Great Britain’s two most senior military officers added to the uneasiness. Field Marshal His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army (and cousin to the Queen) wrote that if the English terminal to a tunnel were seized by surprise, Britain could not hope to oppose any great Continental power. “We might, despite all our precautions,23 very possibly some day find an enemy in actual possession of both its ends and able at pleasure to pour an army through it unopposed.” Lord Wolseley, Adjutant General, thought that it might be possible for an enemy to invade without waiters and pastrycooks. “A couple of thousand armed men24 might easily come through a tunnel in a train at night, avoiding all suspicion by being dressed as ordinary passengers, or passing at express speed through the tunnel with the blinds down, in their uniforms and fully armed.” As the years went by—with no tunnel present or in the offing—Channel tunnel invasion stories dwindled. One of the last, written in 1901, focussed on a tunnel being secretly bored from Calais. The clandestine terminus was to be established on a farm in Kent belonging to a French spy who had taken the name and manners of an Englishman. The plot was frustrated, but English readers were warned that “the tube of steel25 still lies beneath the sea....”
As relations with France grew warmer and relations with Germany chilled, the source of fictional invasions shifted: it was from across the North Sea and not the Channel that England’s despoilers were to come. In the best of the invasion genre, Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands, published in 1903, the invaders were Teutons. Childers’ tale is one of adventure at sea: two young Englishmen on holiday aboard a small yacht are sailing and duck shooting amidst the elaborate web of sand banks, estuaries, and tidal pools that stretch along the German North Sea coast from the Dutch frontier to the mouth of the Elbe. Here, in this shifting maze of sand and water, they stumble upon a mysterious enterprise, avoid attempted murder, dine with a gentlemanly English traitor, overhear shocking plans, and, one dark night, hidden aboard a German tugboat, one of the two young sailors catches a glimpse of His Imperial Majesty, the German Emperor. The Kaiser is present to verify the feasibility of the enterprise; the stowaway realizes what it is when he realizes where the tugboat is going:
“The course... was about west,26 with Norderney light a couple of points off the port bow. The course for Memmert? Possibly; but I cared not, for my mind was far from Memmert tonight. It was the course for England too. Yes, I understood at last. I was assisting at an experimental rehearsal of a great scene, to be enacted, perhaps in the near future—a scene when multitudes of sea-going lighters, carrying full loads of soldiers, not half-loads of coal, should issue simultaneously, in seven ordered fleets, from seven shallow outlets, and, under escort of the Imperial Navy, traverse the North Sea and throw themselves bodily upon English shores.”
The Riddle of the Sands is more than a spy story; it is also a sailor’s book. Childers himself was a yachtsman; he writes of “the wind humming into the mainsail,”27 “the persuasive song the foam sings under the lee bow,” and “the noble expanse of wind-whipped blue, half surrounded by distant hills.” His own preference among his two young heroes is Davies, the owner of the yacht, a resourceful sailor whose daring and skill at the helm pilot the craft to the point where the secrets of the sands can be discovered. Davies has been to Oxford, been turned down by the navy, and now lives on his old thirty-foot sloop, its rigging and decks turned gray, its brass tarnished green. Davies’ shipmate is Carruthers, an Oxford friend in the Foreign Office, whose world consists of writing reports and dining and dancing at country-house weekends. When Carruthers arrives, dressed in flannels and blazer, one look from Davies is enough; Carruthers changes into old clothes. Davies, not Carruthers the Foreign Office professional, understands what is going on. Sitting one day belowdecks, while the yacht lies in a harbor wrapped in clammy, silent fog, Davies puffs on his pipe and rolls out his charts on the cabin table. He is filled with respect, even admiration, for Germany:
“‘Here’s this huge empire,28 stretching half over Central Europe—an empire growing like wildfire, I believe, in people, wealth, and everything. They’ve licked the French and the Austrians and are the greatest military power in Europe.... What I’m concerned with is their seapower. It’s a new thing with them but it’s going strong and that Emperor of theirs is running it for all it’s worth. He’s a splendid chap, and anyone can see he’s right. They’ve got no colonies to speak of, and must have them, like us. They can’t get them and keep them, and they can’t protect their huge commerce without naval strength. The commerce of the sea is the thing nowadays, isn’t it. I say, don’t think these are my ideas.... It’s all out of Mahan and those fellows. Well, the Germans have got a small fleet at present, but it’s a thundering good one and they’re building hard.’”
England, on the other hand, ignores the source of her greatness and spurns the zealous “sun-burnt, brine-burnt”29 sailors who understand these things and know how to save her:
“‘We’re a maritime nation,’”30 Davies tells Carruthers. “‘We’ve grown by the sea and live by it; if we lose command of it, we starve. We’re unique in that way; just as our huge Empire, only linked by the sea, is unique. And yet, my God!... see what mountains of apathy and conceit have had to be tackled. It’s not the people’s fault. We’ve been so safe so long, and grown so rich, that we’ve forgotten what we owe it. But there’s no excuse for those blockheads of statesmen as they call themselves, who are paid to see things as they are.... By Jove, we want a man like this Kaiser, who doesn’t wait to be kicked, but works like a nigger for his country and sees ahead.... We aren’t ready for her [Germany]; we don’t look her way. We have no naval base in the North Sea and no North Sea fleet.... And, to crown all, we were asses enough to give her Heligoland which commands her North Sea coast.... We can’t talk about conquest and grabbing. We’ve collared a fine share of the world and they’ve every right to be jealous. Let them hate us and say so; it’ll teach us to buck up; and that’s what really matters.’fn1
Growing public concern over the danger of German invasion can be measured by comparing Childers’ innocent, windswept tale with a lurid, melodramatic book which appeared three years later. In March 1906, when Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal government had been in power only three months, the London Daily Mail began to serialize The Invasion of 1910 by William Le Queux. Behind the book lay Lord Roberts’ warnings that, despite the navy, Britain lay open to foreign invasion. Le Queux also believed in conscription and building a larger army; the purpose of his book was to shock the nation into believing the same.
In The Invasion of 1910, the invading army assembles in exactly the spot reconnoitered by Erskine Childers’ two yachtsmen: amidst the tidal sands of the Frisian coast. Charging suddenly across the North Sea, it falls upon an unprepared England. Although untrained—because Lord Roberts’ call for conscription has gone unheeded—England’s soldiers and civilians fight with desperate bravery, but are no match for the efficient, professional enemy. On both sides, the war is fought with ferocity. The Germans are monsters who bayonet women and children, force terrified citizens to dig their own graves, and, in retaliation for the ambush of a German supply party, slaughter the entire population of an English town. The Kaiser is not a “splendid chap,” but a bloodthirsty barbarian who craves the bombardment and sacking of London. “The pride of these English33 must be broken,” commands the All-Highest. The English are almost as brutal: any German who falls into their hands is shot, stabbed, hanged, or garrotted.
In Le Queux’s plot, London is subjected to bombardment with heavy loss of life, then to fighting in the streets. Covered with gore, the Germans capture the city but cannot hold it. An enraged England rises up, forces the surrender of the invading army, and wreaks vengeance. German prisoners are lynched, torn limb from limb, or die in ways “too horrible to here describe34 in detail.” The war ends in uneasy compromise. Germany, having annexed Holland and Denmark, ponders its chances in another invasio
n. England’s economy, finances, and trade are demolished. Those wealthy enough to get away have fled; those left behind are starving.
The moral of this tale is hammered home by Le Queux when a character says, “Had we adopted his [Roberts’] scheme35 for universal service, such dire catastrophe could never have occurred.” The point also was made in a foreword written by Roberts, in which he declared that “the catastrophe that may happen36 if we still remain in our present state of unpreparedness is vividly and forcibly illustrated in Mr. Le Queux’s new book which I recommend to the perusal of everyone who has the welfare of the British Empire at heart.”
The idea for the novel was born in the restless mind of Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, who ceaselessly strove to boost the circulation of his London Daily Mail. Roberts’ constant warnings that a weak and complacent England was open to invasion suggested a story, and Le Queux was hired to write it. For four months, financed by the Daily Mail, the novelist roamed the east coast of England, scouting invasion beaches and sites for his fictional battles. He took his research to Lord Roberts and, together, hack writer and former Commander-in-Chief sat down to plot the course of the German campaign. Their work went to Lord Northcliffe, who initially vetoed it on the grounds that, although militarily sound, it overlooked the fundamental truths of newspaper circulation. For Northcliffe’s purposes, the German Army had to battle its way through big cities and large towns, “not keep to remote, one-eyed37 villages where there was no possibility of large Daily Mail sales.”
Lord Northcliffe launched The Invasion of 1910 with sandwich men in spiked helmets and Prussian blue uniforms parading down Oxford Street, their boards proclaiming imminent invasion. Each day thereafter, advertisements advised which towns would be invaded the following morning in the Daily Mail. Success was overwhelming: newspapers sold out, again and again; published in book form, the novel was translated into twenty-seven languages, including Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic, and sold over a million copies around the world. The German edition chagrined Le Queux. Its cover depicted a triumphant German Army marching into the smoking ruins of a shattered London, and the translator’s editing left the invading army in possession of the British capital. The Kaiser, who read both editions, ordered that the General Staff of the Army and the staff of the German Admiralty analyze the book for useful information.
Again, foreigners living in Britain became suspect. “Most of these men,”38 Le Queux told his readers, “were Germans who, having served in the army, had come over to England and obtained employment as waiters, clerks, bakers, hairdressers, and private servants, and being bound by their oath to their Fatherland, had served their country as spies. Each man, when obeying the Imperial command to join the German arms, had placed in the lapel of his coat a button of a peculiar shape with which he had long ago been provided and by which he was instantly recognized as a loyal subject of the Kaiser.” Across England, worried citizens looked up from the Daily Mail or Le Queux’s book, casting about for potential “enemy agents.” The War Office was flooded with reports of German plots to seize dockyards and naval bases, thereby putting the Fleet out of action as a prelude to invasion. Mysterious airships were rumored floating over British towns at night. The number of potential enemy warriors already in England escalated from Le Queux’s relatively innocuous “6,500 spies” to Lord Roberts’ “80,000 trained soldiers” to the revelation by a Colonel Driscoll that “350,000 trained German soldiers” resided in Britain. A Conservative M.P., Sir John Barlow, asked Haldane, the War Secretary, to tell the House of Commons what he knew about the 66,000 German Army reservists living near London. While he was at it, Barlow suggested, the War Secretary might also investigate the secret cache of thousands of German rifles stored in the cellars of a bank in Charing Cross. Another Tory M.P., Colonel Lockwood, asked that something be done about the “military men from a foreign nation”39 who had been busy for two years in the neighborhood of Epping “sketching and photographing the whole district.”
The government attempted to deal with these fears. The “mysterious airships” turned out to be small balloons put up to advertise new automobiles. The German rifles in Charing Cross were traced to a purchase of old pieces by the Society of Miniature Rifle Clubs, temporarily stored by the society’s bankers. Haldane, disgusted by Le Queux, Roberts, and the entire spy-invasion mania, sarcastically suggested that the enemy agents near Epping had been wasting their time as the information they required was already available in public ordnance survey maps. “Lord Roberts’ repeated statements40 that we are in danger of invasion and are not prepared to meet it... are doing a good deal of mischief,” he told the House. “Worse still is the effect on the public mind that Germany is the enemy which renders any attempt to improve relations increasingly difficult. The King is a good deal worried about this and I have told him that I would myself back up Lord Roberts’ proposal for Compulsory Service in order to restore confidence and banish the German bogey if I were not convinced that it was both impracticable and dangerous.”
In part, the Liberal government’s annoyance at The Invasion of 1910 and similar works stemmed from the Tory prejudice of most of the authors of these books. Le Queux made his views explicit, ascribing the initial success of his German invasion to the fact that “a strong, aristocratic Government41 had been replaced by a weak administration, swayed by every breath of popular impulse. The peasantry, who were the backbone of the nation, had vanished and been replaced by the weak, excitable population of the towns.” Irritated by such slurs, Liberal M.P.’s rose in Parliament to ask what could be done to limit the damage done by vulgar, inaccurate books which aroused passions and inflamed hatreds. Campbell-Banner-man, the Prime Minister, advised leaving the book “to be judged by the good sense42 and good taste of the British people.” The government, of course, could decide on the policy matter of compulsory conscription. It decided against Lord Roberts: peacetime conscription of men into the British Army never occurred.
Roberts, nevertheless, continued to speak, and accounts of fictional invasions continued to appear. In January 1909, at the height of the Naval Scare, when the Cabinet was locked in fierce debate over whether to authorize four or six dreadnoughts, a new play, An Englishman’s Home, opened at London’s Wyndham’s Theatre. The playwright was Guy du Maurier, a Regular Army officer who had never written a play or anything else and who at that moment was in South Africa serving as second in command, Third Battalion, the Royal Fusiliers. Before leaving England, Major du Maurier, affected by Roberts’ warnings, had written the play and given it to his brother, Gerald du Maurier, the actor and theatrical manager.fn2 Gerald du Maurier read his brother’s work and, without troubling to inform the far-off major, put it on the stage.
In the play, England is invaded by a foreign army. The Lord Chamberlain’s office, which approved and licensed theatrical works, worried that a specific foreign power might be offended; thus, the nationality of the invaders was unspecified. Accordingly, the enemy soldiers swear allegiance to “the Emperor of the North” and their country is known as “Nearland.” The action takes place in the parlor of Mr. and Mrs. Brown, a middle-class English family whose house is suddenly surrounded and entered by a troop of Nearland soldiers. The names of the invaders—Prince Yoland, Thol, Garth, and Hobart—vaguely disguise their national identity, but their spiked helmets provide an unmistakable clue. Initially, Mr. Brown is apathetic, declaring that wars should be fought between professional soldiers. The enemy commander, Prince Yoland, treats the Englishman and his family with rigid civility and arrogant contempt. When household articles are destroyed or confiscated, the damage or loss is paid for. As the play develops, Brown becomes increasingly indignant at the presence of intruders in his domestic castle and verbally lashes out. Ultimately, he seizes a rifle and points it at his enemies. Prince Yoland coolly reminds him of his own previous statement that civilians have no role in fighting wars. Brown replies, “Bah! What does that matter?43 I am an Englishman!” Nightly, at this line, the
theater rang with sustained applause. In the end, brave Mr. Brown kills two Nearland soldiers and then is himself executed, a hero but also a victim of England’s unpreparedness. At the final curtain, patriotism is avenged when British regulars arrive to expel the invaders.
The play played to packed houses for eighteen months. The sight, even on stage, of foreign soldiers in spiked helmets trampling across an English lawn and bursting through French windows into the parlor of an English house was too much for many a fervent theatergoer. The army set up a special recruiting station in the lobby of the theater so that fiery young men, erupting out of the stalls once the curtain had fallen, could volunteer on the spot for Haldane’s new Territorial Army.