Engineering Opinion - from: "A Genius for Deception"

Engineering Opinion
(Extracted from: "A Genius for Deception - How Cunning Helped the British
Win Two World Wars", Nicholas Rankin, Oxford University Press, 2008)

Just as camouflage brought painters, designers and artists into WW1, so the propaganda effort required authors, critics, poets and playwrights to lend a hand. Like ‘camouflage’, the word ‘propaganda’ did not have an entry in the eleventh edition of Encylopaedia Britannica, but everybody knew about it by the end of WW1 when the twelfth edition came out. Of course the concept was not wholly new. As Samuel Johnson observed in the eighteenth century:

Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages . . . I know not whether more is to be dreaded from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lie.

Arthur Ponsonby, the author of Falsehood in War-Time, recognised that the lie was an extremely useful weapon in warfare, deliberately employed by every country ‘to deceive its own people, to attract neutrals, and to mislead the enemy’. He wrote this book because he thought the ‘authoritative organization of lying’ in wartime was not sufficiently recognised: ‘The deception of whole peoples is not a matter which can be lightly regarded.’ Ponsonby knew that famous writers were better able ‘to clothe the rough tissues of falsehood with phrases of literary merit’ than statesmen.
As early as 2 September 1914, Charles Masterman, a member of Asquith’s cabinet, called a meeting of senior British writers to get together a response to German propaganda leaflets and manifestos. In one room were gathered some impressive names, among them J. M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Gilbert Murray, George Trevelyan, H. G. Wells and Israel Zangwill. Also invited but not able to attend were Arthur Quiller-Couch and Rudyard Kipling.

After a second meeting on 7 September 1914 with writers and editors from the respectable British press (no pacifists or socialists were invited), Charles Masterman set up a War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House, Buckingham Gate, in London. Its mission was to sell the British line and counter the arguments of ‘The Unspeakable Prussian’ to educated elites in Allied and neutral nations, rather than in Britain or Germany and Austria. By June 1915, this discreet clearing house had distributed 2.5 million copies of speeches, booklets and official publications in seventeen different languages. A year later, it was distributing a million illustrated newspapers every fortnight, and had helped publish 300 books and pamphlets.
Anthony Hope Hawkins, author of The Prisoner of Zenda, was the War Propaganda Bureau’s literary adviser. Arnold Toynbee and Lewis Namier were among the historical consultants. William Archer, translator of Ibsen, headed the Scandinavian department. G. K. Chesterton wrote a tract called The Barbarism of Berlin. Arthur Conan Doyle tackled a history of the campaigns in France and Flanders. John Galsworthy wrote articles. The historian G. M. Trevelyan wrote and lectured on the Serbs and the Austrians before leaving for Italy. John Masefield wrote one book on Gallipoli, and another on the Somme. Popular novelist Mrs Humphrey Ward promoted her 1916 paean of praise to the war workers, England’s Effort: Letters to an American Friend, on tour in the United States.
The USA was considered the most crucial country to get on side, and so the War Propaganda Bureau put the Canadian-born romantic novelist Sir Gilbert Parker in charge of the public relations campaign aimed across the Atlantic. The basic propaganda message was that the decent British and their allies were honourably muddling through against the Schrecklichkeit or ‘frightfulness’ of the belligerent Kaiser and his ruthless Huns. The rape of plucky little Belgium was the first atrocity to be cited.
The Imperial German army certainly killed at least 5,500 civilians in Belgium, but some of the more imaginative bestialities they were accused of probably owed more to fantasy than truth. ‘War is fought in this fog of falsehood,’ wrote Ponsonby. ‘The fog arises from fear and is fed by panic.’

1915 brought a rich harvest of war atrocity stories from Belgium, most notably the execution of the British nurse Edith Louisa Cavell in October 1915. The matron of the Berkendael Institute in Brussels who stayed at her post when it became a Red Cross hospital after war broke out, Miss Cavell, the 49-year-old unmarried daughter of a Norfolk vicar, was formally tried and shot by German firing-squad in Brussels for the crime of helping Belgian, British and French soldiers escape from German-occupied territory into neutral Holland. The British never denied that she had done this. The Germans incurred a propaganda disaster by prosecuting and executing Edith Cavell for treacherously undermining the German war effort, without pausing for merciful gestures and without considering the publicity it would generate.
Her execution duly caused outrage in the UK, and in the USA.
Killing a nurse in wartime hardly wins public approval, and Edith Cavell’s death was milked by British propagandists as the murder of an angel of mercy. She became the perfect symbol of Belgian martyrdom, and a justification for the war. The War Illustrated (30 October 1915) has a drawing of a glaring-eyed prognathous Prussian approaching a figure lying on the ground. Headlined ‘The murder of Nurse Cavell’, the caption reads:

The ill-fated woman had no strength to face the firing party, and swooned away, whereupon the officer in charge approached the prostrate form, and, drawing a heavy Service pistol, took his murderous aim, while the firing-party looked on.

In March 1920, Queen Alexandra unveiled Cavell’s memorial statue in St Martin’s Place in central London, just north of Trafalgar Square, the heart of the British Empire, between the National Portrait Gallery and the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields.
M. R. D. Foot, once a wartime intelligence officer, pointed out in his book MI9: Escape and Evasion 1939–1945 (written with J. M. Langley) that Norman Crockatt, the head of this secret organisation founded in WW2 to help servicemen get out of enemy territory, traced the rivalry between different British secret services back to Edith Cavell. She had in fact been working for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6), but had been exposed through helping prisoners of war to escape. This was why the older set of spooks, SIS, wanted nothing to do with MI9, because SIS ‘were determined to prevent evaders and escapers from involving them in any way’.
Her secret role was also revealed in Paul Routledge’s Public Servant, Secret Agent: the enigmatic life and violent death of Airey Neave. Foot, reviewing it in the TLS in May 2002, noted

a story on which I have had to sit for a generation: that Edith Cavell, shot by the Germans in Brussels in 1915 for having helped scores of British soldiers to escape into Holland, had, in fact, been an exceptionally well placed spy, despised in the Secret Service for having turned aside from her duty as a spy to perform a work of mercy.

Cavell’s work could not be acknowledged for the usual reason: the secret services have to stay secret in order to be effective. She probably also suffered because of her sex and the popular view of it in the media. Women did not have the vote then and they did not serve in the armed forces; feminine heroism was mostly framed in terms of self-sacrifice.
Thus to call nurse Edith Cavell anything like a ‘spy’ (with all its lurid connotations then) would mean sliding her down the scale of female achievement, away from worthies like Florence Nightingale towards houris like Mata Hari. Compromising her virtue might have diminished her propaganda value. When the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, included Edith Cavell in his book Courage: Eight Portraits in June 2007, he also made no mention of her secret service activities.
Perhaps the major cause célèbre of WW1 propaganda was the sinking of the Cunard passenger liner RMS Lusitania, torpedoed by U-20 off Ireland on 7 May 1915. One hundred and twenty-eight American lives were lost, and the incident outraged the USA, whose government protested that such an attack on a passenger ship was a flagrant breach of the rules of war and, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy F. D. Roosevelt put it, ‘piracy on a vaster scale of murder than old-time pirates ever practised’. In short, it was an act of ‘terrorism’.

The German government’s defence was that the Lusitania was an armed merchantman built with British government funds, mounted with hidden guns and quite prepared to ram submarines, and that she was carrying Canadian troops for the Western Front as well as thousands of crates of illicit munitions (which, they said, the torpedo caused to explode, thus sinking the ship in eighteen minutes). They added that this was a war zone in wartime and that the Imperial German ambassador inWashington DC, Count Bernstorff, had placed notices in US newspapers stating that British and allied vessels might be attacked, so there was fair warning.

Some of these arguments are not true. The Lusitania was unarmed and had no hidden guns, and there was only one Canadian soldier on board, running off with his mistress. Others are half true: the Lusitania was indeed carrying four million rounds of .303 rifle ammunition and 5,000 3.3-inch Bethlehem Steel shrapnel shells not yet filled with explosive, but marine archaeology does not suggest the ammunition blew up. Certainly the British government was not anxious to publicise the existence of munitions on a passenger ship, which would have undermined their righteous indignation. In any case, the German justifications could never carry as much emotional weight in world public opinion as the distressingly horrible deaths of 1,200 innocent people, including many women and nearly a hundred children, a third of them babies. This was one of the great shockhorror stories for newspaper front-page headlines: ‘The Huns Sink the Lusitania’ said The Daily Sketch on 8 May; ‘Full Story of the Great Murder’, ‘Lusitania Survivors’ Terrible Stories’.

When the Lusitania sailed on her last voyage the passenger list included a small, deaf, angry designer called Oliver Percy Bernard. The immediate outlet for his rage on board the Cunard liner was British caste and class snobbery, but the fires of his anger had been long stoked by the frustrations of life.

Born among ‘vague and violent people’ in Lambeth, where his father boxed with bare knuckles, Oliver ‘Bunny’ Bernard had been sent as a 13-year-old orphan to learn backstage theatrical arts in Manchester, where he taught himself to draw by paying attention to trees, carefully drawing their boles, branches and bark. From a lonely adolescence, Oliver Bernard grew into an outsider who liked the theatre but was cold-eyed about

the tiresome vanity of successful actors, the emotional insincerity of favourite actresses . . . those who practise deception are most deeply deceived; those who excel in the simulations of grief are most early reduced to tears; the liar falls most completely for the lie.

By 1915 he was a successful stage architect and scenic artist. Oliver Bernard loved the effects that music and drama could achieve but loathed the ‘consecrated humbug’ of grand opera in London, Boston and New York, so often a world of ‘beasts and bitches’, charlatans and frauds. Unloved, unhappy in love, resentful of the rich lording it on board, ashamed to be a non-combatant in wartime, and remembering how ‘deafness and discriminating methods of muddled recruitment had revented him from becoming cannon fodder in 1914’, it was a rather disgruntled and acerbic ‘Bunny’ Bernard who paced the deck of the Lusitania as her sirens hooted into the Atlantic fog.
On the sixth day out, the sun was shining off the south-west of Ireland, and the passengers’ mood on board the floating luxury hotel brightened. After lunch, around 2.15 p.m., Bernard went up on deck. The smooth, still sea was like ‘an opaque sheet of polished indigo’ and the horizon was undisturbed by the smoke or sails of any other vessel.
Bernard’s reverie was interrupted by ‘a frothy track snaking up . . . like an express’. The torpedo was nearly seven metres long and weighed over a ton: it carried 160 kilos of high explosive in its nose, and was travelling at over 80 kph towards the ship.
Oliver Bernard felt a slight shock through the deck, as though a tugboat had run into the giant liner. Then there was a terrific explosion.
A column of white water rose high in the air, followed by an eruption of debris. Lumps of coal bounced on the deck. He was no longer alone. Fellow passengers in the floating hotel appeared from everywhere in a rush of trampling feet, wails and cries. Bernard dutifully went down to B deck to fetch his lifebelt from his cabin. The lights were all out. He fell down tilting stairs; could not balance; reeled in darkened corridors to his cabin. Back on the crowded deck, a woman demented with fear snatched his lifebelt from him. No one knew what to do, and there was no loudspeaker system to tell anyone. Passengers had no lifejackets or put them on wrongly. As the ship canted more to starboard and dipped down forward, Bernard began taking off his clothes, methodically folding his coat, waistcoat, collar and tie, carefully putting his tie-pin in his trouser-pocket like a man about to have a wash. But ‘Bunny’ could not swim. He slid down the steep sloping deck and in ‘a wild lucky splash’ scrambled into a lifeboat that had to be hacked away from its bow davit. By rowing frantically they only narrowly missed engulfment by a huge smokestack as the ship slid sideways under the waters. From the boat they watched the triumphant sea pouring into the funnel’s steaming black maw, and then the Lusitania’s mastheads disappearing.

‘All that remained was a boiling wilderness that rose up as if a volcanic disturbance had occurred beneath a placid sea.’

Public anger burned long on the fuel of the Lusitania story. Gruesome horrors lasted for weeks: the morgues and mass graves at Queenstown; the bloated corpses with seagull-pecked faces washing up on Irish beaches; the pathetic stories; the private griefs. The propaganda press feasted on it in words and graphics. Rioting mobs in Liverpool and London sacked shops with Germanic names. That emotional barometer, D. H. Lawrence, said, ‘I am mad with rage myself. I would like to kill a million Germans – two millions.’ The Liberal government in Britain ordered the arrest and internment of up to 30,000 ‘enemy alien’ males.

The Lusitania incident not only destroyed German propaganda hopes in America, but fitted right into the War Propaganda Bureau aim of demonising the Germans. There was no shortage of material that month. On 15 May 1915, The Times added more details to a completely untrue story it had run on 10 May about a Canadian soldier being crucified by German bayonets on a barn wall in Belgium. This was just a gobbet of tainted meat to add to the ghoulish feast of the official Bryce Report into the Alleged German Outrages in Belgium, published on 13 May 1915 and distributed by Wellington House to almost every important newspaper in America and in twenty-seven languages to many countries around the world. Its author, James Bryce, was a distinguished jurist, member of the House of Lords and former ambassador to Washington DC, who 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.
‘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 ofWilliam 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’s boss 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 man who works by spirit on spirit. We are only beginning to realize the strange crannies of the human soul. The real magician, if he turned up today, wouldn’t bother about drugs and dopes . . . The great offensives of the future would be psychological, and . . . the most deadly weapon in the world was the power of mass-persuasion . . .

In March 1918, Lord Beaverbrook took over the Ministry of Information, and John Buchan was renamed director of Intelligence for the last eight months of the war. Anthony Masters, in Literary Agents: The Novelist as Spy, says Buchan’s work then is ‘shrouded in mystery’, but some idea may be gathered from Anthony Clayton’s Forearmed: A History of the Intelligence Corps (1993):

John Buchan, later Lord Tweedsmuir, was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps in 1915 to assist with the communiqués for, and later for an official account of, the Battle of the Somme . . . Deception plans and misleading information were used by GHQ Intelligence on occasions – false reports being given to the Press or drafted into carefully prepared political speeches.

Other clues are in his fiction. John Buchan was a classical scholar who energised a new literary genre, the paranoid spy-thriller, for popular consumption in the early twentieth century. The story is often a sinister plot that threatens England. John Buchan was fascinated by deception and ‘the veiled prophets who are behind the scenes in a crisis’. His adventures often involve joining up disconnected pieces of information to reveal a picture of the problem or danger which then has to be resolved by decisive, heroic action. Such popular books have upbeat endings because the hero always prevails and restores order, but they also articulate in an interesting way the anxieties and prejudices of the author’s group.
Buchan’s new hero first appeared in October 1915 in his ‘shocker’, The Thirty-Nine Steps, which sold 25,000 copies by Christmas. This hero, Richard ‘Dick’ Hannay, is first encountered as a rough-and-ready mining engineer from Rhodesia, bored in London in May 1914 until he gets caught up in a fast-moving adventure of murder and escape that eventually unravels a German spy ring called the Black Stone, Der Schwarzestein. In chapter V, Hannay remembers Peter Pienaar, an old Boer scout in Rhodesia, telling him that the secret of playing a part was to think yourself into it. ‘You could never keep it up, he said, unless you could manage to convince yourself you were it.’ In chapter X, Hannay recalls Pienaar’s advice that the secret of effective disguise was to blend fully into your surroundings. Hannay then remembers hunting a duncoloured rhebok with his dog in the Pali Hills in Rhodesia:

That buck simply leaked out of the landscape . . . Against the grey rocks of the kopjes it showed no more than a crow against a thundercloud. It didn’t need to run away, all it had to do was to stand still and melt into the background.

The leader of the German Black Stone spy ring is a master of disguise who successfully impersonates the British First Sea Lord in front of his military colleagues, precisely because they are expecting to see him and so take him for granted. ‘If it had been anybody else you might have looked more closely, but it was natural for him to be here and that put you all to sleep.’
In the final chapter, Hannay realises the ruthless German spy ring has also managed to camouflage itself into ‘the great, comfortable, satisfied middle-class world, the folk that live in villas and suburbs’. Hannay remembers the old scout’s theory of ‘atmosphere’ in matching your surroundings: ‘A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the same and is different.’

In Buchan’s second Richard Hannay adventure novel, Greenmantle, Hannay pretends to be an anti-British, pro-German Boer called Cornelius Brand in order to travel deep into the Kaiser’s Germany. This exploit is modelled on the true story of John Buchan’s friend and fellow Scot, Edmund Ironside, the future Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS). As a young officer in 1903, Ironside went undercover in German South-West Africa (now Namibia) to investigate German activities during the revolt by the Herero people. The Intelligence Department helped disguise the burly Ironside as a Boer ox-cart driver in battered hat and veldskoens. He grew a beard, smoked Boer tobacco in a foul pipe, and spoke authentic colloquial Cape Dutch. He was soon accepted, but was horrified one day to see his white bull terrier proudly trotting alongside his wagon in a bright collar proclaiming his owner’s name: ‘Lt. Ironside: Royal Artillery’.
Nevertheless, Ironside managed to bluff his way through and even got a German medal (which he later displayed to Adolf Hitler).
Greenmantle was Buchan’s tenth novel and thirtieth book and remains one of the finest novels of the imperial ‘Great Game’, perhaps second only to Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 novel Kim. There is an allusion to the fact that Kim, the boy spy, worked with a red-bearded Afghan horse-trader called Mahbub Ali when the fictional head of the Secret Service in Greenmantle, Sir Walter Bullivant, says:

I have reports from agents everywhere – pedlars in South Russia, Afghan
horse-dealers, Turcoman merchants, pilgrims on the road to Mecca, sheikhs
in North Africa, sailors on the Black Sea coasters, sheep-skinned Mongols,
Hindu fakirs, Greek traders in the Gulf, as well as respectable Consuls who
use cyphers.

The classic opening chapter of Greenmantle, ‘A Mission Is Proposed’, was chosen by Graham Greene and Hugh Greene to open their 1957 anthology, The Spy’s Bedside Book, in tribute to the author whose memoirs Memory Hold-The-Door recorded that one side of his WW1 duties ‘brought me into touch with the queer subterranean world of the Secret Service’.

‘You Britishers haven’t any notion how wide-awake your Intelligence Service is,’ the American agent John S. Blenkiron flatteringly says in Greenmantle, adding, ‘If I had a big proposition to handle and could have my pick of helpers I’d plump for the Intelligence Department of the British Admiralty.’ From November 1914 on, British Naval Intelligence had as its director Admiral W. Reginald Hall, who had commanded the battle cruiser HMS Queen Mary at the Battle of Heligoland Bight, and inherited OB40, the cryptographic department led by Sir Alfred Ewing, which cracked German military and diplomatic codes. ‘Hall is one genius the war has developed,’ the American ambassador in London wrote to US President Wilson. ‘Neither in fiction nor in fact can you find any such man to match him.’

John Buchan’s character Sir Walter Bullivant, the spymaster in Greenmantle, was very like Admiral Sir Reginald Hall. Though small, Hall was the archetypal forceful naval officer, from the dome of his bald head to the cleft in his clean-shaven chin. His eyes glared out under bushy eyebrows above a great hooked beak of a nose. This look of an alert peregrine falcon, with a disconcerting eyelid twitch, earned Hall the nickname ‘Blinker’. Hall wielded his power ‘vigorously’, according to F. H. Hinsley, the historian of British Intelligence, ‘building up his own espionage system, deciding for himself when and how to release intelligence to other departments, and acting on intelligence independently of other departments in matters of policy that lay beyond the concerns of the Admiralty’. Translating from the bureaucratic, that means he was a ruthless and cunning rogue elephant. His biographer, Admiral Sir William James, said: ‘There was nothing Hall enjoyed more than planning ruses to deceive the Germans.’

‘Blinker’ Hall had a genius for picking people. He hired civilians whose professional work was analytical, like academics, bankers, lawyers, scientists, and mixed them with the artistic: actors, authors, designers, dilettantes, etc. He also employed clever women at a time when that was unusual, like the formidable, cigar-smoking Lady Hambro who marshalled the secretaries.

John Buchan knew Reginald Hall well, and Greenmantle can be read as a novel about an imaginary British intelligence operation involving disguise and deception, that uses insider knowledge of other operations. It begins a year on from the end of The Thirty-Nine Steps:

Major Richard Hannay of the (fictional) Lennox Highlanders is back in England recuperating from wounds received in the real Battle of Loos in late September 1915. ‘Loos was no picnic,’ says Hannay, in a typical stiff-upper-lip understatement of the catastrophe which left 8,000 dead. Loos was the big attack in the grimy Belgian colliery district where the British first used their own chlorine gas, 140 tons of it, five months after the Germans used gas at Ypres. The 6th battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, which lost three-quarters of its officers and half its other ranks there, got its new commanding officer in France early in 1916: Lieutenant Colonel Winston S. Churchill.

John Buchan begins Greenmantle with Richard Hannay convalescing from Loos in the same Hampshire country house as his friend and brother officer who has just saved his life, ‘Sandy’ Arbuthnot, the second son of Lord Clanroyden. Arbuthnot is a man with a ‘passion for queer company’ – in the old sense. In London, we learn, you get news of Sandy Arbuthnot from ‘lean brown men from the ends of the earth . . . in creased clothes, walking with the light outland step, slinking into clubs as if they could not remember whether or not they belonged to them’.
Sandy Arbuthnot is a creature of romantic imperial fantasy:

He rode through Yemen, which no white man ever did before. The Arabs let him pass, for they thought him stark mad and argued that the hand of Allah was heavy enough on him without their efforts. He’s blood-brother to every kind of Albanian bandit. Also he used to take a hand in Turkish politics, and got a huge reputation . . .We call ourselves insular, but the truth is that we are the only race on earth that can produce men capable of getting inside the skin of remote peoples.

Buchan based Sandy Arbuthnot on a real-life crusader for small nations, the Honourable Aubrey Herbert, second son of the Earl of Carnarvon. Semi-blind at Eton, reckless at Oxford, Herbert had nevertheless got a First in History, joined the diplomatic service as an honorary attaché and was an MP for seven years. At the start of the war he had had an officer’s uniform made by a military tailor and slipped into the ranks of the Irish Guards as they left for France. Smuggled on to a troopship in Southampton by officer friends, he went off to war with the BEF as an interpreter. Within a month he was wounded, captured, freed, sent home.
In Salonika, Aubrey Herbert had acquired a ferocious Albanian bodyguard called Kiazim who sprouted daggers and pistols and took him to hashish dens. He learned fluent Turkish in Constantinople, and like his fictional counterpart travelled widely. Herbert’s only known comment on the character that Buchan based on him was ‘He brings in my nerves all right, doesn’t he?’

Greenmantle ends at the fall of Erzerum, in Turkey, in 1916. This is where the daring deception is finally revealed. In real life, Britain and Russia were fighting Germany and Turkey, and in Buchan’s novel, a British deceiver manages to infiltrate the German-inspired Islamist revolt. Richard Hannay, the Boer scout Peter Pienaar and the American John Blenkiron help their Russian allies to find the weak link in the Turkish defences, and join the grey-clad Cossack cavalry in the final ride across the snow. Ahead of them, in the van of the charge, is one man . . .

He was turbaned and rode like one possessed, and against the snow I caught the dark sheen of emerald. As he rode it seemed that the fleeing Turks were stricken still, and sank by the roadside with eyes strained after his unheeding figure . . . Then I knew that the prophecy had been true, and that their prophet had not failed them. The long-looked for revelation had come. Greenmantle had appeared at last to an awaiting people.

The radical ‘Islamic’ prophet, Greenmantle, turns out to be a British intelligence officer in camouflage: Sandy Arbuthnot. But he also looks and sounds exactly like Lawrence of Arabia, pursuing British policy in native disguise. T. E. Lawrence, that master of dressing up, was impressed by Buchan’s ‘clean-lined, speedy, breathless’ books. In 1933, he wrote perceptively to Edward Garnett about John Buchan’s novels:

For our age they mean nothing: they are sport, only: but will a century hence disinter them and proclaim him the great romancer of our blind and undeserving generation?

John Buchan’s adventures are the premier novels of twentieth-century camouflage and deception. Their villains pass as fine gentlemen at ease in society, and their heroes are also disguised. ‘For men who live so dangerously, they are oddly conventional,’ observed Graham Greene. Buchan’s constant theme is shamming, pretence, tactical deception.

‘I found out in the war that it didn’t do to underrate your opponent’s brains. He’s pretty certain to expect a feint and not to be taken in. I’m for something a little subtler.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that you feint in one place, so that your opponent believes it to be a feint and pays no attention – and then you sail in and get to work in that very place.’
John Buchan, John Macnab (1924)

The subliminal effect of the Richard Hannay adventures on the generation that fought inWW2 was immense. As boys or young men, all of them had read Buchan. Their coeval George Orwell speaks for them:

Personally I believe that most people are influenced far more than they would care to admit by novels, serial stories, films and so forth . . . It is probable that
many people who would consider themselves extremely sophisticated and ‘advanced’ are actually carrying through life an imaginative background which they acquired in
childhood from (for instance) Sapper and Ian Hay.

Richard Usborne wrote Clubland Heroes, a study of the fictions of John Buchan, Dornford Yates and Sapper, and was himself in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), set up by Winston Churchill on 19 July 1940 ‘to co-ordinate all action by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas’. Usborne said that almost every single SOE officer he ever met in WW2 pictured himself as Richard Hannay or Sandy Arbuthnot.
John Buchan’s Dick Hannay novels also exemplify the British success in deception in both World Wars:

‘See here, Dick. How do we want to treat the Boche? Why, to fill him up with all the cunningest lies and get him to act on them.’
John Buchan, Mr Standfast (1919)