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THE PROFITS OF WAR & PROPAGANDA: SAINTS & MUTINEERS!

Written by silvios on

So while I’ve been sat here waiting for the next pretext, for the next, or even ‘a greater war’, and it doesn’t look like I am not the only one:

“It is 1939 all over again. The world waits helplessly for the next act of naked aggression by rogue states. Only this time the rogue states are not the Third Reich and Fascist Italy. They are the United States and Israel.” Iraq War Morphs Into The Iranian War by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

And while Mr Roberts remembers 1939, I have been reminded again, for some reason, St George’s Day it was (& I suppose St George could be seen as a kind of mutineer), of a little event from 1917, which was used by the press to bring the United States fully on board (regards public opinion at least) for their involvement in WWI or to be precise, a book that documents it.

I’m going to quote excerpts from the book because although there has been a DVD released of the TV adaptation, you can see by this review that it is accused of a skewed accuracy, something the book cannot so easily be charged with:

“We won't know the full facts about the first and only mutiny in the British Army until the relevant documents are declassified in 2017, but the DVD release of this splendid BBC series will do much to revive interest in Percy Toplis and his role in the 1917 Etaples rebellion.

Much has been made of the factual inaccuracies in Alan Bleasdale's script, which was adapted from a book by William Allison and John Farley. Indeed, Julain Putkowski, who served as an historical adviser on the series, announced during the four-part transmission that the producers had ignored his advice and perpetuated several fallacies to heighten their drama.” Show Full Review won't know the full facts about the first and only mutiny in the British Army until the relevant documents are declassified in 2017, but the DVD release of this splendid BBC series will do much to revive interest in Percy Toplis and his role in the 1917 Etaples rebellion, . It might also reawaken some of the controversy that surrounded the original broadcast in 1986, when questions were asked in Parliament about left-wing bias within the BBC and whether licence payers' money was being well spent on programmes that shamed the nation.

Much has been made of the factual inaccuracies in Alan Bleasdale's script, which was adapted from a book by William Allison and John Farley. Indeed, Julain Putkowski, who served as an historical adviser on the series, announced during the four-part transmission that the producers had ignored his advice and perpetuated several fallacies to heighten their drama. Subsequently, information has emerged to suggest that Toplis wasn't even in France on the eve of Passchendaele and the project has been written off in some quarters as a shameful sham.

But this ignores the many plus points, such as the provocative manner in which Bleasdale caught a seismic shift in British social history, as the lower classes began to recognise the fallibility of the ruling elite and mount the first challenges to the Establishment that would culminate in the first Labour government in 1929. He also shattered the myth of the heroic Tommy by daring to state that rogues also manned the trenches and were often as guilty of bestial behaviour as the Kaiser's troops, as they did their bit for King and Country.

The naysaying also detracts from the excellence of Paul McGann's performance as Toplis, the Derbyshire pit boy whose gift for mimicry not only enabled him to impersonate officers for his own gain, but also to expose the ineptitude of the aristocratic top brass, who senselessly sent a generation into the killing fields of Flanders in a similar spirit of self-interest that prompted Toplis's own deceptions. Few contemporary programmes display anything like the same courage. Full Review

But anyway, the event, the propaganda and the hidden mutiny:

TOPLIS: THE MONOCLED MUTINEER by W Allison & J Fairley

When the Germans dropped seven bombs on the American-run hospital for British wounded at Etaples at around 11pm on the night of Tuesday 3^rd September, killing one US officer and three other ranks and wounding several other Americans, the blast was felt all over the United States, uniting a deeply divided nation suffering from serious second thoughts about being in the war at all. It was a considerable psychological blunder by the Germans, who had intended the reverse effect. Reports reaching Germany in the summer of 1917 from America showed that the resolve of the US had weakened greatly since President Wilson’s declaration of war in April.

The well-organised anti-war factions throughout the US had been gaining a sympathetic audience. The German intention was to add weight to the arguments of their supporting millions in America with a show of brutal force which would swing the pendulum further their way and perhaps influence a US withdrawal from the war, even at this late stage. Instead, the pro-war Wilsonites found themselves handed the ideal propaganda bludgeon. At last, they were able to declare, Americans had experienced the ‘barbarity of the Hun’.

The hospital bombing at Etaples was hailed in the United States as the end of the phoney-war period and the answer to those who doubted the wisdom of being involved. Because of communications confusion between General Thomson and the remote American military commanders in France, news the American government so desperately wanted to hear dawdled it’s way across the Atlantic.

Begs a question: ‘Pro-war Wilsonites?’ According to John A Thomson, writing in Britain and America: A Special Relationship? Part Two in a BBC / Independent British History Magazine series under the heading ‘Allies and Anglophiles’.

“Wilson was seeking to translate the great power of the US into diplomatic influence without actually deploying it. In early 1917, shortly after Wilson had won re-election as ‘the man who kept us out of the war,’ the German government instigated unrestricted submarine warfare, calculating that Britain would be forced to sue for peace by shortage of food before the US could bring its weight to bear. Wilson still sought to avoid entering the conflict, only deciding that it was unavoidable after the Germans began sinking American ships.”

So within just a few months, we’ve gone from ‘most reluctant’ to ‘unavoidable’ to ‘pro-war,’ maybe those Zionists had more influence than I had previously thought but:

The story did not break until the morning of Sat 8^th Sept when the New York Tribune ran this leader, headlined, “THE HUN”

“The announcement that an American medical officer has been murdered and three others wounded in a German air attack upon an American hospital on the French coast will surprise American people merely because distance has so far served to supplement their faith in human nature & make impossible for them to believe that even Germany would do the things that they have been charged with doing.

Yet there is nothing new in this German attack upon a hospital far removed the scene of operations. The truth is that this is the sort of thing the German does. He rapes women, he tortures old men, murders children, burns villages, enslaves populations, attacks hospitals, because in the German mind this is a method of making war which promises profit to the German cause.

[Easy to see here what Paul Craig Roberts is getting at; it wouldn’t take long to link almost all those accusations with recent events carried out by Americans & British in Iraq and / or Israelis in Palestine.]

The reason why all talk of peace is futile & sometimes approaches sin is that it is impossible for men & women to live at peace with a people who do the things that German’s do. The Canadian people hesitated to believe the French & British accounts of German atrocities until Canadian soldiers reported that some of their wounded had been crucified before Ypres.

The British troops hesitated to believe what French rumours told & Belgium reports asserted, with references to German methods of making war until British soldiers occupied districts in France that had been held by Germans – until they saw what Germans had done to the women & children & old men of the districts of Artois & Flanders. We had our first contact with the German method in the Lusitania. - -

We in the United States are going to know the German as he presently is. The voices that now clamour for peace with reconciliation will fall to silence when the Germans have murdered enough of our nurses and our men physicians and tortured enough of our soldiers to create in America the kind of conviction that similar methods have created in France and in England. The difficulty in the American case has been the bringing home to the mass of the common people far removed from Europe the plain fact of what the German was doing. To them the war remained a remote struggle between nations. It will not long remain a remote struggle now that the Germans have taken to killing Americans, now that they have taken to making war on our hospitals; now that they have adopted toward us the tactics of terribleness familiar to all the big and little nations of Europe. It will not be long now until every American voice is raised in support of a war which strikes at this German peril.”

At Etaples on 7^th September a seven-strong American press corps invaded the area to the great disgust of the British troops, whose wounded were ignored. [The New York Times carried one sentence showing British casualties, dead and seriously wounded, during August, 58,811.] Different versions of this powerful heady propaganda appeared in newspapers throughout the United States.

- BUT THEY MISSED THE REAL STORY OF ETAPLES!

What was sauce for the American gander was not necessarily sauce for the British goose. The German attack on the American manned Etaples hospital, one of six for the British wounded in and around the town, was being used to stiffen the US spine. The raid was beginning to boomerang on the Germans from an American viewpoint but it was having another effect, also unintended. The raid had lowered British morale at Etaples even further, pushing an army nearer still to MUTINY!

[A Morale Made for Mutiny -

But while it was a love story that started the Etaples mutiny, it was the presence of the Australians, which made such a thing seem possible to the British Tommy. Despite urgings from Haig, there was no death penalty in the Australian Army. The Aussie officer often came from the ranks of the fighting troops. When the Aussie soldier went back for a rest, he stood no nonsense about military protocol. The Aussies were indeed an eye-opener for the British troops. For three years the British had not only gone unquestioning to the slaughter at the front but had endured the harshest regime of Victorian discipline whenever they stepped out of line. Field punishment awaited any man who jibbed at a superior’s orders, the firing squad any man who deserted, showed cowardice or even nodded off to sleep while on duty. The class system imposed a succession of increasingly callow public-school officers on even the most battle-hardened troops. By 1917, the British were fertile ground for the talk of peace at the Stockholm Conference of the Socialist International and even for the propaganda of revolution, which seeped out of Russia.

There is no doubt that this feeling was at the heart of the eruption, which was to follow in September 1917. The conscripts who came reluctantly to fill the holes in Kitchener’s slaughtered volunteer army were full of resentment. But the mutiny could never have raged so wildly and venomously as it did without the deep feeling among those who had been at Arras, Messines, the Somme, that they were being humiliated and exploited by people clinging tightly to cushy lives away from the carnage of the front: military police, administration men, instructors, the despised gang of ‘base wallahs.’  ]

Among the first observers of the mutiny would be the (aforementioned) US war correspondents. The pressmen were in the lounge of the Hotel des Voyagers at Etaples, writing features in praise of the British methods of training for war, when the door burst open and in stormed the first of the mutineers who had fought their way into the town. With the newspapermen staring in silent astonishment, the mutineers swept the prepared dispatches off the tables on which they proceeded to dance while they poured bottles of looted wine down their throats. By sheer accident the Americans had landed on the greatest story of the war but, before they could act on it, the British administration demonstrated that they too had a way of suppressing unpalatable news.

One correspondent excitedly telephoned Commandant Thomson’s second in command, Colonel Nason and demanded to know what the hell was going on. He was told to stay put pending the arrival of two British Captains in two staff cars, when all would be revealed. The cars arrived within minutes and the Americans were hustled out of the hotel back to headquarters where Nason, deeply embarrassed and apologetic, explained that his soldiers were proving ‘a little wayward and difficult to handle’. He predicted that the riots would not spread and that a very minor crisis would be over that night. However, just in case it should prove otherwise, the British Censor had already been contacted and the Americans would not be allowed to file one word of copy on the subject. Meanwhile, the British would be pleased to protect the Americans from any further unpleasantness there might be by confining them to British HQ for the next 10 days.

The great Etaples cover-up had begun with the house arrest of the public representatives of Britain’s newest ally.

[Introducing, Percy Toplis, the Monocled Mutineer… although, some would now say:
“The Monocled Mutineer is innocent” ]

The pursuit of the story of Toplis was to lead us into history, into one of the central enigmas of the First World War: the manner in which millions of men apparently went obediently and meekly to the slaughter at the behest of the politicians and the generals. The French Army did rebel and almost cast away the war.

“Nivelle was replaced by Petain who visited 100 divisions in person, promised no more Nivelle-like offensives, said he was waiting for the Americans and their tanks, began reforms: more leave, station canteens, lavatories, showers, beds, better cooks, better pinard wine.”

[Shame the Brits couldn’t wait for the Yanks with their tanks before they sent 400,000 of the Empire’s finest to an early bloody/muddy grave at Passchendale.]

But hitherto the image of the British Army has been one of unquestioning obedience and unbending discipline. Our search for Toplis was to lead us through a succession of outrageous adventures into the centre of a huge mutiny of the British Army previously recorded only as tiny glimpses in memoirs of more glorious moments. Even the most sceptical authors writing about the First World War make no mention of the six days during which a sizeable section of the British Army rebelled and threatened Field Marshal Haig’s autumn offensive against Passchendale in 1917. One author, R H Mottram, in 1929 condemned this omission as a disgraceful conspiracy to conceal an event which should never have been hushed up.

[Whoever said the revolution wouldn’t be televised?]

But 60 years later there are still, the length and breadth of Britain, ordinary men who remember with both bitterness and pride the time when thousands of Scots, Australian, New Zealander and English soldiers defied the Army High Command in the rebellion of Etaples – and won.

Toplis – A pit-boy who tricked his way confidently through London high society, a womaniser, an outlaw, he was to be hunted by the Secret Service, to break his way out of prison under threat of a death sentence and finally to be shot down by the police in what was a spectacular and preposterous ambush as the constabulary have ever mounted in England.

He was ambushed by three policemen near a country church on a hot summer’s evening in June 1920. Worshippers coming out from evensong scattered for cover among the gravestones to avoid being caught up in the exchange of gunfire. Toplis’s killing, at the age of 23, was brutal and its manner unprecedented but it also came as a great relief to the highest authorities in the War Office and the Secret Service. For with him was buried, for 60 years at least, some of the darker secrets of the First World War. The chief constable who, it was claimed, had authorised the operation was awarded the CBE and then, within weeks, mysteriously resigned. Even in death, Percy Toplis continued to blight the lives of the establishment.

It was a very grateful authority that made quiet heroes of the men who had finally gunned him down and who then swiftly swept him under the sod into a pauper’s grave overlooking the hills of Ullswater. The cemetery register simply states: ‘Shot dead by police at Plumpton.” “A lovely lad - today he would have been described as one of those intellectual socialists. Mind you, he was a bit of a tearaway, was Percy.” Said one of his friends.

In June 1920, less than three years after the rebellion, the authorities no doubt excused themselves for the manner of his death with the thought that Toplis had been too dangerous to bring to trial. The country was not yet ready for regrets and recriminations. Or for a first hand, eye-witness account of a mutiny which had officially never happened. Even today, the Ministry of Defence shies away from the word ‘mutiny’. It prefers the word ‘disturbances’, which was the description used in a secret army record of the time. But mutiny it was and it lasted six desperate days, involved thousands of troops and finished with the authorities surrendering and a brigadier-general being relieved of his command. Toplis’s control of another British army – an army of deserters

[Skulking, starving, marauding – but surviving - a numberless regiment of deserters was holed up in the old abandoned battlefield of the Somme away to the south. Germans, French, English, Belgians, they lived I uneasy comradeship in the hulks of command posts, old pill-boxes and battered trenches. The war had moved on from that most terrible of all killing grounds and left its own armistice. Occasionally sweeps of Haig’s cavalry quartered the wasteland. From old dugouts men were flushed out and harassed back to the prison cages and courts martial. But through the winter and spring of 1917 the army of deserters grew. When Toplis arrived he found an almost military discipline. Food was stolen by roster. There was sentry duty against the cavalry. The talk was of the war but even more of the great revolution.]

behind the front line – was so complete that when the mutiny brought about a clean sweep of military police personnel, the first and most important task of the new commander, a secret service agent, Edwin Woodhall, was to track Toplis down.

-

When the mutiny came to Etaples, the combination of the Scots and the Australians, the special grievances of the New Zealanders, the oratory of Percy Toplis, the common hatred of the Red Caps and Canaries, the burgeoning populism, purveyed by papers like John Bull, were together to prove a deadly mix. For 6 days Brigadier-General Thomson and his staff would stand helplessly by and watch the old order collapse and threaten the fighting ability of the British Army, just as their ally on the Eastern Front, Russia, was about to be levered out of the war for good by revolution. As an officer in the Manchester Regiment, the poet Wilfred Owen had written a letter to his mother in which he described Etaples:

“I lay awake in a windy tent in the middle of a vast, dreadful encampment. It seemed neither France nor England but a kind of paddock where the beasts are kept a few days before the shambles. I heard the revelling of the Scotch troops, who are now dead and who knew they would be dead. I thought of the very strange look on all the faces in that camp; an incomprehensible look, which a man will never see in England; nor can it be seen in any battle but only in Etaples.

It was not despair, or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look and without expression, like a dead rabbit’s.”

On 9^th September 1917, the beasts broke out of the paddock. - Several British wounded had also been further injured in the air-raid but no fuss was being made about that. After all, British troops had been dying daily for years in those hospitals. It was hardly news.

But the first American casualties of the war did make news – big news. General Thomson’s official record for 2^nd September at Etaples reads simply: “Enemy Aeroplane Raid. Seven bombs dropped in hospital area. Lt. W T Fitzsimmons USA and three other rank Americans killed.” This meagre record of a very important moment in history reflected how the significance of the event was lost on Thomson.

-

So how do we stop this, capitulation into the ‘greater war?’ 20 million hitting the streets against Iraq held little sway and the 20 or so demonstrations since have had meagre effect. Could it be that it is time once again for the Saints and Mutineers?

The two St George links above; neither mentions, as does the Hutchinson Encyclopedia 2000, The story of St George rescuing a woman and slaying a dragon, as being ‘evidently derived’ from the Greek Perseus legend, which for me at least, makes his sainthood of an even greater significance to today but I think Albert Camus here, gets the drift:

“What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man.

“What I know – and what sometimes creates a deep longing in me – is that if Christians made up their mind to it, millions of voices – millions, I say – throughout the world would be added to the appeal of a handful of isolated individuals, who, without any sort of affiliation, today intercede almost everywhere and ceaselessly for children and other people.”

(Excerpted from Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays)

Albert Camus – Nobel Prize Winner Sixty years ago

Whatever people think of the DVD, it’s not a patch on the book, The Monocled Mutineer, which amazingly is available for as little as 1p from Amazon.

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