was staking his money that his fingers were stained with printer’s ink.
When he had left the place in disgust our man drew a bow at a venture.
‘I used to know that young fellow,’ he said; ‘he used to be a clerk
in your old registry office in Leicester Square.’ ‘No, he was not,’
replied E---- shortly, ‘you are mistaken.’ But our man persisted. ‘I
remember him quite well now; his name was Brown.’ ‘You are mistaken. He
was never a clerk. He is a printer, and his name is W----.’
With this slender clue the police proceeded to scour London for a
printer named W----, and at last, on a wooden gate in an unpretentious
street in North London, they discovered the almost obliterated
inscription, ‘W----, Printer.’ The gateway led into a yard, and from
it ran a little carriage road through a tunnel under the house to a
stable and coach-house in the rear. But this gate seemed permanently
to be locked. The police now rented a window on the other side of the
street and sat down to wait. Three days passed; Friday approached,
and as the dusk fell the watchers saw E---- come down the street and
kick on the door. A few seconds later it was opened from inside and
he disappeared. Then Chief Inspector Fowler, who was in charge of the
case, marshalled his men about the door and waited until it should open
again. The delay seemed interminable, but at last, long after dark, the
door did open and E---- was in their midst.
[Illustration: ANOTHER MACHINE.]
Never in its history had that quiet street been startled by such an
uproar. E---- was wheeling round, spouting streams of £1 notes from
his pockets like some sort of centrifugal machine, and emitting wild
beast howls, which were intended to alarm his partner in the stable.
The whole neighbourhood was raised. The street was carpeted with
notes like autumn leaves, and E----’s resistance had resulted only in
a modification of his features that would have puzzled his nearest
friends. The police, too, had not gone unscathed. When E---- had been
secured they vaulted the gate, went through the tunnel, and knocked on
the stable door. It was opened by a young man in his shirt-sleeves who,
on seeing the police, fell flat on the floor in a faint. The place was
crammed with machinery; notes still damp were lying on the press, and
it was observed that the forger had gone one better than the legitimate
printer by introducing into his die a numbering device. You had only to
turn the handle of the press to forge £1 notes until your arms tired.
There was, besides, a very ingenious device for watermarking which must
not be divulged. Nor was this all. When this forger’s den came to be
searched there were found the lithographic stones on which had been
printed certain forged postage stamps that had formed the subject of
a criminal action some years before. In fact, this expert printer had
been making a fine art of forgery for some years. The next morning I
visited the place with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Sir John
Bradbury, whose signature was on every treasury note, and then and
there, while Sir John fed in the paper, the Chancellor of the Exchequer
turned the handle. It was the first instance in history in which the
Chancellor has been guilty of forging the currency. The notes were
so good that when they took specimens from the press they thought it
well to write ‘Forged’ in large letters across each note for fear they
should get mixed up with genuine notes. Steps were at once taken to
issue a new note which would be proof against fabrication.