MR. BELLOC AND THE WAR
Having contrasted these two summaries, we will leave the reader to form
his own estimate of the nature of Mr. Belloc's work and of the
qualifications he brings to it. There remains to be determined the
measure of success which has attended Mr. Belloc's "attempt to give an
explanation of what is taking place." "There are many men," he says,
"who could do the same thing." On this point we cannot argue with Mr.
Belloc. He may know them: we do not. What we do know is that there are
many men who are trying to do the same thing. In saying this we have no
wish to belittle either individuals or as a class those courageous
gentlemen, among whom the best-known, perhaps, are Colonel Repington and
Colonel Maude, who are striving, and striving honestly, we believe, to
provide the readers of various papers with an intelligent explanation of
the courses taken by the different campaigns. Nor do we regard them as
in any way imitators of Mr. Belloc. We merely assert that no single one
of them is achieving his object so nearly as Mr. Belloc is achieving
his. This should not be understood to mean that the course of events has
proved Mr. Belloc to be right more often than it has proved his
contemporaries to be right, though if it were possible to collate all
the necessary evidence, such a statement might conceivably be proved
correct. This assertion should be understood, rather, to mean that no
single commentary on the war, regularly contributed to any journal or
newspaper, displays those merits of dispassionate honesty, detailed
explanation and lucid exposition in so marked a degree as does Mr.
Belloc's weekly commentary in _Land and Water_.
Were there any necessity to adduce proof of this it would be sufficient
to regard the great gulf fixed between the circulation of _Land and
Water_ and any other weekly journal of the same price. It is of greater
service, however, to realize how and why Mr. Belloc surpasses his
contemporaries than to waste space and time in proving what is already
an admitted fact. The two outstanding features of Mr. Belloc's work in
_Land and Water_--two of the most conspicuous features, indeed, as will
be seen in the course of this book, of all his work--are his fierce
sincerity and amazing lucidity. In this first characteristic we are
willing to believe that his respectable contemporaries equal though they
cannot surpass him. We will suppose, though we can find no signs of it,
that they equal him in that extraordinary combination of qualifications
acquired by study, travel and experience which he has been seen to
possess. Even then, all other things being supposed equal, they fall far
short of him in this quality of lucidity.
This is not merely the gift of the journalist to state things plainly.
It is the gift of the Latin races which Mr. Belloc was given at his
birth: it is the furnace of thought in which Mr. Belloc has forged his
prose style into a finely-tempered instrument.
Two of life's chief difficulties, it has often been said, are, first, to
think exactly, and, second, to give your thought exact expression. It is
the lot of the majority of men to know what they want to say but to be
unable to say it. Many men are shy of expressing their thoughts because
of the very present but indefinite feeling they have that their
thoughts, though real and sound in their minds, become in some
extraordinary way unreal and unsound when expressed. That this curious
transformation takes place we all know; newspaper reporters carry
incontestable evidence of it in their notebooks. Few public speakers,
indeed, realize how deeply in debt they are to reporters, who are
trained in the art of reproducing in their reports and conveying to the
public, not what the speaker said, but what he intended to say. And this
curious transformation of our thoughts in the process of expression from
reality to unreality, from sense to nonsense; this divergence between
thought and language; this disability under which we all labour, but
which so few of us overcome, which is so common among men as almost to
justify the jibe that "language was given to men to conceal their
thought," is due entirely, of course, to the insufficiency of our power
of expression. A speaker or writer is great in proportion as his power
of expression nears perfection.
According as we are satisfied to read in print what a writer says, and
do not find it necessary to read between the lines what he intended to
say, we may regard him as possessed of lucidity of thought and lucidity
of style.
Many of the ideas, emotions and actions to which Mr. Belloc has given
expression in his essays are so intimate a part of the collective
experience of man as to allow each one of us to see that he has
visualized and expressed them with exactness; and so to realize that he
possesses in his style a wonderful instrument.
With the aid of that instrument it has been said he can expose the
technicalities of a battle or the transformations of the human heart.
How great is the power of that instrument is at no time so generally
susceptible to proof as when it is seen applied to facts as in the
writings of Mr. Belloc on the war, which it is proposed to examine in
this chapter. But before we enter upon our examination of the nature and
influence of those writings, it may be well to emphasize their
importance as an example of style.
In his writings on the war, and more especially in his weekly chronicle
in _Land and Water_, Mr. Belloc is not expressing views or ideas of his
own; he is not writing in support of the thesis or argument; he is
stating facts. He is stating the facts of military science, which may be
found in a hundred books, side by side with the facts of the war, which
may be found in a thousand official _communiques_; and he is stating
both sets of facts, so that the one set is explanatory of the other set,
and so that both may be easily understood. This Mr. Belloc is only able
to accomplish by virtue of his peculiar power of lucid expression.
Not alone, then, in this particular, but supremely alone in this
particular, Mr. Belloc towers above other contemporary writers on the
war. He can explain as they can never explain: expound as they can never
expound: describe as they can never describe. His meaning stands clear
in print while theirs must be read between the lines. He makes himself
understood while we must make ourselves understand them.
This is the supreme power that has carried all his other powers to
fruition. We do not think that "there are many men who could do the same
thing."
That this great power, tremendous as it is, is afflicted by weaknesses
in practice is unfortunately true. These weaknesses arise mainly from
the clash of Mr. Belloc's overpowering honesty with the cynical attitude
towards newspapers in general which recent methods in journalism have
engendered in the public. There was a time in the history of journalism
when it was a crime to be wrong. For "wrong" modern journalism has
substituted "dull." In recent years competition among newspaper
proprietors and editors of newspapers has not been, as in times past,
for the most reliable news or the most trustworthy views on important
events, but for the latest news and the brightest "stories." The
reputation for a newspaper which has been looked upon as pre-eminently
desirable is not that it should be regarded by the public as
well-informed or as expressing a sound judgment, but as pithy and
interesting. The inevitable consequence of this tendency is that the
great mass of English daily newspapers have lost their former high place
in the estimation of the public as serious and necessary institutions,
and have descended to the level of an amusement. The only exceptions
that can be made from this sweeping condemnation are the _Daily
Telegraph_, the _Morning Post_, the _Manchester Guardian_, and the
_Westminster Gazette_. Of the rest, some are of a higher, some of a
lower type, but all are virtually forms of amusement and of distraction
rather than of learning and instruction. What differences exist between
them are differences of degree, not differences of kind. Some of them
may be compared to a good comedy; others to those musical plays which
are less plays than exercises in the production of plays; many rank no
higher than the picture palace. The most base of all, though they rank
as distractions, can scarcely be classed as amusements. They are patent
medicines. It has been well said that the _Daily Mail_ has achieved what
no other paper has ever achieved, in enabling some millions of the
English proletariat to be whisked from the breakfast to the office table
every day of the week and to forget in the process the discomfort they
undergo.
Viewed from the other side, the existence of this state of affairs
argues a curious temper of mind in the public, which permitted and
assisted, even if it did not always quite approve of its continuance.
That is to say, English people bought and read the papers which were
pithy and interesting, but did not imagine that they were learned or
instructive, and when, by chance, they sought some statement on which
they could place reliance, they realized that it could not be found in
the newspapers. This strange development in the attitude of the public
towards newspapers in general, real as it is, is hard to follow and
difficult to define. It was due in great measure to the fact that the
public in ever-increasing numbers was gradually ceasing to regard as
real what the newspapers regarded as real. The chief realities for the
newspapers remained the various aspects of capitalism and party
politics, when to the public eye other things already appeared more
real. The whole effect of this development may best be summed up,
perhaps, in the expression, half of annoyance, half of resignation, so
usual on the lips of newspaper readers: "It says so in the paper, but
who knows how much to believe."
Some such pass had been reached in the growing estrangement between the
public and the Press when the war broke out and the public was faced by
an event of overwhelming interest. The people of England woke to a
desire for the truth and clamoured for the newspapers to give it to
them. The newspapers were helpless. They had forgotten where truth was
to be found. So far as any of our modern newspaper men could remember it
was one of those antiquated encumbrances, such as wood-cuts and flat-bed
machines, which they had banished long ago. The only distinct impression
of it they retained was that it had been plainly labelled "not
interesting." So they met the emergency by buying a new set of type,
blacker and deeper than any they had used before, and introducing the
page headline.
We have seen how, while the mass of the English Press was left fatuously
floundering before the spectacle of the greatest military event the
world has ever seen, Mr. Belloc set out quite simply to give the public
an account, week by week, of the progress of that event which was as
plain and as truthful as he could make it. That approximately a hundred
thousand persons are willing to pay sixpence a week to read this account
we already know. It is inevitable, however, that a considerable
percentage of Mr. Belloc's readers should approach his commentary in
_Land and Water_ in the same attitude of mind as they have for so long
approached the perusal of the daily newspaper. They will tend to speak
of Mr. Belloc's articles as "interesting" or "dull," forgetting that
criticism on these lines can rightly be directed only to the events of
which Mr. Belloc is writing. For it is not Mr. Belloc's object to make
the events of the war interesting to his readers. It does not even
remotely concern him whether those events are interesting or not. His
sole object is to give his readers as detailed an explanation of the
nature of those events and as clear an account of their progress as it
is possible for him to give.
There is one other point in which Mr. Belloc's amazing lucidity is
afflicted by a peculiar weakness in practice. The method which he adopts
so extensively of explaining situations by means of diagrams is
undoubtedly very successful. It has, however, its limitations. So long
as the situation which he is concerned to describe is of a simple nature
it may be admirably expressed in diagrammatic form. When, however, the
situation itself is complex the diagram is also necessarily complex,
which results, in the text of his writing, in long strings of letters or
figures which lead to almost greater confusion than would the
enumeration of the objects they are intended to represent. This weakness
appears very plainly in a passage in _A General Sketch of the European
War_, in which Mr. Belloc describes how the Allied force in the
operative corner before Namur stood with relation to the two natural
obstacles of the rivers Sambre and Meuse and the fortified zone round
the point where they met. To illustrate the position of the Allied
force he draws a diagram which is excellently clear. In describing this
diagram, however, he falls into difficulties which may be seen very
plainly in the following extract in which he describes the French plan:
Now, the French plan was as follows. They said to themselves:
"There will come against us an enemy acting along the arrows VWXYZ,
and this enemy will certainly be in superior force to our own. He
will perhaps be as much as fifty per cent. stronger than we are.
But he will suffer under these disadvantages:
"The one part of his forces, V and W, will find it difficult to act
in co-operation with the other part of his forces, Y and Z, because
Y and Z (acting as they are on an outside circumference split by
the fortified zone SSS) will be separated, or only able to connect
in a long and roundabout way. The two lots, V and W, and Y and Z,
could only join hands by stretching round an awkward angle--that
is, by stretching round the bulge which SSS makes, SSS being the
ring of forts round Namur. Part of their forces (that along the
arrow X) will further be used up in trying to break down the
resistance of SSS. That will take a good deal of time. If our
horizontal line AB holds its own, naturally defended as it is,
against the attack from V and W, while our perpendicular line BC
holds its own still more firmly (relying on its much better natural
obstacle) against YZ, we shall have ample time to break the first
and worst shock of the enemy's attack, and to allow, once we have
concentrated that attack upon ourselves, the rest of our forces,
the masses of manoeuvre, or at any rate a sufficient portion of
them, to come up and give us a majority in _this_ part of the
field."
Alongside these slight criticisms we may mention, perhaps, another
criticism which has been publicly levelled against Mr. Belloc's writings
on the military aspect of the present war. The issue of the _Daily Mail_
of September 6, 1915, contained an article in which Mr. Belloc was
charged with grave errors of judgement. The gist of this article was
that Mr. Belloc had regarded an enemy offensive in the West in the
spring of 1915, as certain to take place, whereas, in point of fact, the
Germans made their great effort against the Russians in the East. This
was the chief charge brought against Mr. Belloc; and to it were added a
number of lesser charges of which the majority were perfectly just,
showing how in this place and in that Mr. Belloc had overrated one
factor or underrated another.
With this criticism it is unnecessary to concern ourselves further than
to note the nature of Mr. Belloc's reply, which appeared in _Land and
Water_ on September 18, 1915:
There is in such an indictment as this [he says] nothing to
challenge, because I would be the first, not only to admit its
truth, but, if necessary, to supplement the list very lengthily. To
write a weekly commentary upon a campaign of this magnitude--a
campaign the facts of which are concealed as they have been in no
war of the past--is not only an absorbing and very heavy task, but
also one in which much suggestion and conjecture are necessarily
doubtful or wrong, and to pursue it as I have done steadily and
unbrokenly for so many months has tried my powers to the utmost.
But I confess that I am in no way ashamed of such occasional errors
in judgment and misinterpretations, for I think them quite
unavoidable. They will be discovered in every one of the many
current commentaries maintained upon the war throughout the Press
of Europe and even in the calculations of the General Staffs. Nay,
I will now add to the list spontaneously: In common with many
others, I thought that an invasion of Silesia was probable last
December. At the beginning of the war I believed that the French
operations in Lorraine would develop towards the north--an opinion
which will be found registered many months later in the official
records recently published. In the matter of numbers my early
estimates exaggerated the proportion of wounded to killed, while
only a few weeks ago I guessed for the number of German prisoners
in the West a number which subsequent official information conveyed
to me proved to be erroneous by between 17 and 18 per cent. I long
worked on the idea that the line from Ivangorod to Cholm was a
double line--a matter of some importance last July. I have since
found that it was single. The total reserve within and behind Paris
which decided the battle of the Marne was, I believe (though the
matter is not yet public), less large than I had suspected, and the
figures I gave would rather include the Sixth Army as well as the
Army of Paris. A few weeks ago I suggested that there was
difficulty in moving a great body of men rapidly across the Upper
Wierpz. Yet the movement, when it was made, might fairly be
described as rapid. At any rate, the aid lent to the Archduke came
more promptly than had seemed possible. I certainly thought, though
I did not say so in so many words, that the capture of the
bridgehead at Friedrichstadt would involve an immediate and
successful advance by the enemy upon Riga, and in this opinion, I
believe, no single authority, enemy or ally, differed. What has
caused the check to the enemy advance here for ten full days no one
in the West can tell, nor, for that matter, does any news from
Russia yet enlighten us.
To this criticism of the writer in the _Daily Mail_ Mr. Belloc's reply
is so final and complete that any addition would be out of place. It is
very necessary, however, that we should devote careful consideration to
the facts which prompted the publication of this criticism; and this
will be done in the succeeding chapter.