"CAN'T BELIEVE A WORD"
I
If you cannot hit or kick during a fight, at any rate you can spit. But,
to be happy in this arm of the service, you have to feel sure that the
adversary is signally fit to be spat upon. Hence, on each side in every
war, the civilian will-to-believe that the other side are a set of
ogres, every man of them. What a capital fiend the Boer, the man like
Botha or Smuts, was made out to be during the last Boer War! He abused
the white flag, he sawed a woman in two, he advanced behind screens of
niggers; O, he was a great fellow! In 1870 French civilians laid freely
to their souls the flattering unction that the Prussians murdered their
prisoners. Strong in what was at bottom the same joyous faith, German
civilians told you that French officers usually broke their parole. A
few choice spirits will even carry this fond observance into the milder
climate of sport. A boy of this kidney, while looking on at a vital
house match, will give his mind ease by telling a friend what "a lot of
stinkers" the other house are. A follower of Cambridge cricket, a man of
fifty, in whom you might expect the choler of youth to have cooled, has
been found musing darkly over a large photograph of an Oxford eleven.
They seemed to me, as is the way of these heroes, to lack nothing of
outward charm except the light of intellect in the eye. But "Look at
them!" he observed with conviction. "The hangdog expressions! The
narrow, ill-set Mongol eyes! The thin, cruel lips! Prejudice apart,
would you like to meet that gang in a quiet place on a dark night?" From
these sombre reflections he seemed to derive a sort of pasture.
Little doubt, then, as to what had to come when five of the greatest
nations on earth were suddenly rolling over and under each other in the
dust. While their armies saw to the biting, the snarling was done with a
will by the press of Berlin and Vienna, Petrograd, Paris, and London.
That we were all fighting foul, every man, was the burden of the strain.
Phone and anti-phone, the choric hymn of detraction swelled; if this had
been an age of simpler faith there might have been serious fear lest the
music should reach the ear of some Jove sitting at his nectar; what if
he should say in a rage that those nasty little beasts were at it again,
and throw such a comet down on the earth as would settle the hash of us
all? But no such fears troubled Europe. And then policy, viewing these
operations of instinct, was moved to cut in. Official propaganda began,
and one of its stock lines was to help in stoking these fires in the
non-combatant heart.
II
Some of the fuel to hand was fine. The German command fed the best of it
all into our bunkers, gratis. It owned that its "frightfulness" plan was
no slip, no "indiscretion of a subordinate," but a policy weighed and
picked out--worse than that, an embodied ethical doctrine. A Frenchman,
when he is cross with our English virtue, will say that none of us can
steal a goose without saying he does it for the public good. But the fey
rulers of Germany could not even be content to say it was an act of
moral beauty to sink the _Lusitania_ or to burn Louvain. They must go on
to boast that these scrubby actions were pieces of sound, hard thinking,
the only tenable conclusions to impregnable syllogisms. Besides man's
natural aversion to cruel acts, they thus incurred his still more
universal distaste for pedants. They delivered themselves into our hand.
They were beautiful butts, ready made, like the learned elderly lady in
_Roderick Random_, whose bookish philosophy made her desire to "drag the
parent by the hoary hair," and to "toss the sprawling infant on her
spear."
But man, rash man, must always be trying to go one better than the best.
With this thing of beauty there for our use, crying out to be used, some
of our propagandists must needs go beyond it and try to make out that
the average German soldier, the docile blond with yellow hair, long
skull, and blue, woolgathersome eyes, who swarmed in our corps cages
during the last two years of the war, craving for some one, anyone, to
give him an order, was one of the monsters who hang about the gates of
Vergil's Hell. If you had to make out a good hanging case against
Germany could you, as Hamlet asks his injudicious mother, on that fair
mountain cease to feed and batten on this moor? And yet some of us did.
The authentic scarecrow, the school of thought that ruled the old German
State, was not used for half of what it was worth. But the word went
forth that any redeeming traits in the individual German conscript were
better hushed up. When he showed extreme courage in an attack, not much
must be made of it. When he behaved well to a wounded Englishman, it
must be hidden. A war correspondent who mentioned some chivalrous act
that a German had done to an Englishman during an action received a
rebuking wire from his employer, "Don't want to hear about any nice,
good Germans."
Even in the very temple of humourless shabbiness comedy may contrive to
keep up a little shrine of her own, and on this forlorn altar the dread
of "crying up anything German" laid, now and then, an undesigned
offering. One worthy field censor was suddenly taken aback by a
dangerous flaw in a war correspondent's exultant account of a swiftly
successful British attack. "Within ten minutes from zero," I think the
correspondent had written, "our men were sitting at ease on what had
been the enemy's parapet, smoking good German cigars." "Hullo!" said the
censor, "this won't do. 'Good' German cigars. _Good_ German cigars! No!
'Good' must come out." And come out it did. Like the _moral_ of his
troops, like the generalship of his chiefs, the foeman's tobacco had to
be bad. It was the time when some of our patriotic pundits found out
that Mommsen's Roman history was all wrong, and that Poppo did not half
know his Thucydides.
III
Of all this kind of swordsmanship the most dashing feat was the
circulation of the "corpse factory" story. German troops, it was written
in part of our Press, had got, in certain places near their front, a
proper plant for boiling down the fat of their own dead. It was not said
whether the product was to be used as a food, or as a lubricant or
illuminant only. Chance brought me into one of the reputed seats of this
refinement of frugality. It was on ground that our troops had just
taken, in 1918. At Bellicourt the St. Quentin Canal goes into a long
tunnel. Some little way in from its mouth you could find, with a
flash-lamp, a small doorway cut in the tunnel's brick wall, on the
tow-path side of the canal. The doorway led to the foot of a narrow
staircase that wound up through the earth till it came to an end in a
room about twenty feet long. It, too, was subterranean, but now its
darkness was pierced by one sharp-edged shaft of sunlight let in through
a neat round hole cut in the five or six feet of earth above. Loaves,
bits of meat, and articles of German equipment lay scattered about, and
two big dixies or cauldrons, like those in which we stewed our tea, hung
over two heaps of cold charcoal. Eight or ten bodies, lying pell-mell,
nearly covered half of the floor. They showed the usual effects of
shell-fire. Another body, disembowelled and blown almost to rags, lay
across one of the dixies and mixed with the puddle of coffee that it
contained. A quite simple case. Shells had gone into cook-houses of
ours, long before then, and had messed up the cooks with the stew.
An Australian sergeant, off duty and poking about, like a good
Australian, for something to see, had come up the stairs, too. He had
heard the great fat-boiling yarn, and how this was the latest seat of
the industry. Sadly he surveyed the disappointing scene. Ruefully he
noted the hopelessly normal nature of all the proceedings that had
produced it. Then he broke the silence in which we had made our several
inspections. "Can't believe a word you read, sir, can you?" he said with
some bitterness. Life had failed to yield one of its advertised marvels.
The Press had lied again. The propagandist myth about Germans had
cracked up once more. "Can't believe a word you read" had long been
becoming a kind of catch-phrase in the army. And now another good man
had been duly confirmed in the faith, ordained as a minister of the
faith, that whatever your pastors and masters tell you had best be
assumed to be just a bellyful of east wind.
IV
Partly it came of the nature--which could not be helped by that time--of
war correspondence. In the first months of the war our General Staff,
being what we had made it, treated British war correspondents as pariah
dogs. They might escape arrest so long as they kept out of sight; that
was about the sum of their privileges. Long before the end of the war
the Chiefs of Staff of our several armies received them regularly on the
eve of every battle, explained to them the whole of our plans and hopes,
gave them copies of our most secret objective and barrage maps; every
perilous secret we had was put into their keeping. A little later still
an Army Commander would murmur, with very little indistinctness, if he
thought the war correspondents had not been writing enough about his
army of late. After the Armistice Sir Douglas Haig made them a speech of
thanks and praise on the great bridge over the Rhine at Cologne, and at
the Peace all the regular pariah dogs were offered knighthoods.
The Regular Army had set out by taking a war correspondent to be, _ex
officio_, a low fellow paid to extract kitchen literature from such
private concerns of the military profession as wars. It harboured the
curious notion that it would be possible in this century to feed the
nation at home on _communiqués_ from G.H.Q. alone or eked out with
"Eye-Witness" stuff--official "word-painting" by some Regular Officer
with a tincture of letters. With that power of learning things, only
just not too late, which distinguishes our Regular Army from the
Bourbons, it presently saw that this plan had broken down. About the
same time the Regular Army began to recognise in the abhorred war
correspondent a man whom it had known at school, and who had gone to the
university about the time when it, the Army, was going into the Army
Class. That was enough. Foul as was his profession, still he might be a
decent fellow; he might not want to injure his country.
When these reflections were dawning slowly over the Regular Army mind it
happened--Sir Douglas Haig having a mind himself--that his Chief of
Intelligence was a fully educated man with a good fifty per cent. more
of brains, imagination, decision, and initiative than the average of his
fellow-Regulars on the Staff. He knew something of the Press at first
hand. Being a Scotsman, he regarded writers and well-read people with
interest and not with alarm. Under his command the policy of helping the
Press rose to its maximum. War correspondents were given the "status,"
almost the rank, of officers. Actual officers were detailed to see to
their comfort, to pilot them about the front, to secure their friendly
treatment by all ranks and at all headquarters. Never were war
correspondents so helped, shielded and petted before. And, almost
without an exception, they were good men. Only one or two black sheep of
the trade would try to make a reader believe that they had seen things
which they had not. The general level of personal and professional
honour, of courage, public spirit, and serious enterprise, was high. No
average Staff Officer could talk with the average British correspondent
without feeling that this was a sound human being and had a better mind
than his own--that he knew more, had seen more, and had been less
deadened by the coolie work of a professional routine. When once known,
the war correspondents were trusted and liked--by the Staff.
V
There lay the trouble. They lived in the Staff world, its joys and its
sorrows, not in the combatant world. The Staff was both their friend and
their censor. How could they show it up when it failed? One of the first
rules of field censorship was that from war correspondents "there must
be no criticism of authority or command"; how could they disobey that?
They would visit the front now and then, as many Staff Officers did, but
it could be only as afternoon callers from one of the many mansions of
G.H.Q., that heaven of security and comfort. When autumn twilight came
down on the haggard trench world of which they had caught a quiet
noon-day glimpse they would be speeding west in Vauxhall cars to lighted
châteaux gleaming white among scatheless woods. Their staple emotions
before a battle were of necessity akin to those of the Staff, the
racehorse-owner or trainer exalted with brilliant hopes, thrilled by the
glorious uncertainty of the game, the fascinating nicety of every
preparation, and feeling the presence of horrible fatigues and the
nearness of multitudinous deaths chiefly as a dim, sombre background
that added importance to the rousing scene, and not as things that need
seriously cloud the spirit or qualify delight in a plan.
"Our casualties will be enormous," a General at G.H.Q. said with the
utmost serenity on the eve of one of our great attacks in 1917. The
average war correspondent--there were golden exceptions--insensibly
acquired the same cheerfulness in face of vicarious torment and danger.
In his work it came out at times in a certain jauntiness of tone that
roused the fighting troops to fury against the writer. Through his
despatches there ran a brisk implication that regimental officers and
men enjoyed nothing better than "going over the top"; that a battle was
just a rough, jovial picnic; that a fight never went on long enough for
the men; that their only fear was lest the war should end on this side
of the Rhine. This, the men reflected in helpless anger, was what people
at home were offered as faithful accounts of what their friends in the
field were thinking and suffering.
Most of the men had, all their lives, been accepting "what it says 'ere
in the paper" as being presumptively true. They had taken the Press at
its word without checking. Bets had been settled by reference to a
paper. Now, in the biggest event of their lives, hundreds of thousands
of men were able to check for themselves the truth of that workaday
Bible. They fought in a battle or raid, and two days after they read,
with jeers on their lips, the account of "the show" in the papers. They
felt they had found the Press out. The most bloody defeat in the history
of Britain, a very world's wonder of valour frustrated by feckless
misuse, of regimental glory and Staff shame, might occur on the Ancre on
July 1, 1916, and our Press come out bland and copious and graphic, with
nothing to show that we had not had quite a good day--a victory really.
Men who had lived through the massacre read the stuff open-mouthed.
Anything, then, could figure as anything else in the Press--as its own
opposite even. Black was only an aspect of white. With a grin at the way
he must have been taken in up to now, the fighting soldier gave the
Press up. So it comes that each of several million ex-soldiers now reads
every solemn appeal of a Government, each beautiful speech of a Premier
or earnest assurance of a body of employers with that maxim on guard in
his mind--"You can't believe a word you read."