Fleet Street in the days before the declaration of war was like the
nerve center of the nation’s psychology, and throbbed with all the
emotions of fear, hysteria, incredulity, and patriotic fever, deadened
at times by a kind of intellectual stupor, which took possession of her
people.
It was self-convicted of stupendous ignorance. None of those leader
writers, who for years had written with an immense assumption of
knowledge, had revealed this imminence of the world conflict. Some of
them had played a game of party politics with “the German menace,” and
had used it as a stick for their political opponents. _The Daily Mail_,
favoring a big navy, and more capital ships, had led the chorus of “We
want eight and we won’t wait.” _The Daily News_, favoring disarmament,
had denied the existence of any aggressive spirit in Germany. According
to the political color of the newspapers, Liberal or Tory, the question
of German relations had been written up by the leader writers and news
had been carefully selected by the foreign news editors. But the public
had never been given any clear or authoritative guidance; they had
never been warned by the press as a whole, rising above the political
game, that the very life of the nation was in jeopardy, and that all
they had and were would be challenged to the death. Murder trials,
suffragette raids, divorce court news, the social whirligig, the
passionate folly in Ireland, had been the stuff with which the press
had fed the public mind to the very eve of this crash into the abyss of
horror.
Even now, when war was certain, the press said, “It is impossible!” as
indeed the nation did, in its little homes, because their imagination
refused to admit the possibility of that monstrous cataclysm. And when
war was declared, the press said, “It will be over in three months.”
Indeed, men I knew in Fleet Street, old colleagues of mine, said, “It
will be over in three weeks!” Their theory seemed to be that Germany
had gone mad and that with England, France, and Russia attacking on all
sides, she would collapse like a pricked bladder.
Looking back on that time, I find a little painful amusement in the
thought of our immeasurable ignorance as to the meaning of modern
warfare. We knew just nothing about its methods or machinery, nor about
its immensity of range and destruction.
After the first shock and stupor, news editors began to get busy, as
though this war were going to be like the South-African affair, remote,
picturesque, and romantic. They appointed a number of correspondents to
“cover” the various fronts. They engaged press photographers and cinema
men. War correspondents of the old school, like Bennett Burleigh, H. W.
Nevinson, and Frederick Villiers, called at the War Office for their
credentials, collected their kit, and took riding exercise in the Park,
believing that they would need horses in this war on the western front,
as great generals--dear simple souls--believed that cavalry could ride
through German trenches.
The War Office kept a little group of distinguished old-time war
correspondents kicking their heels in waiting rooms of Whitehall,
week after week, and month after month, always with the promise that
wonderful arrangements would be made for them “shortly.” Meanwhile, and
at the very outbreak of war, a score of younger journalists, without
waiting for War Office credentials, and disobeying War Office orders,
dashed over to France and Belgium, and plunged into the swirl and
backwash of this frightful drama. Some of them had astounding and
perilous adventures, in sheer ignorance, at first, of the hazards they
took, but it was not long before they understood and knew, with a shock
that changed their youthful levity of adventure into the gravity of men
who have looked into the flames of hell, and the torture chamber of
human agony. Henceforth, between them and those who had not seen, there
was an impassable gulf of understanding....
Owing to the rigid refusal of the War Office, under Lord Kitchener’s
orders, to give any official credentials to correspondents, the
British press, as hungry for news as the British public whose little
professional army had disappeared behind a deathlike silence, printed
any scrap of description, any glimmer of truth, any wild statement,
rumor, fairy tale, or deliberate lie, which reached them from France or
Belgium; and it must be admitted that the liars had a great time.
A vast amount of lying was done by newspaper men who accepted the
official statements of French Ministers, hiding the frightful truth of
the German advance. It was an elaboration of the French _communiqués_
which in the first weeks of the war were devoid of truth. But a great
deal of imaginative lying was accomplished by young journalists, who
at Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk, Ghent, or Paris, invented marvelous
adventures of their own, exaggerated affairs of outposts into
stupendous battles, and defeated the Germans time and time again in
verbal victories, while the German war machine was driving like a knife
into the hearts of Belgium and France.
Reading the English newspapers in those early days of the war, with
their stories of starving Germany, their atrocity-mongering, their
wild perversions of truth, a journalist proud of his profession must
blush for shame at its degradation and insanity. Its excuse and defense
lie in the psychological storm that the war created in the soul of
humanity, from which Fleet Street itself--very human--did not escape;
in the natural agony of desire to find some reason for hopefulness; in
the patriotic necessity of preventing despair from overwhelming popular
opinion in the first shock of the enemy’s advance; and in the desperate
anxiety of all men and women whose heritage and liberties were at
stake, to get some glimpse behind the heavy shutters of secrecy that
had been slammed down by military censorship.
I was one of those who did not wait for official permits, and plunged
straightway into the vortex of the war game. In self-defense I
must plead that I was not one of the liars! I did not manufacture
atrocities, and had some temperamental difficulty in believing those
that were true, because I believed in the decency of the common
man, even in the decency of the German common man. I did not invent
imaginary adventures, but found tragedy enough, and drama enough, in
the things I saw, and the truth that I found. As I had two companions
most of the time in those early days, whose honor is acknowledged by
all who know them--H. M. Tomlinson and W. M. Massey--their evidence
supported my own articles which, like theirs, revealed something to our
people of the enormous history that was happening.
Strangely, as it now seems to me, I was appointed artist correspondent
to _The Graphic_, as I had been in the Bulgarian war, and I actually
made some sketches of French mobilization and preparations for war,
which were redrawn and published. But my old paper, _The Daily
Chronicle_, desired my services and I changed over to them, and
abandoned the pencil for the pen, with _The Graphic’s_ consent, a few
days after the declaration of war.
I had crossed over to Paris on the night the reservists had been called
to the colors in England, although so far war had not been declared by
England or France. But the fleet was cleared for action, and ready,
and that night destroyers were out in the English Channel and their
searchlights swept our packet boat, where groups of Frenchmen who
had been clerks, hairdressers, and shop assistants in England were
singing “The Marseillaise” with a kind of religious ecstasy, while
in the saloon a party of Lancashire lads were getting fuddled and
promising themselves “a good time” on a week-end trip to Paris, utterly
unconscious of war and its realities.
In _The Daily Chronicle_ office in Paris, where I had done night duty
so often, my friend and colleague, Henri Bourdin, was white to the lips
with nervous emotion, and constantly answered telephonic inquiries from
French journalists: “Is England coming in? Nothing official, eh? Is it
certain England will come in? You think so? Name of God! why doesn’t
England say the word?”
It was the consuming thought in all French minds. They were desperate
for an answer to their questions. Because of the delay, Paris was
suspicious, angry, ready for an outbreak of passion against the English
tourists, who were besieging the railway stations, and against English
journalists, who were in a fever of anxiety.
I saw the unforgetable scenes of mobilization in Paris, which made
one’s very heart weep with the tragedy of those partings between men
and women, who clung to each other and kissed for the last time--so
many of them for the last time--and on the night of August 2nd I went
with the first trainload of reservists to Belfort, Toul, and Nancy. All
through the night, at every station in which the train stopped, there
was the sound of marching men, and the song of “The Marseillaise”:
“_Formez vos bataillons!_”
The youth of France was trooping from the fields and workshops,
not in ignorance of the sacrifice to which they were called, not
light-heartedly, but with a simple and splendid devotion to their
country which now, in remembrance, after the years of massacre and of
disillusion, still fills me with emotion....
I do not intend here to give a narrative of my own experiences of war.
I have written them elsewhere, and what do they matter, anyhow, in
those years when millions of men faced death daily and passed through
an adventure of life beyond all power of imagination of civilized men?
I will rather deal with the subject of the Press in war, and with the
peculiar difficulties and work of the correspondents, especially in the
early days.
For the first few months of the war we had no status whatever. Indeed,
to be quite plain, we were outlaws, subject to immediate arrest (and
often arrested) by any officer, French or British, who discovered us in
the war zone. Kitchener refused to sanction the scheme, which had been
fully prepared before the war, for the appointment of a small body of
war correspondents whose honor and reputation were acknowledged, and
gave orders that any journalist found in the field of war should be
instantly expelled and have his passport canceled. The French were even
more severe, and sent out stern orders from their General Headquarters
for the arrest of any journalist found trespassing in the zone of war.
For some time, however, it was impossible to enforce these rules. The
German advance through Belgium and Northern France was only a day or
two, or an hour or two behind the stampede of vast populations in
flight from the enemy. The roads were filled with these successive
tides of refugees. The trains were stormed by panic-stricken folk,
and even the troop trains found room in the corridors and on the
roofs for swarms of civilians, men and women. Dressed in civilian
clothes, unshaved and unwashed, like any of these people, how could a
correspondent be distinguished or arrested? Who was going to bother
about him? Even the spy mania which seized France very quickly and
feverishly did not create, for some time, a network of restriction
close enough to catch us. I traveled for weeks in the war zone on a
pass stamped by French headquarters, permitting me to receive the daily
_communiqué_ from the War Office in Paris. I had dozens of other passes
and _permis de séjour_ from local authorities and police, which enabled
me to travel with perfect facility, provided I was able to bluff the
military guards at the railway stations, who were generally satisfied
with those bunches of dirty passes and official-looking stamps. There
was, too, a dual control in France, and a divergence of views regarding
war correspondents. The civil authorities--prefects, mayors, and
police--favored our presence, desired to let us know the suffering and
heroism of their people, and welcomed us with every courtesy, because
we were English and their allies. Often they turned a blind eye to
military commands, or were ignorant of the orders against us.
Massey, Tomlinson, and I, working together in close comradeship, in
those first weeks of war, traveled in Northern France and Belgium
with what now seems to me an amazing freedom. We were caught up in
the tide of flight from French and Belgian cities. We saw the retreat
of the French army through Amiens, from which city we escaped only a
short time before the entry of Von Kluck’s columns. We came into the
midst of the British retreat at Creil, where Sir John French had set
up his headquarters; mingled with the crowds of English and Scottish
stragglers, French infantry and engineers, who were falling back on
Paris, before the spearheads of the German invasion, with a world of
tragedy behind them, yet with a faith in victory that was mysterious
and sublime. We had no knowledge of the enemy’s whereabouts and set
out in simple ignorance for towns already in German hands, or alighted
at stations threatened with immediate capture. So it was at Beauvais,
where we were the only passengers in a train that pulled over a bridge
where a cuirassier stood by bags of dynamite ready to blow it up, and
where the last of the civilian population had trudged away from streets
strewn with broken glass. Only by a strange spell of luck did we escape
capture by the enemy, toward whose line we went, partly in ignorance
of the enormous danger, partly with foolhardy deliberation, and always
drugged with desire to see and know the worst or the best of this
frightful drama.
We were often exhausted with fatigue. On the day we came into a
deserted Paris, stricken with an agony of apprehension that the Germans
would enter, I had to be carried to bed by Tomlinson and Massey, as
helpless as a child. A few days later, Massey, a strong man till then,
but now ashen-faced and weak, could not drag one leg after another. We
had worn down our nervous strength to what seemed like the last strand,
yet we went on again, in the wagons of troop trains, sleeping in
corridors, the baggage rooms of railway stations, or carriages crammed
with French _poilus_, who told narratives of war with a simplicity and
realism that froze one’s blood.
We followed up the German retreat from the Marne, when the bodies
of the dead were being buried in heaps and the fields were littered
with the wreckage of battle, and then went north to Dunkirk, bombed
every day by German aëroplanes, but crowded with French _fusiliers_,
_marins_, Arabs, British aviators of the Royal Navy, and Belgian
refugees. Here I parted for a time with Massey and Tomlinson, and in
a brief experience as a stretcher bearer with an ambulance column
attached to the Belgian army, saw into the flaming heart of war, at
Dixmude, Nieuport, and other places, where I became familiar with the
sight of death, dirty with the blood of wounded men, and sick with the
agony of this human shambles--a story which I have told in my book,
_The Soul of the War_.
Other men, old friends of mine in Fleet Street, were having similar
adventures, taking the same, or greater, hazards, dodging the military
authorities with more or less luck. Hamilton Fyfe, then of _The Daily
Mail_ and now editor of _The Daily Herald_, was caught in a motor car
by a patrol of German Uhlans, and only escaped becoming a prisoner of
war by an amazing freak of fortune. George Curnock, also of _The Daily
Mail_, was arrested by the French as a spy, and very nearly shot. A
little group of correspondents--among them Ashmead Bartlett--were flung
into the _Cherche Midi_ prison and treated for a time like common
criminals. I happened to fall into conversation with a French officer,
who had actually arrested them. He was strongly suspicious of me, and
asked whether I knew these gentlemen, all of whose names he had in
his pocket book. I admitted that I had heard of one or two of them by
repute, and expected to be arrested on the spot. But this officer had
been French master at an English public school and was anxious, for
some reason, to get an uncensored letter to the head master. I told him
I was going to England, and offered to take it.... I was not arrested
that time.
Another adventurer was young Lucian Jones, son of the famous
playwright, Henry Arthur Jones. He made frequent trips to the Belgian
front and was one of the last to leave Antwerp after the siege, which
was not a pleasant adventure when heavy shells smashed the houses on
every side of him. As he made no disguise whatever of his profession
and purpose, he was sent back to England and forbidden to show his face
again. He took the next boat back, and was again arrested and flung
into a dirty prison. His editor, who received word of his plight, sent
a message to General Bridges, asking for his release, and obtained the
brusque answer, “Let the fellow rot!”--only it was a stronger word than
“fellow.”
One great difficulty we had in those days was to get our messages
back to our newspapers. Sometimes we intrusted them to any chance
acquaintance who was making his way to England. Several times we
had to get back to the coast, in those terrible refugee trains, to
bribe some purser on a cross-Channel steamer. When that became too
dangerous--because it was strictly forbidden by the military and
naval authorities--we made the journey to London, handed in our
messages, and hurried back again the same day to France. The mental
state of our newspaper colleagues exasperated us. They seemed to have
no understanding whatever of what was happening on the other side,
no conception of that world of agony. “Had a good time?” asked a
sub-editor, hurrying along the corridor with proofs--and I wanted to
choke him, because of his placid unconsciousness of the things that had
seared my eyes and soul.
I could not bear to talk with men who still said, “It will be over in
three months,” and who still believed that war was a rather jolly,
romantic adventure, and that our little professional army was more
than a match for the Germans who were arrant cowards and no better
than sheep. In Fleet Street, at that time, there was no vision of what
war meant to the women of France and Belgium, to the children of the
refugees, to the mothers and fathers of the fighting men. It had not
touched us closely in those first weeks of war.
My vexation was great one morning, after one of these journeys home,
when I missed the train to Dover, and my good comrades Massey and
Tomlinson--by just a minute. Perhaps I should never see them again.
They would be lost in the vortex.
“Take a special train,” said my wife.
The idea startled me, not having the mentality or resources of a
millionaire.
“It’s worth it,” said my wife, who is a woman of big ideas.
I turned to the station master, who was standing at the closed gates of
the continental platform.
“How long would it take you to provide a special train?”
He smiled.
“No longer than it would take you to pay over the money.”
“How much?”
“Twenty-two pounds.”