A Shared Rhetoric: The Western Front in 1914/15 as reported by Harry Gullett and Philip Gibbs

Introduction

In the deepening twilight one evening in March 1915, Harry Gullett and Philip Gibbs moved carefully through the shattered streets of Ypres. They carried no weapons, bearing with them only a bottle of Cointreau and a cake as a sure means of gaining admission to any British outpost that might offer a tenuous safety from the shelling. Five years later, by then no longer an official correspondent and therefore free from the constraints of censorship, Gibbs recalled standing in the Grande Place, beneath the ‘last flame feathers of the sinking sun’ and being placed under a spell by the ‘frightful beauty of the ruins’. Gibbs described the Cloth Hall, once a symbol of the town’s status as a great commercial centre, as a skeleton with ‘immense, gaunt ribs’, a ‘carcass’ devoid of its ‘former majesty’. As German artillery fire began to rake the ruins, a flare illuminated the whole shape of the Salient. In that instant it appeared to the now thoroughly unnerved correspondent as though a great army of ghosts had appeared, a spectral record of the ‘spirits of all those who had died on this ground’ (Gibbs, 1936: 97). In contrast, Gullett was less emotive in his description of the devastation. He recalled the indiscriminate gunfire that had left ‘one of the architectural glories of Europe a stately pile of large dimensions and close behind it is the Cathedral. Both are now in ruins’ (Gullett, 1915b: 4).

It is fitting that two correspondents who would do so much to shape their respective nations’ understanding of the War, both as it was being fought and in the years after 1918, would find themselves together in Ypres just as the British Army was taking its first tentative steps towards absorbing the press into the war effort. For it was this Belgian town more than any other that came to symbolize the immolation of the armies of the British Empire. Yet the significance of that meeting is more than just the place of Ypres in the collective memory. For, despite seemingly profound differences in their upbringing and temperament, they described the fighting on the Western Front during the first year and a half of the conflict in an almost identical fashion. Their shared rhetoric was underpinned by an approach to war reporting and censorship which they had arrived at independently of the other and which allowed them to balance their patriotic and professional loyalties without conscious dishonesty. Their journalistic output during this period, however, was therefore informed and shaped as much by pre-war attitudes and language conventions as it was by censorship.

Gullett and Gibbs: The correspondents

Gullett was a product of the Australian Bush, one who came to celebrate the birth of a new Britain in the colonies, one shaped and hardened by rural living. The early death of his father combined with his life as a child of the frontier in rural Victoria gave him a much harder, pragmatic edge than the equally social though more introspective Gibbs. It also gave him a capacity for action in the real world, as evident in his post-war political career. As a journalist prior to the war, both in Australia and in England, Gullett was a vocal supporter of immigration and the imperial connection, seeing Australia’s future inextricably tied to both. In both life and death, he left his mark on Australian public life; in word, in the form of The Australian Imperial Force in Sinai and Palestine 1914–1918, Volume VII of the Official History; in stone, in the form of his important contribution to the Australian War Memorial which remains a potent reminder of the place of war in the Australian story; and in a more abstract fashion, he contributed to the creation and perpetuation of the mythology of Anzac. In the immediate post-war years, Gullett was part of the Australian delegation at the Versailles Peace Conference, after which he served as Director of Commonwealth Immigration. He won a seat in the 1925 Federal election and thereafter held a variety of posts, including Minister for Trade and Customs, Deputy Leader of his party and of the Opposition, and member of the War Cabinet. His death in 1940 in an aircraft accident contributed to the fall of the Menzies government the following year.

Gibbs was one of the most famous and widely read English journalists of the first half of the 20th century. Prior to the outbreak of the First World War he reported on most of the great events of the age – industrial unrest, Ireland, the suffragette movement, changing technology, royal births, deaths and coronations, and the sinking of the Titanic. In contrast to Gullett’s desire for participation, Gibbs believed that as a journalist and writer he was an ‘onlooker of life’, standing in the ‘wings of life’s drama’ but never walking on the stage as one of the actors (Gibbs, 1957: 10). As one of a handful of accredited war correspondents, his articles, which appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, did much to shape civilian attitudes both during the conflict and in its immediate aftermath. Many critics, however, have dismissed the work of Gibbs and his colleagues as ludicrous (Hudson and Stainer, 1998). Gibbs’ knighthood in 1920 was characterized by fellow war correspondent Hamilton Fyfe (1935) as a bribe. Other critics such as Knightley (1989) would later concur with that assessment.

In the years following 1918, the British war correspondents have come to personify the broader propaganda war waged by the Allies. Despite the rewards of fame, fortune and, for some, knighthoods, ¹ they have not been treated well by history. For they were among the central players in what some critics describe as the most discreditable period in the history of journalism (Knightley, 1989; Ponsonby, 1928). That indictment did not fully satisfy Knightley (1989: 81), who went so far as to argue that more deliberate lies were told between 1914 and 1918 than in any other period of history, and that a ‘large share of the blame for this must rest with the British war correspondents’. The correspondents have generally been characterized, at worst, as liars, and at best, as a group ‘traduced by a sense of duty, patriotism, and front line bonding’ to the extent that they succumbed to the most ‘corrosive dictatorship of all: self-censorship’ (Moorcroft and Taylor, 2008: 43). As Gibbs observed, although the correspondents were indeed subject to military censorship, they were volunteers in the cause of silence and omission:

[We] had no other desire than to record the truth as fully as possible without handing information to the enemy and to describe the life and actions of our fighting men so that the nation, and the world should understand their valour, their suffering and their achievement. We identified ourselves absolutely with the armies in the field … There was no need of censorship of our dispatches. We were our own censors. (Gibbs, 1923: 248)

An assessment of the forces that acted on the war correspondents must, however, consider how propaganda and censorship were characterized by their readership in 1914. Propaganda was not a word used extensively in the 18th and 19th centuries and, as such, it did not have the negative connotation familiar to modern audiences. It was in fact the war which gave it its ‘miasmic aura’ for only then did it become suggestive of ‘the next thing to a damned lie’ (Irwin, 1936: 3). The damned lies perpetrated by the Allies emphasized four common themes: the ‘abhorrent nationalism of a perverted people’, the atrocities committed by the German Army, the desire of German socialists and the middle class to rise against Prussian militarism, and the democratization of Germany as a precursor to a lasting peace (Lutz, 1933: 504). Gullett and Gibbs touched on each of these four themes in their reporting, and although there is no evidence that they were directed in what they wrote, let alone coerced, it is clear that they were aware of this pattern and were influenced by it. Yet viewing propaganda as they did, there was nothing in this participation that would have appeared intrinsically reprehensible to journalists such as Gullett and Gibbs. For they worked in an environment in which there was not the clear distinction made between publicity and propaganda that a modern audience would be conditioned to expect. Both were regarded as legitimate extensions of diplomacy (Koss, 1984: 239). Yet, just as surely, Ponsonby (1928: 15) was justified in his broad criticism of what this pattern demanded of its participants.

Facts must be distorted, relevant circumstances concealed and a picture presented which by its crude colouring will persuade the ignorant people that their Government is blameless, their cause is righteous, and that the indisputable wickedness of the enemy has been proved beyond question … The amount of rubbish and humbug that pass under the name of patriotism in war-time in all countries is sufficient to make decent people blush when they are subsequently disillusioned.

Again though, Gullett and Gibbs’ wartime correspondence appeared a natural extension of their pre-war experiences and attitudes. Gullett’s work in promoting immigration to Australia prior to 1914 had given him considerable experience in blurring the lines between journalism and advertising. It left him, like the other war journalists such as Ashmead-Bartlett and Keith Murdoch, writing ‘more in the manner of publicity agents for the Digger as an exemplar of heroic racial characteristics than as disinterested observers of human conflict’ (Gerster, 1987: ix). Gibbs, always the romantic idealist moved by what he saw as the ‘spirit of the common people’ did the same for the British Army. In time he came to identify with them so closely that he found it almost impossible to criticize them and, by extension, the higher direction of the war which they fought.

Both correspondents openly acknowledged the operation of censorship and, other than some moments of rebellion directed at the more ludicrous application of it, accepted it as a just and logical policy, as did the greater part of their readership. Both also acknowledged that censorship prevented some things being written, but neither ever admitted to writing what Gibbs quaintly characterized as a conscious untruth. Yet neither was oblivious to the fact that they were compromised. In response, they created an ethical framework and operated within it without, in their view, the need for conscious falsehood. Gibbs argued that ‘the big things belong to history and will be familiar enough, but afterwards the next generation will search for the intimate records and the psychology of the men who served’ (Bickersteth and Bickersteth, 1996: 69), issues he was relatively free to write on. It was a theme which he expanded on at the end of the war when he wrote that that he ‘was more interested in the things I had seen than in map references and divisional boundaries’ (Gibbs, 1936: 36). In 1915, when offered the opportunity to officially visit the Front, Gullett outlined a similar philosophy in a letter to the Australian High Commissioner:

I have after much consideration decided that the best way to treat the matter was from a personal standpoint. While this appears an intrusion of self, it is preferable I think to assuming a knowledge which no outsider can possess in attempting to reach definite conclusions. I have kept closely, or as closely as the Censor would permit, to what I actually saw. ²

Although this approach failed to meet what a modern audience would see as the minimum standard for objective reporting, critics have denied Gullett and Gibbs a posthumous appeal for mitigation on the grounds of context. They were middle-aged, middle-class patriotic men who saw their reporting as an ethical and important contribution to what they understood to be a war of national survival. Answerable to both the Army and the newspapers, both of whom had a vested interest in positive reports, the correspondents were men ‘compromised on all fronts’ (Williams, 1999: 3) with neither the training, experience or official sanction required for such an enormous task. Moorcraft and Taylor (2008: 43), who argue that censorship compelled the press to ‘peddle fantasies’, nevertheless concede that the correspondents were ‘psychologically numbed by the vast landscapes of horror caused by total war’. Gibbs admitted that he had been ‘overwhelmed’ by the ‘vastness and horror’ (Gibbs, 1936: 70).

This shared approach is evident in Gibbs’ description of Paris when he returned there from the French coast. On 2 September 1914, utterly exhausted and emotionally spent, he found the city seemingly deserted, but still in Allied hands. He wept for a city

in which so many human hearts have suffered and strived and starved for beauty’s sake, in which there have always lived laughter and agony and tears, where Liberty was cherished as well as murdered, and where love has redeemed a thousand crimes. (Gibbs, 1915: 103)

Gibbs’ skill as an observer rather than an analyst is further demonstrated when he described the detritus marking the flight of the tens of thousands of refugees rather than an interpretation of the war or the fighting that had caused it:

It was a pitiful thing to see the deserted houses of the Paris suburbs. It was as though a plague had killed every human being save those who had fled in frantic haste … Roses were blowing in their gardens, full blown because no woman’s hand had been to pick them, and spilling their petals on the garden paths … Packing cases littered the trim lawns and cardboard boxes had been flung about. (p. 99)

Although he witnessed no combat first hand, Gibbs was proud that his report on the retreat from Mons had helped to restore confidence in England and Scotland, thereby acknowledging an ill-concealed agenda. Gullett was equally adept at using personal experience to make a broader point when hard news was scant. In his first report as an official correspondent, he made no mention of Neuve Chapelle which had cost 7000 British and 4000 Indian casualties. Instead he described his journey to France as though it was a peace-time jaunt across the Channel. He painted a scene of order and purpose in which the liners moved ‘inward and outward, cleave the placid waters; a sailing ship beats bravely up; the might of the British navy is vividly realised in this swish across the waters to France’. The vessel he was on passed one of ‘the fleet of hospital ships’ and Gullett felt that it was ‘almost gay in her clean, white paint, with a wide green band, and symbolical of the cheerful spirit which everywhere marks the British conduct of the war’ (Gullett, 1915c: 9). He visited the Canadian lines and frequently heard ‘happy soldiers snoring loudly as their mates kept watch, quite unconscious of the crack of rifles from the enemy’s line only 200 yards away’ (Gullett, 1915d: 9). The Indian troops possessed an ‘oriental magnificence’ as befitting ‘small landholders who adopt soldiering because the love of fighting is in their blood’ (Gullett, 1915b: 4).

Any assessment of their wartime performance also needs to be cognizant of the fact that the relationship between the press and the British Army was anything but static. In fact, it had three quite distinct stages, with Gibbs present for the duration and Gullett only for the first and the opening months of the second. During the first stage which occurred between August 1914 and May 1915 (with the exception of guided tours conducted in March 1915), the correspondents were outlaws, and subsequently liable to be arrested on sight. In the second stage from May 1915 to April 1917, there was a reluctant acceptance of their role, but they were closely controlled and hampered by sustained efforts to waste their time. During the third and final stage from April 1917 until the Armistice in November 1918, the war correspondents were now valued as a vital component of a complex system of propaganda (Farrar, 1998).

Both Gullett and Gibbs were working as freelance journalists in London in July 1914, so it was the British Government’s attitude to press coverage that would shape their initial reporting. In the days leading up to the outbreak of war, the British press assented to a voluntary code of censorship which covered the reporting of troop movements and shipping. ³ The War Office subsequently released ‘Regulations for Press Correspondents Accompanying a Force in the Field’. This, in turn, led to the creation of a register of approved correspondents who were authorized to travel with the army. Even after consultation between the press and the War Office, prospective correspondents would still have to be approved by the Army Council before a licence was granted and their name added to the register. Any communication between correspondents and their papers would have to be submitted in duplicate to the Chief Field Censor via the Press Officer. It was forbidden to mention, let alone discuss, morale, casualties, troop movements, or their strength, location or composition. To protect those who oversaw their nation’s war effort, criticism or praise of those in a position of authority was also forbidden. From the very outset, the aim was to both limit the number of correspondents and to ensure that those chosen were of the ‘right type’.

Much of this early discussion concerning the role of the war correspondents became purely academic on 5 August 1914 when Lord Kitchener assumed the post of Secretary of War. He immediately banned the war correspondents from entering a military zone around the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and demanded that dispatches be submitted to the War Office for authorization. He also created a Press Bureau under FE Smith whose task it was to censor news reports from the Army and then to issue heavily doctored information to the domestic and international press. These reports were intentionally devoid of any real news and sought merely to limit or remove the power of the correspondent and provide the newspapers and the public with a distraction (Farrar, 1998). This desire to muzzle the press was only part, however, of a much wider process centred on the Defence of the Realm Act (1914) (DORA), which was enacted on the fourth day of the war. It granted the State unlimited power to control the dissemination of information. Any opposition to the War in any form potentially became a criminal offence so that it was rightly characterized as a ‘meddlesome woman’ who, though not lacking teeth, had no real need to bite (Moorcroft and Taylor, 2008: 35).

In any event, it was all essentially a smokescreen, one which left the correspondents who waited for official accreditation exercising their horses in Hyde Park as the German Army crashed through Belgium. Correspondents such as Gullett and Gibbs who defied their government and travelled to the Continent did so as outlaws. Gibbs won a roving commission, first as an artist correspondent to The Graphic, and a few days after the declaration of war as correspondent for the Daily Chronicle. He left for Paris on the night of 29 July 1914 clad in a lounge suit and carrying a walking stick. He described the next seven months as a period of freelance adventure, ended only by the belated granting of official status as a war correspondent in May 1915. In Paris he witnessed the first scenes of mobilization, but found in the French Ministry of War an organization equally opposed to war correspondents as their British counterpart. Frustrated by official opposition and sensing that beyond Paris ‘history was being made’, Gibbs and two companions struck out on their own (Gibbs, 1915: 153). Gullett also made the journey across the channel although he left behind a far more limited record of this period, in spite of the intermittent newspaper reports published in Australia not suggesting movement beyond Paris.

In a ‘prolonged nightmare’, Gibbs wandered back and forth between the west coast ports and the Allied armies, relying on luck to stumble across something newsworthy (p. 45). In the ‘vortex of the French retreat’, conditions were far too chaotic to enforce the draconian decrees restricting correspondents (p. 72). Gibbs was able to blend in with the thousands of refugees, trusting to his charm and luck while waving a pass stamped by French Headquarters permitting him to receive the daily communiqué from the War Office in Paris and dozens of other passes and permits from local authorities and police.

Gullett made two or three visits to France during 1914 but, like Gibbs, he was also hampered by a lack of verifiable facts or proximity to battle. In keeping with Gibbs’ experience, his reports focused on the French rather than the British Army. Indicative of the difficulty in offering an informed assessment of events, a number of Gullett’s articles during this period, probably written between visits, are little more than opinion pieces ranging from one entitled ‘A Gossipy Letter’ dealing with a conversation with ‘an old Russian’ who predicted that a million Cossacks would soon be ravaging eastern Germany (Gullett, 1914f), a broad exploration of ‘Labor and the War’ (Gullett, 1914a) and, as if despairing of ever writing authoritatively about the British Army, a discussion about the attrition rate for horses at the front (Gullett, 1914e).

The regenerative power of war

Although Gibbs had been home schooled and Gullett was compelled by family circumstances to cut short his education at age 13, both were in fact very widely read. Neither, therefore, was immune to the broader trends that shaped the British literary response to the war. Both saw in war the opportunity for a national regeneration. Prior to August 1914, Gullett saw a ‘host of young men in England living soft, easy lives’ (Gullett, 1916: 4). His view was that war would purify and strengthen rather than destroy. In doing so, it would reveal an authentic England, one in which ‘hundreds of thousands of protected, unromantic, and even squalid lives [are] suddenly plunged into the supreme game of war’. For although ‘excessive militarism may brutalise’, a ‘grand sudden enterprise such as this cannot but elevate and ennoble.’ The impact of the war on a ‘virile and active young race’ such as the one resident in Australia would not, in Gullett’s view, be as profound, but for the British a ‘new manhood will be born out of this war’. It would be nothing less than a ‘new era of Anglo-Saxon greatness, with eminence in art and literature, an increased supremacy in industry, and best of all perhaps, a swift development in every branch of social reform’ (Gullett, 1914a).

Gibbs shared with Gullett a belief in the regenerative possibilities offered by war, although his language was if anything underpinned by an even more unapologetic romanticism:

What man may lay bare the soul of England as it was stirred during those days of July when suddenly, without any previous warning, loud enough to reach the ears of the mass of people, there came the menace of a great bloody war, threatening all that had seemed so safe and so certain in our daily life? England suffered in those summer days a shock which thrilled to its heart and brain with an enormous emotion such as a man who has been careless of truth and virtue experiences at a ‘Revivalist’ meeting or at a Catholic mission when some passionate preacher breaks the hard crust of his carelessness and convinces him that death and the judgement are very near, and that all the rottenness of his being will be tested in the furnace of a spiritual agony. (Gibbs, 1915: 1)

Ten years after the outbreak of war, Gibbs still believed that it was ‘as though the nation had been shaken by a great wind in which the voice of God was heard’. He saw in the call to arms a ‘nobility of purpose’ which only the newspaper press ‘vulgarized and degraded’ by its appeal to ‘blood lust and its call to hate and many frantic lies’ (Gibbs, 1924: 18–20).

Gullett and Gibbs’ rich prose is indicative of their exposure to a pre-war view that grappled with the contrast between an increasingly plutocratic and industrialized England with an idealized view of the past dominated by a vision of a lost, rural England with a simplicity and decency that was somehow more authentic. War, with its discomfort, its male asceticism and its sacrifice was the physical and spiritual opposite of Edwardian luxury. War therefore might both cleanse and purify (Hynes, 1991). Gullett’s deep attachment to rural living allowed him to identify a causal link between the declining influence of England’s rural areas and a national malaise. It is this England he rediscovered in Dorset in early October 1914, probably a few days before travelling to Paris, where for ‘all the signs of war the Aisne and its thunders might have been thousands of miles away’:

The little straw thatched village dozes in the warm autumn sunshine; slow moving labourers worked in the fields; an occasional sportsman passed with his gun or plied his rod by the shallow, noisy river … In the fat meadows prime cattle slept and grazed alternately. Half Europe is bleeding and devastated while England, which has incomparably more at stake than any of the other participants, is undisturbed, apparently almost innocent. (Gullett, 1914b)

Here in this rural idyll was a world at peace, as Rupert Brooke conceived it, under an English heaven. For in this corner of a field that was anything but foreign, there was proof of an historical continuity. There were lines of trees planted by French prisoners during the Napoleonic wars and the remains of a Roman fort, ensuring that even the landscape was evidence that ‘England has in her time fought all the ambitious armies of Europe’ (Gullett, 1914b: 6). It is this England that men such as Gullett and Gibbs hoped to see returned in the maelstrom of war.

The language

As is evident in their description of war as a regenerative force, it was not merely pre-war attitudes that shaped the correspondents’ reports. It was also the very language they used. In representing the war using a traditional rhetoric, a ‘set of abstractions that expressed traditional martial and patriotic values’, the correspondents, as Hynes (1991) observed, misrepresented it. It was not as a significant proportion of pre-war society had expected, an adventure or crusade, but rather a ‘valueless, formless experience that could not be rendered in the language, the images, and the conventions that existed’. Hampered by this increasingly outmoded rhetoric, the correspondents gave the war undeserved ‘meaning, dignity, order, greatness’ (p. 108). The truth was that all too often it was futile, undignified, disordered and petty (Kerby, 2016: 65). Fussell (2000: 169) saw this failure of rhetoric as a ‘collision between events and the language available – or thought appropriate – to describe them’. He questioned whether there is, in fact, ‘any way of compromising between the reader’s expectations that written history ought to be interesting and meaningful and the cruel fact that much of what happens – all of what happens? – is inherently without “meaning”’ (p. 172). The correspondents were thus faced with the unenviable task of describing a new and terrible reality in an ‘atmosphere of euphemism as rigorous and impenetrable as language and literature skilfully used could make it’ (p. 174). It was also one which used unashamed sentiment and utter sang-froid as supporting players in an effort to make sense of the war using imagery familiar to the reading audience.

For example, in one report on 18 July 1916, Gibbs showed how adept he was at writing in this manner when describing the street fighting in the town of Ovilles. In the rubble and cellars of smashed buildings there had been ‘no sentiment’, a euphemism which is only half resolved by the additional description that the soldiers ‘had flung themselves upon each other with bombs and weapons of any kind’. The question remains as to what Gibbs wished to communicate – is he referring to the ferocity of the fighting, the brutality of using ad hoc weapons which may, or may not have been clubs, shovels and rocks, or does it hint at a refusal to take prisoners in the heat of battle. Perhaps it was nothing more than Gibbs’ own imaginative reconstruction of what it may have been like, but he clearly and with intent left part of his job to his readers’ imaginations. Once combat is complete, however, he reverts to sentiment in his description of the eventual surrender of the ‘last of the German garrison [a descriptor which gives the desperate defence an ordered and meaningful character] being received with the honours of war, and none of our soldiers denies them the respect due to great courage’. Finally, Gibbs celebrated the sang-froid, or what Fussell (2000) described as the ‘British Phlegm’ by quoting a participant in the fighting who in observing the courage of the Germans noted that they had ‘stuck it splendidly’ (Gibbs, 1916: 136–137).

Gullett also confined himself to a rhetoric that reflected pre-war values. In one article he led his readers through each of the steps of a hypothetical attack. The decontextualized nature of this article was perhaps a means of escaping censorship, but it has a further, perhaps unintended consequence. It is inaccurate, almost profoundly so, in that it gives order and purpose to a chaotic event. To a reader, the attack is imbued with a narrative structure comprised of a series of logical, planned steps, each progressing towards a clear and attainable objective. Beyond even this shortcoming is the issue of language. ‘The crowded and glorious hour of the supreme test’ when ‘hell is loosed by the attacking force’ sees the troops ‘eager, dry lipped but rejoicing in their appointed task’ as ‘they clamber over the parapet and dash for the smoking mutilated ground which shelters the remains of the enemy’. The actors, playing their parts as the scriptwriter conceives them, ‘are not yet warm, and know no lust of battle; they are impelled by duty and calculating love of honour and country’ (Gullett, 1915a: 3). This traditional martial language that Gullett adopts mirrors that used by the other correspondents; one in which

soldiers were not killed; they had fallen or had died gamely … words such as honour, duty, sacrifice and manliness had very clear meanings. Empire meant the British Empire, and a fine paternal thing. God was an Anglican. The one word that was never tolerated was failure. (Anderson and Trembath, 2011: 66)

In the chaos of the early months of fighting, the correspondents struggled to provide their readers with anything beyond emotive vignettes and an enduring impression that much was being kept from them. Temperamentally and ideologically, Gibbs was well suited to the presentation of war as a series of dramatic, actor-focused vignettes. His description of the French mobilization is a case in point:

Fate had come with the little card summoning each man to join his depot, and tapped him on the shoulder with just a finger touch. It was no more than that – a touch on the shoulder. Yet I know that for many of those young men it seemed a blow between the eyes, and, to some of them, a strangle grip as icy cold as though Death’s fingers were already closing round their throats … The French women gave their men to ‘La Patrie’ with the resignation of religious women who offer their hearts to God. Some spiritual fervour, which in France permeates the sentiment of patriotism, giving a beauty to that tradition of nationalism. (Gibbs, 1915: 23–26)

Although Gullett described the French mobilization less emotively, the similarities in approach are still evident. He noted that the French ‘trooped to the call, not unwillingly, but without a semblance of enthusiasm’ for they went ‘to a grim national duty’ in a war that ‘had been forced upon them’. Looking to contextualize events for an Australian audience, he observed that ‘the shadow of 1870 was very deep over the land’, a situation he believed was exacerbated by French doubts over the intentions of England and the readiness of Russia. He described the early fighting, which neither he nor Gibbs witnessed first-hand, as ‘swift, dramatic and bloody’. After the Battle of the Marne, Gullett found the war entering a second phase in which the national spirit has ‘entirely changed’. In meeting the ‘dread German’, France had ‘re-found herself’ and had reversed ‘the verdict of 1870’. Gullett witnessed no ‘hysterical rejoicing’ but instead everywhere he saw ‘great confidence’. The third phase, or the Race to the Sea, made clear to the French people ‘the real nature of the war’. They now perceived it as something much more than ‘a mere military campaign’ but rather as an ‘unprecedented struggle of nation against nation, in which every unit of the population, and every device of civilisation, were engaged’ (Gullett, 1915c: 9). By presenting the turmoil of the early months of the war as a series of stages, Gullett has again imposed a narrative structure to give order to the chaos.

German atrocities

During its advance through Belgium, the German Army was responsible for the deaths of 5000 civilians who were ‘shot as guerrilla fighters, as hostages or simply because they got in the way of a victorious army in which not every soldier was a saint’ (Knightley, 1989: 83). The Allies turned this into a deliberate and systematic campaign of barbarism. Although there are well-documented crimes, the investigations of the now discredited Committee on Alleged German Outrages (1915), often called the Bryce Committee, saw allegations of mass rapes, mutilations and murders which were clearly fabricated (Horne and Kramer, 2001).

Although Gibbs would later express contempt for these stories, he nevertheless employed some of the novelist’s flair to flesh out his descriptions of bestial soldiers ‘who would have their kisses even though they had to hold shrieking women to their lips’. More disturbing was his reference to a woman, raped at gunpoint in front of her mother-in-law and 8-year-old child, as having insufficient pride or courage to resist. He contrasts her failure with another woman who fought like ‘a wild thing’. For Gibbs (1915: 141–142),

it was better for women and children to be in Arras under continual shell fire than in some of the villages along the valleys of the Marne and the Meuse … it was a nicer thing to be killed by a clean piece of shell than to suffer the foulness of men whose passions had been unleashed by drink and the devil and the madness of the first experience of war, and by fear which made them cruel as beasts.

Although Gibbs made these few modest contributions to the atrocity mongering, he was at times nevertheless quite capable of seeing the war in broader terms. Near the village of Rouville, on or about 23 September 1914, he walked through fields strewn with the bodies of French and British soldiers and witnessed the burning of the German dead.

No individual corpse among them could be brought in guilty of the crime which had caused this war, and not a soul hovering above that mass of meat could be made responsible at the judgement seat of God. They had obeyed orders, they had marched to the hymn of the Fatherland, they believed as we did, in the righteousness of their cause. But like the dead bodies of the Frenchmen and the Englishmen who lay quite close, they had been done to death by the villainy of statecraft and statesmen, playing one race against another as we play with pawns in a game of chess. (Gibbs, 1915: 125)

Gullett’s reporting in the early months of the war was remarkably inconsistent, particularly in his portrayal of the Germans. At times, like Gibbs, he displayed a capacity for nuanced assessment of the war situation and some considerable balance in his discussion of German motives:

The German people, in the depths of their hearts, believe that they are fighting this war for the right to live and grow … However wonderful it may appear to us from our standpoint, the Germans are not conscious that they are fighting a wicked, brutal war which is destined to humiliate their pride and smash, perhaps forever, their colossal power. They believe that they have been sinned against. Their cause is to them as spotless as ours is to us and that being so they will fight as a solid and patriotic nation to the very end of their military resources. (Gullett, 1914d: 2)

Gullett understood that the waging of total war, the hatreds that were needed to sustain it and the shared desire to see the great issues to be decided on the battlefield would all mitigate against any type of negotiated peace. For even if the Germans sought an end to the fighting, they would be deterred ‘by the terms of peace the allies will assuredly propose’. The war, therefore, ‘will end only from one course – the utter destruction of German strength’ (p. 2). Yet just as surely, Gullett showed himself well able to participate in the virulent anti-German rhetoric of the British press. He offered his readers a description of what was then still hypothetical – Zeppelin raids aimed at the ‘historic London buildings which the Kaiser and his gentle captains dream of destroying’. Unprepared to leave the impending destruction to a reader’s imagination, Gullett characterized it as a war between culture, decency and the rule of law on one side and militarism and nihilism on the other. The targets would, in Gullett’s view, include Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, Downing Street, Pall Mall and St Paul’s: a history of England in stone. Describing area bombing a quarter of a century before it became reality, Gullett noted that Devonshire House, the home of the Red Cross and the leading hospitals would be ‘particularly attractive’. The German pilots, ‘flying away in the rosy dawn to the Fatherland’ would be rewarded with an ‘extra iron cross or two from William’s inexhaustible supply’ (Gullett, 1914c: 2). Even two years later, Gullett still characterized the Germans at this time as ‘triumphant Teuton[s]’, ‘a turbulent foreign host swilling wine and insulting women’, all the while ‘exulting in the prospect of the days close ahead in Paris’ (Gullett, 1916: 4).

Conclusion

It would not be until March 1915, by which time Gibbs had been arrested and returned to join Gullett and most of his contemporaries in England, that arrangements were made for representatives of the press to make official tours of the Front. This concession reflected the growing dissatisfaction on the home front with the lack of reliable war news and the growing awareness that accredited journalists of a good type would be more easily controlled than irregular correspondents. The first visit of a handful of journalists during the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in 1915, Gullett and Gibbs included, resulted in infuriatingly irrelevant articles that showed proximity to battle did not equate to veracity. Aware by now that official correspondents could be more easily controlled, the Army committed itself to keeping its enemies close, and there was perhaps no greater enemy than a press operating outside of official sanction. The correspondents would shortly afterward be ‘attired in the King’s uniform’ and ‘to all intents and purposes, Officers of the Army, conscious of their debt to it and conscious too of their duty to keep up morale and to reinforce that continuing loyalty of the people at home’ (McDonald, 1983: 80). Although the correspondents’ standing as eye witnesses would be regularly reinforced over the course of the war, the perception that they ‘were in the thick of things’ has been justly derided by writers such as Williams (1999: 3) as ‘another variety of Great War falsehood, since the danger faced by closeted pressmen on the Western Front was such that no French or British Empire correspondent was lost there to enemy action in the war’. Yet for all those differences of temperament, Gullett and Gibbs were participants in a process that by conflict’s end would culminate in the correspondents becoming official contributors to their nation’s war effort. The question, as Shakespeare may have expressed it, is whether they ‘played’st most foully for ’t’.