The four and a half years of war were, of course, to me, as to all men
who passed through that time, the most stupendous experience of life.
It obliterated all other adventures, impressions, and achievements. I
went into the war youthful in ideas and sentiment. I came out of it old
in the knowledge of human courage and endurance and suffering by masses
of men, and utterly changed, physically and mentally. Romance had given
way to realism, sentiment of a weak kind to deeper knowledge and pity
and emotion.
Our life as war correspondents was not to be compared for a moment in
hardness and danger and discomfort to that of the fighting men in the
trenches. Yet it was not easy nor soft, and it put a tremendous, and
sometimes almost intolerable, strain upon our nerves and strength,
especially if we were sensitive, as most of us were, to the constant
sight of wounded and dying men, to the never-ending slaughter of our
country’s youth, to the grim horror of preparations for battle which we
knew would cause another river of blood to flow, and to the desolation
of that world of ruin through which we passed day by day, on the
battlefields and in the rubbish heaps which had once been towns and
villages.
We saw, more than most men the wide sweep of the drama of war on the
Western front. The private soldier and the battalion officer saw the
particular spot which he had to defend, knew in his body and soul the
intimate detail of his trench, his dugout, the patch of No-Man’s Land
beyond his parapet, the stink and filth of his own neighborhood with
death, the agony of his wounded pals. But we saw the war in a broader
vision, on all parts of the front, in its tremendous mass effects, as
well as in particular places of abomination. Before battle we saw the
whole organization of that great machine of slaughter. After battle we
saw the fields of dead, the spate of wounded men, the swirling traffic
of ambulances, the crowded hospitals, the herds of prisoners, the
length and breadth of this frightful melodrama in a battle zone forty
miles or more in length and twenty miles or more in depth.
The effect of such a vision, year in, year out, can hardly be
calculated in psychological effect, unless a man has a mind like a
sieve and a soul like a sink.
Our headquarters were halfway between the front and G.H.Q., and we were
visitors of both worlds. In our château, wherever we might be--and we
shifted our locality according to the drift of battle--we were secluded
and remote from both these worlds. But we set out constantly to the
front--every day in time of active warfare--through Ypres, if Flanders
was aflame, or through Arras, if that were the focal point, or out from
Amiens to Bapaume and beyond, where the Somme was the hunting ground,
or up by St. Quentin to the right of the line. There was no part of the
front we did not know, and not a ruined village in all the fighting
zone through which we did not pass scores of times, or hundreds of
times.
We trudged through the trenches, sat in dugouts with battalion
officers, followed our troops in their advance over German lines,
explored the enemy dugouts, talked with German prisoners as they
tramped back after capture or stood in herds of misery in their
“cages,” walked through miles of guns, and beyond the guns, saw
the whole sweep and fury of great bombardments, took our chance of
harassing fire and sudden “strafes,” climbed into observation posts,
saw attacks and counterattacks, became familiar with the detail of the
daily routine of warfare on the grand scale, such as, in my belief,
the world will never see again.
We were visitors, also, to the other world--the world behind the lines,
in G.H.Q., in Army Corps and Divisional Headquarters, in training
schools and camps, and casualty clearing stations and billets in the
“rest” areas, remote from the noise and filth of battle. From the
private soldier standing by a slimy parapet to the Commander-in-Chief
in his comfortable château, we studied all the psychological strata of
the British armies in France, as few other men had the chance of doing.
But all the time we were between two worlds, and belonged to neither,
and though I think our job was worth doing (and the spirit of the
people would have broken if we had not done it) we felt at times (or
I did) that the only honest job was to join the fighting men and die
like the best of British manhood did. Our risks were not enough to
make us honest when so many were being killed, though often we had the
chance of death. So it seemed to me, often, then; so it seems to me,
sometimes, now.
We had wonderful facilities for our work. Each man had a motor car,
which gave him complete mobility. On days of battle we five drew lots
as to the area we would cover, and with one of the censors, who were,
as I have said, our best comrades, set out to the farthest point at
which we could leave a car without having it blown to bits. Then often
we walked, to get a view of the battlefield, amid the roar of our own
guns, and in the litter of newly captured ground. We got as far as
possible into the traffic of supporting troops, advancing guns, meeting
the long straggling processions of “walking wounded,” bloody and
bandaged prisoners, stepping over the mangled bodies of men, watching
the fury of shell fire from our own massed artillery, and the enemy’s
barrage fire.
Then we had to call at Corps Headquarters--our daily routine--for the
latest reports, and after many hours, motor back again to our own
place to write fast and furiously. Dispatch riders took our messages
(censored by the men who had been out with us that day) back to
“Signals” at G.H.Q., from which they were telephoned back to the War
Office in London, who transmitted them to the newspapers.
The War Office had no right of censorship, and our dispatches were
untouched after they had left our quarters. Nor were our newspapers
allowed to alter or suppress any word we wrote.
It may surprise many people to know that we were not in the employ of
our own newspapers. The dispatches of the five men on the Western front
(apart from special Canadian and Australian correspondents attached to
their own Corps) were distributed by arrangement with the War Office to
all countries within the Empire, under the direction of an organization
known as The Newspaper Proprietors Association, who shared our expenses.
From first to last we were read, greedily and attentively by millions
of readers, but I tell the painful truth when I say that many of
them were suspicious of our accounts and firmly believed that we
concealed much more than we told. That distrust was due, partly, to
the heavy-handed censorship in the early days of the war, when our
first accounts were mutilated. Afterward, when the censorship was very
light so that nothing was deleted except very technical detail and, too
often, the names of battalions, that early suspicion lasted.
During long spells of trench warfare, without any great battles but
with steady and heavy casualties, the British public suspected that we
were hiding enormous events. They could not believe that so many men
could be killed unless big actions were in progress. Also, when great
battles had been fought, and we had recorded many gains, in prisoners
and guns, and trench positions, the lack of decisive result seemed to
give the lie to our optimism.
Again, the cheerful way in which one or two of the correspondents
wrote, as though a battle was a kind of glorified football match,
exasperated the troops who knew their own losses, and the public who
agonized over that great sum of death and mutilation.
Personally, I cannot convict myself of overcheerfulness or the
minimizing of the tragic side of war, for, by temperament as well as
by intellectual conviction, I wrote always with heavy stress on the
suffering and tragedy of warfare, though I coerced my soul to maintain
the spiritual courage of the nation and the fighting men--sometimes
when my own spirit was dark with despair.
To our mess, between the two worlds, came visitors from both. It was
our special pleasure to give a lift in one of our Vauxhalls to some
young officer of the fighting line and bring him to our little old
château or one of our billets behind the lines and help him to forget
the filth and discomfort of trenches and dugouts by a good dinner in
a good room. They were grateful for that, and we had many friends in
the infantry, cavalry, Tank corps, machine guns, field artillery and
“heavies” to whom we gave this hospitality.
When Neville Lytton became our chief, we even rose to the height of
having a military band to play to our guests after dinner on certain
memorable nights, and I remember a little French interpreter, himself a
fine musician, who, on one of those evenings when our salon was crowded
with officers tapping heel and toe to the music, raised his hands in
ecstasy and said, “This is like one of the wars of the eighteenth
century when slaughter did not prevent elegance and the courtesies of
life.”
But in the morning there was the same old routine of setting out for
the stricken fields, the same old vision of mangled men streaming
back from battle, prisoners huddled like tired beasts, and shell fire
ravaging the enemy’s line, and ours.
Army, Corps, and Divisional Generals, occasionally some tremendous
man from G.H.Q., like our supreme chief, General Charteris, favored
us with their company, and discussed every aspect of the war with us
without reserve. Their old hostility had utterly disappeared, their old
suspicion was gone, and for three years we possessed their confidence
and their friendship.
In a book of mine--“Realities of War,” published in the United States
under the title of “Now It Can Be Told”--I have been a critic of the
Staff, and have said some hard and cruel things about the blundering
and inefficiency of its system. But for many of the Generals and Staff
officers in their personal character I had nothing but admiration and
esteem. Their courage and devotion to duty, their patriotism and honor,
were beyond criticism, and they were gentlemen of the good old school,
with, for the most part, a simplicity of mind and manner which doesn’t,
perhaps, belong to our present time. Yet I could not help thinking, as
I still think, that those elderly gentlemen who had been trained in
the South-African school of warfare, had been confronted with problems
in another kind of war which were beyond their imagination and range
of thought or experience. Even that verdict, however, which is true,
I believe, of the High Command, must be modified in favor of men who
created a New Army, marvelously perfect as a machine. Our artillery,
our transport, our medical service, our training, were highly
efficient, as the Germans themselves admitted. The machine was as good
as an English-built engine, and marvelous when one takes into account
its rapid and enormous growth in an untrained nation. It was in the
handling of the machine that criticism finds an open field--and it’s an
easy game, anyhow!
Apart from Generals, staff officers, and battalion officers who came to
our mess, there were other visitors, now and then, from that remote
world which had been ours before the war--the civilian world of England.
During the latter part of the war all sorts of strange people were
invited out for a three-days’ tour behind the lines, with a glimpse
or two of the battlefields, in the belief that they would go back as
propagandists for renewed effort and strength of purpose and “the will
to win.” A guest house was established near G.H.Q., to which were
invited politicians, labor leaders, distinguished writers, bishops, and
representatives of neutral countries.
In their three-days’ visit they did not see very much of “the real
thing,” but enough to show them the wonderful spirit of the fighting
men and the enormous organization required for their support, and the
unbroken strength of the enemy. Now and then these visitors to the
guest house came over to our mess, more interested to meet us, I think,
than Generals and officers at the Base, because they could get from us,
in a more intimate way, the truth about the war and its progress.
Among those apparitions from civil life, I remember, particularly,
Bernard Shaw, because it was due to a freakish suggestion of mine that
he had been invited out. It seemed to me that Shaw, of all men, would
be useful for propaganda, if the genius of his pen were inspired by the
valor and endurance of our fighting men. Anyhow, he would, I thought,
tell the truth about the things he saw, with deeper perception of its
meaning than any other living writer.
Bernard Shaw, in a rough suit of Irish homespun, and with his beard
dank in the wet mist of Flanders, appeared suddenly to my friend
Tomlinson as a ghost from the pre-war past. His first words were in the
nature of a knock-out blow.
“Hullo, Tomlinson! Are all war correspondents such bloody fools as they
make themselves out to be?”
The answer was in the negative, but could not avoid an admission, like
the answer yes or no to that legal trick of questioning: “Have you
given up beating your wife?”
Bernard Shaw was invited, by suggestion amounting to orders from
G.H.Q., to lunch with various Generals at their headquarters. I
accompanied him two or three times, and could not help remarking the
immense distinction of his appearance and manners in the company of
those simple soldiers. Intellectually, of course, he was head and
shoulders above them, and he could not resist shocking them, now and
then, by his audacity of humor.
So it was when an old General who had sat somewhat silent in his
presence (resentful that this “wild Irishman” should have been thrust
upon his mess) enquired mildly how long he thought the war would last.
“Well, General,” said Shaw, with a twinkle in his eye, “we’re all
anxious for an early and dishonorable peace!”
The General’s cheeks were slightly empurpled, and he was silent,
wondering what he could make of this treasonable utterance, but there
was a loud yelp of laughter from his A.D.C.’s at the other end of the
table.
Before entering the city of Arras, in which shells were falling
intermittently, Shaw, whose plays and books had had a great vogue in
Germany, remarked with sham pathos, “Well, if the Germans kill me
to-day, they will be a most ungrateful people!”
I accompanied him on various trips he made--there was “nothing doing”
on the front just then, and he did not see the real business of
war--and in conversation with him was convinced of the high-souled
loyalty of the man to the Allied Cause. His sense of humor was only a
playful mask, and though he was a Pacifist in general principles, he
realized that the only course possible after the declaration of war was
to throw all the energy of the nation into the bloody struggle, which
must be one of life or death to the British race.
“There is no need of censorship,” he told me; “while the war lasts we
must be our own censors. All one’s ideas of the war are divided into
two planes of thought which never meet. One plane deals with the folly
and wickedness of war. The other plane is the immediate necessity of
beating the Boche.”
He has surprising technical knowledge of aviation, and talked with our
young aviators on equal terms regarding the science of flight. He was
also keenly interested in artillery work. Unfortunately his articles,
written as a result of his visit, were not very successful, and the
very title, “Joy-riding at the Front,” offended many people who would
not tolerate levity regarding a war whose black tragedy darkened all
their spirit.
Sir J. M. Barrie was another brief visitant. He dined at our mess one
night, intensely shy, ill-at-ease until our welcome reassured him, and
painfully silent. Only one gleam of the real Barrie appeared. It was
when one of my colleagues asked him to write something in the visitors’
book. He thought gloomily for a moment, and then wrote: “_Beware of
a dark woman with a big appetite_.” The meaning of this has kept us
guessing ever since.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a great sensation along the roads
of Flanders when he appeared for a few days, not because the
troops recognized him as the writer of Sherlock Holmes and other
favorite books, but because he looked more important than the
Commander-in-Chief, and more military than a Field Marshal. He wore the
uniform of a County Lieutenant, with a “brass hat,” so heavy with gold
lace, and epaulettes so resplendent, that even Colonels and Brigadiers
saluted him as he passed.
John Masefield was more than a three-days’ guest. After his beautiful
book “Gallipoli,” he was asked to study the Somme battlefields from
which the enemy had then retreated, and to write an epic story of those
tremendous battles in which the New Armies had fought the enemy yard
by yard, trench by trench, wood by wood, ridge by ridge, through twenty
miles deep of earthworks, until, after enormous slaughter on both
sides, the enemy’s resistance had been broken.
Masefield arrived late on the scene, and was only able to study the
ground after the line of battle had moved forward, and to get the
stories of the survivors. I had had the advantage of him there, as an
eyewitness of the tremendous struggle in all its phases and over all
that ground. When I republished my daily narrative in book form under
the title of “The Battles of the Somme,” Masefield abandoned his plan,
and so deprived English literature of what I am certain would have
been a deathless work. All he published was an introduction, which he
called “The Old Front Line,” in which, with most beautiful vision, he
described the geographical aspects of that ground on which the flower
of our British youth fell in six weeks of ceaseless and terrible effort.
I met Masefield at that time. He was billeted at Amiens with Lytton’s
wild team of foreign correspondents. They were all talking French,
arguing, quarreling, gesticulating, noisily and passionately, and
Masefield sat silent among them, with a look of misery and long
suffering.
The most important visitor from the outside world whom we had in our
own mess was Lloyd George, then Minister for War. He came with Lord
Reading, the Lord Chief Justice of England. Like most other visitors,
they did not get very far into the zone of fire, and it would, of
course, have been absurd to take Lloyd George into dangerous places
where he might have lost his life. He did, however, get within reach of
long-range shells, and I remember seeing him emerge from an old German
dugout wearing a “tin hat” above his somewhat exuberant white locks.
Some Tommies standing near remarked his somewhat unusual appearance.
“Who’s that bloke?” asked one of them.
“Blimy!” said the other. “It looks like the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
The visit of Lloyd George was regarded with some suspicion by the
High Command. “He’s up to some mischief, I’ll be bound,” said one of
our Generals in my hearing. It was rumored that his relations with
Sir Douglas Haig were not very cordial, and I was personally aware,
after a breakfast meal in Downing Street, that Lloyd George had no
great admiration of British Generalship. But it was amusing to see
how quickly he captured them all by his geniality, quickness of
wit, and nimble intelligence, and by the apparent simplicity in his
babe-blue eyes. Officers who had alluded to him as “the damned little
Welshman,” were clicking heels and trying to get within the orbit of
his conversation.
He was particularly friendly and complimentary to the war
correspondents. I think he felt more at ease with us, and was, I think,
genuinely appreciative of our work. Anyhow, he went out of his way
to pay a particular compliment to me when, in 1917, Robert Donald of
_The Daily Chronicle_, was kind enough to give a dinner in my honor.
The Prime Minister attended the dinner, with General Smuts, and made a
speech in which he said many generous things about my work. It was the
greatest honor ever given to a Fleet-Street man, and I was glad of it,
not only for my own sake, but because it was a tribute to the work of
the war correspondents--handicapped as they were by many restrictions,
and by general distrust.
I had an opportunity that night of saying things I wanted to say to the
Prime Minister and his colleagues, and the memory of the men in the
trenches, and of the wounded, gassed, and blinded men crawling down to
the field hospitals, gave me courage and some gift of words.... I do
not regret the things I said, and their emotional effect upon the Prime
Minister.
At that time, I confess, I did not see any quick or definite ending
to the war. After the frightful battles in Flanders of 1917, with
their colossal sum of slaughter on both sides, the enemy was still in
great strength. Russia had broken, and it was inevitable that masses
of German troops, liberated from that front, would be brought against
us. America was still unready and untrained, though preparing mighty
legions.
There was another year for the war correspondents to record day by
day, with as much hope as they could muster, when in March of ’18 our
line was broken for a time by the tremendous weight of the last German
attack, and with increasing exaltation and enormous joy when at last
the tide turned and the enemy was on the run and the end was in sight.
That last year crammed into its history the whole range of human
emotion, and as humble chroniclers the small body of war correspondents
partook of the anguish and the exaltation of the troops who marched at
last to the Rhine.
The coming of the Americans, the genius of Foch in supreme command,
the immortal valor of the British and French troops, first in retreat
and then in advance, the liberation of many great cities, the smashing
of the German war machine, and the great surrender, make that last
year of the war unforgettable in history. I have told it all in
detail elsewhere. Here I am only concerned with the work of the war
correspondents, and the supreme experience I had in journalistic
adventure.
On the whole we may claim, I think, that our job was worth doing, and
not badly done. Some of us, at least, did not spare ourselves to learn
the truth and tell it as far as it lay in our vision and in our power
of words. During the course of the battles it was not possible to tell
all the truth, to reveal the full measure of slaughter on our side, and
we had no right of criticism. But day by day the English-speaking world
was brought close in spiritual touch with their fighting men, and knew
the best, if not the worst, of what was happening in the field of war,
and the daily record of courage, endurance, achievement, by the youth
that was being spent with such prodigal unthrifty zeal.
I verily believe that without our chronicles the spirit of the nation
would not have maintained its greatness of endeavor and sacrifice.
There are some who hold that to be the worst accusation against us.
They charge us with having bolstered up the spirit of hatred and made a
quicker and a better peace impossible. I do not plead guilty to that,
for, from first to last no word of hate slipped into my narrative, and
my pictures of war did not hide the agony of reality nor the price of
victory.