The appointment and work of five official war correspondents (of whom I was one from first to last) caused an extraordinary amount of perturbation at British General Headquarters. Staff officers of the old Regular Army were at first exceedingly hostile to the idea, and to us. They were deeply suspicious that we might be dirty dogs who would reveal military secrets which would imperil the British front. They had a conviction that we were “prying around” for no good purpose, and would probably “give away the whole show.”
Fear, personal and professional, was in the minds of some of the generals, it is certain. We found that many of the regulations to which we were subject—until we broke them down—were much more to safeguard the reputation and cover up the mistakes of the High Command than to prevent the enemy from having information which might be of use to him. They were afraid of the British public, of politicians, and of newspapers, and were profoundly uneasy lest we should dig up scandals, raise newspaper sensations, and cause infernal trouble generally.
I can quite sympathize with their nervousness, for if newspapers had adopted ordinary journalistic methods of sensation mongering, the position of the Army Command would have been intolerable. But this must be said for the newspaper press in the Great War—whatever its faults, and they were many—proprietors and editors subordinated everything to a genuine and patriotic desire to “play the game,” to support the army, and to avoid anycriticism or controversy which might hamper the military chiefs or demoralize the nation.
As far as the five war correspondents were concerned, we had no other desire than to record the truth as fully as possible without handing information to the enemy, and to describe the life and actions of our fighting men so that the nation and the world should understand their valor, their suffering, and their achievement. We identified ourselves absolutely with the armies in the field, and we wiped out of our minds all thought of personal “scoops,” and all temptation to write one word which would make the task of officers and men more difficult or dangerous. There was no need of censorship of our dispatches. We were our own censors.
That couldn’t be taken for granted, however, by G.H.Q. They were not sure at first of our mentality or our honor. The old tradition of distrust between the army and the rest was very strong until the New Army came into being, with officers who had not passed through Sandhurst but through the larger world. They were so nervous of us in those early days that they appointed a staff of censors to live with us, travel with us, sleep with us, read our dispatches with a mass of rules for their guidance, and examine our private correspondence to our wives, if need be with acid tests, to discover any invisible message we might try to smuggle through.
We had to suffer many humiliations in that way, but fortunately we had a sense of humor and laughed at most of them. Gradually also—very quickly indeed—we made friends with many generals and officers commanding divisions, brigades, and battalions, broke down their distrust, established confidence. They were surprised to find us decent fellows, and pleased with what we wrote about the men. They became keen to see us in their trenches or their headquarters. They wanted to show us their particular “peepshows,” they invited us to see special“stunts.” Their first hostility evaporated, and was replaced by cordial welcome, and they laughed with us, and sometimes cursed with us, at the continued restrictions of G.H.Q., which forbade the mention of battalions and brigades (well known to the enemy) whose heroic exploits we described.
For some time G.H.Q., represented by General Macdonagh, Chief of Intelligence, under whose orders we were, maintained a narrow view of our liberties in narration and description. Hardly a week passed without some vexatious rule to cramp our style by prohibiting the mention of facts far better known to the Germans than to the British, whose men were suffering and dying without their own folk knowing the action in which their sacrifice was consummated.
The heavy hand of the censorship fell with special weight upon us during the battle of Loos. General Macdonagh himself used the blue pencil ruthlessly, and I had no less than forty pages of manuscript deleted by his own hand from my descriptive account. Again it seemed to us that the guiding idea behind the censorship was, to conceal the truth not from the enemy, but from the nation, in defense of the British High Command and its tragic blundering. That was in September of 1915, and we became aware at that time that the man most hostile to our work was not Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief, but Sir Douglas Haig, at that time in command of the First Corps. He drew a line around his own zone of operations beyond which we were forbidden to go, and the message which conveyed his order to us was not couched in conciliatory language. It was withdrawn under the urgent pressure of our immediate chiefs, and I was allowed to go to the Loos redoubt during the progress of the battle, with John Buchan who had come out temporarily on behalf ofThe Times.
The tragic slaughter at Loos, its reckless and uselesswaste of life, its abominable staff work, and certain political intrigues at home, led to the recall of Sir John French and the succession of Sir Douglas Haig as Commander-in-Chief.
For a time we believed that our doom was sealed, knowing his strong prejudice against us, and in the first interview we had with him, he did not conceal his contempt for our job. But with his new responsibility he was bound to take notice of the increasing demand from the British government and people for more detailed accounts of British actions and of the daily routine of war. It became even an angry demand, and Sir Douglas Haig yielded to its insistence. From that time onward we were given full liberty of movement over the whole front, and full and complete privileges, never before accorded to war correspondents, to see the army reports during the progress of battle, and day by day; while Army Corps, Divisions, and Battalion headquarters were instructed to show us their intelligence and operation reports and to give us detailed information of any action on their part of the front.
The new Chief of Intelligence, General Charteris, who succeeded General Macdonagh, devoted a considerable amount of time to our little unit, and in many ways, with occasional tightening of the reins, was broad-minded in his interpretation of the censorship regulations. It may be truly said that never before in history was a great war, or any war, so accurately and fully reported day by day for at least three years, subject to certain reservations which were abominably vexatious and tended to depress the spirit of the troops and to arouse the suspicion of the nation.
The chief reservations were the ungenerous and unfair way in which the names of particular battalions were not allowed to be mentioned, and the suppression of the immense losses incurred by the troops. The lastrestriction was necessary. It would be disastrous in the course of a battle to give information to the enemy (who read all our newspapers) of the exact damage he had done at a particular part of the line. Nothing would be more valuable to an attacking army than that knowledge. In due course the losses became known to the nation by the publication of the casualty lists, so that it was only a temporary concealment.
With regard to the mention of battalions, I am still convinced that there was needless secrecy in that respect, as nine times out of ten the German Intelligence was aware of what troops were in front of them, along all sectors. Scores of times, also, mention was made of the Canadians and Australians, where no reference was permitted to English, Scottish, Irish, or Welsh battalions, so that the English especially, who from first to last formed sixty-eight per cent of the total fighting strength, and did most fighting and most dying, in all the great battles, were ignored in favor of their comrades from overseas. To this day many people in Canada and the United States believe that the Canadians bore the brunt of all the fighting, while Tommy Atkins looked on at a safe distance. The Australians have the same simple faith about their own crowd. But splendid beyond words as these men were, it is poor old Tommy Atkins of the English counties, and Jock, his Scottish cousin, who held the main length of the line, took most of the hard knocks, and fought most actions, big and little. Anybody who denies that is a liar.
Our victory over the censorship, and over the narrow and unimaginative prejudice of elderly staff officers, was due in no small measure to—the censors. That may sound like a paradox, but it is the simple truth. I have already said that each correspondent had a censor attached to him, a kind of jailer and spy, eating, sleeping, walking, and driving. Blue pencil in hand, they readour dispatches, slip by slip, as they were written, and our letters to our wives, our aunts, or our grandmothers. But these men happened to be gentlemen, and broad-minded men of the world, and they very quickly became our most loyal friends and active allies.
They saw the absurdity of many of the regulations laid down for their guidance in censoring our accounts, and they did their best to interpret them in a free and easy way, or to have them repealed, if there was no loophole of escape. Always they turned a blind eye, whenever possible, to a vexatious and niggling rule, and several of them risked their jobs, and lost them, in putting up a stiff resistance to some new and ridiculous order from G.H.Q. They went with us to the front, and shared our fatigues and our risks, and smoothed the way for us everywhere by tact and diplomacy and personal guarantees of our good sense and honor.
The first group of censors who were attached to our little organization were as good as we could have wished if we had had a free choice of the whole British Army.
Our immediate chief was a very noble and charming man. That was Colonel Stuart, a regular soldier of the old school, simple-hearted, brave as a lion, courteous and kind. He led us into many dirty places and tested our courage in front-line trenches, mine shafts, and bombarded villages, with a smiling unconcern which at least taught us to hide any fear that lurked in our hearts, as I freely confess it very often did in mine. He was killed one day by a sniper’s bullet, and we mourned the loss of a very gallant gentleman.
Attached to us, under his command, was an extraordinary fellow, and splendid type, famous in the two worlds of sport and letters by name of Hesketh Prichard. Many readers will know his name as the author ofThe Adventures of Don Q.,Where Black Rules White, and other books. He was a big game hunter, a great cricketer,and an all-round sportsman, and he stood six foot four in his stockings, a long lean Irishman, with a powerful, deeply lined face, an immense nose, a whimsical mouth, and moody, restless, humorous, tragic eyes. He hated the war with a deadly loathing, because of its unceasing slaughter of that youth which he loved, his old comrades in the playing fields and his comrades’ sons. Often he would come down in the morning, when the casualty lists were long, with eyes red after secret weeping. He had a morbid desire to go to dangerous places and to get under fire, because he could not bear the thought of remaining alive and whole while his pals were dying.
Often he would unwind his long legs, spring out of his chair, and say, “Gibbs, old boy, for God’s sake let’s go and have a prowl round Ypres, or see what’s doing Dickebush way.” There was always something doing in the way of high explosive shells, and once, when my friend Tomlinson and I were with Prichard in the ruin of the Grand Place in Ypres, a German aëroplane skimmed low above our heads and thought it worth while to bomb our little lonely group. Perhaps it was Hesketh’s G.H.Q. arm-band which caught the eye of the German aviator. We sprawled under the cover of ruined masonry, and lay “doggo” until the bird had gone. But there was always the chance of death in every square yard of Ypres, because it was shelled ceaselessly, and that was why Hesketh went there with any companion who would join him—and his choice fell mostly on me.
He left us before the battles of the Somme, to become chief sniper of the British army. With telescopic sights, and many tricks of Red Indian warfare, he lay in front-line trenches or camouflaged trees, and waited patiently, as in the old days he had lain waiting for wild beasts, until a German sniper showed his head to take a shot at one of our men. He never showed his head twice when Hesketh Prichard was within a thousand yards.Then Prichard organized sniping schools all along the front, until we beat the Germans at their own game in that way of warfare.
He survived the war, but not with his strength and activity. Some “bug” in the trenches had poisoned his blood, and when I saw him last he lay, a gaunt wreck, in the garden of his home near St. Albans, where his father-in-law was Earl of Verulam—Francis Bacon’s old title. In a letter he had written to me was the tragic phrase, “Quantum mutatus ab illo”—How changed from what once he was!—and as I looked at him, I was shocked at that change. The shadow of death was on him, though his beautiful wife tried to hide it from him, and from herself, by a splendid laughing courage that masked her pity and fear. He was a victim of the war, though he lived until the peace.
Another man who was attached to the war correspondent’s unit in that early part of the war was Colonel Faunthorpe, famous in India as a hunter of tigers—he had shot sixty-two in the jungle—and as a cavalry officer, pigsticker, judge, and poet. When, after the war, Faunthorpe went for a time to the British Embassy in Washington (making frequent visits to New York), American society welcomed him as the Englishman whom they had been taught to expect and had never yet seen. Here he was at last, as he is known in romance and legend—tall, handsome, inscrutable, with a monocle, a marvelous gift of silence, a quiet, deep, hardly revealed sense of humor, and a fine gallantry of manner to pretty women and ugly ones. He left a trail of tender recollection and humorous remembrance from New York to San Francisco.
Faunthorpe, behind his mask of the typical cavalry officer, had (and has), as I quickly perceived, a subtle mind, a lively sense of irony, and a most liberal outlook on life. He had a quiet contempt (not always sufficiently disguised) for the limited intelligence of G.H.Q. (or ofsome high officers therein), he was open in his ridicule of journalists in general and some war correspondents in particular, and he regarded his own job in the war, as censor and controller of photographs, as one of the inexplicable jests of fate. But he stood by us manfully in a time of crisis when, at the beginning of a series of battles, a venerable old gentleman, an “ancient” of prehistoric mind, was suddenly produced from some lair in G.H.Q., and given supreme authority over military censorship, which he instantly used by canceling all the privileges we had won by so much work and struggle.
With the Colonel’s full consent, we went “on strike” and said the war could go on without us, as we would not write a single word about the impending battles until all the new restrictions were removed. This ultimatum shocked G.H.Q. to its foundations—or at least the Intelligence side of it. After twenty-four hours of obstinate command, the ancient one was sent back to his lair, our privileges were restored, but Colonel Faunthorpe was made the scapegoat of our rebellion, and deposed from his position as our chief.
We deplored his departure, for he had been great and good to us. One quality of his was a check to our restlessness, nervousness, and irritability in the wear and tear of this strange life. He had an infinite reserve of patience. When there was “nothing doing” he slept, believing, as he said, in the “conservation of energy.” He slept always in the long motor drives which we made in our daily routine of inquiry and observation. He slept like a babe under shell fire, unless activity of command were required, and once awakened to find high explosive shells bursting around his closed car, which he had parked in the middle of a battlefield, while his driver was painfully endeavoring to hide his body behind a mud bank.... Colonel Faunthorpe is now “misgoverning the unfortunate Indians”—it is his own phrase—asCommissioner at Lucknow, with command of life and death over millions of natives whom he understands as few men now alive.
India was well represented in the group of censors attached to our organization, for we had two other Indian officials with us—Captains Reynolds and Coldstream, both men of high education, great charm of character, and unfailing sense of humor. For Reynolds I had a personal affection as a wise, friendly, and humorous soul, with whom I tramped in many strange places where death went ravaging, always encouraged by his cool disregard of danger, his smiling contempt for any show of fear.
Coldstream was a little Pucklike man, neat as a new pin, damnably ironical of war and war correspondents, whimsical, courteous, sulky at times, like a spoiled boy, and lovable. He is back in India, like Reynolds and Faunthorpe, helping to govern our Empire, and doing it well.
Our commanding officers and censors changed from time to time. It was a difficult and dangerous position to be O. C. war correspondents, for such a man was between two fires—our own resentment (sometimes very passionate) of regulations hampering to our work, and the fright and anger of G.H.Q. if anything slipped through likely to create public criticism or to encourage the enemy, or to depress the spirit of the British people.
Colonel Hutton Wilson, who was our immediate chief for a time, was a debonair little staff officer with the narrow traditions of the Staff College and an almost childlike ignorance of the press, the public, and human life outside the boundaries of his professional experience, which was not wide. He was amiable, but irritating to most of my colleagues, with little vexatious ways. Personally I liked him, and I think he liked me, but he had a fixed idea that I was a rebel, and almost a Bolshevik.
Later in the war he was succeeded by Colonel theHonorable Neville Lytton, the grandson of Bulwer Lytton, the great novelist, and the brother of the present Lord Lytton. Neville Lytton was, and is, a man of great and varied talent, as painter, musician, and diplomat. In appearance as well as in character he belongs to the eighteenth century, with a humorous, whimsical face, touched by side whiskers, and a most elegant way with him. He is a gentleman of the old school (with a strain of the gypsy in his blood), who believes in “form” above all things, and thebeau gestein all situations of life or in the presence of death. When I walked with him one day up the old duckboards under shell fire, he swung his trench stick with careless grace, made comical grimaces of contempt at the bursting shells, and said, “Gibbs, if we have to die, let’s do it like gentlemen! If we’re afraid (as we are!) let’s look extremely brave. A good pose is essential in life and war.”
At the soul of him he was a Bohemian and artist. His room, wherever we were, was littered with sketches, sheets of music, poems in manuscript, photographs of his portraits of beautiful ladies. Whatever the agony of the war around us, he loved to steal away alone or with one of his assistant officers, my humorous friend Theodore Holland (“little Theo” and “Theo the Flower,” as he called himself), well known as a composer, and play delightful little melodies from Bach and Gluck on an eighteenth-century flute.
In the early part of the war Lytton had served as a battalion officer in the trenches, with gallantry and distinction, and then was put in charge of a little group of French correspondents, whom he controlled with wonderful tact and good humor. He spoke French with theargotof Paris, and understood the French temperament and humor so perfectly that it was difficult to believe that he was not a Frenchman, when he was in the midst of his little crowd of excitable fellows who regarded himas a “bon garçon” and “un original” with such real affection that they were enraged when he was transferred to our command.
Another distinguished and unusual type of man—one of the greatest “intellectuals” of England, though unknown to the general public—joined us as assistant censor, halfway through the war. This was C. E. Montague, editor ofThe Manchester Guardian. At the outbreak of war he dyed his white hair black, enlisted as a “Tommy,” served in the trenches, reached the rank of sergeant, and finally was blown up in a dugout. When he joined us he had taken the dye out of his hair again and it was snow-white, though he was not more than fifty years of age.
It was absurd for Montague to be censoring our dispatches, ordering our cars, looking after our mess, soothing our way with headquarter staffs, accompanying us as a silent observer to battlefields and trenches and “pill-boxes” and dugouts. He could have written any man of us “off our heads.” He would have been the greatest war correspondent in the world. He writes such perfect prose that every sentence should be carved in marble or engraved on bronze. He had the eye of a hawk for small detail, and a most sensitive perception of truth and beauty lying deep below the surface of our human scene. Compared with Montague our censor—hating his job, deeply contemptuous of our work, loathing the futility of all but the fighting men, with a secret revolt in his soul against the whole bloody business of war, yet with a cold white passion of patriotism (though Irish)—we were pigmies, vulgarians, and shameless souls. His bitterness has been revealed in a book calledDisenchantment—very cruel to us, rather unfair to me, as he admits in a letter I have, but wonderful in its truth.
There was one other man who joined our organization as one of the censors, to whom I must pay a tribute ofaffection and esteem. This was a young fellow named Cadge, unknown to fame, always silent and sulky in his manner, but with a level head, a genius for doing exactly the right thing at the right time, and a secret sweetness and nobility of soul which kept our little “show” running on greased wheels and made him my good comrade in many adventures. Scores of time he and I went together into the dirty places, into the midst of the muck and ruin of war, across the fields where shells came whining, along the trenches where masses of men lived in the mud, under the menace of death.
A strange life—like a distant dream now!—but made tolerable at times, because of these men whose portraits I have sketched, and whose friendship was good to have.
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 ofwarfare 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 avoidan 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 thosetremendous 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 hissomewhat 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 ofThe 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 tellall 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.
The coming of Peace, after four and a half years of a world in conflict, was as great a strain to the civilized mind as the outbreak of war. Indeed, I think it was more tragic in its effect upon the mentality and moral character of the peoples who had been strained to the uttermost.
The sudden relaxation left them limp, purposeless, and unstrung. A sense of the ghastly futility of the horrible massacre in Europe overwhelmed multitudes of men and women who had exerted the last vibration of spiritual energy for the sake of victory, now that all was over, and the cost was counted. The loss of the men they had loved seemed light and tolerable to the soul while the struggle continued and the spirit of sacrifice was still at fever heat, but in the coldness which settled upon the world after that fever was spent, and in homes which returned to normal ways of life, after the home-coming of the Armies, the absence of the breadwinner or the unforgotten son, was felt with a sharper and more dreadful anguish. A great sadness and spirit of disillusion overwhelmed the nations which had been victorious, even more than those defeated. What was this victory? What was its worth, with such visible tracks of ruin and death in all nations exhausted by the struggle?
As a journalist again, back to Fleet Street, in civil clothes, which felt strange after khaki and Sam Brown belts, I found that my new little assignment in life was to study the effects of the war which I had helped torecord, and to analyze the character and state of European peoples, including my own, as they had been changed by that tremendous upheaval.
Fleet Street itself had changed during the war. In spite of the severity of the censorship under the Defense of the Realm Act, and the almost slavish obedience of the press to its dictates, the newspaper proprietors had risen in social rank and power, and newspaper offices which had once been the shabby tenements of social outcasts—the inhabitants of “Grub Street”—were now strewn with coronets and the insignia of nobility. Fleet Street had not only become respectable. It had become the highway to the House of Lords.
The Harmsworth family had become ennobled to all but the highest grade in the peerage, this side of Dukedom. As chief propagandist, the man I had first met as Sir Alfred Harmsworth (when General Booth forced me to my knees and prayed for him!) was now Viscount, with his brother Harold as Lord Rothermere. He aspired to the dictatorship of England through the power of the press, and, but for one slight miscalculation, would have been dictator.
That miscalculation was the growing disbelief of the British public in anything they read in the press. The false accounts of air raids (when the public knew the truth of their own losses), such incidents as the press campaign against Kitchener, and that ridiculous over-optimism, the wildly false assurances of military writers (I was not one of them) when things were going worst in the war, had undermined the faith of the nation in the honesty of their newspapers. Nevertheless, the power of men like Northcliffe was enormous in the political sphere, and Cabinet Ministers and members of Parliament acknowledged their claims.
Burnham ofThe Telegraphwas now a Viscount, but, unlike Lord Northcliffe, he supported whatevergovernment was in power and had no personal vendetta against politicians or policies.
Max Aitken, once a company promoter in Canada, and now proprietor ofThe Daily Express, became Lord Beaverbrook as his reward for the part he played in unseating Asquith and bringing in Lloyd George. Another peer was Lord Riddell, owner of the “News of the World,” which is not generally regarded as a spiritual light in the land. As one of the most intimate friends of Lloyd George, he merited the reward of loyalty. Not only peerages, but baronetcies and knighthoods were scattered in Fleet Street and its tributaries by a Prime Minister who understood the power of the press, but, in spite of a free distribution of titles, did not possess its loyalty when the tide of public favor turned from him.
The five war correspondents on the Western front—Perry Robinson, Beach Thomas, Percival Phillips, Herbert Russell, and myself—received knighthood from the King, at the recommendation of the War Office. I had been offered that honor before the war came to an end, but it was opposed by some of the newspaper proprietors who said that if I were knighted the other men ought also to receive this title—a perfectly fair protest. I was not covetous of that knighthood, and indeed shrank from it so much that I entered into a compact with Beach Thomas to refuse it. But things had gone too far, and we could not reject the title with any decency. So one fine morning, when a military investiture was in progress, I went up to Buckingham Palace, knelt before the King in the courtyard there, with a top hat in my hand, and my knee getting cramped on a velvet cushion, while he gave me the accolade, put the insignia of the K.B.E. round my neck, fastened a star over my left side, and spoke a few generous words. I should be wholly insincere if I pretended that at that moment I did not feel the stir of the old romantic sentiment with which I had beensteeped as a boy, and a sense of pride that I had “won my spurs” in service for England’s sake. Yet, as I walked home with my box of trinkets and that King’s touch on my shoulder, I thought of the youth who had served England with greater gallantry, through hardship and suffering to sudden death or to the inevitable forgetfulness of a poverty-stricken peace.
That knighthood of mine deeply offended one of my friends, whose good opinion I valued more than that of most others. This man, who had been in the ugly places with me, could hardly pardon this acceptance of a title which seemed to him a betrayal of democratic faith and an allegiance to those whom he regarded as part authors of the war, traitors to the men who died, perpetrators of hate, architects of an infamous peace, and profiteers of their nation’s ruin. A harsh judgment! The only difference I find that knighthood has made to my outlook on life is the knowledge of a slight increase in my tradesmen’s bills.
One change in the editorial side of Fleet Street affected me in a personal way, and was a revelation of the anxiety of the Coalition Government to capture the press in its own interests. Robert Donald, under whose Directorship I had served onThe Daily Chroniclefor many years—with occasional lapses as a free lance—had been a close personal friend of Lloyd George, but toward the end of the war permitted himself some liberty of criticism—very mild in its character—against the Prime Minister. It was his undoing. Lloyd George was already under the fire of the Northcliffe press which had helped to raise him to the Premiership and now tired of him, for personal reasons by Lord Northcliffe, and he foresaw the time when, after the war, he would need all the support he could get from the press machine. A group of his friends, including Sir Henry Dalziel (afterward promoted to the peerage) and Sir Charles Sykes, a richmanufacturer, approached the Lloyds, who ownedThe Daily Chronicle, and bought that paper and LloydsWeekly Newsfor over £1,000,000. Robert Donald found it sold over his head, without warning, and felt himself obliged to resign his editorship. Ernest Perris, the former news editor, who had managed that department with remarkable ability, reigned in his stead, andThe Daily Chroniclebecame the official organ, the defender through thick and thin, fair and foul, of Lloyd George and his Coalition.
A series of dramatic telegrams reached me at the front, but I paid very little heed to them and failed to understand the inner significance of this affair. But in loyalty to Robert Donald, and by his advice, I signed a contract withThe Daily Telegraph. It made no difference to my readers, as my articles continued to appear inThe Daily Chronicle, as well as inThe Telegraph, as they had done throughout the war, by arrangement of the Newspaper Proprietors Association and the War Office.
Nominally Lord Burnham was my chief instead of Robert Donald. I liked him thoroughly, as he had always been particularly kind to me, especially on a night when I was deeply humiliated by one of those socialfaux paswhich hurt a man more than the guilty knowledge of a secret crime.
This was during the war, when I arrived home on leave to find a card inviting me to dine with Lord Burnham at the Garrick Club. I had often dined at the Garrick with my brother, who was a member of the club, and remembered that evening clothes had not been worn by most of the men there. Anyhow, I arrived from a country journey in an ordinary lounge suit, with rather muddy boots, owing to a downpour of rain, and then found, to my consternation, that I was the guest of a distinguished dinner party assembled in my honor. The first man to whom I was presented was Field MarshalSir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial Staff, and behind him stood Admiral Lord Charles Beresford (old “Charlie B.”) and a number of important people who were helping to “win the war.” Lord Burnham entirely disregarded my miserable clothes, but I was damnably uncomfortable until I forgot my own insignificance in listening to the conversation of these great people who were as gloomy and pessimistic a crowd as I have ever met, and seemed to have abandoned all hope. The one exception was Sir William Robertson, who sat rather silent until at the end of the meal he said “We may be puffed, and breathing hard, but all I can say is, gentlemen, that the Germans are more exhausted.”
That reminiscence, however, only leads me to the fact that after the Armistice I again transferred toThe Daily Chronicleand remained with them until Lloyd George’s policy of reprisals in Ireland filled me with a sudden passion of disgust and led to my resignation from the paper which supported it.
I think every journalist must now admit that the English press, with very few exceptions, fell to a very low moral ebb after the Armistice. The “hate” campaign was not relinquished but revived with full blast against the beaten enemy. A mountain of false illusion was built up on the basis that Germany could be made to pay for all the costs of war in all the victorious nations, and a peace of vengeance was encouraged, full of the seeds of future wars, at a time in the history of mankind when by a little spirit of generosity, a little drawing together of the world’s democracies, even a little economic sanity in regard to the ruined state of Europe as a whole, civilization itself might have been lifted to a higher plane, future peace might have been secured according to the promise of “the war to end war,” and at least we should have been spared the squalor, the degradation, the bitterness of the last four years. But the English press led thechorus of “Hang the Kaiser,” “Make the Germans pay,” “They will cheat you yet, those Junkers!” and all the old cries of passionate folly, instead of concentrating on the defeat of militarism now that Germany was down and out, the economic reconstruction of Europe after the ruin of war, and the fulfilment of the pledges that had been made to the men who won the war. For, as we now know, and as I foretold, the German people could not pay these colossal, unimaginable sums upon which France and Great Britain reckoned, and the whole argument of these “fruits of victory” was built upon a falsity which demoralized the peoples of the allied Powers, and kept Europe in a ferment. The English press (apart from a few papers) refused to bear witness to the real truth, which was that the Peace of Versailles was impossible of fulfillment, that Europe could not recover under its economic provisions, and that the victor nations would have to face poverty, an immense burden of taxation, a stagnation of trade, the awful costs of war, with no chance of getting rich again by putting a stranglehold on the defeated peoples.
For four years following the Armistice I become a wanderer in Europe, Asia Minor, and America, as a student of the psychology and state of this after-war world, trying to see beneath the surface of social and political life to the deeper currents of thought and emotion and natural law set in motion by the enormous tragedy through which so many nations had passed.
Everywhere I saw a loosening of the old restraints of mental and moral discipline and a kind of neurotic malady which was manifested by alternate gusts of gayety and depression, a wild licentiousness in the crowded cities of Europe, a spirit of restlessness and revolt among the demobilized men, and misery, starvation, disease, and despair, beyond the glare and glitter of dancing halls, restaurants, and places of frivolity.
In France the exultation of victory, which inspired a spirit of carnival in the boulevards of Paris, crowded with visitors from all the Allied nations, did not uplift the hearts of masses of peasants and humble bourgeois folk who returned to the sites of their old homes and villages of which only a few stones or sticks or rubbish heaps remained in the fields which had been swept by the flame of war. With courage and resignation they cleared the ground of barbed wire and unexploded shells, and the unburied bodies of men, and the foul litter of a four years’ battle, but they faced a bleak prospect, and behind them and around them was the vision of ruin and death. For a long time they were without water or light, stone or timber, for the work of reconstruction, or any recompense for their losses from the French Government which looked to Germany for reparations and did not get them. I talked with many of these people in their hovels and huts, marveled at their patience and courage and was saddened because so quickly after war they mistrusted the friendship of England, and the security of the peace they had gained. Their hatred to the Germans was a cold, undying fire, and beneath their hatred was the fear, already visible, that Germany hadn’t been smashed enough, and that one day she would come back again for vengeance.
In Italy there was violence, bitterness, poverty, and revolt. The nation was demoralized by all the shocks that had shaken it. The microbe of Bolshevism was working in the brains of demoralized soldiers. The very walls of Rome were scrawled with Communistic cries and the name of Lenin.
In Rome I accomplished a journalistic mission which, in its way, was a unique honor and experience. This was to interview the Pope on behalf ofThe Daily Chronicleand a syndicate of American newspapers. Such a thing seemed impossible, and I knew that the chances againstme were a million to one. Yet I believed that some plain words from the Pope who, perhaps, alone among men had been above and outside all the fratricidal strife of nations, and had been abused by both sides as “Pro-German” and “Pro-Ally,” would be of profound interest and importance. It was possible that he might give a spiritual call to humanity in this time of moral depression and degradation. I pressed these views upon a certain prelate who had the confidence of Benedict XV, and who was a broad-minded man in sympathy with democratic thought and customs.
He laughed at me heartily for my audacity, and said, “Out of the question!... Impossible!” He explained that no journalists were allowed even at the public audiences of the Pope, owing to regrettable incidents, and that my request for a private interview couldn’t be considered.... We talked of international affairs, and presently I took my leave. “It is no use pressing for that interview?” I asked at the door. He laughed again, and said, “I will let you have a formal reply.”
Three days later, to my immense surprise, I received, without any other word, a card admitting me to a private interview with H. H. Benedict XV, at three-thirty on the following afternoon.
I knew that I had to wear evening clothes, and on that hot afternoon I entirely wrecked three white ties in the endeavor to make a decent bow, and then borrowed one from a waiter. Hiring an oldcarrozza, and feeling intensely nervous at the impending interview, I drove to the Vatican. My card was a magic talisman. The Swiss Guards grounded their pikes before me, and their officer bowed toward a flight of marble steps leading to the private apartments. I was passed on from room to room, saluted by gentlemen of the Pope’s bodyguard in impressive uniforms, until my knees weakened above the polished boards, my tongue clave to the roof of mymouth, and my waiter’s dress tie slipped up behind my right ear.
Finally, in a highly self-conscious state, I reached an ante-chamber where I was kept waiting for ten minutes until a chamberlain came through a little door and beckoned to me. As I passed through the doorway, I saw a tiny little man in white robes, waiting for me on the threshold.
He smiled through his spectacles, took hold of my wrist as I went down on one knee, according to etiquette, hauled me up with a firm grip, and led me to two gilt chairs, side by side. “Now we can talk,” he said in French, and he sat in one chair and I in the other, in that big room where we were alone together.
In a second my nervousness left me, and we had what the Americans call a heart-to-heart talk. The Pope did not use any fine phrases. He asked me a lot of questions about the state of Europe, the feeling in England and America, and then spoke about the war and its effects. Several times he called the war “a Scourge of God,” and spoke of his efforts to mitigate its misery and relieve some of its agonies. He alluded to the abuse he had received from both sides because of his neutrality and his repeated efforts on behalf of peace, and then waved that on one side and entered into a discussion on the economic effects of war. He saw no quick way of escape from ruin, no rapid means of recovery. “We must steel ourselves to poverty,” he said, and alluded to the great illusion of masses of people, duped by their leaders, that, after the destruction of the world’s wealth, there could be the same prosperity. He spoke sternly of the profiteers, and in a pitying way of the poverty-stricken peoples. “The rich must pay,” he said. “Those who profited out of the war must pay most.” His last words, after a twenty-minutes’ talk, were a plea for charity and peace in the hearts of peoples.
All the time he was talking, I had in the back of my mind the doubt whether I might publish this conversation, and whether, indeed, he knew my profession and purpose. I could not leave him with that doubt, and asked him, with some trepidation, if I might publish the words he had spoken to me. He smiled, and said, “It is the purpose of this conversation.”
I hurried back to my hotel, and wrote a full account, and then desired to submit it for approval to the prelate who had obtained this great consent. But he waved it on one side, and said, “You can write what you like, and publish what you like, provided it is the truth. We trust you!”
I did not abuse that trust, and my interview with the Pope was quoted in every newspaper in the English-speaking world, and created a very favorable effect.
The raid on Fiume by d’Annunzio was a passionate assertion of Imperial claims denied by the Great Powers which have made a peace regarded by Italy as a robbery of all its rightful claims, but this new manifestation of militarism was offset by the capture of factories by Communist workers and the hoisting of the Red Flag in many industrial towns. Beneath the beauty of Rome, Florence, Naples, and Venice, I saw the ugly shadow of revolution and anarchy.
I went from Trieste to Vienna, and saw worse things in a city deliberately doomed by the Allied Powers—a city of two million people which had once been the capital of a great Empire, the brilliant flower of an old civilization, and now was cut off from all its old resources of wealth and life. In slum streets and babies’ crêches, and hospital wards, away from the wild vice and gayety of great hotels and dancing halls crowded with foreigners and profiteers, I saw the children of a starving city, stricken with rickets, scrofula, all kinds of hunger-diseases, and so weak that children of six or seven had no hardnessof bone, so that they couldn’t stand up or sit up, and had bulbous heads above their wizened bodies. The women could not feed their babes for lack of milk. Men like skeletons in rags slouched about the streets, begging with clawlike hands. Ladies of good family could not buy underclothing or boots. Professional men, aristocrats, Ministers of State, lived on thin soup, potatoes, war bread, and the very nurses in the hospitals were starving. The Austrian kronen became worth hardly more than waste paper, and despair had settled upon this great and beautiful city.
I went on to Germany, deeply curious to know what had happened in the soul and state of this people after their tremendous struggle and their supreme defeat. I found there an immense pride of resistance to the consequence of defeat, an utter repudiation of war guilt, an intense vital energy and industry by which they hoped to recapture their lost trade and economic supremacy in Europe, a friendly feeling toward England, a deadly hatred toward France. Outwardly there was no sign of poverty or despair. There were no devastated regions, like those in France, no tidal wave of unemployment, like that in England. All the great engineering works, like those of Krupp which had provided a vast output of artillery and munitions for a world war, had adapted their machinery to the purposes of peace, and were manufacturing railway engines, agricultural machines, typewriters, kitchen utensils, everything that is made of metal, for the world’s needs. It was staggering in its contrast to the lack of energy, the commercial stagnation, the idleness and debility of other war-tired peoples.
But, again, I tried to see below the surface of things, and I saw that this feverish activity was not based on sound foundations of material life, but on a rotten financial system and unhealthy laws. The workingman was underpaid and underfed, and the victim of a system ofslave labor. The professional classes were in dire poverty, and what money they earned and saved lost its value day by day, because the German Government was deliberately inflating its paper money by racing the printing presses with issues of false notes which had no reality to back them. German export trade was capturing the world’s markets, but only by underselling to a rate which gave no real industrial profit. And whatever wealth Germany made, or could make, was earmarked for reparations and indemnities which, when the day of reckoning came, would make a mockery of all her efforts, reveal the great sham of her paper money, cast her into the depths of ruin, and mock at the demands of France and her Allies for the payment of those debts of war upon which they counted for their own needs and escape from ruin.
In Germany I had long talks with some of their leading politicians, bankers, and financial experts, whose figures and statements I checked by consultation with our own Ambassador and political observers. It was not without a thrill of cold emotion, and dark remembrance, that I stood for the first time in the Reichstag and saw all around me those men who had been the propagandists of hate against England, the supporters of the War Lords, the faithful servants of the Kaiser and his Chancellors, up to the last throw in their gamblers’ game with fate, when all was lost. There was Scheidemann, the Social Democrat who had voted for all the war subsidies until the hour of defeat, when he voted for the new Republic. There was Stresemann, the leader of the People’s Party, and an avowed Monarchist, in spite of all that had happened. There was Bernsdorff, the intriguer in America, up to his neck in conspiracy with dynamiters and Sinn Feiners and spies. These men filled me with distrust. Their new profession of good will to England had a hollow sound. Yet these, and others, spoke with the utmost frankness about Germany’s condition, and for their ownreasons did not hide the desperate menace of that gamble with national finance by which they hoped to postpone the inevitable crash. I was more deeply interested in the mentality of the ordinary German folk and their way of life. A strain of pacifism seemed to be working among them, and they were sick and saddened by their loss of blood in the war, terrible in its sum of death. But the very name of France inflamed their passion. “We are all pacifists,” said one man I met. “We want no more war—except one!” The humiliation of the French occupation on the Rhine, the continued insults of the French press, above all, the presence of Moroccan troops in German cities, instilled a slow poison of hate into every German mind. It made me afraid of the future....