Free Churchill's Wizards by Nicholas Rankin

had helped Roger Casement to expose the involvement of British-owned companies in atrocious exploitation of rubber-tappers in the Amazon in 1907. But his Royal Commission report on Belgium is naïvely credulous, luridly recounting ‘witness’ stories of mass rape, amputation and baby-bayoneting, collected without any cross-examination or corroboration.
    â€˜Your report has swept America,’ Charles Masterman wrote to Lord Bryce, ‘As you probably know even the most sceptical declare themselves converted, just because it is signed by you!’ War Propaganda Bureau operatives in America told Masterman: ‘Even in papers hostile to the Allies, there is not the slightest attempt to impugn the correctness of the facts alleged. Lord Bryce’s prestige in America puts scepticism out of the question.’
    Some sceptics did want to spoil the horror stories, including a furious Roger Casement, but he was just a cranky, homosexual Irish nationalist who would soon be hanged for high treason in Pentonville prison on 3 August 1916. The US lawyer Clarence Darrow went to France later in 1915 and could not find any of Bryce’s eyewitnesses, though he offered $1,000 to meet any Belgian child amputee. The Pope, the Italian Prime Minister and David Lloyd George also had diligent inquiries made, but no one ever found the supposed handless kiddies. The atrocity stories were designed to unite people against the foe.
    But not everyone in Britain shared these views. The brilliant, gentle cartoons of William Heath Robinson, born into a family of illustrators in 1872, are a wonderful deflation of both sides in the combat. He said that ‘the much advertised frightfulness of the German army’ gave him one of his best opportunities as an artist, and in such books as Some ‘ Frightful’ War Pictures (1915), Hunlikely! (1916) and The Saintly Hun: a Book of German Virtues (1917), he ridiculed the demonisation of the enemy by accusing Germans of minute failures of sporting etiquette but also showing them in improbable acts of saintliness. German aeronauts protect the modesty of a young Englishwoman in her attic; an enormously fat, be-helmeted Prussian general withstands the tempting aroma of a pie carried by a starving child, and another ‘benignant Boche returning good for evil’ offers a cigar to a British soldier as the latter impales him with a bayonet. Heath Robinson was a good advertisement for British amateurishness and larkishness, and an antidote to the over-serious simplicities of propaganda.
    They are masters of propaganda, you know. Dick, have you ever considered what a diabolical weapon that can be – using all the channels of modern publicity to poison and warp men’s minds? It is the most dangerous thing on earth. You can use it cleanly – as I think on the whole we did in the War – but you can use it to establish the most damnable lies.
    John Buchan, The Three Hostages (1924)
    John Buchan was not well known enough to attend Charles Masterman’s first meeting of writers in Whitehall on 2 September 1914, but he later became the master of propaganda in journalism, fiction and history. Buchan wrote many books for Masterman’s War Propaganda Bureau, and in February 1917 he became Masterman’sboss when the Prime Minister appointed him director of the Department of Information, charged with coordinating all British propaganda.
    Buchan was the son of a Church of Scotland minister and understood that effective propaganda was linked to deep belief. The word ‘propaganda’ is religious in origin, coming from the Roman Catholic Church’s congregatio de propaganda fide , ‘congregation for propagation of the faith’, a body set up to aid the missionary work of the Church. But Buchan links propaganda to less orthodox spirituality in his novel The Three Hostages , published in 1924, the era when Lenin, Stalin and Hitler emerged:
    The true wizard is the