NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENTS
As soon as not only the menace but the cruel reality of the occupation
was lifted from the smaller towns and villages, some of which had
suffered so far more terribly than Lunéville, M. Mirman and M. Linarés,
the Prefects of Meurthe et Moselle and Vosges, and M. Minier, the
Sous-Préfet of Lunéville, were engaged almost every day in visiting
different parts of their Departments in the track of the ruthless
invader, partly to take stock of the crimes and destruction of which he
had been guilty, but chiefly with the object of doing what could be done
to relieve the bitter distress of what was left of the population. It
was principally owing to the courtesy, and, if I may say so, the wise
tolerance of these gentlemen and of M. Simon, the Mayor of Nancy, that
M. Lamure and I were able to see with our own eyes some of the handiwork
of the Teuton Kulturists in that part of France. I say wise tolerance
because, although I know from personal experience that newspaper
correspondents are as a rule a despised race, I still believe that they
have their uses. The newspapers which they help to supply with news and
comments on news are read by every one, and not only, as is commonly
supposed in some quarters, by the enemy. They are even read by the high
authorities who to all appearances are minded to thwart them and
throttle their vitality, partly, perhaps, because they think that they
may catch them tripping (in spite of the watchful supervision of the
censorship), but partly and still more because they have the natural and
human craving for news and like to be interested and well-informed.
When, therefore, ministers and other high officials try to suppress and
do suppress as effectually as they have in this war the liberty of
newspaper correspondents, they inevitably put themselves in a false
position and even do harm to their country. No sensible man in such
serious times as those in which we are now living objects to a thorough
supervision of news published in the newspapers by men who are supposed
to know more of the wider issues of the war than the editors who control
them. That is what the censorship on the despatch and receipt of
telegrams and all the calculated delay of the postal service exists for.
But these well-meaning but autocratic gentlemen are not satisfied with
that. They go a long step further and not only say to the newspapers
(and their readers), “Everything in the shape of news about the war
shall be censored”—which is right—but “As far as is possible we will
prevent you from getting any real news about the war at all”—which is
wrong. For truth, unfortunately for their theory, will out, and if it is
violently suppressed it has a way of finding its way out like lava from
a volcano, which will certainly do a great deal of harm before, as it
must, because it is truth, it does good in the end. My own belief is
that nations, like men and women, practically never gain anything by
concealing the truth, because its place is certain to be taken by
mistakes and doubts and lies—as has been proved over and over again
during this war. It is partly because diplomacy is, perhaps necessarily,
founded and built up on concealment that it is so often, as it has been
more than once in the last eighteen months, a complete and dismal
failure. And as for war—as my warrior friend said to me earlier in this
book—“War is a serious matter: let us make it seriously.” By all means
let us make it and take it with the utmost seriousness possible. But
also let us be sensible about it. His own complaint against the
journalists whom he implicitly accused of taking it lightly was that he
could not move out of his quarters without the enemy knowing it. Yet
till he met me, not a journalist, French or English, had been within
miles of his quarters, as he knew perfectly well. What he did not appear
to know, like many other people in authority, is that the Germans have
no need to go to French or English newspapers for information about the
movements of generals or of troops. They know in any case that to do so
would be futile, since they are already checkmated in advance by the
censor. Most of the information that matters they gain in open fight in
the field. They knew long before even _The Times_ knew it that the
English army was short of shells and especially of the right kind of
shells. A soldier does not take much time to learn whether he is being
fired at with shrapnel or with high explosives. They knew long before
any newspaper correspondent could have informed them of the fact
(supposing there had been any at the front, which, of course, there were
not) that the French and English were going to attempt a strong
offensive movement in Champagne and at Loos on September 25th, 1915.
Their informant was a preliminary bombardment along that particular part
of the front which lasted for seventy-two hours. As for other kinds of
useful military information, which cannot be gathered on the field of
battle, but only from behind the enemy’s lines, for that they depend
once again not on newspapers but on aeroplanes and spies (including,
thanks to the scanty patriotism and common-sense of some soldiers, women
belonging to the profession of Rahab). From each of these sources alone
they probably get as much news in a week as all the correspondents of
all the newspapers “behind the front” could gather in a year.
But there is another side to the question. Under an enlightened
censorship there is practically no fear of newspapers and newspaper
correspondents doing harm. Under enlightened editors there is every
chance of their doing a great amount of good for the cause of their
country and its navy and its armies in the field. Every body knows that,
even the enlightened censorship itself, whose members have had precisely
the same training at the same schools and universities as the purblind
editorial staffs. But most of all the enemy know it, and, because they
know it, they fear the newspapers and rejoice when their freedom of
speech is curtailed. They fear first of all their own newspapers; and
because of that fear they forbid them not only to tell the truth, but
urge them, if they do not command them, to tell lies. That is the sort
of thing, I suppose, which is meant when one is asked to take war
seriously: as in most things, even in their follies, the Germans are
more thorough than England and France. But even more than their own
newspapers they fear those of London and Paris, for two reasons. They
dread them first of all for the effect which they have on public opinion
in the neutral countries, and secondly because they know that to them
and their pressure are due practically all the political and military
changes, useful to the Allies and detrimental to Germany, which have
been brought about during the course of the war.
The second of these two points I will not labour to support by
instances. They are written large in the leading articles and military
articles of _The Times_ and other newspapers. All the world knows what
they are, though all the world does not as yet acknowledge them.
About the other point, the question of the effect which English and
French newspapers have and might have (and might have had) on the
opinions of neutrals, I have a word or two to say. I said just now that
nations practically never gain anything by concealing the truth. There
is an important exception to that rule. They gain, or at least they seem
to gain, and do gain for the time being, when they conceal their own
misdoings. That is exactly what happened in Belgium and in the invaded
provinces of France. For a considerable time the horrible wrong-doings
of Germany in those two countries were concealed from the world, and are
even now not fully believed by those who do not wish to believe them,
because they were not seen and recorded at the time by credible
eye-witnesses, that is to say, by competent newspaper correspondents. A
few days before those atrocities began to be committed in Belgium all
the foreign newspaper correspondents were ordered by their own
governments to leave the country. As a consequence practically every
account of them which we have is second-hand, taken, that is to say,
from the lips of the victims who escaped death some little time after
they occurred, and therefore not made known to the public of the allied
countries and to the rest of the world, except in general terms, till a
further time still had elapsed. What England and France gained by this
suppression of newspaper correspondents, and therefore of the truth, it
is difficult to see. What Germany gained is obvious. I will take only
one instance the evolution of which I happen to have watched on the
spot.
At the beginning of the war most of the public opinion in Switzerland
was strongly in favour of Germany. That this was only partly due to
natural racial tendencies (for seven out of every ten Swiss are of
German origin and speak or read the German language) is obvious from the
way in which, after about six months of the war, a large proportion of
the German-Swiss majority began to lose their pro-German proclivities
and to come round to the side of the Allies. Naturally we all wish to
have the neutral nations on our side, not only because it is our side,
but for the higher reason that we believe it to be the side of right.
But besides this there were and are particularly strong economic
military reasons which made it desirable for us to secure the support,
or at least the really benevolent neutrality, of the Swiss. While any
considerable part of them, especially before Italy joined the alliance,
were for the Germans and against us, secret contraband was bound to run
riot, with disastrous consequences for our projected blockade of German
war-material. And that is exactly what happened, chiefly owing to our
policy with regard to the Press. At the beginning of the war,
Switzerland, like America, could only form her views of the rights and
wrongs of the conflict and the course which it was pursuing, from the
newspapers. In German-Switzerland numbers of the newspapers are financed
by German money and even written by German writers. Quite naturally the
readers of these papers believed what they told them. In other words,
they were convinced that the atrocities in Belgium were either imaginary
or grossly exaggerated, that Germany would at the end of the war make
good her promise to make up to Belgium for the violation of her
neutrality, and that meanwhile she was winning all along the line.
That was the positive side of the newspaper evil in Switzerland, over
which France and England had, of course, no control. The negative side,
which they might have controlled, which was indeed of their own making,
was that the true news, which should have acted as a corrective to the
false, hardly existed at all on the question of the atrocities in
Belgium, because there were no correspondents in Belgium to give it. If
the Swiss had known then, as they know now, though many of them still do
not choose to believe it, the real truth about Belgium, there is no
doubt at all that the greater part of the old pro-German feeling would
have perished at the beginning. It throve only on lies and the
concealment and ignorance of the truth. That is a fact which can be very
simply proved. As soon as the Swiss knew, because they saw it for
themselves with their own eyes, something of the way in which Germany
has made war, the revulsion against her and therefore in our favour
began. It happened in this way. From the ruined villages of Lorraine and
the other occupied provinces the Germans carried away to Germany at the
beginning of the war a large number of what they called “hostages” and
the French “_internés_,” old men and women and children, mainly of the
poorest classes. They had committed no military or political crime, they
had only lost their homes and their possessions and most of their
relatives, and they could under no conceivable circumstances affect one
way or the other Germany’s chances of winning or losing the war. For
months, wretchedly clad and fed, they were kept in prison-camps in the
fatherland. Then by the good offices of the compassionate Swiss and
partly probably because the Germans were beginning to find them a
nuisance and to wonder why they had ever taken them away from France,
they were sent back in relays of three or four hundred at a time to
their own country by way of Switzerland. At the same time the far
smaller number of _internés_ whom the French had detained in France or
taken from Alsace in retaliation were sent back in exchange. I never
myself saw any of the _internés_ from France on their way back to
Germany. But the Swiss, who worked untiringly day after day and month
after month to show practical sympathy to all these unfortunates on
their way through their country, constantly saw both the French and the
Germans, and the effect on their judgment of the German nation, even
against their own natural inclinations, showed very decidedly which
nation had treated worst these innocent victims of the war. I never met
a Swiss man or woman, German-Swiss, or French-Swiss, who had seen the
French _internés_ on their way back to France—not to their homes, for
their homes in most cases no longer exist—who was not intensely shocked
and indignant at the state in which they were and the sufferings which
they had undergone, and from the date at which they first began to see
them and act the good Samaritan to them, at Schaffhausen, at Basle, at
Zurich, at Berne, at Lausanne, and at Geneva, from that moment the
marked revulsion of a large part of the Swiss people against Germany and
Prussian militarism took its rise. It is my firm opinion that it would
have begun long before if only the correspondents of French and English
newspapers had been allowed from the beginning to see for themselves, as
nearly as they could, what happened in Belgium, and to publish it to
Switzerland and the world.
All this is only a parenthesis—I am afraid rather a long one—to what I
was saying some pages back about the large-minded tolerance as well as
the great personal kindness which the Prefects and Sous-Préfets of the
eastern provinces of France, from Belfort to Commercy, showed to M.
Lamure and myself as representatives of the English Press. All of them,
like every Frenchman who has talked to me on the subject, and,
unfortunately, unlike some Englishmen, believed in _The Times_ as a
great power for good. With that feeling in their minds they took us with
them, as they had, of course, an official right to do, on some of their
official visits to the ravished districts, because they believed that
the publication of the truth about them in _The Times_ would be of
service to the common cause. M. Mirman in particular held that view. He
believed that the articles we sent to London, which, but for him and his
fellow-Prefects and Sous-Préfets, could never have been written, were of
real positive use for France and against the common enemy.
I seem, perhaps, to be getting a long way from the main purpose of this
book, which is to state, as strongly as I can, the debt which I believe
France and England owe to the generals and armies that have fought for
the common cause in the east of France. But while I am on the subject I
mean to go a little further, and to illustrate what I have said on the
subject of newspaper correspondents (if the Censor will let me say it)
by a reference to a personal matter, because as I see it, it is not a
personal matter at all, but of real importance to the country. After we
had been in Nancy for four months, during all which time we were in
constant and friendly relations with many of the civil and military
authorities, we were one morning politely but peremptorily ordered to
leave the town within twenty-four hours. Otherwise we were told that we
should be arrested and tried before a court-martial on a charge of
espionage—not, of course, because we were spies, but because we were
journalists exercising our _métier_ within the zone of the armies (in
which, up to a few days before that time, Paris was also included!). No
complaint was made against us personally, because none could be. In a
letter which M. Mirman wrote to me at the time, most of which is too
personal to quote, though he gave me full liberty to show it to any
French authorities whom I might meet, he expressly said that I had been
guilty of no indiscretion during my stay, that my papers and my comings
and goings had always been perfectly in order, and that he would be
happy to see me come back to Nancy.
[Illustration:
Photograph by Libert-Fernana, Nancy.
OUTSIDE THE PREFECTURE, NANCY.
M. Mirman, Mme. Mirman, M. Puech, who acted as M. Mirman’s chauffeur,
and some members of the staff of the Prefecture.
Seated in front, the author and M. Jean Rogier of the _Petit
Parisien_.
]
Now, a Prefect of France, and above all, one of M. Mirman’s standing and
record and experience and ardent patriotism, does not take upon himself
the responsibility and trouble of making a direct appeal to the highest
authorities on behalf of the correspondent of a foreign newspaper
without very good reason. In this particular case I believe that what
chiefly affected him was the conviction that in the present critical
times one of the most important functions which an allied newspaper can
fulfil is the promotion of a fuller understanding and still more cordial
relations between England and France, and that few things could serve
that purpose so well as the permanent presence of an English
correspondent near the French fighting-line.
Since then, in my efforts to return to the place where I believe
honestly I can be of most use to my country in this war, I have shown
that letter to some of the highest authorities in France, but without
practical effect. Sometimes it has nearly melted their hearts, but not
quite. But I mean to go on trying. That is why I am writing this
chapter. I not only believe, but I am certain, not because I am I, but
because I am a responsible correspondent of _The Times_, that “somewhere
in France”—somewhere in the east of France for me—I can in my small way
(but _The Times_ is not a small paper) help to win this war, and, with a
little encouragement and help from the military authorities, do much
more useful work than was possible under the restricted conditions by
which M. Lamure and I were handicapped during our stay in Lorraine in
1914. And I believe firmly that that is true of the great mass of
correspondents of the big English and French newspapers, and that a
grave mistake is being made in not using us, and giving us real and not
little snippets of pretended liberty. We are not out for scalps and
“scoops,” as we might be in ordinary journalism and an ordinary war. We
are ready to take the war as seriously as any general or any minister.
What we want to do is to tell the truth, or as much of it as the Censor
and our own discretion will let us, because we know that only the truth
will prevail.