The result can scarcely fail to amuse even the most gloomy of war pessimists: The Strand Magazine and the First World War

"It will doubtless be a satisfaction to the Proprietors, Staff, and Readers of 'The Strand' to know that Thomas Atkins, when wounded and in hospital, prefers that excellent publication to any other," an anonymous correspondent "responsible for the distribution of books and magazines in one of our Military hospitals" informed readers of the Strand Magazine in November 1915.¹ "I have developed such a yearning for 'Strands,'" the writer confesses, "that when I see one being read in a train or at a station I can hardly restrain myself from asking for the reversion of it when finished."² The correspondent concludes by "urg[ing] everyone who buys a 'Strand' to pass it on, when read, to a Military hospital."³ The following month, the Strand marked its twenty-fifth birthday with a bumper number of 200 pages that concluded with a sombre yuletide "Reminder" to readers: "Do not forget that 'The Strand' may now be sent free of all charge to British soldiers and sailors at home or abroad. All you need do is to hand your copies, without wrapper or address, over the counter at any post-office in the United Kingdom, and they will be sent by the authorities wherever they will be most welcome."⁴ In December 1916 the magazine even reproduced an image of the cover of a prison camp magazine closely modelled on its own to provide evidence that it was indeed fondly remembered by soldiers (figure 1).⁵

Despite the Strand's appeal to readers to forward used copies to frontline soldiers, a perusal of the magazine's contents suggests that its primary war-time consumers were in fact non-combatants. As the Strand's original target reader, the commuting middle-class office worker, found himself in the trenches, the magazine had to adjust to new home-front reading communities.

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Chief among these were women with new-found spending power, boys still too young to be sent to the front, and older men who may have been Strand readers ever since the magazine's appearance in 1891. This challengingly diverse home-front readership was not subject to any official propaganda until the establishment of the National War Aims Committee in 1917, the British state instead relying on what Jonathan Cranfield calls a "weaponisation of … writers and publications."⁶ The press and the cultural industries, including the Strand, took on the responsibility of maintaining civilian morale.

After a brief overview of the Strand's war coverage, I examine four strategies that demonstrate how and to what effect the magazine, still under the exceptionally long editorship (1891–1930) of Herbert Greenhough Smith, adjusted to total war: it adapted its tried-and-tested fictional, factual, and human-interest formulas to accommodate military concerns; it used illustration and page layout to reinforce propagandistic messages in ways that did not unnecessarily alarm home-front readers; it ambivalently acknowledged its female readers by publishing female-centred stories that simultaneously gave women a role in the war effort and deplored the necessity of such a step; and it frequently deployed humour, particularly comic sketches satirising the home-front experience, in an attempt to foster communal resilience. Drawing on David Monger's analysis of the multiple "sub-patriotisms"—civic, proprietorial, communal, sacrificial, adversarial, supranational, and aspirational—in the propaganda of the National War Aims Committee in the final months of the war, I argue that the Strand's war-time content represents a range of sustained, cogent, but multivalent middlebrow patriotisms designed to persuade home-front readers of the necessity of the war effort.⁷ Far from representing "a single text" with "many voices speaking as one," as Cranfield argues, the war-time Strand gave voice to a spectrum of patriotisms from the xenophobic to the progressive.⁸

The War-Time Strand

As Ann-Marie Einhaus observes, the angry, proto-modernist trench poetry of combatant authors such as Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg has come to typify the canonical literary response to the First World War; by contrast, the "ephemeral" prose printed in magazines and intended for immediate consumption "rarely features in the war's literary memory."⁹ However, "the 'great casualty' narrative" set in "the muddy, rat-infested trenches of the Western Front" is just one form of First-World-War writing, with the popular press representing, as Adrian Bingham argues in his analysis of popular newspapers, a significant untapped historical resource.¹⁰ Although the Strand has been described as a "national institution" that offered "a timely and appealing response to the particular needs of its audience," it has also been viewed, like the popular newspapers Bingham analyses, as "predictable, trivial, unsophisticated, usually politically and socially conservative and prone to episodes of irrational sensationalism," its middlebrow agenda tending to "distract popular attention away from politics to entertainment, celebrity and consumption."¹¹

Paradoxically, such responses date back to the Strand's founder George Newnes, who famously described his "humble and unpretentious" journalism as "giving wholesome and harmless entertainment to crowds of hardworking people, craving for a little fun and amusement" rather than attempting to "direc[t] the affairs of nations" or "buil[d] up Navies."¹² While the bulk of scholarship on the Strand focuses on the magazine's first decade, the few critics who have written about the war-time Strand have taken their cue from Newnes. Reginald Pound, for example, describes the war-time magazine's "editorial policy" as a combination of "diversion" and "humour."¹³ For Cranfield, the monthly responded to the "upheaval" of the early twentieth century in "rather unspectacular ways," becoming a "vehicle for propaganda" during the war.¹⁴ For Einhaus, the Strand's war coverage is "essentially formula literature … clearly aimed at a mass audience, and written for commercial purposes."¹⁵ Implicit in all these responses is a sense of disappointment at the nature of the magazine's middlebrow, home-front-oriented war coverage, so different both in shape and tone from canonical trench poetry.

That coverage is, however, both extensive and intertextual, pervading all elements of the Strand during the war years and presenting the reader with a range of patriotic sentiments. Einhaus notes that the magazine typically printed at least one war story per month, but the conflict also featured in its factual and human-interest features and even influenced its page layout.¹⁶ Since the Strand "went to press five weeks ahead of publication," it was never a particularly agile vehicle for addressing sudden change.¹⁷ The autumn 1914 issues, though including general military themes and backdrops that hint at the conflict looming on the horizon, contain very little to mark the beginning of a real war. The actual conflict was first acknowledged in combat-themed puzzles and human-interest features in November 1914 and then in fiction and popular-science articles from January 1915. The Strand continued to print war-related material well into 1919, indicating how early publishing decisions were made.

If the Strand's readers suffered losses during the war, the magazine itself did not escape unscathed, shrinking due to the "growing scarcity of paper" from 120 pages at the beginning of the conflict to 112 pages in January 1916, 104 pages in May 1916, ninety-six pages in May 1917, eighty-eight pages in February 1918, eighty pages in March 1918, and just seventy-six pages (less than two-thirds of the size of the pre-war magazine) in June 1918.¹⁸ Meanwhile, the price of the regular monthly issue increased from 6d. to 7d. in February 1917, 8d. in September 1917, 9d. in January 1918, and is. (double the long-established pre-war price) in June 1918. Since the magazine strove to provide excellent value for money, these changes mattered.

Figure 2 provides a sense of the fluctuations in the Strand's war-themed contents from the beginning of the conflict in August 1914 to January 1919, an issue likely to have been sent to press soon after the Armistice. During this period, approximately 28 percent of the pages of an average issue were war-themed, but the contents of monthly issues varied widely, especially during different phases of the conflict. In 1915 the war took up on average 23 percent of the monthly pages, but this figure rose to 32 percent in 1916 and 36 percent in 1917. Autumn 1917—a period of concern over civilian morale following the disastrous Somme campaign the previous year, shortages of food and other necessities, increasing hours of labour, and enemy air raids—saw a particularly heavy concentration of war-themed content to encourage morale.¹⁹ By 1918, with the end of the war in sight, the monthly's war coverage fell back to 27 percent. Although my argument focuses on the Strand's war-themed contents, variety remained the magazine's watchword. Throughout the conflict, war and spy fiction, illustrated portraits of military figures, factual articles about British military successes, and pseudoscientific and comic interpretations of German psychology mingled with Sherlock Holmes stories, comic fiction by P. G. Wodehouse and W. W. Jacobs, and trivial human-interest features.

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Generic Mutations

The Strand had in the years since its inception built a loyal following amongst readers of genre fiction. In this market, Ian Small notes, "Success depended … upon identifying a community of taste" with shared socio-cultural values.²⁰ During the conflict, the Strand remained a magazine of genre writing, but generic hybridity was key to its responses to total war. As Cranfield observes, the war-time Strand drew "upon existing discourses and styles from the magazine's own past," with the tried-and-tested generic formulas of crime and adventure fiction, popular science, and illustrated interviews now often taking a military turn.²¹ By continuing to print "Perplexities," "Portraits of Celebrities," articles about the latest scientific advancements, and extensively illustrated crime and adventure stories, the Strand provided its readers with pleasurable continuity amidst flux; however, by giving these features a military twist, it also reconfigured them for new realities. As Ailise Bulfin suggests, popular military and invasion narratives may have served simultaneously to "mitigate anxiety" and "fue[l] security concerns and undermin[e] confidence."²²

The first items to acknowledge the war appeared in November 1914 when the monthly's regular "Perplexities," brain-teasers that could be commissioned at short notice, took a military turn. The monthly offering includes "Exercising the Spies" (a chess problem), "The War-Horse" and "The Despatch-Rider" (mathematical puzzles), "Avoiding the Mines" (a geometric or visual puzzle), and "A Battle-Scene Charade."²³ The conflict continued to feature in "Perplexities" for the duration, presenting war as a glorious game that could be won through logic and perpetuating stereotypes about the enemy, for example when challenging the reader to "convert KAISER into PORKER" by changing one letter at a time.²⁴ The magazine even issued its own "Strand War Game," with a colonel's endorsements, and noted the "similarity between chess and the great art of war."²⁵ By inviting readers to solve these puzzles, the magazine deployed New Journalistic reader-bonding strategies to involve home-front readers in the "perplexities" facing the military.

The first human-interest feature with a world-war theme appeared in November and December 1914, when the two-part "Our Friends the Fighting Rajahs" introduced readers to Indian princes who had placed their armies and financial might at the service of the British Empire. Illustrated with photographs to emphasise the reality of these valuable allies, the feature concludes with the reassuring statement that "in possessing the co-operation of these powerful personages the British Empire has an asset whose value cannot be over-estimated."²⁶ Factual human-interest features, typically illustrated with photographs, would later follow on all manner of military themes from discussions of military medals and trophies to articles about the training and daily life of the troops. Educational and historical articles explored British military successes, culminating in Arthur Conan Doyle's lengthy serial history of the war, "The British Campaign in France." The monthly's established "Portraits of Celebrities" increasingly focused on military figures, whether depicting Field Marshal Hindenburg as the "beaten leader of a beaten people" (figure 3) or noting the "qualities of genius and insight" that had made General Foch the "Great Victor."²⁷ Meanwhile, the magazine's pre-war interest in popular science mutated into pseudoscientific analyses of the criminal responsibility of the kaiser, the brutality of the German military, and even the degeneration of the entire German nation, as in Sir Ray Lankester's analysis of "Culture and German Culture" in January 1915 and the medical symposium "Is the Kaiser Mad?" the following April. These scientific interests also emerged in features on the latest advances in military technology, including aerial flight and the tank as topics of special interest. These human-interest and factual articles, which deploy existing generic formulas familiar to the magazine's pre-war readers, sought to educate readers about the conflict's causes and likely outcome—that is, the defeat of a "degenerate" enemy by Britain's superior fighting power.

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Fiction underwent a similar generic transformation. Cranfield argues that "the Strand's traditional modes of fiction were inadequate for dealing with the horrors of the war," but Strand authors were not struck dumb by the ineffability of trench warfare.²⁸ Instead, the magazine's established, confident adventure and detective genres mutated with relative ease into frontline heroics, paranoid invasion tales, and spy stories in recognition of Britain's new position.²⁹ Immediately preceding Lankester's pseudo-scientific analysis of Kultur in the January 1915 issue, the reader would have found the Strand's earliest significant investment in world-war fiction, the first instalment of Richard Marsh's propagandistic "Sam Briggs Becomes a Soldier." In this twelve-part serial, Marsh, a regular contributor to the monthly, transformed an existing Edwardian comic character into an unlikely war hero whose trench adventures combine humour with a Boy's Own bravado, spattered with propagandistic messages about German brutality and British values of "honour, liberty, justice and democracy."³⁰ After Marsh's death in 1915, a writer calling himself "Sapper" (Cyril McNeale) took up a similar ideological position in stories published in 1916 and 1917. In Morley Roberts's story "Spink and the Submarine" (May 1915), the Germans are ridiculed when the enemy attempts to take over a British vessel—"'Stop!' said the submarine skipper, very angrily. 'Stop your engines. I vill on board come and your papers examine. You are Englisch!'"—only to have his submarine converted into a colander by the plucky Captain Spink.³¹ These propagandistic narratives combine stories about German brutality and incompetence with reminders about British values and citizenship duty, while seeking to relocate adventure and humour at the front.

However, not all of the Strand's war stories offered upbeat confirmations of Britain's certain victory. By 1917, when catastrophic losses and food shortages fuelled civilian war-weariness, F. Britten Austin was beginning to introduce more sombre themes into the monthly's war fiction to acknowledge the possibilities of imperfection, mental disintegration, and defeatism amongst soldiers. "The Other Side" (July 1917), for example, considers the possibility of telepathic communication with the dead in recognition of a war-time upsurge in spiritualism. "They Come Back" (October 1917) discusses the levelling effect of the war on class relations. "In the Hindenburg Line" (April 1918) approaches the question of shell shock, a controversial subject perhaps made acceptable by the story's setting in the German lines. "Peace" (September 1918) chillingly imagines the bleak homecoming in store for German troops. Intriguingly, this sense of gloom also permeates the most famous of the Strand's war stories, Doyle's "His Last Bow: The War Service of Sherlock Holmes," which appeared in September 1917. This paranoid story, in which detection mutates into counter-spy fiction, sees Holmes return from retirement as beekeeper to help Britain prepare for the "impending European tragedy," a veritable Dusk of Nations, and takes place on the night of "the second of August—the most terrible August in the history of the world. One might have thought already that God's curse hung heavy over a degenerate world, for there was an awesome hush and a feeling of vague expectancy in the sultry and stagnant air. The sun had long set, but one blood-red gash like an open wound lay low in the distant west."³² Helped by Watson and the trusty servant-woman Martha, Holmes defeats the German spy Von Bork, who has been amassing intelligence that would enable a speedy German invasion on the following day, but not even Holmes can prevent the war. The story suggests that all the internal problems that the country (and the Strand) had struggled with in the preceding years—"a devil's brew of Irish civil war, window-breaking Furies, and God knows what"—had been of German manufacture and that Germany had been preparing for the coming conflict for some time while Britain had been slumbering.³³ Appeasement would be futile, as Holmes's antagonists explain: "It is to-day or to-morrow with Mr. John Bull. If he prefers to-day we [the Germans] are perfectly ready. If it is to-morrow we shall be more ready still."³⁴ While Holmes defeats Von Bork's immediate plans, the story concludes on an uncharacteristically gloomy note, with "Holmes point[ing] back to the moonlit sea" and predicting, "There's an east wind coming … such a wind as never blew on England yet."³⁵

Einhaus describes the Strand's war stories as "entertaining tales that employ the war as a setting for standard plots and often formulaic conflicts and resolutions" and that "cater for home-front needs, provide a welcome distraction, reinforce a sense of the justness of the British cause and address the realities of war in a manner designed to reassure readers."³⁶ However, the magazine's readjustment of its contents to new war-time realities powerfully indicates the persistence, flexibility, and usefulness of successful generic formulas for authors and readers alike. In particular, the war years saw the spy thriller, specifically the counter-espionage narrative about sleeper agents on British soil, firmly established as a "close but distinct variation of the tale of detection."³⁷ Given genre writing's appeal to particular socio-cultural communities of readers, Einhaus is wrong to dismiss the Strand's contents as lightweight. Instead, we should recognise how these features created and maintained what Monger terms a "'concrescent community' growing together" in the imaginary space of the magazine through shared narratives of heroism and watchfulness that bridged the war years with the pre-war world.³⁸

Illustrating the War

Robert T. Tally likens genre to a "guidebook" that can "organiz[e] knowledge in such a way as to make things meaningful."³⁹ As an illustrated magazine, the Strand reinforced such meaning-making visually by repeating propagandistic messages and shoring up home-front morale without unduly offending readers' sensibilities—a difficult task given the casualty figures at the front. In her analysis of the coverage of the Franco-Prussian War in the illustrated press, Michèle Martin argues that the "production of journalistic illustrations … in wartime … always involves an attempt at creating" documentary "images of reality."⁴⁰ The Strand was not, of course, a newspaper, but it had nonetheless sought to educate its readers about the modern world through instructive factual articles. Furthermore, some of its illustrators were official war artists, and the war provided opportunities for fact-based reportage drawing on "autopsy or firsthand experience."⁴¹ However, its war-time visual practices cannot be said to agree with Martin's assessment of the documentary quality of war reportage, demonstrating instead some of the tendencies identified by Christopher Pittard and James Mussell as characteristic of the Strand of the 1890s.

In an analysis of the "close symbiosis of image and text" in the Sherlock Holmes stories, Pittard argues that the Strand's effort to provide "wholesome" reading matter led the monthly to "suppress sensational elements" by avoiding illustrations of gruesome crime.⁴² These "remarkably restrained" illustrations, according to Pittard, "make crime narratives safe … by refusing to portray crime head on."⁴³ Mussell, meanwhile, has examined the Strand's innovative use of half-tone photographs to illustrate factual and scientific articles but "rarely … fiction because of their claims to authenticity."⁴⁴ These analyses illuminate the war-time magazine's selective visual reporting, which mixed "factual" photographic visualisations with exciting, action-packed, and remarkably bloodless pen-and-ink sketches. For example, while Sapper's story "Shrapnel" (May 1916) invites the reader, addressed as "you," to experience the "vivid, startling, wonderful" "horror" and "damage" of shellfire, G. Henry Evison's starkly beautiful long-distance, black-and-white illustrations depict explosions and aerial bombardment abstractly, as largely devoid of human suffering (figure 4).⁴⁵

The Strand's most sustained investment in war fiction, Marsh's twelve-part "Sam Briggs Becomes a Soldier" (January–December 1915), depicts a previously hapless clerk's transformation into a heroic soldier to hammer home propagandistic messages about German brutality, British values, and the importance of enlisting. The accompanying illustrations by Charles Pears, official War Artist to the Admiralty, chart Sam's unlikely evolution from an undersized, feather-brained figure of fun to a Victoria-Crossdecorated war hero. In keeping with Pittard's analysis of the restraint apparent in Paget's Holmes illustrations, Pears's semi-photographic illustrations avoid overt depictions of bloodshed. In the course of his "adventures," the diminutive Sam single-handedly confronts gigantic German soldiers, is gassed, engages in sniping, blows up trenches, and is himself blown up so

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that he has to be joined together out of "ten or a dozen pieces."⁴⁶ The nurse in charge of Sam's recovery describes him at the conclusion of his adventures as a "mass of bandages" with "parts missing," unable even to feed himself because "it wasn't clear where [his] mouth began and ended."⁴⁷ While these glib descriptions encourage readers to visualise Sam's horrific injuries and "willingness to engage in explicit, methodical violence," Pears's entirely bloodless black-and-white illustrations refuse, even in the partially colour-printed Christmas 1915 number, to depict either, focusing instead on scenes of adventure and hiding Sam's disfigurements behind bandages as he enjoys tea in his hospital bed.⁴⁸ Pears's illustrations of Sam's unlikely adventures also visually reinforced readers' sense of conflict by pitting the English against the enemy across the opening, with Sam and his allies most commonly placed on the left under the running header "THE STRAND MAGAZINE" and the enemy soldiers on the opposite page, seen from a greater distance and denied facial features. The positioning of the header serves to align the monthly with the British cause, with the reader's viewpoint placed behind Sam. In illustrations of the enemy wearing gas masks, the Germans appear machine-like and barely human, which suggests intriguing commonalities between the middlebrow Strand and modernist depictions of mechanised warfare.

Doyle was responsible for the Strand's most extensive non-fictional war features with "The British Campaign in France," his lengthy "true record" of the "great adventure of the German War."⁴⁹ The series, which promised readers "The FACTS AT LAST! The Inside Story of the War," commenced in April 1916 and ran for fifteen monthly instalments until being put on hold in July 1917 (because its painstaking detail and maps "might prove to the advantage of the enemy") and was picked up again in 1918.⁵⁰ The Strand paid Doyle a staggering £5,000 for the serial, but as Pound wryly remarks, "It was felt with considerable unanimity that he had not distinguished himself as a war historian."⁵¹ The relative failure of the series is apparent from its demotion from flagship status and in the reduced number of pages allowed to Doyle.

Doyle's "history" was extensively illustrated with a variety of visual means, including drawings, maps, photographs, and diagrams. The series mixes battle-scene drawings, some of which claim to be "drawn from material supplied by one who was present" (figure 5), with photographs of distinguished officers and diagrams of actual battles (figure 6).⁵² This combination of "factual" maps and photographs with "fictional" drawings suggests a slippage between reportage and storytelling: the serial's narrative elements question the authenticity of the supposedly factual images, while the maps and photographs simultaneously invest the fictionalised images with authenticity. While war artists typically worked up hastily made battle-field sketches at greater leisure, the fictional quality of the battle-scene drawings is evident in their depiction of cavalry charges and hand-to-hand combat as well as in their relative—if not total—avoidance of injury and death (figure 7). As in the adversarial images of Sam Briggs's war-time adventures, the British side tends to feature in the foreground, often on the left under the header "THE STRAND MAGAZINE," while enemy soldiers are placed at the back of the image where the reader will find it more difficult to sympathise with their suffering (figure 8).

While the Strand's war-time illustrations were not entirely devoid of battle-field injury or death, they prioritised scenes of action over the stagnation of trench warfare, portraying war as an exciting game told in bloodless black and white. These generically hybrid images reinforce the ideological rifts between the Allies and the Central powers and envisage opportunities for civil duty and military heroism. One can imagine them meeting the reading needs of a number of non-combatant readerships by encouraging new recruits, reassuring young men approaching the age of conscription, satisfying older male readers who had grown up devouring the Boy's Own Paper before graduating to the Strand, and comforting female readers whose husbands, brothers, and sons were at the front.

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New Female Reading Communities

The Strand's unrealistic portrayal of frontline heroics and deliberate confirmation of national stereotypes demonstrate its complicity in war propaganda, but as its traditional male readers left for Flanders the monthly also had to attract a new community of purchasers: women. Prior to the war, the Strand had been a vocal opponent of women's suffrage. As late as 1915, Lankester had compared German militarism to the "mad women" demanding the vote in Britain, while Doyle claimed flippantly that "half-a-dozen able-bodied Suffragettes would cause more damage to property than all the Zeppelins that have ever come out of Germany."⁵³ Despite the persistence of these attitudes, women came to play an increasingly important role during the war as authors, artists, and protagonists in the Strand. The magazine's readiness to grant work to female writers and artists may have been dictated by a shortage of available contributors. Still, the monthly's willingness to accord fictional women a greater role in war work, resistance, and espionage may also signal an awareness that home-front copies were increasingly acquired and consumed by female war workers (a significant concession given the monthly's previously conservative gender politics and hostility to feminism) and a desire to involve war-weary women more closely in the war effort.⁵⁴ Ultimately, although these stories appear at first sight to broaden the Strand's readership community, their ideological message is significantly ambivalent.

Several short stories acknowledged the difficult position of continental women. Alongside the familiar comic figure of the English Sam Briggs, Marsh introduced Netta Swerts, a "broad and strong" Flemish woman "of powerful build" whom Sam had previously known as a London waitress.⁵⁵ Netta and her mother are initially given traditionally feminine roles as they nurture Sam back to health following an encounter with the enemy. This depiction evokes the contemporary "highly gendered image of an innocent female Belgium at the mercy of a powerful and brutal Germany."⁵⁶ However, it soon becomes apparent that the war has forced Netta into unconventional action as an excellent sniper and reconnaissance worker who proves an "equal to the average strong man."⁵⁷ Netta explains, "So long as a German remains on Belgian soil it is the duty of a Belgian woman to carry a gun—and to use it when she can," adding that "there is a piece of ground on the other side [of her home] which we call the 'Graveyard' … full, just a little way under the surface, of dead men."⁵⁸ While Netta's actions depart significantly from accepted gender roles, the series represents this transgression as understandable, but only in the direst circum-stances. Sam explains: "Nearly everyone she held near and dear had been killed before her eyes by the ruthless invaders. … The happy, thriving home had been turned into a ruin from which even hope was banished. Neither age nor sex had been spared. Brutal, senseless cruelty had usurped the place of law and justice. … I did not wonder that it was always of the rifle she was dreaming. … One fact was sure—no sacrifice could be too great which would keep an unfriendly German foot from being set upon English ground."⁵⁹ The war has literally forced Netta out of the domestic sphere by destroying the very "roof to cover" her.⁶⁰ Her position as a resistance fighter is not, however, natural.

Other atrocity stories set in occupied Belgium and France similarly presented readers with this feminine predicament, endorsing the message that brutal military conflict had forced women into abnormal roles in which they could, however, excel and calling for "compassionate sympathy" and "chivalry."⁶¹ In the French author Marcelle Tinayre's story "The Soul of France Was in Her" (June 1916) the would-be postmistress Marie defends her office against all odds, while in J. J. Bell's story "For Belgium" (August 1915) a young woman helps her soldier lover destroy a German convoy, for "one must take risks for Belgium."⁶² Both stories equate the female protagonist's plight with that of her occupied country. In Mrs. Belloc Lowndes's December 1916 story, "The Parcel," a loving French wife loses her mind after unexpectedly receiving her executed husband's clothes in the German parcel post—but not before turning her rage against the German prince who is quartered with her. The women have all been forced into unbearable situations and unfeminine actions by the brutality of the German invader.

The ambivalent illustrations accompanying these stories depict women trapped in cramped, claustrophobic spaces, threatened by brutal Germans, and compelled to act in self-defence. However, while the women are shown at the point of taking action, the images seldom depict the outcome of unfeminine violence. Thus, Marsh's Netta is shown taking aim at German soldiers, while Bell's Louise, drawn by Dudley Tennant, points a sword at a German officer. Lowndes's unhinged Madame Bissonet is visually arrested in the act of attacking a German officer with a knife in Warwick Reynolds's illustration, but her face is hidden from view with the reader positioned behind her in support (figure 9). The unattributed illustration accompanying Tinayre's story shows a German officer clutching his neck but not the knife buried there by Marie, whose posture in the background displays extreme agitation, even madness (figure 10). Each of these stories, while detailing the plight of continental women, serves as a propagandistic warning of the possible consequences of a German invasion of Britain. The Strand's readers, like Marsh's Sam, are invited to "pictur[e] English women at the mercy of German soldiers," forced to "make use of any weapon on which they could lay their hands."⁶³ Paradoxically, then, while these atrocity stories present the reader with images of female agency and heroism, they are also designed—particularly before conscription was introduced in January 1916—to encourage hesitant men to enlist so that their women-folk would never have to take up arms to defend themselves.

Counter-spy stories set at the home front suggested positive opportunities for women to support the war effort through feminine watchfulness and intuition. In Harold Steevens's June 1915 story, "The Sentry Post at Cowman's Curl," a soldier guarding a crucial rail crossing saves a young

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woman's life, only for her subsequently to save his when a German spy attacks him. In March 1916 Steevens's story "Schmitt's Pigeons" follows Mrs. Egerton as she travels by train to visit her naval-officer husband. The protagonist sees a fellow traveller preparing to release homing pigeons, only to conclude that "he was almost certainly a spy, and it was her duty to checkmate him."⁶⁴ Although the story acknowledges that a "woman's chances of striking directly at the enemy are few," Mrs. Egerton's "woman's lightning wit" ensures that the naturalised German's weather reports fail to reach their intended audience and a planned air raid on Britain fails.⁶⁵ While Dudley Tennant's illustrations visualise Mrs. Egerton's bewilderment at her courageous action, her intuitive, non-violent heroism does not transgress the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, for the spy is physically tackled by men. In both stories, the woman's war effort is rewarded romantically in the promise of future marital happiness with a partner to whose survival she has contributed. Therefore, even while they allow for female agency, these stories conform to the Strand's pre-war conservative gender politics in conflating husband and country as woman's true mission.

As the war continued, the Strand acknowledged the public's growing war-weariness in spy stories that appear to recognise male military incompetence. In Doyle's February 1916 story, "The Prisoner's Defence," the supposedly French Ena Garnier is revealed to be a German spy whose "exquisite combination of beauty and intelligence" tricks Captain John Fowler into revealing a crucial military secret.⁶⁶ Luckily, Fowler places his "honour as a soldier and a gentleman" above his love for this woman "of a very independent spirit," whose "strange moods and fancies" have repeatedly driven him to fits of jealousy.⁶⁷ It is therefore excusable that he should shoot Ena dead when she attempts to flee with the secrets he has carelessly revealed. Male failure also features in Edgar Wallace's April 1916 story, "Code No. 2," in which an unobservant Security Service allows a foreign agent to copy a secret code, only for the perceptive female agent May Prince to save the day.

The Strand granted women increasingly visible roles as authors, artists, and protagonists during the war, at least partly in acknowledgement of their increasing importance as consumers; by the end of the war, the magazine appears even to have come to accept female suffrage.⁶⁸ However, it was never entirely comfortable with this increased visibility or the departure from conventional gender roles that it implied. Women on the war-torn continent were shown to be capable of action and violence, but such behaviour was also depicted as unfeminine and dangerous. Indeed, atrocity stories may have been aimed primarily at men hesitating to enlist. Stories about the home front, by contrast, encouraged women to support the war effort by remaining vigilant and accepting war-time discomforts, imagining the nation as an increasingly inclusive community. This attempt to create and maintain broad-based middlebrow readership communities is also apparent in the Strand's comic take on the war.

A Comic Turn

As a middlebrow magazine, the Strand sought to provide its readers with humorous entertainment, as evidenced in its interest in comic fiction, cartoons and caricatures, and "Curiosities," short features about all manner of weird and wonderful occurrences. During the war, the magazine appears to have decided that humour would ensure the nation's survival over "that rather vague and indefinite period known as 'the duration of the war.'"⁶⁹ Thus, the Strand continued to print non-military comic fiction by Wodehouse and Jacobs but also invested heavily in sketches that illustrated "The Lighter Side of War," showing how conflict furnished artists with unlikely humorous opportunities "to amuse even the most gloomy of war pessimists."⁷⁰ Einhaus's observation that the "special 'Humour Number' of the Strand Magazine, published in March 1917 and expressly recommended as ideal reading material to be posted to the trenches, includes no war story whatsoever" thus ignores the issue's non-fictional war-themed contents, including two sets of comic illustrations.⁷¹ These features serve multiple purposes: they ridicule and satirise the enemy, spotlight the dogged humour of British troops, and identify shared British characteristics and war-time experiences. "Not without reason are the British regarded as the most tolerant of people, and the slowest to anger," the magazine declared: "We prefer to laugh at our enemies rather than hate them."⁷² For James Sully, such ridicule of another group of people serves a "self-protective" purpose that confirms "our own superiority."⁷³

A significant strand of comic sketches featured trench humour produced by artists with military experience. These sketches, which depict British soldiers doggedly cracking grim jokes in their dugouts, deploy incongruity, self-deprecation, and understatement to prove that Britons' "invincible gaiety" and "incorrigible surface levity" mask their "tenacity of purpose."⁷⁴ In March 1916 "A Great Humorist of the Trenches" introduced readers to the war drawings of Captain Bruce Bairnsfather. "There goes our blinkin' parapet again," a British soldier mutters as a trench that has taken hours to shore up is blown up.⁷⁵ In another sketch, two soldiers reluctantly share a shell crater during bombardment; one wryly remarks, "If you know of a better 'ole, go to it."⁷⁶ In the March 1917 humour issue, "A Sketch-Book from the Trenches" prints similarly understated images by Lieutenant Walter Kirby (figure 11). For example, a sketch titled "Optimism" depicts a soldier cooking dinner in a filthy trench, soaked by rain and harassed by shellfire, while humming "When you come to the end of a perfect day."⁷⁷ These understated sketches, which acknowledge some of the discomforts

[ Image omitted: See PDF ]

and horrors of trench life, were perhaps the most subversive of all the military-themed items the Strand printed and closest in spirit to the irony of canonical war poetry. Only here, their implied criticism of trench warfare is transformed into a self-protective, cynical chuckle that "restores perspective and preserves one's sanity."⁷⁸

The great majority of the Strand's war humour was, however, unambiguously aimed at the home front. "The Lighter Side of War" (September 1915) and "As Funny as They Can" (December 1915) provide multiple sketches by diverse artists, culled from various illustrated publications. Their settings include the seaside, city, museums, and barbershops—places where ordinary Britons attempted to live their lives despite the war. In "The Patriot's Sacrifice" by Ricardo Brook, for example, a bald customer whose two remaining tufts of hair resemble the kaiser's moustache asks a barber to "trim [his] hair a little less Kaiserish," while Hesketh Daubeny's sketch likens slow progress on a golf course to the stagnation of trench warfare.⁷⁹ In Alfred Leete's "Spy" sketches, German spies' imperfect cultural grounding leads them to assume that Londoners are reduced to eating boiled wood when they are in fact enjoying asparagus (figure 12). In another sketch by Leete, German spies mistake a recruitment office for general servants for one recruiting army generals and thus conclude that the British war effort must be about to collapse with women at the helm; the unspoken suggestion is, of course, that women would not make good

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generals and that their true sphere is domestic. By selecting such scenes of everyday life, the cartoonists sympathetically acknowledge the war's impact on the home front even as they suggest that life continues despite shared sacrifices for the war effort. In identifying this common ground between readers, the magazine affirms the arguments of James Sully and Henri Bergson that laughter is a communal activity based on shared experiences and social values that "will tend to consolidate the group."⁸⁰

Unlike the features discussed above that appear to repress uncomfortable truths about the war, the comic sketches also afforded readers temporary relief in keeping with Sigmund Freud's contention that "humorous pleasure [comes] from savings in expenditure on feeling[s]" such as "pity, annoyance, pain, [or] sympathy."⁸¹ W. Heath Robinson was a regular contributor of distinctive home-front comic sketches to the Strand that find humour in hardship. His "When Peace Comes Along" in the March 1917 humour number imagines the uses to which military equipment might be put after the war (figure 13). Tanks, for example, might be redeployed as omnibuses, submarine mines as stairlifts for the elderly, and torpedoes as foot-warmers. The sketches deplore the waste of the war and acknowledge that its effects will be felt for a long time, but they also optimistically look forward to a post-war life in which war-time technology could be used for the good of the public. Robinson's flagship feature in June 1917, "Untraining the Army," imagines humorous ways to rehabilitate soldiers to domestic habits after the brutality of life in the trenches, for example by making them spend time with lifeless female statues before being allowed back into the company of real women. In May 1918 Robinson again featured at the beginning of the issue with "War-Time Economies," the grim humour of which imagines how the nation might do without clothes given the scarcity of textiles and how oxtail could be stretched, quite literally, to go farther. In December 1918 Robinson's sketches—which must have been produced before the Armistice—envisage "The Militarization of Christmas" as Christmas dinner proceeds according to military order and Father Christmas calls children to attention when delivering presents. Significantly, this final set of images was subtitled "If and When We Become a Military Nation," suggesting that the scenes envisaged were too ridiculous ever to be enacted in Britain.

While the Strand's comic features contain some elements hostile to the enemy, particularly caricatures of the kaiser and the German mindset, their overall effectiveness relies on their successful identification of everyday experiences shared by middlebrow home-front readers. These shared experiences of hardship included food shortages, the militarisation of society, and anxieties pertaining to the end of the war. The resulting comic bias suggests, in agreement with near-contemporary theorists of humour, that laughter played an important role in releasing anxieties, cementing

[ Image omitted: See PDF ]

communal values, and supporting home-front morale. A characteristically middlebrow strategy, the Strand's comic turn represents a primarily non-adversarial response to the conflict that stands in striking contrast to the more xenophobic propaganda also printed in the magazine's pages.

Middlebrow Home-Front Patriotisms

Often seen as a Victorian institution, the Strand survived the First World War and maintained its circulation of 500,000 with demand outstripping supply.⁸² This suggests that the magazine's recognisable brand and its "strong and coherent set of cultural values" were resilient enough to support readers through total war.⁸³ Cranfield argues that during the war the Strand "effected a difficult balancing act by preserving old certainties while appropriately representing the conflict and its upheavals."⁸⁴ The magazine adjusted its generic contents to war-time realities, provided illustrations that supported Britain's war aims without unduly distressing readers, made limited adjustments in tone to encourage female backing for the war effort, and supported the creation and maintenance of home-front communities by identifying and humorously depicting shared experiences of hardship.

My analysis suggests that the war-time Strand was a multivocal text, the success of which relied on its ability to articulate a wide range of home-front sub-patriotisms. Marsh's "Sam Briggs" series, for example, promoted a sense of citizenship duty amongst men by extolling British values and depicting German brutality, while Charles Pears's accompanying illustrations effectively reinforced readers' sense of adversarial cultural conflict. However, by providing the English Sam with a Flemish female cofighter, the series also depicted Britain as the saviour of small, victimised nations, identified shared European values that crossed national boundaries, allowed women a meaningful role in the war effort, and warned against the threat of a German invasion of the British Isles. By involving Sam in dangerous frontline ventures, the series articulated the need for individual sacrifices, but by allowing him to survive and prosper, it reassured home-front readers and depicted war as an aspirational pursuit. Not all war-themed features articulated such a range of sub-patriotisms, of course: shorter and generically less diverse items typically offered less scope for expansive patriotic messages than a year-long serial. Nonetheless, each war-time issue of the Strand allowed a number of different patriotic voices to speak to the multiple reading communities who consumed the magazine.

As a middlebrow publication, the Strand was not invested in the irony of Sassoon and Owen or the feminist pacifism of Vera Brittain, but neither was it jingoistic. It supported the war effort largely without fanaticism, "mediat[ing] between conflicts and extremes" and seeking to provide a balanced platform for "all tastes and cultures."⁸⁵ Thus, the Strand allowed readers to follow Sam Briggs's incredible journey to a Victoria Cross and visualise the conflict through innovative layout, to cheer on Mrs. Egerton and feel compassion for Netta, to ponder the potential insanity of the kaiser and chuckle knowingly at home-front deprivations. Its responses to the conflict vary from the stereotypically xenophobic to the progressive, from the fanciful to the grimly realistic. While this multivocal stance is often read as a sign of equivocation, it is precisely such tolerance of multiple, not always complementary viewpoints that makes middlebrow journalism a valuable historical resource.

NOTES

1. "Tommy's Taste," 481.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. "A Reminder!," 800.

5. "An Old Friend," 729. The design for the cover was suggested by one of the prisoners, Ernest W. Boot, whose father W. H. J. Boot had been the Strand's art editor until 1910 and whose brother J. Sydney Boot was the war-time art editor.

6. Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda, especially 17–36; Sanders and Taylor, British Propaganda, 31, 39; Cranfield, Twentieth-Century Victorian, 143.

7. Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda, 86.

8. Cranfield, Twentieth-Century Victorian, 2, 105.

9. Einhaus, The Short Story, 3, 2.

10. Korte, introduction to The Penguin Book of First World War Stories, ix; Tate, "The First World War," 162; Bingham, "Ignoring the First Draft of History?," 311–12.

11. Pound, Strand Magazine, 9; Jackson, George Newnes, 117; Bingham, "Ignoring the First Draft of History?," 311, 313.

12. Friederichs, Life of George Newnes, Bart, 116–17.

13. Pound, Strand Magazine, 127.

14. Cranfield, Twentieth-Century Victorian, 5, 105.

15. Einhaus, The Short Story, 48–49.

16. Ibid., 47.

17. Pound, Strand Magazine, 122.

18. "Important," 417. August and December issues tended to be heftier and more expensive.

19. Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda, 1, 21–22, 26.

20. Small, "The Economies of Taste," 14; italics in the original.

21. Cranfield, Twentieth-Century Victorian, 137.

22. Bulfin, Gothic Invasions, 211.

23. Dudeney, "Perplexities," November 1914, 589.

24. Dudeney, "Perplexities," May 1916, 538.

25. "The 'Strand' War Game," 15; Watts, "The Chess-Board," 119.

26. Singh, "Our Friends," December 1914, 620.

27. "Hindenburg," 49; "The Great Victor," 24.

28. Cranfield, Twentieth-Century Victorian, 148. On the ineffability of war, see McLaughlin, "War and Words."

29. Cranfield, Twentieth-Century Victorian, 142; Hitchner, "Edwardian Spy Literature," 413.

30. Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda, 140.

31. Roberts, "Spink and the Submarine," 489.

32. Doyle, "His Last Bow," 230, 227.

33. Ibid., 229.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid., 236.

36. Einhaus, The Short Story, 49.

37. Seed, "Spy Fiction," 115.

38. Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda, 86.

39. Tally, Spatiality, 56, 55.

40. Martin, Images at War, 43.

41. McLaughlin, "War in Print Journalism," 48; italics in the original.

42. Pittard, "'Cheap, healthful literature,'" 10, 6.

43. Ibid., 12.

44. Mussell, "Science and the Timeliness of Reproduced Photographs," 205.

45. Sapper, "Shrapnel," 502, 504, 505.

46. Marsh, "On the Way Home," 582.

47. Ibid.

48. Bartlett, "'The Crowd Would Have It,'" 119.

49. Doyle, "The British Campaign," April 1916, 340.

50. "Important Notice," 13.

51. Pound, Strand Magazine, 125–26.

52. Doyle, "The British Campaign," May 1916, 466–67.

53. Lankester, "Culture and German Culture," 34; Doyle, "An Outing," 374.

54. On women's war-weariness, see Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda, 43.

55. Marsh, "Sanctuary," 219.

56. Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda, 116.

57. Marsh, "Sanctuary," 219.

58. Ibid.; Marsh, "In Their Own Gas," 260.

59. Marsh, "Sanctuary," 221.

60. Marsh, "In Their Own Gas," 258.

61. Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda, 115.

62. Bell, "For Belgium," 162.

63. Marsh, "In Their Own Gas," 258.

64. Steevens, "Schmitt's Pigeons," 310.

65. Ibid., 313–14.

66. Doyle, "The Prisoner's Defence," 117.

67. Ibid., 117–18.

68. Powell, "The Girls," 400.

69. "A Great Humorist," 317.

70. "The Lighter Side of War," 345; "As Funny as They Can," 794.

71. Einhaus, The Short Story, 48.

72. "The Artist with the Funny Ideas," 98.

73. Sully, An Essay on Laughter, 271.

74. "A Great Humorist," 317.

75. Ibid., 318.

76. Ibid.

77. Martindale, "A Sketch-Book," 222.

78. Freud, The Joke, 226; Martindale, "A Sketch-Book," 223.

79. "The Lighter Side of War," 347.

80. Bergson, An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, 6; Sully, An Essay on Laughter, 255.

81. Freud, The Joke, 228, 225.

82. Pound, Strand Magazine, 127.

83. Cranfield, Twentieth-Century Victorian, 11.

84. Ibid., 147.

85. Bracco, Merchants of Hope, 12; Macdonald and Singer, introduction to Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, 6.

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