A WAR CORRESPONDENT'S TRIALS IN BULGARIA
A sense of grievance was the first fruits of my experience as a war
correspondent in Bulgaria. It was the general policy of the Bulgarian
army and the Bulgarian military authorities to prevent war
correspondents seeing anything of their operations. They wished nothing
to interfere with the secrecy of their plans. There were only three
British journalists who succeeded, in the ultimate result, in getting to
the front and seeing the final battle of the first phase of the war, at
Chatalja. There were over a hundred correspondents who attempted to go.
Perhaps as I was one of three who succeeded, I do not think I,
personally, have any reason to complain. But I found a good deal of
vexation in the Bulgarian policy, which was to prevent any knowledge of
their plans, their dispositions, their strategy, and their tactics,
from getting beyond the small circle of their own General Staff. Even
some of their generals in the field were kept in partial ignorance.
Officers of high standing, unless they were on the General Staff, knew
little of the general plan; they were informed only about the particular
operations in which they were engaged.
This policy of secrecy was, however, a good thing from the point of view
of getting to know the Bulgarian people. If the military authorities had
given me facilities to go with the army and see its operations I should
have become familiar with the Headquarters Staff, perhaps with a few
regimental officers, but not with the great mass of the army nor with
the Bulgarian people generally. But the refusal of facilities to
accompany the army cast upon me the responsibility of trying to get
through somehow to the front, and in the process of getting through I
won to knowledge of the peasant soldiers and their home life.
Ultimately the residuum of my grievance was not with the secretive
methods of the Bulgarians--they were wise and necessary--but with the
wild fictions which some correspondents thought to be the proper
response to that policy of secretiveness.
Returned to Kirk Kilisse from the Bulgarian lines at Chatalja, I amused
myself in an odd hour with burrowing among a great pile of newspapers in
the Censor's office, and reading here and there the war news from
English, French, and Belgian papers.
Dazed, amazed, I recognised that I had seemingly mistaken the duties of
a war correspondent. For some six weeks I had been following an army in
breathless, anxious chase of facts; wheedling Censors to get some few of
those facts into a telegraph office; learning then, perhaps, that the
custom at that particular telegraph office was to forward telegrams to
Sofia, a ten days' journey, by bullock-wagon and railway, to give them
time to mature. Now here, piping hot, were the stories of the war.
There was the vivid story of the battle of Chatalja. This story was
started seven days too soon; had the positions and the armies all wrong;
the result all wrong; and the picturesque details were in harmony. But
for the purposes of the public it was a very good story of a battle.
Those men who, after great hardships, were enabled to see the actual
battle found that the poor messages which the Censor permitted them to
send took ten days or more in transmission to London. Why have taken all
the trouble and expense of going to the front? Buda-Pesth, on the way
there, is a lovely city; Bucharest also; and charming Vienna was not at
all too far away if you had a good staff-map and a lively military
imagination.
In yet another paper there was a vivid picture--scenery, date, Greenwich
time, and all to give an air of artistic verisimilitude--of the signing
of the Peace armistice. The armistice had not been signed at the time,
was not signed for some days after. But it would have been absurd to
have waited, since "our special correspondent" had seen it all in
advance, right down to the embrace of the Turkish delegate and the
Bulgarian delegate, and knew that some of the conditions were that the
Turkish commissariat was to feed the Bulgarian troops at Chatalja and
the Bulgarian commissariat the Turkish troops in Adrianople. If his
paper had waited for the truth that most charming story would never have
seen the light.
So, in a little book I shall one day bring out in the "Attractive
Occupations" series on "How to be a War Correspondent," I shall give
this general advice:
1. Before operations begin, visit the army to which you are accredited,
and take notes of the general appearance of officers and men. Also learn
a few military phrases of their language. Ascertain all possible
particulars of a personal character concerning the generals and chief
officers.
2. Return then to a base outside the country. It must have good
telegraph communication with your newspaper. For the rest you may decide
its locality by the quality of the wine, or the beer, or the cooking.
3. Secure a set of good maps of the scene of operations. It will be
handy also to have any books which have been published describing
campaigns over the same _terrain_.
4. Keep in touch with the official bulletins issued by the military
authorities from the scene of operations. But be on guard not to become
enslaved by them. If, for instance, you wait for official notices of
battles, you will be much hampered in your picturesque work. Fight
battles when they ought to be fought and how they ought to be fought.
The story's the thing.
5. A little sprinkling of personal experience is wise; for example, a
bivouac on the battlefield, toasting your bacon at a fire made of a
broken-down gun-carriage with a bayonet taken from a dead soldier.
Mention the nationality of the bacon. You cannot be too precise in
details.
[Illustration: A YOUNG WIDOW AT HER HUSBAND'S GRAVE]
Ko-Ko's account of the execution of Nankipoo is, in short, the model for
the future war correspondent. The other sort of war correspondent, who
patiently studied and recorded operations, seems to be doomed. In the
nature of things it must be so. The more competent and the more accurate
he is, the greater the danger he is to the army which he accompanies.
His despatches, published in his newspaper and telegraphed promptly to
the other side, give to them at a cheap cost that information of what is
going on _behind_ their enemy's screen of scouts which is so vital to
tactical, and sometimes to strategical, dispositions. To try to obtain
that information an army pours out much blood and treasure; to guard
that information an army will consume a full third of its energies in an
elaborate system of mystification. A modern army must either banish
the war correspondent altogether or subject him to such restrictions of
Censorship as to veto honest, accurate, and prompt criticism or record
of operations.
The Bulgarian army had not the courage to refuse authorisation to the
swarm of journalists which descended upon its headquarters. Editors had
argued it out that the small Balkan States, anxious to have a "good
press" in Europe, would give correspondents a good show. But the
Bulgarian authorities, anxious as they were to conciliate foreign public
opinion, dared not allow a free run to the newspaper representatives.
Apart from the considerations I have mentioned, which must govern any
modern war, there were special reasons why the Bulgarians should be
nervous of observation. They were waging war on "forlorn hope" lines
with the slenderest resources, with the knowledge that officers and
men--especially transport officers--had to do almost the impossible to
win through. Further, they had the knowledge that in some cases the
correspondents were representing the newspapers (and the Governments,
for newspapers and cabinets often work hand in hand on the Continent) of
nations which were at the very moment threatening mobilisation against
the Balkan States. To have specially excepted Roumanian, Austrian, and
German press representatives from permission to see operations would
have been impossible. The method was adopted of authorising as many
press correspondents as cared to apply, then carefully pocketing them
where they could see nothing, and instituting such a rigorous Censorship
as to guard effectively against any important facts, gleaned indirectly,
leaking out. A few managed to earn enough of the Bulgarian confidence to
be allowed to go through to the front and see things. But, even then,
the Censorship and the monopoly of the telegraph line for military
messages prevented them from despatching anything.
Some of the correspondents--one in particular--overcame a secretive
military system and a harsh Censorship by the use of a skilled
imagination and of a friendly telegraph line outside the area of
Censorship. At the staff headquarters at Stara Zagora during the early
days of the campaign, when we were all straining at the leash to get to
the front, waiting and fussing, he was working, reconstructing the
operations with maps and a fine imagination, and never allowing his
paper to want for news. I think that he was quite prepared to have
taken pupils for his new school of war correspondents. Often he would
come to me for a yarn--in halting French on both sides--and would
explain the campaign as it was being carried on. One eloquent gesture he
habitually had--a sweeping motion which brought his arms together as
though they were gathering up a bundle of spears, then the hands would
meet in an expressive squeeze. "It is that," he said, "it is
Napoleonic."
Probably the Censor at this stage did not interfere much with his
activities, content enough to allow fanciful descriptions of Napoleonic
strategy to go to the outer world. But, in my experience, facts, if one
ascertained something independently, were not treated kindly.
"Why not?" I asked the Censor vexedly about one message he had stopped.
"It is true."
"Yes, that is the trouble," he said--the nearest approach to a joke I
ever got out of a Bulgarian, for they are a sober, God-fearing, and
humour-fearing race.
The idea of the Bulgarian Censorship in regard to the privileges and
duties of the war correspondent was further illustrated to me on another
occasion, when a harmless map of a past phase of the campaign was
stopped.
"Then what am I to send?" I asked.
"There are the bulletins," he said.
"Yes, the bulletins which are just your bald official account of
week-old happenings which are sent to every news-agency in Europe before
we see them!"
"But you are a war correspondent. You can add to them in your own
language."
Remembering that conversation, I suspect that at first the Bulgarian
Censorship did not object to fairy tales passing over the wires, though
the way was blocked for exact observation. An enterprising story-maker
had not very serious difficulties at the outset. Afterwards there was a
change, and even the writer of fairy stories had to work outside the
range of the Censor.
We were all allowed down to Mustapha Pasha, and considered that that was
a big step to the front. "For two days or so," we were told, it would be
our duty to wait patiently within the town (the battle-ground around
Adrianople was about twelve miles distant). Some waited there two months
and saw no real operations. The Censorship at Mustapha Pasha was so
strict that all private letters had to be submitted, and if they were
in English the English Censor insisted that they should be read to him
aloud; and he re-read them, again aloud, to see if he had fully grasped
their significance. Then they could go if they contained no military
information and did not mention guns, oxen, soldiers, roads, mud, dirt,
or other tabooed subjects. An amusing "rag" was tried on the Censor
there. A sorely tried correspondent wrote a letter of extreme warmth to
an imaginary sweetheart. This began "Ducksie Darling," and continued in
the same strain for two pages. He waited until there was a full
house--the Censors had no private office, but did their censoring in a
large room which was open to all the correspondents--and then submitted
his ardent outburst. Other press-men did not see the joke at first, and
began to sidle out of the room as, like a stream of warm treacle, the
love-letter flowed on. But they came back.
"'Ducksie Darling,'" began the writer, "that, you know, is not a
military term. It is a phrase of endearment used in England.--'A
thousand, thousand kisses'--that has nothing to do with the disposition
of troops." So he went through to the honeyed end, the Censor blushing
and furious, the audience hilarious.
The Mustapha Pasha Censorship would not allow ox-wagons or reservists to
be mentioned, nor officers' names. The Censorship objected, too, for a
long time to any mention of the all-pervading mud which was the chief
item of interest in the town's life. Yet you might have lost an army
division in some of the puddles. (But stop, I am lapsing into the
picturesque ways of the new school of correspondents. Actually you could
not have lost more than a regiment in the largest mud-puddle.)
Let the position be frankly faced, that if one is with an army in modern
warfare, common sense prohibits the authorities from allowing you to see
anything, and suggests the further precautions of a strict Censorship
and a general hold-up of wires until their military value (and therefore
their "news" value) has passed. If your paper wants picturesque stories
hot off the grill it is much better not to be with the army (which
means, in effect, in the rear of the army), but to write about its deeds
from outside the radius of the Censorship.
Perhaps, though, your paper has old-fashioned prejudices in favour of
veracity and will be annoyed if your imagination leads you too palpably
astray? In that case do not venture to be a war correspondent at all. If
you do not invent you will send nothing of value. If you invent you will
be reprimanded.
Let me give my personal record of "getting to the front" and the net
result of the trouble and the expense. I went down to Mustapha Pasha
with the great body of war correspondents, and soon recognised that
there was no hope of useful work there. The attacking army was at a
standstill and a long, wearisome siege--its operations strictly guarded
from inspection--was in prospect. I decided to get back to staff
headquarters (then at Stara Zagora), and just managed to catch the staff
before it moved on to Kirk Kilisse. By threatening to return to London
at once I got a promise of leave to join the Third Army and to "see some
fighting."
The promise anticipated the actual granting of leave by two days. It
would be tedious to record all the little and big difficulties that were
then encountered through the reluctance of the military authorities to
allow one to get transport or help of any kind. But four days later I
was marching out of Mustapha Pasha on the way to Kirk Kilisse by way of
Adrianople, a bullock-wagon carrying my baggage, an interpreter
trundling my bicycle, I riding a small pony. The interpreter was gloomy
and disinclined to face the hardships and dangers (mostly fancied) of
the journey. Beside the driver (a Macedonian) marched a soldier with
fixed bayonet. Persuasion was necessary to force the driver to undertake
the journey, and a friendly transport officer had, with more or less
legality, put at my command this means of argument. A mile outside
Mustapha Pasha the soldier turned back, and I was left to coax my
unwilling helpers on a four days' journey across a war-stricken
countryside, swept of all supplies, infested with savage dogs
(fortunately well fed by the harvest of the battlefields), liable to
ravage by roving bands.
That night I gave the Macedonian driver some jam and some meat to eke
out his bread and cheese.
"That is better than having a bayonet poked into your inside," I said,
by pantomime. He understood, grinned, and gave no great trouble
thereafter, though he was always in a state of pitiable funk when I
left the wagon to take a trip within the lines of the besieging forces.
[Illustration: GIPSIES]
So to Kirk Kilisse. There I got to General Savoff himself and won not
only leave, but a letter of aid to go down to the Third Army at the
lines of Chatalja. But by then what must be the final battle of the war
was imminent. Every hour of delay was dangerous. To go by cart meant a
journey of several days. A military train was available part of the way
if I were content to drop interpreter, horse, and baggage and travel
with a soldier's load.
That decision was easy enough at the moment--though I sometimes
regretted it afterwards when the only pair of riding-breeches I had with
me gave out at the knees, and I had to walk the earth ragged--and by
train I got to Tchorlu. There a friendly artillery officer helped me to
get a cart (springless) and two fast horses. He insisted also on giving
me as a patrol, a single Bulgarian soldier, with 200 rounds of
ammunition, as Bashi-Bazouks were ranging the country. I objected that I
had a revolver, and there was the driver, a Greek. "He would run away,"
said the officer pleasantly, and the patrol was taken.
It was an unnecessary precaution, though the presence of the soldier
was comforting as we entered Silivri at night, the outskirts of the town
deserted, the chattering of the driver's teeth audible over the clamour
of the cart, the gutted houses ideal refuges for prowling bands. From
Silivri to Chatalja there was again no appearance of Bashi-Bazouks. But
thought of another danger obtruded as we came near the lines and
encountered men from the Bulgarian army suffering from the choleraic
dysentery which had then begun its ravages. To one dying soldier by the
roadside I gave brandy; and then had to leave him with his mates, who
were trying to get him to a hospital. They were sorely puzzled by his
cries, his pitiful grimaces. Wounds they knew, and the pain of them they
despised. They could not comprehend this disease which took away all the
manhood of a stoic peasant, and made him weak in spirit as an ailing
child.
From Chatalja, the right flank of the Bulgarian position, I passed along
the front to Ermenikioi ("the village of Armenians"), passing the night
at Arjenli, near the centre and the headquarters of the ammunition park.
That night at Arjenli seemed to make a rough and sometimes perilous
journey, which had extended over seven days, worth while.
Arjenli is perched on a high hill, to the west of Ermenikioi. It gave a
view of all the Chatalja position--the range of hills stretching from
the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmora, along which the Bulgarians were
entrenched, and, beyond the invisible valley, the second range which
held the Turkish defence. Over the Turkish lines, like a standard, shone
in the clear sky a crescent moon, within its tip a bright star. It
seemed an omen, an omen of good to the Turks. My Australian eye
instinctively sought for the Southern Cross ranged against it in the sky
in sign that the Christian standard held the Heavens too. I sought in
vain in those northern latitudes, shivered a little and, as though
arguing against a superstitious thought, said to myself: "But there is
the Great Bear."
For by this time I had come to sympathise thoroughly with the Bulgarian
army and its cause. The soldiers were such good fellows: their
steadiness, their sense of justice, their kindness were so remarkable.
Just an incident of the camp at Arjenli to illustrate this. It was on
the Friday night of November 15, and on the morrow we expected the
decisive battle of the war. At Arjenli (which was a little to the rear
of the Bulgarian lines) was the ammunition park of the artillery,
guarded by a small body of troops under Lieutenant-Colonel Tchobanoff.
Coming towards the front from Tchorlu, the fall of night and the
weariness of my horses had compelled me to halt at the village, and this
officer and Dr. Neytchef gave me a warm welcome to their little Mess.
There are six members, and for all, to sleep and to eat, one room. Three
are officers, three have no commissions. With this nation in arms that
is not an objection to a common table. Discipline is strict, but
officers and soldiers are men and brothers when out of the ranks. Social
position does not govern military position. I found sometimes the
University professor and the bank manager without commissions, the
peasant proprietor an officer. The whole nation had poured out its
manhood for the war, from farm, field, factory, shop, bank, university,
and consulting-room.
Here at Arjenli on the eve of the decisive battle, I think over early
incidents of the campaign. It is a curious fact that in all Bulgaria I
have met but one man who was young enough and well enough to fight and
who had not enlisted. He had become an American subject, I believe, and
so could not be compelled to serve. In America he had learned to be an
"International Socialist," and so he did not volunteer. I believe he was
unique. With half the population of London, Bulgaria had put 350,000
trained men under arms.
We eat our simple meal of goat's flesh stewed with rice. Then, smoking
cigarettes made of the tobacco of the district, Colonel Tchobanoff and I
talk over the position as well as my bad French will allow. He is serene
and cheerful. His chief care is to impress upon me the fact that in
making war the Bulgarians had not been influenced by dynastic
considerations nor by military ambition. It was a war dictated not by a
Court circle or a military clique, but by the irresistible wish of the
people.
Whilst we were talking the sound of a rifle shot came up from the
village. A junior officer was sent out to make inquiries. Soon he
returned with two soldiers leading between them a Turkish prisoner.
I learn the facts. The Turk had tried to rush past a sentry standing
guard over the ammunition park. The sentry had fired, had not hit the
man, but had grappled with him afterwards and taken him prisoner.
I nerved myself to see the Turk shot out of hand. The rules of war
warranted it. He had tried to rush a sentry on guard over an important
military station. But the Bulgarian officers decided to hear his story,
and a kind of informal court-martial was constituted. The proceedings,
which were in Turkish, were translated to me, as I was acting in a way
as friend of the accused to "see fair play."
The Turk's story was clear enough. He had lived in Arjenli all his life
and was not a soldier. When the Turkish army had evacuated the district
he had not left with them, but had stayed in his old village. That night
he had gone out of his hut to the village well. Returning, a sentry had
challenged him, and he had become frightened and tried to run away.
It was clear that the man was telling the truth. The Bulgarians believed
him, and let him go with a warning. This showed justice and courage, and
a good "nerve" too. In some armies, I suspect, the Turk would have been
shot, or hanged first and left to explain afterwards, if he could. And
this was among the Bulgarians, who some insist are a bloodthirsty,
cut-throat race, with no sense of justice or of mercy!