Into the Silence: The Great War Mallory and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis said:
Sir Francis Younghusband had spent the war as a propagandist, rallying the British public to the cause. His mission began in the heady days of August 1914, when the war still seemed sublime and glorious. The spiritual impulse he had brought away from Lhasa, together with his mystic sense of patriotism, came together in a new calling, service in a national movement called Fight for Right. “For we will fight,” stated the organization’s manifesto, “not for the Highest but for a Higher than the Highest—for the sky beyond the mountain top! We mean to see to it that the code of the gentleman and not the custom of the barbarian shall be the rule among nations.” The country was fighting “the battle of all humanity,” and Younghusband took it upon himself to rouse all men and women for service in the sacred cause, and to sustain those already at arms and ready to die. The intention of the movement, announced a widely circulated pamphlet, was to stage on Sunday afternoons throughout the country a series of meetings “of a definitely spiritual character,” at which time men and women inspired by the Fight for Right would through music, song, and speeches share their inspiration with others and thus buck up the national morale.
Such rallies, the first of which took place on November 7, 1915, in this same Aeolian Hall where the RGS was now gathered, were small comfort for the men returned from France, but they served the needs of a government increasingly concerned about unrest and discontent on the home front. As early as the end of August 1914, the foreign secretary, Edward Grey, and David Lloyd George had established the Secret War Propaganda Bureau, the goal of which was to promote British war aims, both at home and abroad. On September 2 of that year a meeting held at Wellington House, Buckingham Gate, brought together Britain’s most prominent writers, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Masefield, Rudyard Kipling, G. M. Trevelyan, G. K. Chesterton, and J. M. Barrie. The previous day Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, had described the conflict in the Times as a holy war, a conviction heralded in a manifesto that appeared in the newspaper two weeks later, signed by each of these well-known writers. Within months several of them, including Masefield and Conan Doyle, were on the government payroll. Within a year the Propaganda Bureau had produced and distributed 2.5 million copies of books, pamphlets, and speeches. Robert Bridges wrote only three poems during the war; his time went into editing an anthology of English verse, The Spirit of Man, which deliberately avoided the subject of war. Intended to inspire the public after the disasters of 1915, it was poetry as propaganda. Curiously, it was this book that Mallory carried with him to Everest, and from which he read aloud to his companions while camped in the ice and snow at 23,000 feet on the flank of the mountain.
In 1917 the Propaganda Bureau was taken over by the Department of Information. It was headed by John Buchan, who, as a friend of Cecil Rawling’s, Tom Longstaff’s, and Francis Younghusband’s, had been recruited to help with the media and publicity for the proposed 1913–15 Everest expeditions that had been aborted by the outbreak of the war. By 1917, as Prime Minister Lloyd George wrote, the “terrible losses without appreciable results had spread a general sense of disillusionment and
war weariness throughout the nation.” John Buchan’s mandate was to quell and counteract pacifist sentiment and maintain the fantasy that the war remained something honorable, even as serious statesmen in all nations began to call for a negotiated end to the slaughter. “If the people really knew,” Lloyd George told C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian in December 1917, “the war would be stopped tomorrow.”
Buchan’s task was to ensure that they did not know. In this, his closest allies were the Harmsworth brothers, Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Times and the Daily Mail, and Lord Rothermere, who controlled the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Pictorial, and the Glasgow Daily Record. Together they set the tenor of the British media, controlling, as they did, the most important of London’s thirty-seven daily newspapers. Censorship left journalists at the mercy of their imaginations. Anything might be written as long as it vilified the enemy and propped up morale. “So far as Britain is concerned,” recalled Buchan, “the war could not have been fought for one month without its newspapers.” The truth itself became a casualty. “While some patriots went to the battle front and died for their country,” wrote A. R. Buchanan, “others stayed home and lied for it.”