Atrocity Propaganda, Liberalism and Humanitarianism in the British Empire and Australia During the First World War
Complex Imperialism: atrocity propaganda, liberalism and humanitarianism in the British Empire and Australia during the First World War
EMILY ROBERTSON
A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
School of Humanities and Social Sciences Canberra Campus
November 2016
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Abstract Despite the large body of research generated by Australian historians about the First World War, little work has been done on the atrocity propaganda that was produced during the conflict. Nor has there been adequate investigation into the humanitarian ideals that influenced atrocity propaganda, and the role these ideals played in gaining support for the war. As a consequence, the multifaceted reasons behind why Australians supported or condemned the First World War have been neglected. Instead, some Australian historians have depicted support for the war as having been driven by unthinking imperial sentiment that was fed by jingoistic government propaganda. This thesis demonstrates that imperial sentiment was in fact far more complex, and was not merely jingoistic. It establishes that imperial sentiment was influenced by a variety of ideological and political factors that heavily impacted upon how Australians regarded the moral legitimacy of the war. One of the primary forms of imperial sentiment that influenced Australian support for the war was liberal humanitarian imperial sentiment.
Liberal humanitarian imperial sentiment mobilised people to support the Great War not simply on the grounds that it was a war fought on behalf of the British Empire, but also because it was a just war. It both influenced, and was influenced by, Great War atrocity propaganda. Through an investigation of atrocity propaganda and the liberal and humanitarian ideals that largely underpinned it, this study demonstrates that Australians had a complicated relationship with the British Empire. I establish that liberal imperial humanitarian sentiment was vital in securing support for the war in two communities that had an ambivalent and sometimes extremely negative engagement with the British Empire: the labour movement and the Irish Australian community.
This thesis provides an original contribution to the field of Australian historical studies in three ways. Firstly, it provides a new interpretation of how Australians engaged with war propaganda: they were not passive recipients who embraced the war after being exposed to propaganda. Instead they were also producers of pro and anti war propaganda who worked in a politically contested space. Secondly, by showing that not all Australian supporters of the war were imperial jingoists, this thesis provides a more nuanced portrait of how Australians related to the British Empire. Imperial sentiment was not restricted to simple patriotism – it also was concerned with moral and ethical issues that were intertwined with liberalism and humanitarianism. This thesis proposes that the liberal imperial humanitarian sentiment contained in atrocity propaganda was of crucial importance in gaining Australian approval of the war. Atrocity propaganda contended that it was the duty of the British to protect Belgian civilians from the violence of the German military. This humanitarian interventionist argument appealed strongly to liberal imperialists. Thirdly, by mapping out the multidimensional relationship that Australians had with the British Empire, liberalism and atrocity propaganda, the thesis provides new insights into the political complexities that influenced whether Australians supported or opposed the war. iii
Acknowledgements
This thesis has only been possible through the help, support, and encouragement of many individuals and institutions. Several people at UNSW
Canberra were of great assistance. First and foremost, my supervisor David
Blaazer provided excellent insight into my thesis topic, as well as sensitive and useful editing. I was also fortunate to have Neil Ramsey as my co-supervisor - it was always a pleasure to discuss my work with him. I’d also like to thank
Peter Stanley, who gave constructive feedback about style.
In addition to my immediate supervision, I was fortunate to receive support and advice from Australian historians at other universities. Frank
Bongiorno from the Australian National University and Bart Ziino from Deakin
University both gave me valuable advice.
I also received wonderful support and care from friends and family. It has been a delight to share my thesis journey with fellow students Kelly Frame,
Kerry Neale and Umut Ozguc. My father Paul Robertson has assisted me throughout this project, supplying both much needed financial assistance and enthusiasm. My sister Sarah has been a long time fellow sufferer of the PhD experience, and has been a great source of strength.
Finally, and most importantly, I am deeply grateful to my partner Jason for his patience and support over the course of this thesis.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii List of Images vi Abbreviations viii INTRODUCTION ‘Manufactured hatred’: the ethics and political impact of atrocity propaganda in Australia 1914-1918 9 Defining jingoistic imperial sentiment and liberal humanitarian imperial sentiment 20 A reappraisal of the ethics of propaganda 42 Just War and ‘moral force’ 54 Politics, ideology and propaganda 59 CHAPTER ONE Truth, lies and credibility: the reputation of atrocity propaganda and the First World War in Great Britain and Australia 1927-2014 65 Historical reassessment of German atrocities in Belgium 70 Great War atrocity propaganda and the Nazis 59 The Bryce Report, rape and warfare 95 Atrocity propaganda and international law 107 CHAPTER TWO Selling war, opposing war: propaganda as a contested space during the First World War 122 Pro-war propaganda 133 Atrocity propaganda in Australia: an overview 140 CHAPTER THREE ‘Merciless humanitarians’: altruism, imperialism, race and the creation of the German ‘Hun’ 1876-1918 155 Humanitarian intervention and ‘altruism’ in an age of realpolitik 160 White Barbarism and the ‘Hun’ 189 Liberalism and war in the twentieth century 198 CHAPTER FOUR ‘A heartfelt sympathy’: British liberalism, Home Rule and Irish Australian responses to the Empire at war 1899-1918 201 Just and unjust war: British liberal responses to South Africa and Belgium 209 The South African War and atrocities 222 Liberalism, imperialism and Irish Australian support for the war 232 The limits of liberal consensus 238 CHAPTER FIVE The division in the labour movement over the First World War: liberalism, socialism, atrocity propaganda and Empire 257 The South African War and the labour movement 263 The Australian working class and the British Empire 268 Liberal imperialism and labour movement support for the Great War 274 Anti-war sentiment and the limits of liberalism in the labour movement 297 v
CHAPTER SIX A much misunderstood monster: the German ogre and Australia’s final and forgotten recruiting campaign of the Great War 309 Misdating and misconceptions 316 Reframing the ‘German Monster’ 321 Conclusion ‘The Great War for Civilisation’: reframing the Great War in Australia 343 BIBLIOGRAPHY 356 vi
List of Images
Figure Page 1 Emilio Kupfer, ‘The Soul of the Hun’ 15 2 Cadbury, [The Tie That Binds] 26 3 Artist unknown, ‘SOUDAN WAR, 1885: Attack by the Arabs on the Commissariat’ 27 4 A. Sutherland, ‘Defence of Mafeking’, c.1899 -1902 37 5 British South African War postcard, c. 1899-1902 37 6 Louis Raemaekers, ‘Seduction’, 1915 74 7 ‘The Woman Soldatovitch’, 1916. 104 8 George Grosz, Murder in Ackerstrasse, 1916-17 107 9 Louis Raemaekers, ‘The exhumation of the Martyrs of Aerschot’, 1915 108 10 ‘Men of Britain’ 117 11 W.A. Gullick, ‘Enlist’ 119 12 C. Ensor, ‘Conscription and Death’ 132 13 David Henry Souter. 'It is nice in the surf, but what about the men in the trenches?' 135 14 ‘Australia’s Imperishable record’, printed by Farmer’s Sydney, published by the N.S.W. government, c. 1914-1916 137 15 Henry J. Weston, ‘Would You Stand by While a Bushfire Raged?’, N.S.W. Recruiting Committee, 1917 138 16 ‘Don’t Falter Go and meet the Hun Menace’, John Sands, N.S.W. Recruiting Committee, c.1915-1918 139 17 ‘War Supplement to The Statesman and Mining Standard’, 8 July 1915, Queensland Recruiting Committee Records 1914-1918 149 18 German Barbarities in Russia: the evidence illustrated, published by the Authority of the Imperial Russian Government, Australia, Critchley Parker, 1916 151 19 Norman Lindsay, the Bulletin, 6 May 1915 153 20 John Tenniel, ‘A Strong Appeal’, Punch, 26 September 1896 180 21 Edmund Sullivan, ‘The Prussian Butcher’, from The Kaiser’s Garland 191 22 John Tenniel, ‘Times Waxworks’, Punch, 31 December 1881. 192 23 Norman Lindsay, ‘Reprisals’, The Bulletin, 19 July 1917 193 vii
24 ‘The only good German is a dead German’, calendar supplement to the Australian Statesman and Mining Standard, 15 February 1917 194 25 Fred Leist, ‘An Ominous Start’, the Bulletin, 18 November 1899 217 26 Lizzie van Zyl in the Camp Hospital, Bloemfontein, 1900-01 226 27 ‘In a Boer Concentration Camp’, The World’s News, 4 January 1902 227 28 ‘The Mafeking Mania’, The Tocsin, 24 May 1900 267 29 Syd Nicholls, Direct Action, January 15 1916. 282 30 ‘Workers of the World Unite!’ Westralian Worker, 4 September 1914 291 31 Will Dyson, ‘Back into the pit’, The Kingdom of Shylock, 1917 298 32 Syd Nicholls, ‘War what for?’, Direct Action, 10 August 1914 304 33 Syd Nicholls, Untitled, Direct Action, 15 August 1915. 306 34 Norman Lindsay, ‘German Monster’, Commonwealth of Australia, 1918 311 35 Norman Lindsay, ‘Will you fight now or wait for This?’, 1918 313 36 Norman Lindsay, detail, from ‘The Military Situation/Australia’s Deadly Peril/Your Help is Needed’ pamphlet, Commonwealth of Australia, 1918 324 37 Norman Lindsay, ‘Peace by negotiation’, from ‘The Military Situation/Australia’s Deadly Peril/Your Help is Needed’, Commonwealth of Australia, 1918 327 38 ‘The gun with the greatest range’, Melbourne Punch, 16 August 1917 332 39 Norman Lindsay, ‘Where Germany Prays’, Commonwealth of Australia, 1918 335
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Abbreviations
A.I.F. Australian Imperial Force A.L.P. Australian Labor Party A.W.M. Australian War Memorial I.W.M. Imperial War Museum, London I.W.W. Industrial Workers of the World N.A.A. National Archives of Australia N.F.S.A. National Film and Sound Archive N.L.A. National Library of Australia Q.S.L. State Library of Queensland S.L.N.S.W State Library of New South Wales S.L.S.A. State Library of South Australia S.L.V. State Library of Victoria S.R.S.A. State Records of South Australia T.N.A. The National Archives, Great Britain U.D.C. Union of Democratic Control V.B.E.S. Voluntary Ballot Enlistment Scheme W.P.A. Women’s Peace Army
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INTRODUCTION ‘Manufactured hatred’: the ethics and political impact of atrocity propaganda in Australia 1914-1918
A few months after the Great War ended, Charles Bean, propagandist, journalist and Australia’s official war historian, wrote a speech to be delivered during the Peace Celebrations. In it he described the men in the
Australian Imperial Force as, ‘…Australians who rushed forward to prevent a dreadful thing from happening in the world’. Of Germany, he wrote, ‘A small sister nation had offended her and she determined to try upon the world her wicked rule that whoever stood in the way of a strong nation, right or wrong, should be crushed’. He continued, ‘…when the Belgian nation, small though it was, struck back at them, they burned the villages and killed the people in order to cow them into quietness ’.1 For Bean the war had been a just one, fought not only to support the British Empire, but also to defend liberal values against a militaristic and anti-democratic
Germany.
Bean’s perception of the justness of the war, grounded as it was in the belief that German soldiers had committed atrocities against civilians, was shared by other Australians across the political spectrum, from socialist to conservative, and provided a unifying justification for war. However, the just war interpretation of the conflict, and the atrocity propaganda that promoted it, have largely been neglected by Australian historians. Instead,
1 C.E.W. Bean ‘Address on the Great War by Mr C.E.W. Bean in connection with Peace Celebrations’ 1919, National Australian Archives, MP367/1 462/4/599. 10
they have commonly identified imperial sentiment in its most simplistic and jingoistic form as the main source of support for the war within Australia.2
The country’s enthusiastic response at the beginning of the war, for example, has been placed at the door of ‘imperial idealism’.3 Federal Labor politician Andrew Fisher’s 1914 election speech in which he promised to support the mother country down to ‘our last man and our last shilling’ became emblematic of Australia’s apparently unreflective support for the
Empire.4
Imperial sentiment has been characterised by some Australian historians as impulsive, simplistic and uncomplicated. L.F. Fitzhardinge, for example, has described Australia’s initial support of the war as
‘unquestioning’ and ‘romantic’, stating that ‘it was enough that Britain was at war for a cause she declared to be just’ for Australians to support the
2 E.M. Andrews, The Anzac Illusion: Anglo-Australian relations during Word War I, Australia, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 32-34; J. Beaumont, ‘”Unitedly we have fought”: imperial loyalty and the Australian war effort’, International Affairs, Vol. 90, Iss. 2., p. 399- 400; J F. Williams, ANZACS, the media and the Great War, UNSW Press, Australia, 1999, p. 48; B. Bessant, ‘The Experience of Patriotism and Propaganda for Children in Australian Elementary Schools before the War’, Paedogogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, Vol. 31., Iss. 1., 1995; R. Evans, ‘The lowest common denominator: loyalism and school children in war-torn Australia 1914-1918’, in L .Finch (ed), Young in a Warm Climate: Essays in Queensland Childhood, Queensland Review, Vol. 3., No. 2., University of Queensland Press, Queensland, 1996; J. Hollingworth, ‘The Cult of Empire – Children’s Literature Revisited’, in B. Bessant (ed.), Mother State and Her Little Ones, Centre for Youth and Community Studies, Melbourne, 1987; J.M. Hollingworth, The call of Empire being the study of the Imperial Indoctrination of Australian school children in the period 1890 - 1910, PhD, LaTrobe University, 1993; H. Reynolds, ‘Colonial Cassandras: Why weren’t the warnings heeded?’, in M. Lake and H. Reynolds (eds.), What’s Wrong with ANZAC: the militarisation of Australian History, Sydney, New South Wales Press, 2010, p. 70. 3 G. Mansfield, ‘August to Anzac: a popular response to the outbreak of the Great War in Australia, 1914-1915’, PhD, University of New England, 2007, p.12. The enthusiasm or lack thereof of the Australian populace at the outbreak of the war has been the subject of some historiographical debate. See also: J. Smart, War and the concept of a new social order: Melbourne: 1914-1915, PhD, Monash University, 1992. 4 Beaumont, op.cit., p.400. 11
Empire.5 Joan Beaumont has written, ‘There was no doubt in August 1914 that the majority of Australians would support the imperial war effort without reservation’. They did so because of imperial loyalty, which was
‘anchored in a cultural and emotional identification with the United
Kingdom which transcended any rational calculations of strategic pragmatism’.6
However, for the Australians under examination in this study,
‘membership of the Empire could not entail either uncritical or unconditional support’, because jingoistic imperial sentiment alone was not enough for them to support the war – the conflict also had to be just.7 And for the war to be just, it had to encapsulate a range of moral and ideological qualities that appealed to a different sort of imperial sentiment. Over the preceding forty years, a specific kind of imperial sentiment had developed in the British Empire that melded together the emotional, empathetic qualities of humanitarianism with the increasingly interventionist policies that had come to define some aspects of British liberalism.8 This kind of sentiment
(which will be defined in detail later in this introduction) was an ideology of cautious intervention: only in the most desperate cases was it acceptable for the British Empire to interfere. These desperate cases included atrocities
5 L.F. Fitzhardinge, The Little Digger: William Morris Hughes, a political biography, Volume 2, Australia, Angus and Robertson, 1979, p.15. 6 Beaumont, op.cit., pp. 399-400. 7 B. Attard, ‘Andrew Fisher, the High Commisionership and the Collapse of Labor’, in Labour History, No. 68, 1995, p.117. Attard has argued in this article that Fisher’s statement is often taken out of context and used to imply that Fisher unreservedly supported the prospect of an imperial war. 8 S. Moyn, ‘Review Essays: Empathy in History, Empathizing with Humanity’, History and Theory, Vol. 45, 2006, pp. 397-399. I am using the term ‘empathy’ very deliberately here, as it was an emotion that, Moyn has argued, was central to the development of the kind of ‘sentimental humanitarianism’that was the precursor of the form of liberal imperial humanitarianism that is the focus of this study. 12
against civilians. In the case of the First World War, the empathetic credo of liberal humanitarian imperial sentiment was in perfect sympathy with the call for a humanitarian intervention in Belgium and France.
For these liberal humanitarian imperialists, the Great War was a just war. And it was through the medium of atrocity propaganda that the just war argument was presented, using everything from lofty altruistic rhetoric to vulgar anti-German slander. It appealed to both the best and the worst in human nature, drawing upon humanitarianism, liberalism and seemingly paradoxically - racist caricature - to inspire people to support the war. As
Brian Lewis, a young boy during the war in Australia recalled, ‘in those four years of war we showed idealism and selfless sacrifice, stupid credulity and vile hatred. At the beginning we believed everything that we were told; at the end we believed nothing’.9
Through an analysis of the liberal, humanitarian and imperial ideals that provided the ideological discourse which influenced atrocity propaganda and its reception, this study traces the arc of the war from its idealistic inception to its bitter end, from an Australia that had raced to enlist when the stories of German atrocities reached their peak in May 1915, to an Australia that met similar atrocity stories at the end of the war with widespread derision and hostility.10 In doing so, it provides new insights into why Australians both embraced and resisted the war. It also
9 B. Lewis, Our War: Australia during World War I, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1980, p.3. 10 See: T.A. Van Dijk, ‘Ideology and discourse analysis’, Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol.11., Iss. 2., 2006, p.17 for a definition of ideological discourse. 13
demonstrates that some Australians had a complex relationship with imperialism, one that altered as the economic, social and political costs of the war became apparent.
This thesis contributes original insights into Australia and the First
World War in several ways. Firstly, it provides a comprehensive portrait of how atrocity propaganda functioned in Australia. Not only has the topic of
Australian Great War propaganda in general been neglected, so too has the topic of atrocity propaganda specifically. While Peter Stanley has provided two brief sections on Australian First World War propaganda in his books
What did you do in the war, Daddy?, and more recently in The War at Home, no other general overviews of propaganda in Australia during the First
World War have been produced.11 In relation to atrocity propaganda Judith
Smart has written a journal article on the importance of the ‘poor little
Belgium’ campaigns that took place in Australia. 12 All other investigations into the impact of propaganda on Australian support for the war have focused on pre-war jingoistic imperial propaganda.13
Other than Smart’s article, references to atrocity propaganda have been fleeting and focused upon its gendered nature. Certainly, the use of
11 J. Connor, P. Stanley, P. Yule, The War at Home, Australia, Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 176-177 and pp.190-192 ; P. Stanley, What did you do in the war, Daddy?: a visual history of propaganda posters, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 8-11. Nathan Wise has written a chapter about themes of isolation and abandonment in Australian recruitment posters; however, it is published in Spanish. See: N. Wise, ‘”We’re coming Lads!”: Isolation and abandonment themes in Australian recruitment posters during the First World War’, in José Manuel Goñi Pérez (ed.), La Guerra: Retórica y Propaganda (1860-1970), Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva, 2015. 12 J. Smart, ‘‘’Poor Little Belgium’ and Australian Popular Support for War 1914-1915”, in War and Society, Vol. 12., No. 1., 1994. 13 Bessant, op.cit.; Evans, op.cit.; Hollingworth, ‘The Cult of Empire – Children’s Literature Revisited’ op.cit.; Hollingworth, The call of Empire being the study of the imperial Indoctrination of Australian school children in the period 1890 – 1910, op.cit. 14
female vulnerability and rape in atrocity propaganda is notable and important. For example, as Carmel Shute has noted, atrocity propaganda preyed upon ‘women’s sexual vulnerability’ by portraying them as ‘prime victims of imminent attack’.14 The exploitation of images of helpless women and children was a key element of atrocity propaganda; imagery such as that used by the N.S.W. Recruiting Committee, in which a demented Hun threatens a defenceless woman and children, certainly is dependent upon pre-existing tropes about female helplessness.15 Figure 1.
Appealing to traditional notions of gender was not, however, the only tool in the atrocity propagandist’s kit. In addition to the use of portrayals of female helplessness (and its corollary – masculine heroism) were references to a complex range of ideologies. These ranged from Enlightenment ideals about moral progress, to nineteenth century scientific racism to liberal conceptions of Empire, and finally, humanitarianism.16
In order to provide a convincing portrait of how atrocity propaganda functioned in Australia during the Great War, I have challenged how previous Australian historians have characterised Australians’ engagement with propaganda. As I will discuss in detail later in the introduction, the majority of Australian historians have conceived of propaganda as a powerful means of top-down ‘official’ government communication that could control people. Instead, I define propaganda as a medium that drew
14 C. Shute, ”Blood votes” and the “bestial boche”: a case study in propaganda, Hecate, Vol.2., Iss. 2., 1976, pp. 16-17. 15 N. F. Gullace, The Blood of our sons: men, women, and the renegotiation of British citizenship during the Great War, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, p.19. 16 M. Lake, A Divided Society: Tasmania During World War I, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1975, p.22; Shute, op.cit., pp. 16-17. 15
heavily upon the surrounding culture and various ideological discourses that already existed: for it to be successful, it had to already reflect existing beliefs, not introduce new ones. Instead I contend that propaganda is a method through which ideological discourse is transmitted. Ideology is a term that describes how a group organises its ‘self image…identity, actions, aims, norms and values’; this group then perpetuates and confirms these notions ‘through discourse’.17 I argue that propaganda – which can be visual, textual and even musical - is a form of discourse that can be used to perpetuate and confirm ideologies. Propaganda during the First World War was the means through which competing ideological discourses and political viewpoints could be transmitted in a mass society. An analysis of atrocity propaganda therefore provides us with a window into the ideological discourse – that of liberal humanitarian imperialism (a form of imperial sentiment) – which was influential during the course of the First World War.
Figure 1. Emilio Kupfer, ‘The Soul of the Hun’, reprinted in Call to Arms, Anzac Day 1916, published by the New South Wales Recruiting Committee, p.13, Q.S.L.
17 Van Dijk, op.cit., p.115. 16
The second way this thesis provides an original contribution to knowledge is through an exploration of how Australians related to the
British Empire. As I will discuss later in the introduction, imperial sentiment consisted of more complex than jingoistic patriotism. It encompassed numerous values, from liberal humanitarianism to aggressive expansionist policies. Australia was not a mono-polity, and support for
British imperialism was therefore ideologically varied. Supporters of
Empire ranged from those who approved of Benjamin Disraeli’s aggressive
‘new imperialism’ to others who believed the Empire was a force for gently
(but persistently) spreading civilisation and liberal ideals throughout the globe.
The third purpose of this thesis is to analyse the political role played by atrocity propaganda during the Great War. Atrocity propaganda had a real and significant impact upon how Australians regarded the war. The liberal and humanitarian concerns articulated in atrocity propaganda were powerful enough to unite disparate groups. Labour movement newspapers such as the Westralian Worker used the same strong language about German atrocities as Melbourne’s conservative newspaper, The Argus. German soldiers, The Argus reported, were ‘Inhuman monsters’.18 Across the continent the Westralian concurred, stating that the Germans had
18 ‘Inhuman Monsters. Baby Pinned with Sword. British Avenge Atrocity’, The Argus, 7 December 1914, p.9. 17
committed ‘hideous barbarities’.19 Atrocities therefore provided a strong moral imperative to fight which spanned political, social and class divisions.
While atrocity propaganda and the liberal humanitarian imperial ideals contained in it appealed to a variety of classes and creeds, from
Catholic to Protestant, conservative to trade unionist, this study will analyse its impact upon two groups in Australian society in detail: the labour movement and the Irish Australian community. These groups are discussed for two reasons. Firstly, they had a complex relationship with imperialism, one that was dependent upon a range of political and economic circumstances. Their support for the war was therefore conditional, and in some cases, finite. Because they had an ambivalent relationship with the
British Empire, their responses to the wars fought and promoted by the
British were multifaceted: where the South African War was generally unpopular amongst these groups, the Great War initially received a much more positive reception. This was, in part, because the liberal humanitarian ideals contained in atrocity propaganda appealed to those who believed the
British Empire could be a force of moral good if the war was just.
This study demonstrates that while jingoistic imperialism was undoubtedly influential in Australia during the Great War, it was not as powerful a motivator for those within the labour movement or the Irish
Australian community. For a variety of reasons (which are explored in detail in Chapters Four and Five) the liberal and humanitarian idealism contained in atrocity propaganda was persuasive. However, by the close of
19 ‘The Atrocities of German Soldiers’, Westralian Worker, 13 August 1915, p.3. 18
the Great War, these justifications for the war were less convincing. In addition, some newspapers and individuals within the groups being examined were never sympathetic to justifications for the war – liberal or otherwise. Groups such as the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) had absolutely no interest in defending an imperial war. The only conflict they were interested in was the one between the capitalist and the working class.
By tracking both the embrace and the rejection of liberal atrocity propaganda among these groups, this study provides new and important insights into the political and ideological complexities surrounding the rise and fall of support for the war in Australia.
For the purposes of this thesis the Irish Australian community and the labour movement are considered as separate entities. While the labour movement was strongly influenced by Irish Australians (who formed a large percentage of the trade union movement and the Australian Labor Party –
A.L.P.), Irish Australians can also be considered as a separate group in that they had distinct political preoccupations during the war.20 Where Irish
Australians were concerned with the impact of the war upon the status of
Home Rule and Irish nationalism, the labour movement was undergoing a split not just over conscription, but also Prime Minister Hughes’ stifling of the union movement through the use of the War Precautions Act. These different preoccupations will be examined in detail in Chapters Four and
Five.
20 N. Kirk, Labour and the politics of Empire: Britain and Australia 1900 to the present Manchester; New York, Manchester University Press, 2011, p. 21. It is important to note that the A.L.P. dropped the ‘u’ in ‘labour’. 19
These two groups are of central importance to tracking war enthusiasm in Australia for a couple of reasons. Firstly, they formed a large enough portion of the population for their support to be crucial to sustaining the war. In the period from 1788 to the beginning of the twentieth century, twenty five percent of immigrants to Australia were Irish.21 And while the number of immigrants declined in the following decade (a 1911 census revealed that only three percent of Australians had been born in Ireland),
‘there remained…large numbers of native-born men and women of Irish descent…who retained strong bonds of affection for Ireland and maintained a keen level of interest in its affairs’.22 Furthermore, the same census of
1911 found that those of Irish descent formed about a quarter of Australia’s population, and around eighty percent of this group were Catholic.23 In relation to the labour movement, their support was crucial to the prosecution of the war: two-thirds of the Australian Imperial Force (A.I.F.) was drawn from the working class, many of whom were unlikely to be unthinking followers of imperialism. 24
The second reason this thesis focuses upon these two groups is because they were largely hostile towards wars of imperial aggression and unimpressed by imperial jingoism. While a large proportion of these groups
21 O. MacDonagh, ‘The Irish in Australia: A General View’, in O. MacDonagh and W.F. Mandle (eds.), Ireland and Irish-Australia: studies in cultural and political history, Australia, Croom Helm, 1986, p.159. 22 M. Campbell, ‘Emigrant Responses to War and Revolution, 1914-21: Irish Opinion in the United States and Australia’, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 32., No. 125., 2000, p.75. 23 S. James, ‘Loyalty Becoming Disloyalty? The War and Irish-Australians Before and After Easter 1916’, in M.J.K. Walsh and A. Varnava (eds.) Australia and the Great War: Identity, Memory and Mythology, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2016, p.110. 24 N. Wise, ‘The Lost Labour Force: Working-Class Approaches to Military Service in the War’, Labour History, No.93, 2007, p.161. 20
were in fact British imperialists, their brand of imperial sentiment was different from that of the imperial jingoist, or the ‘new imperialist’ who has been characterised as supporting a violent and economically expansionist form of imperialism.25 In contrast, some sections of both the Irish
Australian community and the labour movement were heavily influenced by liberal strands of imperialism. These people were more receptive to the liberal humanitarian messages contained in First World War atrocity propaganda rather than jingoistic propaganda.
Defining jingoistic imperial sentiment and liberal humanitarian imperial sentiment
The primary purpose of this thesis is to examine how the ideological messages contained within atrocity propaganda impacted upon Australian home front engagement with the Great War. Essentially, this thesis is therefore a study of how a complex interplay of ideologies – liberalism, humanitarianism, and imperialism – was manifested in atrocity propaganda.
In this section I will provide an explanation of how liberalism, humanitarianism and imperialism formed an ideological discourse that formed one aspect of ‘imperial sentiment’. Jingoistic imperial sentiment was also influential, although it does not form the focus of this thesis. However, because it has been regarded as a major source of Australian war enthusiasm, it needs to be defined for the purposes of this thesis.
25 C.C. Eldridge, England’s Mission: The Imperial Idea in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli 1868-1880, Great Britain, University of North Carolina Press, 1973, p.3. For a discussion of ‘new imperialism’ within the Australian context see: C.N. Connolly, ‘Class, birthplace, loyalty: Australian attitudes to the Boer War’, Historical Studies, Vol.18., Iss. 71., p. 211. 21
Despite the complexity of imperial sentiment, Australian historians of the First World War have for the most part conceived of imperial propaganda and imperial sentiment as a simple and potent patriotic formula. For some of the historians under discussion, imperial sentiment consisted solely of duty, Empire Day bonfires, and penny dreadfuls, and included the kind of imperial propaganda that Australian schoolchildren were exposed to both before and during the war.26 Basing his understanding of the mindset of Australian schoolchildren on the School
Papers that were distributed to school children, historian Bob Bessant has stated that ‘The children could be forgiven for assuming that the King was the real ruler of Australia’. Bessant located the support for the war in imperial indoctrination in schools, claiming that its influence ‘should not be underestimated’.27
Bessant and other Australian historians have argued that jingoistic imperial sentiment was one of the main reasons men ‘enthusiastically’ joined ‘the armed forces in 1914 to fight and die for the Empire’.28 Raymond
Evans also ascribed Australian war enthusiasm to pre-war jingoistic imperial propaganda, writing, ‘Most Australian school children, whether public or private, primary or secondary, had been finely tuned for warfare long before the Great War of 1914-18 had actually begun.29 Jacqueline
Hollingworth also identified jingoistic imperialism as the main impetus for
26 Bessant, op.cit.; Evans, op.cit.; Hollingworth, ‘The Cult of Empire – Children’s Literature Revisited’, op.cit.; Hollingworth, The call of Empire being the study of the imperial Indoctrination of Australian school children in the period 1890 – 1910, op.cit,. 27 Bessant, op.cit., p.97. 28 Ibid., p.102. See Bessant’s paper for an exploration of Lord Meath’s activities in Australia. 29 Evans, op.cit., p.100. 22
the Great War in her study of Victorian and Edwardian school curricula and unofficial imperial propaganda; imperial sentiment, she has argued, brought
‘together members of the British Empire and had a considerable influence in persuading so many young Australians to join the armed forces in 1914 and later’.30 The overall impression given by these historians was that imperial sentiment was an uncomplicated affair, one of flag waving and patriotism: it was something that appealed to those who lived in a simpler time, who believed in duty first and thinking second. Hollingworth, for example, dismissed those who were influenced by Imperial propaganda to join the
Australian Imperial Force as the ‘brave and the brainless’.31
However, this form of imperial sentiment was not the only kind, as imperialism itself was not a simple phenomenon. There were many different sorts of imperial sentiment, some of it jingoistic, some of influenced by humanitarianism and liberalism. This was due in part to the fact that what the Empire represented was a source of debate. Was it an economic entity, existing for the purpose of enriching the coloniser, and therefore a wholly pragmatic affair, as some of the Socialists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century perceived it? Or was it simply a creation that was held together through the pure power of sentiment? Just as the definition of what the Empire stood for was dependent upon who was discussing it, so too was imperial sentiment. For example, many socialists adhered to a theory of economic imperialism, believing that the British
30 Hollingworth, The call of Empire being the study of the imperial Indoctrination of Australian school children in the period 1890 – 1910, op.cit., p.207. 31 Hollingworth, ‘The Cult of Empire – Children’s Literature Revisited’, op.cit., p.90. 23
Empire was nothing more than an economically parasitical system that mouthed humanitarian platitudes but functioned only to make profit through oppression.32 In contrast, both liberals and conservatives who lived in the late Victorian era believed the Empire could be a cause that benefited people.33 As Richard Whatmore has observed, ‘A view of the British Empire as a moral phenomenon – a force for education, civilisation, and progress – became commonplace in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’.34
Whether or not it was acutally a force for ‘progress” is not at issue here – the point is that both conservatives and liberals, and even some Socialists, believed it was.
What British imperialism was, exactly, has continued to be the source of argument and conjecture. There is a great store of debate about what exactly constituted British imperialism, with some late twentieth and early twentieth first century historians arguing that it was more of a cultural phenomenon than an economic one; the Empire really was only a powerful illusion, pasted together with the iconography of propaganda and pageantry.35 Historian Ronald Hyam went so far as to assert in 2002 that
‘When you come to think of it, there was no such thing as Greater Britain,
32 See for example: J.A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study, London, Constable, 1905. 33 N. Etherington, Theories of Imperialism: War, Conquest and Capital, New York, Routledge Revivals, 1984; 2014, p.86. 34 R. Whatmore, ‘’Neither Masters nor Slaves’: Small States and Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in D. Kelly (ed.), Lineages of Empire: the Historical Roots of British imperial Thought, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, p.53. 35 E.A. Robertson, The Hybrid Heroes and Monstrous Hybrids of Norman and Lionel Lindsay: art, propaganda and race in the British Empire and Australia from 1880-1918, M.A., Australian National University, 2010, pp. 27-28. 24
still less a British Empire – India perhaps apart’36. Others, such as Peter Cain and Anthony Hopkins, integrated economic and social history in their 1993 two-volume work British Imperialism to depict the British Empire as both a pragmatic and profitable entity.37 The debate therefore about exactly what the British Empire, and by extension, British imperialism was and remains a rich area of study, and has occupied scholars for many decades.38 The debate and historiography surrounding the nature and operation of the
British Empire and imperialism falls outside of the purview of this thesis.
However, it is important to acknowledge the historiography of the British
Empire, in order to frame a definition of how I will use the term ‘Empire’ and
‘imperialism’ in this thesis. Michael Doyle’s terse definition is perhaps the most suitable, as it is simple, succinct and sufficient for the purposes of this study. He wrote in 1986 that an empire was
…a relationship, form or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, by economic, social, or cultural
36 R. Hyam, Britain's Imperial Century, 1815 - 1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion, Palgrave Macmillan, Great Britain, 2002; 1993, p.1. 37 R. E. Dummett, ‘Exploring the Cain/Hopkins paradigm: issues for debate; critique and topics for new research’, in R.E. Dummett (ed), Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism: the new debate on Empire, Abingdon, Routledge, 2014, p.2. 38 See: Hobson op.cit., for the argument that the Empire existed to economically exploit its colonies. For a good summary of John Maynard Keynes’ approach to the economic aspects of the British Empire, see: C. Carlo, The Political and Economic Thought of the Young Keynes: Liberalism, Markets, and Empire, London, Routledge, 2014; For counter-arguments against Hobson’s perspective on the British Empire, see: D.K. Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire, 1830-1914, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973; Fieldhouse has argued the main drivers of imperial expansion were not economic, but ideological and political. Other notable theorists include Jack Gallagher and Ronald Robinson (who published an influential article in 1953 in Economic History Review titled ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’), and Bernard Porter and John M. Mackenzie (who are both consulted throughout this thesis). Important debates about the British Empire and the nature of imperialism can be accessed via The Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History. 25
dependence. Imperialism is simply the process or policy of maintaining an empire.39
One form in which an empire expresses itself, and consolidates identity, is through sentiment – in other words, through a pervasive ideological discourse. In 1906, F.S. Oliver, a Scot who wanted to bring stability to the
Empire by federating all of the nations within it, argued that the Empire was not ‘a political fact, but only a phrase, an influence, or a sentiment…a voluntary league of states, terminable upon a breath’.40 This thesis argues that imperial sentiment was, in fact, very powerful in the period in which
Scot was writing. It was precisely this fragile sentiment, or indeed breath, that made many Australians feel they were part of the distant British
Empire. However, despite the strength of imperial sentiment, this breath faltered and indeed, ceased altogether in some communities as the Great
War extracted its cost in the basic necessities of life, and of course, life itself.
Propaganda was one of the primary vehicles through which imperial sentiment was expressed. Two kinds of imperial sentiment, and also two kinds of propaganda, are discussed throughout the thesis. The first is jingoistic imperialism, which is reasonably simple to define. Jingoistic imperialism was often exploited by advertisers and purveyors of various goods who propagated a pure and simple patriotic imperial sentiment; that is, a straightforward expression of love of King and Country. This kind of jingoistic imperial propaganda was part of a broader network of imperial
39 M. Doyle, Empires, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1986, p. 45. 40 F.S. Oliver, ‘Alexander Hamilton: An Essay on American Union, 1906, p. 20, pp 447-57 quoted in Hyam, op.cit., p.3. 26
propaganda that helped to hold together disparate colonies through shared culture – and also shared commodities.41 A Cadbury’s advertisement, for example, which was displayed in the Sydney magazine The Bulletin in 1907, provides the impression of a geographically immense Empire bound together by the comforting domestic commodity of cocoa. Figure 2.
Figure 2. Cadbury, [The Tie That Binds], printed in the Bulletin, 25th July 1907
The linking of commodities to military prowess was a powerful advertising strategy in the Victorian era, as ‘commodity jingoism itself helped reinvent and maintain British national unity in the face of deepening
Imperial competition and colonial resistance.’42 Commodities were also linked to imperial military actions. The ‘Little Wars’ that took place in Africa and Central Asia, for example, were exploited by manufacturers, who connected the heroism of the British troops with the patriotic quality of their products. Melbourne biscuit manufacturer Swallow and Ariell commissioned a stirring print which linked a battle in the Sudan with their
41 B. Groseclose, ‘Death, glory, empire: art’, in J.F. Codell and D.S. Macleod (eds.), Orientalism Transposed: the Impact of the Colonies on British Culture, Singapore, Ashgate, 1998, p.190. 42 A. McClintock, ‘Soft-Soaping Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising’, in N. Mierzoeff (ed.) The Visual Culture Reader, New York, Routledge, 1998, p.125. 27
doughty treats. Figure 3. Most likely a depiction of the 1885 Battle of
Tofrek, the implication of the print was that Australian produce provided the sustenance for British troops to swiftly dispatch the enemy. Indeed, while Australian troops themselves never saw combat in the Sudan, it is possible that some of the Australian biscuits may have made their way into the British camp, as Swallow and Ariell had donated ten tons of ‘cabin’ biscuits to the NSW contingent.43
Figure 3. Artist unknown, ‘SOUDAN WAR, 1885: Attack by the Arabs on the Commissariat’, Ferguson and Mitchell Art Printers Melbourne, c.1885, A.W.M.
The second kind of imperial sentiment under discussion in this study is liberal humanitarian imperial sentiment. This is a nuanced concept, which requires us to give some attention to the development of humanitarianism, imperialism and the many and varied manifestations of liberalism that had developed in Great Britain during the nineteenth
43 ‘The Soudan Campaign’, Bendigo Advertiser, 18 February 1885, p.3. 28
century. This kind of imperial sentiment was expressed with great power in atrocity propaganda during the Great War. It is important to note here that the term ‘liberal humanitarian imperial sentiment’ will be shortened throughout the thesis to ‘liberal humanitarianism’ or ‘liberal imperialism’ for ease of reading.
The forms of liberalism, humanitarianism and British imperialism under scrutiny in this study developed from the mid-eighteenth to the late - nineteenth century. Because these ideologies developed concurrently, they were not strictly independent concepts – indeed, to some extent they influenced each other, despite the fact that they also had their own singular ideological pathways. Michael Barnett, for example, linked the development of humanitarianism with liberalism in the eighteenth century, because the new Enlightenment experience of ‘sympathy’ (which Barnett describes as a direct predecessor of humanitarianism) coupled with ‘the protection of individual liberties and intervention for the public good stimulated a newfound confidence in the human capacity to make a difference’.44
The historical development of these three concepts will be analysed in more depth in Chapter Three, which tracks their emergence and evolution. In this introduction, however, I will provide a historical summary of the development of liberal humanitarian imperial sentiment will be sufficient to underpin the thesis as a whole.
44 M. Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism, United States, Cornell University Press, p. 51. 29
In order to do so, I interlink concepts that have been regarded by some scholars as inherently inimical. As Uday Singh Mehta has argued, the fact that both British Empire and liberalism strengthened and consolidated in the nineteenth century was not necessarily a contradictory phenomenon.45 In his study of British liberalism and the Empire, Mehta sought to reconcile liberal ideals with imperial practice. He asked, ‘how did thinkers who were committed to ideas of equality and liberty, and on occasion even fraternity, see in a plurality of extant life forms little more than an occasion to assert a rational paternalism to which their ideas had already committed them?’46 The answer lies partly in the evolution of liberalism from the non-interventionist and limited government policies of seventeenth century liberal John Locke, to the interventionist liberalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. As Manfred Steger has pointed out, the great liberal achievements of the nineteenth century were ones in which the state directly intervened – for example, the ‘establishment of a national system of free elementary public education’ in 1870.47
Thus, while British liberalism championed notions that would ordinarily be regarded as in opposition to the colonial policies of imperialism – individual liberty, for example - it was also a philosophy
(driven by Utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham) that championed the role of the state in supporting the greatest public good. By the late nineteenth
45 U. S. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought, Chicago; London, University of Chicago Press, 1999, p.7, 46Ibid., p.190. 47 M. B. Steger, ‘The Grand Ideologies of the Nineteenth Century: British Liberalism, French Conservatism , and German Socialism’, Oxford Press Scholarship Online, 2011, p.8 and p.9, accessed online 24 September 2016. 30
century, many liberals had abandoned the idea of ‘a minimal State in which individual property rights were sacrosanct’. Instead, some liberals
‘acknowledged that the freedom of people whose struggle for survival afforded them little scope to make the best of their capacities’ was in practice severely limited. Only state intervention, in other words, could assist people to make the best use of their lives. 48
And it was that very propensity to interfere in state and individual affairs (amongst some influential liberals) which also made liberalism an ideology that was, on occasion, sympathetic to the notion of the interference of the Empire on behalf of the greater good of colonised people. 49 For how could a colonised people exercise their freedoms when they existed in an environment that was inherently opposed to supporting individual freedom? Mehta has argued that some liberals conceived of the Empire as an ‘unselfish idea’, and that the bestowal of a ‘more just and free politics’ were a ‘beneficent compensation’ for the Empire.50
Of course, this is a simplification of the interaction of liberalism with the imperial idea. Liberalism is a complex and multifaceted ideology that has a difficult history, particularly in relation to imperialism. While this introduction will not attempt to reconcile this complex past, it will however, provide enough knowledge of the sympathy between liberalism and imperialism to lay the groundwork for the definition of liberal humanitarian
48 R. Eccleshall, British Liberalism: Liberal Thought from the 1640s to the 1980s, United States, Longman Group UK Limited, 1987, p.3. 49 Barnett, op.cit., p.51. 50 Mehta, op.cit., p.191. 31
imperial sentiment. Firstly, I have shown that liberalism, despite its credo of non-interference, was, by the period covered in this thesis, sympathetic to interference if the moral impetus behind it was to ultimately provide greater liberty.
Another complicating factor, however, was war. And it is to the varied ways that the British liberals responded to war that we must turn, in order to provide a definition. Because it was in war that divisions within liberalism became most starkly apparent. This thesis is greatly concerned with the various ways in which liberal ideology influenced political responses to both the South African and Great War. Liberal humanitarian imperial sentiment was but one, if not one of the most important, manifestations of liberalism during the Great War.
Liberal humanitarian imperialism only became apparent as an ideology when the Empire embarked upon the South African War in 1899.
David Blaazer and other scholars of late nineteenth and early twentieth century British liberalism such as George L. Bernstein have noted that war was a force that created division within the ranks of the British liberalism.
Blaazer has focused upon the impact of the South African War upon liberal progressivism, whom, he has stated had ‘anti-imperialist’ instincts.51 The war solidified anti-imperialist thinking amongst progressives such as J.A.
Hobson, whose book Imperialism: A Study became the ‘statement of a
51 G. L. Bernstein, ‘Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and the Liberal Imperialists’, The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 23., Iss. 1., 1983, p.105. D. Blaazer, The Popular Front and the Progressive Tradition: Socialists, Liberals, and the Quest for Unity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 72. 32
progressive anti-imperialist position which was to shape progressive opinion for decades to come’.52 However, it also created a different response amongst other liberals, one of which has not to date been explicitly mapped as a movement that influenced the course of politics between the
South African War and the Great War. This was the paradox in which many liberals who opposed the South African War then supported the Great War.
War was a fundamentally disruptive and divisive force within British liberal ranks. Bernstein has written, ‘There is no question that the Liberal party verged on the unmanageable during the crisis over imperialism and the Boer War’. Many of those Liberals in the British parliament who supported the South African War were known as Liberal Imperialists, who were in some ways more sympathetic with conservative politics than liberal ideology. It is very important here to differentiate liberal humanitarian imperialists from the Liberal Imperialists who supported aggressive intervention in South Africa, as opposed to those such as Henry Campbell-
Bannerman, who sought a diplomatic solution.53 Indeed, the liberal humanitarian imperialists in this thesis were, like Campbell-Bannerman, opposed to the South African War. And the language that these liberals drew upon to oppose the war was strongly influenced by humanitarianism.
As will be thoroughly explored in Chapter Four and Five, liberal humanitarian opponents of the South African War spoke of the ‘rights of small nations’, and of the atrocities being committed by the British army against Boer civilians. This language drew heavily upon the humanitarian
52 Ibid., Blaazer, pp. 72-73. 53 Bernstein, op.cit., p.109. 33
rhetoric that, as we shall see in Chapter Three, had become a dominant discourse throughout the British Empire.
By this point, humanitarianism had become an almost centrifugal force in British (and by extension, Australian) politics, particularly in relation wartime atrocities against civilians. Humanitarianism had also become interlinked to the imperial project. For example, prominent humanitarian activist Emily Hobhouse said to the British authorities that it was for the sake of the Empire that the Boer women and children should be treated well in the concentration camps. She understood that the Empire’s humanitarian credentials were important to those who adhered to the ideal that the Empire stood for civilised behaviour. In a conversation with Lord
Milner about the conditions in the camps, Hobhouse reportedly told him,
‘Britain’s honour was at stake’. 54 For Hobhouse to have used these terms with Milner is indicative of how unacceptable atrocities against civilians during wartime had become during a period which historian Michael
Barnett has dubbed the ‘age of imperial humanitarianism’.55
Michelle Tusan has agreed with Barnett’s assessment, contending that by the late nineteenth century humanitarianism was intimately connected with the British Empire, and to liberalism. This paternalistic engagement with humanitarianism was often an inherently colonial one.56
Humanitarian sympathy was never, therefore, ‘broadly a constant’ that
54 Hobhouse quoted in: M. Hasian, ‘The “Hysterical” Emily Hobhouse and South African War Concentration Camp Controversy’, in Western Journal of Communication, Iss. 67., Vol. 2., 2003, p.148. 55 Barnett, op.cit., pp. 49-76. 56 M. Tusan, ‘Humanitarianism, genocide and liberalism’, Journal of Genocide Research,Vol. 17., Iss. 1., 2015, p.90. 34
could be ‘applied differently according to circumstances’ it instead framed
‘suffering within moral and civilizational discourses and traditions of activism’.57
As Michael Barnett has written, ‘Humanitarianism comes in many shapes and forms’.58 Humanitarianism was and remains a constantly evolving ideology that is expressed in a particular way in a particular historical context. Abigail Green has observed that humanitarianism per se does not exist. Instead there are humanitarian traditions which need to be differentiated according to the ‘different national, religious and imperial cultures’.59 Thus, humanitarianism has different expressions according to the time and space in which it is situated.
The humanitarianism under examination in this thesis is intertwined closely with British imperialism and liberalism. It was a strongly interventionist form of humanitarianism that ‘found voice in campaigns’ to force the government to abolish slavery and that also became engaged on a mass level to demand government intervention when atrocities were being committed.60 It was also inextricably bound up in the imperialist ideology that paradoxically promised to free its colonial subjects through the application of benevolent rule.
57 L. Kelly, ‘Christianity and Humanitarianism in the Doukhobor Campaign, 1894-1902’, Cultural and Social History, [no volume/issue available], May 2016, p.1. 58 Barnett, op.cit., p.22. 59 A. Green, ‘Humanitarianism in Nineteenth-Century Context: Religious, Gendered, National’, Historical Journal, Vol.57, No. 4., 2014, p.169. 60 Tusan, op.cit., p. 90 and p.97. 35
The humanitarianism under examination in this thesis was also deeply concerned with how war should be conducted. This was due not just to internal developments of humanitarian ideology within Britain, but also to the influence of Red Cross founder Henry Dunant’s visionary experience at the Battle of Solferino in 1859. Dunant’s activism was part of a larger evolution about how war was thought about in Europe: ‘at this time’, Barnett has written, ‘natural law-based theories led to a stronger distinction between combatants and noncombatants, the view that not all violence was necessary or justified, especially as it pertained to the wounded and prisoners of war’.61
Humanitarianism, liberalism and imperialism evolved alongside one another in the nineteenth century. Viewed in this way, it seems to be both obvious and inevitable that humanitarianism, liberalism and imperialism should become closely intertwined, particularly in relation to how war was discussed and prosecuted. It was this nexus that led some people to deplore one imperial war (the South African War), only to support a larger and more devastating one (the Great War). The vision of war and empire that was shared by liberal humanitarian imperialists was therefore a complex one which was morally fraught and politically multi-dimensional. Atrocity propaganda, with its depictions of vulnerable non-combatants and militaristic Germans, perfectly encapsulated the moral values that were held be liberal humanitarian imperialists.
61 Barnett, op.cit., p.78. 36
Jingoistic propaganda, in contrast, expressed a very different vision of imperialism. British printmakers such as G.W. Bacon produced twelve prints of various battles that had taken place during the course of the South
African War.62 One image, being the ‘Siege of Mafeking’, by artist A.
Sutherland, depicted Baden-Powell’s ‘Rough Riders’ fighting the Boers.
There were various details of violence, one being the skewering of a Boer through the eye by a British soldier. Figure 4. A British postcard by an unknown artist also depicted a Boer being savagely stabbed by a British soldier, albeit this time by a bayonet, not a sword. Figure 5. The accompanying text quotes part of a Rudyard Kipling poem, ‘He is out on active service wiping something off a slate’.63
62 P. Harrington, British Artists and War: the Face of Battle in Paintings and Prints, 1700 – 1914, Great Britain, Greenhill Books, 1994, p.297. While there is no evidence that these particular items of propaganda were distributed in Australia, there were nonetheless cheap chromolithographs being distributed around the country celebrating various British victories in South Africa. Newspapers in particular printed special illustrated supplements. See: ‘Mafeking Memento’, The Telegraph, 18 June 1901, p.5; ‘Souvenirs of Mafeking Day’, The Northern Miner, 23 May 1900, p.3. 63 John Fraser Collection, Propaganda postcards, Great Britain, GB1 Important events pre- 1914, South African War, Patriotic, Bodleian Library. No publication details are available for this postcard, c. 1899-1902. 37
Figure 4. Detail. A. Sutherland, ‘Defence of Mafeking’, chromolithograph on paper, c.1899 -1902, collection of the Australian War Memorial.
Figure 5. British South African War postcard, c. 1899-1902, John Fraser Collection, Bodleian Library.
While this sort of propaganda was no doubt effective with some audiences, it did not appeal to all Australians. It also most likely raised a measure of disquiet amongst Irish Australians in particular, many of whom were more likely to sympathise with the Boers being skewered, rather than the 38
imperialists who were doing the skewering. The casual brutality of jingoistic propaganda was an exclusive rather than inclusive type of propaganda that failed to take into account the sensitivities of Irish members of the Empire, or indeed, liberal humanitarians. What was required to mobilise a disparate and complex Empire was a far more sophisticated moral message than that afforded by imperial jingoism alone.
As British historian Adrian Gregory has pointed out, ‘other conditions were required to move from patriotic cheering on the sidelines to actually joining up’.64 Simple patriotism alone was not sufficient to motivate millions of people to support a protracted bloody conflict, much less to volunteer to fight in it.
This is not to say that patriotism and love of Empire were not strong motivators – they were. However, ‘patriotism’ and love of Empire encapsulated more than flag waving and cheering. Imperialism was also a deeply moralistic engagement with the world. ‘Imperial loyalty’ in Australia during the First World War was a complex phenomenon and the type of imperialism expressed by Australians varied greatly, from jingoistic imperialism to the imperialists of the liberal-left persuasion, who thought deeply about what Empire represented and only supported a war they believed defended civilisation against barbarism. For Australians with liberal progressive tendencies, ideal Britishness was represented by liberal values, and the moral legitimacy of wars conducted by Great Britain were judged accordingly.
64 A. Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War, Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom, 2008, p. 74. 39
In contrast to jingoistic propaganda, atrocity propaganda framed the
First World War as a humanitarian intervention and was part of the liberal humanitarian imperial rhetoric that justified the war. At the outset, the
British government had defended the war within a liberal tradition: it was being fought to defend the rights of small nations. Germany had torn up the treaty to respect Belgian neutrality and was a menace to international law.
Their disrespect towards Belgium neutrality had persuaded reluctant
Liberals in the British Cabinet to support the war.65 In addition, when news of the atrocities emerged, ‘the conduct of German forces in Belgium lifted the Allied cause to a higher and more compelling plane’. Militarism and
‘Prussianism’ had become a clear threat to civilisation, and by extension, liberal humanitarian ideals.66
Through image, word and song, atrocity propaganda transformed this liberal conception of a just war into a compelling reason to fight. This thesis will examine the underlying narrative that was contained in atrocity propaganda, one that was sustained across numerous mediums. The invasion of Belgium and France, the shelling of British towns, Zeppelin attacks on cities and the sinking of passenger liners all featured in posters, pamphlets, films and newspapers – these will be analysed during the course of the thesis. German atrocities were discussed frequently in the Australian media, and regularly featured in speeches by politicians and recruiting
65 Z. S. Steiner and K. Nelson, Britain and the Origins of the First World War, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, p.248. 66 T. Frame, ‘The Belgian “Atrocities” and the Australian Churches’, conference paper delivered at Poppies, Propaganda and Passchendaele: Australia, Belgium and the Great War, 23 July 1915, State Library of New South Wales, unpublished. 40
sergeants. Atrocity propaganda drew upon a variety of cultural, philosophical and ideological influences to represent the German, or the
‘Hun’, as a monstrous threat to civilisation. It played a fundamental role in depicting the conflict as a just war, one fought to defend women and children from a ruthless and militaristic enemy.
Thus, it is not atrocity propaganda itself that is the focus of this study, but instead the various ideologies – humanitarianism, liberalism and imperialism - that it embodied, and the impact that these ideologies had over the course of the war. The same words and visual symbols repeat themselves in atrocity propaganda, regardless of the medium, and regardless of whether they emanate from an official government source, or from an unofficial propagandist. From books to posters, speeches to musical scores, atrocity propaganda was defined by its ‘anti-Hun’ mantra coupled with a call to defend the Belgians and French. It is the purpose of the thesis to decode these messages, and relate them back to the broader political and ideological currents that produced them.
As was discussed earlier, despite the importance of atrocity propaganda in shaping how Australians engaged with the Great War, atrocity propaganda has not received much attention from historians. This is due, in part, to the way that Australian historians have interpreted the term ‘propaganda’ itself. Part of this introduction re-evaluates and redefines
‘propaganda’ because Australian historians have used this term in a limited way. Propaganda is a complex form of communication, yet Australian historians have misunderstood it, believing it instead to consist of simple 41
and often untruthful messages that are sold to the naïve masses.67 As a result, the full role of propaganda in Australia during the Great War has not been properly explored. In the next section of this introduction I will challenge how Australian historians have used the term ‘propaganda’ and provide an alternative conceptualisation.
Another reason that atrocity propaganda has not been comprehensively explored is that the German atrocities have until the 21st century been regarded by the majority of historians of the Great War as fictions manufactured by propagandists. In Chapter One, the historiography of the German atrocities is therefore addressed. Because historians have regarded propaganda as untruthful, the German atrocities that featured in
Allied propaganda have been dismissed as having been manufactured. As
John Horne, Alan Kramer, and more recently Isabel V. Hull have demonstrated, not all of the atrocities were confected. Some of them had in fact occurred. In Chapter One I discuss how the negative reputation of the war and the atrocity propaganda that supported it has distorted how historians have discussed Australian responses to atrocities. In addition, this thesis demonstrates that simplistic interpretations of the terms
‘propaganda’ and ‘imperialism’ have produced not a portrait but a caricature of how Australians related to the war.
67 See: R. Evans, Loyalty and disloyalty: social conflict on the Queensland homefront, 1914-18, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1987, p.31; L. Finch, Dark Angel: propaganda in modern warfare, Victoria, circa, 2006, p.11; J. Smart, ‘‘’Poor Little Belgium’ and Australian Popular Support for War 1914-1915”, in War and Society, Vol. 12., No. 1., 1994, p.32; G. Fischer, ‘”Negative integration” and an Australian road to modernity: Interpreting the Australian homefront experience in World War I’, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 26., Iss. 104., 1995, p.467; Connor, Stanley and Yule, op.cit., p.191. 42
In order to create an alternative picture of how Australians related to the war it is important, therefore, to introduce a more nuanced definition of propaganda than the one that has been commonly utilised by Australian historians. Propaganda was not just a simple form of communication. It was a vehicle through which people could express and promote their moral and political values.
A reappraisal of the ethics of propaganda
Atrocity propaganda and the liberal ideals that promoted the war played a central role in motivating many Australians to support the conflict. Despite the importance of these moral imperatives, the role of atrocity propaganda during the Great War has been greatly misunderstood by Australian historians. This is because the term ‘propaganda’ itself has been misunderstood. This has occurred in two ways. Firstly, historians have used the ‘hypodermic needle’ definition of propaganda. This theory depicts propaganda as a ‘top down’ procedure in which the government injects the masses with the political poison of the day.68 Historians have thus conceived of propaganda as ‘the activity, or the art, of inducing others to behave in a way in which they would not behave in its absence’.69 This definition imputes a tremendous power to propaganda, giving it in effect the capacity to coerce rather than merely to persuade. In using the
68 D. Welch, ‘Introduction’, in Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: a Historical Encyclopaedia, 1500 to the Present, in N.J. Cull, D. Culbert, D. Welch (eds.), California, ABC CLIO, 2003, p. xviii. The hypodermic needle theory has been replaced by a more nuanced understanding of how propaganda functions. Welch has written, ‘Most writers today agree that propaganda confirms rather than converts – or at least is more effective when the message is in line with existing opinions and beliefs of most consumers’.68 69 L. Fraser, Propaganda, Great Britain, Oxford University Press, 1957, p. 1. 43
‘hypodermic’ model, scholars have discussed propaganda as if it is an autonomous determinant of history much in the same way that Marxist scholars believe economic factors determine historical outcomes. The hypodermic needle theory disconnects propaganda from its political and military context and thus from its historical context. Propaganda has principally been regarded as a force that can manufacture phobias out of thin air.
A second type of misrepresentation of the nature of atrocity propaganda by Australian historians is that they have assumed that propaganda is inherently unethical: it presents idealised untruths generated by the propagandist for cynical self-serving (and often sinister) purposes.
These beliefs, coupled with the use of the ‘hypodermic needle’ theory have resulted in a one-dimensional portrayal of how atrocity propaganda functioned in Australia during the First World War. Atrocity propaganda has variously been described by Australian historians as ‘manufactured’, an
‘invention’ and ‘constructed’. This comment from Raymond Evans about the
Queensland home front is an excellent example:
Censorship and propaganda were tools to manipulate collective passions into responding towards the enemy as a monstrous presence and the war as the singular justifiable means of obliterating this scourge…Germany and the war itself represented ultimate barbarity – the butcherer of women and children. The war, waged courageously and sportingly by the Allies ‘to a clean finish’ would alone put a stop to such atrocities .70
70 Evans, Loyalty and Disloyalty, op.cit., p.31. 44
Atrocity propaganda, Evans concluded, was nothing more than a means to manufacture hatred in order to stir up support for an ignoble war. 71
Lynette Finch, referring to Nazi interpretations of Allied propaganda during the Great War, has likewise described propaganda as a ‘pseudo- environment of warfare [which] manufactured war in people’s minds…[giving] civilians a feasible way of understanding what is happening, why it concerns them, why they should support their government in warfare’.72 Judith Smart dismissed the stories about Belgium as a
‘deliberate…construction’.73 Gerard Fischer also believed atrocity propaganda was a construction, and has written that,
the invention of a threatening enemy figure dramatised the war experience and offered a convenient ideological smokescreen behind which the growing divisions in Australian society could be covered up and glossed over, diverting attention from social inequalities and class differences sharpened by the conditions of a wartime economy under the simultaneous challenge of accelerated industrial change.74
While Fischer is certainly correct that the ‘Hun’ provided a uniting influence in Australia, he has exaggerated the extent to which this figure was invented for First World War recruiting purposes. The German as ‘Other’ emerged from a number of sources, ranging from liberal humanitarianism to scientific racism of the nineteenth century. As I discuss in Chapter Three, the ‘Hun’ was a credible figure because it drew upon existing beliefs and ideological systems.
71 Ibid., p.31. 72 Finch, op.cit., p.11. 73 Smart, op.cit., p.32. 74 Fischer, op.cit., p.467. 45
Alongside the belief that propaganda was ‘invented’ was the belief that the Australian public were unable to intelligently interpret and criticise the propaganda that they were exposed to. Peter Stanley has recently written ‘in an age innocent of the degree to which the press could manipulate popular opinion’ the public unquestioningly accepted ‘hysterical exaggeration’ and ‘outright’ falsehoods as the truth. 75 This is not an entirely accurate assessment of how Australians received atrocity propaganda.
Firstly, as Chapter One demonstrates, not all atrocity propaganda was
‘hysterical exaggeration’ and lies. Secondly, not all Australians accepted pro-war propaganda. Indeed, Chapter Two details how anti-war activists physically repudiated pro-war propaganda by tearing it down from the walls, slinging mud at it and writing mocking invective about it in newspapers. They also produced their own counter-propaganda. Thus, while atrocity propaganda was a dominant voice, there were other voices that challenged it. Despite being surrounded by intense propaganda campaigns, and faced with heavy censorship, Australians were often active critics and not always passive consumers; many sought to glean their own
‘truths’ from the news and propaganda that surrounded them.76
These Australian historians have misinterpreted how propaganda functioned during the Great War because they have been drawing upon a negative and simplistic definition of propaganda. The popular nature of
75 Connor, Stanley and Yule, op.cit., p.191. 76 B. Ziino, ‘Audience and the news media in Australia during the First World War’, conference paper delivered at Australia Media Traditions Conference: Soundings and Sightings, 2-3 December 2015, Macquarie University Centre for Media History, N.F.S.A., Canberra, unpublished. 46
propaganda, its sheer omnipresence in 20th and 21st century culture, has led historians to adopt a simplistic approach to the topic; perhaps because there is an assumption that since propaganda often presents messages in a relatively black and white fashion, the nature of its construction is equally black and white. As Taithe and Thornton put it, ‘most readers will assume that it [propaganda] is largely composed of lies and deceit and that propagandists are ultimately manipulators and corrupt. In twentieth century Western Europe [and by extension Australia] the popular perception of propaganda focuses on the activities of governments and the state’.77
It is somewhat ironic that the word ‘propaganda’ attained its ‘miasmic aura’ following its use during the Great War.78 In 1921, American author
Agnes Repplier wrote, ‘One of the ill turns done us by the war was the investing of this ancient and honourable word with a sinister significance, making it at once a term of reproach and the plague and torment of our lives’.79 As will be discussed in detail in the next chapter, the tremendous sense of disillusionment that followed the First World War accounted in part for the backlash against propaganda.
However, while the term became particularly odious following the war, Australian historians’ misinterpretation of how propaganda functions is also connected to traditional objections to rhetoric. Because propaganda
77 B. Taithe and T. Thornton, Propaganda: Political Rhetoric and Identity: 1300-2000, Great Britain, Sutton Publishing, 1999, p.1. 78 W. Irwin, Propaganda and the News, New York (no publisher provided), p.3., quoted in E. W. Fellows, ‘”Propaganda”: History of a Word’, American Speech, Vol. 34, No. 3, 1959, p.184. 79 A. Repplier, ‘A Good Word Gone Wrong’, Independent and the Weekly Review, CVII, 1st October 1921, p. 5. 47
appeals to the emotions of the listener/viewer, the inference is that propaganda interferes with the audience’s free will. Of propagandists,
Bryant wrote, they ‘do not seek to balance or overbalance alternative ideas or courses of action; they seek to obliterate them, to circumvent or subvert the rational processes which tend to make men weigh and consider’.80
These concerns about the emotional power of propaganda were the same ones levelled against rhetorical persuasion by Plato.81 As British propaganda scholar Nicholas O’Shaughnessy observed of the influence of rhetoric upon propaganda, ‘the wicked charm of rhetoric has long been feared’.82
Indeed, the two pivotal charges levelled against propaganda are the same ones that have been levelled against rhetoric. The first problem with propaganda (and rhetoric) is its apparent lack of
‘sincerity’ and truthfulness, its tendency to exaggerate and hyperbolise in order to bring the subject around to the propagandist’s opinion.
Philosopher Stanley B. Cunningham condemned all propaganda on the grounds that it ‘disregards superior epistemic values such as truth and understanding’.83 Thus, propaganda is an unethical form of persuasion, because unlike ‘honest persuasion’, it stoops to manipulate information in order to encourage ‘others to adopt one’s position’.84 The second
80 Bryant, op.cit., p.417. 81 N.J. O’Shaughnessy, Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004, p.5. 82 Ibid., p.66. 83 S. B. Cunningham, The Idea of Propaganda: A Reconstruction, United States, Praeger, 2002, p.4. 84 J. B. White, Heracles’ Bow: Essays on Rhetoric and the Poetics of the Law, Madison, Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, p.6 and p.17. 48
ethical problem with propaganda is that it does not necessarily appeal to people’s rational faculties, but to their emotions. Cunningham has asserted that ‘it corrupts reasoning and the respect for evidence’.
Furthering this line of reasoning, philosopher David C Bryant has claimed propaganda is a means by which ‘some men can impose their wills on others through language in despite of reason’.85
Communications scholar Randall Marlin followed this philosophical line of reasoning and defined propaganda as ‘the organised attempt through communication to affect belief or action or inculcate attitudes in a large audience in ways that circumvent or suppress an individual’s adequately informed, rational, reflective judgement’.86
The first charge against propaganda – that it is untruthful – is reasonably easy to dispense with. Propaganda does not always lie. Of course some Great War atrocity propaganda was untrue. It is highly unlikely that German soldiers turned the bodies of Allied soldiers into soap, bayonetted babies as they walked away singing, or cut off the hands of children.87 In addition, information contained in official British government reports have been subject to considerable scrutiny by historians. For example, the truthfulness of the1918 British blue book
85 D. C. Bryant, ‘Rhetoric: Its functions and its scope’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 39, Iss. 1., 1973, p. 426. 86 R. Marlin, Propaganda: The Ethics of Persuasion, Peterborough, Canada, Broadview Press, 2002, p.22. 87 J. Neander and R. Marlin, ‘Media and Propaganda: The Northcliffe Press and the Corpse Factory Story of World War I’, Global Media Journal, Vol.3., Iss.2., 2010; S.K. Kent, ‘Love and Death: War and Gender in Britain, 1914-1918’, in Frans Coetzee and Marilyn Shevin- Coetzee (eds.), Authority, Identity and the Social History of the Great War, United States, Berghahn Books, 1995, pp. 158-159. 49
into the treatment of South-West Africans by Germans has been questioned.88
On the other hand, as will be discussed in the next chapter in relation to wartime rape and other atrocities committed by the Germans, a considerable number of allegations in atrocity propaganda have turned out to be true. So too were other more quotidian atrocities, such as the sacking of Louvain. The definition of propaganda as being inherently untruthful is therefore misleading and simplistic. Even though much propaganda is untruthful, this is not the always the case.
Moreover, the efficacy of propaganda depends upon its credibility. As
Phillip Taylor has argued, effective propaganda cannot only consist of lies: ‘to be completely convincing…shadow does require some substance and myth needs to be rooted in some reality if propaganda is to succeed’.89
More problematically, some of the propagandists who produced items such as the Bryce investigation into German atrocities in Belgium sincerely believed that atrocities had occurred. Despite the lurid nature of some of the stories in the Bryce Report, Charles, who was the Head of
Wellington House (and was responsible for creating and distributing atrocity propaganda to neutral countries) believed that the Bryce report was
88 C. Twomey, ‘Atrocity Narratives and Inter-Imperial Rivalry: Britain, Germany and the Treatment of “Native Races” 1904-1939’, in T. Crook, R. Gill, B. Taithe, (eds.), Evil, Barbarism and Empire: Britain and Abroad, c. 1830-2000, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p.206. 89 P.M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990; 2003, p.4. 50
truthful. Masterman wrote to Lord Bryce shortly after the release of the report: 90
And I wish – as I have no doubt you wish – that you could have disproved the evidence or brought in the verdict of “Not Guilty”. But as it was true the world must know it that it may never occur again.91
The second charge against propaganda shadows the Platonic condemnation of rhetoric: it is illogical and ‘moves the soul’.92 However, not all propaganda scholars share Plato’s condemnation. They utilise Aristotle’s defence of the rhetoricians’ use of emotions. Communications theorists
Taithe and Thornton, for example, have refuted the notion that appealing to people through their emotional faculties is illogical and thus unethical.93
This is because Aristotle did not believe that decisions arrived at through emotions lack logic. Nussbaum has written, ‘In Aristotle’s view, emotions are not blind animal forces, but intelligent and discriminating parts of the personality, closely related to beliefs of a certain sort, and are therefore responsive to cognitive modification’. In Aristotle’s reasoning, ‘belief and argument’ in fact lay at the heart of what stirs emotions, and the rhetorician needs to appeal first to the logical aspect of the audience’s minds, rather
90 M.L. Sanders and P.M. Taylor, British Propaganda During the First World War, 1914-18, London, Macmillan, 1982, pp. 38-39. 91 C. Masterman, 7 June 1915, Wellington House to Lord James Bryce, Bryce Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 92 R. Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric, Chicago, Gateway, 1968, p.68. The underlining is Masterman’s emphasis. 93 B. S. Bennett and S. P. O’Rourke, ‘A Prolegomenon to the future study of rhetoric and propaganda: Critical foundations’, in G. Jowett and V. O’Donnell (eds.), Readings in Propaganda and Persuasion: New and Classic Essays, Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications, 2006, p.62. 51
than naively expecting that emotion could be stirred through the manipulation of people’s irrational faculties.94
A propagandist’s arguments must therefore be crafted very carefully in order to convince an audience. Firstly, the accusations must be credible and be based to some extent on observable events that the audience can affirm have occurred. Secondly, the arguments presented must resonate with existing belief systems to be successful. Public Relations scholar Jacquie
L’Etang has observed that, ‘propaganda is that which affects social construction to such a degree that its assumptions are welded to the taken- for-granted norms and values of the host culture and make it difficult for deviant views to be expressed’.95 For example, people who were not moved by atrocity propaganda during the war were subject to enormous pressure, largely because atrocity propaganda reflected the ethical norms about war that included ‘the widely held moral principle of civilian immunity’.96
Therefore, when an image of a German soldier attacking a Belgian woman in
1915 was produced for an Australian audience, the propagandist was appealing to the viewer’s existing belief that it is fundamentally wrong for a soldier to attack a woman.
Rather than treating propaganda ‘as decontextualized phenomena’, it is more useful to engage with it as a product of numerous processes (the
94 M.C. Nussbaum, ‘Aristotle on Emotions and rational persuasion’, in A.O. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Oakland, California, University of California Press, 1996, pp. 303-306. 95 J. L’Etang, ‘Public relations and propaganda: Conceptual issues, methodological problems, and public relations discourse’, in J. L’Etang and M. Pieczka (eds.), Public Relation: Critical Debates and Contemporary Practice, London, Lawrence Erlbaum Associations, 2006, p.24. 96 A.J. Bellamy, Massacres and Morality: Mass Atrocities in an Age of Civilian Immunity, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, p.42. 52
manipulation of belief) and context (what is occurring at the time).97
Therefore, in order to seriously assess the role of atrocity propaganda on the
Australian home front during the war, one must first recognise that propaganda is not an independent entity capable of ‘manufacturing hatred’ out of nothing. It is instead a medium that draws upon the concerns and hopes of its time – in short, it is a historically situated form of communication. As David Blaazer has written, ‘the successful propagandist must understand the values, anxieties, and idiom of his or her audience, just as the historian must who wishes to understand the operation and importance of a propaganda campaign’.98
A more suitable way of engaging with the ethics and function of propaganda is to assess it case by case, rather than dismiss it with a blanket definition as ‘unethical and untruthful’. Just as Aristotle regarded rhetoric as ‘a neutral tool that can be used by persons of virtuous or depraved character’, propaganda is neither moral nor immoral.99 Instead, questions should be asked: who created this propaganda? Why did they create it?
What were the ideologies that influenced it? Were they sincere? And how does this propaganda connect to other events occurring at the time? These questions prompt a more accurate assessment and understanding of the moral nature of any particular item of propaganda.
97 I. Marková, ‘Persuasion and Propaganda’, Diogenes, Vol. 55., Iss. 1., 2008, p.49. 98 Blaazer, op.cit., p.7. 99 ‘Aristotle’s rhetoric’, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, online, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/., accessed online 20 February 2013, p.6. 53
It is important to acknowledge that Great War atrocity propaganda contributed to anti-Germanism and chauvinism. Moreover, as Chapter
Three demonstrates, it contained racialised depictions of the ‘Hun’ that were dehumanising and cruel. Evans has contended that the wave of anti-Germanism that swept Australia was ‘as intense and as massive as the anti-Chinese agitations of the late 1880s had been’.100 However, it was not simply the ‘mechanism of unrelenting propaganda’, that facilitated this phenomenon. I demonstrate that this propaganda succeeded because it drew upon ‘flawed’ ideologies and ‘false beliefs’ that were already present in the populace.101 These beliefs may have been immoral, they may have been distasteful – for example, as Nicoletta
Gullace has demonstrated, atrocity propaganda was a deeply gendered and stylised mode of communication which was ‘evocative, sentimental’ and at times highly sexualised – but the medium through which these beliefs were transmitted – propaganda - was not inherently ‘bad’.102
Just as Aristotle regarded rhetoric as ‘a neutral tool that can be used by persons of virtuous or depraved character’, so too is propaganda.103
Furthermore, whether the argument and its underlying ideology are unethical or ethical is partly determined by the historical context of the creator and the viewer. Atrocity propaganda, therefore, sits at various points on a moral continuum, utilising both truth and falsehood to make
100 Evans, Loyalty and disloyalty: social conflict on the Queensland homefront, op.cit., p.63. 101 Andrew M.I. Knox, Book Review, ‘How Propaganda Works’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, [early preview copy] 2016, accessed 22 March 2016, p.2. 102 Gullace, “The Blood of Our Sons”: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War, op.cit., p.19. 103 ‘Aristotle’s Rhetoric’, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed online 20 February 2013, p.6. 54
moral assertions about the war. However, while the falsehoods have been emphasised in the historical literature (for example, the story that the bodies of Allied soldiers were being turned into soap by the
Germans), the truthful stories have been overlooked, as well as the underlying humanitarian sentiment.
This thesis demonstrates that propaganda was not, as has frequently been assumed, an inherently mendacious form of communication. Nor was it a disconnected synthetic discourse that had been simply concocted by the government.104 Instead it was a vehicle through which moral arguments were presented for and against the war.
Just War and ‘moral force’
As a persuasive discourse, propaganda was designed to influence people’s opinions and actions. In the case of atrocity propaganda, its purpose was to raise the dual emotions of humanitarian compassion and hate in order to induce people to join the A.I.F. or otherwise support the war effort. In fact, moral issues sat at the core of atrocity propaganda. As Dale Blair has noted,
‘Australian soldiers did not enter the conflict in a moral vacuum’. The
Christian moral dictum that ‘thou shalt not kill’ was a powerful dictum and an equally powerful argument was needed to inspire some Australian men to set it aside. 105 These moral arguments were deeply rooted in both
104 E. Kris and N. Leites, ‘Trends in Twentieth Century Propaganda’, in Daniel Lerner (ed.), Propaganda in War and Crisis, Arno Press, New York, 1972, p.42. Kris and Leites made the observation that First World War propaganda (in contrast to Second Word War propaganda) relied heavily upon ‘moral argumentation’. 105 D. Blair, No Quarter: Unlawful Killing and Surrender in the Australian War Experience 1915-18, Canberra, Ginninderra Press, 2005, p.11 55
Christian and Enlightenment ideals about war. War is therefore not simply the application of violent force to a situation; it is also a ‘cultural phenomenon’ – the way a society promotes or protests against a war reflects the values and morals of the society conducting the war.106 Recruiters in the
A.I.F. realised that jingoism and patriotism were not enough to inspire reluctant men to join. In 1917, a staff member on the N.S.W. Recruiting
Committee noted that:
A successful appeal would provide the necessary moral force that would compel the indifferent and the selfish…to realise their duty, and bring them flocking in their thousands to take their places in the AIF.107
Atrocity propaganda provided the source of ‘moral force’ in Australia during the Great War. It formed part of a complex nexus between the government, international law, morality and the masses. During the
First World War it was through the medium of atrocity propaganda that ideals about limited warfare and the rights of non-combatants entered the public sphere, and it was also through atrocity propaganda that killing was morally legitimated.
As governments scrambled at the outset of the war to harness the expertise of the advertising industry to engage with a mass audience, propaganda became an essential part of the war effort.108 Historian George
Bruntz has explained, ‘The World War drastically changed the relationship
106 P. B. Kern, ‘Military Technology and ethical Values in Ancient Greek Warfare’, in War & Society, Vol. 6., No. 2, 1988, p.1. 107 Lieutenant McCulloch, on the staff of the N.S.W. State Recruiting Committee, 9th February 1917. Scheme for reinforcements presented to the Director-General of Recruiting. MP367/1 609/30/699, N.A.A. Melbourne. 108 J. Aulich, War Posters: Weapons of Mass Communication, London, Thames and Hudson, 2007, p.8. 56
of the established order of society to propaganda’. He continued,
‘participating governments saw at once that psychological war must accompany economic war and military war. They took seriously the task of psychological mobilization, and they felt the impact of the psychological campaigns of their rivals’.109 A state of near-total war demanded a high degree of civilian participation, and therefore civilian support, for the war.110 The high volume of propaganda produced by the Australian government in the First World War attests to the ongoing need of the authorities to persuade men to fight and, in addition, to the need to convince voters to support a war that drained the economy and crippled a generation of young men. As Martin van Crevald has argued, when it is not a war of obvious self-defence, strong moral arguments are required to make a man willing to risk his life – and to take the lives of others.111
Far from promoting a war based on flimsy excuses, atrocity propaganda advanced an argument for just war behind which lay centuries of philosophical, political and religious thinking. An excellent summary of how the defence of Belgian women and children fits into just war tenets is provided by American theologian Paul Ramsey, who wrote, ‘…it was for the sake of the innocent and the helpless of earth that the Christian first thought
109 G. G. Bruntz, Allied Propaganda and the Collapse of the German Empire in 1918, Stanford University Press, United States of America, 1938, p.vii. 110 I. V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, Cornell University Press, United States of America, 2005, p.205. Hull wrote, ‘World War I was a major stage in the process of totalisation but…it stopped short of its complete development ‘. Hull defined total war as ‘the complete mobilization of civilians, of civil society and especially of the economy for the war effort’. However, the deliberate targeting of civilians and the need for mass support made the Great War one that consumed most of the resources of society. 111 M. van Crevald, ‘The End of Strategy’, in H. Smith (ed.) The Strategists, Australian Defence Studies Centre, Canberra, 2001. 57
himself obliged to make war against an enemy whose… deeds had to be stopped’.112
While just war has been central to mobilising support for conflicts since the early twentieth century, the terminology of just war – its origins and ethics – is extremely complex and dates back to Cicero. 113
Although there are multiple definitions and understandings of what constitutes just war, this study concerns itself with the form of just war that First World War atrocity propaganda drew upon. In this case, a just war occurred when ‘the offense of aggression committed against a nation or a people incapable of defending themselves against a determined adversary’ rendered it permissible for another country to intervene.114 In addition, the conduct of the military forces once the war had commenced was as important as the underlying causes of the war, and the well-being of civilians was absolutely central to the notion of a justly conducted war. Discrimination had to be shown by assuring that military force was applied only to legitimate targets, i.e. to combatants.115 Conversely, a war that targeted civilians (non- combatants) under the pretence of military necessity, as the Germans were said to have done in Belgium, was unjust. Fundamental to this definition, and consistent with both the theological and secular
112 P. Ramsey quoted in R. E. Brigety, Ethics, Technology and the American Way of War = Cruise Missiles and US Security Policy, Abingdon, United Kingdom and New York, 2007, p.30. 113 For a definition of the origins of the term Just War see: R. Kolb, ‘Origin of the twin terms jus ad bellum/jus in bello’, International Review of the Red Cross, Vol. 37., Special Issue 320., 1997, pp. 553-62. 114 J.B. Elshtain, ‘Just War and Humanitarian Intervention’, American University International Law Review, Vol. 17., Iss.1., 2001-2002, p.8. 115 Elshtain, op.cit., p.6. 58
traditions of just war, is the ‘use of moral principles or criteria’.116 As
Lang and O’Driscoll have argued, ‘the just war tradition is the predominant moral language through which we address questions pertaining to the rights and wrongs of the use of force in international society’.117
Atrocity propaganda drew upon sophisticated moral concepts and political ideologies. This conception of propaganda lies at the heart of this study, as it is through propaganda that the great moral and political debates about the war in Australia occurred. I show that in order to be effective, propaganda must ‘make sense of political and social reality to the point that the propaganda message will become significant of a whole political cosmology’.118 Propaganda cannot be relevant if it does not incorporate existing societal morals and fears. As Jacques Ellul has explained,
‘Propaganda must not only attach itself to what already exists in the individual, but also express the fundamental currents of the society it seeks to influence’.119 Thus not only does it influence society; it is influenced by society. As part of this dynamic, propaganda can be rejected as well as embraced.
116 T. Kochi, ‘Problems of Legitimacy within the Just War Tradition and International Law’, in A.F. Lang., C. O’Driscoll, and J. Williams (eds.), Just War: Authority, Tradition, and Practice, United States of America, Georgetown University Press, 2013, p.115. 117 A. F. Lang and C. O’Driscoll, ‘Introduction: the Just War Tradition and the Practice of Moral Authority’ in A. F. Lang, C. O’Driscoll and J.Williams (eds.), Just War: Authority, Tradition and Practice, United States of America, Georgetown University Press, 2013, p.1. 118 B. Taithe and T. Thornton, Propaganda: Political Rhetoric and Identity: 1300-2000, Sutton Publishing, Great Britain, 1999, p.2. 119 J. Ellul, Propaganda: the formation of men’s attitudes, New York, Vintage Books, 1965; 1973, p.38. 59
Politics, ideology and propaganda
Atrocity propaganda and the underlying liberal ideology that supported it had a profound impact upon both groups under examination in this thesis.
So too did the accompanying liberal conception of a ‘just war’. Despite the importance of atrocity propaganda to how the war was perceived in
Australia, historians have not seriously investigated it. The reasons for this are complex. Firstly, the appalling reputation of the war created an environment in which more nuanced readings of Australian support of the war were unlikely to occur. Secondly, the simplistic definition of propaganda used by Australian historians has led to a culture of denial about the civilian suffering that was a consequence of the German invasion of Belgium. Chapter One analyses this historiographical legacy and then re- contextualises atrocity propaganda by interpreting it within the circumstances in which it was viewed and either believed or rejected. In challenging the prevailing myth surrounding the war – that it was fought for petty reasons – this chapter clears the way for a more complex portrayal of how Australians regarded the war.
Because this study analyses the political impact of atrocity propaganda upon Australian politics, it is important to provide a broad overview of the function and content of Australian propaganda during the
First World War. Chapter Two investigates the contested space in which atrocity propaganda operated. This was a dynamic and politically violent arena in which arrests took place as the government sought to control how the war was discussed. Those who were arrested came from a small select 60
group that were immune to the arguments contained in all pro-war propaganda, be it atrocity propaganda or jingoistic imperial propaganda.
These people, mostly in the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) or the
Women’s Peace Army (W.P.A.) were staunchly opposed to the war throughout the duration of the conflict. They persistently opposed the large government and non-government pro-war propaganda system, and continued to publish despite censorship and the threat of heavy fines and jail. This environment formed the backdrop for the political battles which took place within the labour movement and the Irish Australian community about the legitimacy of the war.
Chapter Three provides the historical reasons why atrocity propaganda appealed to Australians by exploring both its racist and humanitarian origins. The humanitarian appeal of atrocity propaganda at this time was greatly enhanced by the use of racist imagery, as it was communicating with a populace that had deeply ingrained notions about the relationship between morality and race – who often believed, for example, that people who committed atrocities were barbarians and that barbaric behaviour was predominantly a feature of non-whites. It demonstrates that the transference of racial symbols from the ‘black’ man onto the ‘white’
German had an important political function. As race was one of the primary lenses through which the idea of moral progress was viewed in Australia – the black man was uncivilised, the white man civilised – for the German to occupy the status of a barbarian, he therefore had to be symbolically deprived of his ‘whiteness’. 61
Chapter Three also examines how the notion of a ‘humanitarian intervention’ – being a war fought in order to protect non-combatants from military violence – became an established norm in the British Empire. It does so be exploring the public outcry over two events that involved the
Ottoman military: the Bulgarian outrage of 1876 and the Armenian crisis of
1896. These events, which were often viewed through the prism of race, had united the British public in moral outrage when news of atrocities committed by the Turkish became widely publicised.
Chapters Four and Five then examine how the labour movement and the Irish Australian community respectively responded to the British concentration camps scandal that took place during the South African War.
These chapters also examine the lack of enthusiasm within both of these groups for this conflict, and the reasons for it. The South African War is an extremely important point of reference in this thesis, as it was during this conflict that the labour movement and the Irish Australian community demonstrated their strong ambivalence – indeed, at times, outright hostility
– towards wars of imperial expansion and jingoistic imperialism.
Those who expressed their opposition to the South African War using liberal terminology went on to support the Great War using the very same phrases. For example, the objections that had been levelled against the South African War – that it was an attack on the rights of small nations, and that civilians were being targeted by the military – were used to support
Australia’s participation in the First World War. This phenomenon was 62
shared between both the labour movement and the Irish Australian community.
These chapters demonstrate that the moral concepts behind atrocity propaganda were complex and grounded in liberal ideology. British liberal progressivism had a profound influence upon how some Australians engaged with the moral issues presented by conflict. These reluctant war- makers and intellectual propagandists eventually framed how the First
World War was discussed in Australia.
The importance of the influence of British progressive liberalism upon the atrocity propaganda that entered Australia, and the context in which it was received, cannot be emphasised enough. The great architects of atrocity propaganda were British progressive liberals. In order to establish one of the main contentions of the study - that the war was perceived by Australians as just - the ideology of those who crafted the just war argument must be analysed. It was primarily in Great Britain that the language of atrocity propaganda was formulated and then disseminated throughout Allied and neutral countries. Without engaging in some measure with the complex development of atrocity propaganda in Great
Britain, the impact and role of atrocity propaganda in Australia is not comprehensible. The liberal progressive ideals of British propagandists such as Oxford classicist Gilbert Murray, and diplomat James Bryce, are explored briefly in Chapter Four. Both of these men believed the Great War was a humanitarian intervention. 63
Chapters Four and Five also examine why the labour movement and the Irish Australian community respectively became divided over the war.
To a certain extent both of these groups had been united by liberal imperial sentiment at the start of the war. For Irish Australians, the promise of Home
Rule and a liberal Empire had galvanised support for the war, but support declined as it became increasingly obvious that Home Rule would not eventuate. For those Irish Australians who opposed the conflict, the aftermath of the Easter Rising had revealed that the British were as atrocious masters as Allied atrocity propaganda suggested the Germans would be. Within the labour movement the war was widely seen as a just one: it was a humanitarian intervention. Again, support for the war eroded in this group, particularly as living conditions deteriorated and the government and unions clashed over worker’s rights. In both cases, there was a sense of betrayal at the hands of the authorities who had promoted the war.
Chapter Six discusses the federal government’s response to the growing influence of peace activists. By the middle of 1918, ‘peace by negotiation’ was gaining increasing traction against the government’s preferred ‘knock-out blow’, in which Germany was to be completely subjugated. The Labor Party had also become openly hostile to the war, and had come very close to adopting a position in which they would have actively opposed recruiting efforts. The government responded by crafting a recruiting campaign that desperately sought to counter anti-war 64
propaganda with images of German depravity. Shrill and anachronistic, the campaign was belatedly released just as the war was ending.
When it was unified under the aegis of a complex imperialism, Australia was initially tremendously supportive of the war. This consensus slowly disintegrated under the pressures of political differences and growing inequality. From 1916 until the end of the conflict, a home front war took place in Australia through the medium of propaganda as working class men, female peace activists, politicians and bureaucrats passionately fought to win the ideological struggle over the moral legitimacy of the war. Atrocity propaganda was the greatest tool available to the pro-war forces in
Australia to promote their cause. However, it held increasingly limited appeal as the war continued. Far from possessing a unique power to coerce people into fighting war, government propaganda was successful only when it reflected community values, ideals and aims and was consistent with the reality that people perceived through other sources. By 1918, the government was steadily losing the consensus for war. Atrocity propaganda had lost its moral authority, only to gain the negative reputation that was to occlude its role in the Great War for the next one hundred years.
65
CHAPTER ONE Truth, lies and credibility: the reputation of atrocity propaganda and the First World War in Great Britain and Australia 1927 - 2014
The First World War has a reputation amongst both conservative and liberal historians as one of the most unnecessary and wasteful ever to have been fought.1 The scale of the loss of life, contrasted with the petty imperial ambitions that seemingly drove the war, became by the latter half of the twentieth century the epitome of the futile war.2 Of the conflict in public memory, Australian historian Joan Beaumont has written, ‘for generations the popular narrative of the First World War has been one of futility, the dominant image, one of a ravenous maw into which millions of “lions” were shovelled by “donkeys”’. 3 This widespread perception of the war has been informed not just by scholars, but also by satirical TV series’ such as the British comedy
Blackadder Goes Forth (1989) which was notoriously lambasted by the
Conservative British Education Minister Michael Gove in 2014 as having
1 R. Evans, Loyalty and Disloyalty: Social Conflict on the Queensland Homefront, 1914-18, Australia, Allen & Unwin, 1987, p.183; N. Ferguson, The Pity of War, England, Allen Lane, 1998, p.462; B. Gammage, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War, Australia, Penguin Books, 1990; 1974, p. xviii; J. Keegan, The First World War, London, Pimlico, 1999, p.3; M. Lake, A Divided Society: Tasmania During World War I, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1975, p.196; L.L. Robson, The First A.I.F.: A Study of its Recruitment 1914- 1918, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1970; 1982, p.1; M. McKernan, Australians in Wartime: Commentary and Documents, Australia, Topics in Australian History Series, Nelson, 1980, p.48; M. McKernan, The Australian People and the Great War, Australia, Nelson, 1980, p.13; J. Winter, ‘Hatred without bounds’ in Times Literary Supplement, August 10, 2012, p.21. 2 D. Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory, Hambledon Continuum, Great Britain, 2005, pp. 125-126. A. Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War, United States, Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp.1-5. 3 J. Beaumont, ‘”Unitedly we have fought’: imperial loyalty and the Australian war effort’, International Affairs, Vol. 90., Iss.2., 2014, p. 397. 66
falsely portrayed the conflict as a ‘misbegotten shambles…perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite’.4 Gove’s outburst, and the attendant outrage that accompanied his claim that the war had been just and necessary, has demonstrated that the Great War and the just war ideals promoted by atrocity propaganda remain deeply contested a century later.
This chapter focuses upon the complex historiography of the Great
War and the atrocity propaganda that promoted it. Until recently literature about the war has served to obscure the voices of those who had believed the stories that were conveyed in atrocity propaganda. Following the war, many disillusioned people came to reject both atrocity propaganda and the just war argument that atrocity propaganda had supported. By the latter half of the twentieth century, the notion that Great War atrocity propaganda was nothing but a series of untruths that had ‘duped’ the population into
‘fighting a war it didn’t understand’ had come to dominate the perspectives of Australian and British historians.5
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the development of this attitude towards atrocity propaganda and the war. Following this, I explore engage why people during the Great War found both atrocity reports and atrocity propaganda credible. This in turn provides some insight into why the war was widely supported. However, many British and Australian
4 T. Shipman, ‘Michael Gove blasts “Blackadder myths” about the First World War spread by television sit-coms and left-wing academics’, The Daily Mail, 3 January 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2532923/Michael-Gove-blasts-Blackadder- myths-First-World-War-spread-television-sit-coms-left-wing-academics.html, online, accessed 28 January 2015. 5 D. Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory, Hambledon Continuum, Great Britain, 2005, p.176. 67
historians have viewed atrocity propaganda within the context of post-war disillusionment and also as part of the process of apportioning post-war blame. As Michael Howard has written:
For most of the twentieth century the historiography of the First World War was largely a quest for blame…Only recently have historians begun to escape from this obsession, to see the conflict…as ‘a part of history’: a terrible and tragic event certainly, but one that must be understood in its context, and explained rather than condemned.6
A further issue has been that the condemnation of the war came from the benefit of hindsight, and this has distorted perceptions of why the war was fought in the first place. Adrian Gregory observed in his book The Last Great War:
…hindsight carries risks when applied to understanding the thoughts and actions of people in the past…We might choose to condemn the First World War as a human tragedy and an error of colossal proportions, but in doing so we must be aware that there is something essentially anachronistic about this.7
Apprehending the bias of historians against atrocity propaganda is important when assessing the overall role of propaganda in Australia during the First World War because negative interpretations have profoundly coloured how First World War propaganda has been written about. The historiography presented here charts the decline of the reputation of atrocity propaganda from its height during the war, when it was understood to be relaying a horrible truth, to its nadir at the end of the twentieth century, when it came to be regarded as conveying only
6 M. Howard, ’Introduction’ in M. Howard (ed.), A Part of History: Aspects of the British Experience in the First World War, Continuum, Great Britain, 2008, p.xiv. 7 Gregory, op.cit., p.1. 68
a manipulative series of lies. The ascent and decline of the reputation of atrocity propaganda is charted through Australian, British, American and German authors, as all four countries influenced each other both during the invention of Great War atrocity propaganda and its subsequent moral repudiation.
Atrocity propaganda in particular, rather than attitudes about First
World War propaganda in general, is the focus for the present discussion, because atrocity propaganda became emblematic of all propaganda from the First World War in that it was used subsequently by historians as the exemplar of lies propagated by governments in order to gain popular support for the war. Alongside the decline of the reputation of atrocity propaganda was the decline of the reputation of the war itself. This chapter also argues that the bias against atrocity propaganda is due not just to its exaggerated nature, but to the view held by many British and Australian historians that the First World War was, in the words of John Keegan, ‘a tragic and unnecessary conflict’.8
The hyperbole surrounding the First World War was reignited by the centenary of the conflict. Recently, American historian Jay Winter closed a review of Michael S. Neiberg’s book The Dance of the Furies:
Europe and the outbreak of World War I thus: ‘The population of Europe was frogmarched into an unnecessary war, and learned that the only way to win was with hatred and violence of a depth and intensity the
8 Keegan, op.cit., p.3. 69
world had never seen before’, a problematic statement as humanity has been engaged in vicious wars of attrition for millennia. 9 For example, while the Thirty Years War did not involve tanks or trenches, it was a breathtakingly horrific conflict that devastated much of Germany and other areas of Europe for many years. The intensity of violence and hatred involved in the Sack of Magdeburg (1631), in which approximately 25,000 civilians were killed over the course of one day, surely matched that employed in the trenches of the Somme.10
Winter’s hyperbole came from a long tradition in which historians have suggested that the war was a particularly pointless one. Niall
Ferguson asked in The Pity of War, ‘What were all these deaths – more than 9 million in all – really worth... was Britain truly confronted by such a threat to her security in 1914 that it was necessary to send millions of raw recruits across the Channel and beyond in order to ‘wear down’
Germany and her allies?’ 11 After vigorous questioning over many pages,
Ferguson concluded his book by asserting that the First World War ‘was nothing less than the greatest error of modern history [Ferguson’s italics]’.12 Ferguson’s book was a further contribution to the popular and scholarly legend of the First World War as the ’bad, futile war’ that
9 Winter, op.cit., p.21. 10 L. H. Addington, The Patterns of War Through the Eighteenth Century, Indiana University Press, United States of America, 1994, p.87. Of the impact of the Thirty Years War, Addington wrote, ‘perhaps a quarter of the German population of sixteen million perished as the result of fighting, atrocities, hunger, disease, banditry and other misadventures between 1618 and 1648. The population of Bohemia – perhaps three million people at the beginning of the war – may have been reduced by two-thirds. Over the empire as a whole, towns, villages were wiped out, and even the relatively large cities were not spared.’ 11 Ferguson, op.cit., p.xlii. 12 Ibid., p.462. 70
destroyed a generation of men.13 Less than twenty years earlier,
Australian journalist and historian Phillip Knightley had written:
The First World War was like no other war before or since. It began with the promise of splendour, honour, and glory. It ended as a genocidal conflict on an unparalleled scale, a meaningless act of slaughter that continued until a state of exhaustion set in because no-one knew how to stop it. 14
Knightley, Ferguson and Keegan’s moral condemnation of the First
World War is relevant to understanding part of the reason why atrocity propaganda from the Great War was condemned so strongly: if moral condemnation is the lens through which all of the propaganda attached to the war is viewed, then this propaganda looks very foolish indeed, if not downright wicked.
Historical reassessment of German atrocities in Belgium
As I demonstrated in the introduction, one of the major failings of post-war assessments of atrocity propaganda has been the manner in which historians have treated it as a ‘hypodermic syringe’ and thus divorced it from the cultural beliefs about war that were deeply embedded in the populace and the environment in which it was both produced and experienced. Furthermore, the dominance of the idea that atrocity propaganda ‘manufactured hatred’ to stir up support for what came to be regarded as an ignoble war has led some historians to deny that atrocities took place. For example, as I discuss in detail later, there has been a belief among some historians that propagandists had mostly fabricated stories of
13 Ibid., p.xxxiii. 14 P. Knightley, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to the Falklands: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker, London, Pan Books, 1980; 1975, p.80. 71
rape of Belgian women by German soldiers.15 So too have historians denied other allegations of atrocities committed by the German army. It is only comparatively recently that a consensus has developed among scholars who have reassessed the claims contained in atrocity propaganda, and concluded that some of them – including rape - are based on reality.16
Horne and Kramer’s book German Atrocities: A History of Denial started this historiographical re-assessment by demonstrating that German soldiers had committed atrocities in Belgium. They demonstrated that not only had atrocities occurred, but also that German authorities had been instrumental in denying them through the publication of their ‘White Book’.
This publication justified the mass killings on the grounds that Belgian civilians (or franctireurs) had attacked German soldiers. Horne and Kramer have stated, ‘What…had happened between September 1914 and May 1915 was that Germany’s civilian and military authorities agreed on a policy of
15 S. Kingsley Kent, ‘Love and Death: War and Gender in Great Britain, 1914-1918’, in F. Coetzee and M. Shevin-Coetzee (eds.), Authority, Identity and the Social History of the Great War, United States; United Kingdom, Berghahn Books, 1995, pp. 158-159. C. Shute, ”Blood votes” and the “bestial boche”: a case study in propaganda, Hecate, Vol.2., Iss. 2., 1976, p.17; T. Wilson, ‘Lord Bryce’s Investigation into Alleged German Atrocities in Belgium, 1914-15’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol.14., Iss.3., 1979, pp. 380 – 381. 16 C.P. Barreira, ‘”Myth of Poor Little Belgium’ as mainspring: a remark’, Flinders Journal of History and Politics, Vol. 19., 1997. S. Constantine, ‘”If an inhabitant attacks, wounds or kills a soldier, the whole village will be destroyed”: Communication and Rehearsal in Soldiers’ Phrasebooks 1914-1918’, Journal of War and Culture Studies, Vol. 6., No. 2., 2013; J. Horne and A. Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial, United States, Yale University Press, 2001, p. 71; Gregory, op.cit., p.308; N. Gullace, ‘Allied Propaganda and World War I: Interwar Legacies, Media Studies, and the Politics of War Guilt’, History Compass, Vol. 9., Iss. 9., 2011; I.V. Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during the Great War; Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 2013; I.V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 2005. 72
denial’.17 Six years later, Kramer explored the killing of civilians by German forces in Louvain:
When some of the corpses were exhumed in January 1915 on German orders, it was found that there were not only bullet wounds, but also signs that the victims had been injured by bayonets, possibly tortured. This indicates that the ‘executions’ were carried out with extreme violence and emotions of great hatred.18
Horne and Kramer’s work was part of a general movement in First World
War historiography to relate the story of the conflict without the thick patina of censure that had previously occupied historians.19
Because the invasion of Belgium was the casus belli for Great Britain and Australia, framing the war as unjust and unnecessary required that the allegations contained in atrocity propaganda be downplayed or dismissed.
Of course, the nature of atrocity propaganda itself meant that many of the allegations seemed increasingly implausible following the war. Atrocity propaganda often mixed exaggeration with fact, and the cruel caricatures of the ‘Hun’ became repugnant following the war. The grotesque nature of some atrocity propaganda, with its vile depictions of the German soldier as a
17 Horne and Kramer, op.cit., pp.246. 18 A. Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War, United States, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 8. In his introduction, however, Kramer quite rightfully has pointed out that Germany’s destructiveness during war was not distinctive. It is important to note that the issue at stake here is whether or not the stories of German atrocities were purely ‘manufactured’, or sometimes reported the actual truth. 19 See also: S. Audoin-Rouzeau and A. Becker, 14-18 Understanding the Great War, United States of America, Hill and Wang. 2000; Gregory, op.cit.; Gullace, op.cit.; Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, op.cit.; Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during the Great War, op.cit. 73
mad, sexually crazed beast, became inextricably linked to the apparent meaninglessness of the war.20
However, these images resonated very differently during the war.
Thus some cartoons that had been regarded as truthful and humanitarian during the war were perceived in a very different light in the aftermath of the conflict. Figure 6. Louis Raemaekers, the Dutch artist whose work was promoted by the British government and distributed throughout neutral and Allied countries, was described in glowing terms throughout the war. In
1917 an Australian newspaper described him as ‘a kind of apostle who believes in the cause of democracy with heart and soul’. 21 A British magazine declared:
Louis Raemaekers will stand out for all time as one of the supreme figures which the Great War has called into being. His genius has been enlisted in the service of mankind, and his work, being entirely sincere and untouched by racial or national prejudice, will endure.22
Raemaekers’ work initially drew upon reports of atrocities in Belgium.
Originally published in the pages of Dutch newspaper the Amsterdam
Telegraaf, his work came to be championed by the Fine Art Society in
London, and then picked up by the British propaganda arm of the
20 S. Kingsley Kent, ‘Love and Death: War and Gender in Britain, 1914-1918’, in F. Coetzee and M. Shevin-Coetzee (eds.) Authority, Identity and the Social History of the Great War, United States of America, Berghahn Books, 1995, p.158; Lake, op.cit., p.22. G. Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War, Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 1992, p.73; C. Shute,’”Blood votes” and the “bestial boche”: a case study in propaganda’, Hecate, Vol. 2., Iss., 2., 1976, p.17. 21 ‘Raemaekers: a personal study’, The Daily News, 24 November 1917, p.7. 22 Editor, ‘Introduction’, The Land and Water Edition of Raemaekers Cartoons, Part 1., 1916, p.1. 74
government for distribution to neutral and some Allied countries.23 So widespread was his work that following the war it became inextricably linked to the Allied war machine. His reputation declined and by the late twentieth century, British historian Gary Messinger described his work as
‘hate-inspiring’ and ‘lurid’; propaganda experts Sanders and Taylor described his work as ‘brutal’. Robson described the cartoons as ‘truly obscene’.24
Figure 6. Louis Raemaekers, ‘Seduction’, Raemaekers’ Cartoons, Hodder & Stoughton, 1915. Caption: ‘Germany to Belgium: “AREN’T I A LOVABLE FELLOW?”
23 A. de Ranitz, Louis Raemaekers: ‘Armed with Pen and Pencil’, Netherlands, Louis Raemaekers Foundation, 2014, p88, pp. 122-128, p.155. For the distribution of Raemakers in Australia see: E Robertson, ‘(Australia)’, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, in U. Daniel, P. Gatrell, O. Janz, H .Jones, J. Keene, A. Kramer, and B. Nasson (eds.), issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, 2014. 24 G.S. Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War, Manchester; New York, Manchester University Press, 1992, p.92; M.L. Sanders and P.M. Taylor, British Propaganda During the First World War, 1914-18, London, Macmillan, 1982, p.177; L.L. Robson, The First A.I.F.: A Study of its Recruitment 1914-1918, Melbourne Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1982; 1970, p.104. 75
Yet Raemaekers’ cartoons were exceedingly powerful, so much so that they eventually came to symbolise the movement of the Australian populace from credulity to post-war cynicism in George Johnston’s autobiographical novel, My Brother Jack. Published in 1964, the novel describes the protagonist’s childhood in post-war Melbourne that has been deeply affected by the war. This is because he shares his home with numerous maimed war veterans. Against this backdrop of physical suffering, David finds a cache of war memorabilia in his parent’s room. Alongside C.E.W.
Bean’s Anzac Book were three volumes of Louis Raemaekers’ war cartoons, which contained works that deeply preoccupied the young child:
For weeks I was in morbid thrall to these grotesque, hating pictures of brutal infernos, of cloven-footed devils wearing Kaiser Bill hats impaling naked babies and women on their swords…but after a time, perhaps because it was essential to reject the horror that the pictures inspired – for I was unable to develop a hatred, which, in fact, was the purpose of their message – I forced myself to realise that these were only drawings after all, made, I thought, by some vengeful and embittered man who must have suffered frightfully at the hands of the Germans.25
Raemaekers was thus demoted over the passing years from the status of moral arbiter to spiteful trauma victim. The decline in Raemaekers’ reputation, from those who championed it during the war to those who condemned it decades later was extreme. Nonetheless, the trajectory of
Raemaekers’ reputation matched the rise and fall of the reputation of the
Great War, and also the atrocity propaganda that supported it.
25 G. Johnston, My Brother Jack, Great Britain, Fontana Books, 1964; 1973, p.18. 76
These changes were part of broad social and political changes that deeply influenced how the past was viewed. For example, when My Brother
Jack was published in the 1960s, Australian historians were beginning to formulate a damning perspective on the war. Indeed, the publication of many Australian books about the First World War intersected with a period that has been described as the ‘New Nationalism’ and they appeared during a period in which historians began to question the extent to which
Australian identity should be connected to its British Imperial past.26 These historians, mostly of the radical nationalist tradition, believed the war had destroyed the egalitarian promise of post-federation Australia, that it had been ‘the wrecking ball of progressive sentiment in Australia’. 27 This outlook proved to be a seminal one for many social historians who followed: from the 1960s through to the 1980s, the war was portrayed as having been particularly futile. Just as the protagonist in My Brother Jack yielded up atrocity propaganda to the wreckers of history – in this case to the local greengrocer who used the Raemaekers’ cartoons to wrap up fruit and vegetables - so too did historians such as Bob Bessant and Jacqueline
Hollingworth dismiss the importance of atrocity propaganda, emphasising instead the imperial motivation for war.28
26 G. Mansfield and F. Bongiorno, ‘Whose War Was It Anyway? Some Australian Historians of the Great War’, in History Compass, Vol. 62, Iss. 90, 2008, p.64. 27 C. Holbrook, ANZAC: the unauthorised biography, Australia, NewSouth, 2014, p.113. 28 B. Bessant, ‘The Experience of Patriotism and Propaganda for Children in Australian Elementary Schools before the War’, in Paedogogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, Vol. 31., Iss. 1., 1995; J. Hollingworth, ‘The Cult of Empire – Children’s Literature Revisited’, in B. Bessant (ed.) Mother State and Her Little Ones, Centre for Youth and Community Studies, Melbourne, 1987; J. M. Hollingworth, The call of Empire being the study of the Imperial Indoctrination of Australian school children in the period 1890 - 1910, La 77
The historiography of Australian historians’ viewpoints about the
Great War was in some ways more politically complex than the British one, as scholars became increasingly critical of Australian ties with Great Britain.
Moreover, aside from Joan Beaumont’s recent book, Broken Nation:
Australians in the Great War, the majority of Australian histories of the home front during the Great War were published in the period between 1965 and
1985, a time in which many historians, consciously or unconsciously, used the past not just to debate Australia’s connection to Great Britain, but also to reflect upon the moral legitimacy of the Vietnam War. Refracted through the deep concern that Australia too often fought ‘other people’s wars’, the
Great War was viewed with ‘uncompromising hostility’.29 For Marilyn Lake,
L.L. Robson, Bill Gammage and Raymond Evans, the war was the opposite of the Australian foundation myth. Instead, the war functioned as a destruction myth: rather than acting as the ‘baptism of a new nation’, it had demolished the promise of an egalitarian, united and newly federated
Australia, creating in its place a society riven by class and sectarian conflict.30 In 1975, Marilyn Lake wrote in her book A Divided Society:
Tasmania During World War I that ‘Reaction and repression swept Australia during 1919 and 1920. Middle-class fear of change was to help make
Australia, once one of the most democratic and progressive of countries, one of the most conservative’.31 Michael McKernan stated that ‘the innocence of
Trobe University, PhD Thesis, Centre for Comparative and International Studies in Education, 1993. 29Ibid., p.162. 30 P. Adam-Smith, The ANZACS, Nelson, Adelaide, 1978, p.9. 31 M. Lake, A Divided Society: Tasmania During World War I, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1975, p.196. 78
Australian society collapsed under the impact of war’, that ‘dreams of unity and harmony had been shattered and gave place to the nightmare of sectarianism and class warfare’. 32 His condemnation of the devastating effects of the Great War was intimately tied up with the anti-war sentiment created during the Vietnam War. On the facing page to this passage in
McKernan’s book is the transcript of the lyrics for the song, And the Band
Played Waltzing Matilda, a song written by Eric Bogle in 1971. Although the protagonist is an Anzac veteran, it was written as an indictment of the
Vietnam War and is considered to be one of Australia’s most powerful anti- war songs.33 That McKernan anachronistically included this song at the conclusion of his chapter on the Great War is striking. The most damning stanza of the song, in which the emasculation of the narrator is complete, reads:
Then they gathered the sick and the Crippled and maimed. And sent us back home to Australia. The armless, the legless, the blind and insane, The brave wounded heroes of Suvla; And when our ship pulled into Circular Quay I looked at the stumps where my legs Used to be. And thanked Christ there was nobody Waiting for me To grieve, to mourn and to pity.34
32 M. McKernan, Australians in Wartime: Commentary and Documents, Topics in Australian History Series, Nelson, Australia, 1980, p.48. 33 J. Casimir, ‘Secret life of Matilda’, Sydney Morning Herald, published April 20 2002. Accessed Online 23 June 2002. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/04/19/1019020705613.html ‘ Bogle said in his interview with Casimir, "I felt that as long as the Vietnam War was on and the feeling within the community was such as it was, the song might have some validity, but as soon as the war was over, it would disappear forever." 34 This version was transcribed from McKernan’s book. McKernan, op.cit., p. 49. 79
It could be inferred from his inclusion of an anti-war song written decades after the Great War that McKernan did indeed believe it to have been a futile experience. 35 In his more scholarly publication on the Australian home front, McKernan reiterated this view: ‘Within Australia the war provoked class conflict and religious and racial hatred; it confirmed the male dominance of society and produced massive displays of confrontation’.36
His perspective, which promoted the view that before the war Australia had been on the ‘right path’, was shared by other Australian historians, some of whom made much stronger statements than McKernan. In the introductory paragraph to his book on The First A.I.F., L.L. Robson wrote that he sought to understand:
…how Australia’s effort to keep up the reinforcements said to be necessary to sustain and strengthen the A.I.F. led to the shattering of the spirit of optimism, virtual unanimity and cocky pride with which the new Commonwealth entered the war. The theme is the wrecking of Australian optimism and happiness, and the creation of a situation where negative thought and destructive criticism could flourish.37
Raymond Evans also asserted towards the end of his book Loyalty and
Disloyalty: Social Conflict on the Queensland Homefront that the war had destroyed the possibility of an Australian progressive utopia that would have been possible had war not occurred:
35 Ibid., As a young boy in Scotland, Bogle was captivated by some old copies of the British weekly propaganda magazine, The War Illustrated. Significantly, Bogle’s interest in the First World War began with a chance purchase of First World War propaganda in which there were drawings of “brave Tommy bayoneting the fiendish Hun”. 36 M. McKernan, The Australian People and the Great War, Australia, Nelson, 1980, p.13. 37 L.L. Robson, The First A.I.F.: A Study of its Recruitment 1914-1918, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1982; 1970, p.1. 80
The grim aftermath of total warfare bequeathed no social millennium upon its participants and victims. Instead, as the advocates of a fundamental reconstruction were penalised and dismissed as fools and dangerous dreamers, the political, cultural and ideological status quo was vigorously defended and the promised foundations of a new social order were never laid.38
In 1995, Bill Gammage divided Australian history into two camps – the ‘pro- war’ camp, which believed Australia’s involvement in the war was inevitable
(because Australia was a Dominion within the Empire and had no military discretion of its own), and historians like himself, who believed the war was emphatically not Australia’s war and therefore Australian participation was unnecessary. In a 1995 conference paper, Gammage strongly positioned himself against the realpolitik views of historians such as Robin Prior and
Carl Bridge (for whom the interests of Britain and Australia in this period could not be separated), by declaring that the war should not have been fought, and nor should Australia have fought in it.39
Gammage’s moral condemnation of the war was first articulated during the 1970s, and out of all of the historians surveyed in this historiography, he produced the most powerful and influential historical critique against the war. In 1974 The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the
Great War was published as public interest in Anzac Day was waning.
Gammage’s book, which pieced together the Australian soldiers’ experience of the war using diaries and letters, is a deeply moving book and the first of
38 R. Evans, Loyalty and Disloyalty: Social Conflict on the Queensland Homefront, 1914-18, Allen & Unwin, Australia, 1987, p.183. 39 B. Gammage, ‘Was the Great War Australia’s War?’,in C. Wilcox (ed.), The Great war: Gains and Losses – ANZAC and Empire, Canberra, The Australian War Memorial and the Australian National University, 1995, pp.6-8. 81
many publications to reignite an interest in the hardships endured by the
‘digger’ – it has been credited in part for reviving interest in the First World
War.40 Gammage has written in his introduction:
There never was a greater tragedy than the First World War. It engulfed an age, and conditioned the times that followed. It contaminated every ideal for which it was waged, it threw up waste and horror worse than all the evils it sought to avert, and it left legacies of staunchness and savagery equal to any which have bewildered men about their purpose on earth.41
Marilyn Lake has continued to document her concern with the Australian obsession with the First World War and the militaristic Anzac legend. Her most recent co-authored book, What’s Wrong with ANZAC?: the Militarisation of Australian History, while more concerned with directly confronting contemporary Australian popular engagement with the Anzac myth, nonetheless has presented a moral condemnation of the First World War as part of its argument. In her introduction, Lake has asserted that the First
World War damaged Australian democracy. Furthermore, she has argued that it was time for Australians to move on from ’Imperial myths and proclaim ourselves a free and independent republic, enshrining not militarist values, but the civil and political values of equality and justice, which in an earlier era had been thought to define a distinctive ‘Australian ethos’’.42 In lockstep with Ferguson and Keegan – whom he cites to reinforce his viewpoint – Lake’s co-author Henry Reynolds argues that the
40 Holbrook, op.cit., p.134. 41 B. Gammage The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War, Penguin Books, Australia, 1974; 1990, p. xviii. 42 M. Lake, ‘Introduction: what have you done for your country’, in Damousi, J., Lake M., Reynolds, H., McKenna, M. (eds.) What’s Wrong with ANZAC: the militarisation of Australian History, New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2010, p.2. 82
war was pointless, particularly for Australia, which fought for no greater reason in his view than Australia’s imperial connection to Britain.43
The few Australian historians who have investigated propaganda and the Great War have approached the topic in a manner that was distinctly informed by the backdrop sketched above. As we saw in the introduction, most historians who have investigated the influence of propaganda in
Australia have focused on jingoistic imperial sentiment as having being the primary motivating force behind Australian support for the war: they have argued that the pre-war imperial propaganda that Australian schoolchildren were exposed to primed them to fight on behalf of the Empire.44 Only three
Australian authors have produced specific scholarly studies on the topic of how propaganda influenced people during the Great War: Bob Bessant,
Jacqueline M. Hollingworth and Judith Smart.45
Smart, however, has focused exclusively on the impact of propaganda produced during the war, and to date she is the only Australian historian to have seriously investigated the impact of atrocity propaganda on the
Australian public. 46 Smart’s argument is twofold: firstly, anti-German atrocity propaganda and the campaigns to raise funds for Belgium emerged out of sheer political expediency – atrocity propaganda operated as a ‘myth’ or a ‘fairy tale’ and was not based on reality. She has contended that, ‘there
43 Ibid., p. 70. 44 P. Stanley, What Did You Do in the War Daddy? A Visual History of Propaganda Posters, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1983, pp. 8-11. 45 Bessant, op.cit.; Hollingworth, ‘The Cult of Empire – Children’s Literature Revisited’, op.cit.; Hollingworth, The call of Empire being the study of the Imperial Indoctrination of Australian school children in the period 1890 – 1910, op.cit. 46 J. Smart, ‘‘’Poor Little Belgium’ and Australian Popular Support for War 1914-1915”, in War and Society, Vol. 12., No. 1., 1994, pp. 30 – 31. 83
was little or no evidence of the gratuitous cruelty and atrocity charged against the Germans’.47 Smart’s second argument was that Australia during this period was a highly volatile and divided polity. It was through discussion of ‘poor little Belgium’ that its disparate elements could be glued together to form mass support for the war.48 While Smart’s analysis went some way to overturning the ‘Imperial jingoism’ theory of support for the war, it neglected to engage with why atrocity propaganda was regarded as credible at the time. Instead, her article portrayed the public outrage about the atrocities taking place in Belgium as evidence of an elaborate and successful confidence trick played by the Allied governments upon their people.49
By the end of the twentieth century, there was widespread belief amongst Australian historians that the atrocities simply had simply not occurred. John F. Williams has claimed that atrocity propaganda was based upon ‘extravagant…lies’.50 While Joan Beaumont re-assessed her position on atrocity propaganda in Broken Nation, her earlier book on the Australian home front professed the same scepticism as other Australian historians.
She has written of Australian fears of German invasion, ‘If the Allies were defeated, Australia would be vulnerable...to such horrors as had supposedly been visited upon Belgium under German occupation [my italics].’51 Phillip
47 Ibid., p.37. 48 Ibid., pp. 30 – 31. 49 Ibid., p.41. 50 J.F. Williams, ANZACS, the media and the Great War, UNSW Press, Australia, 1999, p.17. 51 J. Beaumont, ‘The politics of a divided society’, in J. Beaumont (ed.), Australia’s War: 1914- 18, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1995, pp. 46-47. In her 2013 book in which she revisited the Australian home front during the Great War, Beaumont stated about Belgian atrocity propaganda ‘Some of these stories were later found to be exaggerated, but there was 84
Knightley, while acknowledging the massacre of Armenians by Turkish forces, denied that the Germans had committed atrocities in Europe.52 John
McQuilton wrote of atrocity stories circulating in regional Australia:
It was…inevitable that ‘the Hun’ would make his appearance. In August, the regional press had urged its readers to draw a clear distinction between the German people and Germany’s leaders, and debunked stories of German atrocities. By December, however, the mood had changed and rumours of German atrocities were printed as fact [my italics].53
However, this scepticism about atrocities began long before the 1960s and scholarly expressions of it originated in Great Britain and the United States.
Australian historians were drawing upon a dialogue about the Belgian atrocities that had been established in the 1920s as allegations that the atrocities had been concocted began to appear in the media in both Great
Britain and Australia. The embittered rejection of atrocity propaganda by the Allied countries - which accompanied deep disillusionment about the war - came to dominate. The media in Australia increasingly printed stories in which the more outrageous atrocity propaganda was ‘debunked’.54
Because there was a growing belief that propaganda contributed towards the war’s length and ferocity, interest in the topic increased.55 The attacks emanated from the media, and books published by politicians, academics,
considerable substance to them’. See: J. Beaumont, Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2013, p.49. 52 Knightley, op.cit., pp. 104-105. 53 J. McQuilton, Rural Australia and the Great War: from Tarrawingee to Tangambalanga, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2001, p.20. 54 ‘Constantine the scapegoat’, book review, The Mercury, Friday 13 September 1929, p. 3. See also: ‘A Snowball Lie’, Northern Standard, 10 August 1928, p.5; ‘Lies’, Sunday Times, 10 February 1929, p.23. 55 P.M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind, a history of propaganda from the ancient world to the present era, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003, p.1. 85
memoirists and novelists, all of whom repudiated the idea that the Allies had fought a war for a just cause.
Harold Lasswell, a prominent American sociologist, published
Propaganda Technique in the World War in 1927. In this seminal book on wartime propaganda, Lasswell systematically deconstructed the methods and means of propagandists.56 In a chapter titled ‘Satanism’, Lasswell unpacked the realpolitik advantages (to both sides) of employing atrocity propaganda: ‘The enemy is atrociously cruel and degenerate in his conduct of the War. A handy rule for arousing hate is, if at first they do not enrage, use an atrocity’.57 Lasswell’s book was ‘the first major scholarly publication to attempt to naturalise the presence of propaganda in everyday life’. 58 It was also in this book that Lasswell condemned atrocity propaganda as a mechanism used by governments to manipulate men into fighting.
British parliamentarian Arthur Ponsonby wrote an equally influential book a year later. During the war, Ponsonby had helped to establish the
Union of Democratic Control (U.D.C.), a British group that had opposed the war and the secret diplomacy that they believed had led to it.59 His book,
Falsehood in Wartime: containing an assortment of lies circulated throughout the nations during the Great War, was written not just within the context of the backlash against the war and atrocity propaganda, but also reflected ‘the
56 H. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War, United States, Garland Publishing, 1927; 1974. 57 Ibid., p.80. 58 L. Finch, Dark Angel: Propaganda in Modern Warfare, Melbourne, Circa, 2006, p.4. 59 L. R. Bisceglia, ‘Lord Ponsonby, Pacifist Peace Campaigner’, Peace Research, Vol.16., No.2., 1984, p.38. 86
accelerated sentiment for peace’ had come to dominate the latter part of the
1920s.60
Ponsonby was one of the most vehement and influential critics of First World War atrocity propaganda. He asserted firstly that atrocity propaganda consisted only of lies, and secondly, that people believed these lies because they were credulous and naive. He wrote in
Falsehood in Wartime:
Exposure, therefore, may be useful, even when the struggle is over, in order to show up the fraud, hypocrisy, and humbug on which all war rests, and the blatant and vulgar devices which have been used for so long to prevent the poor ignorant people from realizing the true meaning of war.61
Ponsonby’s work had a profound effect as historians adopted his argument that atrocity propaganda manufactured hatred against the Germans by spreading lies about the German invasion of Belgium.62 It also had an immediate impact in Australia, as some of the mainstream Australian media welcomed it. In 1929 an anonymous reviewer wrote:
Since the war there has been a constant succession of books exhibiting the imbecilities of democracies during the time of war, the absurdities of public opinion when exploited and played upon by passion, prejudice, and politic and journalistic demagogy. Works such as…Arthur Ponsonby’s Falsehood in War Time were devoted exclusively to this text, but almost every volume of memoirs by men closely concerned in the tremendous drama of the war shatters human complacency anew, and makes the
60 Ibid., p.43. 61 A. Ponsonby, Falsehood in wartime: containing an assortment of lies circulated throughout the nations during the Great War, London, G. Allen and Unwin, 1928, p.26. 62 Gullace, op.cit., p. 690. 87
nation, looking back with calmer mind, marvel how such blatant propaganda ever led them by the nose.63 Thus the negative reputations of the Great War and the atrocity propaganda that supported it have mutually reinforced one another over the past century. As the allegations of German atrocities appeared increasingly manufactured, the notion that the war had been ‘just and necessary’ began to lose traction. By the 1930s the idea that atrocity propaganda was an
‘essential falsehood’ had come to dominate.64 As the century progressed, the
Great War began to be compared to the Second World War, and it fared badly. Nicoletta Gullace has noted that ‘as a counterpoise to World War II – the good war – World War I provided the template for a conflict where innocent young men were sent to the slaughter by mendacious governments for a futile cause’.65
The reputation of a war can therefore have a powerful impact upon how atrocities are remembered, denied, exonerated or mourned. For example, because the Second World War is ‘overwhelmingly positive’ in
British and Australian memory, and secure in its status as a just war, the mass atrocities committed by the Allies via strategic bombing remain highly controversial. In contrast to the First World War, non-combatants during the Second World War were ‘singled out’ by Great Britain ‘as important military targets’.66 Scholarly debate about the effectiveness and the morality
63 ‘Constantine the scapegoat’, book review, The Mercury, Friday 13 September 1929, p. 3. See also: ‘A Snowball Lie’, Northern Standard, 10 August 1928, p.5; ‘Lies’, Sunday Times, 10 February 1929, p.23. 64 Gullace, op.cit., p. 691. 65 Ibid.,p. 692. 66 R. P. Hopkins, The Historiography of the Allied Bombing campaign of German, M.A. Dissertation, unpublished, East Tennessee State University, 2008, p.4. 88
of the bombing continues today, yet the atrocities themselves do not occupy popular memory to any significant extent.67 Moreover, mythologies about the Second World War have resulted in a distorted picture of the past.
Although a ‘majority of the British supported the reprisal bombing of
German civilians by Bomber Command’, the prevailing story has instead been that British people endured the Blitz with stoicism and humour. The reality has been forgotten, aviation historian Brett Holman has argued, because it contradicts the positive ‘myth of the Blitz’.68 How historians balance and judge the violence of war is therefore often influenced by factors other than the atrocities themselves.
A further point is that atrocities are often denied or promoted according to political allegiance. As George Orwell wrote in 1942 in an essay about the Spanish Civil War:
...what has impressed me ever since, is that atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocity of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.69
Orwell then went on to observe that the negative response to the
‘systematic lying of 1914-18’ had resulted in an ‘exaggerated pro-
German reaction’ in Britain in the early years of the Second World
67 T. Haggith, ‘Great Britain: Remembering a Just War (1945-1950)’, in L. Kettenacker and T. Riotte (eds.), The Legacies of Two World Wars: European Societies in the Twentieth Century, New York, Berghan Books, 2011, p. 225. For insight into the controversy of Allied bombing campaigns see: R. Hansen, Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany 1942-45, Toronto, Random House of Canada, 2008; M. Hastings, Bomber Command, London, Papermac, 1993. T. R. Searle, ‘”It Made a Lot of Sense to Kill Skilled Workers”: the Firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945, Military History, Vol. 6., 2002. 68 B. Holman, ‘”Bomb Back, and Bomb Hard”: Debating Reprisals during the Blitz’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 58., Iss. 3., 2012, p.394. 69 G. Orwell, ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’, in S. Orwell and I. Angus (eds.), Great Britain, Penguin Books, 1968; 1970, p.289. 89
War.70 The post-war denial of German atrocities in Belgium had had a dramatic effect upon how atrocities were perceived during the inter-war period. The Nazi government’s Minister for Propaganda, Joseph
Goebbels, brilliantly deflected attention from German persecution of
Jews by exploiting the public’s sense of disillusionment about the Great
War and the atrocity propaganda that had justified it. Furthermore, alongside the general hostility towards propaganda was an apathy towards the tenets contained in international law about the abuse of non-combatants by military forces. As Isabel Hull recently observed:
…the eclipse of international law’s reputation among the public after 1919 was most strongly determined by two propaganda campaigns: paradoxically, the successful British one during the war, and the successful German one afterward. The first made international law the centrepiece of attention, the second erased it.71
Great War atrocity propaganda and the Nazis
Following the First World War, the principles of international law that had been promoted by atrocity propaganda began to erode. The consequence that was that reports of German atrocities were met with scepticism, allowing atrocity propaganda to become a weapon again by the 1930s, but this time in the hands of the Nazi party.72 Propaganda and counter- propaganda were so central to the consolidation of the Nazi dictatorship in
Germany that six days after Hitler was elected to power (following the abolition of civil rights under the emergency degree), he established the
70 Ibid., p.290. 71 Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during the Great War, op.cit., p.3. 72 D. Welch, ‘Powers of Persuasion’, in History Today, August, 1999, p.25. 90
Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. A number of articles emanated from this Ministry, some of which appeared even in Australian newspapers. The Nazi public relations machine countered suspicion about their actions against Jews in Germany by deftly reminding people in former
Allied countries of the lies they had been fed before.73 In anticipation of international condemnation following a Nazi directed boycott of Jewish products in Germany, the Ministry produced a press release reported in an
Australian newspaper which read: ‘Every Nazi with relatives or friends abroad was urged to write, telegraph or telephone denials of the “atrocity propaganda”. The Nazi communique states that the campaign is merely a defensive measure against the lies published abroad’.74
Those directly involved in former Allied countries in attacking Great
War atrocity propaganda were drawn into the Nazi counter-propaganda campaign. American author Sylvester Viereck was personally contacted by the ex-Crown Prince (who in 1933 was supporting Hitler) to assert that the propaganda being produced about the N’azi treatment of Jews was comparable with the wartime lies of the saponifying of dead soldiers’. This was a direct reference to the myth that the Germans were turning corpses into soap during the Great War.75 Unfortunately, Ponsonby’s work was also drawn into the denial of atrocities. In 1934 a writer calling himself ‘Japhet’ directly referred to Ponsonby’s book in response to a Newcastle Rabbi warning that the Jews of Germany were under threat. In the midst of
73 R. Eatwell, Fascism: A History, London, Chatto & Windus, 1995, p. 111. 74 ‘Boycott of Jews’, The Brisbane Courier, 30 March 1933, p.11. 75 Ibid., p. 11. See Viereck’s book as an American example of the interwar backlash against atrocity propaganda: G. S. Viereck, Spreading Germs of Hate, London, Duckworth, 1931. 91
alluding to the role of the Jews in the death of Jesus and asserting that Jews took positions of power whilst fleecing the poor, Japhet wrote:
I would recommend Rabbi Morris to read Major [sic] Ponsonby’s Falsehoods in Wartime [sic]. It is an illuminating book which shows that the so-called atrocities have been found, on investigation, to be the invention of the fertile brain of the ‘special correspondent’.76
Overseeing these repudiations was the guiding hand of the German government. In 1935 a group of Australian schoolboys were feted by the
German government during a visit to Germany: ‘The newspapers candidly declare that this rare opportunity of impressing young educated Australians must not be missed, because no country was so flooded with “atrocity stories” as Australia’.77
While the above articles were published a few years before
Kristallnacht, systemic violence was committed by the state against parties who were perceived to threaten Nazi supremacy, and the state-sponsored discrimination that fuelled the Holocaust had already begun. It is important to stress that the repudiation of Allied atrocity propaganda was part of the consolidation process of the Nazi Dictatorship. For example, in July 1933, the Nazi party announced that the death penalty would ‘be enforced where the state’s dignity and existence are imperilled by “atrocity propaganda”’.78
He understood atrocity propaganda and would not tolerate it being deployed by a party unsympathetic to his cause.
76 ‘Germany and the Jews’, Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate, 9 January 1934, p.7. 77 ‘Australian schoolboys; cordial welcome in Germany’, The Argus, 4 September 1935, p.8. 78 The Canberra Times, Monday 24 July 1933, p.1. 92
Adolf Hitler had an acute understanding of the importance of propaganda in war. In his manifesto Mein Kampf [‘My Struggle’] Hitler zeroed in on the importance of atrocity propaganda to the Allied war effort:
By representing the Germans to their own people as barbarians and Huns, they prepared the individual soldier for the terrors of war, and thus helped to preserve him from disappointments. After this, the most terrible weapon that was used against him seemed only to confirm what his propagandists had told him; it likewise reinforced his faith in the truth of his government’s assertions, while on the other hand it increased his rage and hatred against the vile enemy. For the cruel effects of the weapon, whose use by the enemy he now came to know, gradually came to confirm for him the ’Hunnish’ brutality of the barbarous enemy.79 Hitler was convinced that Allied use of propaganda was the reason for
Germany’s defeat rather than military causes; he and his co-propagandist
Goebbels became experts at reading the mood of the former Allied presses.
As Nicholas O’Shaughnessy has argued, ‘propaganda is prism through which to view the Third Reich’.80 The early Nazi propaganda machine was so finely calibrated that articles sponsored by Goebbels often resonated with articles from the same period that were reporting the viewpoints of anti-atrocity propagandists in Australia. In Australia in 1934, for example, a minor stoush occurred between a member of the Sydney University branch of the
Australian League of Nations Association and Australian war historian,
C.E.W. Bean. On 3 July A W Wood addressed a meeting of the branch of the
League of Nations Association claiming that ‘during the Great War both sides
79 A. Hitler, Mein Kampf, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925; 1943, p.181. 80 N. O’Shaughnessy, ‘Selling Hitler: propaganda and the Nazi brand’, Journal of Public Affairs, Vol. 9., Iss. 1., 2009, p.55 and p. 57. 93
systematically invented atrocity stories to keep up the fighting spirit of their troops’.81 In response, Bean wrote ‘while I yield to no one in detestation of war-time propaganda’, he seriously doubted that the British government deliberately invented atrocity stories.82 Wood rebutted Bean’s argument, stating,
…the British government failed to suppress stories which it knew to be untrue… [however] my whole object was not to criticise any Government, but actually to point out that such unscrupulous use of propaganda is an absolute necessity if any war is to be carried on: and to show the case with which it is still possible for public opinion to be manipulated by those who have power.83
Bean responded by tracing the evolution of the ‘corpse conversion factory story’ (this was the name by which the story that the Germans had turned
Allied soldiers into soap was known) and asserted the tale had originated not in Great Britain but in Belgium and Holland – and it was not the fault of
The Times who later reported it that it was a lie.84 Regardless of who invented tales, or who invented the worst tales, the correspondence between Wood and Bean was indicative of the kind of debates that took place in relation to Great War atrocity propaganda. Ironically and perhaps tragically, this debate, which was conducted in the spirit of peace, was subverted by the Nazis for their own purposes.
81 ‘War Propaganda. Reference to “Contemptible” Army”’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 3 July 1934, p.15. 82 ‘Atrocity stories’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 July 1934, p.10. 83 ‘Atrocity stories’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 July 1934, p.1. 84 ‘Atrocity stories’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 7 July 1934, p.12. For a background to the story please see: J. Neander and R. Marlin, ‘Media and Propaganda: The Northcliffe Press and the Corpse Factory Story of World War I’, Global Media Journal, Vol.3., Iss.2., 2010. 94
Allied atrocity propaganda cast a long shadow well into the Second
World War. By the 1940s allegations of German atrocities being committed in during this conflict were initially met with weary incredulity, or as one US commentator put it in 1942, as ‘dinosaurs of falsification’.85 David Welch has asserted that ‘The dislike of propaganda was so deep that when in the
Second World War the [British] government attempted to “educate” the population on the existence of Nazi concentration camps, the information was widely suspected of being ‘propaganda’, and not believed’.86
Articles published during the Second World War in Australia made constant reference to Great War atrocity propaganda – it was the immediate reference point for readers in that period. In an article titled ‘Eye-Witness
Stories of Nazi Bestialities’, the author wrote that the stories of witnesses to atrocities ‘must disconcert those old ladies and gentlemen who are still writing letters to the newspapers protesting against “atrocity propaganda”’.87 And even when the stories were deemed believable, Great
War atrocity propaganda hovered like a malign revenant:
Anyone who has read the stories of Nazi prison camps over-run in the Allied advance through Germany must be horrified by the picture of sadistic cruelty they reveal. And there can be no suggestion of officially-inspired atrocity propaganda in these stories.88
The reputation of atrocity propaganda reached its moral nadir decades later when it was appropriated by Holocaust deniers. Arthur Ponsonby’s book
85 C. Larson, ‘Propaganda, Publicity and the War’, in The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 6., No.2., 1942, p.298. 86 Welch, op.cit., p.25. 87 Anonymous, ‘Eye-witness Stories of Nazi Bestialities’, The Mail, Saturday 16 September 1944, p.1. 88 Anonymous, ‘Grim Story, But True’, The Courier-Mail, Thursday 19 April 1945, p.2. 95
was reprinted in the United States by the Institute of Historical Review, which denied the Holocaust occurred. Lewis Brandon wrote in the introduction of Ponsonby’s book:
For, if the lies of World War One could all be admitted to and written about in 1928 – a mere ten years after the war ended – why is it that no such admissions have been made in these 35 years after the end of the Second World War?...it would appear that only when the power of Zionism, and its control over our media has been curtailed, will the truth about the “Holocaust” gain currency.’89
Ponsonby, a liberal and a pacifist, would have been horrified.
The Bryce Report, rape and warfare
While Ponsonby’s book focused mostly upon unofficial media reports, the
Bryce report had been published by the British government and was another avenue through which atrocity propaganda could be discredited.
The Bryce report (its full title being Report of the Committee on Alleged
German Outrages: appointed by His Britannic Majesty’s government and presided over by the Right Hon. Viscount Bryce) was produced by a committee headed by James Bryce a highly respected humanitarian and former diplomat. It conferred absolute legitimacy upon all manner of atrocity propaganda following its publication in May 1915.90 For example, by 1917 the Australian government began to produce pamphlets based on the Bryce report. German Atrocities: Germany and Inhumanity versus
Humanity and Christianity quoted at length from the report, and the final
89 See L. Brandon, ‘Introduction’, Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in War-Time, Containing an Assortment of lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War, Institute for Historical Review, California, 1980. 90 J.M. Read, Atrocity Propaganda, 1914-1919, New Haven; London, Yale University Press, 1941, pp. 204 -206; Wilson, op.cit., p. 378. 96
Federal Recruiting Campaign of 1918 also drew heavily upon it for material to lend legitimacy to posters and pamphlets. 91
Because Bryce’s involvement had given the report the imprimatur of truth, the destruction of the report’s reputation was integral to the demolishing of the reputation of atrocity propaganda, and by extension, the war. The decline of the reputation of the Bryce report is a little more complex than that of the general decline of atrocity propaganda. From 1941, when James Morgan Read critiqued the report, to 1979, when New Zealand historian Trevor Wilson approached it, the shaky circumstances of the production of the report led to damning assessments about its veracity.
Both historians very ably demonstrated that the report had been flawed from the outset. At no point did the committee personally hear testimony from the Belgian refugees who were living in England. Wilson’s major criticism of the report lies in the fact that the written testimony was passed on to the committee and then compiled into a report.92
Another perceived flaw, according to Wilson, were the allegations of rape. He argued that stories of rape had been largely manufactured by the
Allies because rape seemed to outrage people more than other consequences of war.93 While Wilson acknowledged that thousands of
91 German Atrocities: Germany and Inhumanity versus Humanity and Christianity, Melbourne, Director-General of Recruiting, 1917. 92 Wilson, op.cit., pp. 373-375; J.M. Read, Atrocity Propaganda, 1914-1919, New Haven; London, Yale University Press, 1941, pp. 204 -206. 93 Wilson, op.cit., p.381. Wilson described this as ‘a strange quirk of human psychology’. 97
civilian men were shot by the German military, he strongly implied that
Belgian women had not been ‘outraged’ by the invading German army.94
By 1995 the notion that the Bryce report was a series of outrageous falsehoods had become unassailable fact in many histories of the war. Rather than being regarded as one of the first serious
(albeit flawed) investigations into human rights abuses during war, the report was again dismissed as a document designed to inflame the lusts of Allied men. Susan Kingsley Kent launched an attack on the report, describing it as a ‘pornographic orgy that fostered voyeurism and made war sexually “exciting”’. However, this particular criticism ignores the many pages of the report in which less salacious atrocities, such as the burning of houses, are detailed.95
Significantly, many of the criticisms of the Bryce report are themselves historically inaccurate. British historians Cate Haste and
Gary S. Messinger, the authors of two of the most influential books about British Great War propaganda, made strong assertions about the inaccuracy of the Bryce report without actually investigating whether or not their assertions were true. Haste set the tone in 1977, writing of the Bryce report:
94 Ibid., p.380-1. Of the moral importance of the stories of rape to the justification for war compared to other atrocities against civilians Wilson wrote: ‘If it should emerge that the Germans had not “outraged” Belgian women – only, with great deliberation, executed large numbers of its menfolk, destroyed precious buildings, terminated a whole people’s independence – then the conviction that the Kaiser had behaved shamefully towards Belgium would be seriously impaired, and so consequently would be Britain’s moral warrant for intervening in the war’. 95 Kingsley Kent, op.cit., p.158. 98
While it is the case that modern warfare produced casualties and mutilation on an enormous scale, and that the Germans were hard in their treatment of civilian resistance, there is very little evidence from German sources to support the assumption of large-scale organized terrorization and incendiarism as part of German military policy.96
Haste did not supply any references to back up this statement – indeed, in her entire chapter about British atrocity propaganda, Haste only referred to one German source as part of her enquiry into German military practice.97 Messinger also exonerated German military policy without serious consultation of German sources, instead alleging that all reports of atrocities were manufactured. The consequence is that these historians have been unduly harsh towards the Bryce report as well as allegations of atrocities in general. In 1992 Messinger wrote:
…the stories which the Bryce Report invited readers to believe were so sensationalistic that their negative effects upon public understanding should have been obvious. The report accused German soldiers of such atrocities as using Belgian civilians as human shields in combat; indiscriminately destroying buildings; raping women and young girls; cutting off the heads of babies; cutting off women’s breasts; thrusting bayonets into children and then hoisting the children as if on a spit; cutting off children’s hands and ears while their parents were forced to watch; shooting at children; and nailing a child to a farmhouse door.98
Thus the Bryce report became synonymous in many histories with atrocious lies. The great tragedy of the Bryce report is that because it reported some of the more outlandish allegations amongst the absolutely true ones, the entire report came to be regarded as totally unreliable. However, many of its
96 C. Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War, London, Allen Lane, 1977, p.94. 97 Ibid., pp.206-207. 98 Messinger, op.cit., p.73. 99
accusations were correct - Germans did execute civilian hostages in Belgium, and use them on occasion as human shields – and this was even acknowledged by American historian James Morgan Read (who was extremely hostile to atrocity propaganda) as early as 1941. 99
The German army did indiscriminately destroy cultural property.
And women and young girls were raped. It is absurd to contemplate the notion that the German army was the first invading force in the history of mankind not to commit rape. As French historians Audoin-Rouzeau and
Becker have argued in their re-assessment of sexual violence during the
Great War, rape is a fundamental instrument of war: ‘women are victimised twice over, as human beings and as future child-bearers, and they are the first whom invaders want to humiliate. Their tortured, raped bodies become proof of the conqueror’s power’.100
Horne and Kramer relied on testimony to establish occurrences of rape. Where atrocity propaganda is overly descriptive, these women were terse and elliptical. They would not name the act, they alluded to it. As one victim said, ‘I’ve no need to tell you the rest, you can easily guess it.’101
British historian Adrian Gregory, who also revisited the question of atrocities in Belgium, succinctly demolished the previous dismissal of allegations of rape in Belgium:
Post-war investigation uncovered very few cases of rape committed by the German Army in 1914 … Rape is a notoriously under-reported crime. The assumption
99 Read, op.cit., pp. 108 and 286. 100 Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, op.cit., p.47 101 Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities: A History of Denial, op.cit., p.199. 100
that every woman raped by a German soldier in 1914 would willingly give evidence to that effect six years afterwards seems deeply flawed, particularly in a country with a strong socially conservative and Roman Catholic ethos … In 1914 the choice was to believe the rumours. After 1920 the rumours were discounted. But the issue highlighted remains. Men at war commit rape. Angry soldiers in a hostile country faced by apparent civilian resistance are even more prone to do so.102
Swiss forensic specialist R.A. Reiss encountered these very difficulties while he was investigating war crimes that had been committed by the Hapsburg army in Serbia in late 1914. He wrote of his experience attempting to quantify rape:
I have also endeavoured to ascertain the number of the cases of rape committed by the army of invasion. This was even a more difficult task than to arrive at the number of the wounded. You, Monsieur le President, are well aware of popular sentiment in your country in all matters touching the honour of the family, and you know that it is impossible, or at least, exceedingly difficult for a girl who has been outraged to find a husband. The families endeavour to conceal as far as possible the misfortune that has befallen them in the violation of their women. Hence the almost absolute impossibility of ascertaining the number of women who had been subjected to lewd assaults from the soldiery of the hostile army.103
The difficulties of proving allegations of sexual assault during wartime have been one of the reasons that historians have regarded
Great War rape stories with complete disbelief. Another reason for scepticism was the gendered nature of atrocity propaganda. This coloured how historians operating during the height of second wave feminism interpreted it.
102 Gregory, op.cit., p.308 103 R.A.Reiss, The Kingdom of Serbia: Report upon the atrocities committed by the Austro- Hungarian Army during the first invasion of Serbia, London, Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1916, pp.32-33. 101
Australian historians Carmel Shute and Marilyn Lake condemned atrocity propaganda as an inherently sexist activity in which the titillating helplessness of the female acted to lure men into supporting the war. Marilyn Lake wrote, ‘Often people’s interest in atrocity stories seemed to have a distinct sado-sexual tinge’.104 For Shute, the stories of rape were ‘in the main fabricated – their propaganda value lay in the sexual intimidation they induced in women and the opportunities they presented for fantasies of male lust’.105 This response continued into the final decade of the twentieth century. In 1997 Nicoletta Gullace also assumed that allegations of rape were symbolic rather than literal.
Her argument was that because Germany’s disregard of Belgian neutrality did not fire enough outrage in the populace, atrocity propaganda was introduced. She has written:
Although the German disregard of European treaty law was sufficiently shocking to an educated elite, many observers expressed a persistent anxiety that the campaign to rally the British public was not having as much effect as it should on the classes that would become the backbone of the war.106
Gullace has argued that the propagandists were concerned that legalistic arguments about the cause of the war were regarded as too abstract to interest the working classes, and therefore a crass and relatable justification
– the rape and murder of Belgian women and children – had to be used; it
104 Lake, op.cit., p.22. 105 Shute, op.cit., p.17. 106 N.F Gullace, ‘Sexual Violence and family honor : British propaganda and international law during the First World War’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 102., Iss., 3., 1997, p.723. 102
was from this manipulative thinking that atrocity propaganda emerged.107
Because people were insufficiently outraged by the more quotidian allegations of atrocities (such as the shooting of men), or breaches of international law, allegations of rape had to be brought to the fore.
This interpretation is problematic because it has removed the historical framework from atrocity propaganda. By focusing only on its lascivious and brutal aspects, historians have neglected to engage with its overall context. Some historians have perhaps been naïve about war and the violent behaviour that it can elicit, and (as will be explored shortly), atrocity propaganda did not focus exclusively on rape and sexual depravity – it engaged with many other wartime acts of violence committed by the Germans.
The first issue to be examined is the mocking assumption by some historians that the stories contained in atrocity propaganda were simply too outlandish to be true. Messinger’s amusement has already been noted, but Kingsley Kent’s reaction deserves a more detailed analysis, because her logic in dismissing some atrocities simply because they sounded too outrageous to have occurred is somewhat problematic: no matter how ridiculous some atrocity stories sound, they may have in fact occurred.
Out of the historians surveyed in this chapter, Kingsley Kent perhaps most egregiously misinterpreted the allegations of brutality
107 Ibid., p.724. 103
against women. As stated earlier, Kingsley Kent regarded the Bryce report as ‘pornographic’ and ‘sexually “exciting”’. She then went on to quote very selectively from the report drawing forth the both the most unlikely cases and also ones that did not sound particularly unlikely at all – for example, the gang rape of a 14 year old by seven German soldiers.108 However, in the context of war this crime is not unlikely.
Even soldiers who were allied to the country they were living in were capable of gang rape. Peter Stanley has recounted an Australian soldier’s recollection of his fellow soldiers gang-raping a young woman in France during the Great War.109
Other crimes that seemed inconceivable to some late twentieth century historians were stories in which women were mutilated by bayonets. Kingsley Kent quoted from this episode in the report, in order to demonstrate its ‘pornographic’ nature:
A Belgian soldier marching along outside Liege came upon ‘a woman, apparently of middle-age, perhaps 28 to 30 years old, stark naked, tied to a tree. At her feet were two little children about three or four years old. All three were dead. I believe the woman had one of her breasts cut off … both children had been killed by what appeared to be bayonet wounds. The woman’s clothes were lying on the grass thrown all about the place’.110
It is understandable that a reader will initially believe this report is exaggerated. However, some of the more horrific tales of mutilation with
108 Kingsley Kent, op.cit., pp. 158-159. 109 P. Stanley, Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force, Australia; United Kingdom, Pier 9, 2010, p. 125. ‘Gallwey [the witness] had of course heard stories of rapes by German soldiers, but “it is the last thing I expected of my own comrades…They should be shot”, he wrote’. 110 Kingsley Kent, op.cit., p. 158. 104
bayonets while exceedingly uncommon, did happen. This possibility is raised when Reiss’s report into the Austro-Hungarian’s depredations in
Serbia is consulted. Despite the fact that this report was skewed by the author’s sympathy for the Serbians (he went on to fight for the Serbians during the war), his work is regarded as having been foundational to the development of the profession of forensic science.111 Reiss’s report was methodical, he personally interviewed people – including soldiers who admitted to committing the atrocities – and he visited the sites of the atrocities.112 In the report, he included stories and statistics. Most disturbingly, he included a photograph of an elderly lady who had had her breasts hacked off with a bayonet. Figure 7.
Figure 7. ‘The Woman Soldatovitch’, in R.A. Reiss, The Kingdom of Serbia: Report upon the Atrocities committed by the Austro-Hungarian Army during the first invasion of Serbia, 1916.
111 J. Mathyer, ‘Professor R.A. Reiss: A Pioneer of Forensic Science’, Journal of the Forensic Science Society, Vol 24., No.2., 1984, pp.131-135. 112 B. M. Scianna, ‘Reporting Atrocities: Archibald Reiss in Serbia, 1914-1918’, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 2012, Vol. 25., Iss. 4., 2012, pp.599-602. 105
Reiss also included anecdotes – again, of women’s breasts being cut off, along with other horrors too numerous to detail.113 Perhaps most disturbing, however, is Reiss’s tragic photograph of a violent end to an elderly woman’s life. This image means that we cannot say with absolute certainty that women’s breasts were not hacked off with bayonets in Belgium (or indeed, France). Certainly, this was a different army, in a region that in which extraordinary violence between and against civilians was a common pastime. However, the photograph must raise questions – if this had happened in Serbia at the beginning of the Great War at the hands of European soldiers, is the allegation of mutilation in Belgium so outlandish? We must continue to treat the allegations about Belgium with the extreme caution they deserve, but perhaps a thorough (albeit exceedingly difficult) investigation of the culture of violence against civilians by the European military during this period would yield a more historically accurate result than mocking dismissal.
Furthermore, an investigation of the culture of violence against women both on the home and battlefront might prove to be illuminating. Certainly, many artists in Germany had become preoccupied with the issue of sexual murder (or Lustmord) by the middle of the war. In George Grosz’s Murder in Ackerstrasse a man who
113Reiss, op.cit., Frontispiece. Reiss has included in a statistical analysis of injuries to civilians, one section being ‘sexual parts mutilated’, another specifically quantifiying the number of women who had their ‘breasts cut off’ (2 recorded instances). In comparison to the other atrocities (for example, ‘burnt alive’ or ‘bayonetted or knifed’) this is a very small section. Nonetheless, this table and the accompanying photograph, does demonstrate atrocities of this kind were occurring, at least, in Serbia. 106
has violently defiled a woman with an axe furtively attempts to clean the blood from his body. Figure 8. This obsession with the grotesque violation and murder of women by Germany’s leading Expressionist artists indicates that they were concerned not only with the moral consequences of modernity and the metropolis, but also with the moral degradation brought about by the war.114
A further point is that concerns that men had become brutalised by the war were aired in Great Britain shortly after the conflict. Phillip
Gibbs, a wartime correspondent, perceived an increase in violent sexual crime in England, believing that the soldiers’ experience at war had dehumanised them. In 1919 the Commissioner of the Metropolitan
Police told The Times that ‘he…feared that a battle-hardened husband might now murder his wife rather than, as before the war administering “just a clip under the ear”’.115 When these facts are presented, the notion that women were brutalised in Belgium seems less absurd.
114 J. Lloyd, ‘German Expressionism: apocalypse, war and revolution’, in J. Strecker (ed.), The Mad Square, Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2011, pp. 34 and 48. 115 Commissioner quoted in: Clive Emsely, ‘Violent Crime in England: post-war anxieties and press narratives’, Continuity and Change, Vol. 23., Iss. 1., 2008, p.175. The Commissioner’s casual reference to ‘a clip under the ear’ is also an important reminder to modern readers how acceptable domestic violence was in this period. 107
Figure 8. George Grosz, Murder in Ackerstrasse, 1916-17, collection of the A.G.N.S.W.
Atrocity propaganda and international law
There is a further issue with historians’ focus upon the sexual elements contained in atrocity propaganda, being that it provides a distorted image of what preoccupied people in relation to atrocities during the war. Kingsley Kent has written that ‘[m]uch of the atrocity propaganda that circulated throughout Britain focused on outrages committed against women’.116 However, a survey of the comprehensive John Johnson collection of First World War British propaganda at Oxford University reveals a much more nuanced reality.
The treatment of POWs held by the Germans was a topic of interest,117
116 Kingsley Kent, op.cit., p.158. 117 A. Conan Doyle, The Story of British Prisoners, London, The Central Committee for Patriotic Organisations, c.1915. In his preface Doyle connects the treatment of prisoners with German attacks on civilians via sea and air, pp. 3 -4. 108
as was the use of submarines to target civilian ships.118 In its special fundraising edition for Belgium, the magazine Everyman, which was edited by Belgian Charles Sarolea, focused on the destruction of architecture and culture during the German invasion.119 Finally, Louis
Raemaekers portrayed many aspects of war, from the use of poison gas and zeppelins, to the political machinations of the Kaiser. However, some of his drawings were simple elegies to towns and communities that had been destroyed by war. Figure 9.
Figure 9. Louis Raemaekers, ‘The exhumation of the Martyrs of Aerschot’, 1915.120
These examples show that there was a very particular understanding held in Great Britain and Australia about how war should be conducted, which was based on a type of ‘public sensitivity to suffering’ that had begun in the early nineteenth century. This
118 W. Frost, Devils of the Deep, Great Britain, The Field and Queen, c. 1915. 119 Everyman: Special Belgian Relief Number 1, Great Britain, November 1914. 120 Source: de Ranitz, op.cit., p.82. 109
burgeoning humanitarian sentiment is discussed in detail in Chapter
Three. Alongside the development and increasing influence of humanitarianism in Victorian England was a general movement in late nineteenth century Europe to make war more humane by limiting it with arms control and more defined laws of armed conflict. Indeed, even in the minds of some of the most idealistic, there was an aim to abolish war itself. In 1899 and 1907, two conferences took place that ‘culminated in the Hague Conventions, which helped to lay the foundations of humanitarian law’.121 While the Hague Conventions had limited efficacy
(as Detlev Vagts observed, they ‘opened the doors – just barely – to the era of arms control’), they were nonetheless part of a broader optimism that was prevalent in Europe at the time.122 Limited in outcome by the fact that the participants bargained from the perspective of national interest, rather than for broader international interest, it is nonetheless apparent that idealism also had a role to play in these conferences, because the main items on the agenda - arms limitation and ‘peaceful settlement of disputes’ were under discussion partly due to the influence of ‘the middle-class peace movement’ which had gained some measure of popularity in Europe.123
121 T. Morris-Suzuki, ‘Humanitarian dilemmas in mid-twentieth century Australia and Asia’, History Australia, vol. 10., No. 2., 2013, p.8. 122 D. F. Vagts, ‘The Hague Conventions and Arms Control’, American Journal of International Law, 2000, Vol. 94., Iss. 1., 2000, p.31. 123 J. Dülffer, ‘Prevention or Regulation of War?’, in L. Kettenacker and T. Riotte (eds.), The Legacies of Two World Wars: European Societies in the Twentieth Century, New York, Berghan Books, 2011, p. 2 and pp. 16-17. 110
Great War atrocity propaganda and its condemnation of poisonous gas, exploding bullets and general atrocities against civilians was therefore a product of this period of burgeoning humanitarianism. Its accusation that certain forms of warfare were barbaric was not merely an opportunistic public relations assault upon Germany by the Allies, but also a part of an ongoing and considered debate about the ‘humane’ conduct of warfare. It must be stressed that by the time of the Great
War, the interest in limiting the types of weaponry used was of concern across Europe, and not just a hypocritical British construct. For example, in the mind of the neutral Dutch public, whoever used gas had done away with ‘civilization and had regressed humanity at the same time’.124
Thus by 1914 the notion that non-combatants should not be the targets of military aggression had become a norm in many countries that came to be involved in the war. By extension, it was a potent force in the propaganda wars between the Allies and Germany, and it was the Allies’ contention that they possessed the higher moral ground. And the higher moral ground was an important position to occupy, as it was from here that the sympathy of neutral countries (such as America until 1917) could be courted. In a cartoon by British artist ‘Poy’ (Percy Fearon), the
Kaiser and his minions are viewing the devastation wrought by a
Zeppelin bombing raid. Their target is not in fact France or England, but
124 L. van Bergan and M. Abbenhuis, ‘Man-monkey, monkey-man: neutrality and the discussions about the ‘inhumanity’ of poison gas in the Netherlands and International Committee of the Red Cross’, First World War Studies, Vol. 3., No. 1., 2012, p. 17. 111
‘Neutral Pro-Germanism’, a smoking city from which the words ‘disgust’ and ‘indignation’ rise. The caption reads: ‘The only result of Zeppelin raids has been to shatter what remained of pro-German sentiment in neutral countries’.125
Atrocity propaganda therefore represented ideas that were relevant to those who lived through the Great War. The ideals contained in atrocity propaganda were particular to the early twentieth century.
Because of the legacy of the 1899 Peace Conference and the 1907 Hague
Conventions, wars of the twentieth century were different from previous wars.126 It was believed by many that war could be limited in a way that would make it more humane.127 Some countries such as the United
States were strongly committed to the humanitarian ideas contained in these new laws. Allan Kramer has explained:
The shock and outrage felt by contemporaries in the countries of Germany’s victims and in neutral states can be explained not only by the breach of international law. It was also because the killing of civilians and the destruction of cultural monuments during the entire war did not, with the exception of aerial bombardment, even involve complex modern technology or long-range artillery fire, but unsophisticated weapons … most of such killing was done face to face…In this sense, too, German warfare was held at the time to represent a reversion to barbarism.128
Germany and Great Britain therefore had different conceptions of the
‘best’ way to conduct military operations during the Great War. In the
125 W. McCartney, Poy’s War Cartoons. London, Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., Ltd, 1915-1918, p.27. 126 Finch, op.cit., p.xii. 127 Kramer, op.cit., Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War, p.25. 128 Kramer, op.cit., Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War, p.27. 112
case of Germany, it did not include the protection of non-combatant civilians or their property. Horne and Kramer have argued that ‘from the outset, the German response was endorsed, regulated and generalised’ through to the very top of the government – the Kaiser. In a telegram from the Kaiser to President Wilson on the 7th September,
German atrocities against Belgians were defended by him: Germans had been forced to ‘take the most drastic measures in order to punish the guilty and to frighten the blood-thirsty [Belgian] population from continuing their work of vile murder and horror’. Further to this Horne and Kramer quoted the diary of General Karl von Einem, who noted that he had ordered ‘“all the houses burned and the inhabitants shot” in reprisal for supposed Belgian resistance’.129 Isabel Hull went even further in relation to German atrocities in Belgium and France:
Neither the wartime German government nor the Weimar parliament denied them. Instead, they defended them as regrettably necessary reprisals against illegal franc-tireurs (whom subsequent scholarship has shown did not exist) the object of the atrocities was to force civilian obedience and to re- create in the occupied zones the reliable order of home.130
Conversely, amongst the British (and many Allied nations) there was a genuine belief that war had been made more civilised, and that those who indulged in violence against civilians had regressed into medieval barbarism.
129 J. Horne and A. Kramer, ‘War between soldiers and enemy civilians: 1914-15’, in R. Chickering and S. Föster (eds.), How Total was the Great War? Germany, France, Great Britain and the United States, 1914-1918, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p.158. 130 Hull, op.cit., Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, pp. 210-211. 113
Horne and Kramer have written comprehensively about atrocity propaganda and the social and political context from which it emerged.
These differences in conceptions of atrocity are reflected in the official doctrine of the various countries involved. Two comparisons, one from
Australia and one from Germany which relate to international law and the conduct of the military, provide excellent examples of how differently the two countries perceived how soldiers should conduct themselves.
In the case of Australia, so important were the concepts laid out in the Hague in 1899 and 1907 to the just war narrative that they were distributed to Australian troops in a booklet. In the Notes on the Laws and Customs of War, which was written for the Australian Imperial Force in 1914, Ambrose Pratt wrote ‘The British Empire is making war against
German soldiers, not against peaceful German citizens’. Pratt continues,
Civilians – men, women and children – were in olden times at the mercy of an invading army. This cruel doctrine has been abolished. Under the modern laws of war, civilians are entitled to enjoy security for their persons and property so long as they shall remain quiescent and refrain from hostile attempts against the invading troops.131
Official German doctrine, however, had a different interpretation of legitimate violence. In the German Handbook of International Law, it stated that ‘war is in its essence violence, [and] the violent force of the conqueror in the conquered land is completely unlimited’.132 Hull has observed that the atrocities that occurred in Belgium because of ‘the
131 A. Pratt, Notes on the Laws and Customs of War: written for the Australian Imperial Force, Albert J. Mullet, Government Printer, Melbourne, 1914, p.1, N.L.A. 132 German Handbook of International Law, 1915, quoted in:., Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War, op.cit., p.26. 114
conscious and customary acceptance among [German] officers that making the risky plan work might require using terror against civilians’.133
As Dan Todman has pointed out, British ideals in the Great War were never really put to the test – had Britain been the invading army, perhaps they would have behaved in the same manner. The fact that the grim consequences of starvation caused by the British naval blockade against Germany were not clear to the majority of the public meant that the differences in doctrine could be used as an effective propaganda tool.134 During the course of the war, controversy had been largely contained within elite diplomatic circles; it was not until after the war that the public expressed ‘revulsion’ about the tactics of the blockade.135
Where German military doctrine was dangerously pragmatic towards civilians, Australian and British doctrine strove to encompass the violent contradictions of conflict by creating a rule-bound theatre of war in which the line between the military and civilians was meant to be clear. Allied atrocity propaganda reflected these differences in doctrine.
In Great Britain and Australia, idealism about the moral responsibilities of soldiers towards civilians provided a vital propaganda message,
133 Op.Cit., Hull, op.cit., Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, p.211. 134 Todman, op.cit., p.125. 135 Hull, Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during the Great War, op.cit., p. 164 and pp. 170-176. 115
which was that ‘the enemy of the Allies [was] a brutal barbarian whose defeat was essential to the survival of civilised life on the planet’.136
This deep abhorrence of direct military violence against civilians meant that atrocities committed by the Germans dominated how the war was discussed. Even committed opponents of the war had to acknowledge the atrocities that were taking place. E.D. Morel, a vehement opponent of the conflict, wrote in a U.D.C. leaflet after the sinking of the Lusitania:
We meet this afternoon our minds still tense with horror and indignation at the latest and most barbarous outrage of which innocent civilians have been the victims since hell was let loose. All the attendant circumstances have combined to invest the tragedy of the “Lusitania” with a poignancy of pathos and a dramatic force which no other single incident of war has yet equalled.137
The sinking of the Lusitania had a powerful and enduring effect on public opinion. The civilian liner was torpedoed by a German U-boat on
7 May 1915, and 1,200 civilians perished.138 This event occurred around the same time that the Bryce report was released. It must be remembered that the public did not receive news pertaining to German atrocities as individual primary sources secreted in an archive, but generally as a news item amongst many others.
In Australian newspapers these news items were often on the same page. For example, in the Sydney Morning Herald on 13 May 1915
136 C. Roetter, The Art of Psychological Warfare 1914-1945, New York, Stain and Day, 1974, p.66. 137 E.D. Morel, War and Diplomacy, London, Union of Democratic Control, 1915, p.1. John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library. 138 Gregory, op.cit., p.61. 116
a story titled ‘International law its vindication: Britain’s Clear Duty’
(which refers to the Bryce report) is situated close to a story about the outraged reaction in Pretoria to the sinking of the Lusitania.139 In many
Australian newspapers, the contents of the Bryce report were reproduced alongside news of the Lusitania. That these two stories emerged in tandem can only have made the Bryce report seem highly credible in the mind of the reader at the time as both concerned German military action against civilians.
However, the relationship between real world events and atrocity propaganda has not been apparent to some historians. Nicoletta Gullace claimed in 1997 that the British government used atrocity propaganda to ‘explain the arcane language of international law to a democratic public increasingly empowered to support or reject its enforcement.’ In her argument, she regarded First World War propaganda as following a logical trajectory, in which atrocity propaganda was part of a symbolic domestication of the war for a British audience.140 This is problematic in that, in the case of the British, the Germans themselves ‘domesticated’ atrocity propaganda in 1914 when they shelled Scarborough, Hartlepool, and Whitby, killing numerous non-combatants. ‘Remember
Scarborough’, a poster produced by the British Parliamentary Recruiting
Committee just before the close of that year, was a ‘typical’ atrocity poster, tying together events in Belgium with those occurring in Britain.
139 ‘International law its vindication Britain’s Clear Duty’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 13 May 1915 p.9; ‘Lusitania outrage’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 13 May 1915 p.9. 140 Gullace, ‘Sexual Violence and family honor : British propaganda and international law during the First World War’, op.cit., p. 716. 117
The poster invoked the deaths of women and children at the hands of the German barbarian: ‘the Germans who brag of their “CULTURE” have shown what it is made of by murdering defenceless women and children at SCARBOROUGH’.141 Another poster published in 1915 contains the following text under the image of a bombed out house:
No.2 Wykenham Street, SCARBOROUGH, after the German bombardment on Dec. 16th. It was the Home of a Working Man. Four People were killed in this House including the Wife, aged 58, and Two Children, the youngest aged 5. 78 Women and Children were killed and 228 Women and Children were wounded by the German Raiders ENLIST NOW.142
Figure 10. ‘Men of Britain’, Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, printed by Johnson, Riddle and Co., 1915, IWM PST 5119, collection of the IWM.
Yet Gullace did not mention these particular items of atrocity propaganda in her article, and only fleetingly refers to attacks on
141 ‘Remember Scarborough’, Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, printed by Harrison and Sons, IWM PST 5089, collection of the I.W.M. 142 ‘Men of Britain’, Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, printed by Johnson, Riddle and Co., 1915, IWM PST 5119, collection of the I.W.M. 118
‘unarmed towns’. In this manner, Gullace creates the impression that the attacks on towns were merely part of a semi-constructed narrative produced by British propagandists who ‘skilfully played on humanitarian sentiment’, rather than real events with serious consequences for unarmed civilians.143 Thus, by focusing only on the atrocity propaganda about sexual violence in Belgium, and omitting the
British posters that had been produced in response to direct attacks against British civilians, Gullace has not engaged with the broader historical context in which atrocity propaganda about the rape and murder of women was produced and received.
The accusation that the Germans had abandoned their humanity through attacks on Belgian civilians was made more credible when their navy attacked small British towns. German Zeppelin raids in Great
Britain also added credibility to the idea that the German military had little respect for civilian lives. During the war aerial bombardment killed 1,413 Britons and wounded 3,408, many of whom were civilians.
This is a significant number of people and as James Morgan Read speculated, galvanised support for the war in that more men attended recruiting centres immediately after Zeppelin raids.144 As the poster
Enlist demonstrates, the Zeppelin raids held the attention of Australians too. Figure 11
143 Ibid., pp.737-738. 144 Read, op.cit., p.192. 119
Figure 11. W.A. Gullick, ‘Enlist’, Government Printer, 1915
The enduring perception in histories of the First World War that atrocity propaganda was inherently mendacious is therefore problematic, particularly as it has left a historiographical legacy of misinterpretation about why people supported the war. Through rejecting the ‘hypodermic needle’ model, and adopting a more complex one which acknowledges that propaganda is historically situated, this study contributes to the formation of a broader picture of how atrocity 120
propaganda functioned during the Great War. It was not simply a series of lies; instead, it often portrayed real military actions conducted by the
Germans against civilians, as evidenced by the posters about attacks on civilian British towns. Moreover, it was not dominated by created fantasies about the rape of Belgian women by German soldiers, as these events also occurred. To be sure, some atrocity propaganda was obviously exaggerated, some of it was untruthful, and as we will see in
Chapter Five, it drew upon and perpetuated vicious racial stereotypes.
However, these elements do not comprise the whole.
Atrocity propaganda also reflected the deep and enduring moral convictions held by both the populace and government in both Britain and Australian at the time about how war should be conducted, notably that non-combatants should be immune from military aggression. Hate was therefore not the only emotion to which propagandists appealed to fuel a war which broke the old imperial orders of Europe, and shaped
‘the world in the twentieth century’.145 However misplaced, a sense of duty drove it too.
Not all Australians, however, shared this sense of duty. The next chapter will explore the context in which atrocity propaganda operated in Australia. Atrocity propaganda functioned in an adversarial environment; opponents of the war directly challenged the moral assertions contained in atrocity propaganda, as well as disputing
145 H. Strachan, The First World War: A New Illustrated History, London, Simon and Schuster, 2003, p.332. 121
conscription and the war in general. These anti-war and anti- conscription activists opposed a vast and sophisticated pro-war propaganda apparatus. Despite the complexity and power of this machine, opponents of the conflict produced their own propaganda that directly challenged the power and will of the state. The following chapter will establish that propaganda was one of the main weapons used in an ideological battle that was fought over the moral legitimacy of the conflict.
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CHAPTER TWO Selling war, opposing war: propaganda as a contested space during the First World War
Propaganda was one of the vital engines of the war effort in Australia during the First World War. It had a nearly unique role as it was produced in one of the few nations that maintained a voluntary recruiting system throughout the course of the conflict. Despite two attempts to introduce conscription in the referenda of 1916 and 1917, Australia remained stubbornly voluntary. This had two major consequences for the use of propaganda in Australia: the first being that persuasion not compulsion was the sole means for the government to gain recruits – thus recruitment propaganda of an increasingly desperate nature was produced until the very close of the war. Secondly, the complete reliance on volunteer recruits meant that any opposition to the war was regarded as highly threatening by the government. As a result, aggressive legislation was introduced under the auspices of the War Precautions Act of 1914. This repressive Act was strengthened during the conflict in an attempt to suppress propaganda that could be regarded as prejudicial to recruiting. 1 Nonetheless, peace activists and members of the labour movement persisted in producing anti-war propaganda despite its illegality. Atrocity propaganda operated within this dynamic, challenging and adversarial climate.
1 J. Beaumont, Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2013, p.45. 123
Because this study investigates the political role of atrocity propaganda in Australia, it is important to situate it within the broader context of the propaganda war that took place in Australia. This war was about the moral legitimacy of the conflict. Propaganda was a contested space in which pro-war and anti-war advocates fought to persuade people to join their side. By documenting the struggle between the pro-war atrocity propagandists and those who rejected atrocity propaganda (and often the war itself) with their own propaganda, it becomes possible to reframe how Australians engaged with propaganda; far from being passive recipients, Australians were often active participants. What emerges is a portrait of a country that conducted bitter battles over important principles.
These principles were represented in the propaganda that survives – propaganda that was produced by everyone from powerful government figures and media magnates, down to anonymous socialists producing and hoarding illegal anti-war propaganda in the working class Melbourne suburb of Collingwood.2
The groups of people who produced propaganda was therefore rich and varied. Official propaganda and unofficial propaganda promoted both pro and anti-war viewpoints. The conscription referenda were also part of this contested field as conflicting viewpoints were presented in the public realm via pamphlets and newspaper articles. In this case, participants were not necessarily pro or anti-war. Nonetheless, they were as abrasive, humorous and desperate in their pleas as other war propagandists.
2 MP 707/1 V/248, N.A.A. Melbourne [This file was found by the archivists and photocopied for me. It still hasn’t been uploaded to the system]. 124
Australia’s propaganda war was certainly not fought on an even playing field. Enormous industry was dedicated to producing pro-war propaganda. From Belgian Relief Fund campaigns to films about Gallipoli, private groups and individuals zealously contributed to war effort. The state and federal governments also produced huge volumes of recruiting propaganda. In contrast, a much smaller number of people produced anti- war propaganda. The Women’s Peace Army (W.P.A.), the Australian Peace
Alliance (A.P.A.) and the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) were the most notable groups to produce anti-war propaganda.3 These groups objected to the war on a variety of grounds, ranging from Christianity to
Socialism. Additionally, labour newspapers and Irish Catholic newspapers also voiced strident and extensive objections to the conflict, particularly towards its end.
Regardless of affiliation, anybody who voiced objections to the war
(or conscription) risked the scrutiny of Military Intelligence. In 1915 and
1916, the War Precautions Act had been strengthened specifically to target anti-war activists. Section 30 (f) listed ‘endangering the successful prosecution of the war’ as an offence, and it was under this section and another (which forbade the spreading of ‘public alarm’) that anti-war and anti-conscriptionists were prosecuted.4
3 J. Connor, P. Stanley, P. Yule, The War at Home, Australia, Oxford University Press, 2015, p.182. 4 B. Oliver, Peacemongers: Conscientious objectors to military service in Australia, 1911-1945, Western Australia, 1997, p.34. 125
Despite the strength of the Act, and the enthusiasm with which it was enforced, the War Precautions Act did not silence dissent. The I.W.W., for example, distributed an impressive amount of propaganda until they were shut down by a different piece of legislation (which is discussed in Chapter
Five). One member of I.W.W. described their anti-war activities from August
1914 until February 1917:
As for propaganda, not alone against conscription, but also against the war, the IWW held 120 Sunday afternoon Domain meetings…We sold over 1000 copies of Kirkpatrick’s ‘War, What For’ and over 2000 pounds of revolutionary literature…5
The amount of propaganda disseminated indicates that, despite their persecution, the I.W.W. did manage to present their viewpoint for a significant period of the war. In addition, although the I.W.W. were generally viewed as a group of dangerous extremists, the views they espoused were not always regarded as outrageous by the mainstream media. This meant that I.W.W. propaganda was sometimes extensively reproduced in more politically neutral newspapers.
A good example mainstream reproduction of I.W.W. propaganda was when Tom Barker (the editor of the I.W.W.’s newspaper Direct Action) published this poster: ‘To arms! Capitalists, politicians, newspaper editors and other stay-at-home politicians: your country needs you in the trenches.
Workers follow your masters’. 6 This 1915 poster had been ‘prominently
5 F. Cain, The wobblies at war: a history of the I.W.W. and the Great War in Australia, Melbourne, Spectrum Publications, 1993, Cain, p.197 6 Ibid., p.230-233. 126
displayed in various workshops and other places in the city’ and immediately attracted official opprobrium. Not only was Barker targeted by the law – so too were those who displayed the poster.7 Despite these punitive measures, the mischievous words were reprinted throughout
Australia as newspapers reported the words of the poster. A Victorian newspaper made this caustic observation about the contents of the poster:
Presumably the sting lies in the last four words, for the advice to the stay-at-home politicians seems to be both necessary and patriotic. It has struck many of us forcibly that there are broad shouldered, seemingly healthy young parliamentarians whose constituents might very well give them a hint that when next an election comes the ballot will not be for shirkers. As to the last words of the poster, the Minister of Defence might well shudder if he thought the workers would postpone enlistment to the very distant day when the more talkative of our politicians set the example.8
This article was reproduced throughout Australia, from the Warrnambool
Standard to the Cairns Post.9 Even worse for the government, the inflammatory text of the poster was also reproduced verbatim throughout the country.10 Two years later, the same poster was a factor in another propaganda scandal. Alexander Rosenthal had displayed it at a public meeting in the Domain in Sydney. The Barrier Miner described his act of rebellion thus: ‘He took the poster from his pocket, which he read slowly and deliberately. He held it up, so that all could read it. He said: ‘This is the cause of the first prosecution against the I.W.W’. In addition to other
7 ‘Recruiting Discouraged: An Objectionable Poster in Sydney’, The Age, 13 August 1915, p.9. 8 ‘Anti-Recruiting Poster: Government Action’, The Telegraph, 13 August 1915, p.7. 9 ‘An Expensive Poster’, Cairns Post, 28 September 1915, p.2; ‘An Expensive Poster’, Warrnambool Standard, 21 September 1915, p.4. 10 ‘Breach of Precautions Act’, Gippsland Mercury, 17 September 1915, p.3.; ‘I.W.W. Poster Editor Fined 50 pounds’, The Sun 14 September 1915, p. 3.; ‘Miscellaneous Notes’, Upper Murray and Mitta Herald, 23 September 1915, p.2.; ‘The Critic’, Truth, 19 September 1915, p.1. 127
offences, Rosenthal was fined simply for having read out the poster. His inflammatory speech was in front of 2000 people – not an insignificant gathering.11
Propaganda was part of an ornate realm of physical theatre in which dramatic speech and physical gestures were combined to defy the authorities. Rosenthal’s action of displaying the banned poster added an extra layer of insult to his defiant public speech. Ironically, the repressive response from the authorities often resulted in more media, and more coverage of anti-war perspectives. The Women’s Peace Army, which had been founded by Vida Goldstein in 1915, also flouted the proscriptions against anti-war propaganda, and their actions were frequently reported in the media.12 The W.P.A. used both print and song to broadcast their anti- war message. In 1915 Adela Pankhurst (daughter of British suffragette
Emmeline Pankhurst) and Cecilia John campaigned in Queensland using an
American pacifist song, ‘I didn’t Raise my Son to be a Soldier’. The song expressed a number of sentiments, the primary one being that the protagonist did not raise their son ‘to kill some other mother’s darling boy’.
During a trip down the Brisbane River on a government steamer the two dissidents distributed copies of the song as well as singing it. Pankhurst and John were condemned as disloyal both by the media and Queensland parliament. 13
11 ‘Prejudicing Recruiting’, Barrier Miner, 22 September 1917, p.6. 12 V. Coleman, Adela Pankhurst: The Wayward Suffragette, 1885-1961, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, p. 66. 13 Ibid., p.67; ‘An Unpatriotic Circular’, Gympie Times and Mary River Mining Gazette, 27 November 1915, p.1. 128
Pankhurst was a persistent and indefatigable anti-war propagandist.
Faced with verbal abuse by soldiers at anti-conscription meetings, the theft and public airing of her private correspondence (Hughes read out a letter at a pro-conscription rally) and finally four months of jail, Pankhurst nonetheless refused to stop propagandising. Indeed, not long after her release from jail she ‘taunted security observers at a Yarra Bank rally…and attacked the war as being only in the interests of capitalists’. The Crown
Solicitor had wanted to prosecute her again, ‘but she escaped any summons’.14
While the I.W.W. and W.P.A. mounted counter-propaganda campaigns, other people protested against the war by physically repudiating pro-war and/or pro-conscription propaganda; these people used posters as proxies for their ideological opponents. Rather than reacting to propaganda with passivity, some people would erupt into rage. The most striking example of the physical repudiation of propaganda occurred in Melbourne, early 1916:
At about 2 o’clock on Wednesday afternoon a man walked boldly into the rooms occupied by the Australian Patriots’ League…tore a recruiting poster off the window, and threw it into the face of Madame McCracken, who was engaged on an Irish spinning-wheel a few paces away working material for the troops at the front. Before the culprit disappeared by the front door, he exclaimed, ‘If you keep these things in your window, you will have a pistol at your head.’15
14 Coleman, op.cit., pp.69 and 74; S. Hogan, ‘Pankhurst, Adela Constantia (1885-1961)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/pankhurst-adela-constantia-9275, published first in hardcopy 1990, accessed online 20 February 2016. 15 ‘Recruiting poster torn down’, The Argus, Monday 24 January 1916, p.11. 129
In 1917 a Darwin man was fined for defacing a poster. The defendant had thrown mud at the poster in broad daylight ‘in the presence of some twenty to thirty other workers’. Although the conscription referendum had been defeated only days before the trial, the worker’s involvement in anti- conscription meetings was part of the prosecution’s ‘evidence’ that he was a wilful defacer of posters. 16 In another incident in March 1916 anti-war activists stuck little placards on recruiting posters, ‘urging young men’ not to join. There was concern in parliament that these interventions had directly and negatively impacted on a recruiting census that was taken place.17
These were not cases of mindless hooligans defacing posters simply for fun, but serious expressions of dissent. The problem was vexatious enough for the Federal government to draft a special amendment to the War
Precautions Act in 1917 specifically making it illegal to damage recruiting posters.18 Despite this legislation, people continued to be charged with interfering with recruiting posters. At the very end of the conflict Patrick
O’Brien was fined 50 pounds for pulling down a poster at Rawdon Island
(the alternative to paying the fine was six months’ hard labour).19
Other people found ingenious methods for distributing their own propaganda. The Argus reported in April 1918 that a number of old anti-
16 ‘A Police Court Case’, Northern Territory Times and Gazette, Thursday 2 November 1916, p. 15. 17 ‘State Session. Defacing Recruiting Posters’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Tuesday 21 March, p.8; ‘Anti-Recruiting Placards’, ‘Anti-Recruiting Placards’, The Armidale Express and New England General Advertiser, 28 March 1916, p.8. 18 ‘War Precautions’, The Daily Mail, 5 May 1917, p.2. 19 ‘Pulling down Recruiting Poster’, Barrier Miner, 28 October 1918, p.2. 130
conscription leaflets had been sewn into the telephone directory which had been delivered to houses in Kew, Melbourne. These ‘anti-conscription songs’ had a variety of titles, ranging from ‘“maiden’s sacrifice,” the “greedy master class”, “incubate the kids” and “bump me into Parliament”’. The newspaper speculated that the people who had bound the leaflets into the telephone book were ‘employees in the Government Printing Service, whose low conception of their obligations as public servants makes it highly desirable their identities should be established and fitting punishment imposed.’20
The two conscription plebicites have become notorious in Australian historiography for dividing the nation.21 However, the level of dispute in the community also signified an actively engaged polity. The propaganda from these campaigns demonstrate that views about the issue of conscription were diverse. Those who objected to conscription had numerous reasons, from farmers in South Australia whose business would suffer should they be conscripted, to people who objected to conscription on religious grounds.
Others who supported conscription were convinced the war desperately required more Australian troops, and the only way to gain the number needed was through compulsion. Some members of the labour movement supported conscription as an extension of the concept of unionism – South
20 The Argus, 13.4.1918, cutting in N.A.A. Melbourne MP341/1 1918/4397 21 Beaumont, op.cit., pp. 378-85. 131
Australian politician Thomas Ryan wrote, ‘Is not this very compulsion the foundation upon which we have laid the superstructure of Labour?’22
Others were not at all convinced that conscription was a positive thing, and condemned it with a level of virulence and sarcasm that must have enraged the censors. An excellent example is a pamphlet by the sarcastically named ‘C.ENSOR’ of Melbourne, who opted for shock tactics. In his ‘Conscription and Death’ pamphlet, ‘Ensor’ included an illustration of a soldier standing at ease with his own head impaled on the end of his bayonet. Figure 12.
22 T. Ryan, National Preservation: a plea, Essendon, John Osborne Print, c.1916-1917, p.11, Josiah Symons collection of First World War propaganda, S.L.S.A. Ryan broke with the Labor Party and joined Hughes’ Nationalist Party, gaining a seat in Victorian Parliament shortly before this pamphlet was produced. He only resigned his South Australian seat after he won his seat in Victoria. 132
Figure 12. Detail. C. Ensor, ‘Conscription and Death’, Melbourne, 1916-17, Riley Collection, N.L.A.
Many of these activists continued to publish and distribute anti-war and anti-conscription propaganda, despite the strongest efforts of authorities: a news article titled ‘The Lottery of Death’ was republished in pamphlet form although it had been banned.23 A further act of defiance against censorship was by the Melbourne publisher Fraser and Jenkinson, who had repeatedly thumbed their noses at authorities despite having been
23 People Printery: The Lottery of Death, 1917, Riley Collection, NLA. Henry Earnest Boote, publisher, printer and editor of the ‘Worker’ was prosecuted for publishing the article as it was deemed prejudicial to recruiting (see: ‘Editor of “The Worker” prosecuted’, The Australian Worker, 30 November 1917, p.6. 133
‘convicted on several counts for breaches of the War Precautions
Regulations’.24 Despite the fact that the names of prohibited publications could not even be read out in parliament ‘in the interests of public safety’, the publishers produced a lengthy pamphlet listing the banned works.25
While anti-war and anti-conscription activists successfully distributed propaganda, and also had some impact upon sentiment about the war (as will be discussed in the final Chapter, anti-war propaganda became increasingly influential as the war took a toll on the home front), the system that these groups and individuals challenged was vast.
Pro-war propaganda
Official government propaganda campaigns were produced by the states in the early stages of the war, and from late 1916, the federal government. 26
From the beginning of the conflict posters created for state recruiting campaigns drew upon the existing expertise of advertising specialists and commercial artists.27 There was also a flourishing advertising and film industry when the war commenced. The poster business was estimated to be worth 127, 000 pounds per year in Melbourne alone, with an estimated
6,000 men employed.28 The film industry was also very developed. From
24 Brigadier-General, 3d Military District to Secretary, Department of Defence, 26 June 1917, MP367/1 B570/12/269 25 ‘Prohibited Publications’, Melbourne, Fraser and Jenkinson, c. 1915-1918, Mitchell Library. 26 E. Robertson, ‘Propaganda at Home (Australia), in U. Daniel, P. Gatrell, O. Janz, H. Jones, J. Keene, A. Kramer and B. Nasson (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the First World War, Freie Universität Berlin, http://encyclopedia.1914-1918 - online.net/article/propaganda_at_home_australia, online, accessed December 2015. 27 R. Crawford, But Wait, There’s More…A History of Australian Advertising, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2008, pp. 27-28. 28 ‘The Poster Business’, The Mail, 20 September 1914, p.2. 134
1911 to 1913, both Sydney and Melbourne experienced a dramatic boom in the number of cinema houses being established. In Melbourne ‘twenty-five permanent cinemas were listed… with a combined seating capacity of
50,000. By 1913…65 000 people were attending city and suburban cinemas on a Saturday night’.29 Official propaganda deftly exploited these existing networks to produce and distribute propaganda.
Official propaganda drew upon a number of themes to promote recruiting: these ranged from jingoistic imperial slogans, to shaming men into enlisting. Recruiting authorities seized upon Australian symbols of masculinity and sport – healthy bodied ‘shirkers’ such as David Souter’s iconic swimmer were depicted relaxing at the expense of their injured mates at the front. Figure 13. Shame was a primary function of these sorts of posters – a Queensland poster asserted:
Some men seem to think they can live forever! And are not game to take the sporting chance the ANZAC took when they sacrificed themselves for you! Are you content to hide yourself behind the blood of men and the sorrow of women? Take your share of your troubles going and never go back on your mate. Your mates are clamouring for reinforcements. The spirits of your dead pals send their cooee.30
29 G. Shirley and B. Adams, Australian Cinema in the First Eighty Years, Australia, Angus and Robertson, 1983, pp. 15 – 23. The Bulletin quoted in Shirley and Adams, p.23. 30 B.E. Pike, To the men of Rockhampton and Central Queensland, hesitate no longer, Australian Commonwealth Military Forces, c.1915 – 1917, ARTV00151, A.W.M. 135
Figure 13 David Henry Souter. 'It is nice in the surf, but what about the men in the trenches?' c. 1915, A.W.M.
Another poster (also from Queensland) read, ‘you have got to do your share or be forever shamed in the eyes of those who are now your friends’. 31 The triple emotional themes of shame, duty and sacrifice were, in fact, highly prominent themes in Australian state recruiting posters. They served to remind viewers that the Empire was ‘in serious danger because every citizen who is fit to serve is not enlisting’.32
31 ‘Compelled to win’, Queensland Government Printer, Queensland Recruiting Committee, c. 1915-1918, ARTV04962, A.W.M. 32 ‘Enlist at once: a message from the Premier’, Queensland Government Printer, Queensland Recruitng Committee, c.1915-1917, ARTV08949, A.W.M. 136
Some themes were more prominent than others. An analysis of eighty four First World War recruiting posters from the Australian War
Memorial reveals that twenty two specifically centred upon shaming the eligible man into joining through appeals to his masculine sense of duty.
(See Table 1.).
Table 1. Breakdown of themes of First World War recruiting posters (Total: 84)
Shame and Imperialism Nationalism Atrocity Other * duty propaganda
22 13 7 21 21
* ‘Other’ refers to posters that are text only and have simple messages such as ‘Enlist’
In contrast, only thirteen of these posters appealed to jingoistic imperial sentiment; this indicates that imperialism was not the major preoccupation for official recruiting propagandists. There were references to the monarchy – one poster titled ‘The Empire Calls’ quoted King George V.33
These posters also quoted British politicians and generals; Kitchener and
Haig featured, as did the Union Jack. For example, one poster featured a quote from British general Sir Ian Hamilton, which connected the white members of the Empire together through the mechanism of race. Figure 14.
He stated ‘Speaking out of a full heart, may I be permitted to say how gloriously the Australian and New Zealand contingent have upheld the finest traditions of our race during this struggle still in progress’.34 Hamilton’s
33 ‘The Empire Calls’, Queensland Recruiting Committee, A.J. Cumming Government Printer, c.1915-1917, ARTV00153, A.W.M. 34 ‘Australia’s Imperishable record’, printed by Farmer’s Sydney, published by the NSW government, c. 1914-1916, A.W.M. 137
statement drew upon an enduring ideology that was present in Australia, in which the British race was a unique and vital force. Regardless of nationality, white members of the Empire would always be connected by shared ethical qualities that were a result of shared race. 35
Figure 14. ‘Australia’s Imperishable record’, printed by Farmer’s Sydney, published by the N.S.W. government, c. 1914-1916, AWM.
Singularly Australian themes also featured in this sample, with seven posters depicting Australian flora, fauna and the archetypal Australian
‘digger’. These images began to emerge after 1915 when Australians started
35 Please see the following chapter for a discussion about the importance of ‘whiteness’ to British and Australian imperial identity. 138
to develop a distinct identity following their defeat at Gallipoli. 36 Shame and national symbols also intermixed: Harry J. Weston’s iconic poster ‘Would you stand by while a bushfire raged’ features a man insouciantly observing a group of men who are working feverishly to put out a bushfire. Figure 15.
Figure 15. Henry J. Weston, ‘Would You Stand by While a Bushfire Raged?’, N.S.W. Recruiting Committee, 1917, AWM.
Atrocity propaganda was the most prominent theme after shame and duty within the sample of posters from the Australian War Memorial.
Twenty one posters from the sample were devoted to depicting the fiendish
‘Hun’ and the carnage that he had inflicted upon Europe. In one poster, the
‘little boy from Manly’ (who was a Bulletin cartoon character that signified
36 S. Garton, ‘War and Masculinity in Twentieth Century Australia’ in Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 22., Iss. 56., 1998, p.86. 139
youthful Australia) is depicted reeling away from the spectre of the wrecked and smoking remains of the cloth hall at Ypres. Figure 16. In another, a
German officer stands over the body of Nurse Edith Cavell. Behind him hovers the ghostly figure of Justice, who inveighs the viewer to ‘remember
Nurse Cavell!’.37 Another poster warned, ‘If the Hun wins you are undone…Australia becomes a Teuton province and Australians a slave people. Remember Belgium’. 38
Figure 16. ‘Don’t Falter Go and meet the Hun Menace’, John Sands, N.S.W. Recruiting Committee, c.1915-1918, A.W.M.
37 V. Reilly, ‘Boys! Remember Nurse Cavell!’, Melbourne, State Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, 1915, collection of the A.W.M. 38 ‘Voluntary enlistment: the great ANZAC blood brotherhood is calling for assistance’, Townsville, Queensland, c.1914-1918 [further details unknown]. 140
Atrocity propaganda in Australia: an overview
Atrocity propaganda was one of the most dominant themes in Australian
First World War propaganda. The sheer ubiquity of atrocity propaganda demonstrates that the topic of atrocities was of great interest to the public.
Throughout the war, novelists, film-makers, poets, cartoonists and publishers circled around the topic of ‘poor little Belgium’ and other German atrocities. Some even made tremendous profits from doing so. For example
‘The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell’ (1916) grossed 25,000 pounds. According to one insider, the film ‘put several showmen on Easy Street for a long time’.39 Indeed, a large amount of atrocity propaganda came from unofficial rather than government sources. For example, newspaper owner Critchley
Parker, who will be explored in detail later, was an enthusiastic and prolific independent producer of atrocity propaganda.
The immorality of the militaristic ‘Huns’ and the depredations they exacted upon Belgian women and children were also frequently alluded to in the media, not just by politicians, but by journalists and the public in letters to the editor. During the war, discussions about German atrocities were part of the everyday fabric of Australians’ lives. The story of Nurse
Cavell had inspired not just films, but also sermons that were later published in pamphlet form, and also the raising of memorial funds.40 Films such as ‘If the Huns Came to Melbourne’ imagined an Australia experiencing
39 R. Cooper and A. Pike, Australian Film 1900-1977, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1981, p.79. 40‘Nurse Cavell Memorial: Will You Help’, [no publication details], Mitchell Library, S.L.N.S.W.; W.G. Hindley, Archdeacon of Melbourne, ‘In Memoriam: Nurse Cavell’ [no publication details], Mitchell Library, S.L.N.S.W. There is a bust of Edith Cavell situated close to the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne’s King’s Domain. 141
the full devastation of a German invasion.41 Writing in late 1915, ‘Massage’ of the I.W.W. described the atmosphere in Sydney: ‘We read in the papers every day, “German Atrocities”. At every workshop, tram car, we hear people talking about German cruelties’. 42 In the same year, Albert B. Dreher wrote that the ‘only topic of conversation in the town for days’ in the small town of Minyip, Victoria, had been the sinking of the Lusitania.43 People were therefore deeply engrossed by the topic of German atrocities. The topic was so ubiquitous that it even appeared at the first celebration of
Anzac Day, which was also a celebration of the Eight Hour Day. In one display, the Felt Hatters presented a variety of hats in different shapes and sizes to represent ‘Kultur’ and ‘Atrocities’.44 As the Herald explained:
Labor, in its celebration of its day of victory, was not forgetful of the gallantry of those brave boys who are fighting that the Australian workmen may not have to see his advantages swept away by the rough hand of Prussianism.45
Poets and novelists were also inspired by the events in Europe. A 1915 poem by Australian S. Terrill used the perfidy of the ‘Hun’ to encourage men to enlist:
With “song of hate” and demon heart; see where the fiendish Hun Confronts heroic Belgium’s sons by shot, and shell, and gun.
41 Cooper and Pike, op.cit., p. 83. 42 Massage, ‘Atrocities’, in Direct Action, Saturday 11 September 1915, p.1. Massage then goes on to list several atrocities committed by Australian soldiers against Australian children, ironically ending the article with ‘Aren’t we “Australians” nice, kind, loving, extraordinary sympathetic people? But what brutal barbarians the Germans are!’ 43 ‘The Lusitania Outrage’, Minyip Guardian and Sheep Hills Advocate, 15 June 1915, p.2. 44 F. Bongiorno, Raelene Frances and Bruce Scates, ‘Labour and Anzac: An Introduction’, Labour History, no.106, 2014, p.2. 45 Daily Herald, 14 October 1915, p.6, quoted in Frank Bongiorno, Raelene Frances and Bruce Scates, ‘Labour and Anzac: An Introduction’, Labour History, no.106, 2014, p.1. 142
Nor woman, girl, or helpless babe is spared his cruel rage.46
Out of all the atrocity stories the tale of ‘poor little Belgium’ possessed the most pathos, and it featured in three books by prominent Australian authors. In From Billabong to London by Mary Grant Bruce, the hero’s father gave his permission to go to war based upon the Belgian cause:
There isn’t any room for further doubt. Every day brings evidence of what the job is going to be – the biggest the Empire ever had to tackle. And the cry from Belgium comes home to every decent man.47
Renowned Australian poet C.J. Dennis was also preoccupied by
Belgium. His redoubtable larrikin Ginger Mick was inspired to enlist by their plight. In Dennis’s 1916 book The moods of Ginger Mick, the protagonist was initially disgusted by the ‘flamin’ war…wot’s old England got snake-‘eaded for?’ Watching a car with ‘two fat toffs be’ind two fat cigars’ glide by does nothing to inspire Mick to enlist. Taking a leaf from the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the labour movement, Mick mutters ‘Struth! I’d fight fer that sort – I don’t think’. Mick then asks his mate about why the war was being fought. His mate tells ‘im wot I read about the ‘Uns, an’ wot they done in Beljum an’ in France’. Mick listens intently to the narrator’s story of atrocities:
…I tells ‘im ‘ow they starts Be burnin’ pore coves ‘omes an’ killin’ kids, An’ comin’ it real crook wiv decent tarts, An’ fightin’ foul, as orl the rules forbids, Leavin’ a string uv stiff-uns in their track.
46 S. Terrill, The Silver Lining, “Christian World” Print, Sydney, 1915, Mitchell Library, S.L.N.S.W. Terrill’s first name is unknown. 47 M.G. Bruce, From Billabong to London, Ward, Lock and Co, London, Melbourne and Toronto, 1915, p. 31. 143
While Mick is outraged by these stories, he claims ‘it’s no affair uv mine’.48
Yet in the very next chapter he has enlisted. As The Sydney Morning Herald observed in a book review, the stories of Belgium had been very effective and Mick’s decision to enlist ‘surprises no-one’.49
Where Ginger Mick is the epitome of the working class Australian male, Brigid and the Cub by Ethel Turner used a very different protagonist.
In this book, a young middle class British girl becomes caught up in the invasion of Liège and witnesses an atrocity. This children’s book was initially published in serial form in The Daily Telegraph, and its first few instalments would have been very topical when they were first produced in
1915.50 Turner’s atrocity scenario is interesting, as the first killing is made not by a German, but by a Belgian: after a German soldier has dragged the bedridden wife out of bed, the crippled husband (Lemulquinier), unable to physically defend his wife, shoots the German soldier in the heart. The other soldiers retaliate by killing the husband, wife and baby. Brigid and
Lemulquinier’s surviving child Josette witness the horrific scene while hidden in the rafters of the house. Josette the pitiable Belgian orphan is eventually adopted by Brigid’s family and taken to Australia.51 Turner’s tender depiction of Josette would have roused sympathy amongst the
Australian population.
48 C.J. Dennis, The Moods of Ginger Mick, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1916, pp. 23-26. 49 ‘Ginger Mick’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 October 1916, p.8. 50 ‘Brigid and the Cub (Ethel Turner)’, The World’s News, 27 December 1919, p.29. 51 E. Turner, Brigid and the Cub, London; Melbourne, Ward Lock and Co., 1919. 144
While Turner’s book served as unofficial atrocity propaganda, government propagandists also specifically targeted children. The Deputy
Chief Inspector of the Department of Education in N.S.W. produced a pamphlet that was ‘written for Young Australians’. H.D. McLelland opened the pamphlet by acknowledging that the war had cost many lives. He then spent a full one and a half pages discussing how the war was just.
‘Germany’s treatment of Belgium is a warning to the civilised world’, he wrote.52 Later in the pamphlet he warned that ‘Germans have been taught, and alas! Have come to believe, that every abomination may be practised by the strong nation in its effort to conquer the world’.53
These discussions about German depravity deeply inspired some young Australians. For example, thirteen year old Denis Cullilane wrote in a letter to The Catholic Press of his desire to join the A.I.F.:
If I were able I should go and fight to avenge the broad Belgian and French acres, made desolate by the German troops, the countless innocent people maimed or murdered by the barbarous Germans, the air raids by Germans on undefended English towns, the sinking of passenger ships and the blowing up of churches &c., by the ruthless Germans.54
One poignant account written by a father in memory of his soldier son recalled the conversation in which the son persuades his father to grant him permission to join the A.I.F. All attempts had failed until the son produced an argument that the father
52 H.D. MacLelland, The Great War: written for Young Australians, Sydney, Wlliam Applegate Gullick, Government Printer, 1916, pp. 1-1. 53 Ibid., p.32. 54 ‘A Soldier’, The Catholic Press, 21 October 1915, p.42. 145
could not resist. ‘Father’ he said, ‘if some foe came to our country and committed against my mother and sisters the atrocities and abominations which the Huns are committing daily on the women and children of France and Belgium, what opinion would you have of a robust fellow like me who would be content with folding his arms and looking on?’ 55
A bereaved mother wrote in a somewhat different tone to the Director
General of Recruiting about the German atrocities against women. Jean
White of Melbourne was left destitute by her son’s death in France; she asked for a pension but was not eligible for government money. As part of her final bitter protest against government parsimony, White wrote:
You must not forget how the Mothers of Australia gave our Sons our dearest and best – not only to fight for their King and Country but to die for the only thing their Mothers hold dear. Her WOMANHOOD…we did not sacrifice our sons for wealth…it was for freedom and justice and to revenge the brutal Hun who murdered dear Miss Cavell and protect our own womanhood.56
These personal responses to the stories of German atrocities provide a glimpse into why recruiters were so keen to use atrocity propaganda: they believed it was effective. Not only that, when these stories were combined with the power of the cinema, they appeared to whip up potential recruits into a frenzy. In early 1917 a man in the small Victorian town of Nhill became so ‘enraged’ by a series of films detailing German atrocities in
Europe that he attempted to attack the Germans on the screen. Shouting,
‘Kill the bastards!’ the unidentified man had to be physically restrained lest he damage the screen. That evening the residents of Nhill and surrounding
55 The life and death of Corporal Edward Felix Tardent: in Memoriam by his Father, Brisbane, Watson, Ferguson & Co, 1918, Josiah Symons Collection of First World War propaganda, SLSA, p. 16. 56 Letter from Mrs Jean White to Donald Mackinnon, the Director General of Recruiting, 1 July 1918, MP 367/1 609/30/702, N.A.A. Melbourne. 146
areas had been exposed to a veritable cornucopia of atrocity propaganda, with titles of the films ranging from ‘German Frightfulness’ to ‘The truth about German atrocities’ (these films formed part of a larger picture called
‘Why Britain Went to War’).57 Following this incident eight local men enlisted in the A.I.F. Several months earlier in South Yarra, Melbourne, a woman had also reportedly ‘jumped up out of the audience and rushed towards the screen to attack the German in the picture’. As a result, six men had presented themselves to enlist.
The Vice-Chairman of the Victorian Recruiting Committee presented the story of these two incidents (and the resulting recruits) to the Director-
General of Recruiting as evidence of the efficacy of film, in particular atrocity films like ‘Why Britain Went to War’.58 This piece provided a broad condemnation of everything German. While the film no longer exists, the sub-titles give some indication about the content. They explained that the
German system of Kultur was one in which ‘the individual belongs body and soul to the State and must do anything demanded by the state: - even to murder’. It covered the ‘terrible record’ of the German invasion of Belgium:
‘At Melen’, read another sub-title, ‘in one household alone the father and mother were shot, the daughter died after being outraged, and the son wounded’.59
Recruiting authorities at this point certainly believed that propaganda was, in the sense referred to in the introduction, a hypodermic
57 ‘Why Britain Went to War’, Nhill Free Press, 24 April 1917, p.2. 58 Henry Noyes to Donald Mackinnon, 2 May 1917, MP 367/1 560/2/27 N.A.A. Melbourne. 59 ‘Synopsis of Films for Recruiting Campaign’, c. May 1917, MP 367/1 560/2/27 N.A.A. Melbourne. 147
needle, and that the film ‘Why Britain Went to War’ provided a potent dose of patriotism. Sergeant Pickett, who had provided an account of the hysteria at Nhill, stated, ‘I feel very confident in predicting many more enlistments from this district as a result of the screening of this picture’.60 J.G. Swan, also of the Victorian State Recruiting Committee, wrote in a newspaper article of the same film:
The object of the film is to pictorially place the facts of the war before the people in such a way as to impress the mind of onlookers, and to legitimately act on those brain centres that are responsible for such necessary national feelings as pride of race, duty to one’s country, family affection and personal manhood.61
Those higher up in the organisation also hoped that the combination of atrocities and the cinema would arrest the great decline in recruiting numbers that had commenced in the middle of 1916.62 In April 1917, a federal conference was held to discuss the tactics of the various recruiting committees throughout Australia. Most of the states felt that their use of cinema in recruiting had been very effective. Captain Dash of the
Queensland Recruiting Committee asserted that ‘the pictures were the best method of getting recruits’. Mr. Noyes concurred, stating that ‘pictures were responsible for forty percent of the recruits being obtained in Victoria.’
Senator Newland of South Australia also agreed and ‘hoped it would be continued’. The Victorians seemed to be the keenest proponents of film.
Noyes stated: ‘The cinematograph films seem to be the best means we have
60 Sergeant Pickett to Captain A.L. Baird, Secretary, State Recruiting Committee [Victoria], 1 May 1917, MP 367/1 560/2/27 N.A.A. Melbourne. 61 J.G. Swan, ‘The Cinema in Recruiting’, Graphic of Australia, 27 April 1917, p.5. 62 AWM 38 3DRL 6673/169 PART 1, Donald Mackinnon memo to historian 15 July 1919, p.1, A.W.M. 148
yet discovered to get audiences, and I am receiving more encouraging reports from the country in consequence of showing them’.63 There was, however, no magic bullet to solve the intractable problem of recruiting, and as will be discussed in Chapter Six, numbers continued to decline despite the best efforts of recruiting authorities.
While the government authorities were enthusiastic about the potential of atrocity propaganda, nothing could match the enthusiasm of
Critchley Parker, a Victorian newspaper owner. Parker owned the
Australian Statesman and Mining Standard, and used this platform to variously attack Catholics and anti-conscriptionists.64 He also reproduced a significant amount of propaganda from overseas and circulated it around
Australia. Parker reprinted the Bryce report on the Belgian atrocities and sold it at the relatively low price of sixpence. He claimed that in ‘Victoria alone our commitments now run into 30,000 copies’. As a committed propagandist, Parker offered this publication – ‘the best recruiting agent there is’, to the South Australian government.65
Parker published and distributed an extraordinary range of atrocity propaganda that was extremely graphic in nature. He reproduced photographs of women who had been raped and bayonetted, men with their tongues torn out, and peasants who had been executed by the German
63 Henry Noyes to Donald Mackinnon, 14 March 1917, MP 367/1 560/2/27, N.A.A. Melbourne. 64 J.P. Holroyd, ‘Parker, Frank Critchley (1862-19440’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/parker-frank-critchley- 7954, published first in hardcopy, accessed online 23 February 2016. 65 Critchley Parker to Premier South of South Australia, 14 July 1915, Unit 581, File 876, GRG 24/6 1842-1982, S.R.S.A. 149
military. In the poster ‘Further outrages by the enemy’, Parker reproduced the photographic evidence used by R.A. Reiss (whose work was discussed in the previous chapter) in his report into Austro-Hungarian atrocities in
Serbia.66 Figure 17. Under the photograph of the mutilated bodies of Serbian women, Parker wrote ‘How the enemy treats women’.67
Figure 17. War Supplement to The Statesman and Mining Standard’, 8 July 1915, Queensland Recruiting Committee Records 1914-1918, collection of the QSL.
Parker’s atrocity propaganda was highly dependent upon photographs, and he often bolstered his text with shocking images. For example, he fortified his allegations about the Germans - that they represented the ‘very powers of darkness’ - with pictures of French peasants
66 See: R.A. Reiss, , The Kingdom of Serbia: Report upon the atrocities committed by the Austro-Hungarian Army during the first invasion of Serbia, London, Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1916 67 ‘Further Outrages by the Enemy’, War supplement to The Statesman and Mining Standard, 17 June 1915, Queensland Recruiting Committee Records 1914-1918, Q.S.L. 150
who had been shot.68 He also reproduced a Russian government report into
German atrocities that featured photographs of soldiers who had been mutilated by exploding bullets and torture.69 Figure 18. As Christina
Twomey and Andrew J. May have demonstrated, photography had been used in Australia from the last quarter nineteenth century to elicit strong humanitarian responses in people. Photographs of victims of the Indian famine of 1876-78 for example, had helped contribute to successful fundraising campaigns. These photographs had acted as ‘truth claims, as evidence that the hunger and suffering were real’. 70 Parker used also used the photographs as ‘truth claims’. In addition, he used them to justify the allegation that Germany was completely opposed to the basic tenets of
Western civilisation. ‘No moral scruple can confine Germany’, claimed
Australian writer Ambrose Pratt in the introduction to the report on German barbarism in Russia.71
68 ‘War Supplement to The Statesman and Mining Standard’, 8 July 1915, Queensland Recruiting Committee Records 1914-1918, QSL. 69 German Barbarities in Russia: the evidence illustrated, published by the Authority of the Imperial Russian Government, Australia, Critchley Parker, 1916, N.L.A. 70 A.J. May and C. Twomey, ‘Australian Responses to the Indian Famine, 1876-78: Sympathy, Photography and the British Empire’, Australian Historical Studies, Vol.43, Iss. 2., 2012, p.242 and p.252. 71 A. Pratt, ‘Preface’, German Barbarities in Russia: the evidence illustrated, published by the Authority of the Imperial Russian Government, Australia, Critchley Parker, 1916, p.1., N.L.A. 151
Figure 18. German Barbarities in Russia: the evidence illustrated, published by the Authority of the Imperial Russian Government, Australia, Critchley Parker, 1916, p.22.72
Another prominent unofficial atrocity propagandist was Australian artist Norman Lindsay, whose work appeared in the Bulletin on a weekly basis.73 In contrast to photograph of atrocities, Lindsay’s work functioned through the use of symbols. Nicholas O’Shaugnessy has identified three major constituents of propaganda: rhetoric, myth and symbol.74 Where rhetoric and myth constitute the verbal or textual aspects of the narrative of
72 The report stated that Semen Pilyugin had been tortured by German officers who forced his mouth open and cut off the tip of his tongue ‘with a pocket knife’. In addition, ‘Pilyugin’s tongue had been severed at the point of the attachment to the frenum liguae…and thus his speech had consequently become unintelligible’. Ibid., p.19. 73 N. Lindsay, My Mask: For What Little I Know of the Man Behind It, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1970, p. 234. 74 N.J. O’Shaughnessy, Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. 2-3. 152
propaganda, the visual symbol provides ‘a heuristic or cognitive short cut’ to the narrative.75 O’Shaugnessy has observed, ‘If myths are the heart of propaganda, symbolism is its outer garment – indeed, to speak of a propaganda devoid of symbolism is really to be speaking about some other phenomenon’.76
Lindsay drew on a number of props to render the German down into an inhuman beast. I will discuss in Chapter Three how Norman Lindsay combined the logic of scientific racism with imperial concepts about race and civilisation to produce a creature that was irredeemably bestial. Suffice it to say, his work was powerful, pungent and grotesque. Figure 19.
Following the publication of the Bryce report into atrocities in Belgium,
Lindsay produced an image for the Bulletin of a devolved Teutonic ape-man who is grasping the hair of conquered Belgium in his bloody first: in the background are the smoking ruins of a Belgian town. In the foreground a small boy cowers from the simian monster that roars at him with unrestrained anger.
75 Ibid., p.6. 76 Ibid., p.100. 153
Figure 19. Norman Lindsay, the Bulletin, 6 May 1915, frontispiece.
Australian writer Peter Fullerton has written of Norman Lindsay’s use of symbols and allegory in his war art:
Lindsay recognized that ideas in his cartoons could be made clearer by association with other things in an allegorical way…in Lindsay’s war cartoons the figures thus became the people and attitudes they were used to represent, and there is a deliberate confusion between the literal and the metaphorical, the sign and the actual thing signified. This blurring suited Lindsay’s themes because it permitted him to reinforce visually particular and recurring associations: Germans became synonymous with the ‘Hun-ape’…rape and slaughter came incontestably to mean Prussianism.77
77 P. Fullerton., Norman Lindsay war cartoons, 1914-1918, Victoria, Melbourne University Press, 1983, p.4. 154
Lindsay’s work was tremendously powerful; his work for the Bulletin was relentless, pitiless and was distributed throughout Australia during the war;
I discuss in Chapter Six how the federal government drew upon Lindsay’s talent for horror in a belated attempt to bring in more recruits in the final year of the war.
As powerful as it was, the work of Parker, Lindsay and the official government propagandists did not persuade everyone the war was worth supporting. As I demonstrate in Chapters Four, Five and Six, atrocity propaganda was driven by ideological and philosophical concepts of war that were not shared by all Australians. It did, however, provide an intense and vivid backdrop for how the war was discussed, promoted and justified – and opposed. In the next chapter, I introduce the rich and varied cultural, philosophical and political concepts that influenced First World War atrocity propaganda. Some of the ideals that atrocity propaganda drew upon emerged from the Enlightenment, others from Victorian liberal conceptions of humanitarian intervention and just war. These deep conceptual roots provided a solid foundation for the pro-war rhetoric that promoted the war throughout the conflict.
155
CHAPTER THREE ‘Merciless humanitarians’: altruism, imperialism, race and the creation of the German ‘Hun’ 1876-1918
Australian participation in the First World War has been regarded by some historians as having mainly been driven by jingoistic imperial sentiment. Those who enlisted in the war, they have argued, were exposed to imperial sentiment in the era before the Great War, when schools and children’s books propagated imperial themes.1 However, this kind of imperial propaganda was not the only influence upon the Edwardian children who went on to fight - nor indeed was it the sole influence upon their Victorian parents who supported the war.2 While the period under analysis in this chapter saw the explosion of unofficial imperial propaganda, from the grand battle paintings of Lady Elizabeth Butler to cheap chromolithographic battle prints, there was also considerable debate taking place about the function, and indeed morality, of these imperial wars that
1 B. Bessant, ‘The Experience of Patriotism and Propaganda for Children in Australian Elementary Schools before the War’, in Paedogogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, Vol. 31., Iss. 1., 1995. R. Evans, ‘The lowest common denominator: loyalism and school children in war-torn Australia 1914-1918’, in Young in a Warm Climate: Essays in Queensland Childhood (ed. Lynette Finch), Queensland Review, Vol. 3., No.2., University of Queensland Press, Queensland, 1996; J. Hollingworth, ‘The Cult of Empire – Children’s Literature Revisited’, in Mother State and Her Little Ones, (ed. B. Bessant), Centre for Youth and Community Studies, Melbourne, 1987; J.M. Hollingworth, The call of Empire being the study of the imperial Indoctrination of Australian school children in the period 1890 - 1910, La Trobe University, PhD Thesis, Centre for Comparative and International Studies in Education, 1993. 2 T. Dixon, The Invention of Altruism, Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008, p.32. 156
were so gloriously reproduced in colour on biscuit tins.3 Aggressive imperialism was challenged by prominent philosophers such as Herbert
Spencer, and an alternative form of imperialism, based upon the Victorian ideals of ‘altruism’ and ‘humanitarianism’ was promoted in its place. 4 Thus, while the overtly imperial wars were questioned, other justifications for war gained traction. Humanitarian intervention became an increasingly popular justification for war: it posited that the British Empire was morally obliged to mount a war to defend innocent civilians against brutal military abuse. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there were calls from politicians and the public for British forces to stage a humanitarian intervention when
Ottoman forces committed atrocities against civilians in Bulgaria in 1876.
This and other events such as the massacre of Armenians in 1896 contributed to the creation of an imperial humanitarian discourse about atrocities and just war that foreshadowed atrocity propaganda of the Great
War.5
In this chapter I investigate how liberal and humanitarian ideologies played a fundamental role in producing the narrative of humanitarian intervention that drove much First World War atrocity propaganda. I demonstrate that while jingoistic imperialism was a strong presence in the years leading up to the First World War, humanitarianism, expressed
3 The 1882 British naval bombardment of Alexandria was ‘heavily criticised by many as being an atrocity violating all international laws’.3 The earlier Zulu War was also a campaign that met with disapproval by journalists, politicians and the public. See: P. Harrington, British Artists and War: The Face of Battle in Paintings and Prints, 1700-1914, London: Pennsylvania, Greenhill Books in conjunction with Stackpole Books, 1993, p.212. 4 Dixon, op.cit., p.183. 5 C. Twomey, ‘Framing Atrocity: Photography and Humanitarianism’, History of Photography, Vol. 36, Iss. 3., 2012, p.257. 157
through the lens of British imperialism, was equally important. So too was liberal imperialism, which synthesised the Victorian principle of altruism with the Enlightenment ideals of civilisation, progress and sympathy to provide a moral justification for imperialism, and, on occasion, war.
This chapter also explores how liberalism, imperialism and humanitarianism contributed to the creation of the atrocious ‘Hun’. The characterisation of the ‘Hun’ was very much a liberal humanitarian one: it was the duty of the imperialist to intervene in Belgium, both for reasons of
‘altruism’ but also to protect civilisation. This justification for war was first clearly articulated in relation to the Ottoman outrages of the final quarter of the nineteenth century. Significantly, the same language that was employed to characterise the Ottomans – that they were ‘barbaric’ and savage - was used in the next century against the Germans.
I also investigate why traits that had become synonymous with
‘coloured people’ during the nineteenth century – cruelty and barbarism – were projected onto the white German soldier. First World War atrocity propaganda presented a Manichean world in which civilisation was being threatened by the forces of Germanic barbarism. British propaganda historian David Welch has asserted that the categories of ‘civilisation’ and
‘barbarism’ were merely ‘abstract terms’ used by the Oxbridge-educated propagandists who had shaped so much of the discourse of First World War atrocity propaganda. 6 The opposite is the case. These terms were deeply
6 D. Welch, ‘War Aims and the “Big Ideas” of 1914’, in D. Welch and J. Fox (eds.), Justifying War: Propaganda, Politics and the Modern Age, United Kingdom, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 158
meaningful to liberal atrocity propagandists such as James Bryce and Gilbert
Murray (whose philosophy about just war is discussed in more detail in
Chapter Four). The Enlightenment ideals of civilisation and progress, refracted through the lens of humanitarian imperialism, justified the Empire on the basis that it was raising its coloured subjects out of savagery.
Liberal imperialism conceived of the Empire as a civilising force throughout the globe. ‘The Empire’, Algis Valiunas has observed, ‘was a juggernaut of solicitude’.7 This juggernaut, epitomised by Kipling’s poem
‘The White Man’s Burden’, sought to spread liberal ideals to non-European countries. By the 1880s the British Empire was often represented as ‘the pinnacle of civilization.’ It had recreated the Pax Romana ‘by providing one- fifth of humanity with a hegemonic peace that was supposedly more enlightened, enduring and exalted than anything that had preceded it’. 8
Essentially, ‘Britain, as the leading nation in the Western world, had a duty above and beyond all other civilized countries to fulfill this civilizing task.’9
Leading liberal theorists such as John Stuart Mill have been characterised by some scholars as having bound ‘British colonialism’ to liberal ideals about promoting civilisation to the colonized.10
Liberal politician William Gladstone framed Ottoman atrocities against civilians within this highly racialised conception of the world, one
7 A. Valiunas, Churchill’s Military Histories: A Rhetorical Study, Rowman and Littlefield, United States, 2002, p. 6. 8 A. Parchami, Hegemonic Peace and Empire: the Pax Romana, Britannica and Americana, Canada and the United States, Routledge, 2009, p.61. 9 Ibid., p.105. 10 I.S. Marwah, ‘Complicating Barbarism and civilisation: Mill’s complex sociology of human development’, History of Political Thought, Vol. 32., No 2., 2011, p.347 159
that was divided between the civilized Europeans, and the barbaric race of the Ottoman Turk. 11 To Gladstone, it was appalling that the British Empire had allied itself with a group that were so manifestly incapable of anything other than tyranny. He was horrified that Conservative Prime Minister
Benjamin Disraeli had dismissed the atrocities; in response, ‘the Liberal opposition’ had charged ‘the Conservative government with being morally implicated in the massacre of 12,000 Bulgarians’.12
The atrocities committed by the Ottoman Turks were of particular concern to the British because they were part of what was known as the
‘Eastern Question’, which involved the ‘fate of the slowly collapsing Ottoman
Empire’, and therefore the security of Great Britain and her Empire.13 The
Ottoman Empire provided a bulwark against a potential Russian incursion into India via Mesopotamia. Due to the geo-political importance of the
Ottoman Empire to the British Empire, actions taken by the British government were more inclined to prop up, rather than undermine, the
Eastern regime: neither Armenia nor Bulgaria were likely to receive assistance. 14 Yet at the same time, the behaviour of the Ottoman Empire at
11 W.E. Gladstone, The Turco-Servian War: Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, Lovell, Adam, Wesson & Company, New York and Montreal, 1876, p.10. 12 C.C. Eldridge, England’s Mission: the Imperial Idea in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli 1868-1880, Great Britain, The University of North Carolina Press, 1973, p.214. 13 G. J. Bass, Freedom’s Battle: the Origins of Humanitarian Intervention, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, p.240. 14 A. J. Kirakossian, British Diplomacy and the Armenian Question from the 1830s to 1914, Princeton; London, Gomidas Institute Books, 2003, p.xi. Kirakossian defines the Armenian Question as understood by nineteenth century Britons thus: ‘As an integral part of the Eastern Question, the Armenian Question became a subject of bilateral and multilateral discussions between the Great European Powers – Great Britain, Russia, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary and Italy. For the European countries, especially Britain, the issue was viewed through the prism of their interests in the Near East, and as a tool to assert influence over the decaying Ottoman Empire, as well as to stake a claim over its dominions’. 160
times ran contrary to the growing imperial humanitarian rhetoric that was attached to the British Empire.15
Humanitarian intervention and ‘altruism’ in an age of realpolitik
Gladstone was perhaps the most powerful public figure to support the idea of a humanitarian intervention against the Ottomans; his involvement in the
Bulgarian and Armenian crises was of crucial importance towards the development of a morally nuanced form of imperial sentiment. Gladstone has gained the reputation of having been ‘personally and politically opposed to imperialism’.16 The manner in which he framed humanitarian intervention was intensely idealistic, and he pitted himself directly against conservatives who did not believe that a nation should behave
‘altruistically’. 17
Despite Gladstone’s opposition to Disraeli’s creed of imperialism, it would be more accurate to describe him as an opponent of aggressive imperialism rather than as a complete opponent of imperialism per se. He pitted himself directly against Disraeli’s vision of an ‘expanding militant empire which was often linked with an undemocratic and illiberal imperial spirit glorifying British achievements and rule overseas’.18 In contrast,
15 M. P. Fitzpatrick, ‘”Ideal and Ornamental Endeavours”: the Armenian Reforms and Germany’s Response to Britain’s imperial Humanitarianism in the Ottoman Empire, 1878- 83’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol.40, No.2., 2012, pp. 183-184. Ironically, the Kaiser believed that British humanitarian ‘pro-Armenian’ policies had pushed the Ottomans into committing the Armenian massacres in the 1890s. 16 F. Harcourt, ‘Gladstone, monarchism and the ‘new’ imperialism 1868-75’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 14., Iss. 1., p.21. 17 Dixon, op.cit., pp. 217-218. Lord Lytton (who was connected with the Conservative party) had publically argued in 1888 that while altruism was a good principle, it should not be used as a justification for nations to intervene in the affairs of another nation. 18 C.C. Eldridge, England’s Mission: the Imperial Idea in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli 1868-1880, Great Britain, The University of North Carolina Press, 1973, p.232. 161
Gladstone publically ‘advocated a limited Empire’ and was deeply opposed to justifications for expansion.19 However, it is important to note that more territory was added to the Empire under Gladstone’s stewardship than
Disraeli’s.20 In this sense, Gladstone was in reality as much as an imperialist as Disraeli.
It is not the contention of this chapter that Gladstone had only the defence of humanity as his goal when he spoke out against the Bulgarian and
Armenian atrocities. His reputation as a humanitarian has been shadowed by the suspicion that his humanitarian acts were sometimes opportunistic political ploys. At times, he appeared to act as much for political expediency as for principle, and some historians have accused him of using humanitarian ideals cynically in order to advance British interests and to aid his own political fortunes.21 As Bass observed of Gladstone’s decision to involve himself in the Bulgarian atrocities, ‘the massive public outcry following the stories in the Daily News could not have escaped Gladstone’s attention, and he slowly sensed an opportunity, both political and moral’.22
There has, however, been a tendency for an either/or reading of
British humanitarian activities in the Turkish Empire, in which Bass for example has argued that Gladstone functioned primarily as a humanitarian, while other scholars have argued the opposite – being that Gladstone’s humanitarianism only masked political necessity. Australian historian
19 H. Macdonald, ‘Gladstone and Imperialism’, Journal of International Studies, Vol.1., No.2., 1971, p. 17. 20 L. E. Davis, R. A. Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: the Political Economy of British imperialism, 1860-1912, United States of America, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p.10. 21 Fitzpatrick, op.cit., pp.184 and 200. 22 Bass, op.cit., p.269. 162
Matthew Fitzpatrick, for example, has argued that Gladstone’s interventions in Armenia were driven by geo-political, not humanitarian concerns.23
Although much humanitarian action and rhetoric in this period was imperial in nature, it was nonetheless an early progenitor of what we would now call campaigns for human rights. Michelle Tusan has observed that historians have neglected the impact of nineteenth-century humanitarianism on the development of human rights because it was
‘rooted…in strident evangelicalism and a moralising liberalism’. She has noted, however, that it is vital to look at the role of the British Empire in the establishment of human rights, as humanitarianism today can only be properly understood by ‘exploring its roots in nineteenth century humanitarianism and its translation to twentieth-century modes of representation’.24
This was a morally complex period: humanitarian principles within the British government and some parts of British society contrasted sharply with the relentless racism and cruel notions of ‘military necessity’ that underpinned much of the imperial project.25 Thus, despite the supremacy of imperial realpolitik, the existence of liberal humanitarian attitudes towards the colonised and oppressed was also real and significant.
Amongst the various humanitarian concerns which occupied people in Great Britain in this period, which ranged from the Indian famine of 1876-
23 Fitzpatrick, op.cit., p. 200. 24 M. Tusan ‘”Crimes against Humanity”: Human Rights, the British Empire, and the Origins of the Response to the Armenian Genocide’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 119., Iss.1., 2014, p. 50. 25 M. Hasian, ‘The “Hysterical” Emily Hobhouse and South African War Concentration Camp Controversy’, in Western Journal of Communication, Vol. 67., Iss. 2., 2003, p. 140. 163
78 to the atrocities against the Congolese by Belgian and French colonists, was Ottoman violence against civilians during the Bulgarian Crisis of 1876 and the massacre of the Armenians of 1896. Both of these events were highly influential, and helped to frame how atrocities in the Great War were conceived of. In September 1914, Adelaide newspaper Southern Cross stated:
The Prussian butchers of Belgium have found a fitting ally in the perpetrator of the Bulgarian and Armenian atrocities. The German papers denounced England for siding with the Russian ‘barbarians’, yet they welcome as ally ‘the unspeakable Turk’.26
In the same year the editor of the Melbourne Catholic newspaper, Tribune, wrote that:
The unspeakable Turk of Armenian atrocity fame…finds himself today allied with the great apostles of modern culture, the cathedral-destroying, murdering marauding Germans! If the somewhat drastic Sultan, known familiarly to the late Mr Gladstone as Abdul the Damned were today alive with what a genial salaam would he greet his ally Kaiser William. The same English press that gave Abdul his pet name and declared his race “unspeakable” has nowadays declared that the Germans are not even in the dictionary.27
That these conflicts had become the benchmarks of ‘barbarism’ and
‘atrociousness’ during the Great War demonstrates that a high level of public concern had been generated about them, which survived in public memory.
For this concern to have achieved a lasting impact was due in part to the increasing importance of concepts such as ‘humanitarianism’. This concept was partly the legacy of Enlightenment discourse. From the late eighteenth
26 ‘To Belgium’, Southern Cross, 6 November 1914, p.9. 27 ‘The Unspeakable Turk’, Tribune, 7 November 1914, p.4. 164
century, people had been attempting ‘to end all sources of suffering, including cruelty to animals, destitution, slavery, and inhumane forms of punishment and incarceration’. 28 Australian historian Christina Twomey has suggested that an interest in atrocities was intrinsically linked to the growth of humanitarian sentiment. The ‘new understandings of suffering and the body’ that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, she has written, ‘prompted a wave of humanitarian action and a new fascination with pain’.29 It was not, however, until the mid-nineteenth century that a specific sense of ‘altruism’ or ‘humanitarianism’ became widespread across classes, and came to underpin the moral outrage that was generated by the military actions of the Ottomans. 30
The term ‘humanitarian’ first entered the English language through the French humanist Auguste Comte’s ‘Religion of Humanity’.31 It was also through Comte that the word ‘altruism’ was introduced during the Victorian era.32 Altruism was ‘a key word that captured some of the most characteristic sentiments and ideas of the Victorian period’ and had a large role in the increasing dominance of humanitarian sentiment in Victorian politics.33 ‘Altruism’ emphasised the importance of displaying interest in
‘others’, over the interests of the ‘self’ only. Accordingly, the term ‘egoism’ was positioned on the opposite end of the moral spectrum. To behave
28 M. Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2011, p.5. 29 C. Twomey, ‘Framing Atrocity: Photography and Humanitarianism’, History of Photography, Vol. 36, Iss. 3., 2012, p.256. 30 Barnett, op.cit., p.5. 31 S. Jones, ‘Book Review’, Reviews in History, online, http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/print/review/757, accessed online 15 April 2015. 32 Dixon, op.cit., p.1. 33 Ibid., p.32. 165
altruistically was regarded by some Victorians as ‘good’ and to behave egoistically as ‘bad’.34
Altruism was influential across class, political and philosophical divides. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century it was also influential amongst some sections of the working class, and had become ‘a watchword of political, social and religious reform’. 35 In addition, although altruism was initially associated with atheists, by the period under discussion it had come to be used interchangeably with ‘the teachings of
Jesus Christ’.36 Thus from the 1880s onwards, Christian social reformers and atheist socialists alike had come to embrace the term, which had become a widely accepted concept within Victorian society.37 Therefore, a sense of altruism, and not Christianity alone, accounts for why non- conformist Christians and missionaries were moved to organise meetings and protests calling for England to intervene.38
The language of British humanitarian intervention that was used in the First World War developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.39 The highly moralistic rhetoric that flowed into the First World
War had its direct origins with influential liberals such as William
34 Ibid., p.362. 35 Ibid., p.222. 36 Ibid., p.90. 37 Ibid., p.9. 38 S. Goldsworthy, ‘English Nonconformity and the Pioneering of the Modern Newspaper Campaign: including the strange case of W.T. Stead and the Bulgarian Horrors’, Journalism Studies, Vol.7., No.3., 2003, p. 389. 39 J. Bew, ‘“From an umpire to a competitor”: Castlereagh, Canning and the issue of international intervention in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars’, in B. Simms and D.J.B. Trim (eds.), Humanitarian Intervention: A History, United States, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 119. 166
Gladstone.40 Gladstone’s humanitarian rhetoric, so close to that of the Great
War (bombastic bigotry included), was to eventually provide the template for a Liberal government to justify total war. Moreover, the two case studies under examination in this chapter never resulted in actual humanitarian interventions. In this sense, their rhetoric remained unchallenged by the calamitous consequences of war and the moral complexities presented by armed conflict. Thus, the idealistic language of humanitarian intervention could flow in a pure and uncompromised state directly into the propaganda of the First World War.
The outrages of 1876 and 1896 elicited a powerful response not just from the elite of society, or fringe political groups, but also a large section of the working class. This was because the press had ‘entered upon a new phase and had become a formidable medium of propaganda’.41 Alongside the development of mass printing technology was increased literacy across the classes.42
Those who opposed the Ottoman violence in Bulgaria and Armenia wanted a humanitarian intervention, a war fought to protect non- combatants from military abuse. Great War atrocity propaganda argued that the primary purpose of the war was to protect Belgian and French non- combatants. This idealism had come from the quintessentially Victorian
40 Tusan, op.cit., p.47. 41 Harcourt, op.cit., p.23. 42 J. Springhall, ‘Disseminating Impure Literature’; “The Penny Dreadful” Publishing Business since 1860’, The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 47, No. 3., 1994, p. 568. In addition, education reform and changes in taxes respectively increased the numbers of the literate and reduced impediments to publishing. 167
notion that ‘the essence of barbarism lay in the assault of the weak by the strong’.43
Of the public anger expressed about Bulgaria, Pearce and Stewart have written, ‘never before, or since, has there been such a noble outburst of popular moral indignation at human wickedness’.44 The anger of the British public was fuelled by newspapers which were inexpensive ‘enough to attract a wide audience but reputable enough to be taken seriously at the highest levels’.45 The outpouring was extraordinary, perhaps because the
Bulgarians were Christians massacred by Turkish Muslims. Nevertheless, the notion of a ‘just war’ as expressed in Great War atrocity propaganda was partially founded in the Bulgarian drama, as both Gladstone and British citizens expressed the wish that Britain would somehow interfere to protect the lives of Bulgarian civilians against military aggression.
This marked the beginning of the Gladstonian tradition that Peter
Clarke has identified as the basis for the narrative of the struggle of the
Great War.46 The spontaneous public outrage about the atrocities in
Bulgaria - first initiated through the media and then judiciously stoked by
Gladstone’s pamphlets and speeches, laid the ideological groundwork for the British government to be able to mobilise millions of people to commit themselves to war on the behalf not just of Empire, but of a foreign people from a small nation.
43 J. S. Ellis, “The Methods of Barbarism” and the “Rights of Small Nations”: War Propaganda and British Pluralism, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 , 1998, p.57. 44 M. Pearce and G. Stewart, British Political History 1867-1990: Democracy and Decline, Great Britain, Routledge, 1992, p.43. 45 Bass, op.cit., p.256. 46 P. Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain 1900-1990, London, Penguin, 1996, p.72. 168
The atrocities first gained international attention when American reporter Januarius Aloysius MacGahan published his reports in the British liberal newspaper the Daily News. MacGahan’s reports were brutal, describing in detail the grotesque human detritus - the children’s hair clinging to skulls, the rotting bodies in churches - remaining from the vicious attacks of the Ottoman bashibazouks. The impact was real and visceral, sparking ‘a popular protest movement across Britain, from Queen Victoria herself down’.47 MacGahan did not spare readers the grisly details of what he found in Batak, a village in which he found an estimated 3,000 dead:
There were little curly heads there in that festering mass, crushed down by heavy stones; little feet not as long as your finger on which the flesh was dried hard...children who had died shrinking with fright and terror; young girls who had died weeping and sobbing and begging for mercy...all lying there together, festering in one horrid mass. They are silent enough now.
Bass has observed of this passage, ‘one can barely imagine the emotions of a
Victorian newspaper reader. This was an age before the term mass grave was a staple of the news, a time when British readers might have still believed that humans did not do such things.’48 These reports stimulated moral outrage across Great Britain as the working class joined Gladstone’s demands for ‘liberty for subjugated nationalities’.49 Some working class leaders were so emotionally affected by the atrocities in Bulgaria that they met with Lord Derby in his office about the matter.50 This level of mass outrage was part of what Dixon described as the ‘great moral awakening in
47 Bass, op.cit., p.236. 48 MacGahan quoted in Ibid., p.259. 49 K. E. Miller, Socialism and Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice in Britain to 1931, the Netherlands, Martinus Nijhoff, 1967, p. 19. 50 Bass, op.cit., p.376. 169
later Victorian Britain’.51 The penetration of humanitarian sentiment into the working classes and socialist groups was crucial towards the development of Great War propaganda, as it provided a morally compelling justification for war when imperial patriotism alone would not suffice.
In summarising the impact of altruism upon socialist thinking during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Dixon made the observation that
‘whether debating the merits of co-operation…or revolutionary Marxism, rhetoric about selfishness and altruism were rarely further than a paragraph or two away.’52 However, as we will see, the intrinsic tensions within British socialism about the need for altruistic action on behalf of those who could not protect themselves, and the fact that this protection would be prosecuted by an imperial system become insupportable during the South
African War. This tension established the dialectical argument between those liberal progressives and socialists who agreed with the just war argument presented in Great War atrocity propaganda, and those who rejected this justification. The emergence of this divide will be teased out in the next chapter.
In relation to the Bulgarian crisis, the classes were united in their opinion that Great Britain should cease its alliance with the Turks.
Numerous petitions were sent to the Earl of Derby, urging the conservative government to intervene on behalf of the Bulgarians. An examination of these petitions makes it abundantly clear that the notion of civilised versus barbaric warfare as conceived by the Victorians was a predecessor to Great
51 Dixon, op.cit., p.230. 52 Ibid., p.237. 170
War rhetoric about the ‘barbaric Hun’ and the civilised Empire. These letters ran across class, from groups of working men to general meetings of entire towns. A Working Man’s meeting in Red Hill, Surrey, expressed horror and disgust at the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria and demanded that the British legislators along with other great European nations ‘endeavour to secure a firm and lasting settlement to the Eastern Question, on the basis of the peaceful independence of Bulgaria and other Christian Nations’.53 The inhabitants of Penzance decried the abuse of ‘the defenceless population and especially the women and children of the Bulgarian territory [my italics]’.
The citizens of Penzance then went on to allude to the notion of civilisation during war: ‘By such gross disregard of the Rules of War the Turkish
Government has just forfeited any claims to be regarded as a kindred
European nation’.54 The letters in the file repeatedly urged the British government to find a way to grant Bulgaria independence.
The popular outrage met with cool detachment from Prime Minister
Benjamin Disraeli, who dismissed the atrocities as ‘inventions’, writing to a concerned Queen Victoria that the stories were ‘one of those fictions by which insurgent leaders try to keep up the spirit of their followers’.55
Disraeli mocked and dismissed the accounts in the House of Commons, calling a consular report that substantiated the allegations ‘coffee-house
53 Folio No. 25, Letter to the Earl of Derby, Foreign Office, September 1876, FO 78/2553, ‘Atrocities in Bulgaria, Vol. 2.’ T.N.A., Great Britain. 54 Folio No. 15, Resolutions at a Public Meeting of the Inhabitants of Penzance respecting the Turkish outrages in Bulgaria, September 1876, FO 78/2553, ‘Atrocities in Bulgaria, Vol. 2.’, T.N.A., U.K.. 55 Disraeli to Victoria, 14 July 1876, Letters of Victoria, vol. 2. pp. 471-472, quoted in Bass, op.cit., p.261. 171
babble brought by an anonymous Bulgarian’.56 A pamphlet circulated by a
Disraeli supporter satirised (perhaps accurately) Gladstone’s perspicacious use of the Bulgarian atrocities. After casting Gladstone as a pugilist who has been overpowered by ‘Ben’ Disraeli in the boxing ring, the pamphlet ruthlessly skewered Gladstone as an opportunist who hypocritically used the cry of ‘atrocities’ to gain the upper hand against his opponent:
‘Atrocities! Atrocities! I’ll scream, And when the people are to a frenzy wrought, Ben will to them a perfect monster seem, And I their honest champion will be thought… That there Will be hook or by crook shall win; They’ll crowd the ring, cut the ropes, if need be, And claim the stakes with infernal row and din; The belt I will seize, and my vengeance I will wreak’… Champion I’ll be, tho’ some may call me snob and sneak.57
While this particular pamphlet mocked Gladstone for his canny manipulation of human suffering, Disraeli’s attitude was, in fact, politically disastrous. Although his public gaffes about the atrocities were largely due to the ineptitude and callous indifference of the British Ambassador to the
Ottomans, Sir Henry Elliott, he nonetheless severely misjudged the situation within both the public sphere and his own circumscribed sphere of politics.
At one point during the crisis, Disraeli had disparaged the crowd of 10,000 who had gathered in the rain to hear Gladstone speak of the plight of the
Bulgarians by describing them as ‘merciless humanitarians’.58
56 G.E. Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1920, Vol. 6., p.45. 57 Tim, Will’s Soliloquy: or why he cried ‘Atrocities! Atrocities!’, London, Charing Cross Publishing Company, 1876, pp.13-15. 58 Buckle, op.cit., p.62. 172
Disraeli’s tone deaf responses had been enough to lure Gladstone out of retirement to vigorously decry Disraeli’s commitment to British imperial interests over human rights. 59 This would eventually give Gladstone the oratorical armament to mount the successful 1880 Midlothian Campaign, in which he lambasted the Disraeli government over its foreign policy, and regained the Prime Ministership at the following general election.60 As the satirical poem suggested, Gladstone’s agitation about the Bulgarian atrocities did indeed help him to beat his foe ‘Ben’.
The most notable item of atrocity propaganda from the Bulgarian
Crisis was Gladstone’s pamphlet Bulgarian Horrors. It had been a popular success, with sales of 40,000 copies in a few days.61 Its significance lay not in its elegant turn of phrase, but in its timing, in that it reflected the general attitude of the public at the time. ‘The essential point is that it was a far less a case of Gladstone exciting popular passion than of popular passion exciting
Gladstone’, wrote his biographer, Richard Shannon.62 This is an interesting point to reflect upon in relation to the events in the Great War, when the mass media reported events that were later picked up by official government propagandists and used in campaigns. In this sense, Gladstone’s pamphlet provides us with a clear point of comparison with the Great War in that the public outrage, stoked by an independent media, preceded the propaganda produced by the elite. That the elite contributed to the Great
59 Bass, op.cit., p.262. 60 R. Shannon, Gladstone, 1865-1898, Volume 2., Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1999, p. 200. 61 Pearce and Stewart, op.cit., p.42. 62 Shannon, op.cit., p. 174. 173
War outrage is undeniable, but their use of and engagement with popular anger against atrocities was far more intense than has previously been discussed.
Gladstone’s pamphlet also anticipated Great War atrocity propaganda, in that it was vehemently bigoted. As Bass has observed,
‘Gladstone’s pamphlet is an unlikely magna carta for the human rights movement’.63 In this, it set the template for Great War atrocity propaganda, which linked the high ideals of humanitarian sentiment with racism. This founding paradox of much Great War atrocity propaganda may account in part for why its humanitarian elements have been overlooked by historians.
Gladstone’s belief that the Turks’ racial taint was responsible for their barbaric behaviour anticipated the same charge against the Germans decades later. He wrote:
Let me endeavour very briefly to sketch, in the rudest outline, what the Turkish race was and what it is. It is not a question of Mahometanism simply, but of Mahometanism compounded with the peculiar character of a race. They are not the mild Mahometans of India, nor the chivalrous Saladins of Syria, nor the cultured Moors of Spain. They were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went, a broad line of blood marked the track behind them; and as far as their dominion reached, civilization disappeared from view.64 However, it was not the racism that made Gladstone’s pamphlet extraordinary (as we will see later in the chapter, racial stereotyping was central to many Victorians’ conceptions of the world), but its humanitarian
63 Bass, op.cit., p.270. 64 W.E. Gladstone, The Turco-Servian War: Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, Lovell, Adam, Wesson & Company, New York and Montreal, 1876, p.10. 174
call for action, which was a presage to the just war language of Great War propaganda. Of the Disraeli government’s mildly expressed indignation at
Turkish atrocities, Gladstone wrote, ‘It might as well assure us of their indignation at the crimes of Danton, or of Robespierre, or of Nana Sahib.
Indignation is froth, except as it leads to action’.65 Privately in a letter,
Gladstone wrote that there ‘was something horrid in reflecting that, while horrors were going on, our fleet was at Besika Bay within a few hours sail and not only was not there to arrest them but was believed by the perpetrators to be there for the purpose of securing their impunity’.66
Gladstone’s pamphlets, and the public outrage had brought the British government very close to launching a humanitarian intervention in
Bulgaria.67
The moral scaffolding supporting Gladstone’s objections to Disraeli’s response consisted of a fundamental rejection of pragmatic imperialism in favour of humanitarian imperialism. While Gladstone’s rhetoric was powerful, it did suffer several counter-punches from supporters of the Great
Game. Those who followed Disraeli’s politics by supporting Turkey and condemning Russia sought to undermine Gladstone’s propaganda with their own. Between 1876 and 1877, British Army Captain Frederick Burnaby travelled to Central Asia ‘to see if the accusations directed by...British newspapers against the Ottoman Turks for cold-bloodedly and
65 Ibid., p.35. 66 Mr. Gladstone to Lord Granville, August 7th, 1876, in A. Ramm, The Gladstone-Granville Correspondence, United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p.489. 67 Bass, op.cit., p.237. 175
systematically massacring the Christian subjects…were based on reality’.68
He produced two books, both of which presented the Turks as very mild imperialists and presented the Russians as brutal, territory-grabbing fiends.
On Horseback in Asia Minor directly challenged Gladstone’s pro-Russian stance, and questioned his belief that ‘Muscovite soldiers’ were incapable of having committed atrocities.69
A further and extremely influential item of counter-propaganda was created in response to the war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in
1877. A popular song titled MacDermott’s War Song championed British intervention in the Dardanelles to assist the Turks against the Russians.
This song gave rise to the term ‘jingoism’ as it has been used in this thesis, which expressed ‘the righteousness of British predominance’.70 The most famous section was:
We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do, We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too, We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true, The Russians shall not have Constantinople.71
While Gladstone was at his fulminating best when discussing humanitarianism and Empire, he was therefore also at his most politically vulnerable. In a series of speeches at a dinner to inaugurate the Palmerston
Club, which was set against the backdrop of Disraeli preparing to defend
Constantinople from the invading Russians, Gladstone chided Disraeli’s
68 S. Akilli, ‘Propaganda through Travel Writing: Frederick Burnaby’s Contribution to Great Game British Politics’, Journal of Faculty of Letters, Vol.26., No.1., 2009, p.2. 69 Ibid., p.10. 70 P. Summerfield, ‘Patriotism and empire: Music-Hall entertainment, 1870-1914’, in J.M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular culture, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1989, p.26. 71 MacDermott’s War Song quoted in: Summerfield, op.cit., pp. 25-26. 176
continued defence of the Turks (despite the fact that it was now clear that the Russians were committing grave atrocities against Muslim civilians).72
He said:
Perhaps it was my fault, but I must admit that I did not learn when I was at Oxford that which I have learned since – namely, to set a due value in the imperishable and the inestimable values of human liberty.
Alfred Milner, who was presiding over this event claimed ‘that Gladstone had neglected a very important aspect of the Eastern Question - “the interests of the British Empire”’.73 This tension between humanitarianism and the defence of the Empire was resolved in the rhetoric of the Great War, which neatly twinned the two seemingly irreconcilable ideologies by framing the conflict as a defensive war fought in order to stop a militaristic menace from dominating Europe.
Another focus of public outrage was Armenia, which occupied British humanitarians throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century.74 Like the Bulgarian outrage, this one also had potentially dangerous implications for the Concert of Europe, as it was the Ottomans who again were claimed to be committing the atrocities. Humanitarian sentiment had become so central to British domestic politics that Otto von Bismarck told Kaiser
Wilhelm he was concerned that the British government’s ‘strident
72 The outrage over the abuse of Bulgarian Christians in Britain was matched in Russia, and fuelled the momentum for Russia to launch a war against Turkey (the Russo-Turkish War 1877-78). 73 Milner quoted in Shannon op.cit., pp. 217-218. 74 Laycock, op.cit., p.9. 177
humanitarianism for the sake of domestic politics’ had become a
‘dangerously destabilising new development’ in international politics.75
British interest in Armenia was intense, and some of those who watched the treatment of Armenians in the latter part of the nineteenth century were the same people that produced First World War atrocity propaganda. James Bryce, was the most significant example, as his First
World war report on Ottoman atrocities in Armenian drew upon his earlier engagement with the same issue.76
In 1876, Bryce presciently noted in his book Transcaucasia and
Russia that British policies which relied upon Russian intervention in
Turkey would fail to protect non-Christians from Turkish atrocities.77
Eighteen years later, Bryce’s predictions came true and the atrocities in
Armenia attracted mass media attention. Between 1894 and 1896, a series of massacres and insurrections took place in an atmosphere of ‘anti-
Christian, Islamic chauvinism’ that had been encouraged by the sultan.
During this period 80-100,000 Armenians were directly killed, and many others died as a result of displacement.78 Bloxham has asserted that the massacres were linked to a chain of events which began with ‘large scale, nationalist-influenced Armenian resistance in 1893-4’.79 He has stated that
75 Bismark quoted in Fitzpatrick op.cit., p.196. 76 See: Viscount J. Bryce and A.J. Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman empire : documents presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs / with a preface by Viscount Bryce, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1916. 77 J. Bryce, Transcaucasia and Ararat: Being notes of a Vacation Tour in the Autumn of 1876, United Kingdom, Macmillan and Company, 1896, p.398. 78 D. Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians, United States, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.51-54. 79 Ibid., p.51. 178
the massacres were a ‘dramatic incursion of Armenian affairs into British politics and society’, which provoked a tremendous amount of debate about
Great Britain’s humanitarian duty.80
British journalist W.T. Stead authored a pamphlet that graphically detailed some of the atrocities that had occurred: ‘Flaying alive, burning alive, burying alive, are repeatedly recorded. Mutilation of the eyes, the fingers, the limbs… every conceivable species of torture, were resorted to’.81
Books such as E.A. Brayley Hodgett’s Round About Armenia, while abjuring from a ‘recital of the repulsive details of cruelty which attended the massacres’, nonetheless echoed Stead’s perspective, which was that intervention by the British was necessary.82
Hodgetts closed his book with a similar plea to that with which Bryce had ended his book on Armenia some twenty years earlier: England should not wait for the other great European powers (Russia in particular) to assist the Armenians. The crisis instead presented England with ‘a great opportunity of reasserting her ancient claim to be regarded as the friend of oppressed nationalities’. 83 He closed his book with these stirring words:
…let every humane person, every patriotic Englishman, demand loudly the liberation of Armenia, and never think of the consequences. If we have to face a war let us face it,
80 Laycock, op.cit., p.84. 81 Stead’s pamphlet partially reprinted in: ‘Distress in Armenia’, The Brisbane Courier, 11 May 1896, p.4. 82 E.A. Brayley Hodgetts, Round About Armenia: The Record of a Journey across the Balkans through Turkey, the Caucasus and Persia in 1895, London, Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1896, p.vii. 83 Ibid., p.289. 179
and remember that to-day the cause of the poor down- trodden Armenians is the cause of the British Empire.84 It was during this crisis that the language of forceful humanitarian intervention seen in Great War atrocity propaganda was finessed. Although initially reluctant to become involved, Gladstone re-emerged from retirement again in the guise of liberal humanitarian warrior and delivered his swan song in a speech that, ‘in an echo of the evangelical spirit of 1876’, thunderously denounced the Sultan.85 In September 1896 Punch’s John
Tenniel depicted Gladstone as a Christian Crusader urging Britannia to protect the Armenians. Gladstone is brandishing his sword, while in the background Turkish soldiers are murdering Armenians. Figure 20. Beneath the cartoon reads an extract from a letter in which Gladstone fulminated against the Sultan: ‘That coercion, which ought long ago to have been applied to him (the Sultan) might even now be the means of averting another series of massacres, probably even exceeding those which we have already seen.’
84 Ibid., p.290. 85 Shannon, op.cit., pp. 576 and 582. 180
Figure 20. John Tenniel, ‘A Strong Appeal’, Punch, 26 September 1896.
There were large public demonstrations in favour of an armed intervention in Armenia. A month after Gladstone’s speech 12,000 working men gathered in Hyde Park to demand that ‘the Government…take steps to stop the massacres’.86 The Weekly Despatch of London asserted that ‘before long we will have to act, and not merely talk’, and suggested that sending
86 ‘Armenia: meeting of workers in England’, The Armidale Chronicle, 14 October 1896, p.2. 181
British ironclads to Constantinople would be an appropriate response.87 In
Australia, too, concerned citizens begged the armed forces to intervene.
‘J.H.F.’ of Adelaide was of the opinion that ‘those of us who believe in the existence of a God or a moral government of the universe believe also that the nation who dares to strike a blow for right will, and must, be victorious’.88 Churches ‘held meetings of protest’ and also called for war on the grounds that the Turks had behaved barbarously and cruelly towards the Armenians.89
Leaving aside the diplomatic manoeuvring that took place between the great powers over the issue, the Armenian Question was of genuine concern to people in the British Empire. This was partly because ‘minority campaigns’ were central to nineteenth century imperialism. Liberal imperial ideals about race and progress also drove people’s interest in these issues. British historian Jo Laycock has written:
Theories of race, of progress and degeneration and concepts of civilisation and barbarism which had been elaborated in order to deal with the diversity encountered through imperialist expansion, were all utilised in order to fit the Armenians into the hierarchical worldviews of the nineteenth century.90
The Ottoman Turks, she continued, ‘had no place in the modern world’, as their rule was barbaric – it was the job of the British to bring them to heel and protect those who were victims of such despotic rule. In contrast, the
Armenians were brought into the fold of the white European. ’Portraying
87 ‘England’s duty to Armenia’, Geelong Advertiser, 22 June 1895, p.3. 88 ‘Armenian Horrors’, South Australian Register, 12 September 1896, p.6. 89 V. Babkenian and P. Stanley, Armenia, Australia and the Great War, Sydney, NewSouth 2016, pp. 30 – 31. 90 Laycock, op.cit., p.27. 182
the Armenians as part of civilised Europe’, Laycock has written, ‘allowed the massacres to be portrayed as an attack upon ‘civilisation’’, not just upon a minority in the Ottoman Empire’.91
However, the discourse surrounding ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilisation’ was not as simple as Laycock has contended. Her reading is problematic, as it has confined British concern about victims of Turkish aggression to simple racist discourse. In Laycock’s view, because the British sought to defend those who were at least religiously akin (the Christian Armenians) from the barbaric Other, their concern was solely ‘Orientalist’ and therefore could not be even partly informed by genuine humanitarian sentiment. While much of the rhetoric surrounding the Turkish abuse of the Armenians was both implicitly and explicitly racist, as stated before, the secular origins of modern humanitarianism were also contained within the British response to Turkish atrocities.92
The manner in which the media engaged with the Balkans and
Transcaucasia was more complex than a binary division between Christians and Muslims. Contrary to Laycock’s assertion that British people from the
1870s until the First World War viewed atrocities solely from an
‘Orientalist’ perspective by painting the Turk as the ‘barbaric Other’ and the
Armenian as the innocent Christian, press reports were also made about
Christian atrocities committed against Turkish people.
91 Ibid., p.122 92 Tusan, op.cit., p.50. 183
An 1877 newspaper report about Russian atrocities in Bulgaria was unsparing in its criticism of the treatment of the Muslim Turks by the
Christian Russians, who reportedly had killed approximately 4000 Turks in
Bulgaria. The article stated, ‘six Turkish villages…have, so to say totally disappeared from the face of the earth, the whole of their inhabitants having been exterminated by the Russian troops, and their houses destroyed.’ 93
Despite their quasi-European status, the Russians’ moral capacities were considered to be deeply questionable. In his 1876 book on his travels through Armenia and Transcaucasia, Bryce judged the Russian to be morally lacking despite their nominal ‘whiteness’. The Russians, he wrote:
...with all their versatility and quickness, are not yet, and will not for many years to come, be thoroughly civilized. Till they become so, they may govern, but they must remain unable not only to civilize the races on a lower level, but even to give to those races such an impulse towards material progress as will make them profitable subjects, a strength to the empire instead of a mere dead-weight impeding its onward march.94
Bryce concluded his book with the observation that it would behove Britain to cease relying upon Russia to intervene in Turkey – for they were simply
‘too imperfectly civilized…to make the further extension of power a benefit’.
In the language of classic British Imperial humanitarianism, Bryce asserted that it was up to Great Britain alone to intervene during the final years of the decaying Turkish Empire.
The suspicion that the Russian was not wholly civilised, or indeed white, continued up until the First World War. In early 1914 the Australian
93 ‘Russian Atrocities in Bulgaria’, Karang Times and Swan Hill Gazette, 2 November 1877, p.4. 94 Bryce, op.cit., p.398. 184
magazine The Bulletin went so far as to project an Asian ‘taint’ onto the
Russian, who,
…though he is a white man, isn’t exactly in the van of affairs; but then unfortunately, Tartar invasions, culminating in a Tartar conquest, made him just sufficient of an Asiatic to handicap him in the struggle. He didn’t lose his white color, but he lost some of his white characteristics.95
While Bryce and the Bulletin’s views on the Russians are clearly influenced by geo-political concerns, there was nonetheless general concern about atrocities being committed by all by all sides in the Balkans right up until the outbreak of the First World War. A year before the First World
War an article quoted a Russian report into Christian Bulgarian cruelties perpetrated against the Muslim civilians in Adrianople in Turkey:
Numbers of Mussulmans who had been killed overnight were found in the streets every morning, and even now the corpses of Turkish prisoners, covered with wounds, are being found in the public wells...on the third day of the occupation 20 Bulgarian soldiers massacred 13 Turks in one of the mosques in a horrible manner.96
Atrocities were a source of concern to people throughout the Empire
– including Australia. In late 1913 the Annie Carvosso, Secretary of the
National Council of Women of Queensland (NCWQ), wrote to the
Queensland Governor asking that he forward a letter from ‘the women of
Greece’ to the Secretary of State for the Colonies.97 The letter appealed to their sisters ‘of the civilised world’ to spread the word about the
95 ‘The Gate of Color and the Gate of Sheol’, The Bulletin,16 January 1914, p.6. 96 ‘Human Fiends: Bulgarian Atrocities: Incredible Horrors’, in The Sydney Morning Herald, 22nd August, 1913, p.9. 97 Letter from Annie Carvosso, Secretary National Council of Women of Queensland to Sir William Macgregor, Governor of Queensland, 18 October 1913, A11804 1914/4. 185
‘unspeakable atrocities against our brethren in Macedonia’ by the
Bulgarians. The women asked that:
…in the name of thousands of martyred women and children, ministers of God, and servants of the state, both Christian and Mussulman, that they will demand the intervention of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities of the whole civilized world, to put an end to the inhuman crimes of the Bulgarians.98
Carvossa introduced this letter with a plea for the British to intervene in the Balkans, ‘to exercise its good offices towards the pacification of the Balkan Nations so as to ensure lasting peace among them…and thereby speedily bring relief to those suffering under the alleged atrocities’.99
The same concerns about moral fitness were thus often turned upon white people who were believed to have regressed into a state of savagery.
From the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the First World War, white people in the British Empire were confronted with the moral problems presented by white (and also Christian) acts of ‘barbarism’.
Rather than justifying atrocities committed by Europeans, critics sometimes condemned them as comprehensively as they would have if the barbarities had been inflicted by the Ottomans. While this was often driven by political expediency, there was also at times sincere condemnation of atrocities being committed by Europeans. As Alistair Bonnett has explained of this period,
‘Whiteness, as the phenotype of civilisation, must simultaneously be made
98 ‘The Women of Greece to the Women of the Civilised World’, A11804 1914/4, N.A.A. Canberra. 99 Letter from Annie Carvosso to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 13 October 1913, A11804 1914/4, N.A.A. Canberra. 186
available to all Europeans within the colonial imagination, but denied to those deemed unfit or unwilling to carry its burden in Europe itself’.100
Liberal imperialism was therefore not solely obsessed with the poor behaviour of non-Europeans – the treatment of the native inhabitants of the
Belgian Congo by white people was also of great interest at the close of the nineteenth century. So too, was the behaviour of European military forces in China during the Boxer Rebellion. When the stories of abominable behaviour of white troops filtered out of China during the Boxer Rebellion, the headline read: ‘Massacre and Rapine in China: Brutality of “civilised” troops’. The article closed the article with the observation, ‘Never before…in our generation has Europe had occasion to be so utterly ashamed of itself’.101 Ironically, it was Kaiser Wilhelm who introduced the term ‘Hun’ in relation to German military behaviour in his notorious Bremerhaven speech, in which he demanded that German soldiers to treat the Chinese with extreme violence. Germany became in involved in the campaign in China following the assassination of its envoy, Baron Wilhelm Emmanuel von
Kettler.102 The Kaiser said:
When you meet the enemy, you will beat him; you will give no pardon and take no prisoners. Those whom you capture are at your mercy. As the Huns a thousand years ago under King Etzel made a name for themselves that has lasted mightily in memory, so may the name
100 A. Bonnett, ‘How the British Working Class Became White: the Symbolic (Re)formation of Racialised Capitalism”, The Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 11., No.3. 1998, p.322) 101 ‘Massacre and Rapine in China: Brutality of “civilised” troops”, in Warwick Argus, 8 June 1901, p.4. 102 I.V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, United States of America, Cornell University, 2005, p. 135. 187
‘Germany’ be known in China, such that no Chinese will ever again even dare to look askance at a German.103
In calling for unrestrained warfare, the Kaiser had unwittingly delivered the monstrous ‘Hun’ to his future enemies during the Great War. In 1900 his attitude was already profoundly out of step with the liberal turn that had seized Great Britain over the issue of atrocities against non-European peoples.
For example, Roger Casement and E.D. Morel’s activism about atrocities in the Congo had ‘blazed high and hot’ in 1902.104 Although there was already concern about the treatment of the Congolese by Europeans,
Casement was not able to personally go to the Congo and investigate the atrocities that had been committed by the King of Belgium’s rubber company until 1903.105 Among other atrocities, workers had been punished by the company for failing to harvest sufficient rubber by having their hands amputated.106 Photographs of victims were taken by missionaries, and were circulated around the world for use in lantern slides. They were also reproduced by Morel in his book, King Leopold’s Rule.107
It is notable that during this scandal the status of Belgians as civilised
European men was called into question. In responding to Morel’s revelations about abuse in the Congo in 1903, British parliamentarian
Herbert Samuel asked, ‘if the administration of the Congo State was
103 ‘The Kaiser’s Bremerhaven Speech’, Newcastle Morning Herald and Miner’s Advocate, 12 September 1900, p.3. The Kaiser’s speech was met with widespread condemnation in Germany. 104 W. R. Louis, ‘Roger Casement and the Congo’, Journal of African History, Vol.1., 1964, p.99. 105 Ibid., p.102. 106 Twomey, op.cit., p.262. 107 Ibid., p.263. 188
civilization, then what was barbarism?’108 The Belgians were not the only country whose conduct and status was questioned. In his 1903 expose of
French atrocities in the Congo, Morel wrote ‘…the actions of the Congo State authorities have long since debarred that so-called State from any claim to the epithet of civilized’.109
It is a mark of the ferocity and appeal of the liberal imperial humanitarian rhetoric contained in Great War atrocity propaganda that so many rallied to the cause of the Belgians, despite the previously appalling reputation of King Leopold. First World War atrocity propaganda therefore simultaneously returned the descriptor ‘civilised’ to the Belgians, whilst removing it from the Germans.
Therefore, while humanitarianism was at times a force of imperialism and racial bigotry, the same moral scrutiny was occasionally turned upon white imperialists – albeit that such scrutiny was sometimes politically expedient. Not only that, atrociousness against coloured people was scrutinised. No doubt, some of this scrutiny was part of a game of moral one-upmanship over which country had a greater moral right to colonise
Africa; nonetheless, the atrocities were condemned within a humanitarian rubric. Humanitarianism therefore has ‘as many faces as it has specific historical contexts’.110
108 H. Samuel, Parliamentary Debates, 4th series 122 20 May 1903, c. 1298, quoted in W.R. Louis, ‘Roger Casement and the Congo’, The Journal of African History, Vol. 5., Iss. 1, 1964, p. 101. 109 My italics. E.D. Morel, The British Case in French Congo: the Story of a Great Injustice, its Causes and its Lessons, London, William Heinemann, 1903, p.vii. 110 A. Ribi Forclaz, Humanitarian imperialism: The Politics of Anti-Slavery Activism, 1880- 1940, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015, p.8. 189
From the end of the nineteenth century, therefore, it was becoming increasingly obvious to some British liberals that whiteness was not a prophylactic against savage behaviour. In 1898 Herbert Spencer wrote to peace campaigner Moncure D. Conway that he feared a League designed to arbitrate between nations would fail to prevent a war. He said, ‘Now that the white savages of Europe are over-running the dark savages everywhere it is useless to resist the wave of barbarism’. He finished somewhat prophetically by stating, ‘There is a bad time coming, and civilised mankind will (morally) be uncivilised before civilisation can again advance’.111 For liberal First World War propagandists such as Bryce and Gilbert Murray, race was not immutable; Europeans were not always the torch-bearers of civilisation. Fellow Great War propagandist and historian A.J. Toynbee wrote of Murray, ‘As far back as 1900 he had written that if you scratched any civilized European deep enough you would find a savage.’112 This belief that the white man could man to revert to the savagery of a coloured man accounts in part for the creation of the German ‘Hun’. Thus, when Australian newspapers attacked the Germans as ‘Unrestrained German Savages’ who had committed ‘Frightful Barbarities’ in November 1914, they were not, as
Australian historian John Hilvert has alleged, displaying ‘spontaneous anti-
German sentiment’.113 Instead, they were drawing upon a deep ideological
111 H. Spencer, quoted in M. D. Conway, Autobiography: Memories and Experiences, Vol. 1., London, Cassell and Col., 1904, pp.407 -408 112 A.J. Toynbee, ‘Foreword’ in G. Murray, Gilbert Murray, an Unfinished Autobiography with contributions by his friends, London, Allen and Unwin, 1960, p.18. 113 J. Hilvert, Blue Pencil Warriors: Censorship and Propaganda in World War II, St Lucia, Queensland University Press, 1984, p.10. 190
narrative about civilisation and barbarism that had been consistently applied to atrocities since the final quarter of the nineteenth century.
White Barbarism and the ‘Hun’
Throughout the Great War, Australian and British propagandists portrayed the German enemy as a creature that was closer to the animals than humankind. This monstrous hybrid, half man, half ape, became a symbol for rapacious violence and was widely used in both government and non-government propaganda.114 British artist Edmund J. Sullivan, for example, produced a splendidly grotesque, machete wielding ‘Hun’ in his book The Kaiser’s Garland. Arranged in a lax pose, the simian ‘Hun’ is casually arranging a cherub for butchering. Figure 21.
114 This section uses some sources and concepts from my Masters thesis. They have been reframed in this chapter in order to provide emphasis to my argument about race, barbarism and civilization in First World War propaganda. See: E.A. Robertson, The Hybrid Heroes and Monstrous Hybrids of Norman and Lionel Lindsay: art, propaganda and race in the British Empire and Australia from 1880-1918, M.A., Australian National University, 2010. 191
Figure 21. Edmund Sullivan, ‘The Prussian Butcher’, from The Kaiser’s Garland.115
Sullivan’s caricature drew upon a nineteenth century tradition of
‘blackening’ white people with undesirable racial traits. From the mid-
nineteenth century, these racial caricatures were used to isolate and
dehumanise unstable elements in the British Empire. As L. Perry Curtis
demonstrated in his ground-breaking book, Apes and Angels, the Irishman in
Victorian Literature, white men who threatened the stability of the Empire
were akin to the uncivilised Africans and Asians, and were therefore often
depicted as the apelike ‘Other’. In 1881, for example, Punch published a John
115 E. J. Sullivan, The Kaiser’s Garland, London, William Heinemann, 1915, p.73. 192
Tenniel cartoon in which a dynamite and gun wielding Irishman is depicted as a black man. Figure 22. By placing him on a dais with other waxworks of weapon-wielding coloured ‘problems’, Tenniel removed his status as a fellow Caucasian, thereby justifying a number of actions against the Irish that would have been considered unacceptable against the white English race.116
Figure 22. John Tenniel, ‘Times Waxworks’, Punch, 31 December 1881.
Many years later, Norman Lindsay affected a similar act of racial exchange upon the German. In a 1917 cartoon he drew a number of lower
‘specimens’ of evolution, such as the Cave Dweller and the Gorilla, which are all on display in an ethnographic museum. The ethnographer has updated
116 L. Perry Curtis, Apes and Angels: the Irishman in Victorian Caricature, United States, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997p.24. 193
his collection: the German has been placed at the very end, right next to the
Gorilla. Figure 23.
Figure 23. Norman Lindsay, ‘Reprisals’, The Bulletin, 19 July 1917.
Sullivan, Tenniel and Lindsay drew upon the language of nineteenth century scientific racism for their creations. According to the logic of scientific racism, white people were inherently more civilised, and coloured people more savage. Race was the determinant of moral character, not environment.117 British anthropologist James Hunt believed that ‘Negro’ people were incapable of embracing human civilisation, and that they were far closer to the ape ‘than the European’.118 Atrocity propagandists consistently stripped the German of their ‘whiteness’. In 1917, Critchley
117 E. Richards, ‘The “Moral Anatomy” of Robert Knox: The Interplay between Biological and Social thought in Victorian Scientific Naturalism’, Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 22., No.2., 1989, p.394. 118 J. Hunt, ‘Nineteenth-Century Racism: The Anthropologist Who First Defined the Negro’s Place in Nature’, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 58., 2007/2008, pp.62-63. This paper is an extract from a speech titled ‘The Negro’s Place in Nature’ by Hunt to the Anthropological Society of London in 1863. 194
Parker (whose work was discussed in Chapter Two), produced a supplement to his newspaper which stated, ‘The Allies must so finish the war that Germans will not raise their eyes to a White Man’s level for a century’. Figure 24.
Figure 24. ‘The only good German is a dead German’, calendar supplement to the Australian Statesman and Mining Standard, 15 February 1917, collection of the A.W.M.
A Bulletin editorial argued that the German was outside of the civilised ken of the average white man. More damningly, the German was described as the ‘Chinaman of Europe’:
…the modern German is proved out of place in the Aryan family. He is as much so as the Chinaman…the German is a savage among pacifists. Europe, after centuries of struggle, shook itself clear of feudalism. Its impetus bore Germany along with it. Germanism’s doctrine of unreasoning obedience is a recrudescence. It is a reversion to a type which is no longer regarded as civilised … Whatever the explanation, the Chinaman of Europe possesses this quality in the same measure as the Chinaman of Asia, whom we have long since ceased to regard as a desirable immigrant. 195
The German therefore were placed in the same group as the Indians or
Chinese, no longer welcome as immigrants to White Australia. He went from inhabiting the highest part of the ‘Aryan’ racial tree, to the lowest of soils.
While the nineteenth century provided the racial scaffolding upon which the German Monster was constructed, an examination of his deeper ancestry reveals that he was also a product of the Enlightenment. The full meaning of the ‘Hun’ cannot be truly apprehended without exploring how race, progress, civilisation and barbarism were formulated in the eighteenth century, and how these concepts were interpreted through the lens of nineteenth century imperialism.
While scientific racism posited that race was fixed, immutable and bound to hierarchy, liberal theorists did not completely adhere to this perspective. Though upon initial examination it would appear that some prominent Victorian liberals conformed with the logic of scientific racism, this was not always the case. John Stuart Mill, for example, has been accused by critics of justifying imperial expansion by binding ‘a hierarchal conception of social progress’ to Europeans’ moral right to ‘civilise’ barbarians’.119 However, as political scientist Inder S. Marwah has demonstrated, Mill did not hold that there was only one route to civilisation.
There was no ‘universal trajectory’ that was marked out by Europeans.
Instead, ‘civilised states’ developed in their ‘own unique ways…civilisation’
119 I. S. Marwah, ‘Complicating Barbarism and civilisation: Mill’s complex sociology of human development’, History of Political Thought, Vol. 32., No.2., 2011, p.345. 196
unfolded as a ‘multi-faceted process’.120 Civilisation for some liberals, therefore, was not a uniquely European phenomenon. Nor was it a phenomenon that always was regarded as fixed and stable.
In his approach to theorising about civilisation, Mill was being very selective in how he approached the racially reductionist writings of many
Enlightenment thinkers. From the mid-Eighteenth century ‘”reason” and
“civilization” became almost synonymous with “white” people and northern
Europe, while unreason and savagery were…located among the non-whites, the “black”, the “red” and the “yellow” outside of Europe’.121 This process occurred as ‘civilisation came to indicate a process of growth…in opposition to the savage state and to barbarism’.122 Not all Enlightenment thinkers, however, believed in a racial ‘narrative of human progress’.123
For Scottish Enlightenment scholar James Dunbar, civilization was not a teleological and fixed progress. It was in fact a tenuous achievement, and
Europeans would do well to remember their own capacity to regress into barbarism. He wrote,
Since it was equally natural and frequent to progress out of a barbarous state as it was to regress from civilization to barbarism, it was ridiculous to oppose, on the basis of a declaration of natural superiority, the eternal greatness of one people compared to the eternal meanness of another.124
120 Ibid., p.360. 121 S. Fernando, D. Ndegwa and M. Wilson, Forensic Psychiatry, Race and Culture, London, Routledge, 1998, p.17. 122 S. Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress, United States, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p.50. 123 B. Neilson, ‘Barbarism/Modernity: Notes on Barbarism’, Textual Practice, Vol. 13., Iss. 1., 1999, p.2. 124 Dunbar quoted in: Sebastiani, op.cit., p 128. 197
Therefore, while the racial caricatures of the German owe much to the scientific racism of the nineteenth century, the underlying perspective that
Europeans were not inherently morally superior was inherited from a strand of Enlightenment thought. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, it had become clear to some liberal thinkers that savagery and barbarism were traits that Europeans were more than capable of regressing into during times of war.
Neil Ramsey has noted that the Enlightenment challenged the prevailing belief that war was an inevitable part of human affairs and gave rise ‘to a belief in historical progress that saw war as an exceptional state…that must and could one day be purged from civilization as civilization became ever more commercial, polite and rational’.125 During the First World War, the Germans were regarded as a threat to civilisation: they had turned their backs upon the Enlightenment project, and taken a wrong turn down a militaristic path. To have invaded a small nation and committed atrocities against civilians was an act of betrayal towards the
European project of progress.
However, because of the language of scientific racism, and the assumption that coloured people were ‘barbaric’ the actions of the Germans were often viewed through the prism of race. A letter from an army surgeon to a friend in London, and reproduced in an Australian newspaper, decried the use of poison gas by the Germans as ‘ghastly cruelty’. He wrote, ‘As an army surgeon one has had to face many duties that have shocked the
125 N. Ramsey, ‘Orientalist Violence in Romantic Era Travel Writing’, UNSW Canberra English Seminar Series, Friday 26 September 2014. 198
toughest natures, but I declare on my honour that never in the course of experiences of savage warfare with the tribes of Soudan, Ashanti, Northern
India etc have I met with cases of inhuman torture to equal this poisonous gas procedure of the Germans’. 126
Liberalism and war in the twentieth century
Humanitarian imperialism was complex: it drew upon racial clichés about coloured people to transform the ‘white’ and civilised German into a coloured savage. The German monster, which was a dehumanised and racially degraded beast, was the main character in a narrative that required a villain against whom a just war could be fought. Concurrently, the humanitarian ideals contained within atrocity propaganda about the rights of civilians in wartime were powerful and undoubtedly sincerely held. The
German ‘Hun’ was therefore a quintessentially liberal and humanitarian creation, borne of the belief that it was duty of humanity to transcend barbarism and pursue civilisation.
The final quarter of the nineteenth century also produced a public in
Great Britain and Australia that was familiar with the rhetoric, if not the reality, of armed intervention. During this period, a number of phenomena developed which were of critical importance to how atrocity propaganda was both produced and received during the Great War. Imperial humanitarianism, the hallmark of late nineteenth century liberalism, became oriented towards the concept of armed intervention. This was the
126 ‘The War A Blot on Civilisation: an appeal to Humanity’, The Advertiser, 13 July 1915, p.10. 199
predecessor of the just war rhetoric employed by atrocity propagandists during the Great War. The final quarter of the nineteenth century also saw the development of a mass sense of outrage about atrocities, as newspapers developed alongside increased literacy rates, and liberal humanitarianism became increasingly dominant within public discourse. A further development was that within the political sphere, where an adroit use of humanitarian rhetoric could be politically advantageous.
Although the Bulgarian Crisis and the outrage about atrocities in
Armenia did not lead to mass protests in Australia, they were nonetheless widely reported in the media. Moreover, they contributed to the rhetorical culture in which the just war argument for the Great War could flourish.
Importantly, they also contributed to the development of a culture in which wars were discussed according to their moral merits. Thus, the South
African War was not universally approved of for reasons that had important implications for the reception of Great War atrocity propaganda.
The next two chapters analyse the influence of liberal progressive rhetoric upon Australian responses to both the South African War and the
Great War. During the South African War intense criticism was levelled at
British forces when they were perceived to have committed atrocities against civilians. These very same criticisms were eventually directed at the
German military by Great War propagandists who painted on a much broader moral canvas than the meagre one afforded by imperial jingoism alone. 200
However, the next two chapters will also examine the limits of liberal influence. As we shall see, those who were influenced by liberalism opposed the South African War only to support the Great War; those who were not extensively influenced by liberal humanitarianism, for example, many socialists remained fixed in their opposition to both conflicts. In the case of
Irish Australians, the Boer War was an offensive and brutal conflict being conducted by an illiberal Empire. However, the liberal promise of Home
Rule convinced many Irish Australians to support the Great War. These ideals become less compelling following both the Easter Rising, and the failure of the British to implement Home Rule. This exploration of both the extent of the influence of liberal perspectives about just war, as well is its limits, provides crucial insights into the rise and fall of support for the First
World War in Australia.
201
CHAPTER FOUR ‘A heartfelt sympathy’: British liberalism, Home Rule and Irish Australian responses to the Empire at war 1899-1918
On 25 September 1914, John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary
Party, declared to a crowd at the Mansion House in Dublin that Ireland had
‘a heartfelt sympathy’ with the war. Ireland, he said, had ‘been profoundly moved by the spectacle of the heroism and sufferings of Belgium’.1
Redmond’s embrace of the war was mirrored by many Irish Australians who celebrated both Australia’s entry into the Great War and also Ireland’s imminent entry into the Empire as an independent Dominion via Home
Rule.2 The liberal ideal of Home Rule twinned with the defence of the small nation of Belgium powerfully motivated the Irish Australian community at the beginning of the First World War. However, as the war continued and the British failed to match their liberal rhetoric – firstly through the brutal suppression of the Easter Rising, and perhaps more importantly, through their unwillingness to deliver Home Rule, Irish Australian support for the war declined. In this chapter I contend that both the promise and the failure of British liberal ideals lay at the core of Irish Australian responses to the
Great War. By comparing Irish Australian opinions about the South African
War with the Great War, this chapter demonstrates that a very particular
1 J. E. Redmond, Ireland and the War: Speeches delivered by John E. Redmond, M.P. (Leader of the Irish Party), at Dublin and Kilkenny, on September 25th and October 18th 1914, Ireland, reprinted from the Freeman’s Journal, c.1914. 2 S. James, ‘Loyalty Becoming Disloyalty? The War and Irish-Australians Before and After Easter 1916’, in M. Walsh and A. Varnava, Australians and the Great War: Identity, Memory and Mythology, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2016, pp.110-111. 202
kind of liberal humanitarian imperialism appealed to Irish Australians.3
Where the South African War was perceived by the Irish Australian community as one of imperial aggression, the Great War was seen as a just conflict in which the rights of a small nation were being defended against an imperial aggressor. It was during the South African War that the Irish
Australian community established a discourse about atrocities and the rights of small nations that made the liberal imperial justifications for the
First World War especially compelling. However, as the consensus between
Ireland and England fractured during the course of the war, liberal justifications for the war lost both their appeal and their moral power.
At the beginning of the Great War, atrocity propaganda and the liberal rhetoric that accompanied it had a strong role in framing support for the conflict within both Ireland and the Irish Australian community. In
Ireland, recruiting posters ‘drew analogies between the old English conquest, occupation, and colonisation of Ireland and the new German conquest, and colonisation of the small nations of Europe’.4 While the logic of atrocity propaganda in Ireland (and Irish Australia) seems paradoxical, it was part of a logic in which a reformed, progressive and liberal British
Empire would grant Home Rule to Ireland.
Atrocity propaganda therefore highlighted the shared liberal values within an Empire that was, at the commencement of the war, upholding the
3 Properly speaking, the conflict that took place between 1899-1901 should be known as the Second South African War, but for the sake of brevity, it will be called the South African war in this thesis. 4 J. S. Ellis, “The Methods of Barbarism” and the “Rights of Small Nations”: War Propaganda and British Pluralism, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 30., No. 1., 1998, p.71. 203
rights of both Ireland and Belgium. In discussing the propaganda used in
Ireland to mobilise the population to fight, Catriona Pennell has recently defined British government propaganda as a form of ‘negotiated persuasion’. She has stated, ‘European populations invested in the conflict through a process of popular consent not state-sponsored coercion’.
Atrocity propaganda was one manifestation of negotiated persuasion.5 For the Irish, and also Irish Australians, the liberal rhetoric of the rights of small nations and the reference to atrocities was powerful, especially in conjunction with the promise of Home Rule.
The Irish Australians under examination in this chapter responded strongly to events that took place in Ireland; these responses then influenced how they viewed both the South African and the Great War.
However, like many other groups in Australia, Irish Australians’ thinking about both wars was also profoundly influenced by liberal ideals about just war. In addition, liberal ideology was intrinsic to how Irish politics were discussed; Home Rule was a quintessentially liberal concept, and liberal ideology was also central to how many Irish Australians framed their opposition to the South African War.
The very objections voiced against the South African conflict by some progressive liberals, nationalists and socialists both in Great Britain and
Australia during the period under examination in this chapter - that it was an unjust conflict oppressing a small nation, and a war in which the British
5 C. Pennell, ‘Presenting the war in Ireland, 1914-1918’, World War I and Propaganda, T. Paddoc (ed.) Leiden, Brill, 2014, p.43. 204
acted in a barbarous manner against civilians – were used against the
German enemy in First World War atrocity propaganda. As American historian John S. Ellis has pointed out, ‘the pro-Boer rhetoric of “the methods of barbarism” and the First Word War propaganda of “the rights of small nations are intimately linked through their roots in the pluralist Liberal vision of Britishness’.6 In this sense the justifications used to prosecute the
Great War directly undermined the objections that could potentially have been levelled against the Great War by Liberals who held influential positions in British parliament. By presenting a just war defence, the government neatly side-stepped accusations of Imperial war, and in doing so, defused the majority of objections in the British parliament amongst
Liberal and Labour members.
Foreign Secretary Grey’s ploy to pacify Liberals in 1914 with a just war argument had therefore been a brilliant stroke, which also ensured strong support for the war among Irish nationalists. By using the same rhetoric to justify the war that his Liberal colleagues had traditionally used against war, Grey had not merely neutralised them, but brought many to active support of the war. The stories of atrocities by the German military against Belgian civilians, members of a small vulnerable nation, only strengthened Grey’s moral stance. It was in fact, the Liberal ‘aversion to war’, as Irene Cooper has written, ‘which made this war different from previous ones and consecrated it from the outset as a war on behalf of
6 Ellis, op.cit., p.49. 205
civilisation.7 By integrating the concerns of anti-war liberals, the pro-war rhetoric of poor little Belgium made it difficult for liberals and Irish nationalists alike to attack the moral integrity of those who supported the conflict.
The pro-war rhetoric of the First World War brilliantly reflected and incorporated the anti-war rhetoric of the South African War, which had aroused such a strong response among Irish nationalists. The South African
War was crucial in the rhetorical development of Great War atrocity propaganda, as the rhetoric developed by 'pro-Boers' regarding the ‘plight of the Boer women and children’ in the South African concentration camps was readily adapted to propaganda about the plight of Belgian women and children.8 As Jo Laycock has observed, the Great War was sold as ‘a war for traditional Liberal values, as over the past few decades the defence of the rights of small nations against despotic powers had become an important part of these values’.9 For the Irish Australian community and the labour movement (who are assessed in the following chapter) imperialism alone was a grossly inadequate reason to wage war. Liberal justifications, on the other hand, proved to be highly persuasive. These justifications, coupled with an abhorrence of atrocities, made the allegations about German mistreatment of civilians especially compelling.
7 I. C. Willis, England’s Holy War: A Study of English Liberal Idealism during the Great War, United States of America, Garland Publishing, 1972, p.86. 8 J. S. Ellis, ‘“The Methods of Barbarism” and the “Rights of Small Nations”: War Propaganda and British Pluralism’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 , 1998, p.57. 9 J. Laycock, Imagining Armenia: Orientalism, ambiguity and intervention, Manchester University Press, Great Britain, 2009, p.119. 206
The appeal of liberal justifications for war amongst Irish Australians was, however, limited and conditional. Some Irish Australians who were sympathetic at the start of the conflict became deeply disillusioned when the
British government failed to uphold their own liberal principles in Ireland.
Following the ‘martyrdom’ of the leaders of the Easter Rising at the hands of the British authorities, a number of Irish Australians, felt that the British had violated their own war rhetoric by carrying out the executions. The Easter
1916 rebellion, O’Farrell has stated, posed ‘loyalty to Ireland and loyalty to the Empire as alternatives’.10
Melbourne Archbishop Daniel Mannix, who was one of the most notorious anti-conscription campaigners during the Great War, had little sympathy for liberal justifications for the conflict. Mannix, in fact, adopted not just an anti-conscription position during the war, but also eventually took an anti-war stance. He largely dismissed stories of German atrocities and focused instead upon how war benefited the capitalists. His main energies were focused upon British mistreatment of the Irish. He was a powerful advocate for political justice for Ireland; in this German atrocities were placed well behind the atrocious history of the English occupation of
Ireland.11 When referring to execution of the leaders of the Easter Rising,
Mannix said, ‘…murder was murder just the same if it was committed in
10 P. O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia: 1788 to the Present, Notre Dame Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2000, p.259. 11 M. McKernan, ‘Ryan, John Tighe (1870-1922)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ryan-john-tighe-8315, published first in hardcopy 1988, accessed online 5 January 2016. 207
Dublin or Belgium…and they could not blot out the bloody stain by simply covering it with the Union Jack’.12
Perhaps more significantly, the threat of the ‘slavery’ of conscription both in Australia and Ireland, coupled with the gradual death of hopes for
Home Rule, meant that many Irish Australians became bitterly disillusioned with the war and, to a certain extent, the Empire itself: a pact had been made at the start of the war that the Irish (and thus the Irish Australians) would support the war if Home Rule were delivered. By the end of the war there was a feeling that the British had broken that pact, and publications like
Sydney’s The Catholic Press became increasingly derisive of the liberal ideals that had driven the war. Atrocity propaganda therefore provides a lens through which the complex rise and fall of support for the First World War by the Irish Australian community can be understood.
John Tighe Ryan, who was the editor of The Catholic Press, eventually became one of the most vehement Irish Australian media critics of the conflict. Unlike Mannix, he had no sympathy for socialists (during the 1916 conscription campaign he called socialism a form of slavery, much like conscription), but he was nonetheless deeply disillusioned by the British failure to implement Home Rule.13 Committed to the war as a means through which Ireland could attain some form of independence, Ryan was not particularly interested in the German atrocities. Thus, as the liberal hopes of Home Rule were progressively quashed by the heavy-handed
12 ‘Archbishop Mannix and the War’, The Catholic Press, 15 March 1917, p.25. 13 ‘What We May Get Under Conscription’, The Catholic Press, 5 October 1916, p.22. 208
treatment of rebels and the threat of conscription in Ireland, Ryan became bitterly angry. In late 1918, when it seemed to some that Home Rule would never occur, he wrote, ‘Ireland has been frequently taken in by the soft sawder of English Governments…the biggest take down of all was the Home
Rule Act’. Ryan condemned Home Rule in the strongest language that a
Catholic could employ, writing, ‘And this was the abortion which the Irish
Party got for keeping the English Liberals in power for years!’ How could
England refuse Ireland Home Rule, asked Ryan, ‘while she professes to be fighting for the rights of small nations?’.14
Ryan had greeted the Great War with an entirely different attitude.
For both him and many Irish Australians, the Great War was an opportunity for Ireland to prove itself worthy of Dominion status. Like Australia, Ireland would become ‘free within the British Empire’.15 This was a form of Irish nationalism that was entirely compatible with British imperialism: in this scenario, Irish nationalism was not opposed to the British Empire. Instead,
Ireland could function as an autonomous entity within a diverse Empire, much like Australia the Dominion did. Nation and Empire were therefore perceived to be much like a set of Russian dolls, with Irish and Australian nationalism fitting comfortably within the larger doll of the British Empire.
Patrick O’Farrell has written, ‘…the main attraction of the Home Rule scenario was that it allowed Irish Australians to reconcile, without difficulty,
14 ‘The Liberty of Ireland’, The Catholic Press, 31 January 1918, p.26. 15 O’Farrell, op.cit., p.259. 209
their various loyalties, old and new: they could be loyal to Australia, Ireland and the Empire all at once’.16
The liberal ideals underlying Home Rule were part of an ideological continuum that was also expressed in the just war rhetoric that underpinned atrocity propaganda. Home Rule and the call to avenge
Belgium were both based upon the ‘rights of small nations’. This rhetoric emerged from a particular form of British Imperialism that was inclusive, and promoted ‘equality, volunteerism and friendship’. Prominent liberals such as James Bryce believed that the best way to ensure that the Empire was strong and unified was through the application of tolerance and respect for the ‘small nations’ within it.17 The promise of Home Rule combined with the allegations of German barbarism meant that at the beginning of the war the Empire was operating from a position of moral strength. Atrocity propaganda provided an important focal point for Irish Australians as it was the medium through which both humanitarian and Irish nationalist ideals could be reconciled into a pro-war, pro-Empire position.
Just and unjust war: British liberal responses to South Africa and Belgium
Consideration of British liberal responses to the Anglo-Boer war shows that liberal ideals were crucial to both the creation and reception of atrocity propaganda. Many scholars have failed to fully appreciate this point. Of
Charles Masterman’s time as the head of Wellington House, Patrick Deer, for example, has written:
16 Ibid., p.259. 17 Ellis, op.cit., p.62. 210
…Masterman did his best to promote an ‘ethical propaganda’ designed to avoid the kind of excesses thought to have damaged the German cause. His reformist vision of an inclusive national spirit was rooted in the politics of New Liberal intellectuals like Hobson and Hobhouse, and writers like Galsworthy, Bennett, and Wells, and the ‘Little Englanders’ who supported Irish Home Rule and critiqued the popular imperialism and jingoism of the South African War…But this tolerance would not last…By 1915 Wellington House was circulating the highly inflammatory and best-selling Bryce Report on alleged German atrocities in Belgium, as well as the luridly anti-German cartoons of the Dutch illustrator Louis Raemakers [sic]’.18
By presenting atrocity propaganda as a medium that was in complete opposition to liberal ideals, Deer has provided a skewed interpretation of liberalism and its relationship to propaganda, war and Empire. Two of the most significant architects of Great War propaganda – Gilbert Murray and
James Bryce - were also prominent progressive liberals whose embrace of the cause was by no means inconsistent with their previous opposition to the South African War. These were not simple propagandists; instead they drew upon their considerable expertise as public intellectuals to craft a morally compelling justification for the conflict.
While Gilbert Murray’s work did not attain the notoriety that Bryce’s report on atrocities in Belgium did, his contribution to the war effort was nonetheless significant. An Australian-born Oxford classicist, Murray was
Vice-President of the ‘Fight for right’ movement, which was essentially a large, privately funded group that sought to convince Britons that the Great
18 P. Deer, Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009, pp.37-38. 211
War was fought for ‘the best interest of humanity’.19 Murray produced several influential pamphlets supporting the war, and was employed by
Wellington House to travel to neutral nations and give speeches in favour of the war. Murray had also authored the ‘first systematic defence of British policy after war had broken out’ in his assessment of Sir Edward Grey’s diplomatic actions in the build up to the Great War.20 His first instinct when the Great War started was to oppose it. However, Murray changed his mind after Grey’s speech in the House of Commons on August 3rd, when he argued that Britain should be involved in the war on the basis of Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality.21
Both Bryce and Murray condemned the South African War and championed the Great War. In his 1914 pamphlet How can war ever be right?, Murray stated: ‘I have all my life been and advocate of Peace…I opposed the policy of war in South Africa with all my energies’.22 Bryce had
‘sympathised with the Boer farmers in their passion for independence’.23 He had, furthermore, been appalled at the civilian deaths in the concentration camps, describing them as ‘a frightful loss of life’.24
Deer’s perspective that liberalism was inimical to Great War atrocity propaganda was therefore highly problematic. When the attitudes of
19 ‘English Membership Grows’, Creswick Advertiser, 14 April 1916, p.3. 20 F. West, Gilbert Murray: A Life, Great Britain; Australia, Croom Helm, 1984, p.149. See: G. Murray, The foreign policy of Sir Edward Grey, 1906-1915, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1915. 21 J. Smith, ‘1899-1957: some personal and chronological notes’, in G. Murray, An Unfinished Autobiography, with contributions by his friends, London, Allen and Unwin, 1960, p.110 22 G. Murray, How can war ever be right?, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1914, p. 11. 23 H.A.L. Fisher, James Bryce (Viscount Bryce of Dechmont, O.M.), London, Macmillan and Col, 1927, p.313. 24 ‘Mr Bryce on Ireland and the South African War’, Advocate, 1 march 1902, p.8. 212
liberals who supported the Great War are examined, it becomes very clear that their support was part of a coherent ideological belief system in which the rights of small nations and the rights of civilians in a warzone are consistently defended. Thus, Deer’s assertion that L.T. Hobhouse’s ‘Little
Englander’ perspective was inherently opposed to Great War atrocity propaganda is revealed to be rather awkward – particularly because
Hobhouse did, in fact, come to support the Great War. Indeed, he largely agreed with the tenets of atrocity propaganda. In early 1916, Hobhouse had praised Gilbert Murray’s pamphlet, Ethical Problems of the War: ‘It expresses my sentiments more exactly and also satisfactorily than anything else that I have read’.25 The pamphlet dwelt upon German use of exploding bullets, gas, the death of women, children and non-combatants – in short, atrocities.
Murray wrote,
There is a process…by which a highly civilised and ordinarily humane nation has gone on from what I can only call atrocity to atrocity. How these people have ever induced themselves to commit the crimes in Belgium which are attested to by Lord Bryce’s commission, even to organising the flood of calculated mendacity that they pour out day by day, and last of all to stand by passive and apparently approving, while deeds like the new Armenian massacres are going on under their aegis…all this passes one’s imagination.26
Murray’s objections to German atrocities directly echoed those that had arisen in relation to the atrocities of the South African War. The furore over the concentration camps in South Africa in particular had an important role in the development of First World War atrocity propaganda. In some ways,
25 L.T. Hobhouse to Gilbert Murray, 16 February 1916, Papers of Gilbert Murray, Box 30, Bodleian Library. 26 G. Murray, Ethical Problems of the War, London, T. Nelson, 1915, pp. 8-9. 213
the Boer camp scandal, which was exposed through the press to a newly- literate public by the humanitarian activist Emily Hobhouse, could be described as the British military’s first modern ‘public relations’ disaster.27
When the consequences of Kitchener’s concentration camps in South Africa became public, the deaths of civilians (caused mostly through illness) severely undermined Britain’s credentials as a positive civilising force. For many people both in Great Britain and Australia, ‘the essence of barbarism lay in the assault of the weak by the strong’.28 As was discussed in the previous chapter, this was not a concept that developed in response to the
German actions in Belgium, it had evolved during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and was to be used for the first time against the British government by those who opposed Kitchener’s camps.
During the latter part of the South African War, the British altered their military strategy, and ‘brought the conflict to the homesteads and farms of Boer civilians’.29 In order to combat the successful guerrilla tactics employed by the Boers, the British burnt farms and sequestered the Boer women and children in poorly run concentration camps. For the South
Africans, the war was experienced as a total war, involving as it did the
27 M. Hasian, ‘The “Hysterical” Emily Hobhouse and South African War Concentration Camp Controversy’, Western Journal of Communication, Vol. 67., Iss. 3., 2003, p.138. As Hasian observed, Hobhouse was ‘one of the most visible humanitarian critics of Britain’s imperial policies’. 28 J. S. Ellis, “The Methods of Barbarism” and the “Rights of Small Nations”: War Propaganda and British Pluralism, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1., 1998, p.57. 29 S. M. Miller, ‘Duty or Crime? Defining Acceptable Behaviour in the British Army in South Africa, 1899-1902’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 49., Iss. 2, 2010, p.312. 214
‘civilian population to an extreme degree and not merely soldiers’.30 British military tactics resulted in the deaths of approximately 28,000 Boer civilians, mostly children, and led the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-
Bannerman to denounce the British tactics as ‘methods of barbarism’ – the very same accusation that would be levelled at the Germans regarding their conduct in Belgium.31
Thus, when the rights of small nations and the battle against German militarism were coupled with outrage over the atrocities committed against the non-combatants of Belgium, the unlikely support of disparate groups within Australia was secured. Atrocity propaganda’s depiction of the abuse of civilians at the hands of the German military had a strong uniting effect as during this period ‘the widely held moral principle of civilian immunity’ had become ‘a shared ethical norm’. 32 Atrocity propaganda therefore convinced many groups who, had the war been promoted solely as a war for Empire, would otherwise have been unconvinced of the necessity for war.
Nevertheless, some problems arose from the liberals’ annexation of the anti-war rhetoric of the South African War to their cause. By the Great
War, British concentration camps remained a significant and comparatively recent example of wartime atrocities. Liberals found it difficult to defend their wholesale condemnation of the Germans when confronted with British military tactics that they themselves had censured. In 1916 Gilbert Murray
30 J. Carruthers, 'Introduction', in R. Greenwall, Artists and Illustrators of the Anglo-South African War, Vlaeberg, Fernwood Press, 1992, p.13. 31 D. Lowry, ‘Introduction: not just a “teatime war”’, in D. Lowry (ed.) The South African War reappraised, United Kingdom, Manchester University Press, 2000, p.2. 32 A. J. Bellamy, Massacres and Morality: Mass Atrocities in an Age of Civilian Immunity, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012, p.42. 215
had sought assistance from Charles Masterman following a ‘despairing’ letter from Danish neutral, the Reverend J.P. Bang, who had been enlisted by
Wellington House to publish sympathetic articles in Denmark about the
Allied cause. A conflicted Bang had pointed out to Murray that the Germans were using the Boer camps ‘as an example of British cruelty’, and he was therefore finding it difficult not to condemn both sides.33 Caught in a moral paradox, Masterman rather cynically wrote back to Murray:
As to the concentration camps of fifteen years ago…you and I know something of the horrors of that time and how we protested against it. I suppose there is the ordinary answer that was given then that these people were brought into camps to save them from starvation on the veldt. It did not convince you, nor did it convince me, but perhaps it will convince Professor Bang. Seriously he has got altogether out of any sense of the proportion of things both in connection with atrocities…all this comes from being a Professor of dogmatic theology.34
Bang’s concerns about the concentration camps highlighted the difficulty faced by liberal propagandists when confronted with British atrociousness during the South African War. Not only had this conflict been crucially important in the creation of the anti-war rhetoric that was, rather ironically, to become central in the pro-war rhetoric of the Great War, it had also been the source of not a small amount of condemnation. In Australia, a small and vocal minority asserted their opposition to the war.
As is discussed in the next chapter, some elements of the labour movement were very vocal in their opposition to the war. Contrary to
Bobbie Oliver’s assertion that early ‘dissent was confined to a few, middle
33 Professor Bang to Gilbert Murray, [illeg.] 1916, Papers of Gilbert Murray, Box 30. 34 Charles Masterman to Gilbert Murray, 8 February 1916. Papers of Gilbert Murray, Box 30. 216
class individuals writing letters to the newspapers’, objections were in fact immediately voiced in significant publications like the Bulletin.35
Announced against the backdrop of coming Federation, the war was mourned by the Bulletin as a barbaric and inauspicious beginning for the
Australian nation. In a cartoon by Fred Leist a woman signifying the nation of Australia stands in front of the N.S.W. contingent as it sails to South Africa.
The caption reads: ‘And so my first national act is to back up a wanton deed of blood and rapine!” Figure 25. The cartoon is a significant one, as it situates the South African War within the debate about how Australia could define herself as a nation – either through jingoistic Imperial warfare, or though non-warlike and more productive activities that would directly benefit its people.
35 B. Oliver, 'A Wanton Deed of Blood and Rapine': Opposition to Australian Participation in the South African War, in eds P Dennis and J Grey, The South African War: Army, Nation and Empire / the 1999 Chief of Army/Australian War Memorial Military History Conference , Nov 1 1999, Canberra, Army History Unit, Department of Defence, Canberra, 2000, p.191. 217
Figure 25. Fred Leist, ‘An Ominous Start’, the Bulletin, 18 November 1899, frontispiece.
Although the Bulletin was an Australian nationalist publication it was, in relation to the South African War, in harmony with much of the Irish
Catholic press, which possessed a similar dislike for loud jingoistic pronouncements and Imperial warfare. Melbourne’s Advocate decried the atmosphere of jingoistic enthusiasm early in the war asserting that, ‘In
Jingoism, at the fever height to which it has now risen, there is the temper of the bully’. 36 In October 1900, Adelaide newspaper Southern Cross reprinted an article by prominent Irish republican Michael Davitt, who declared that
‘there was never such wholesale cowardice exhibited in civilised warfare as
36 ‘The Jingo Fever and Delirium’, Advocate, 20 January 1900, p.15. 218
that which has disgraced this abominable Jingo war’.37 The Catholic Press scornfully observed towards the end of the conflict, ‘Any silly anti-Boer story is believed by the credulous jingo…no story is too thin’.38
Despite strong opposition to the South African War within the Irish
Australian community (and also, as will be discussed in the next chapter, the labour movement), the conflict was nonetheless a reasonably popular cause in Australia - sixteen thousand Australians served overseas in South Africa,39 and when the New South Wales contingent departed, it was farewelled by
200,000 people. 40 Dale James Blair has stated that strong imperial sentiment in Australia meant that ‘for the majority the simple motto ‘the
Empire, right or wrong’ was justification enough to enter the war. Blair assumed widespread approval existed because of large public demonstrations that took place at key points during the conflict. 41 Barbara
R. Penny wrote of the atmosphere at the beginning of the war, ‘a war fever had gripped the community, and imperial and military sentiment ran so high that resistance was futile’.42 This sentiment was, however, by no means universal in Australia.
Irish Australians who opposed the South African War did so because it was perceived as another attempt by the English to oppress a small nation
37 ‘Davitt and the South African War: British Valor Discounted’, Southern Cross, 12 October 1900, p.12 38 ‘The Credulous Jingo’, The Catholic Press, 5 April 1902, p.7. 39 Oliver, op.cit., p.191. 40 D. J. Blair, ‘Image and Attitude: Australia and the South African War’, in Sabretache, Vol. 33, 1992, p.27. 41 Ibid., p.127. 42 B. R. Penny, ‘Australia’s Reactions to the South African War – A Study in Colonial Imperialism’, The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 7., Iss. 1., 1967, p.98. 219
by force. While there was a small section of middle class and Australian born Irish Catholics who supported the South African War, the large majority appear to have opposed it, as the greater part of ‘Irish Catholic comment’ in newspapers took an anti-war stance.43 Irish Catholics (and as we will see in the case of Henry Bourne Higgins, some Irish Protestants) rejected the war because it was a war of ‘imperialist expansion’.44 This did not equate to simple opposition to the British Empire. Irish Australian attitudes about the Empire were complex and ambivalent with many accepting the popular view that the survival of the British Empire was integral to the survival of Australia. This was made especially clear following the string of military disasters during ‘Black Week’ in mid-
December 1899. Following this, previously hostile publications such as
Sydney’s Freeman’s Journal lent their support to the war effort.45
Victorian M.P. Edward Murphy made an elliptical yet revealing speech that summarised the complex emotions Irish Australian Catholics felt about the South African War. In the first debate about sending a Victorian contingent to South Africa he had felt ‘that they were asked to send men to murder men, women, and children who were fighting for their independence, hearths and homes’. Following the defeats, ‘he felt compelled to look upon the matter in quite another light. When it came to the test of war they had to forget all the past, and do what was right for the present and for the future, whatever might have taken place in the past’. Murphy himself
43 C.N. Connolly, ‘Class, birthplace, loyalty: Australian attitudes to the South African War’, Historical Studies, Vol. 18., No. 71., 1978, pp.224-225. 44 Ibid., p. 218. 45 Ibid., p. 224. 220
could not quite let go of this past, continuing, ‘As far as his countrymen were concerned they were not fairly treated, for they were invaded by another and stronger power’. Despite this, Murphy would support the contingent now as
…the British Empire was in danger, every man felt it his duty to come to the rescue, because the laws of Great Britain, if carried out fairly, were the fairest under the sun. Unfortunately, they weren’t always carried out fairly.46
Here, in Murphy’s speech, the ambivalence of Irish Catholic sentiment in
Australia towards both the South African War and the British Empire is made manifest. The laws of Great Britain were ‘the fairest under the sun’, yet ‘they weren’t always carried out fairly’. The liberal ideals of the British
Empire were worth upholding, even if these ideals were being crushed in the pursuit of an illiberal war in which civilians fighting for their hearths and homes were attacked.47 These contradictions were an inevitable product of a group that was torn between resentment at Britain’s treatment of Ireland, and a longing for a fair and equitable inclusion in her Empire.
In comparing the Irish diaspora in Australia with diasporas in the
United States and Canada, both Oliver McDonagh and Malcolm Campbell have concluded that Irish Australians were significantly less militant in their opposition to the British Empire. 48 MacDonagh has suggested that Irish
Australians were very different in political make-up from their more vocal
46 Victorian Parliamentary Debates, Session 1899-1900, Legislative Council and Legislative Assembly, Vol. 93, Melbourne, Robt. S. Brain, Government Printer, 1900, p.2866. 47 Ibid., p. 2866. 48 M. Campbell, ‘Emigrant Responses to War and Revolution, 1914-21: Irish Opinion in the United States and Australia’, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 32., No. 125., 2000, p.75. 221
and generally anti-Imperial American brethren because the majority had emmigrated during more prosperous times. In comparison to North
America, only a small proportion of famine victims emigrated to Australia, and those that did were not ‘in the condition of acute want’ that characterised those who arrived in Canada. MacDonagh has observed,
‘Irish-Australia showed remarkably little of the bitter folk-memory or hereditary myth of hunger, disease, dispossession and even genocide which marked much of Irish-America’.49
Thus, the Irish Australians who rejected the South African War did so out of opposition to the Empire, but because its premise was exclusive rather than inclusive of Irish nationalism. The conflict represented a version of imperialism that was incapable of bestowing Home Rule. Opposition was thus based on a disapproval of the conservative imperialism that drove the war. This expansionist imperialism was inimical to the liberal ideals that had sustained the hope of Home Rule.
While Irish Australians had their own distinctive relationship with the British Empire, they were nonetheless strongly influenced by reactions and events in Ireland. As O’Farrell has written, ‘Events and processes in
Ireland and in Australia interacted and fed on each other’.50 Irish Australian responses to both the South African and Great War were therefore heavily mediated by how these conflicts were discussed in Ireland itself.
49 O. MacDonagh, ‘The Irish in Australia: A General View’, in O. MacDonagh and W.F. Mandle (eds.), Ireland and Irish-Australia: studies in cultural and political history, Australia, Croom Helm, 1986, pp. 159 – 160. 50 O’Farrell, op.cit., p.252. 222
In the case of the South African War, South Africa was thought of as
‘another Ireland’. Donal P. McCracken listed the perceived similarities thus:
‘the Boers were opposed to the rule of an alien power in their land; they disliked the English who were that power; they were a religious people; they were essentially simply pastoralists’.51 The similarities between the Boers and the Irish – small agrarian nations being bullied by the English – were strong enough to make the comparison, and thus the sympathy, very strong.52 Australian newspaper The Catholic Press echoed this sympathy when it published a poem praising the stoicism of the Boer soldier:
His heart is full of bitterness For woes of many years, The ruined homes – the pathless wastes Beset with nameless fears …He stands upon his border line And calls his God to aid, He sees the crimson ranks approach His spirit undismayed.53
The South African War and atrocities
The South African War, McCracken has argued, allowed Irish nationalism to rise ‘as a phoenix from the ashes of Parnell’s funeral pyre’, and there was a strong belief that ‘to support the Boers was to advance Ireland’s cause’. 54
Irish nationalism had lost direction following its split over the Charles
Parnell’s affair with a married woman (Parnell had been the leader of the
Irish Parliamentary Party, the political vehicle of Home Rule) and the failure
51 D.P. McCracken, Forgotten Protest: Ireland and the Anglo-South African War, Belfast, Ulster Historical Association, 2003, p.xvi. 52 MCracken, op.cit., p. xix. 53 ‘The Boer’, The Catholic Press, 16 December 1899, p.16. 54 McCracken, op.cit., p. xv. 223
of Gladstone to pass the Second Home Rule bill in 1893. In contrast,
Unionism, which by definition opposed Home Rule, strengthened and gained coherence in Great Britain.55 For Irish Australians, Parnell’s behaviour had been a ‘betrayal’, and the destruction of the Irish Parliamentary Party ‘threw the Australian Home Rule movement into…confusion’.56
This does not mean that Irish Australians ceased to feel strongly about Irish republicanism. It was, however, a romantic and symbolic attachment to radical republicanism, rather than a serious political movement. 57 For example, in 1898, 100,000 people attended the reburial procession for Irish rebel Michael Dwyer, who had been part of the Irish
Rebellion of 1798. As part of a process of commemorating the Rebellion,
Dwyer’s remains were moved to a £2000 monument in Sydney’s Waverly
Cemetery. These displays, however, were not politically focused, and active campaigning for any brand of Irish nationalism (including Home Rule) was muted during this period.58
The outbreak of the South African War altered this subdued mood, particularly in Ireland, where it ‘catalysed a mood of national self- awareness’. Groups like the Gaelic League, which promoted Irish language and culture, expanded beyond a ‘narrow educated group’ of people…to a wider public, formed in part by revulsion against the violent jingoism’ of the
55 Charles Townshend, Ireland: the 20th century, Great Britain, Hodder Arnold, 1999, p.13. 56 O’Farrell, op.cit., p.233. 57 N. Meaney, ‘Australian Irish Catholics and Britishness: the Problem of British “Loyalty” and “Identity” from the Conscription Crisis to the end of the Anglo-Irish War’, Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society, Vol.34, 2013, p.28. 58 O’Farrell, op.cit., pp. 237- 238. 224
conflict.59 Some Irish chose to foment a minor rebellion against the Empire: two Irish Brigades were formed specifically to fight alongside the Boers against the British.60 Significantly, it was an Irish Australian, Arthur Lynch, who formed the Transvaal Irish Brigade.61 Even more significantly, Lynch went on to support the British during the Great War, believing that ‘it would be an eternal disaster to humanity if Hohensollerism triumphed, whereas the Allied victory would open an era of liberty wherein Ireland would share’.62 While Lynch’s response to the South African War was extreme (as were the consequences – he was nearly executed for treason), it nonetheless reflected the unhappiness of many Irish Australians with that particular conflict. ‘Australian loyalist criticism of Irish Australia’s lack of patriotic enthusiasm’, O’Farrell has observed, ‘had a basis for their comments’.63
Irish Australian support for the Boers contrasted directly with the mainstream media approach to the war. These newspapers used negative stereotypes about the Boers in order to defend military actions against civilians. Boers were stupid, backward and ignorant: they did not wash their children and, refusing to see doctors, instead administered teas and poultices made of goat and horse dung. In addition, they were ‘extremely callous of one another’s sufferings’.64 Following the lead of British supporters of the war, many Australian newspapers defended the concentration camps as a means through which the Imperial forces could
59 Townshend, op.cit., p.41. 60 Townshend, op.cit., p.2. 61 O’Farrell, op.cit., p.240. 62 ‘German-Irish Plots. Traitorous Sinn Fein Connection’, Zeehan and Dundas Herald, 28 May 1918, p. 3. 63 O’Farrell, op.cit., p.240. 64 ‘South African Concentration Camps’, Wagga Wagga Express, 21 November 1901, p.2. 225
ensure Boer women and children were sheltered and fed – indeed, could even protect children from their own Boer parents. One article, following the reasoning of Arthur Conan Doyle (who used the photographs as proof of
Boer savagery), asserted that the notorious photographs taken by Emily
Hobhouse were evidence not of English incompetence, but rather, of Boer cruelty.65 The most famous image, of the starving child Lizzie Van Zyl, had initially been circulated as ‘a generic statement on the suffering of war’ by those who were opposed to the conflict. It was then co-opted by pro-war propagandists.66 Figure 26. An Australian pro-war newspaper article explained the image thus:
It is perfectly true that Lizzie Van Zyl was a victim of starvation, but it turns out that it was her mother who neglected her and the doctors had this very photograph taken to illustrate the condition in which some of the children reached the camp.67
65 M. Godby, ‘Confronting Horror: Emily Hobhouse and the Concentration Camp Photographs of the South African War’, Kronos, No.32, 2006, p.42; ‘Miss Hobhouse’, The Maitland Weekly Mercury, 15 March 1902, p.7. 66 Ibid., p.42. While Hobhouse certainly brought the photograph back to England with her from South Africa, the circumstances in which the photograph was taken remain unclear. 67 ‘Miss Hobhouse’, op.cit., p.7. 226
Figure 26. Lizzie van Zyl in the Camp Hospital, Bloemfontein, 1900-01.68
These justifications were part of atmosphere in which Boers were mocked as stupid. In a cartoon published in Sydney newspaper The World’s News, a concentration camp was depicted as a haven for silly Boer women who would harangue and overwhelm the alarmed Camp Commandant with petty concerns; in this cartoon the power was undoubtedly in the hands of these nagging female. 69 Figure 27.
68 Source: Godby, op.cit., p.43 69 ‘In a Boer Concentration Camp’, The World’s News, 4 January 1902, p.13. 227
Figure 27. ‘In a Boer Concentration Camp’, The World’s News, 4 January 1902, p.13.
As was discussed in the previous chapter, this type of degradation was extremely familiar to Irish Australians, as the Irish had been the butt of patronising caricature throughout the nineteenth century.70 The Irish
Catholic press, in particular Melbourne’s the Advocate and Sydney’s The
Catholic Press, was keen to reject the prejudiced reporting within the mainstream press about the Boers. ‘We have been taught by South African
Munchausens to picture Boer women’, declared The Catholic Press, ‘as dull, ignorant, uncleanly creatures, as unkempt as Hottentots and as uncivilised as the very Kaffirs that worked on their farms.’ The newspaper then
70 See: L. Perry Curtis, Apes and Angels: the Irishman in Victorian Caricature, United States, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997. 228
speculated that this stereotype explained why ‘the British public allows them to be caged in barbed wire fences and fed like beasts in the zoo without a word of protest’.71
The revelations of the concentration camps had added a further element of hostility to the war. The Advocate wrote, ‘the atrocity of the proceedings in South Africa is beginning to stir even the dull consciences of
Englishmen themselves. Thus we find articles in some of the magazines denouncing Field Marshal Frederick Roberts for his ferocious “War against
Women and Children”’.72 Roberts had introduced the strategies of concentration camps and burning farms in order to combat the guerrilla tactics being used by the Boers.73 The Catholic Press was the most vocal in its condemnations of the camps that had subjected prisoners to ‘barbarous treatment’.74 In an article titled ‘Boer Ingratitude’ the newspaper caustically inquired if the English press would soon complain that ‘ungrateful…Boer prisoners are discontented with the brand of champagne supplied to them by the British Government’.75 Appalled by the deaths in the camps, the newspaper ran another article titled ‘Murdering Boer Children’, and declared, ‘one of the most appalling records ever given to a horrified world is the account just published of the mortality in the concentration camps in
South Africa’. The article closed with a grimly ironic castigation of English humanitarian methods of fighting:
71 ‘The Real Boer Woman, a pathetic letter’, The Catholic Press, 10 August 1901, p.25. 72 ‘The Horrors of South Africa’, Advocate, 12 January 1901, p.5. 73 For a discussion of Roberts’ role in the burning of farms see: S.B. Spies, Methods of Barbarism: Roberts and Kitchener and Civilians in the Boer Republics January 1900-May1902, Cape Town, Human and Rousseau, 1977, pp.102-127. 74 ‘The Boer Prisoners of War’, The Catholic Press, 9 February 1901, p.21. 75 ‘Boer Ingratitude’, The Catholic Press, 7 September 1901, p.8. 229
…think of poor, helpless, innocent children, herded and huddled, and dying under the methods of humane Christian England, which has the impudence to read lessons to the Sultan about his treatment of the Armenians!76
During the Great War, the same repugnance about atrocities was used to support the British Empire’s war effort, and German atrocities against the
Belgians were condemned with equal ferocity. As stated in the introduction, atrocities in Belgium were aligned with atrocities committed in the past by the English in Ireland. In a sermon delivered in July 1915, Bishop Phelan of
Sale in Victoria compared the atrocities between the two countries.
Yes, well may the Lord Bryce Commission say that for three centuries of civilised warfare we have no record of crimes perpetrated on the innocent and non-combatant population of a country such as those inflicted on heroic Belgium. Within that period I have read of only one war upon a civilian population which, for unmitigated atrocity equalled and, indeed, surpassed the scenes in Belgium – viz., Cromwell’s war in Ireland in 1649. For Bishop Phelan, these atrocities were the reason Australia should fight against Germany. The connection between the ‘ruins of Drogheda’ and the ruins of Louvain made Australian participation in the war a moral necessity.
Australia, he stated, was fighting for liberty, civilisation, and the protection of the ‘helpless’.77 Through the alignment of German atrocities with English atrocities in Ireland, atrocity propagandists allowed supporters of the war simultaneously to remain loyal to Irish suffering, and support a war they believed was just. Under the logic of Home Rule, Ireland would be freed from the shadow of English conquest should the Empire prevail. It would, however, only suffer yet another brutal conquest should Germany succeed.
76 ‘Murdering Boer Children’, The Catholic Press, 16 November 1901, p.9. 77 ‘War’s Greatest Sacrifice: the Mother’s Share’, Advocate, 31 July 1915, pp.14-15. 230
In 1915 atrocity stories about German depredations against civilians were at their most effective, particularly after the sinking of the Lusitania and the publication of the Bryce report. For the Irish, the fear of invasion by the Germans overwhelmed the past invasions by the English. The spectre of military abuse of women and children in Belgium loomed large, and Irish propaganda centred upon the potential horror of the Hun on Irish soil.
Posters asked pointed questions of the viewer: ‘have you got a mother, a sister, a girl or a friend worth fighting for? Do you realise that they may share the fate of the daughters of France and Belgium?’78
Moreover, just as the fate of the Boers had seemed so familiar to the
Irish, so too did the fate of the Belgians. Pennell has observed, ‘The use of
Belgium was particularly effective in the Irish case: how could Ireland refuse to defend another small nation and one with whom they shared the bond of religion?’79 One Irish poster quoted Belgium’s Cardinal Désiré-Joseph
Mercier, who had been an active campaigner against the German occupation and atrocities: ‘The example of Ireland has been for centuries before the eyes of Belgium. Your admirable history is a perpetual stimulus for the generations which have seen you at work’.80
78 ‘Have YOU a mother...’, UK-556, Hoover Institution Archives Poster Collection, c.1914- 1918, http://www.politicalposters.hoover.org/browse?page=45&keys=World+War,+1914- 1918--Ireland&country=21422, accessed online 10 January 2016. 79 Pennell, op.cit., p.48. 80 ‘Cardinal Mercier, Ireland’, c. 1914-1918, UK0544, Hoover Institution Archives Poster Collection, http://www.politicalposters.hoover.org/browse?page=33&keys=World+War,+1914-1918- -Ireland&country=21422, accessed online 10 January 2016. 231
And quite simply, the atrocities themselves appalled the Irish. A poster reproduced a speech by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Raphoe, in which he decried the war tactics of Germany:
With all the boasting of civilisation and progress, under the reign of science, no one could anticipate that the civilian population would be so brutally treated in the theatre of war, or that outside that theatre, explosives from the cloud and explosives from the waves would mangle women and children in unfortified positions.81
Irish Australians were equally appalled, and the Irish Catholic media
(with the exception of The Catholic Press) was completely engrossed with the stories that were emerging from Europe. These ranged from concerns that were of particular interest to the Irish Catholic community (the abuse of priests and nuns),82 to the revelations contained in the Bryce report. The abuse of fellow Catholics held a particular fascination, as did the manner in which the Catholic clergy in Europe managed the crisis. The Advocate reproduced a letter from various French Cardinals to Cardinal Mercier in which they condemned the ‘atrocities and murders of which the civil population and the clergy have been the victims’.83 For newspapers such as
Melbourne’s Advocate, atrocities lay at the heart of Irish (and by extension,
Irish Australian) support for the war.
It is, perhaps Germany which is largely responsible for this outburst of Irish feeling, and especially her unspeakable brutalities in Belgium.
81 ‘”The New Paganism”, UK-610, Hoover Institution Archives Poster Collection, c.1914- 1918, http://www.politicalposters.hoover.org/browse?page=0&keys=The+New+Paganism+Raph oe&country=All, accessed online 10 January 2016. 82 See, for example: ‘An Irish Nun’s Story’, Southern Cross, 19 February 1915, p.5. Stories might also emphasise the blasphemous nature of the enemy through headlines such as this ‘Killed in Church on Good Friday. German Long-range Gun Atrocity. Indignation in Rome’, Southern Cross, 5 July 1918, p.18. 83 ‘The French Cardinals to Cardinal Mericer’, Advocate, 27 March 1915, p.9. 232
These atrocities have brought home to Ireland what German militarism really means.84
Irish Australian opposition to the South African War was framed in two ways. Firstly, it was rooted in an identification with the Boer; this sprang in part from Irish nationalist (if not necessarily republican) sentiment.
Secondly, it was opposition was framed within the language of liberal humanitarianism, through an abhorrence of the camps and the dehumanisation of the Boers. Liberal ideals therefore sat at the core of both rejection of the South African War, and at the heart of support for the Great
War. Thus, prominent Irish Australians who had condemned the South
African War became supporters of the First World War.
Liberalism, imperialism and Irish Australian support for the war
Individuals such as Henry Bournes Higgins, a prominent Irish Australian, consistently applied liberal idealism to both conflicts. An exploration of his reasoning for condemning the South African War, and supporting the Great
War provides an important insight into the ideological framework in which some Irish Australians viewed the two conflicts. Higgins was a prominent
Irish Australian liberal who, like Charles Parnell, was Church of Ireland, rather than Catholic.85 Higgins ended his controversial career as a Victorian politician when he became a justice of the High Court of Australia.86 The
84 ‘Ireland and the War’, Advocate, 8 may 1915, p.11. 85 Irish nationalism was by no means solely a Catholic sentiment. During the era in which Home Rule was being promoted by Liberals as a solution to the Irish question, a number of prominent Irish Nationalist Protestants had seats in parliament – ie. Sir John Gray (owner of the Irish nationalist newspaper the Freeman’s Journal) and Horace Plunkett. 86 J. Rickard, ‘Higgins, Henry Bournes (1851-1929)’. Australian Dicitonary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/higgins-henry-bournes-6662, published first in hardcopy 1983, accessed online 8 January 2016. 233
‘roots of Higgins’ politics was Gladstonian Liberalism’87 and he was a vigorous supporter of Home Rule.88 Higgins’ liberalism had led him to vocally condemn the South African War in the Victorian parliament.
On the 10th October 1899, the Legislative Assembly of the Victorian
Parliament debated a motion introduced by Sir George Turner who wished to send a small contingent of Victorian men to assist the ‘Imperial army in the Transvaal’.89 In his speech opposing the motion, Higgins presented the
Empire as a bully preying on a weak nation:
I feel that we are casting a dishonour upon ourselves and on this Australian nation by going to the help of the stronger against the weaker, when, to say the least of it, the merits of the quarrel are doubtful. You are helping the most powerful empire of the world against a nation of some 30,000 men – there are 100,000 altogether, men, women and children – and I confess I do not like the idea. 90
Higgins’ objections to the South African War were clear and consistent. The
Great War, however, presented Higgins with a difficult moral dilemma. As
Higgins was the President of the Australian Peace Alliance in 1914 it is unsurprising that he was initially reluctant to support the Great War. As
Higgins’ biographer John Rickard has observed, ‘the principles which served so heroically and, in an inner sense, so successfully in the argument about the South African War were all but swamped by the sheer magnitude of the moral problem posed by the European conflict’. Higgins, however, could not
87 P. M. Grant, Henry Bournes Higgins, Victorian Liberal, 1851-1901, MA, University of Melbourne, 1975, p.93. 88 Ibid., p. 3. 89 10 October 1899, Victoria Parliamentary Debates, Session 1899-1900, Legislative Council and Legislative Assembly, Vol. 87, Melbourne, Robt S. Brain, Government Printer, 1900, p.1727. 90 10 October 1899, Victoria Parliamentary Debates, Session 1899-1900, Legislative Council and Legislative Assembly, Vol. 87, Melbourne, Robt S. Brain, Government Printer, 1900, p. 1778. 234
‘retreat into total pacifism’, and so reluctantly came to support the First
World War. 91 For Higgins, the issue of Belgium made his support for the conflict ethically unavoidable. Following the publication of the Bryce report he stated, ‘…the sacrifice of Belgium at the hands of the Hun called for action, and action had to be taken’. He continued,
The utterances of German statesmen…show conclusively that they conceded it to be the destiny of Germany to dominate the world, and to that end to bring the British empire to heel, and for that purpose to kill as many men and massacre as many women and children as they might find expedient.92
Higgins came to regard the German military machine as a global threat to peace. He believed that Germany was ‘trying to establish a military hegemony over Europe…and it was necessary for all democratic countries to unite in repelling the attack’.93 Well into the conflict, Belgium remained ‘the pivot’ of Higgins’ argument for pursuing the war. 94 His liberal ideals made his support of the war unavoidable. So too, perhaps, did friendships with
British liberals– he was in contact with Bryce throughout the conflict, and even corresponded with him about Allied and German propaganda that he had encountered in Italy in 1916.95
Another Irish Australian who was strongly influenced by liberal ideals in his approach to the war was poet Christopher Brennan, who had followed a similar pattern to Higgins, in that he abhorred the South African
War and supported the First World War. In contrast to Higgins, Brennan
91 Rickard, op.cit., pp. 224-225. 92 ‘Mr Justice Higgins on the war’, The Australasian, 8 May 1915, p.26. 93 N. Palmer, Henry Bourne Higgins, a memoir, London, George G. Harrap and Co., 1931, p.258. 94 Rickard, op.cit., p.221. 95 H.B. Higgins to J Bryce, 18 July 1916, MS 3732 N.L.A. 235
was an Irish Catholic. He was, however, like Brennan, a supporter of Home
Rule.96 Australian literature scholar Andrew Lynch has interpreted
Brennan’s condemnation of the South African War and subsequent support of the First World War as a move from an anti-war to a pro-war position.97
Brennan’s two different responses to these wars were, in fact, consistent when regarded within a liberal imperialist framework: where one war was imperial bullying, the other was a war fought to uphold an Empire that supported the rights of small nations and Home Rule.
Brennan had been ‘disturbed by Australia’s participation’ in the
South African War.98 He was disgusted by jingoistic Imperialism, and described poetry that employed jingoism as ‘sad stuff’.99 Like the Bulletin,
Brennan also disliked the way Australian participation in the war was being used as ‘a badge of its newly federated nationhood’.100 Between 1901 and
1903 he wrote a series of poems criticising the conflict. The Burden of Tyre condemned the war as an ‘imperial connivance’.101 The jingoistic celebrations of Mafeking were also censured:
Why are these streets aflare? – Today We are born a folk. – What love begot? – - Our mother’s need. – Whither? – To slay: - See now wherewith our hand is hot.102
96 ‘The Chant of Doom’, Maryborough Chronicle, Wide Bay and Burnett Advertiser, 28 November 1918, p.3. 97 A. Lynch, ‘C.J. Brennan’s A Chant of Doom’, Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 23., Iss. 1., 2007, p.51. 98 Ibid., p.50. 99 Brennan quoted in Lynch, op.cit., p. 50. 100 Ibid.., p.50. 101 Ibid., p.50. 102 The Burden of Tyre quoted in, op.cit., Lynch p.51. 236
Brennan’s support for the Great War was tied to his commitment to Home
Rule and also to a deep repugnance of German atrocities. Lynch has written,
‘Brennan’s war is purely about civilisation versus barbarism’.103 In 1915,
Brennan began on a series of poems that supported the war. These were collected in a publication at the end of the war called A Chant of Doom.
Described by Brennan’s biographer Axel Clark as ‘incomparably the worst poetry’ he had ever produced, A Chant of Doom nonetheless sold very well.
104 During the conflict, the poems collected in A Chant of Doom were also reproduced in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Daily Telegraph and The Lone
Hand.105 Norman Lindsay stated that the title-poem was ‘the finest expression of a mighty anger against all that Germany meant…It is Homeric.
A godlike expression of man’s just wrath’.106 Described as the Allied version of the German poem Hymn of Hate, Brennan’s poem was ‘the concentrated essence of scorn’ for the atrocity-committing Germans. These were the men, according to the poem ‘Who reck not of the living orphan’s curse, the slow wrath of the dead’. The poem continued, ‘German hate and German lust –
Bring the Beast into the dust’.107
In contrast to Ryan and Mannix (whose perspectives will be explored in detail later), Brennan remained committed to the war long after the
Easter Rising. In late 1917 Brennan wrote a letter to the Sydney Morning
103 Ibid., p.56. 104 A. Clark, ‘Brennan, Christopher John (1870-1932)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/brennan-christopher-john-5345, published first in hardcopy 1979, accessed online 9 January 2016. 105 Lynch, op.cit., p.49. 106 Norman Lindsay quoted in: A. Clark, Christopher Brennan: A critical biography, Melbourne, University of Melbourne Press, 1980, p.219. 107 ‘”The Chant of Doom”, The Daily News, 18 December 1918, p.7. 237
Herald in which he condemned what he called ‘Mannixism’. This was ‘the glorification of Sinn Fein, with its German alliance, and its betrayal of civilisation, and that “sordid” phrase which I shall not set down here’ (here
Brennan was referring to Mannix’s notorious statement that the Great War was ‘a sordid trade war’). Brennan’s purpose in writing the article was to urge people to ignore Mannix and vote for conscription. His was the perspective of a man who was ‘Irish in blood and bone’, and who believed that Sinn Fein had sinned in their alliance with Germany. For this, they were traitors.108
Brennan’s commitment to the war stemmed from his belief that the
Germans were a menace to civilisation. In this, Brennan mirrored the viewpoints of many Irish Australians who supported the war. In contrast, radical republican groups such as Sin Fein were ‘small, powerless and irrelevant’.109 While Fenianism was touted as a credible threat to the
Australia war effort by sectarian fear-mongers, it was not, in fact a perspective that many Irish Australians shared. Certainly, Fenian sentiment increased markedly as the war continued, and it did so in conjunction with a number of other factors which increased opposition to the war. For example, as I discuss in Chapter Six, the standard of living declined as the war progressed. Moreover, after serious defeats with high casualties on the
Western Front in 1917, more Australians were inclined to support a negotiated peace. Irish Australian responses to the war therefore need to be understood within this context.
108 ‘Dr Mannix’, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 December 1917, p.8. 109 O’Ferrall, op.cit., p.254. 238
The limits of liberal consensus
The liberal consensus supporting the war began to decline as the British government found itself embroiled in complex and deadly politics in Ireland.
The first political issue was Home Rule, the second was the British response to the Easter Rising, and the third was the tying of conscription in Ireland to the Home Rule Bill. The most notorious of these factors was the Easter
Rising, the impact of which was exaggerated by sectarian critics of Irish
Catholics during the war. While there was Protestant suspicion of Catholics throughout the conflict, both the Easter Rising and the following two conscription campaigns increased the charges of disloyalty that were being directed at Irish Australians.110 The violence of the Easter Rising, in which
2,000 armed Irish Republicans took over the centre of Dublin, shocked many
– including those within the Irish Australian community.111 However, the few Catholic voices that supported the Rising attained disproportionate attention in the media, and this fed into pre-existing anti-Catholic sentiment.
Daniel Mannix, for example, refused to unconditionally condemn the rebellion, and this served only to fuel ‘sectarian calumnies’.112 Stephanie
James has written ‘the whole community stood condemned of imperial disloyalty’ because of the ‘betrayal of a few Irishmen’.113
Another significant critic of the British response to the Rising was
Ryan, the editor of The Catholic Press. After the execution of the Easter
110 J. Griffin, Daniel Mannix: Beyond the Myths, Victoria, Garrett Publishing, 2012, p.141. 111 J.C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland 1603-1923, London, Faber and Faber, 1981, p.441. 112 Griffin, op.cit., p. 146. 113 James, op.cit., p. 115. 239
Rising leaders, the Catholic Press ‘insisted the question of the hour was not whether Ireland was loyal to England but whether England was loyal to
Ireland’. 114 This same question continued to be asked of England by Irish
Australian critics of the war. England was being judged upon the same liberal criteria as Germany, and it was consistently failing to match its liberal rhetoric to its actions. Those who began to question the war believed that in
Ireland, England had failed to uphold the rights of small nations, and the rights of non-combatants.
The shooting of civilians by British forces during the rebellion was the subject of some attention in both Ireland and Australia. Supporters of
Sinn Fein adopted the great liberal weapon that had been wielded so effectively against the Germans - reports and allegations of atrocities. They produced a small pamphlet that aped the language and tactics of the Bryce report. A Fragment of 1916 History quoted eye-witnesses who attested to the brutality of Imperial troops and the civilised conduct of Sinn Fein.
Captain R.K. Bereton, an English soldier who was a prisoner of Sinn Finn, reportedly stated in May 1916:
What impressed me most was the international tone adopted by the Sinn Fein officers. They were not out for massacre…they were out for war, observing all the rules of civilised warfare and fighting clean.115
The pamphlet then detailed the death of non-combatants who had been killed by the British military. Of the North King Street Massacres, the
114 Griffin, op.cit., p.146. 115 A Fragment of 1916 History, no publisher or author named, 1916, p.3, collection of Dublin Diocesan Archives, http://source.southdublinlibraries.ie/handle/10599/11507, accessed online 21 January 2016.. 240
pamphlet’s authors stated, ‘These 15 unoffending citizens were murdered by the military under circumstances which mark the crime as a cold-blooded and calculated atrocity hardly equalled in the blackest annals of warfare’.116
The deaths of civilians during the insurrection were an uncomfortable reminder to Irish Australians of the potential ruthlessness of the British government towards the Irish. In May 1918, the story of Sheehy Skeffington was circulated. Skeffington had reportedly been placing placards ‘calling upon the people to desist from looting’ before he was shot by the British.
Another two journalists had also been shot.117 An extract from Dublin newspaper the Freeman’s Journal (republished in Southern Cross) asserted that the court-martialled officer responsible had killed several other men and one boy. Other deaths remained unanswered and ‘the promised investigation into the deaths of the men killed in their own homes in North
King Street has already been too long postponed.’ 118
By September 1916, the Catholic Press had begun to question the commitment of the British liberals to liberal ideology in relation to Ireland:
Mr. Asquith’s fine platitudes in his speech at the Albert Hall the other day about the plight of Belgium and Great Britain’s share in restoring to her people their freedom had a very hollow sound when contrasted with the English Government’s unconciliatory treatment of another small nationality subject to its rule…Did he think of the hundreds and hundreds of innocent Irish occupants of the British detention camps, taken there and confined without any charge or even a scrap of evidence against them when he dwelt upon the deportations of the Belgians by the Germans?119
116 Ibid., p. 4. 117 ‘The Rebellion in Dublin: Dramatic Incidents. Scene in Parliament’ The Catholic Press, 18 May 1916, p.19. 118 ‘Sinn Fein Sidelights: the shooting cases’, Southern Cross, 11 August 1916, pp.4-5. 119 ‘Sir John Maxwell: his lame apology’, The Catholic Press, 21 September 1916, p.16. 241
The response of The Catholic Press to the uprising was much stronger than other Irish Catholic newspapers and does not appear to have been representative of Irish Australian opinion. It is important to note that that
Rising does not appear to have had a marked effect upon Irish Australian enlistment. Both Robson and Jeff Kildea have demonstrated that the number of Irish-born Australians who enlisted after the Easter Rising did not, in fact, decrease. Indeed, Irish Australian enlistment was closely tied to enlistment within the general community, and declined at a similar rate as support for the war decreased throughout Australia.120 This decline occurred alongside the fading hope of Home Rule and the ham-fisted suggestions of introducing conscription in Ireland. The Easter Rising therefore did not necessarily change the majority of Irish Australian opinion about the war. It did, however, drive a wedge between Protestant and
Catholic Australia.121 It also sharpened the rhetorical weapons of the Irish
Australians who came to oppose the war. Thus, Irish Australians, already viewed ‘as barely loyal’ by some members of the Australian community, became completely suspect in the eyes of some vehement Protestants.122
Neville Meaney has proposed that the ongoing failure of the British government to implement Home Rule and the ‘summary executions’ of the
Easter Rising insurgents had aggravated previously loyal Irish Catholic
Australians towards some measure of hostility ‘towards British policy in
120 L.L. Robson, ‘The Origin and Character of the First AIF, 1914-1918: Some Statistical Evidence’, Historical Studies, Col.15., No.61, 1973, pp. 740-741 J. Kildea, Anzacs and Ireland, Sydney, NewSouth, 2007, p.87. 121 R. Bollard, In the Shadow of Gallipoli: The Hidden history of Australia in World War I, Sydneym NewSouth, 2013, p. 100. 122 James, op.cit., 114. 242
Ireland’. The result was that the conscription campaigns in Australia had become inextricably connected in the minds of some Irish Australians with
‘Britain’s treatment of Ireland’. As an example, Meaney cited Queenslander
John Fihelly’s powerful outburst. The acting Minister for Justice had stated that ‘every Australian recruit means another soldier to assist the British government to harass the people of Ireland’.123
Filhelly’s response must be read not just in connection with the
Easter Rising, but also in connection with the frustration Irish Australians felt as the promise of Home Rule faded, which was a serious issue, as Home
Rule had been central in securing Irish support for the war. John Redmond had believed the war was an opportunity for Ireland to demonstrate its
‘loyalty and convince unionists they had nothing to fear from Home Rule’.124
He hoped that the cause of the war would meld together the various political, ethnic and religious groups in Ireland that were locked into hostile relationships. David Fitzpatrick has explained:
In urging Home Rulers to participate in the war, John Redmond had hoped to eradicate lingering national and religious hostilities through the agency of personal contact. If Ulstermen, Home Rulers, Englishmen and Scotsmen fought together, their growing comradeship and mutual admiration would allay their mutual suspicions and those of politicians at home.125
This sentiment was shared by many Irish Australians. Even The Catholic
Press, which was to later express such coruscating rage against the Empire,
123 Meaney, op.cit., p.32. 124 Kildea, op.cit., p.13. 125 D. Fitzpatrick, ‘The Overflow of the Deluge’, in O. MacDonagh and W.F. Mandle (eds.), Ireland and Irish-Australia: studies in cultural and political history, Australia, Croom Helm, 1986, p.83. 243
had greeted the outbreak of the conflict with some relief, as it had seemingly averted the potential civil war that was brewing in Ireland over the issue of
Home Rule. In the lead up to the Home Rule bill, two separate groups supporting two different perspectives began to arm themselves. The Ulster
Volunteers, backed in parliament by unionist Sir Edward Carson, and the
Irish Volunteers, who were loosely under the aegis of John Redmond’s party, had both engaged in displays of armed force. Efforts to reconcile the two opposing groups had failed. However, ‘at the last minute’,the crisis was deferred, and its character changed, by the outbreak of the war in
Europe’.126 Both Redmond and Carson reluctantly agreed to set aside the dispute, and focus upon the war effort.127
The Catholic Press was elated by this turn of events: ‘Today, as if by magic, the Irish Volunteer armies are united in defence of their country against a common enemy. The forces that were a menace yesterday are today a blessing’. The newspaper continued in this optimistic vein,
…for the new day has already dawned when the democracies of England and Ireland are united in inseparable friendship, when the centuries-old suspicion and hostility that brought misery and death in their train have disappeared, and a true union has been founded between the two divided countries on the principle of constitutional freedom.128
The political logic of support for the war also meshed well with contemporary Australian politics, and matched Irish Australian conceptions of Empire. ‘Redmond’s stand’, Campbell has written, ‘appeared as yet a
126 Beckett, op.cit., pp. 424-434. 127 Ibid., p.435. 128 ‘Ireland in the War: the national volunteers’, The Catholic Press, 13 August 1914, p.26. 244
further vindication of the argument put so often in the past by moderate
Australian-based nationalists, that the granting of home rule to Ireland would in fact prove beneficial to England and the Empire, as well as to
Ireland itself’.129
However, just as the promise of Home Rule was crucial towards securing support, failure by the British government to implement it became a reason to oppose the conflict. So obvious was the need for the British to honour Home Rule, that even conservative journalist Keith Murdoch was concerned by its failure to deliver it. In May 1918 Melbourne’s Catholic newspaper the Tribune discussed an article by Murdoch:
…[Murdoch] points out that the British people have promised justice to all small nations, and announced as a war aim the freedom of all peoples. The Allied nations are now asking England to reconcile this statement with her treatment of Ireland...Mr Murdoch has this to say: “Without taking sides on the Irish question,…one can readily agree that the British part in the war would be immensely strengthened by an Irish settlement. It would not only bring new battalions, financial aid, and moral support from Irishmen all over the world, but it would clear the air about our un-Imperialistic war aims.”130
Murdoch was correct: the British failure to implement Home Rule was making their justifications for the war seem increasingly hollow. This failure delivered rhetorical weapons of great power to those who believed the British were being hypocritical. One month later The Catholic Press directly compared the German breaching of Belgian neutrality with the
British incapacity to deliver Home Rule. The headline, ‘Home Rule: “A Scrap
129 Campbell, op.cit., p.80. 130 ‘Home Rule has World Interest’, Tribune, 2 May 1918, p.4. 245
of Paper”’ was a clear indictment of what they believed to be British liberal hypocrisy. The article stated, ‘We have heard a great deal about the Belgian treaty, which the German Government treated as a “scrap of paper”’. It continued, ‘What are we to think of the Home Rule Act’, an Act which, the author stated, had meant that Irishmen had ‘responded at once to Britain’s call to arms’. Britain had committed a grievous ‘breach of faith’.131
Archbishop Mannix and The Catholic Press ultimately rejected the liberal justifications for the war that had appealed so strongly to both the
Irish and Irish Australians. The most striking example of this was their lack of engagement with atrocity propaganda. In contrast to newspapers such
Southern Cross and the Advocate, The Catholic Press was inured to the power of atrocity propaganda. Part of this is perhaps due to the limits of liberal influence upon the newspapers. As discussed earlier, The Catholic Press welcomed the war as a solution to an Irish problem – the potential civil war looming over Home Rule. It did not, like Adelaide’s Southern Cross, welcome the war for altruistic reasons, one in which Belgian nuns, international treaties and the libraries of Louvain would be defended. At the outset of the war the Southern Cross had immediately seized upon Grey’s liberal justification for the conflict, writing, ‘No doubt Germany feels that she will now have to fight for her very existence, and hence she is not scrupulous as to how she violates treaties or the neutrality of small nations like
Belgium’.132
131 ‘Home Rule: “A Scrap of Paper”, The Catholic Press, 27 June 1918, p.26. 132 ‘England Declares War’, Southern Cross, 7 August 1914, p.11. 246
In contrast, Ryan’s chief preoccupation had been with the political health of Ireland, and his newspaper was highly sceptical about German atrocities. One headline read, ‘Are most of the Stories of German atrocities untrue? Yes; says a Famous Correspondent’. The reporter described his experience attempting to wrest the truth from witnesses,
Everyday for 20 odd days fresh stories of almost unmentionable hideousness were brought to me, all tricked out with details calculated to curdle the blood in your veins; but the bearers of these tales were not prepared to back them up with even fairly good hearsay evidence.133
Another article reproduced a piece by British author Jerome K. Jerome who stated ‘Half these stories of atrocities I do not believe.’ These reports,
Jerome felt, were ‘an insult to our intelligence. At Louvain 50 of the inhabitants were taken out and shot. On Monday the 50 had grown to 500’.
The war, he believed, brought out madness and fear. To believe the atrocities stories was to ‘build up barriers of hatred that shall stand between our children and our foemen’s children’. This was ‘a crime against the future’.134
Following the sinking of the Lusitania, the newspaper published a measured response, and unlike the other Irish Catholic newspapers, and refrained from using it as an opportunity to condemn the Germans and exalt the Allies:
133 ‘Are Most of the Stories of German Atrocities Untrue? Yes; says a Famous Correspondent’, The Catholic Press, 31 December 1914, p.7. 134 Jerome K .Jerome, ‘Are the Germans fiends? Bogus Atrocities’, The Catholic Press, 29 October 1914, p.16. 247
‘…we cannot expect that there will be no reprisals, and that the Allies will fight with less severity than the enemy. The Lusitania tragedy will undoubtedly loose the maddest passions; it will naturally inflame our men in the trenches as it has inflamed our citizens at home, and it cannot fail to influence the military and naval authorities towards a policy of equally dreadfulness….Nor can we believe that the desolation of Belgium will not be awfully avenged when our own troops cross the German frontiers’.135
Under Ryan’s editorship the conflict was not presented as a war fought against a savage other. It was a war essentially fought to achieve a political goal (Home Rule) and when it became clear that the goal was unattainable
The Catholic Press turned to Sinn Fein and Irish republicanism. In March
1918, The Catholic Press published a pro-Sinn Fein article in response to a chauvinistic article published in the Daily Telegraph. ‘The betrayal of Irish hopes, the treason of Carson…the threats of martial law’ had all worked to lead the party towards a militant stance. The article concluded, ‘Sinn Fein methods may produce better conditions. Certainly they cannot cause worse’.136
The newspaper completely lost patience with the British government in response to its attempt to introduce conscription into Ireland, which had been a fatal mistake. ‘It was the action of the government itself’, Beckett has observed, ‘in proposing to apply military conscription to Ireland that finally confirmed the popular influence of Sinn Fein’.137 The Catholic Press connected the introduction of conscription with the demise of Home Rule.
In using the title ‘The Torpedoing of Home Rule’, The Catholic Press implied
135 ‘The Horrors of War, present and past’, The Catholic Press, 13 May 1915, p.26. 136 ‘St Patrick’s Day: the sneer at Sinn Fein’, The Catholic Press, 21 March 1918, p.26. 137 Beckett, op.cit., p. 444. 248
that the destruction of the bill was the moral equivalent of the German atrocities at sea:
The heated debate on Mr. Lloyd George’s Military Service bill made it clear that the measure was an utter sham, from the standpoint of what it purported to be – a means of increasing the manpower for the fighting forces, which the real object of the Bill, which was to be a lethal instrument for application of the Irish aspirations for Home Rule, was exposed in its perfect nakedness. There can now be no doubt that the actual purpose of the Bill was to play the reactionary game.138
In August, the newspaper’s level of invective increased when it ran an article titled ‘A Foul Act of Treachery: Killing Home Rule’.139 In its outspoken condemnation of the British failure to grant Home Rule, The Catholic Press was closely allied with Mannix. While both parties were flagrantly ‘disloyal’ in their approach to the war, Mannix was perhaps more so in that his rhetoric at times mirrored that of Hughes’ most dire enemy – the international socialists. And like the socialists (whose disdain for atrocity propaganda is explored in the following chapter), Mannix refused to be drawn into considering the atrocities against the Belgians as a justification for war.
Hughes explicitly connected Mannix to the more radical elements of the labour movement in a pamphlet issued to Australian soldiers for the
1917 conscription referendum. Hughes wrote,
…behind Dr. Mannix are arrayed the Independent [sic] Workers of the World , and the reckless extremists responsible for the recent
138 ‘The Torpedoing of Home Rule, Lloyd George’s Game’, The Catholic Press, 4 July 1918, p.6. 139 ‘A Foul Act of Treachery. Killing Home Rule’, The Catholic Press, 29 August 1918, p.15. 249
strike, the pacifists and the pro-Germans. It is this type of men who are urging you to vote ‘No’ on this referendum.140
In relation to Mannix’s sympathies with militant labour, Hughes was not entirely exaggerating, as he had developed a strong socialist perspective on the war. In August 1917 he stated to a meeting regarding the emancipation of the worker, ‘The people who had made this war were the people who stood today for the capitalists. If it were not for the capitalists…there would be no war now’.141 This speech was typical of those Mannix delivered later in the conflict, as it was then that he ‘gave increasing emphasis to working- class, and, at times, radical arguments’.142 Mannix is perhaps most remembered for his outspoken role in the two conscription referenda. To discuss this in detail is beyond the scope of this thesis. Suffice it to say, that he was a prominent anti-conscription campaigner and that his utterances were challenged with great vigour and not a small amount of vitriol by pro- conscriptionists.143
Val Noone has recently proposed that Mannix had been ‘radicalised’ by the ‘working-class strongholds of Melbourne’ where his diocese was located.144 For three years during the conflict Mannix lived in close proximity to working class families ‘whose sons and husbands were dying at a fast rate in a distant war’. One of Mannix’s roles during this time was, along with his curates, to deliver personally the news of a soldiers’ death to
140 ‘Hughes’s Manifesto printed in Canada’, The Catholic Press, 24 January 1918, p.25. 141 ‘War and the Worker: Archbishop Mannix on Capitalism and the War’, The Catholic Press, 30 August 1917, p.23. 142 V. Noone, ‘Class Factors in the Radicalisation of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, 1913-17’, Labour History, No. 106, 2014, p.199. 143 Ibid., p.189. 144 Ibid., p.190. 250
their family - Noone estimates that this would probably have happened several times a month. This along with a friendship with anti-war and anti- conscription activist and Irish Catholic Frank Brennan, were ‘factors in his radicalisation’. 145 In early 1917, Mannix dismissed the war as either an
‘ordinary trade war’, or a ‘sordid trade war’.146 Regardless of the precise phrasing, Mannix had definitely reduced the war to one that was about money and capital, rather than altruistic ideals. He said, ‘The invasion of
Belgium was the spark that lighted the fire in Great Britain. But it was useless to shut one’s eyes to all that went before. Trade jealousy was long leading to a trade war’.147
Thus Mannix’s position on the war changed, not only as he was
‘radicalised’, but also as the situation in Ireland deteriorated. After the
Easter Rising, Mannix ‘declared himself a Sinn Feiner’.148 For Mannix, the moral pact between Ireland and the English had been destroyed by the conduct of the British following the Rising. He said, ‘A war that was just in the beginning might become unjust before its close’.149 He continued, ‘Was it wrong to refer to Ireland as a small nation, and to ask that, when fighting for the rights of other small nations, they should see and insist that justice was done to the small nation at their door?’150
145 Ibid., p.194. 146 Griffin, op.cit., pp.160-163. 147 ‘”The coadjutor at Brunswick: New Christian Brothers’ School Opened: War and Unemployment’, Advocate, 3 February 1917, pp. 12-13. 148 B. Niall, Mannix, Melbourne, Text Publishing, 2015, p.88. 149 ‘Archbishop Mannix and the War’, The Catholic Press, 15 March 1917, p.25. 150 ‘Archbishop Mannix and the War’, The Catholic Press, 15 March 1917, p.25. 251
Mannix’s sympathy for the liberal rhetoric supporting the war was extremely limited. Indeed, throughout the course of the war Mannix rarely mentioned the atrocities, and when he did mention Belgium it was generally in relation to Ireland. His devastating rhetoric consistently drew attention to the hypocrisy of British liberal justifications for the war. At an enormous meeting organised by the Young Ireland Society, an Irish nationalist movement, Mannix systematically challenged Britain’s just war rhetoric.
Over 100,000 people attended the meeting, which was held at Richmond
Racecourse in late 1917. Of the war, Mannix stated
We have been asked – young men and even old men – to rush to Europe to avenge the wrongs of Belgium and the other small nations, and the call has not gone unheeded. But there is a nation whose scars are deeper than Belgium’s scars. Her daughters have been ill-treated, and her shrines and churches have been laid in ruins – and that not by Turks or Austrians or Germans. There is a nation which, we fear, may still remain in slavery when a peace conference has righted the wrongs of Belgium.151
While Mannix was a prominent figure of the Irish Catholic community, his views were not necessarily representative of how Irish Australians related to the war. Mannix’s sympathy with Sinn Fein, for example, caused some embarrassment to other Irish Catholics. Justice Charles Heydon was mortified, and wrote an open letter in the Sydney Morning Herald in which he condemned Mannix’s views and the negative impact of those views upon the Irish Catholic community.152 At the heart of charges of disloyalty,
151 Mannix’s speech quoted in: J. Franklin, G. O. Nolan, M. Gilchrist, The Real Archbishop Mannix from the Sources, Melbourne, Connor Court, 1915, p.30. 152 J.M. Bennett and M. Rutledge, ‘Heydon, Charles Gilbert (1845-1932)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/heydon-charles-gilbert-1103, published first in hardcopy 1913, accessed online 5 January 2016. 252
however, lay not just the spectre of Sinn Fein, but the accusation that Irish
Australians condoned the atrocities committed by the Germans. The war was for many a manifestly just war, and Belgium and the atrocities lay at the heart of the justness of the cause. Heydon challenged Mannix,
Cardinal Mercier, in maintaining the resistance of his Belgian people to the German invaders, has to take the ground, the demonstrably just ground, that the Germans are not in Belgium a lawful authority, but a set of bloody and cruel and tyrannical invaders and treaty breakers. Will Archbishop Mannix dare to say that the Empire stands in that relation in Australia? …will he still tell me that Australia should put herself above freedom, liberty, and righteousness?153
One of the main weapons used against Irish Catholics who were suspected of
‘disloyalty’ was the charge that they did not care about the atrocities. Frank
Brennan was accused by the Argus of wishing to apply ‘the influence of conciliation and arbitration to the fiends who have been guilty of the atrocities’.154 Brennan believed The Argus had thereby painted him as a man who ‘was willing to argue with fiends, as being complacent at the sufferings of my countrymen and their allies’.155 The tactic of pinning disloyalty onto the Irish through their apparent lack of concern about German atrocities, increased in pitch and frequency as the war continued.
On the eve of the second conscription referendum, Hughes claimed
Mannix ‘had never contributed one penny towards the relief of the Belgian
153 ‘Dr. Mannix’s Attitude. Mr. Justice Heydon’s Criticism’, The Daily Mail, 19 December 1917, p.5. 154 ‘Thursday, July 8 1915’, The Argus, 8 July 1915, p.8. 155 ‘Mr Brennan explains: statement in parliament’, the Advocate, 17 July 1915, p.16. 253
nuns and people’.156 On another occasion an Anglican Archdeacon gave a sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral to claim that Mannix would have readily adjusted to life under the Kaiser, should the Allies lose. In a satirical letter to
Kaiser Wilhelm, the Archdeacon had an imaginary Mannix state: ‘I have the honour to present this copy of my published speeches for the past three years. I draw your attention to the absence…of a word of condemnation of
German atrocities’.157 This lack of interest perhaps contributed to pro- conscription propaganda that associated Sinn Feinism with a callous disregard for humanity. The Anti’s Creed, which was also published in the
1917 referendum, directly associated Sinn Feinism with a callous disregard for the civilians killed by the German forces:
I believe it was right to sink the Lusitania… I believe in Sinn Fein… I believe in the massacre of Belgian priests. I believe in the murder of women, and baby-killing. I believe that Nurse Cavell got her desserts I believe that treachery is a virtue.158
The German atrocities and how they were discussed by Irish Australia stood at the heart of charges of disloyalty. For those Irish Australians who continued to support the conflict, the behaviour of Great Britain towards
Ireland while gravely disappointing, did not over-ride the immediate threat posed to Western civilisation by German militarism. From poet Christopher
Brennan to High Court Justice Henry Bourne Higgins, these Irish Australians believed that the greater enemy to a liberal and tolerant world was
156 ‘Archbisop Mannix and Belgium. Reply to Mr. Hughes’, Freeman’s Journal, 20 December 1917, p.22. 157 ‘”Address to the Kaiser” If Germany Won’, Morning Bulletin, 8 September 1917, p.8. 158 The Anti’s Creed, Reinforcements Referendum Council, Melbourne, 1917, Leaflet collection 2/1/1 collection of the A.W.M. 254
Germany, not Great Britain. At the core of these beliefs was an over-riding abhorrence of the atrocities that had been reportedly committed by German forces. So too, was a deep engagement with liberal conceptions of nationhood and war. From the South African War onwards, liberal conceptions of the rights of small nations had preoccupied Irish Australians.
However, for people such as Archbishop Mannix and Ryan, the bestowal of Home Rule was the main preoccupation. Like Ryan at The
Catholic Press, Mannix was supportive of the Great War at the beginning of the conflict partly because it united Ireland, and partly because he believed
Ireland desperately needed Home Rule. In September 1914 he delivered a speech in which he condemned the English government for not using a
‘stronger hand’ in enforcing Home Rule earlier. However, if the war brought about a ‘ better union in Ireland’ there was reason to rejoice. In addition,
Mannix’s support (like Ryan’s) hinged in part upon the eventual granting of
Home Rule by England. 159 As it became increasingly clear that the British government was not going to do so, Mannix’s rhetoric about the war became increasingly bitter.
At a September mass meeting Mannix stated that, in relation to Home
Rule, it was ‘now or never’. If Home Rule was not going to be delivered during the war, there was, he stated merely ‘a faint hope’ of it being bestowed after the end of hostilities.160 In November, Mannix repeated his belief that it was now or never for Home Rule – and added, ‘The Irish people
159 ‘Home Rule and the War’, Advocate, 5 September 1914, p.29. 160 ‘Irish Demonstration: Archbishop Mannix on Home Rule’, The Grenfell Record and Lachlan District Advertiser, 9 November 1917, p.2. 255
had been told to keep quiet until the war was over, then they might get
Home Rule, but it was possible, even then, that the question might be shelved’.161
For those such as Mannix and Ryan, who eventually came to regard the war as an extension of English exploitation of Ireland, the atrocities had never been at the centre of their support for the war. These men initially lent their support to the war because there was a hope that the conflict would ultimately benefit Ireland through the granting of some form of independence. However, liberal justifications rang increasingly hollow following the execution of the Easter Rising leaders – for Mannix and Ryan, it seemed clear that the British were going to continue to violently subjugate
Ireland. Following the demise of Home Rule, Ryan in particular became openly ‘disloyal’ and scathing about the war.
Liberalism therefore had a powerful impact on the Irish Australian community. It helped to sustain support for the war through multiple damaging episodes in Ireland, and also through the two conscription referenda in Australia. The anti-war rhetoric of the South African War about the rights of small nations and the inhumanity of concentration camps was transformed into a pro-war position. The atrocities against the Belgians were a deep and constant preoccupation in many newspapers throughout the war. The soft liberal imperialism of Murray and Bryce reconciled Irish
Australian hopes for Irish independence with support for a war being
161 ‘Home Rule for Ireland: Archbishop Mannix’s Declaration’, The Maitland Weekly Mercury, 10 November 1917, p.7. 256
prosecuted by the British Empire. However, the impact of liberalism upon
Irish Australians who wished first and foremost to see Ireland gain some measure of independence was limited. As is discussed in the following chapter, the acceptance or rejection of liberal justifications for war also lay at the centre of the division within the labour movement about the Great
War. As with the Irish Australian community, the liberal lexicon of just war that was used to justify the Great War was established within the labour movement during the South African War. The next chapter examines the extent and also the limitations of liberal conceptions of just war on the
Australian labour movement. This provides new insights into the political divisions that dogged the labour movement, and also the Labor Party, throughout the course of the Great War.
257
CHAPTER FIVE The division in the labour movement over the First World War: liberalism, socialism, atrocity propaganda and Empire
At the outbreak of the First World War, the majority of the Australian labour movement supported the war and offered ‘scarcely a whimper’ of opposition.1 This support for the war has recently been characterised by some Australian historians as a jettisoning of core Labor values in favour of shallow patriotism and unhealthy pragmatism. Peter Love has stated that the labour movement was divided between workers who ‘responded to the call of country’ and those who remained committed to the class struggle.2
‘Waves of patriotic sentiment’ had banished good socialist sense from those who supported the imperial cause.3 Verity Burgmann has also recently stated that while the Australian Labor Party had ‘traditional doubts and qualms about militarist exploits abroad’ these had ‘unfortunately’ been overcome.4 Robin Archer and Douglas Newton have both investigated support for the Great War in the Labor Party and the labour movement, and found that the basis for this support was deeply practical. As Newton observed, Australia was in the midst of a ‘love-of-empire’ election and Labor
1 R. Archer, ‘Stopping War and Stopping Conscription: Australian Labour’s Response to World War I in Comparative Perspective’ in F. Bongiorno, R. Frances and B. Scates (eds.), Labour and the Great War: the Australian Working Class and the Making of Anzac, special edition of Labour History, No. 106, 2014, p.44. 2 P. Love, ‘Frank Anstey, Money Power and the Labour split in War Time’, Victorian Historical Journal, Vol. 86., Iss. 1., 2015, p.161. 3 Ibid., p.162 4 V. Burgmann and J. Johnson, ‘Workers against Warfare: the American and Australian Experiences Before and During World War 1’, conference paper from Australia-US Transnational and Comparative Labour History Conference, Sydney, January 8-9, 2015, p.1, http://sydney.edu.au/business/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/219338/Burgmann_Johnson_ paper_.pdf, accessed 25 January 2016. 258
had to support the war in order to win the election.5 That Labor supported the war for pragmatic reasons is undoubtedly true. However, not all principles had been jettisoned. Labor politicians promoted the war not just with jingoistic sloganeering, but liberal appeals to higher morality. This chapter demonstrates that liberal imperial ideals were in fact intrinsic to the
Australian labour movement. So too was an attachment to the British
Empire. During the war, Labor politicians pursued an important rhetorical strategy of representing their backing as reluctant, qualified, and most importantly, liberal. These justifications helped to secure the support of the labour movement at the beginning of the war.6
There was a small core of committed socialists, however, who never supported the war. Liberal imperialism held little appeal for these people.
Where liberal humanitarians believed the German atrocities and breach of
Belgian neutrality were good reasons to join the conflict, the militant socialist elements of the labour movement dismissed this framework.
Instead, war in general was regarded as a continuation of the exploitation of the labouring classes by the capitalist classes, one ‘which could be prevented by international working-class solidarity’.7 During the Great War, publications such as the I.W.W.’s newspapers Direct Action mockingly
5 D. Newton, ‘At the Birth of Anzac: Labor, Andrew Fisher and Australia’s Offer of an Expeditionary Force to Britain in 1914’, War and Stopping Conscription: Australian Labour’s Response to World War I in Comparative Perspective’ in F. Bongiorno, R. Frances and B. Scates (eds.), Labour and the Great War: the Australian Working Class and the Making of Anzac, special edition of Labour History, No. 106, 2014, pp. 19-29. Also: Archer, op.cit., pp. 50-51. 6 M. Blackburn, The Conscription Referendum of 1916, Melbourne, published by the Anti- Conscription League, c. 1936, p.8. 7 J. Connor, P. Stanley, P. Yule, The War at Home, Australia, Oxford University Press, 2015, p.92. 259
dismissed liberal concern about German atrocities, believing instead that the allegations were a ruse to cover up the true purpose of the war, which was to benefit capitalists.
The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to investigate the source of the division within the labour movement over whether or not the Great War was justified. At the core of the labour movement’s division over the morality of the conflict lay two different forms of ideologies: liberal humanitarianism, which was an important rhetorical tool for pro-war Labor politicians, and militant socialism, which was the key discourse used by those within the labour movement who opposed the war. These two ideological approaches defined how these groups approached the Great
War.
The labour movement’s response to the Great War was, much like the
Irish Australian response, initially shaped by the South African War. For example, the rhetoric of the defence of the ‘rights of small nations’ during the South African War re-emerged in arguments that supported the war against Germany. As with the Irish Australian community, this defence was adapted to fit with particular ideological (and political) concerns. During the final conscription campaign, for example, Prime Minister William Hughes twinned the labour dictum of collective power with liberal idealism. He said, ‘this was a war for the rights of small nations…we are like the 260
members of a union whose strength comes not from our individual strength but from the collective power given us by our united action’.8
Socialists who rejected the Great War also drew upon rhetoric that had been formulated during the South African War. In 1901, the Queensland newspaper Worker published an article by ‘Marxian’, who argued:
Of all the silly, putrid, loathsome “fakes” by which Capitalism seeks to maintain its crumbling position, the fake of imperialism is about the most stinking…imperialism is simply Capitalism applied to foreign policy…we learn that lesson more clearly every day of the South African War.9
During the First World War the anti-war labour press repeatedly recycled critiques of this kind, drawing directly upon the anti-imperial and anti- capitalist rhetoric that had been developed during the South African War. In
1918 the Australian Worker reprinted an article by American socialist
Charles Edward Russell who pointed the finger at the expansionist requirements of the market and the need for ‘more business to dominate and more territory to exploit’ as the cause of the conflict.10 This brutal paradigm of ruling class exploitation lay at the heart of labour movement resistance to the Great War. Therefore, just as the South African War had played a critical role in shaping how the Irish Australian community engaged with the Great War, it played a crucial role in the construction of rhetoric used both to support and oppose the Great War within the labour movement.
8 ‘Prime Minister At Albury: “War for the Small Nations”, The Register, 19 December 1917, p.9. 9 Marxian ‘Capitalism and imperialism’, Worker, 12 October 1901, p.7. 10 C. E. Russell, ‘Capitalism gone Mad’, The Australian Worker, 28 November 1918, p.20. 261
It is important to tease apart the complex relationships within the labour movement over war and ideology, as they are critical to understanding the political role played by atrocity propaganda and liberalism during the First World War in Australia. The invasion of Belgium largely united those who would otherwise have been hostile to an overtly imperialist and capitalist war, yet failed to convince those who believed that no war under a capitalist system could be just.
A broad range of individuals who condemned the South African War and supported the Great War are analysed in this chapter. Politicians such as N.S.W. Premier William Holman, Prime Minister William Hughes and
Federal Labor M.P. William Maloney played crucial roles in parleying anti-
South African War rhetoric into pro-First World War sentiment. The
Westralian Worker (a staunchly anti-capitalist newspaper based first in
Kalgoorlie, and then Perth) is also discussed. Under John Hilton’s editorship, humanitarian sentiment and liberal imperialism dominated the newspaper’s discussion of both the South African War and the First World War.
Individuals and groups who condemned both the South African and the Great War will also be examined in this chapter. Frank Anstey, perhaps the most prominent anti-war member of federal Labor in parliament is discussed, as are the Industrial I.W.W. and the labour press in general.
Atrocity propaganda had little impact upon these groups and individuals.
They had limited sympathy for the plight of the Belgians, believing that the greater atrocity was the impact of the war upon the workers. For example, a pamphlet published by The Worker Print described an incident in which a 262
soldier’s wife with six children was evicted from her home. It asked: ‘We hear a lot about Hun atrocities and the way the Huns are treating the Belgian women. Could anything surpass this?’ The landlords, the pamphlet concluded, were in fact the real Huns.11
Shared opposition to the South African War masked the differences between those who were loyal to the British Empire and those who were more influenced by international socialism. However, these differences became very clear during the Great War, as liberal imperialists went on to support the conflict as one fought on the behalf of the rights of small nations such as Belgium, while others opposed the Great War on the grounds that it was, like the South African War, simply another opportunity for capitalists to undermine working conditions at home.
The difference in perspective between those who believed the Great
War was a war to defend civilisation and those who believed it was a conflict designed to benefit capitalists represented a comprehensive fault-line across the labour movement. While this fault-line was, in part, exacerbated by the 1916 Labor Party split over conscription, it was perhaps bigger than the conscription crisis. 12 This is because the conscription split was not necessarily about the legitimacy of the war. Many within both the labour movement and the Labor Party who supported the war did not support conscription. For example, T.J. Ryan, the Premier of Queensland, was
11 Is Voluntarism being encouraged, Botany No-Conscription Council, the Worker Print, 1916, Riley Conscription collection, S.L.V. 12 F. Farrell, International Socialism and Australian Labour: the Left in Australia 1919-1939, Sydney, Hale and Iremonger, 1981. p.22. 263
vehemently anti-conscription yet he continued to campaign for recruits until the end of the conflict.13 J.H. Catts, a Labor politician who directed the voluntary recruiting campaigns in N.S.W. led the state’s no-conscription campaign in 1916. His opposition was not in any way influenced by militant socialist ideology. Indeed, following the war he was an outspoken critic of communism.14
Therefore, although some anti-conscriptionists also opposed the war, the divide within the Labor party about conscription was not simply a divide over whether the war should be supported. It was about whether or not conscription itself was morally legitimate. In contrast, this chapter is examining the divide between those who fervently supported the war and those who had grave reservations about it. As will be explored in detail in the next chapter, this divide increased as ‘hard military realities and economic hardship bred growing discontent’. 15 As I discuss in the final chapter, by 1918 a significant number of people within the labour movement agreed with militant socialists that the war had destroyed the living standards of the working class, and refused to support the war.
The South African War and the labour movement
As was stated earlier, the socialist argument that the Great War was a conflict designed to benefit imperial and capitalist masters was honed in the
13 Ryan in fact fought a bitter censorship battle with Hughes over his anti-conscription views. See: R. Evans, Loyalty and disloyalty: social conflict on the Queensland homefront, 1914-18, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1987, pp. 106-107. 14 A. Hoyle, ‘Catts, James Howard (1877-1951)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/catts-james-howard-5535, published first in hardcopy 1979, accessed online 13 November 2015. 15 Op.Cit., Love, p.161. 264
South African War. The work of the British ‘New Liberal’ J.A. Hobson, contributed significantly to how Australian socialists conceived of and criticised South African War. Hobson’s book The War in South Africa: Its
Causes and Effects (1900) claimed the cause of the South African War was the greed of British mining-magnates who had subverted the national interests by persuading the British government to go to war.16 Hobson’s ideas were taken up by the militant Australian labour movement who agreed with his supposition that the war ‘was the outcome of a deliberate conspiracy planned and executed by a small group of self-seeking capitalists’.17 His more nuanced and highly influential 1902 work
Imperialism: a study critiqued the relationship between capitalism and imperialist expansion into other territories. This too, provided a model for
Australian socialists firstly to reject the South African War and then the
Great War. This work firmly rebutted the classic liberal imperialist defence of imperialism as a force of ‘altruism’. In response to their claims that imperialism ‘promoted social evolution, material progress for backward countries and good government for the “lower races”’, Hobson suggested that better progress would be made ‘by international cooperation with democratic safeguards than by an anarchic struggle for power among competing empires’.18
16 I.R. Smith, ‘A century of controversy over origins’, in D. Lowry (ed.), The South African War reappraised, United Kingdom, Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 30-31. 17 H. Mitchell, ‘Hobson Revisited’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 26., No. 3., 1965, p.397. 18 N. Hetherington, Theories of imperialism: War, Conquest and Capital, New York, Routledge Revivals, 1984; 2014, p.86. 265
While Hobson’s book was influential, it was received as part of an already developed form of anti-capitalist Australian ideology called ‘Money power’. This was a populist interpretation of capitalism that had developed within the Australian Labor Party.19 From the 1890s onwards, ‘Money power’ theorists asserted that there was ‘conspiracy between capitalist greed and imperialist ambition to dispossess the Australian people’.20 This critique drew inspiration as much from the international language of
American populism as from Hobson’s work, focused as it was upon ‘the brutal anarchy that might result from unrestrained capitalism manipulated by a ruthless plutocracy’.21 By the First World War, those who possessed a more international socialist outlook believed the conflict was ‘a deliberate capitalist ploy to restrain the worldwide socialist movement by pitting working-class populations against each other’.22
These socialists routinely dismissed Great War liberal rhetoric that claimed the conflict was one fought to defend ‘civilisation’. During the 1917 conscription referendum campaign, Frank Anstey rejected the justifications for the conflict. The Daily Standard reported: ‘All he asked was whether the cause was worthwhile. He did not think it was. It did not hold out to him any hope of the extension of civilisation or any extension of human liberty.
This was why he was opposed to it’.23
19 P. Love, Labour and the Money Power: Australian Labour Populism 1890-1950, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1984, p.1. 20 Ibid., p.18. 21 Ibid., p.10. 22 N. Dyrenfurth, Heroes and Villains: the rise and fall of the early Australian Labor Party, North Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2011, p.163. 23 ‘Against War: Frank Anstey’s Declaration’, Daily Standard, 21 November 1917, p.3. 266
Anstey had also been deeply cynical about the South African War.
The Victorian labour publication The Tocsin, which he had helped to found and had contributed to for many years, described the crowds celebrating the relief of Mafeking as rats who carried ‘infectious germs of rampant militarism’ which was spreading imperialism. 24 In 1900, the newspaper published a satirical representation of the phrenological characteristics of a jingo engaged in ‘Mafeking Mania’. Figure 28. This term had been coined after tremendous public demonstrations of patriotism had taken place throughout the Empire after Mafeking had been liberated from a siege by
Boer forces. ‘Mafficking’ became synonymous with displays of uncontrolled patriotic fervour and eventually came to have ‘pejorative connotations’.25
The Tocsin had little sympathy with public displays of jingoistic sentiment, and portrayed the unfortunate simpleton who was engaged in Mafeking
Mania as a being who had his brain divided into several sections, two of which were reserved for ‘boose’ (presumably – ‘booze’, or alcohol) one for
‘idiocy’ and one for ‘jingoism’. For The Tocsin, one could choose either
‘imperialism or Freedom. Either one or the other’.26 The South African
War, the newspaper declared, was a means through which young ‘ignorant men’ had been ‘sent to South Africa to make a capitalists’ holiday’.27
24 P. Love, ‘From Heroic Persona to Embattled Identity’, Labour History, No. 87, 2004, p.127. 25 ‘Maffik’, Oxford English Dictionary online, http://www.oed.com.wwwproxy0.library.unsw.edu.au/view/Entry/112119?redirectedFro m=Mafficking&#eid38534016, accessed 12 January 2016. 26 ‘The Mafeking Mania’, The Tocsin, 31 May 1900, p.1 27 ‘A Champion of Liberty’, The Tocsin, 6 December 1900, p.4. 267
Figure 28. ‘The Mafeking Mania’, The Tocsin, 24 May 1900, p.2.
Distrust of militarism dominated the newspaper’s attitude towards the South African War. This distrust was not just a socialist concern, it was also a liberal concern. That liberal rhetoric featured alongside militant socialism is not surprising, as the newspaper had been co-established by
Fabian poet Bernard O’Dowd whose liberal conscience had led to him supporting the Great War in its battle against German militarism.28 The
Tocsin’s balance between international socialism and liberal humanism was symbolic of the contradictions that existed within the labour movement
28 C. Wallace-Crabbe, ‘O’Dowd, Bernard Patrick (1866-1953)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/odowd-bernard-patrick-7881, published first in hardcopy 1988, accessed online 15 February 2015; F. Bongiorno, in P. Bucker and R. D. Francis (eds.),‘Fabian Socialism and British Australia, 1890-1972’, Rediscovering the British World, Canada, University of Calgary Press, 2005, p. 215. 268
during the early twentieth century. Militant socialism and liberal humanitarianism had easily co-existed within the labour movement at the turn of the century, but they became fundamentally incompatible when the
Great War broke out. By the Great War the liberal-labour consensus that had dominated early Commonwealth politics began to dissolve.29 In the case of The Tocsin, class difference contributed to this dissolution. Where
O’Dowd was a middle class radical, Anstey was a working class man committed to a form of socialism that was increasingly exclusive of the middle class. In 1898, he helped to found the Victorian Labour Federation, a syndicalist operation that represented a growing ‘conviction amongst some unionists and socialists that the party should rest on a solid working-class foundation’. 30
The Australian working class and the British Empire
While class was an important factor in the division that emerged during the
Great War, what was perhaps most important was the extent to which the groups and individuals analysed in this chapter identified with the British
Empire, or with the international working class. The relationship of the working class with imperialism has been the subject of some controversy.
As historians Richard Price and more recently Bernard Porter have demonstrated in the British context, the presence of jingoistic imperial propaganda and working class celebrations of war did not necessarily
29 P. M. Grant, Henry Bourne Higgins, Victorian Liberal, 185-1901, MA, University of Melbourne, 1975, p.1 30 F. Bongiorno, ‘Bernard O’Dowd’s Socialism’, Labour History, No. 7., 1999, p.108. Love, op.cit., ‘From Heroic Persona to Embattled Identity’, pp. 127-128. 269
equate to unconditional working class support for the Empire.31 As Porter has observed of imperial propaganda, ‘There can be no disputing the fact that the imperialists were propagandizing. The only questions have to do with how effective their propaganda was.’32 He added, “Everywhere we look we see the same phenomenon: the working classes sucking the sugar, then probably spitting the pill of imperial propaganda out’.33
Porter explained elsewhere that his book had been a ‘response to certain scholars…[who had’ simplified and exaggerated the impact of
“imperialism” on Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’. 34 His views drew upon the work of Richard Price who examined the famous ‘jingo’ public displays that took place during the South African War. Price argued that the ‘jingo crowds were substantially middle class’ in the khaki election of 1900.35 For both Price and Porter, imperialism was deeply irrelevant to the working classes of Great Britain.36 This, however, is not a view shared by John M. MacKenzie, who demonstrated in his book Propaganda and
Empire that the working class had indeed taken part in ‘jingo’ displays’.37
The South African War was a popular cause in Australia, and although the ‘A.L.P. was strongly opposed’ to the war, it was ‘not necessarily
31 See: R. Price, An imperial War and the British Working Class: Working Class Attitudes and Reactions to the South African War 1899-1902, Great Britain, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. Also: B. Porter, The Absent-Minded imperialists: empire, society, and culture in Britain, Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press, 2004. 32 Porter, op.cit, p. 175. 33 Ibid., p.211. 34 B. Porter, ‘Further Thoughts on Imperial Absent-Mindedness’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 36., No.1., 2008, p.101. 35 Bernard Semmel, ‘An imperial War and the British Working Class’, Book Review, in Journal of Social History, Vol7., No. 3, 1974, p.358. 36 Price, op.cit., p.237. 37 J. M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880- 1960, Great Britain, Manchester University Press, 1984, pp. 61-63. 270
the case that working-class opinion’ completely ‘mirrored this opposition’.38
In addition, the Australian working class was perhaps more inclined to support imperialism than their British brethren, living as they did in a geographically distant outpost of the Empire. As Geoffrey Blainey has argued, Australians keenly felt ‘the tyranny of distance’. He wrote,
‘Australians have always recognised that distance or isolation was one of the moulds which shaped their history’.39 This sense of vulnerability meant that the labour movement, like the Irish Australian community, differed from their overseas counterparts in that they were willing to support an imperial war if they believed the Empire was at risk. For example, as was also the case with Irish Australians, the military defeats suffered by British forces during Black Week, ‘convinced all but a defiant handful that the prestige of the British Empire – perhaps its very existence – was endangered’.40
Nonetheless, a substantial portion of committed labour activists heartily disliked the South African War. Australian military historian Craig
Wilcox has written that by 1902, ‘It was a commonplace in labour and radical circles…[to believe] that Australians, like other white citizens of the
British empire, had been nudged, even manipulated, into sending their men to fight in South Africa.41 Historian C.N. Connolly has argued that while
38 J. Grey, A Military History of Australia, Port Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p.58. 39 G. Blainey, The tyranny of distance: How distance shaped Australia’s history, Sydney, Macmillan Press, 2001, p.ix 40 B. R. Penny, ‘Australia’s Reactions to the South African War – a Study in Colonial imperialism’, p.106. 41 C. Wilcox, ‘Looking back on the South African War’, in P. Dennis and J. Grey (eds.) The South African War: Army, Nation and empire. The 1999 Chief of Army/Australian War Memorial History Conference, Canberra, November 4-6 1999, Canberra, Army Military History Unit, 2000, pp.2-3. 271
obvious opposition to the South African War was ‘feeble’, support for the war within Australia tended to be restricted to the middle class. The imperialist defence of the war, he argued, was one that would appeal to those with middle class ‘new imperialist’ sensibilities.42
An analysis of labour newspapers reveals that there was in fact considerable opposition to the war. In 1900, the Australian Socialist League had condemned ‘all wars as barbarous, being fostered and perpetuated by the ever increasing greed and rapacity of the capitalist class’. On this basis, they also condemned ‘the war in South Africa as unjust, and waged not in the interests of the disenfranchised uitlander but in the interest of international capitalists’.43 Perhaps more significantly, Queensland politician Andrew Dawson, subsequently known to Queensland schoolchildren as the ‘first Labor premier in the world’, strongly criticised those who went to fight in the war as ‘cowards’.44 In the 1901 federal election he polled first for his seat in the Senate and other pro-Boer members of his party also gained a strong vote. The issue of the South
African War was significant enough for the election of these pro-Boers to federal parliament to be billed in one newspaper as a ‘Pro-Boer Triumph’.45
42 C.N. Connolly, ‘Class, birthplace, loyalty: Australian attitudes to the South African War’, Historical Studies, Vol. 18., No. 71., 1978, pp.210-211. 43 ‘Opinions from Both Sides. Individuals and Organisations on the War Question’, Worker, 28 April 1900, p.2. 44 D.J. Murphy, ‘Dawson, Andrew (1863-1910)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dawson-andrew-5921, published first in hardcopy 1981, accessed online 5 May 2016; ‘Queensland Federal Elections: Claimed as Pro-Boer Triumph’, The North Queensland Register, 26 August 1901, p.40. 45 ‘Queensland Federal Elections: Claimed as Pro-Boer Triumph’, The North Queensland Register, 26 August 1901, p.40. 272
The rejection of the South African War, however, was not necessarily a wholesale rejection of the British Empire. Opponents of the South African
War perceived it as a war of imperial aggression. Moreover, as I discussed in the introduction, jingoistic ‘King and Country’ propaganda was the dominant form of propaganda that justified the war. As with the Irish
Australian community, this kind of propaganda would have held little appeal for those within the labour movement who were influenced by liberal imperialism. In addition it was a war in which the British openly used civilians as part of the their overall military strategy. Queensland newspaper the Worker condemned the concentration camps as the ‘places in which the wives and families of the burghers whose farms have been burnt to ashes’ were imprisoned.46 The Tocsin described them as a place in which the ‘wholesale slaughter of children by privation and exposure’ had occurred.47
The First World War, however, was a very different kind of imperial war, justified as it was as a war against the wholesale slaughter of children.
Porter, however, has not drawn a distinction between jingoistic propaganda and liberal imperial propaganda. By neglecting to include more nuanced kinds of propaganda in his assessment of the impact of imperial propaganda,
Porter has mistakenly presented imperial sentiment as a simplistic monolith. In this sense, Porter may well have been correct about the working class spitting out the pill of plodding, earnest imperial propaganda.
46 ‘Concentration Camp Lies’, Worker, 30 November 1901, p.2. 47 ‘”Boer Atrocities” to Order’, The Tocsin, 19 December 1901, p.2. 273
Porter described imperial propaganda as a deeply patronising medium that suggested for example,
…Working-class imperialists could take the same pride in the empire as, for example, a bricklayer might take in his humble contribution to the building of a great house. It was a serving rather than a participatory kind of imperialism’48 Porter then listed the various kinds of propaganda that the working class were likely to reject: songs, such as Winifred Hare’s ‘Britannia’s Sons shall
Rule the World’ and the flag waving zealotry of Empire Day.49 By the turn of the twentieth century, imperial propaganda would have, he believed, appeared ‘on the edges of the working classes’ perceptions; as somebody else’s business, not theirs’. Porter fundamentally did not believe that the
‘Edwardian working-class culture’ would ‘take on board a full –or even half- blown imperialism easily’.50 Porter’s loose definition of imperial propaganda therefore excluded the kind produced by liberal imperialists.
As we have already seen imperial sentiment was far more nuanced than Porter has acknowledged. John Mackenzie has pointed out that,
‘imperialism…is open to many definitions, but in its popular context it has usually been seen as synonymous with jingoism – aggressive, offensive, and xenophobic’. He continued, ‘But there is no reason why a popular imperialism should be so narrowly defined. Those who deplored jingoism were often the most fervent exponents of a ‘moral imperialism’. 51 As
48 Porter, The Absent-Minded imperialists: empire, society, and culture in Britain, op.cit., p.175. 49 Ibid., p. 177 and p. 224. 50 Ibid., 224-225. 51 J. M. Mackenzie, Propaganda and empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880- 1960, Great Britain, Manchester University Press, 1986, p.10. 274
evidenced by the many thousands of people who gathered in London to protest against Ottoman atrocities in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, this kind of imperialism was not restricted to the middle classes.
The working class also believed in it. And because there were strong links between Great Britain and Australia, the ideology of liberal humanitarian imperialism was present in Australia too. These working class liberal imperialists did advocate for war when it fitted into their conception of a just war, and therefore a just Empire.
Liberal imperialism and labour movement support for the Great War
For some Australians within the labour movement, therefore, imperial sentiment was liberal humanitarian, pacific, and opposed to militarism.
Premier Holman, for example, did not feel he had abandoned his pacifist principles in supporting the war. He argued that German militarism and barbarism had forced the empire into the war.52 This type of reasoning was common amongst Labor politicians who supported the Great War. Andrew
Fisher’s notorious ‘last man and last shilling’ speech has overshadowed his use of pacifist liberal rhetoric at the beginning of the war. In late August he said in his election manifesto:
As regards the attitude of Labor towards war, that is easily stated: We deplore War! We believe war to be a crime against civilisation and humanity. But to deplore and to denounce war is not to abolish it. War is one of the greatest realities of life, and it must be faced. Our interests and our very existence are bound up with those of the empire.53
52 See: W.A. Holman, War Knowledge in Australia: address by W.A. Holman to members of the War Literature Society, at its inaugural meeting, 23rd September 1918, Sydney, War Literature Society, 1918, p.6. 53 ‘Federal elections: Mr Fisher’s Manifesto’, The Week, 28 August 1914, p.30. 275
Fisher’s mixture of Realpolitik with pacifist principles was, on one hand, deeply hypocritical. As Douglas Newton has recently pointed out, the Labor party offered no criticism of Liberal Prime Minister Joseph Cook’s offer of an
Australian expeditionary force because they needed to win the election.54
Fisher’s use of pacifist, anti-militarist language in his election manifesto is nonetheless significant because it was used to galvanise support amongst sections of the labour movement who were not moved by simplistic imperialist jingoism.
That a large section of the labour movement was influenced by liberal imperialism rather than simple jingoism is made abundantly clear in the rhetoric employed by Labor politicians such as Fisher, Hughes, and
Holman. Furthermore, the Westralian Worker frequently employed liberal rhetoric in its support for the Great War. The connection between liberalism and Labor was made explicit by Senator Pearce, the Minister for
Defence, who had declared shortly after the outbreak of war that ‘Labor and liberalism should be united’.55
One of the most obvious examples of a liberal Labor politician was
Holman, who as N.S.W. Premier during the Great War used liberal justifications for the conflict on numerous occasions. Ironically, Holman had foreshadowed his support for the Great War in his opposition to the South
54 D. Newton, ‘At the Birth of Anzac: Labor, Andrew Fisher and Australia’s Offer of an Expeditionary Force to Britain in 1914’, Labour History, No. 106., 2014, pp. 19-29. 55 ‘Pearce in Adelaide’, Westralian Worker, 28 August 1914, p.5. 276
African War. At the beginning of that conflict Holman had made a notorious outburst in parliament in which he said:
Whilst my country is fighting in a just cause I hope I shall be as ready to support its claim as any other member. But … I believe from the bottom of my heart that this is the most iniquitous, most immoral war ever waged with any race.
Shockingly, he ended by expressing the hope ‘that England may be defeated’.56 However, Holman was a supporter of Empire even as he decried
British actions during the South African War.57 Thus it was not an altered attitude to Empire that accounted for Holman’s rejection of the South
African War and support for the Great War; it was that the conduct of the
British during the South African War contradicted his notion of how an ideal empire should function.58 This pattern – opposing the South African War and supporting the Great War – was repeated throughout the Labor party at both the state and federal level. One of Holman’s close colleagues, M.P.
Arthur Griffith, also condemned the South African War, and supported the
First World War as ‘a crusade against Germany for the preservation of civilisation’.59
56 ‘Holman and the Boers: what “Hansard” says’, The Worker, 28 October 1899, p.5. 57D. J. Blair, ‘Image and Attitude: Australia and the South African War’, in Sabretache, Vol. 33, 1992, p.27. 58 A further illustration of the depth of liberal sentiment within the Holman household is Holman’s wife’s involvement in The Anti-War League, which was founded in December 1901 in response to ‘particularly disturbing accounts of starvation and deaths among the Boer prisoners in concentration camps’. See: B. Oliver, 'A Wanton Deed of Blood and Rapine': Opposition to Australian Participation in the South African War, in P. Dennis and J. Grey (eds.), The South African War: Army, Nation and empire / the 1999 Chief of Army/Australian War Memorial Military History Conference , Nov 1 1999, Canberra, Army History Unit, Department of Defence, Canberra, 2000, p. 198. 59 B. Nairn, 'Griffith, Arthur Hill (1861–1946)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/griffith-arthur-hill-6486/text11117, published first in hardcopy 1983, accessed online 29 May 2015. 277
Victorian Labor politician William Maloney followed a similar pattern. In 1899 a Victorian parliamentarian had attempted to justify the war in liberal terms by stating that the alleged state of slavery in the
Transvaal provided ‘one of the greatest arguments for interference by a freedom loving people’.60 Dr Maloney found this moral justification very thin and stated in parliament,
I feel certain that when the history of these times comes to be written, the blackest page of it will be the story of a the crushing of a little race, and one of the most honourable chapters will be the action of Mr. Gladstone, who refused to crush them at a time when the forces of Great Britain were ready to do so.61
Fifteen years later, Maloney supported the Great War within a liberal rubric.
His anti-conscription stance was entirely consistent with his support for the war, in that in both cases he believed he was fighting militarism.62 Like many within the labour movement, he believed that Australian security rested upon the safety of the British Empire.63 This did not translate into jingoism: he believed that the war he supported was not one of imperial expansion, but defence. At the declaration of war he stated, ‘If Germany raised another Napoleon the world would be threatened with a long term of dictatorship. Germany had broken treaties, declared war against Belgium,
60 Mr, Salmon, Victorian Parliamentary Debates, Session 1899-1900, legislative Council and Legislative Assembly,Vol 92, Melbourne, Robt. S. Brain, Government Printer, 1900, p.1781. 61 Ibid., p. 1751. 62 G. Serle, ‘Maloney, William Robert (Nuttall) (1854-1940)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/maloney-william-robert-nuttall-7470, published first in hardcopy 1986, accessed online 15 July 2015. 63 R.B. Cutting, The Little Doctor: A Biography of Dr. William Maloney, Honours Thesis, Monash University, 1974, pp. 45 – 46. 278
which country she had undertaken to protect’.64 This kind of reasoning held no appeal for international socialists, and his approval of the war immediately pitted him against his fellow Laborites. At a local branch meeting, Maloney had passed a resolution in the support of the conflict. In response, trade unionist Nick Gay ‘condemned the war as a capitalists’ war’.65
Atrocities added further ammunition to Maloney’s rhetorical arsenal.
Later in the war Maloney’s recruiting activities included making speeches before the screening of a film about German atrocities. In one meeting ‘he placed before his hearers the fate of Belgium and asked them to save
Australia from a similar risk by enlisting ‘. 66 The films portrayed ‘the murder of Nurse Cavell, and the hideous atrocities perpetrated by the
Germans’.67 Maloney’s support of the war was never jingoistic. He drew instead upon a number of powerful liberal justifications throughout the war.
In this, Maloney was very similar to Holman in that he used liberal ideology to justify both his opposition to the South African War, and his support of the Great War. In a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald Holman presented the reasoning behind his condemnation of British action in South
Africa. Significantly, it was Gladstone’s South African Policy that formed the ideological source of Holman’s objections to the war.68 His was not a socialist rejection of the war, but rather, an exceedingly liberal one; during
64 ‘Mr Maloney’s Opening Address’, The Age, 7 August 1914, p.9. 65 Op.Cit., Cutting, 49. 66‘Recruiting Campaign: Dr Maloney at Footscray’, Advertiser, 24 February 1917, p.2. 67 ‘Moving Picture Appeal: A successful first night’, The Age, 7 February 1917, p.8. 68 W.A. Holman, ‘Mr. Holman and the South African War’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 1902, p.10. 279
the 1880s Gladstone had objected to imperial expansion in South Africa, and abhorred the idea that the Boers should be made ‘unwilling subjects’.69
This pattern of engagement with imperial warfare was consistent amongst Australians who were committed to liberal ideals. George Arnold
Wood, was a liberally inclined Sydney academic who, like Holman, had condemned the South African War and supported the Great War, also had a
Gladstonian conception of empire, one which was ‘committed to liberty and justice’.70
It is clear, therefore, that the ‘Gladstonian’ vision of imperialism and its concomitant condemnation of militarism and atrocities had a profound impact on some influential public figures in Australia. Moreover, it created a consistent line of reasoning that led thinkers such as Holman to condemn one war and justify another, all on the basis of what constituted a just war.
For Holman, an avowed pacifist, imperialism alone was an insufficient justification for war, but a fight against a militaristic nation was enough to drive him to support the war.
Holman’s support for the Great War was cautious and qualified. In
September 1914 he chided Bishop Long for making positive remarks about the advent of war and stated that though the war must be ‘seen through’ the
69 P. Knaplund, Gladstone’s Foreign Policy, United Kingdom, Frank Cass & Co., 1935;1970, p.89. 70 R.M. Crawford, ‘Wood, George Arnold (1865-1928)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/wood-george-arnold-9170/text16193, published in hardcopy 1990, accessed online 17 November 2014. Wood was a lecturer at Sydney University. Unfortunately, space does not permit analysis of this figure. For a thorough exploration of Woods’ ideological position on war see: J. Moses, Prussian-German Militarism 1914-18 in Australian Perspective, Germany, Peter Lang, 1991. 280
conflict was not ‘…a desirable thing’. It was ‘necessary, even in a moment like this, to protest against this view’. However, he continued, ‘Civilisation is not possible in Europe or in Australia until the militarist section in Germany and Austria has been broken’. And while war was an ugly necessity, Holman warned Bishop Long that, ‘war is not an agent of either civilisation or
Christianity, it is the enemy of both’.71 The liberal nature of Holman’s statements allowed him to maintain throughout the war that he was a pacifist.72 This attitude was shared by Wood, who ‘described himself as a
“ferocious pacifist”, meaning that firstly, while he was passionately dedicated to the cause of peace, ‘he would not hesitate to endorse the use of armed force against an aggressor or any power which was, in his scale of values, moved by ignoble motives to impose its will upon a weaker neighbour’.73 This avowed hatred of war, coupled with a determination to prosecute war against militarism, was a characteristic of pro-Great War liberal rhetoric.
Holman’s seemingly contradictory convictions, his pro-war pacifism and idealistic pragmatism, pitted him directly against the interests of the labour movement – immediately on the advent of the First World War, he
‘severely shocked the trade unions by announcing that Cabinet was
71 ‘Civilisation and Christianity war the enemy of both’, National Advocate, 17 September 1914, p.2. 72 In a pamphlet published in late 1918, Holman wrote: ‘I have been for twenty years a pacifist. I am a pacifist today’. W.A. Holman, War Knowledge in Australia: address by W.A. Holman to members of the War Literature Society, at its inaugural meeting, 23rd September 1918, Sydney, War Literature Society, 1918, p.6. 73 J. Moses, Prussian-German Militarism 1914-18 in Australian Perspective, Germany, Peter Lang, 1991, pp.160-161. 281
considering the suspension of industrial awards’.74 When he banned the
I.W.W. from speaking on streets 1916, their newspaper, Direct Action retaliated with a cartoon of Holman and other Labor politicians being hanged from lamp-posts near parliament.75 Figure 29.
74 H.V. Evatt, William Holman: Australian Labour Leader, Australia, Angus & Robertson, 1940; 1979, p. 259. 75 Holman was reportedly increasingly hostile towards the rank and file of the labour movement as the war continued – this was part of his evolution into a ‘Labor rat’, a politician first, unionist second. Vere Gordon Childe, who famously conceived of the notion that Labor parliamentarians inevitably ‘rat’ on their principles wrote in his 1923 book, How Labour Governs: ‘For three decades the Labour Movement has been dominated by the idea of political action. The forces of Labour have been concentrated on the effort to capture the parliamentary machine, and the trade unions have been made subservient to the political Labour Parties’. V.G. Childe, How Labour Governs, Australia, Melbourne University Press, 1923; 1964, p.82. Childe, incidentally, was one of the few Australian members of the Union of Democratic Control during the war, and was forced to resign from his position from the University of Sydney in 1918 because of his pacifist views and concerns about civil liberties. He was therefore directly pitted against the same ‘Labor rats’ - Hughes and Holman - that he came influentially to condemn five years later in his book. 282
Figure 29. Syd Nicholls, Direct Action, January 15, 1916.
Curiously, not much has been written about Holman’s ideological position in relation to the Great War. What motivated him for example, received scant attention in the only biography that was written about him.
In it, Labor stalwart H.V. Evatt devoted a solitary line as to why Holman the
Francophile supported the First World War: ‘Although strongly anti- 283
militarist by general conviction, the fact that England had France as an ally alleviated the supreme tragedy of the war’.76 In the Australian Dictionary of
Biography, Holman’s motivations for supporting the war are also dealt with very briefly. Bede Nairn has claimed that following the South African War,
Holman had developed ‘deeper appreciation of the British empire’ and ‘keen perception of the sufferings of France’, and that these points accounted for his motivation. However, Holman had also developed a strong ideological scaffolding to support his justification of the Great War.77 While it is undoubtedly true that Holman sympathised keenly with France, it is clear that his support for the war was also underwritten by an abiding opposition to militarism and its consequences.
Holman’s ideological relationship to both the South African War and the First World War was therefore liberal progressive in nature, not socialist. An investigation of Holman’s reading patterns demonstrates a range of liberal, Fabian, and indeed radical liberal influences. In a list compiled for the edification of readers of the Worker, for example, he recommended the works of radical liberal J.M. Robertson (Modern
Humanists and The Fallacy of Saving). 78 Moreover, his speeches and interviews during both wars indicate that he was more concerned about the justness of the conflict, not the impact of the war on the working class. He
76 H.V. Evatt, William Holman: Australian Labour Leader, Australia, Angus & Robertson, 1940; 1979, p.261. 77 B. Nairn, ‘Holman, William Arthur (1871-1934)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/holman-william-arthur-6713/text11589, published in hardcopy 1983, accessed online 4 November 2014. 78 L.F. Crisp, ‘”Remember the Literature, Comrades!” Labour Party Reading then and now’, Labour History, Iss. 36., 1979, pp. 32- 34. 284
believed that in some circumstances, even within a capitalist system, a war could be considered necessary to all citizens. A passage from a pamphlet based on a speech by Holman places him ideologically in the same position as the reluctant Liberals in the British Cabinet in 1914 who were outraged by Germany’s breaking of the treaty guaranteeing Belgium’s neutrality.
Holman wrote:
We are fighting to punish a power that breaks treaties. We are fighting for the sanctity of treaties. We are fighting for pacifism. We are fighting for the only way to get a pacific settlement of differences which arise between nations in the future. 79
Because historians have neglected to investigate the impact of liberalism upon Holman, his support of the war and conscription has been painted in terms of personal failings. Jacqueline Dickenson has described Holman’s
‘drift’ away from the A.L.P. as having been driven by his ‘vanity and misjudgement’.80 While this statement may hold some truth, his support of the war was due to his adherence to the tenets of British liberalism, which depended in turn upon his identification as belonging to the Empire and the
‘British World’. Liberal progressivism was a strong influence upon many within the labour movement, particularly because there was a sense that they were part of the ‘British World’, the vast and culturally interconnected series of territories dominated by British principles and politics.81. This
79 W.A. Holman, What we are for, Sydney, National Association of N.S.W., 1918. 80 J. Dickenson, Renegades and Rats: Betrayal and the Remaking of Radical Organisations in Britain and Australia, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2006, p.172. 81 The ‘British World’ or ‘Greater Britain’ in the period between 1880-1914 is best described in terms set out by Lehane: ‘In both Great Britain, where imperial disciples such as Seeley, Dilke and Chamberlain pressed for an empire bound together by the ties of culture and politics, and the self-governing colonies, which responded to the trauma of modernisation by embracing even more fervently than the mother country the idea of an organic community of worldwide British peoples, the idea of Greater Britain took hold of 285
sense of identity was not compatible with the ideals of international socialism. It was, however, an important source of support for the First
World War within the labour movement.
Thus, when members of the labour movement opposed the South
African War and supported the Great War, they were doing it in part, out of a sense of connection to an ideal notion of Empire and to a sense of shared
Britishness. For Australians, liberal ideals were not just liberal ideals - they were British liberal ideals. Fabianism, for example, appealed to some
Australians, not just because of the concepts it espoused, but also because ‘it was recognised as a peculiarly British (or English) form of socialism’.82
During this period, Australian labour activists were more likely to be reading works by British writers, than those from the U.S. or Europe.83
Progressive liberalism in general was profoundly influential in
Australia in the period from the South African to the First World War, and its role has been underestimated. As Ann-Mari Jordens has written, ‘the liberal contribution to anti-war dissent in Australia has been almost totally forgotten’.84 However, perhaps more significantly in the sense of scale and influence, the contribution of liberalism to the outlook of pro-war the collective imagination’. See: R. Lehane, ‘A Military Mission for Greater Britain’, in J. Beaumont and M. Jordan (eds.), Australia and the World: A Festschrift for Neville Meaney, Australia, Sydney University Press, 2013, p.102. 82 F. Bongiorno, ‘Fabian Socialism and British Australia, 1890-1972’, in P. Buckner and R.D. Francis (eds.) Rediscovering the British World, Canada, University of Calgary Press, 2005, p. 215. 83 Between 1906 and 1907 the Worker asked notable activists to contribute a list of books which would illuminate ‘the aims and principles of the Labour Movement’. This was a very small sample but is nonetheless quite interesting - thirty three out of the fifty seven publications were from the United Kingdom. See: L.F. Crisp, ‘”Remember the Literature, Comrades!” Labour Party Reading then and now’, Labour History, No.36, 1979, pp. 31-38. 84 A. Jordens, ‘Against the tide: The growth and decline of a liberal anti-war movement in Australia, 1905-1918’, Historical Studies, Vol. 22., No.88., 1987, p. 373. 286
Australians has also been forgotten. It explains the seeming paradox of
Fabian poet Bernard O’Dowd vigorously opposing the South African War, only to devote the same amount of energy towards the support of the First
World War. As Bongiorno has noted, ‘O’Dowd’s socialist comrades ought not to have been surprised by his response to the war, for he had made his identification with the ideal of British liberty very clear for some years’.85
O’Dowd did not support a British Empire that battered and bullied small nations, which is how he perceived the actions of the British during the
South African War. However, he did support a British Empire that came to the rescue of small nations such as Belgium. In 1918, O’Dowd wrote of Great
Britain:
Whatever her other sins in the past & present may have been or may be, the nation that, against her material interests and ignoring the call of the Teutonic blood which she shares with the Germans, leaped without hesitation into the awful storm to honour her treaties & save a small people from arrogant & wanton annihilation…86
Perhaps the most prominent, if not notorious, proponent of the
British World and the Great War was Prime Minister Hughes. Like the other Labor politicians that have been discussed, Hughes condemned the South African War and vigorously championed the
First World War. His support for the latter conflict soon degenerated into fiercely illiberal tactics, including punitive use of the War
Precautions Act during the conscription campaigns, in which he
85 F. Bongiorno, ‘Fabian Socialism and British Australia, 1890-1972’, in P. Buckner and R.D. Francis (eds.), Rediscovering the British World, Canada, University of Calgary Press, 2005, p. 215. 86 B. O’Dowd quoted in Bongiorno, Rediscovering the British World, op.cit., p.215. 287
vigorously sought to shut down fellow Labor politicians such as Catts and Ryan, and the suppression of the I.W.W. He also jailed peace activist Adela Pankhurst.87 These actions, coupled with his active contribution to inflaming sectarian divisions between Protestant and
Catholic, stood in direct opposition to the liberal rhetoric he employed. That he acted in direct contravention of his own liberal rhetoric does not mean, however, that his use of it during the course of the war was insincere or unimportant.
As with Holman, Hughes’ public engagement with both the South
African and the First World War was framed within the rubric of liberal imperialism. In a speech in New South Wales parliament he objected to the
South African War because it was one in which a ‘great pugilist’ was attacking ‘an infant’, and Australia was being asked to ‘hold the infant while he [the pugilist] gets at him’. Hughes argued that the South African War was not within keeping of the ‘noble traditions of the British race’.88
In keeping with how Holman’s biographers have approached his responses to war, Hughes’ ideological engagement with the morality of conflict has also been neglected. L.F. Fitzhardinge’s impressive and sprawling biography does not engage with his ideological attachments, focusing instead upon the myriad practical issues which preoccupied
Hughes during the war. He has interpreted Hughes’ celebrated speeches in
87 A. Hughes, Billy Hughes: Prime Minister and Controversial Founding Father of the Australian Labor Party, Queensland, Wiley and Sons, 2005, p.69. 88 L.F. Fitzhardinge, That Fiery Particle: A political biography of Morris Hughes Volume 1, Australia, Angus and Robertson, 1964; 1978, p.97. 288
Great Britain in 1916 as ‘oversimplified and empty’.89 There is certainly a large element of truth in this critique. Hughes was brutal in his assessment of the German enemy. Nonetheless, within the searing condemnations is a consistent explication of liberal justifications for the war. For example, in a speech delivered in London in 1916, Hughes stated that the greatest threat to ‘Labour, the realisation of its ideals’ was a German victory. With its
‘despotic militarism’ the ‘…aspirations of Labour’ would ‘shrivel to a dry husk’.90
Hughes’ hard-line military solution to the war, for instance, was founded upon liberal rhetoric. He argued that Germany’s militarism, its lack of respect for treaties and international law, its atrocities and violence made it a profound threat to liberal democracy. In his introduction to a book by
British Orientalist and journalist E.J. Dillion about the tyrannical tendencies of Germany (and it’s ‘annexation mania’) Hughes was unsparing in his invective. Germany’s ‘doctrine of Might’ was one of ‘hideous bestiality’ and a
‘great force of barbarism’. This language may seem simplistic, but it was not.
As was explored in Chapter Three, ‘barbarism’, was a term with deep roots stretching back to the Enlightenment and was regarded as the enemy of what the British Empire stood for – civilisation and humanitarian ideals.
Hughes wrote:
The future for which she [Germany] strives and suffers is a future incompatible with those ideals which our race
89 L.F. Fitzhardinge, The Little Digger: 1914-1952: William Morris Hughes, a political biography, Volume 2, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1979, p.76. 90 W.M. Hughes, “The Day” – and after: war speeches of the Rt. Hon. W.M. Hughes, London, Melbourne, Cassell and Company, 1916, p.113. 289
cherishes and reveres. Either our philosophy, our religion and code prevail, or they fade into decay. The choice is definite. There can be no parley, no compromise with the evil thing for which Germany fights….we must win outright.91
In keeping with his liberal convictions, and also perhaps his abrasive personality, Hughes was an enthusiastic purveyor of atrocity propaganda.
At a large pro-conscription meeting in Adelaide, Hughes discussed the possibility that there had been a ‘guiding hand’ behind the atrocities. He stated, ‘If any men ever deserved to die it is surely these Germans who are a murderers a thousand times over’. It was against these men that ‘the outraged woman of Belgium, the little ones and the helpless’ cried out. He believed that behind the ‘ghastly atrocities in Belgium’ was a ‘scheming brain’, and that if the Allies were in a position to ‘dictate terms, I say that every one of those men should be put in the docks and treated as common prisoners’.92
Nearly a year after the end of the war, Hughes continued to present the war as a liberal conflict. When asking federal parliament to approve the
Treaty of Versailles, Hughes said, ‘We went into the war to fight for the rights of small nations. We were a small nation with a national spirit, and
Germany had threatened our territorial integrity and our political liberty’.93
Ironically, Hughes was referring to what he regarded as bullying at the hands of the British and the other great nations during the drawing up of the terms of peace. He had fought for the ‘rights of small nations’, yet Australia,
91 W.M. Hughes, ‘Introduction’, in E.J. Dillon, Ourselves and Germany, London, Chapman and Hall, 1916, pp.viii- x. 92 ‘The Prime Minister at the Exhibition’, Critic, 9 August 1916, p.4. 93 ‘Prime Minister’s Speech in Federal Parliament: Australia a nation’, Barrier Miner, 20 September 1919, p.3. 290
a small nation, had been locked out of the talks. He had tasted the same bitter medicine that many in the Irish Australian community and the labour movement had tasted during the war: liberal rhetoric about ‘rights of small nations’ and individuals were easily appropriated for opportunistic gain.
While many parties during the war had made use of liberal ideals in a hypocritical yet pragmatic fashion, they nonetheless provided a very powerful vehicle through which members of the labour movement could be convinced to support the war. This was particularly true when liberalism intersected with socialist rhetoric. The fight against militarism was an especially powerful slogan. As Australian historian Robin Archer has noted,
‘in the early twentieth century, the labour movement was the most important force seeking to prevent war and restrain militarism’.94 However, while it may seem contradictory, those opposed to ‘militarism’ during this period could still advocate war, particularly if that war was seen as extension of a larger fight against systems of oppression.
The Westralian Worker, which billed itself as ‘the official organ of the
West Australian Labor Party’, supported the war precisely because it opposed militarism. Shortly after the outbreak of war, the newspaper ran a cartoon of the Kaiser overwhelmed by a rioting crowd of workers, both men and women, armed with pick axes, scythes and axes, baying for his blood. In the background the ruins of a town in Belgium are burning. The caption read: ‘The workers of the world are at one in their hatred of German Military
Autocracy’. Figure 30.
94 Archer, op.cit., p. 47. 291
Figure 30. ‘Workers of the World Unite!’ Westralian Worker, 4 September 1914. In the accompanying editorial, the Westralian Worker carefully laid out the reasons for its support for the war:
Unfortunately…the great powers which science has placed at the disposal of mankind have been largely utilised for evil purposes rather than for good. They have been seized upon as a valuable adjunct of militarism. They have been utilised by the present War Party in Germany to further the insane idea of world-wide dominion, founded upon not the good will of the governed, but upon the exercise of brute force. It is a ghastly idea, and one that is opposed to all the finer and better instincts of humanity.95
95 ‘Labor and the War’, Westralian Worker, 4 September, 1915, p.4. 292
The Westralian Worker’s embrace of the Great War was entirely in keeping with its rejection of the South African War. Despite the numerous changes of editorship (and indeed ownership) experienced by the newspaper in the period between its inception in 1900 and the close of the First World War, the newspaper had a consistently liberal stance on what constituted both a legitimate cause of war and a legitimate manner of conducting war. This changed in February 1917 when editor John Hilton was replaced by future
Prime Minister John Curtin, an anti-conscriptionist who had little sympathy with liberal justifications for war.96
The Westralian often employed mordant wit and sarcasm in relation to Kitchenarian tactics against Boer civilians. This article clearly condemned the use of non-combatants within the tactical field of war:
Kitchener’s heroic resistance to the Boer women and children has won for him unstinted praise. He is sure ultimately to win…Kitchener is a general of the highest order of military genius. In order to stop train-wrecking he is making prominent pro-Boer burghers travel over all lines hitherto rendered unsafe by Boer attacks. The idea is good, but it does not go far enough. Why should he not cause the British soldiers to carry the Boer women and children into battle with them, in order that the Boers would either be compelled to either shoot their own wives and children or give up the ghost. That would be a stroke of genius which would confer eternal glory on the name of Kitchener.97
The concentration camps disgusted the Westralian, and created an indelible black mark against England’s moral record. One article made it clear that the war was deplored not because of a lack of British patriotism , but
96 H.J. Gibney, Labor in Print: a guide to the people who created a labor press in Australia between 1850 and 1939, Canberra, Australian National University Press, 1975, [no page numbers supplied]. Hilton was ‘sacked for supporting conscription’. See: J. Connor, P. Stanley, P. Yule, op.cit., p.118. 97 ‘Stings and Other Things’, Westralian Worker, 13 September 1901, p.2. 293
precisely because of a love for the traditions of great liberals such as ‘the
Burkes and the Foxes, and the Brights and the Gladstones’. For the
Westralian, a love of empire did not equate with jingoistic imperialism.
Indeed, for them, the Jingo heartlessly betrayed the traditions that made
England great. The article stated:
It is precisely because we were proud of our nation’s [England’s] reputation for justice, liberty and its humanity that we deplore its irreparable loss…It is wonderful how rapidly a great people can fall. Two years ago the bare suggestion that England was making war on women would have shocked every Britisher under the flag…now we have proof we are really making war on children, and in a little while that won’t shock us much either. It does not shock the Jingo now.98
The article then went on to detail the meagre rations being given out in the camps, and whole-heartedly condemned the resulting starvation. The stance of the Westralian towards the treatment of civilians in war was exactly the same during the Great War, driven by an underlying liberal concern for non-combatants and a hatred of militarism. However, the
Westralian’s support of the Great War has been described as having straddled ‘two diametrically opposed currents which existed within the labour movement’ – the first being a belief that ‘wars are for the benefit for capital’ and secondly, a belief ‘that when the motherland called upon the empire for assistance, it was the duty of the colonies to respond’.99 But of course, the Westralian Worker did not advocate a stance of blind obedience to Australia’s imperial masters at all. As the Westralian Worker’s position on the South African War demonstrated, support for imperial warfare would
98 P. Plainspeech, ‘The Cry of the Children’, Westralian Worker, 30 August 1901, p.2. 99 R. Corr, Sitting on the Rail: the Westralian Worker in wartime, B.A. Honour Thesis, History, University of Notre Dame, Western Australia, 2003, p.21. 294
only be forthcoming should the war be regarded as just. Mere imperial jingoistic sentiment was not enough to sway an anti-capitalist newspaper towards supporting a war. Moreover, as was stated in relation to W.A.
Holman earlier, the belief that Germany was a militaristic threat was enough to over-ride other principles amongst some groups and individuals within the labour movement. This type of reasoning is not contradictory, but it certainly is complex.
Thus stances that upon initial consideration appear to be inconsistent - how can one condemn one imperial war and then support another; how can one condemn war as a capitalist form of exploitation, and then support it? – are revealed to be compatible when sufficient attention is given to the nuances of both the anti - and pro -war positions that existed in the period spanning from the Boer to the Great War. John Hilton and the other writers on the Westralian Worker did not support the Great War because of jingoistic imperial sentiment, they supported it because they believed that the Germans were behaving barbarously towards civilians – much as the British were purported to have done in the South African War.
During Hilton’s editorship, the Westralian Worker defended publishing atrocity stories because ‘the general charges of foul atrocities against the Germans have been proved up to the hilt’.100 Nor did those who supported the war on the newspaper perceive there to be any conflict at all between the fight against the abuses of capitalism, and the war against
100 ‘German Atrocities’, Westralian Worker, 9 July 1915, p.4. 295
Germany – indeed, the two were perceived to be extensions of the same fight against immorality and cruelty by the powerful against the weak:
This paper has always condemned the horrors of our industrial system, and has done its best to expose them, and why it should be asked to hold its peace in connection with the action of the fiends who have ravished Belgium surpasses all understanding. 101 Following Hilton’s removal from the newspaper, the Westralian ceased to refer to German atrocities, except once – in a letter to the editor.102 Curtin’s appointment reflected the deep schism within the labour movement over the war, and the editorial shift entailed more than merely changing the stance of the newspaper towards conscription from ‘even-handed’ to ‘anti’.
The atrocities now were those committed against the proletariat by the capitalist, the loyalist against the free thinker, or the soldier by the military brass: in August 1918, the newspaper ran a story from British magazine
Everyman about the ‘crucifixion’ (in which soldiers were tied to a wheel of a cart or artillery gun) of British soldiers as punishment for minor disciplinary infringements.103 In the same month it ran a piece which wryly noted that while a Czech newspaper denounced the atrocities against women and children in Belgium in France, it failed to denounce the public humiliation of a Czech woman who was deemed disloyal.104 Indeed, the entire notion of atrocities as a credible moral vehicle through which to justify the war itself was dismissed and sometimes even ridiculed by the paper:
101 Ibid., p.4. 102 ‘The Infamy of Militarism’, Westralian Worker, 31 May 1918. 103‘More Atrocities: the story of the Crucifixion in the Fight for Civilisation’, Westralian Worker, 30 August 1918, p.2. 104 ‘Significant’, Westralian Worker, 9 August 1918, p.2. 296
London: Jan 18. It is stated on credible authority that the Germans have added another to their long list of atrocities. They have forced prisoners to listen for hours to speeches by Baron von Hertling. It is rumoured that the British Government, by way of reprisal, intends to force German prisoners to listen to speeches by the Prime Minister of Australia, W.M. Hughes. The pacifist members in the House of Commons made an attempt to denounce what they called ‘this system of meeting barbarism with barbarism’ but were howled down.105 The alteration in the Westralian Worker’s attitude towards atrocities reflected growing discontent within the Australian labour movement as the war continued. It also reflected the increasing dominance of the radical socialist response to the war, which utterly rejected the liberal ideals contained within the atrocity propaganda that had been so enthusiastically embraced by some elements of the labour movement.
Atrocity propaganda, not jingoistic imperial propaganda, therefore provided the moral fulcrum on which the war was debated within the
Australian labour movement. Where ‘King and Country’ slogans could easily be dismissed as mere jingoism, the moral imperatives within atrocity propaganda were harder to ignore for those with a liberal conscience; many of whom aligned themselves with ‘British values’, not the internationalist principles of socialism. To these people, the humanitarian ideals contained in atrocity propaganda about the civilian victims of war were all but irresistible, creating as they did an image of the war as one prosecuted by the ideal liberal British empire, the defender of the weak.
105 ‘Personalities and Politics’, Westralian Worker, 3 May 1918, p.3. 297
Anti-war sentiment and the limits of liberalism in the labour movement
For politicians such as Frank Anstey, no amount of liberal rhetoric could justify the conflict. Early in the war Anstey condemned the donation of
100,000 pounds to Belgium. In a speech in parliament he stated, ‘The boundary of lines of misery are not in Belgium.’ The money should not be sent to Belgium until ‘a substantial scheme to relieve employment and destitution in Australia was launched’.106 It was in this speech that Anstey declared the war was ‘the product and outcome of men who are dominated by trade and commerce…this is the outcome of…capitalistic society’.107 As
Peter Love has recently observed, Anstey’s ‘analysis of capitalism was not so much robustly socialist as a left populist conception of political and economic power’. His utterances, did however, match that of the more traditional socialists, even though (in contrast to the I.W.W.) his work had a strongly racist element.108
On the front cover of his 1917 anti-war tirade The Kingdom of
Shylock, Anstey placed caricature of a Jewish banker rubbing his hands in glee over the money he was to make from the war. Anstey’s vociferous loathing of ‘Money power’, however, was not just anti-Semitic.109 It also emerged from a framework about how capitalism functioned in relation to the war, and his viewpoint was also influenced by the work of Hobson –
106 ‘The Grant to Belgium’, The Australian Worker, 29 October 1914, p.4. 107 ‘The Belgian Grant’, The Age, 15 October 1914, p.7. 108 Love, op.cit., ‘Frank Anstey, Money Power and the Labour Split in War time’, p. 173. 109 Anti-Semitic conspiracies about war were not contained to Australia, and nor were they peculiar to the Great War. In 1902 Arthur Conan Doyle recorded the objections of some British people, who believed the South African War had been ‘engineered by…Jews’. See: A. Conan Doyle, The War in South Africa: its cause and conduct, Smith, Elder and Co., London, 1902, p. 62. 298
indeed, in Shylock he quoted Hobson’s essay Evolution of Capitalism, in which he stated, ‘the most important lesson of modern warfare is the fact that a knot of men, financiers, politicians and profiteers, can capture its passion, and in the name of patriotism impose a policy of slavery’.110
Anstey was obsessed with men whom he believed provided concrete financial support for the war: they were, he averred, members of a cartel of evil capitalist oligarchs. His book was littered with socialist cartoons from various publications, including a reproduction of a 1913 Will Dyson cartoon that depicted a giant version of Fat the capitalist shoving a hapless worker back into the pit of exploitation and poverty. Figure 31.
Figure 31. Will Dyson, ‘Back into the pit’, The Kingdom of Shylock, 1917.111
110 F. Anstey, The Kingdom of Shylock (revised), Melbourne, Labor Call Print, 1917, p.26, N.L.A. 111 Anstey took this cartoon from a book called Cartoons which was published in London in 1913. Its original title was ‘Labour wants “a place in the sun”’. 299
Another polemic by Anstey was a direct attack upon Hughes. Anstey published the witty pamphlet Hughes and his Views following the Labor split over conscription, and painted Hughes as a man of extremely limited principles, one who was pleased to praise the Labor party whilst in it, but abandoning all principles entirely following the split. Significantly, Anstey asserted that Hughes was part of a capitalist conspiracy. This had taken place in the mining sector, where he had betrayed the interests of both
Australia and the empire by ensuring that German connections to the mining industry were not wholly removed. Anstey (writing in the voice of
Hughes) asserted:
‘I tell the people that I have cut the last tentacle of German influence from the Australian metal industry. I DO NOT TELL THEM that the former proprietorship in those industries still remain. I do not tell them that if a million profit be made, one-half goes to the Baillieu-Kelly end [the Australian owners] AND the other half in trust for the German end of the stick, to be divided after the war’.112
Anstey argued that Hughes’ support for the war was intrinsically linked to a transnational capitalist conspiracy, one that ignored national interests in favour of the international plutocrats. He charged that Hughes had thrown away his socialist loyalties in his prosecution of the war. Anstey did not believe that Australia’s enemy was the German: it was ‘Money Power’ and
Hughes, class traitor and Labor ‘rat’. Hughes and his ilk were feeding hard won worker’s rights into the plutocratic machine of war. By threatening to conscript men, Hughes would empty Australia of white people, and cheap
112 F. Anstey, Hughes and his Views: compiled for the benefit of Mr. Hughes by his best friend Frank Anstey’, Melbourne, published by Frank Anstey at “Labor Call” office, c. 1917, p.2, N.L.A. 300
coloured labour would be imported in their place. 113 Anstey’s rhetoric was shared by other anti-conscription socialists who portrayed conscription as
‘a merciless bludgeon to break down the standard and rights of the industrial classes. When Conscription commences, from that moment every worker is a slave’.114
Because of these preoccupations, German atrocities and liberal justifications for the war were completely irrelevant to Anstey. Thus, while the cause of Belgium was of central importance to those who supported the war, it was a dangerous distraction to those who opposed the conflict. As stated earlier, Frank Anstey had questioned the need to donate funds to
Belgium. In doing so he had challenged the sanctity of the Belgian cause.
Anstey’s dismissal of the suffering of the Belgians put him in direct opposition with those within the Labor movement who supported the war.
In July 1915 Anstey had repeated his conviction that ‘the condition of the people of Australia’ was ‘worse than the condition of the people of Belgium’.
Andrew Hodge, who had voted for Anstey (and was a member of the Labor party) wrote a letter in which he voiced his anger with Anstey’s views. He described Anstey’s language as ‘strong adjective rot’ and paraphrased the
Chief Justice of the High Court, who had said, ‘I will not believe there is any
Australian…man, unless he be a mere degenerate, who is not startled at the horror of the injustices and villainies perpetrated by the German soldiers’.
In other words, by denying sympathy to the Belgians, Anstey was a
113 Love, ‘Frank Anstey, Money Power and the War Time’, op.cit., p.177. 114 Industrial Liberties Swept Away’, Adelaide, The Daily Herald Printers, 1917, Riley Conscription Collection, S.L.V. 301
‘degenerate’.115 Anstey, however, delighted in his role as a ‘degenerate’. In a satirical article in Labor Call (which was the new name for The Tocsin)
Anstey stated that the true atrocity lay in the fact that the ‘Labor Movement’ had been ‘given over to Militarism, Imperialism, and the horrors of War’.116
Anstey remained absolutely unmoved by stories of German atrocities throughout the war.
Dismissing or challenging stories of German atrocities was the hallmark of socialist opposition to the war. Labour newspapers such as
Labor Call and The Australian Worker were also sceptical about atrocity propaganda. By challenging the moral legitimacy of atrocity propaganda these groups challenged the moral legitimacy of the war itself. Labor Call described the pro-war atmosphere as one in which ‘”day-lie” accounts of atrocities and awful mutilations of Germans’ were overwhelming.117 The diet of ‘outrageous atrocities’, complained the paper, was ‘not only repetitive and monotonous, but repulsive and nauseating as well’. It was important that the actions of the British soldiers in the South African War, when they burned Boer farm houses and imprisoned women and children in concentration camps be remembered.118 How then, could the Germans be considered singularly barbaric, if the British Empire had also committed similar acts? How could a war based on such faulty moral reasoning be legitimate?
115 ‘A Voice from Bourke’, Preston Leader, 10 July 1916, p.2. 116 ‘War: Glorious Bloody War!’, Labor Call, 15 April 1915, p.6. 117 ‘Atrocities Doubted’, Labor Call, 10 December 1914, p.10. 118 ‘”Atrocities in War: the hypocrisy of the Nations in Accusing their Enemies of Using Barbarous Methods’, Labor Call, 3 December 1914, p.4. 302
Anti-war activists were also incensed by the way that atrocity propaganda was used as a political tool by pro-war groups during the war: atrocities were referenced by pro-war Labor politicians not only to justify the conflict, but also to justify the increasingly draconian treatment of militant socialists. For example, Holman used Belgian atrocities to justify the jailing of I.W.W. members, stating that the dangerous behaviour of militant criminals could not be tolerated while barbaric Germany continued to pose a threat to Australian democracy. However, in late 1918, The
Australian Worker stated that Holman, who had been involved in the jailing of twelve men, was using Belgium as ‘a red herring’. Henry Boote, who was the editor of the paper, was convinced the men had been illegally jailed.119
Holman, complained Boote, would launch ‘into a recital of Belgian woes and shudders at the thought of German atrocities’ whenever supporters of the
I.W.W. twelve had agitated for a re-trial. ‘There must be some connecting link in his mind between these two things…What is it? Nothing more than a politician’s desire to discredit political opponents’. Boote continued,
‘Belgium’s agony is to him, it seems, a chance to score off the other side’.120
While Holman’s use of atrocity propaganda was extremely opportunistic, we should not lose sight of the fact that the cause of Belgium was one of great ideological power. The fact that this power did not sway groups such as the I.W.W. was significant. The I.W.W. had ‘spearheaded left-
119 F. Farrell, ‘Boote, Henry Ernest (1855-1949)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian national University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/boote-henry-ernest-5288, published first in hardcopy 1979, accessed 20 March 1914. 120 ‘Holman and “The Worker”’, The Australian Worker, 10 October 1918, p.3. 303
wing opposition to Australia’s participation in the war’.121 As an international socialist organisation, it had absolutely no interest in supporting the British Empire or the Great War, and was therefore immune to atrocity propaganda from the beginning of the conflict.
The I.W.W. were an ultra-radical organisation, who ‘were committed’ to organising the working class into ‘One Big Union’. They were not industrial unionists as such, but more anarcho-syndicalist in nature, seeking to destroy capitalism ‘with a general strike and seizure of the means of production’.122 They greeted the outbreak of the war with an uncompromising cartoon of the Fat-cats of capitalism and arms manufacturers sitting beneath a skull spewing out the golden coins which were the profits of war. Figure 32. The caption read: ‘For the workers and their dependents, death, starvation, poverty and untold misery. For the capitalist class: gold, stained with the blood of millions, riotous luxury, banquets of jubilation over the graves of their dupes and slaves’.123 During the Great War, Direct Action was perhaps the most virulently anti-war and anti-capitalist publication. As labour historian Ian Turner has written, it was
‘the bête noire of respectable opinion’.124 It was also dangerously popular, reaching a circulation of 12,000 by mid-1917. However, Hughes passed a
121 V. Burgmann and Jeffrey Johnson, ‘Workers against Warfare: the American and Australian Experiences Before and During World War 1’, conference paper from Australia- US Transnational and Comparative Labour History Conference, Sydney, January 8-9, 2015, http://sydney.edu.au/business/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/219338/Burgmann_Johnson_ paper_.pdf, accessed 25 January 2016, p.12. 122 Farrel, op.cit., p.13-14. 123 ‘War! What for!’, Direct Action, 10 August 1914, p.1. 124 I. Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics: the dynamics of the Labour Movement in Eastern Australia, Sydney, Hale and Iremonger, 1979, p.122. 304
bill in July 1917 that made the I.W.W. illegal and the last Direct Action was printed on 18 August 1917.125
Figure 32. Syd Nicholls, ‘War what for?’, Direct Action, 10 August 1914.
Until it was shut down, the newspaper excoriated the war. Alongside the abuse hurled at the capitalist warlords and their political lackeys, Direct
Action also questioned the German atrocities. ‘Editors vie with each other in
125 Ibid., pp.134-135. 305
expressing horror and indignation at all sorts of nameless barbarities, and pouring forth their maledictions upon the perpetrators’, complained T.
Glynn. If people really wanted to end atrocities, he claimed, they would not travel to Belgium. Instead, they could join the ‘rebel army’ of their class, and put an end to capitalism.126 In another article Direct Action declared that the
‘Modern Huns’, were not the Germans, but the ‘master class’, who were
‘more rapacious than a pack of wild wolves’.127 The victims of German atrocities were perhaps not even victims – Nurse Cavell, the newspaper stated, was simply a spy who had been caught and shot.128
It also dismissed the notion that the Allies could fight a ‘civilised’ war against the Germans: ‘there is no such thing, of course, as civilised warfare.
All war is necessarily barbaric in its methods’.129 This statement was powerful, as it attacked the entire conceit of liberal humanitarian intervention. As was discussed in Chapter Three, First World War atrocity propaganda rested upon the notion that the Allied nations were ‘civilised’, and the Germans had regressed to ‘barbarism’.
The newspaper frequently overturned the moral conventions used in atrocity propaganda: where a half-naked woman was often used to portray the figure of ‘Civilisation’ being menaced by the German ‘Hun’ and the forces of barbarism, Direct Action instead portrayed Civilisation and a despairing
Humanity being threatened by Militarism, Imperialism and War. Figure 32.
126 ‘”German Atrocities” and Others’, Direct Action, 1 November 1914, p.4. 127 ‘The Modern Huns’, Direct Action, 1 November 1915, p.3. 128 ‘The Cavel [sic] Case’, Direct Action, 30 October 1915, p.4. 129 ‘Civilized Warfare’, Direct Action, 1 December 1914, p.3. 306
Figure 33. Syd Nicholls, Untitled, Direct Action, 15 August 1915.
Liberal rhetoric had little chance to flourish in this stony ground of militant socialist scepticism. The enemy was not overseas, the enemy was at home. The enemy was not a barbaric Hun, the enemy was hunger, unemployment and a government that was increasingly intolerant of opposition. The fault line between those who believed in imperialism – even in its liberal, humanitarian version, and those who believed in international socialism - widened as the war continued. The fatal division that had become apparent in the labour movement during the South African War 307
became insupportable. Where one group believed imperial war could be justified, the other believed that no war could be justified. Where one felt that the fate of Australia was dependent upon the British Empire, the other discounted national boundaries, drawing its lines of loyalty transnationally instead between the workers of the world.
From the beginning of the conflict many within the labour movement had supported the war as they had believed in the justness of the cause. In
1936 Victorian parliamentarian and anti-conscription campaigner Maurice
Blackburn recalled that, ‘with few exceptions, Labour supporters, Left and
Right’ believed from the outset that the war was right and necessary. It was
‘a war to avenge the rape of Belgium’. However, as I discuss in the next chapter, ‘growing doubt’ about the ‘righteousness’ of the war had ‘sapped labour enthusiasm’ and meant that by 1918 fewer people were willing to enlist. 130 Thus, while the anti-war propagandists formed but a small minority, their message became increasingly powerful during the latter part of the war. The initial idealism attached to the conflict, the belief in the inherent goodness of a liberal humanitarian intervention, could not survive contact with the consequences of war.
The next chapter investigates how the federal government attempted to manage decreasing enlistments in the final two years of the war. In response to growing war weariness, the government embarked on two separate campaigns of atrocity propaganda. The first campaign was used in rural Australia, and used the medium of the cinema to gain recruits. The
130 Blackburn, op.cit., p.8. 308
second campaign, launched only one month before the war ended, was aimed directly at pacifists and socialists who supported the ‘peace by negotiation’ solution to the war. However, while Australians were highly receptive to liberal justifications for the war in 1915, they were largely inured to them in 1917 and 1918. Despite this, the federal government attempted to inject the populace with a hypodermic syringe filled with atrocities. This final chapter demonstrates that no matter how vicious or powerful propaganda is, it cannot persuade hostile subjects.
309
CHAPTER SIX A much misunderstood monster: the German ogre and Australia’s final and forgotten recruiting campaign of the Great War
One month before the First World War ended federal recruiting authorities distributed what became one of the most notorious examples of Australian wartime anti-German sentiment, Norman Lindsay’s poster ‘German
Monster’. Figure 34. In it, a monstrous gorilla-man wearing the iconic
German Pickelhaube is about to seize the world and maul it in his bloody hands. The poster met with a largely hostile reception and was only very briefly on display before the war ended. However, in Australian historiography ‘German Monster’ became one of the most reproduced
Australian First World War recruiting posters. Its horrid mien has proved irresistible to historians, and many have incorrectly asserted that it was created in a variety of different years for different purposes, from conscription campaigns to early recruiting drives. Frequently misdated and misunderstood, the poster has come to exemplify Australian war enthusiasm. What the poster represents instead is very much the opposite, telling the story of a desperate government attempting to mobilise an indifferent and war weary Australian population. Printed at a time when support for the war was increasingly elusive, the ‘German Monster’ was part of an extravagant campaign that attempted to counter growing support within the labour movement for a negotiated peace. 310
This chapter demonstrates that ‘German Monster’ represents the growing divide between a government still keen to prosecute the war, and a population that was beginning to harbour grave doubts about the cost and duration of the conflict. The shrill and anachronistic tone of the campaign reflects the circumstances in which it was designed: government censors feared that they had lost control of the spread of anti-war propaganda.1
Recruiting sergeants feared that Australia had been ‘overcome with a sleeping sickness’, and were unaware of the true threat posed by Germany; disloyal people had been spreading the call for ‘peace by negotiation’.2 The government sought to counter the growing disillusionment about the war by transplanting the distant violence in Europe into an Australian setting. The war, the propagandists warned, would not remain an abstract danger if the
Germans were not stopped. The government believed that propaganda could close the geographical distance between the distant battle front and the home front, and in doing so, raise enlistment rates. Through an exploration of the historical circumstances of the poster’s creation, I provide an insight into the rhetorical battles the government fought on the home front as it struggled to revive enthusiasm for the war.
1 Memorandum for the Chief of the General Staff from the Deputy Chief Censor, Department of Defence, 4 June 1918, MP367/1 B570/12/269. 2 ‘The Latest War Film: Somebody had Blundered’, Woodend Star, 21 September 1918, p.2. 311
Figure 34. Norman Lindsay, ‘German Monster’, Commonwealth of Australia, 1918, A.W.M. The campaign that included ‘German Monster’ was conceived at the beginning of 1918.3 Following the two failed conscription referenda in
October 1916 and December 1917, and a significant decline in recruiting, it became apparent to recruiting authorities that the wordy style of previous federal propaganda campaigns was no longer adequate.4 The recruiting environment of early 1918 was grim: immense Australian losses in the
Third Battle of Ypres had had a ‘devastating’ impact on the Australian home front. By the end of the battle in November 1917, it was obvious to many
Australians that the 38,000 casualties had been sacrificed for little strategic
3 Donald Mackinnon, 7 February 1918, 3 DRL 6673/169 PART 2, AWM. 4 M. Perks, ‘Labour and the Governor-General's Recruiting Conference, Melbourne, April 1918’, Labour History, Vol. 34., 1978, p. 28. 312
advantage.5 And although British Prime Minister Lloyd George was pressuring Dominions to produce more men following German Spring
Offensive in March 1918, they were not to be had.6 As Robson has written of
Australian Prime Minister William Hughes’ frustration in attempting to obtain recruits, ‘[He] was a devious man, but his deviousness could not lead to the raising of 7,000 men a month to reinforce and maintain the A.I.F.’.
Instead, recruiting numbers levelled out in 1918 to 2,500 per month nationwide.7 One recruiting officer recalled of this period, ‘The work of those engaged in the heart-breaking efforts to raise the necessary quota of enlistments to maintain the strength of the A.I.F. abroad, was exceedingly arduous. Week by week the difficulties to be faced became greater.’8
In response to these pressures, Australian authorities commissioned a Recruiting Kit that contained the now notorious poster ‘German Monster’.9
The same series also contained ‘Will you fight now or wait for This?’,
5 J. Beaumont, Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War, Australia, Allen and Unwin, 2013, p. 362. 6 Perks, op.cit., p.30. 7 L.L. Robson, The First AIF.: A Study of its Recruitment 1914-1918, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1982, p. 182 and 185. 8 T.W. Bowers, Capt. Organising Secretary, State Recruiting Committee of South Australia. ‘Second and Final Annual Report, 1918’ from Organising Secretary’s Second Annual Report for the year 1918, 1. MP367/1, 582/1/1458, N.A.A. Melbourne. 9 The title ‘German Monster’ has been taken from the N.A.A. registry files in Melbourne. Leslie Lloyd Robson cited this number as a file (582/1/1223) in The First AIF: A Study of its Recruitment 1914-1918, 200. However, it is not a file as such, but the designation of a single item of correspondence. The Recruiting Kit nomenclature has been taken from Roger Butler’s book Poster art in Australia: the streets as art Galleries – walls sometimes speak, Canberra, National Gallery of Australia, 1993. Photographic reproductions of the posters, pamphlets, advertisements, film and distribution instructions can be found in: E.A. Robertson, The Hybrid Heroes and Monstrous Hybrids of Norman and Lionel Lindsay: art, propaganda and race in the British Empire and Australia from 1880-1918, M.A. Thesis, Australian National University, 2010. This final section uses some sources and concepts from my Masters thesis. They have been reframed in this chapter to twin together two major themes in my PhD: the myth that atrocity propaganda could alter how people felt about the war, and also to provide a portrait of the final year of the propaganda war that took place on the home front between pro-war and anti-war groups. 313
another outrageous item of anti-German atrocity propaganda which depicted brutal ‘Huns’ attacking a farm in country Australia. Figure 35.
These striking images were part of a Recruiting Kit that was created to promote the Voluntary Ballot Enlistment Scheme (V.B.E.S.). As part of this scheme, a card was posted out to eligible men who could then volunteer to take part in a recruiting ballot. If their name was drawn, they agreed to join the A.I.F.10
Figure 35. Norman Lindsay, ‘Will you fight now or wait for This?’, 1918
Along with the posters and the recruiting ballot card, the Kit also contained mail-out pamphlets, advertising and film. It was probably the most extensive and costly recruiting campaign to be conducted during the
10 ‘Recruiting Cabinet Decisions’ 6 February 1918, A6006 1918/12/31, N.A.A. Canberra. 314
war, as it was the only time the federal government had distributed such enormous amounts of propaganda throughout the country.11 However, the
Kit and the enlistment scheme it was designed to promote were largely forgotten, and the anti-German posters, disconnected from their original context, became emblematic of anti-German sentiment throughout the war.
Yet these posters were designed to sharply remind an increasingly jaded
Australian populace of the horrors perpetrated by the enemy in a war that was being fought so far away.
The failure of ‘German Monster’ to resonate with the public in late
1918 demonstrates that recruiting propaganda during the Great War was not a ‘hypodermic needle’ that could inject the public with war enthusiasm: while ‘German Monster’ was perhaps the most virulent item of atrocity propaganda to have been produced by Australia during the war, it was launched at precisely the wrong time, when war enthusiasm was at its nadir.
Australian atrocity propaganda had been demonstrably effective earlier in the conflict. For example, in July 1915 recruiting reached its highest monthly total – 36,575 men. This level was never to be repeated again in the war, and the reason for this is the result of two factors.12 Firstly, in May, news of casualties in Gallipoli prompted many men to enlist.13
Secondly, in the same month, the Bryce report into German atrocities in
Belgium was published and a German U-boat had torpedoed the civilian
11 E. Robertson, ‘Propaganda at Home (Australia)’, 1914-1918 Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War, in U. Daniel, P. Gatrell, O. Janz, H. Jones, J. Keene, A. Kramer and B. Nasson (eds.), issued by the Frie Universität Berlin [http://encylopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/propaganda_at_home_australia], 2015. 12 Beaumont, op.cit., pp. 107-108. 13 Robson, op.cit., p.43. 315
passenger liner the Lusitania, which resulted in the deaths of 1,200 civilians.14 The cumulative effect of these atrocities had been powerful. It can be reasonably assumed that in 1918 the federal government sought to recapture the public interest in war atrocities, and therefore the war itself, through its Recruiting Kit.
However, the Australia that was receptive to atrocity propaganda of
1915 was not the same Australia that reacted to the ‘German Monster’ at the end of 1918: in 1915 Australia had not yet suffered the crippling divisiveness that was one result of the conscription campaigns. Nor did it have a labour movement that was hostile to the war.15 By 1918, these circumstances had greatly changed. Industrial militancy gradually increased in Australia as the working classes became increasingly radicalised by high rent, low wages and general ‘war weariness’.16 The Great Strike of 1917 was a particularly important example of a radicalised labour movement, with nearly 100,000 workers striking throughout New South Wales and Victoria from the beginning of August to early September. This strike, as Robert
Bollard has observed, ‘cleaved Australia on lines of class and politics to an extent that has rarely been matched’.17 Women engaged in their own public protest too. Adela Pankhurst led a number of demonstrations in Melbourne protesting against the prohibitively high cost of living – so straitened were
14 A. Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 61. 15 R. Archer, ‘Stopping War and Stopping Conscription: Australian Labour’s Response to World War I in Comparative Perspective’, Labour History, Vol. 106., 2014, p.44. 16 N. Kirk, Labour and the Politics of Empire: Britain and Australia 1900 to the present, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2010, pp. 98-99. 17 R. Bollard, ‘The Great Strike of 1917 – was Defeat Inevitable?’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 56., Iss. 2., 2010, pp. 159-160. 316
the circumstances of some that there was ‘near-starvation in the case of a significant few’.18 A further challenge to social cohesion was the sectarian acrimony that developed between Irish-Australians and ardent imperialists following the Easter Rising of 1916.19 All of these factors combined to make
Australians less receptive to war propaganda. Indeed, while war films had been extremely popular earlier in the war, one film-maker in late 1918 was forced to advertise his picture thus: ‘Not a war film’.20
It was within this context that the ‘German Monster’ poster was released, and it is within this historical context that the poster needs to be considered, rather than used as an item of decorative furniture to illustrate a variety of textual arguments about the conflict.21
Misdating and misconceptions
Writing about the deficiencies in Australian historians’ use of First World
War visual resources, Eric Andrews has observed, ‘The same photographs, cartoons and maps constantly appear, although – with the development of technology – in more glossy format’.22 Jayson Althofer has noted that
Lindsay’s work in particular has been used to ‘good effect as illustrations’ of historians’ arguments, ‘but without close examination of particular
18 J. Smart, ‘Feminists, food and the fair price: The cost of living demonstrations in Melbourne, August-September 1917’, in J. Damousi and M. Lake (eds.), Gender and War: Australians at war in the twentieth century, Cambridge; New York, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 276. 19 R. Bollard, In the Shadow of Gallipoli: The Hidden history of Australia in World War I, Sydney, NewSouth, 2013, p.100. 20 R. Cooper and A. Pike, Australian Film 1900-1977, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 63. 21 L. Green, ‘Advertising war: Picturing Belgium in First World War publicity’, Media, War and Conflict, Vol. 7., No. 3., 2014, p.311. 22 E.M. Andrews, The Anzac Illusion: Anglo-Australian relations during World War I, Australia, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 1-2. 317
historical conditions in which they were imagined, produced, disseminated and received’.23 In this vein, ‘German Monster’ has been used many times in publications to illustrate the morally unsavoury elements of Australia during the Great War. Although the poster was circulated only briefly before hostilities ended, for the generations that were born after the conflict, and who viewed atrocity propaganda with a jaundiced eye, it was a peerless example of the Australia’s obsession with German frightfulness during the
Great War.
For example, Michael McKernan dated it as having been produced in
1915, and Glenn Withers mistakenly cited it has having been part of a 1917 recruiting campaign.24 While art historian Roger Butler correctly cited the posters as being part of the Recruiting Kit, he incorrectly asserted that the government had commissioned Lindsay to ‘assist the campaign to endorse conscription’.25 Patsy Adam-Smith recalled Lindsay’s poster in her evocative introduction to her book The ANZACS within the context of her memories of the First World War. For Adam-Smith, Lindsay’s monster was characteristic of the atrocity propaganda she was exposed to during the course of the war:
Of course there were things I never doubted. Horror for instance, the one vignette above others that all children can conjure up at the chance hearing of the sketchiest remark. That the Germans butchered babies was brought home to me
23 J. Althofer, ‘Embattled and Entrenched Art: Norman and Lionel Lindsay’s Cultural Struggles during the First World War’, paper presented at the War and Citizenship in 20th Century Australia symposium, Australian National Museum, 3 July 2004, p.1. 24 G. Withers, Conscription: Necessity and Justice, the case for an all volunteer army, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1972, p. 8; M. McKernan, Australians in Wartime: commentary and Documents, Australia, Nelson, 1980, p. 2. 25 Butler, op.cit., p.16. 318
nightly in my dreams. ‘There was this picture with a Hun with no less than 6 Belgian babies skewered on his bayonet!’…But there were the posters. There was a harsh red and green painting of Norman Lindsay’s with the Hun with his face of Beelzebub slavering over a globe with the blood from his fingers running over Europe and trickling down towards Australia.26
‘Will you fight now or wait for this?’ was equally bloody in tone, and also dated incorrectly. Gerhard Fischer implied in his article on home front
Australia that the poster exemplified the fear of invasion in Australia that was present when the War Precautions Act was introduced in late 1914.27
John F. Williams asserted the poster was part of the conscription campaigns:
In the end it may be that pro-war propaganda was not all that successful in Australia, for two-thirds of eligible males never did join up, even under the pressures of a conscription campaign that utilised Norman Lindsay posters showing spike-helmeted Huns ravishing womenfolk and pillaging outback stations.28
When the ‘German monster’ has been dated correctly, it has not been connected to the V.B.E.S. campaign, or to the circumstances which lead to its creation.29 In misdating the poster, and omitting its relationship to the final
26 P. Adam-Smith, The ANZACS, Adelaide, Nelson, 1978, p.7. 27 G. Fischer, ‘”Negative Integration” and an Australian road to modernity: interpreting the Australian homefront experience in World War I’, Australian Historical Studies Vol. 26., Iss. 105., 1995, p. 453. 28 J. F Williams, ANZACS, the media and the Great Warm New South Wales, University of New South Wales Press, 1987, p.17. 29 Beaumont, op.cit., p.98. For example, Beaumont dated the poster ‘German Monster’ correctly, although she does not connect it to the V.B.E.S. campaign. Peter Stanley, who wrote several pages about the six posters from the Recruiting Kit (one of which was ‘German Monster’) in his book What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, has analysed the imagery quite intensively. However, the five pamphlets which were also in the Kit (and which will be explored in detail later) and which accompanied the atrocity propaganda theme of ‘German Monster’ are barely mentioned. Stanley also neglected to connect the posters or pamphlets with the Voluntary Ballot Enlistment Scheme. P. Stanley, What did you do in the War, Daddy: a visual history of propaganda posters, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 9-11. Graham Donley on the other hand wrote at great length about the V.B.E.S., but only devoted one sentence to the significant propaganda campaign which 319
recruiting campaign, historians have effectively stated that the federal government was underwriting a particularly strong form of atrocity propaganda throughout the course of the war. However, this is a very misleading picture of how the Australian federal government produced and used propaganda during the conflict. It implies that the federal government was spending enormous amounts of money promoting war hungry hysteria from the beginning of the conflict.
However, this is not the case at all. For much of the war the federal government had little need to produce its own atrocity propaganda. While state governments did publish numerous items of atrocity propaganda, the federal government simply could not have produced it before 1917 - it was, in fact, the state governments that produced the bulk of recruiting propaganda for much of the war, not the federal government. In contrast to
Great Britain’s sophisticated propaganda organisations, official propaganda in Australia was a decentralised, ad-hoc affair for much of the war. Part of this was due to the fact that Australia had federated a mere thirteen years before the outbreak of the war, and as a consequence, the bulk of propaganda production for the first half of the war was controlled at the state level. Because of the strength of the state system, recruiting responsibilities did not begin to be federalised until the close of 1916, when
accompanied it: ‘The well-known artist Norman Lindsay was also involved in this project, but which of his many works were specifically for this scheme has yet to be positively identified’. G. Donley, ‘Voluntary Ballot Enlistment Scheme, 1918’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, Vol. 30, 2003, http://www.awm.gov.au/journal/j38/vebs.asp., accessed online March 15, 2015. [no page numbers provided]. 320
Donald Mackinnon was appointed as the Director-General of Recruiting.30
Therefore, it is simply impossible that the federal government could have published ‘German Monster’ early in the war. And while the states drew upon the expertise of advertising specialists and commercial artists in their propaganda, the federal government did not appear to do so until the
Recruiting Kit.31
Despite the federalisation of the recruiting effort, propaganda was not accorded the level of attention it deserved, and the Directorate for War
Propaganda was established only very belatedly, in October 1918.32 It took the defeat of two conscription referenda, German victories in Europe, and a general decline in enthusiasm for the war to force the government to apply the required combination of money and expertise to the creation of a truly federal campaign. The earlier lack of professional input into federal propaganda meant that previous to 1918, Commonwealth recruiting authorities simply lacked the imaginative spark required for the creation of such an arresting campaign: Mackinnon’s previous attempt at atrocity propaganda, German Atrocities, was a visually dull booklet which reiterated sections of the notorious Bryce report into German atrocities in Belgium and also detailed the death of Nurse Cavell and the sinking of the Lusitania.33
30 Donald Mackinnon memo to historian 15 July 1919, p.1, AWM 38 3DRL 6673/169 PART 1, A.W.M. 31 R. Crawford, But Wait, There’s More…A History of Australian Advertising, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2008, p. 27-28. 32 Announcement of Establishment of Commonwealth Directorate of Educational Propaganda on War and Peace Issues, 19th October 1918, A2481 A1918/6573, N.A.A. Canberra. 33 German Atrocities: Germany and Inhumanity versus Humanity and Christianity, Melbourne, Director-General of Recruiting, 1917, p.4. The language in the booklet was however very 321
The Recruiting Kit therefore represented a leap in the government’s understanding of propaganda. During the planning phase, Donald
Mackinnon had written of the final campaign, ‘All the adjuncts of advertising must be employed’, and they were indeed.34 Firstly, Norman Lindsay – arguably Australia’s premier commercial artist - was hired. Secondly, advertising experts were called in to assist. While it is difficult to know all of the advertising experts who assisted the government in the production of the Kit, it is certain that James A. Fletcher of the International Harvester
Company, who had some expertise in advertising, was involved. His name is attached to two booklets, one of which is the guide to the Kit itself. His explicit expertise in direct advertising is made clear in another booklet about the Kit. In Advertising Plan for Reinforcing the AIF he wrote,
‘Advertising to be effective must be carried on systematically, and so planned that each piece of matter used be made to back up those preceding it’.35 The Kit was designed to be rolled out over the course of several months and the planning behind it was meticulous.
Reframing the ‘German Monster’
Peter Stanley has suggested that ‘Lindsay’s posters reflected less a planned propaganda campaign than his own obsessions’.36 This is not the case, as each image was carefully matched to the essays and text that
florid at times: ‘But the German Chamber of Horrors must be kept always open for inspection. Before its contents pale all the fiendish, foul and frightful colossal crimes which the world has ever witnessed or history ever recorded’. 34 Donald Mackinnon, 7 February 1918, 3 DRL 6673/169 PART 2, A.W.M. 35 J.F. Fletcher, Advertising Plan for Reinforcing AI F, Melbourne, [printer and publisher unknown] July 18, 1918, 204/346, World War I 1914 – 1918 Australian Leaflets – Recruitment and Victorian Leaflets, A.W.M. 36 Stanley, op.cit., pp. 10 – 11. 322
accompanied them. In addition, the multi-media campaign used recurring motifs – for example, images in the coloured posters and pamphlets were redrawn in black and white for newspaper advertisements. Essentially, the monstrous Hun was a recognisable brand which was used to bombard the eligible man during most aspects of his waking day: when he caught a train, posters by Norman Lindsay would be on the hoardings; when he got home, a pamphlet illustrated by Norman Lindsay would be waiting for him in the mailbox; when he went to the cinema, a short film based on Lindsay’s monstrous Hun would maraud across the screen. The booklet accompanying the Kit explained that ‘at every hour of the day, and by every possible means,
Australia will be confronted with the necessity of honouring her solemn obligation’.37 Thus even if the eligible man happened to avoid the cinema, when he opened a newspaper, the same images would be displayed.
It can be presumed that this intense exposure to atrocity propaganda was designed to replicate the same responses in eligible men that had occurred earlier in the war, when the sinking of the Lusitania and the release of the Bryce report had assisted in the creation of an unprecedented recruiting spike. These tactics had become central to various campaigns that were being conducted in 1918. The federal government’s Sixth War
Loan Bond campaign sought to remind the viewers about the atrocities that had occurred earlier in the war. One pamphlet read, ‘If you would protect women from the fate that befell the women of Lille; if you want to render it
37 General Plan of Campaign for Reinforcing the Australian Imperial Force, Commonwealth Government of Australia, pp. 5-6. [no printer’s details supplied] 323
impossible for the men who slew Edith Cavell ever to set foot in Australia, back up our Army and Navy to the limit’.38 A visually dull pamphlet released by the Director-General of Recruiting reminded readers that it was the duty of ‘civilised nations of the world’ to bring under control a nation that had committed numerous crimes, from ‘savagely mutilating men, women and children’, to destroying and poisoning wells and using civilians as living shields.
While these items of atrocity propaganda were powerful, the
Recruiting Kit occupied an entirely different level of impact, mostly because of Norman Lindsay’s pungent imagery. The posters and pamphlets were dominated by images of German wickedness, from babies being impaled on the spur of a giant German jackboot to the victims of the Lusitania being dragged down into a watery grave. Figure 36.
However, a new tactic was to directly refute the arguments put forth by some elements of the labour movement that the federal government believed had discouraged men from enlisting - indeed, the main target of the
Kit’s essays were political concepts that had taken root in the labour movement, such as bolshevism, and the belief the war could be equitably ended through peace by negotiation.
38 ‘Keep Australia Free: Bonds are better than Bondage’, No.54., Commonwealth Treasury, March 1918 N.L.A. 324
Figure 36. Norman Lindsay, detail, from ‘The Military Situation/Australia’s Deadly Peril/Your Help is Needed’ pamphlet, Commonwealth of Australia, 1918, A.W.M.
The release by the Bolsheviks of the Sykes-Picot Agreement in late
1917 had led increasing numbers of the Australian labour movement to gravitate towards the idea of peace by negotiation. The ‘secret treaties’ revealed that the major powers had already negotiated new forms of imperial ownership of the Middle East.39 Writers in the Australian labour press believed the release of the treaties provided confirmation that the imperialist and capitalist architects of the war had used secret diplomacy to advance their interests at great expense to ordinary people. The Westralian
Worker stated in relation to the treaties: ‘the peoples of Europe have earned the right to know the truth about these things, owing to their innumerable sacrifices and the universal economic ruin’.40
39 V.H. Rothwell, British War Aims and Peace Diplomacy 1914-1918, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971, pp.28-30. 40 ‘Secret Treaties and Trotsky’, Westralian Worker, 14 June 1918, 5. 325
The A.L.P. officially adopted ‘peace by negotiation’ at the national
A.L.P. conference in June 1918.41 By this point, discontent within the A.L.P. itself had reached a point of near insurrection in relation to the war, and the conference ‘came within two votes of declaring the A.L.P. opposed to sending any more men overseas’.42 While this did not occur, a resolution that was deemed to be deeply disloyal, being the demand for peace by negotiation, was passed. The A.L.P. had announced their commitment to peace in bold language, drawing heavily upon the liberal progressive ideals that had been the centrepiece of the British anti-war organisation, the Union for Democratic Control.43 However, in their report on the Perth conference, the A.L.P. also veered at times towards strong socialist ideals and lent unambiguous support to the Russian revolutionaries:
We, therefore, to quote the “Sydney Morning Herald” of the 18th April, 1917, “rejoice over the revolution in Russia” and congratulate the people of that country upon their efforts to abolish despotic power and class privileges, and urge the workers of every land where similar conditions exist to follow their example with the magnificent courage and determination.44
An analysis of the Recruiting Kit makes it very clear that the federal government regarded both the demand for peace by negotiation and the
A.L.P.’s ‘Bolshevik’ tendencies to be serious threats to the war effort. In a pamphlet that was to be mailed out to eligible men, a lengthy essay accompanied by a variety of Lindsay’s illustrations took great pains to
41 Beaumont, op.cit., p.457. This position had been proposed earlier by various groups within the labour movement. See: Perks, op.cit., p.33. 42 M. Perks, ‘A New Source on the Seventh A.L.P. Federal Conference, 1918’, Labour History, Volume 32, 1977, p.77. 43 Australian Labor Party, Report of the Seventh Commonwealth Conference of the Australian Labor Party Opened at Perth, June 17, 1918, Melbourne, Labor Call Print, 1918, pp. 44-45. 44 Ibid., p.11. 326
explain to the potential recruit why ‘Peace by Negotiation’ was a flawed ideal. The text covered the concept of Prussianism and German militarism, and urged the reader:
… to disregard all those who tell you that the safety of Australia depends upon “peace by negotiation”. Now, as at the beginning, it depends on one thing alone – hard fighting in the field and in that fighting you are most earnestly urged to play your part.45
The most striking aspect of the pamphlet’s argument against a negotiated peace was the image by Lindsay titled ‘Peace by Negotiation’ which is referencing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In it a simian German has ruthlessly cut off the hand of a hapless Russian peasant who has been fool enough to shake hands with him. Figure 37. The Kit also provides an important insight into what the government believed would provide a sufficient moral incentive to persuade reluctant men to join. To close the distance between
Australia and the battlefield, every trope of atrocity propaganda was drawn upon and amplified, with the alleged violence against women and children by German soldiers relentlessly repeated in text and image. Thus the standard depictions of the women and children of Belgium being menaced by the Hun were transformed into Australian women being threatened in outback towns.
Mackinnon believed that Australians had no real conception of what the war had done to the people of Europe. When launching the campaign he stated, ‘the trouble in Australia had been that hundreds of thousands of our
45 ‘The Military Situation/Australia’s Deadly Peril/Your Help is Needed’, Commonwealth of Australia, 1918, ARTV00144, A.W.M. 327
people had never…visualised its importance and its awful nature’. He continued,
Here in the calm of Australian waters, thousands of miles removed from the centres of activity, and dependent as we are for our knowledge of what is going on outside our own corner of the world upon the more or less exaggerated reports given under the scare headlines of the newspapers, it is difficult to bring ourselves to even a faint realisation of what men and children of other countries may be called upon to suffer while the nations may be called upon to suffer while the nations are at one another’s throats…46
Figure 37. Norman Lindsay, ‘Peace by negotiation’, from ‘The Military Situation/Australia’s Deadly Peril/Your Help is Needed’ pamphlet, Commonwealth of Australia, 1918, A.W.M.
46 ‘Mr Mackinnon visits Corio: the new direct recruiting appeal’, Geelong Advertiser, 7 October, 1918, 3. 328
Mackinnon’s tactic of focusing upon closing the gap between the battle front and the home front was not entirely new: it emerged as part of a slow evolution as propagandists attempted to make Australians feel that they were personally at risk should the Germans win the war. In April 1917, J.G.
Swan of the Victorian State Recruiting Committee had stated that Australian war propaganda had altered in its approach. In promoting the atrocity propaganda film ‘Why Britain Went to War’ (which was discussed in
Chapter Two) Swan said, ‘At one time in the earlier history of the war it was customary to appeal to the sense of duty, to love for hearth and home’.
However, the new method was appeal instead to ‘self-interest’. He continued, ‘In other words, of “saving our own skins”’. This was achieved by asking Australians to think about what would occur should Germany invade
Australia.47
This shift from appealing to duty to self-interest accompanied a decline in recruiting that continued until the close of the war. Enlistments
(previously ‘well maintained’) had become ‘very light’ by December 1916.48
They inexorably declined over the following two years: in response campaigns became more co-ordinated and sophisticated. By 1918, the notion that Australians were deluded about the nature of the war, coupled with threats about the presence of the ‘Hun’ in Australia had become a commonplace tool in the propagandist’s kit. For example, another pamphlet from the Sixth War Loan Bond campaign stated, ‘To many thousands in
47 J.G. Swan, ‘The Cinema in Recruiting’, Graphic of Australia, 27 April 1917, p.5. 48 AWM 38 3DRL 6673/169 PART 1, Donald Mackinnon memo to historian 15 July 1919, p.1, A.W.M. 329
Australia the War has not come home, because the conditions here are virtually those of peace’. Australians would share the fate of ‘the women and children ‘whose lives had been sacrificed to the Kaiser’s lust for world power’.49
What differentiates the Kit from other atrocity propaganda is that it was directly responding to the fear that the anti-war propagandists were starting to win. In January 1918, the ‘Militant Propagandists of the Labor
Party’ (who have been described by Judith Smart as ‘the radical ginger group connected with the Trades Hall’) issued a challenging statement in Labor
Call. In a statement that was clearly prejudicial to recruiting they called for
‘the large body of electors who voted against conscription to immediately enter upon an earnest agitation for peace’.50 In May 1918, the Women’s
Peace Army distributed a pamphlet that read, ‘Parents! Safeguard your
Authority, Save your Boys and Us from becoming Prussianised Slaves of the
Servile State’. In June the Deputy Chief Censor sought to prosecute the publisher of this pamphlet not just because it was prejudicial to recruiting but also because it had not been submitted to the censor. This was of particular concern, wrote the Colonel who was concerned about the leaflet, because of the Labor Party’s ambivalent attitude to recruiting. Because
Labor had become more openly opposed to the war the leaders of the pacifist and anti-recruiting campaign had ‘become bolder and more violent in their attitudes towards the war…their ideas are in the ascendant and the movement has spread’. In Brisbane, he continued, a mainstream newspaper
49 ‘Suppose the Enemy Fleet’, No.23. Commonwealth Treasury, April 1918, NLA. 50 ‘Militant Propagandists’, Labor Call, 10 January 1918, p.7. Also see: Smart, op.cit., p.280. 330
had published anti-recruiting material. In Melbourne, ‘the papers are becoming more bold, pamphlets are being issued’. Clearly, the censors felt they were rapidly losing control.51
The final recruiting campaign was therefore exceptional, borne as it was of desperation and a need to communicate that desperation to an increasingly apathetic (or in some cases, hostile) populace. By the final year of the war, it seemed as though Australia was exhausted, both in terms of willing recruits, and also endurance. In discussing the voluntary ballot scheme with State Recruiting Chairmen, Mackinnon described the fatigue present in the country in early 1918:
The voluntary effort achieved much in Australia, but it has been going for nearly four years. The earlier stimulus of war enthusiasm has weakened…It may even be said that people are become used to it; this in turn begets a certain listlessness, which is a condition by no means conducive to a successful recruiting appeal.52
War exhaustion at home mirrored that on the battle front, as the AIF itself was suffering from serious morale problems. Beaumont has written, ‘in the first six months of 1918, there were more Australians in military prisons than men from all other British armies in France’.53 Beaumont attributed this decline to exhaustion, and the high number of casualties in the
Australian Corps: between April and October 1918, 10,500 men were killed
51Memorandum for the Chief of the General Staff from the Deputy Chief Censor, Department of Defence, 4 June 1918, MP367/1 B570/12/269. 52 Donald Mackinnon, Memo to Chairmen of State Recruiting Committees, c. March –April 1918 [undated, but Mackinnon refers to the introduction of a Recruiting Minister, who was appointed late March 1918] AWM 3DRL 6673/169 Part 1, A.W.M. 53 Beaumont, op.cit., 486-487. 331
and 40,000 captured or wounded.54 Reinforcements were therefore urgently needed, not just to replace the wounded and dead, but to improve morale.
However, the Australian government believed it faced as great a foe as the Germans in the form of the Australian labour movement. That the imagery in the Kit was so pungent indicates that the government had concerns that the objections of the working man to the war had become so strong as to almost be insurmountable. As stated earlier, there was widespread disaffection arising from the impact the of the war on the cost of living, and the sense that war profiteering, left unchecked by the government, was to blame.55 In addition, the general strike of 1917, although it was not entirely a result of wartime stresses, nonetheless contributed to a sense amongst some media outlets that the labour movement was dangerously close to undermining the war effort. As a Punch cartoon from 16 August 1917 illustrates, the claim was made that strikes against work conditions were in fact attacks on the war effort, and by extension, attacks upon the AIF itself. In the cartoon an ‘Australian Striker’ had aimed an artillery gun into the distance. He observed, ‘This weapon of ours is the most wonderful gun in the world. It carries all the way to Europe and knocks out our own men there’.56 Figure 38.
54 Ibid., p.487. 54 Stanley, op.cit., p.11. 55 Perks, ‘Labour and the Governor-General's Recruiting Conference, Melbourne, April 1918’, op.cit., p.28. 56 ‘The Gun with the Greatest Range’, Melbourne Punch, 16 August 1917, p.5. 332
Figure 38. ‘The gun with the greatest range’, Melbourne Punch, 16 August 1917
Finally, by the last year and a half of the war, the issue of voluntary recruiting had become as divisive as conscription. As stated earlier, there were groups within the labour movement who firmly opposed the recruiting 333
of any more troops. For example, in mid-1918 the Queensland Labor Party attempted to ban Labor from assisting with recruiting.57
And then of course, there was the divide between Prime Minister
Hughes and the labour movement in general, following the split over conscription. In an attempt to heal some of these divisions, the Governor-
General held a recruiting conference in April 1918. As Perks has argued regarding this initiative, ‘although the conference was an abject failure in terms of its stated objective [stimulating recruiting], its historical significance lies in its role as a catalyst of anti-war feeling in the organised labour movement’.58 However, the transcript of the conference proceedings make it abundantly clear that Hughes had become irrevocably divorced from those in the labour movement who supported a peaceful resolution to the war. Shortly before the close of the conference Hughes and W. Morby, the President of Grand Federal Council of Labour, had a heated exchange:59
Mr. HUGHES. - …It seems to me that the Labour movement is afraid. What is it afraid of? Mr. MORBY. – The Labour movement has a conscience, and I will not sit here quietly and listen to any one tell me that it is afraid. It is not afraid. Mr. HUGHES. – Very well; I was wrong. Mr. MORBY. – We have provided 75 per cent of the men who have gone into the trenches, and you tell us that the Labour movement is afraid.60
57 Perks, ‘Labour and the Governor-General's Recruiting Conference, Melbourne, April 1918’, op.cit., p.42. 58 Ibid., p.8. 59 Report of the proceedings of the conference convened by his Excellency the Governor- General on the subject of the securing of reinforcements under the voluntary system for the Australian Imperial Force now serving abroad, held at Federal Government House, Melbourne, April 1918, Victoria, Government of the Commonwealth of Australia, Government Printer for the State of Victoria, May 1918, p.3. 60 Ibid., p.163. 334
The issue of enlistment was therefore a battleground between federal recruiting authorities and hostile elements of labour movement, and it was one in which neither party would cede any territory. The federal government used the Recruiting Kit as an opportunity to lambast and lampoon the views of those who opposed them in an attempt to discredit their arguments. The second pamphlet that was mailed out to eligible men
(‘The Peril to Australia/The Gospel of Frightfulness/The Voice of Germany’) used a blood red colour scheme, and the images ranged from the female figure of ‘Civilisation’ being ground beneath a Satanic German hoof, to a detailed fantasy of a ‘Hun’ invasion of a small country town. One particular drawing, titled Where Germany Prays, depicted a grotesque monster on a throne upon which the word ‘FRIGHTFULNESS’ was engraved. The bodies of the ghastly ‘Huns’ victims are piled at his feet. Figure 39. The essay accompanying this bloody image advised that
the more extreme of our local Bolsheviks even advise us to follow Russia’s example and lay down our arms before the enemy. This, it appears, would be quite certain to cause him to do likewise. According to these people the makers of war can only be beaten by peaceful methods, and it follows, they tell us, that Australia’s reply to German militarism should take the form of pacifist resolutions rather than of increased enlistments.61
61 ‘The Gospel of Frightfulness/The Voice of Germany/The Peril To Australia’, Commonwealth of Australia, 1918, ARTV00037, A.W.M. 335
Figure 39. Norman Lindsay, detail pamphlet, ‘Where Germany Prays’, Commonwealth of Australia, 1918, AWM
This essay, used in combination with the ghastly image, implies that those who adhered to pacifism were in fact guilty of encouraging the slaughter of innocents and the destruction of democracy. This rhetorical tactic had been used in another pamphlet that had been issued by the
Director-General of Recruiting, but which had not been included in the
Kit. In a letter addressed to those who approved of ‘peace by negotiation’, Labor M.P. Dr. Watkins claimed that their diplomatic solution would result in a ‘world saddled with militarism. If peace is 336
proclaimed before the military power is destroyed Democracy will be thrown back a hundred years’.62
The Recruiting Kit, therefore, did not generate new types of language to encourage men to enlist. However, it did provide a more sophisticated approach to propaganda because it combined image and text to undermine the arguments of those who were ambivalent about the conflict. These essays reinforced each other. In the same pamphlet that depicted ‘Where Germany Prays’ was a section titled ‘The War and
The Worker’:
By some, however, the phrase “A Capitalists’ War,” as used by certain Socialists, seems intended to mean that wars are at present made by Governments in which the worker has no part, or but little part, and that his country’s quarrel is therefore not his quarrel. This claim would be made with an ill grace by any Australian, since in Australia manhood and womanhood suffrage exist and every worker has therefore full share in his country’s government and consequently in its obligations.63
The essays and atrocity images contained in the Recruiting Kit directly addressed the political issues that the government believed were impeding the voluntary recruiting effort. Thus, through discussing the ‘German
Monster’ alongside its fellow pamphlets and posters, and contextualising it within its proper publication date of late 1918, it becomes evident that the frightful imagery did not represent war enthusiasm, but rather, its opposite.
62‘“Peace by Understanding.” What the Labour Leaders Have to Say’, Melbourne, Issued by the Director-General of Recruiting, Albert J. Mullett, 1918, World War I 1914-1918 Australian Leaflets – Recruitment. Commonwealth Recruiting Campaign, Director General of Recruiting, A.W.M. 63 ‘The Worker and the War’, The Peril To Australia, Ibid., Norman Lindsay pamphlet recto: The Gospel of Frightfulness; The Voice of Germany; Hurry!: verso: The Peril To Australia, 1918, verso side, 3. 337
The poster attempted to move the most obdurate worker by appealing to his sense of heroism. It was hoped that upon seeing the monstrous Hun, the working man would put aside his objections to the war and place the protection of women and children first.
Australians had never been exposed to such a relentless and graphic campaign of atrocity propaganda. It is possible that even the creators had second thoughts about the intensely violent nature of the Kit. During the war Norman Lindsay was somewhat embarrassed by the work he had undertaken. Although he admitted in his autobiography that he was always happy to volunteer to produce propaganda for the war effort (in the case of the Kit, he provided his work for free), and clearly believed in the justice of the cause and the need to persuade the eligible man to join, he nonetheless was very disdainful of the recruiting work he did.64 In a letter to poet and journalist Leon Gellert he mocked the campaign:
By work, of course, I mean…recruiting cartoons, posters and so forth for the big campaign to snare the furtive eligible. He is to get a pamphlet decorated with my cartoons every ten minutes, I gather, explaining why he ought to run all the way to Europe without stopping, and if he doesn’t learn to loathe my name attached to my reminders, he must be made of nobler stuff than at present credited with.65
By 1933 Lindsay claimed to have forgotten he had produced some of these singular images.66 Lindsay’s ambivalence was perhaps partly a response to
64 Norman Lindsay, My Mask: for what little I know of the man behind it (Australia: Angus & Robertson, 1973)234. Also see: Norman Lindsay to Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer, 19 July 1918 in R.G. Howarth and A.W. Barker, Letters of Norman Lindsay (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1979) 126. It is in this letter that Lindsay states he was not paid to do the work. 65 Norman Lindsay to Leon Gellert, undated, circa July 1918, Ibid, 127. 66 Letter from Norman Lindsay to CEW Bean in response to request to reprint ‘Will you fight now or wait for This?’ and ‘Quick’, 7 November 1933: DRL 7953/16 PART 2, AWM. 338
the negative responses the Kit received when it was released in October
1918. While there were some supportive and complimentary comments in the press when it came out (The Argus, for example, said the illustrations were ‘different from, and indeed much superior to, anything of the kind yet issued in Australia’), other responses ran the gamut from deep offense to jeering.67 Part of this may have had to do with the method of distribution.
The ‘German Monster’ poster was
distributed widely and secretly. On a prearranged night copies were pasted on train and tram windows, placed in shop windows, pasted on hoardings, and exhibited in all possible ways. It came to the public as a great surprise and caused much discussion.68
It also may have had to do with the relentless ubiquity of the campaign material. We know that four of the six posters were in the process of being distributed before Armistice was declared.69 In addition, the pamphlets were mailed out in great number.70 As intended, Australia had been flooded with recruiting propaganda.
The saturation strategy was risky. As Graham Donley has noted, there was criticism in the community about the high cost of the propaganda scheme that was promoting the V.B.E.S. The government’s expenditure of resources was extraordinary so far into the war, particularly as the country
67 ‘Recruiting Posters: Norman Lindsay’s Cartoons’, The Argus, 5 October, 1918, 21. 68 J.L. Treloar to G.B. Berckelman, 29 February 1948, A.W.M 93 7/1/158, A.W.M. 69 Report, ‘State Recruiting Committee of Queensland’, Captain Pike, State Organising Secretary, 22 October 1918, MP 367/1 609/30/700, N.A.A. Melbourne. 70 For example, according to the SMH, over half a million pamphlets and letters were mailed out in N.S.W. alone. ‘Voluntary Ballot’, in The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 October 1918, p.14. For more detail on the distribution of the pamphlets, see: Robertson, op.cit., p. 81. 339
was in the grip of a severe paper shortage.71 In September The Age ran an article titled ‘Costly publicity scheme. Gross Extravagance Alleged’.72 By 7
November the clear end of the war in sight rendered the pamphlets utterly redundant. Adelaide newspaper The Register opined that while it was not the recruiting authorities’ fault that
…events have, in a few weeks, made the formerly appropriate warning about “Australia’s deadly peril” appear absurdly out of place. But the position being what it is, and the paper shortage becoming so acute, it is reasonable to ask that an immediate stop be put to the prodigal waste of good quality paper involved in pamphlets such as “The Cause of the War.” Of the questionable taste of this lurid and sanguinary poster little need be said, although the wit of the genius who had the envelope labelled “Quick” deserves special mention’.73
The posters generated outrage in federal parliament, with Labor MP Frank
Brennan asking Minister for Recruiting, Richard Orchard, to remove
‘German Monster’ from public view on the grounds that it was ‘corrupting the youth of the community’.74 Significantly, disgust was also expressed by staunch members of the Australian Nationalist Party. Henry Gregory,
Member for Dampier, criticised the pamphlets thus:
I am shocked to find what a large expenditure is being incurred on recruiting. Yesterday I received a number of pamphlets of a peculiar type, that might be of value as Deadwood Dick literature. They must be costing enormous sums….The revelations of the last few days, or even of the last fortnight, justify us crying a halt in this direction.75
71 ‘Paper Shortage’, Trafalgar and Yarrawong Times, 4 October, 1918, 3. 72 ‘Costly Publicity Scheme. Gross Extravagance Alleged’, Age, 14 September, 1918. 73 ‘How not to save paper’, The Register, 6 November, 1918, 6. 74 ‘Federal Parliament: the Senate’, The Advertiser, 17 October, 1918, 9. 757 November 1918. Commonwealth of Australia Parliamentary Debates. Session 1917-18-19. (Second Session of the Seventh Parliament, Vol.LXXXVI. Senate and House of Representatives, (Victoria: Government of the Commonwealth of Australia, Victoria, No year of printing supplied in publication) 7640. 340
As Gregory’s complaint indicates, it was not expenditure alone which irked people, but the bloody nature of the propaganda itself. John Leckie, who had won his seat in Indi in 1917 on a ‘Win the War’ ticket, was equally incensed, and asked parliament, ‘Does the Minister for Recruiting really think that the placarding of the city and country towns with a horrible poster of a gorilla dripping blood over the world is likely to have a good effect in inducing eligibles to enlist; also, are the other posters which are to be placarded of the same horrible character?’76 Mr Leckie was not opposed to the underlying tenets of atrocity propaganda – in May of that same year, Leckie had delivered a speech in which he discussed ‘at some length’ the alleged atrocities meted out by the Germans. He had concluded, ‘it is the duty of every eligible man to save our own countries from such atrocities’.77 It was therefore, not the reference to German atrocities that was distasteful to
Leckie, but the government’s choice of lurid images and emotive prose to convey its message. The sheer extravagance and grotesque nature of the campaign had therefore alienated some who strongly believed that the
Germans had committed atrocities.
However, the true potential of the Kit will never be known. The war ended before the response of eligible men could be gauged. In some cases, the Kit was unpacked only for it to be immediately repacked again. Wrote
76 G. Browne, ‘Leckie, John William (Jack)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (National Centre of Biography, Australian National University) http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/leckie-john-william-jack-7141/text12325, published first in hardcopy 1986, accessed online 24 September 2015; Commonwealth of Australia Parliamentary Debates. Session 1917-18-19, p. 6847. 77 ‘Recruiting Campaign’, Rochester Express, 7 May 1918, p.3. 341
the Secretary of the South Australian State Recruiting Committee,
‘Everything went without a hitch and then suddenly the end came –
Germany and her Allies were beaten, the Armistice was signed and the necessity for taking the ballot passed away. Then for six weeks the office staff was engaged re-packing it to Melbourne’.78
Interpreting First World War propaganda within the historical and political context in which it was created provides a new understanding about the recruiting crisis that took place in the final year of the war. By the end of the conflict, government atrocity propaganda had ceased to engage with how a large section of the population related to the war. Despite the fact the Kit was not fully deployed, an examination of its contents and the circumstances of its creation provides important insights into how the federal government attempted to bully and cajole unwilling eligible men into joining the A.I.F. Caught in the British government’s commitment to the
‘knock out blow’ against Germany, Australian authorities sought to counter the labour movement’s rising interest in the prospects of a negotiated peace by offering a full-throated condemnation of German perfidy, atrocity and
‘frightfulness’. Had ‘German Monster’ been released in March 1918 when it still appeared that Germany could win the war, the Kit may have received a very different reception. However, the campaign - possibly the worst timed in Australian history - was received with derision and hostility. The
‘German Monster’ poster, the campaign’s most memorable and visible extravagance, which had been designed to boost support for the war
78 State Recruiting Committee of South Australia’s Second Annual Report, MP 367/1 582/1/1458, N.A.A. Melbourne. 342
amongst the increasingly hostile working classes, was consigned instead to a history of misdating and misinterpretation.
In this, the fate of ‘German Monster’ was not dissimilar to that of other atrocity propaganda that was produced in Australia during the Great
War. This thesis has gone some way to rectifying this situation by examining the ideological origins and the political function of Australian
First World War atrocity propaganda. By tracking Australian responses to the conflict from the impact of reports of atrocities in Belgium in 1915, to the frenzied campaigning of the final recruiting campaign, this thesis has provided a portrait of a country that had a complex relationship with war, morality and the British Empire.
343
Conclusion ‘The Great War for Civilisation’: reframing the Great War in Australia
In 1919, the British government struck ‘Victory Medals’ for Australians who had served in the First World War. On one side stands the female personification of Victory holding a palm branch. On the other are inscribed the words ‘The Great War for Civilisation’.1 Distributed in the same year that C.E.W. Bean wrote his speech about the just nature of the war, the medals were part of the larger official post-war dialogue about why the war had been fought. Although many Australians in the closing months of the conflict had become cynical and war-weary, rhetorical engagement with liberal humanitarian imperial sentiment remained strong in the year following the war, and the deaths of Australian soldiers were refracted through that lens. On July 25 1919, Peace Day was described by a Victorian newspaper as a celebration of ‘the triumph of freedom, liberty and civilisation over savagery… in the most terrible war ever known in the world’s history’.2
However, by the 1960s the notion that the deaths of Australian soldiers had been worth it, and that the conflict had been ‘the great war for civilisation’, had become risible. Not only that, the slogan was emblematic of a form of propaganda that had manipulated young men into supporting an unnecessary war. In 1962, Martin Boyd had the protagonist of his Great
1 Personal correspondence with the Military, Heraldry and Technology Section in the Australian War Memorial, 5 May 2014. These medals were distributed to other Dominions and colonies too. 2 ‘Peace Day in Benalla’, North Eastern Ensign, 25 July 1919, p.2. 344
War novel, When Blackbirds Sing, throw his Victory Medal into the middle of a pond. For Dominic, the medal symbolised his role in the war not as a hero, but as a murderer: they had been ‘given [to] him for his share in inflicting…suffering’.3 Boyd’s entire book was a repudiation of the notion that the Great War had any moral legitimacy, a throwing into the pond, as it were, all of the reasons proffered by the authorities for the conflict. The moral justifications for the war – that it had been fought to protect civilisation from the murderous ‘Hun’ - had been a sham, designed to trick idealistic young men into committing acts of murder.
Boyd’s rejection of the war was in harmony with the cultural and historical turn in both Great Britain and Australia that saw the complete denunciation of the moral and ideological framework that had justified the conflict. As Isabel V. Hull has written of the process, ‘…in a few short years, what was so completely obvious to contemporaries had become just as completely erased. That erasure continues to this day in both academic writing and popular culture’.4
This thesis has begun the process of reversing the historical erasure of the liberal imperial humanitarian sentiment that drove the justifications for the Great War. It has not been the aim of the study to argue about whether or not Australian support for the war was misguided. Instead its purpose has been to seek out more nuanced explanations for why some
Australians supported the war and others opposed it. Furthermore, this
3 M. Boyd When Blackbirds Sing, Australia, Penguin Books, 1962; 1993, pp. 187-188. 4 I.V. Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War, Cornell University Press, 2014, p.3. 345
study has examined what these stances about the war can tell us about the complex relationship that Australians had with the British Empire during this period. As Joan Beaumont has observed, ‘One of the most profound challenges for historians of the First World War is how to understand what motivated the populations who endured and fought this terrible conflict’.5
By using propaganda as a serious historical source, one that both draws upon and promotes established ideological concepts, I have approached this problem in a novel way. Rather than regarding propaganda as a simplistic form of communication, I have acknowledged it is a medium that can represent complex political and moral concepts. Atrocity propaganda was not just an expression of anti-German hatred. Even when it was at its most vile, atrocity propaganda often also expressed humanitarian concern for the civilian victims of war. It was important to the war effort because it contained a range of complex ideological concepts that held varying degrees of appeal to Australians. It provided a consistent backdrop to the war that either resonated with, or failed to engage, various political groups in Australia.
Through an analysis of the impact of liberal imperial humanitarian sentiment upon the Australian community, this thesis has provided new insight into Australia’s relationship with the British Empire during the First
World War. It has demonstrated that jingoistic appeals to fight for King and
Country were not sufficient to mobilise and motivate the entire nation for four years. Atrocity propaganda, however, provided a compelling
5 J. Beaumont, ‘”Unitedly we have fought”: imperial loyalty and the Australian war effort’, International Affairs, Vol. 90., Iss. 2., p. 397. 346
justification for the conflict: one of the strongest weapons at the disposal of pro-war propagandists was the argument that women and children had been killed by the German military and it was the responsibility of
Australian citizens to intervene. This humanitarian argument sat at the heart of liberal imperialist support for the war.
This study has shown that many of the Australians who supported the war did not do so lightly; while their involvement was inevitable because of imperial ties with Great Britain, there was nonetheless a framework of ideology about war, civilian immunity and humanitarian duty that informed how that imperial allegiance was honoured. A sense of ‘moral purpose’ was therefore central to establishing support for the war. Atrocity propaganda was one of the key ways this moral purpose was asserted.6
Yet, this sense of ‘moral purpose’ was not universal. Nor was affection for the Empire. By investigating the distinct responses of the Irish
Australian community and the labour movement to the liberal imperial humanitarian sentiment contained in atrocity propaganda, this thesis has highlighted that different viewpoints about the relevance and morality of the British Empire lay at the core of divisions over the war. For those who supported the war, the conflict was legitimate on the grounds that it was a humanitarian intervention fought on behalf of a liberal Empire. For Irish
Australians who opposed it, the conflict was not legitimate because it was a war of exploitation fought to defend an Empire that would never release
6 C. Pennell, ‘Why We Are at War’: Justifying War in Britain, 1914’, in D. Welch and J. Fox (eds.) Justifying War: Propaganda, Politics and the Modern Age, United Kingdom, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, p.96. 347
Ireland from its tyrannical grasp. In the case of those in the labour movement who opposed the conflict, the war was designed to destroy working class rights, and benefit the capitalist Empire.
Different kinds of imperial sentiment therefore influenced how
Australians regarded the war. A great deal of that sentiment was far from simple, influenced as it was by a number of different factors. Where hard- line socialists had rejected the Empire and the war from the outset, other groups had a more problematic relationship with the conflict. For many within the Irish Australian community and the labour movement, the Great
War was fought to defend the right kind of imperialism: they would not support a war of expansion, yet they would fight a war that was prosecuted by a British Empire which embodied liberal and humanitarian ideals.
These two groups had a complex relationship with the British
Empire: imperial sentiment was conditional and based upon a series of factors, many of them heavily influenced by liberal ideology. An Irish
Australian with a desire to see Home Rule in Ireland would not support a war fought to aggrandise the British Empire. Nor would a working class man support a war that supported militarism. A war fought to defend the rights of small nations and against brutal militarism and atrocities did, however, appeal to many in both groups.
For liberal-minded people within the labour movement, German aggression threatened to destroy the dream of progressivism: the political freedom to advance the interest of the working class was threatened by 348
German autocracy and militarism. A regime of oppression would destroy conditions and restrict freedom if the Germans won. However, for the more socialist-minded, the war was the real threat to the labour movement. It was the war that had been used as an excuse to undermine workers’ conditions and it was the war that had destroyed freedom of speech when the War Precautions Act was introduced. As the war progressed and living conditions declined, the number of sceptics grew, particularly in the labour movement, encouraged by anti-war propaganda that continued despite censorship and criminal prosecutions. The federal government’s final recruiting campaign sought desperately to counter this kind of anti-war propaganda with images of German depravity.
By analysing how propaganda operated in Australia during the Great
War a new and more nuanced portrait has emerged of how the Australian populace dealt with the conflict. Moreover, a study of the role of atrocity propaganda in the political debates that took place provides an important entry point for examining the motivations of both those who opposed and those who supported the war. By investigating the ideological origins of atrocity propaganda, and also the political context in which atrocity propaganda operated during the war, this study provides new insights into the moral debates and motivations that lay behind Australian involvement in the Great War.
In order for these motivations to be made expressly clear, the deep ancestry of atrocity propaganda needed to be examined. The historical origins of keys terms that appeared repeatedly in atrocity propaganda – 349
civilisation, barbarism - were shown to be terms that, far from being hollow, embodied important principles. The ancestry of the Manichean divide between the civilised Allies and the barbaric Germans stretched back to the
Enlightenment, when notions of civilisation and progress began to be tied to
European culture. There was an expectation that mankind was developing into a less warlike, more rational species. Barbarism was more likely to be expressed by the ‘coloured’ races, but there was concern that Europeans could revert to barbarism too.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Enlightenment ideals about progress and civilisation and the spreading influence of ‘altruism’ had become interlinked with two things: the liberal conception of the British
Empire as a benign force spreading progressive culture, and the development of humanitarianism and a more interventionist style of liberalism. These developments, in conjunction with the development of working class engagement with politics, resulted in the popularity of the notion that the British Empire was obliged to stage humanitarian interventions against foreigners who were harming civilians. Ottoman Turk atrocities against the Bulgarians and the Armenians stimulated mass outrage and the creation of atrocity propaganda that provided the template for the Great War. Following these events were revelations about civilian deaths in the British concentration camps in South Africa. By the beginning of the twentieth century a consistent liberal humanitarian ideology had developed in relation to both a just cause for war, and just conduct in war – one which was consistent with a just Empire. These liberal ideals had 350
imprinted deeply upon many Australians, and account in part for why so many people supported the Great War.
When regarded alongside each other, it is clear that humanitarianism, liberalism and imperialism formed part of an important nexus that lead to the mobilisation of Australians to support the Great War.
Atrocity propaganda was the visual and textual communication tool that conveyed this complex mix of altruism and imperial ideology, and it resonated strongly with those within the Australian population who believed that the British Empire had a moral duty to intervene when atrocities were being committed.
This thesis has demonstrated that a proper appreciation of the role and function of atrocity propaganda is necessary to understanding why so many Australians were committed to supporting such a prolonged and deeply destructive war. However, while this study has presented a comprehensive picture of the role of liberalism, humanitarianism and atrocity propaganda in Australia, the remit of this thesis, by necessity, has been limited. Further study needs to be undertaken about the role of the
British liberal progressive architects of the Great War. While I have discussed Gilbert Murray, James Bryce and Charles Masterman at some length, there nonetheless remains further work to be done. The role of
British historian A.J. Toynbee (who was another ‘Oxbridge’ scholar), who wrote reports about German and Turkish atrocities, requires investigation, as does the nexus between British liberal progressives who supported the war. A further area requiring investigation is the breakdown of 351
relationships within the British liberal progressive network, between those who supported the conflict and those who did not.
Despite these limitations, this thesis has begun the process of exploring the importance of atrocities, and the framing of atrocities, in the conflicts that followed the Great War. Not only that, this thesis marks the beginning of the story of the ebb and flow of the application of international humanitarian law to civilian immunity during the conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Great War atrocity propaganda both anticipated, and was part of, the gradual and complex development of the international laws of armed conflict. As Bruno Cabanes has recently observed, ‘World
War I and its aftermath represent a decisive turning point in the redefinition of humanitarianism: a profound transformation of pre-war humanitarian practices and humanitarian law into an assertion of “humanitarian rights”’.7
Most pertinently, its logic is now used as an international norm that justifies military intervention when it is ostensibly in defence of civilian lives. This norm, known as the ‘responsibility to protect’ was defined in a report by the United Nations as an imperative to intervene ‘in the event of genocide and other large scale killing, ethnic cleansing, or serious violations of humanitarian law which sovereign Governments have proved powerless or unwilling to prevent’.8
7 B. Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918-1924, United Kingdom, Cambrigde University Press, 2014, p.3. 8 United Nations, ‘A More Secure World : Our Shared Responsibility’ quoted in: T. Kochi, ‘Problems of Legitimacy within the Just War Tradition and International Law’, in A.F. Lang., C. O’Driscoll, and J. Williams (eds.), Just War: Authority, Tradition, and Practice, United States of America, Georgetown University Press, 2013, p .123. 352
Defined by the U.N. nearly a century after the First World War, this norm emerged from a number of strands, including those articiulated by the liberal humanitarian imperialists who proposed that the military could mount morally ‘legitimate’ violence when civilian lives were at risk. 9 While the heavy colonialist baggage of humanitarianism might on initial examination make it appear to be an entirely separate from human rights, there is strong evidence that the two are interlinked in, to paraphrase
Michelle Tusan ‘a problematic’ but crucial manner. In closing this thesis, and opening up new fields of future inquiry, I argue, much as Tusan does, that
‘there is room…to consider the historical role of modern and early modern humanitarianism in the making of present day human rights regimes’.10
This is because the manner in which western nations discuss ‘humanitarian intervention’, and how they promote and debate these interventions, find their origins in the language that was forged by liberal humanitarian imperialists and encapsulated in Great War atrocity propaganda.
Atrocities against civilians continued to feature in the conflicts that followed the Great War. It is somewhat ironic that as international law has strengthened around the rights of non-combatants, the actual safety of civilians during wartime has decreased since the time of the Hague
Conventions:
The risks to civilians from the conduct of warfare have increased dramatically. At the end of the nineteenth century,
9 Incidentally, this norm is debated by international lawyers, and within the UN itself. What even constitutes ‘human rights’ remains un-decided. Please see Kochi’s book chapter for more detail. 10 M. Tusan, ‘Humanitarianism, genocide and liberalism’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol.17., Iss. 1., 2015, p.101. 353
the overwhelming percentage of those killed or wounded in war were military personnel. Toward the end of the twentieth century, the great majority of persons killed or injured in most international armed conflicts have been civilian non- combatants.11
Atrocities and how they are represented during wartime therefore remain a central feature of war throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
By providing a new framework through which to understand how atrocity propaganda functions in Western liberal democracies during conflict, this thesis provides the foundations for future areas of inquiry, which range from examining how enemy atrocities were used by Australian propagandists during the Second World War, to how atrocity propaganda is being used (and responded to) in the current conflict in Syria.
Some Australians have responded to the atrocities in Syria very much in the same way that their antecedents did in 1914. When it was reported that Assad had gassed civilians, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd drew upon the same language as those who had denounced German atrocities. Not only that, he had implied that a humanitarian intervention was perhaps the best response:
Mr Rudd says if the allegations prove to be accurate, world powers should act.
"I think all countries in the world would have a view that in the year 2013, if there is a factual basis to any regime in the world using chemical weapons against people, frankly we enter into a new level of barbarism and therefore all civilised nations in the world have a responsibility then to act," he said.12
11 G. H. Aldrich, ‘The Laws of War on Land’, in The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 94., Iss. 1., 2000, p.48. 12‘UN 'seeking clarity' on reports hundreds of people killed in Syrian nerve gas attack’, ABC News online, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-22/hundreds-dead-in-apparent- 354
Kevin Rudd’s use of those key words – civilisation and barbarism - demonstrates that in the case of the First World War, the past is not always a foreign country. While many things were, to paraphrase L.P. Hartley, done differently from how we would do them today, there nonetheless remains a tremendously powerful ideological current of liberal humanitarianism that influences how Australians respond to the violence of war. The British
Empire may be gone, but the remnants of progressive liberalism remain.
This thesis resituates Great War atrocity propaganda from its previous position in history as ghastly sideshow freak to one of the major actors in the war. Its role in Australia was of central importance, appealing as it did to groups that would have hesitated in supporting a war that was promoted solely through jingoistic propaganda. Simultaneously racist, humanitarian, compassionate and vicious, atrocity propaganda was the main weapon used by pro-war propagandists against those who continued to doubt the war. Its clichés and exaggerations have concealed the liberal humanitarian impulses that played such an important role in driving support for the war in Australia.
As American journalist Adam Gopnik observed recently, ‘one can clarify history only be complicating it’.13 For much of the century following
chemical-weapons-attack-in-syria/4903960, accessed online 24 August 2014. This kind of language has persisted throughout the Syrian conflict. The United States condemned Russian bombing of the Syrian city of Aleppo (which resulted in multiple civilian deaths) as ‘barbarism’. (See: ‘Syria: US hits out at Russian “barbarism”, Moscow says peace “almost impossible now”’. ABC News online, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-26/us-slams-russian- 'barbarism'-in-syria/7876320, accessed online 26 September 2016). 13 A. Gopnik, ‘Blood and Soil: A historian returns to the Holocaust’, The New Yorker, 21 September 2015, p.100. 355
the conflict, atrocity propaganda was regarded as a simplistic and blunt weapon. By carefully analysing its rhetorical strategies, and exploring the complexities of its origins and political function, this thesis has provided a clearer picture of Australia during the war, from idealistic enthusiasm at its inception, to the bitter cynicism that dominated not just the final months of the war, but how the conflict itself has been remembered. 356
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Journal Articles
Akilli, Sinan. ‘Propaganda through Travel Writing: Frederick Burnaby’s Contribution to Great Game British Politics’, Journal of the Faculty of Letters, Volume 26, Number 1, 2009. 373
Aldrich, George H. ‘The Laws of War on Land’, in The American Journal of International Law, Volume 94, Issue 1, 2000.
Archer, Robin. ‘Stopping War and Stopping Conscription: Australian Labour’s Response to World War I in Comparative Perspective’ in Frank Bongiorno, Raelene Frances and Bruce Scates (editors), Labour and the Great War: the Australian Working Class and the Making of Anzac, special edition of Labour History, Number 106, 2014.
Barreira, C.P. ‘”Myth of Poor Little Belgium” as mainspring: a remark’, Flinders Journal of History and Politics, Volume 19, 1997.
Bisceglia, Louis R. ‘Lord Ponsonby, Pacifist Peace Campaigner’, Peace Research, Volume 16, Number 2, 1984.
Beaumont, Joan. ‘”Unitedly we have fought’: imperial loyalty and the Australian war effort’, International Affairs, Volume 90, Issue 2, 2014.
Bernstein, George L. ‘Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and the Liberal Imperialists’, The Journal of British Studies, Volume 23, Issue 1, 1983.
Bessant, Bob. ‘The Experience of Patriotism and Propaganda for Children in Australian Elementary Schools before the War’, in Paedogogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, Volume 31, Issue 1, 1995.
Blair, Dale James. ‘Image and Attitude: Australia and the South African War’, in Sabretache, Volume 33, 1992.
Bollard, Robert, ‘The Great Strike of 1917 – was Defeat Inevitable?’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Volume 56, Issue 2, 2010.
Bongiorno, Frank. ‘Bernard O’Dowd’s Socialism’, Labour History, Number 7, 1999.
Bongiorno, Frank and Mansfield, Grant. ‘Whose War Was It Anyway? Some Australian Historians of the Great War’, in History Compass, Volume 62, Issue 90, 2008.
Bongiorno, Frank, Frances, Raelene and Scates, Bruce ‘Labour and Anzac: An Introduction’, in Bongiorno, Frank, Frances, Raelene and Scates, Bruce (editors), Labour and the Great War: the Australian Working Class and the Making of Anzac, special edition of Labour History, Number 106, 2014.
Bonnett, Alistair. ‘How the British Working Class Became White: the Symbolic (Re)formation of Racialised Capitalism”, The Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 11, Issue 3, 1998.
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Bryant, David C. ‘Rhetoric: Its functions and its scope’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Volume 39, Issue 1, 1973.
Campbell, Malcolm. ‘Emigrant Responses to War and Revolution, 1914-21: Irish Opinion in the United States of America and Australia’, Irish Historical Studies, Volume 32, Number 125, 2000.
Constantine, Simon. ‘”If an inhabitant attacks, wounds or kills a soldier, the whole village will be destroyed”: Communication and Rehearsal in Soldiers’ Phrasebooks 1914-1918’, Journal of War and Culture Studies, Volume 6., Number 2., 2013.
Connolly, C.N. ‘Class, birthplace, loyalty: Australian attitudes to the South African War’, Historical Studies, Volume 18, Number 71, 1978.
Crisp, L.F. ‘”Remember the Literature, Comrades!” Labour Party Reading then and now’, Labour History, Issue 36, 1979.
Graham Donley, ‘Voluntary Ballot Enlistment Scheme, 1918’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial Volume 30, 2003, http://www.awm.gov.au/journal/j38/vebs.asp, accessed online 15 May 2013.
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