HOLT WHITE'S STORY OF SEDAN AND HOW IT
REACHED THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE
I pass over the interval between Worth and Sedan, crowded as it was
with events, stopping only to remark that _The Tribune_ was indebted
to an American writer on _The Daily News_ for its account of
Gravelotte, but not to _The Daily News_ except for the opportunity of
buying that account, at a high price. There was an entangling
alliance which forbade _The Daily News_ to hand it over to _The
Tribune_, but did not prevent the correspondent of that paper from
selling it. I am not sure whether the name of the writer is known
but in the circumstances it is not for me to disclose it. The
narrative was, of course, cabled to _The Tribune_ at once.
Gravelotte was fought on the 18th of August. The account of the
battle reached New York, I think, on the 21st. It was, at any rate,
the first, and for some time the only narrative published. The
defeated French called it the battle of Rézonville, and under that
name was this description first printed. From a military point of
view the account had no great value, but it was picturesquely written
and in those {236} difficult days anything from the field was eagerly
read.
Greater days were at hand. The battle of Sedan was fought on
Thursday, September 1st, 1870, followed by the surrender of the town,
the army, and the Emperor Napoleon on the day following. The news of
the catastrophe was not known in London till Saturday morning at ten
o'clock, and then only in the briefest form; the mere fact and not
much more; through the general Press agency; I suppose Reuter's. Mr.
Robinson wired me and I went to _The Daily News_ office. But the
bare news was of no great use for my purposes. I went back to _The
Tribune_ office in Pall Mall wondering what I was to do, and still
more what _The Tribune_ correspondent in the field were doing. I had
not long to wait. A dispatch arrived from Mr. Holt White saying he
should be in London that afternoon, and at five o'clock he walked
into the office.
Seldom have I been so glad to see any man's face as I was to see his,
but there was hardly so much as a greeting between us. I asked first:
"Is your dispatch ready?"
"Not a word of it written."
"Will you sit down at once and begin?"
"I cannot. I am dead tired, and have had no food since daybreak. I
must eat and sleep before I can write."
He looked it; a mere wreck of a correspondent, haggard, ragged,
dirty, incapable of the effort which nevertheless had to be made. It
was no {237} time to consider anybody's feelings. A continent was
waiting for the news locked up in that one man's brain, and somehow
or other the lock must be forced, the news told, and the waiting
continent supplied with what it wanted. Incidentally, it was such an
opportunity for _The Tribune_ as seldom had come to any newspaper.
It was necessary to use a little authority. I said to Mr. Holt White:
"You shall have something to eat, but sleep you cannot till you have
done your dispatch. That must be in New York to-morrow morning."
So we went over to the Pall Mall Restaurant, which was then in the
building now replaced by the Oceanic House, the headquarters of the
International Marine Navigation Company; if that be its name. Food
and drink refreshed him. We were back in _The Tribune_ office not
long after six and work began.
Mr. Holt White wrote one of the worst hands ever seen, so I said to
him I would copy as he wrote and my copy would go to the cable
operators. Bad or good, mine was a hand they were familiar with. We
sat opposite each other at the same table, and I copied sheet by
sheet till there was enough to give the cable a start, then took it
to the Anglo-American cable office in Telegraph Street. I went
myself for two reasons: first to make sure it was delivered, and
second to make sure it went without interruption. The latter,
indeed, was a point of which it was impossible, under the Weaver
régime, to make sure. But I {238} could at least hand in the message
over the counter. Many a message have I trusted myself and nobody
else with, and many a letter have I posted with my own hands;
everything, in fact, of importance ever since I had anything to do
with journalism. It is often inconvenient but I have found it a good
rule.
I dwell on these details. Few things in American journalism, the
Civil War excepted, have made more stir than this exploit of Mr. Holt
White. But the full credit which belongs to him he has never had.
Consider what he had done. He had been all through the battle; he
had been in the saddle all day from four o'clock in the morning till
nightfall. The battle over, he started for London. He rode with his
life in his hand. He had to pass the lines of three armies, the
Prussians who refused him a permit, the French outposts to the north
of Sedan, and the Belgians, who made a pretence of guarding their
frontier and the neutrality of Belgian territory. He could not
explain how he managed it. When he reached Brussels he thought it
might be possible to write there and to wire his account from
Brussels to London. But at the chief telegraph office in Brussels
the official in charge told him flatly he would accept no dispatch
relating to the war. The issue of the battle was unknown in
Brussels. Anything handed in for transmission to London or elsewhere
would be submitted first of all to the censor; and in Brussels, as
elsewhere, the censorship is a heart-rending business; delay
inevitable; and there was {239} no time for delay. It was, as I
explained in an earlier chapter, one reason why all correspondents
were directed to come straight to London where the censorship did not
exist. Mr. Holt White was soon satisfied that it was useless to try
to telegraph from Brussels, and he came on by train to Calais, missed
the Calais boat, caught a later one, which did not connect with the
Dover-London service, and, once at Dover, chartered a special train
to London and so at last arrived.
I asked him if any other correspondent had come with him. He thought
not; at any rate, no one whom he knew as correspondent and, of
course, no one came by the special train. Still, there was no
certainty. It was already two days since the sun had gone down on
the beaten French in sedan. There was nothing to do except to hurry
on the dispatch to New York.
With indomitable courage White wrote on. After a time I asked him if
he would rest a little before finishing.
"No," he said, "if I stop I shall go to sleep, and if I go to sleep I
shall not wake."
The man's pluck was a splendid thing to see. His answer was like the
answer of an Atlantic captain who, in the old days when there was no
telephone and designers had not learned how to make the captain's
cabin the nerve centre of the ship, had been for three days and
nights on the bridge. I asked him how he lived through it. He said
it was rather trying to the knees.
"But did you never sit down?"
{240}
"Oh, if I had sat down I should have gone to sleep."
There are heroisms of that kind in the routine of life, professional
and other, and even in the profession of journalism of which the
newspaper reader in the morning over his coffee and rolls never
thinks. But they are real and without them, and without the loyalty
and devotion of such men, there might sometimes be nothing for the
man with his coffee and rolls to read.
White sat at his table till midnight and later. It was nearer two
o'clock than one before the last of his message was filed in
Telegraph Street. Whether by Mr. Weaver's intervention or not I
cannot say, but there was a delay on the wires. The delay, I was
afterwards told, was on the Newfoundland land lines to New York. It
may be so. It was a message six columns long and not all of it
appeared in _The Tribune_ that next Sunday morning though all of it
had been filed in ample time; two o'clock in the morning in London
being only nine o'clock of the evening before in New York.
No matter. It was a clear, coherent, vivid battle story, and it was
the only one. No morning paper in London had any account of the
battle till the Tuesday following; and all New York accounts, _The
Tribune_ excepted, were from the London Press or Press agencies. It
is not worth while to recall the comments of _The Tribune's_ rivals.
They were angry, naturally enough, and they resorted to conjectures
which might as well {241} have been left unexpressed. It is enough
to explain further that Mr. Holt White's narrative did not appear in
_The Daily News_ because he had an agreement with _The Pall Mall
Gazette_. Part of this account, therefore, was printed in an
abridged form in _The Pall Mall_ of Monday, for which it was written
separately. _The Pall Mall_ is an evening paper, and when that was
cabled to New York and found to be obviously from the same source as
_The Tribune's_ the guesses grew wild. But the plain truth is now
told, and is simple enough.
Mr. Holt White was a journalist but not at that time a journalist of
any exceptional reputation or position. This, I think, was the first
very considerable thing he had done. I am sorry to have to add that
it was also the last. He was a man to whom, after such an
achievement as this, a long repose became necessary. He rejoined the
Prussian headquarters, spent the winter at Versailles, and during all
those months did practically nothing. Of his great gifts and
capacities he made no further use, even down to the end of his life,
and the end came early. But he is entitled to be remembered as a man
who at one supreme moment accomplished one of the most brilliant
exploits in the history of journalism. Let us judge him by his best,
and, so judged, his name must take its place with those of Russell,
McGahan, Forbes, Steevens, and others of that rank if there are any
others.
One more remark, to remind you how alien from {242} the mind of the
British journalist at that time was the free use of the telegraph,
which in America had become a thing of every day. When White sat
down to write he said to me: "I suppose I am to condense as much as
possible?"
"No, write fully."
"But it is going by cable."
"Yes."
"It will be some columns long."
"The longer the better."
He thought a little, then said:
"I still don't quite understand."
"Then please put the cable out of your mind, and write exactly as if
you were writing for a London paper and the printer's devil waiting."
And he did.
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