hidden europe 59

Changing Fortunes: Guidebooks and War

by Nicky Gardner

Picture above: The Meninpoort (Menin Gate) in Ypres was unveiled in 1927 as a memorial to those who fell in the Great War (photo © Sergey Dzyuba / dreamstime.com).

Summary

It's hard to imagine these days that any guidebook might ever sell 100,000 copies each month. But 100 years ago, in the second half of 1919, Michelin was managing just that. We explore how guidebooks fared in the years after the end of the First World War. As Baedeker fell into disfavour among English readers, other companies were quick to fill the gap.

One hundred years ago saw a publishing revolution in Europe, with numerous publishers cashing in on the peacetime dividend as they brought out new guides to the scarred lands of France and Belgium where some of the most terrible battles of the Great War had taken place.

For three long winter months, French attacks on German positions on the Western Front had successfully prevented Germany from focusing entirely on what was happening thousands of kilometres away on its Eastern Front with Russia. On 17 March 1915, the second Allied offensive against the Germans in eastern France — often known as the First Battle of Champagne — had come to an end.

Just two weeks after the end of the Battle of Champagne, the travel firm Thomas Cook — then a more illustrious name than now — advised readers of The Times that “to put a stop to stray enquiries, [the company] will not be organising sightseeing expeditions to the battlefields, at least until the war is over, owing to French opposition.”

The English have of course always been quick to blame the French. There’s no hint here of any sense of English decency or propriety. One wonders whether, had the French not been so implacably opposed to war tourism, Thomas Cook would ever really have managed to get clients safely to and from the battlefields — what with all the disruption to transport and everyday life in wartime France.

After the Armistice

Yet, within six months of the end of the Great War in November 1918, it was not just Thomas Cook but many other organisations which were heavily promoting battlefield tourism. On the very day of the Armistice, the Daily Chronicle reported that Thomas Cook had “practically completed their arrangements for visits to the battlefields by persons who have lost relatives.”

Within six months of the end of the Great War in November 1918, it was not just Thomas Cook but many other organisations which were heavily promoting battlefield tourism.

By March 1919, a steady stream of groups were crossing the Channel to view the battlefields of northern France. Many early travellers were bereaved widows and parents. Organisations like the Salvation Army, the St Barnabas Society, the YMCA and later the Ypres League took the lead in escorting thousands of mourning visitors to the battlefields, those organisations’ skilled guides simultaneously handling the practicalities of travel and a colossal legacy of grief.

But the ranks of the bereft were swelled by the merely curious. War tourism to northern France and Belgium led to a veritable boom in travel writing which justified, codified and even promoted this very particular form of travel.

In just eight months, the French publishing company Michelin sold over 800,000 copies of its various guides to the battlefields, advising readers in the preface that “the contemplated visit should be a pilgrimage; not merely a journey across a ravished land.” Well illustrated with evocative black-andwhite images (lots of before and after scenes of shrapnel-scarred French villages) and very detailed maps, Michelin approached matters of war with the same attention to detail that modern readers will recognise in the company’s handling of issues of food and accommodation.

The anonymous author of Michelin’s 1919 guide to the Marne battlefields wrote with great simplicity about where the traveller might go, viz. “Continuing this road to Étavigny [in the département of Oise], the tourist will go over the position that the Germans established on the plateau.” There is some dry emotion tucked away in the text but it is always restrained and generally very impartial: “Étavigny was taken and retaken in the course of the Battle of the Ourcq. The struggle was hard.” Michelin favoured objective testimony with only minimal embellishment.

The sheer volume of sales of this book — averaging over 100,000 a month in the period after its publication in late spring 1919 — suggests that many purchased the volume not with any real intent to travel but rather as a commemorative object. Here was the ultimate recognition of travel writing as the voice of impartial authority. The memorialization of a terrible period in European history was being etched in words within a few weeks of the hostilities ending.

Photo © Havana1234 / dreamstime.com

Hard times for Baedeker

If Michelin was on the up, another great name in travel publishing was having a much more difficult time of it. In the early months of the Great War, The Times of London had reported the death in action of “Karl Baedeker, the publisher of the famous guidebooks.” It would have been a wondrous thing if Karl Baedeker, who was born in 1801, really had still been sufficiently robust to march off into battle in 1914. The man who was killed on 6 August 1914 at the Battle of Liège was another Karl Baedeker, a 37- year old physicist from Jena, who didn’t work in publishing at all. But he was indeed the grandson of the Karl Baedeker who in 1827 founded the famous publishing house.

Fritz Baedeker, the youngest of the original Karl’s three sons, took over the family business in 1869 when he was aged 25. He remained at the helm for over half a century, so presiding over the heyday of Baedeker travel publishing in the period from about 1870 until the outbreak of the First World War. But he also had to manage the catastrophic decline in the company’s reputation, at least in the English-speaking world, during and immediately after the war.

The success of the Michelin battlefields guide of 1919 lay partly in the manner in which it emulated the authority of Baedeker. The German publisher had created a gold standard in how topography and townscapes might properly be captured in words. The Baedeker guides produced in the 40 years after Fritz moved the family business from Koblenz to Leipzig — then very much the premier city in German publishing — in 1872 still rate as among the finest guidebooks ever printed. Few other guides of that period could rival Baedeker when it came to accuracy in topographical representation — if Baedeker advised readers to look out for the waterfall on the left, then it was most definitely on the left.

And none could match Baedeker for the sheer beauty of the company’s maps, the latter the exquisitely detailed work of the Baedeker cartographic unit run by Heinrich Wagner and Ernst Debes.

But that representational fidelity which was a hallmark of Baedeker — for decades a source of wonder and admiration for readers across Europe — was transformed during the Great War into an object of suspicion among Germany’s adversaries. There was even speculation that the great Baedeker might be part of the German war machine.

Just a week before the Armistice in November 1918, the usually rather cautious journal Scientific American suggested that German successes in the early years of the war might well have depended greatly on the information contained in the Baedeker guides. The company’s thoroughness and reliability, previously heralded as such an asset, was now reinvented as a liability. The Scientific American article revealed that the Baedeker guide to “Holland and Belgium is a wonderful survey of every inch of these countries […] Not a detail is overlooked which could be regarded as of military importance.” Had the company been meticulously documenting every landmark across Europe with half an eye on the value of such intelligence in possible future hostilities?

There was an echo in England of these negative sentiments about Baedeker a generation later when in spring 1942 the German Luftwaffe launched retaliation raids on five English cathedral cities following the British bombing of Lübeck a few weeks earlier. It was widely believed in England that the cities bombed were chosen for their status as heavily-starred destinations in the final pre-war edition of the Baedeker guide to Britain. In the English media, the bombings of York, Bath, Norwich, Canterbury and Exeter were styled as ‘Baedeker Raids’ or even ‘Baedeker Blitz’, so elevating the German publisher to an especially demonic position in the English imagination — even though some commentators noted that, presumably on purpose, the German bombers never directly targeted or hit the cathedrals (or, in the case of York and Bath, the minster or abbey respectively).

Writing history

With Baedeker’s hegemony of the guidebook market broken during and after the Great War, and Michelin’s startling success with its battlefield guides, other European publishers were quick to take their share of the windfall. Hachette’s new Guides bleus series was well received, as was its English-language counterpart, the Blue Guides published by the Muirhead Brothers, who had for many years prior to the Great War been the editors of Baedeker’s English-language editions. The Ward Lock Company emulated Michelin’s success with its battlefield guides.

Not all the writing in the years after the Great War maintained that quiet neutrality of the Michelin battlefield guides. As narratives were shaped around the legacy of the war, a hint of nationalism inevitably crept in. The observational skill of the travel writer was no longer quite so valued as a post-war readership hungered for more interpretative writing. Ypres in Belgian Flanders was progressively elevated into more than merely a ruined town, instead becoming “a very high ideal built up by the lives of men” — at least that’s how the gloriously titled Field Marshal the Lord Plumer of Messines put it in the preface to Beatrix Brice’s The Battle Book of Ypres published in 1927. It is a tangled tale of heroism with Beatrix Brice helpfully reminding the reader that “the Briton is a clean-handed and debonair fighter […] the Teuton is different.”

The publication of Beatrix Brice’s book coincided with the completion of the Meninpoort (Menin Gate) in Ypres — this gracious memorial to the missing was unveiled in July 1927 by the very same Lord Plumer who penned the preface to Brice’s book.

Over the years, pilgrimages morphed gently into tourism and, a century on from the end of the Great War, the Meninpoort attracts considerable numbers of visitors and is fêted as one of the most celebrated sites in Flanders. Yet, even in the early days, some commentators were not impressed. For the English soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was always quick to mock patriotic pretensions, it was “a pile of peace-complacent stone,” one which mocked the memory of hapless conscripts. Sassoon continued:

Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime, Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

The travel writers had largely retired from the scene, leaving the broader narratives of victory (and sometime reconciliation) to be shaped by historians, politicians and poets. Scarred wasteland turned slowly to war cemeteries, poppies grew over the trenches and publishers moved on to other ventures, quietly counting the handsome profits reaped from the battlefields of France and Belgium.

The short quotes from Siegfried Sassoon towards the end of this feature are taken from Sassoon’s poem ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’, written in 1927 and published by William Heinemann Ltd the following year in a collection entitled ‘The Heart’s Journey’.

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