WHAT TO BELIEVE IN WAR NEWS
WHAT TO BELIEVE IN WAR NEWS
Theother day there came a message to London from Italy, solemnly delivered in printer’s ink and repeated in nearly every newspaper, that the town of Cracow was invested, that the bombardment had begun, and that part of the city was in flames.
Cracow is the key of Silesia, and Silesia is the Lancashire of Prussia. The successful investment of Cracow would certainly bring the war to its last phase, and that phase one bringing rapid victory to the Allies.
But Cracow was not invested; no one had bombarded it. The whole thing was fantastic nonsense.
So much for one particular newspaper report, which had nothing to distinguish it from other telegrams and news, and which millions of people must have read and believed.
Every one of the readers of these lines will be able to recall other instances of the same kind. I have before me as I write extract after extract of that sort. In one, Roulers has been retaken; in another, Lille is reoccupied; in another (a much earlier one), the Germans are at Pont Oise.
Sometimes these accounts appear in long and detailed descriptions proceeding from the pens of men who are fairly well known in Fleet Street, and who have the courage to sign their names.
There has, perhaps, never been a great publicoccasion in regard to which it was more necessary that men should form a sound judgment, and yet there has certainly not been one in our time upon which the materials for such a judgment have been more confused.
The importance of a sound public judgment upon the progress of the war is not always clearly appreciated. It depends upon truths which many men have forgotten, and upon certain political forces which, in the ordinary rush and tumble of professional politics, are quite forgotten. Let me recall those truths and those forces.
The truths are these: that no Government can effectively exercise its power save upon the basis of public opinion. A Government can exercise its power over a conquered province in spite of public opinion, but it cannot work, save for a short time and at an enormous cost in friction, counter to the opinion of those with whom it is concerned as citizens and supporters. By which I do not mean that party politicians cannot act thus in peace, and upon unimportant matters. I mean that no kind of Government has ever been able to act thus in a crisis.
It is also wise to keep the mass of people in ignorance of disasters that may be immediately repaired, or of follies or even vices in government which may be redressed before they become dangerous.
It is always absolutely wise to prevent the enemy in time of war from learning things which would be an aid to him. That is the reason why a strict censorship in time of war is not only useful, but essentially and drastically necessary. But thoughpublic opinion, even in time of peace, is only in part informed, and though in time of war it may be very insufficiently informed, yet upon it and with it you govern. Without it or against it in time of war you cannot govern.
Now if during the course of a great war men come quite to misjudge its very nature, the task of the Government would be strained some time or other in the future to breaking point. False news, too readily credited, does not leave people merely insufficiently informed, conscious of their ignorance, and merely grumbling because they cannot learn more, it has the positive effect of putting them into the wrong frame of mind, of making them support what they should not support, and neglect what they should not neglect.
Unfortunately, public authority, which possesses and rightfully exercises so much power in the way of censorship—that is, in the way of limiting information—has little power to correct false information. The Censor receives a message, saying that at the expense of heavy loss General So-and-So’s brigade, composed of the Downshires and the Blankshires, repelled the enemy upon such-and-such a front, but that three hundred men are missing from the brigade at the end of the action. If he allows this piece of news to go through at all he must even so refuse to allow any mention of the names of the regiments, of their strength, of the place where they were fighting, and the numbers of those who are missing.
Why must the Censor act thus? Because this information would be of the utmost value to theenemy. The enemy, remember, does not ever quite know what is in front of him. Indeed, the whole of military history consists in the story of men who are successful because they can gauge better than other men the forces which they have to meet.
Now if you let him know that on such-and-such an occasion the force that he met upon such-and-such a front was a brigade of infantry, and if you let him know its composition, and if you do this kind of thing with regard to the army in general, you end by letting him know two things which he particularly wants to know, and which it is all your duty to prevent him knowing. You let him know the size of the force in front of him, and you let him know its composition.
Similar reasons make the Censor hide from the enemy the number of men missing. The enemy knows if he has taken in prisoners wounded and unwounded two hundred and fifty men, and, for all he knows, that is, excepting the dead, your total loss; but if you publish the fact that you have lost a thousand men, he is accurately informed of a weakness in your present disposition, which he otherwise would not suspect.
All this action of the Censor is as wise as it is necessary, but in the face of false news he is in another position. In the first place, it is difficult for him to judge it (unless, of course, it concerns our own particular forces). In the second place, it may not concern matters which the enemy can possibly ignore. For instance, in this example of the supposed investment of Cracow. The Russians were certainly approaching the place. The newsmight conceivably be true. If it were true, the enemy would already be amply acquainted with it, and it would be of a nature not to aid him, but to discourage him. But the news was, in fact, untrue, and, being untrue, its publication did not a little harm.
Now, how are we to counter this danger? How is the plain man to distinguish in his news of the war what is true from what is false, and so arrive at a sound opinion? After some months of study in connexion with my work upon the three campaigns, I may be able to suggest certain ways in which such a position should be approached.
In the first place, the bases of all sound opinion are the official communiqués read with the aid of a map.
When I say “the official communiqués” I do not mean those of the British Government alone, nor even of the Allies alone, but ofallthe belligerents. You must read impartially the communiqués of the Austro-Hungarian and of the German Governments together with those of the British Government and its Allies, or you will certainly miss the truth. By which statement I do not mean that each Government is equally accurate, still less equally full in its relation; but that, unless you compare all the statements of this sort, you will have most imperfect evidence; just as you would have very imperfect evidence in a court of law if you only listened to the prosecution and refused to listen to the defence. Now, these official communiqués have certain things in common by whatever Government they are issued. There are certain features in them which you willalways find although they come from natures as different as those of a Prussian staff officer and a Serbian patriot.
These common features we may tabulate thus:
(a) Places named as occupied by the forces of the Government in question are really occupied. To invent the occupation of a town or point not in one’s own hands would serve no purpose. It would not deceive the enemy and it would not long support opinion at home. Thus, when Lodz was reported occupied by the Germans in the middle of December, all careful students of the war knew perfectly well that the news was true.(b) Numbers, when they are quoted in connexion with a really ascertainable fact, and with regard to a precise and concrete circumstance, are nearly always reliable; though their significance differs, as I shall show in a moment, very greatly according to the way they are treated. Thus, if a Government says, “in such-and-such a place or on such-and-such a day we took three thousand prisoners,” it is presumably telling the truth, for the enemy who has lost those prisoners knows it as well as they do. But estimates of what has happened in the way of numbers, where the Government issuing the estimate can have no direct knowledge, are quite another matter. These are only gathered from prisoners or from spies, and are often ridiculously wrong.(c) All official communiqués of whatever Government conceal reverses, save in minor points. They are wise to do this because there is no need to tell the enemy more than he may know of his ownsuccess. Reverses are not actually denied. They are omitted. Witness all omission of Lemberg from Austrian or German communiqués and, until somewhat late, of Tannenberg in Russian, of Metz in French official accounts.
(a) Places named as occupied by the forces of the Government in question are really occupied. To invent the occupation of a town or point not in one’s own hands would serve no purpose. It would not deceive the enemy and it would not long support opinion at home. Thus, when Lodz was reported occupied by the Germans in the middle of December, all careful students of the war knew perfectly well that the news was true.
(b) Numbers, when they are quoted in connexion with a really ascertainable fact, and with regard to a precise and concrete circumstance, are nearly always reliable; though their significance differs, as I shall show in a moment, very greatly according to the way they are treated. Thus, if a Government says, “in such-and-such a place or on such-and-such a day we took three thousand prisoners,” it is presumably telling the truth, for the enemy who has lost those prisoners knows it as well as they do. But estimates of what has happened in the way of numbers, where the Government issuing the estimate can have no direct knowledge, are quite another matter. These are only gathered from prisoners or from spies, and are often ridiculously wrong.
(c) All official communiqués of whatever Government conceal reverses, save in minor points. They are wise to do this because there is no need to tell the enemy more than he may know of his ownsuccess. Reverses are not actually denied. They are omitted. Witness all omission of Lemberg from Austrian or German communiqués and, until somewhat late, of Tannenberg in Russian, of Metz in French official accounts.
Those are the three points which all the official communiqués have in common, and by bearing them well in mind we can often frame an accurate picture, in spite of the apparent contradiction and confusion which the reading of several communiqués one after the other produces.
For instance, the Germans are trying to cross the Bzura River according to the Russian communiqué of Saturday. Next Wednesday the Russian communiqué says, “Two attempts to cross the Bzura at such-and-such places were repelled”; while the German communication says, “Our troops succeeded in crossing the Bzura River at such-and-such a village and established themselves upon the right bank.” In such a case the reader will be wise to believe the German communiqué and to take it for granted that while the Russians have repelled certain other attempts of the enemy to cross, this attempt has succeeded. But if the Germans go on to say, “The Russians retired after suffering losses which cannot have been less than twenty thousand,” that is no news at all. It is obviously conjecture.
The various Governments issuing the communiqués have acquired certain habits in them which are worth noting if one is attempting to get at an accurate view of the war, and these habits may be briefly described as follows:
The British Government publishes short notes ofadvances made or of positions maintained, but very rarely refers to the losing of ground. It publishes casualty lists, which are, of course, not complete till very long after the events wherein the casualties were incurred. It supplements the short communiqués, and this by a more or less expanded narrative written by an official deputed for that purpose and giving accounts, often graphic, but necessarily of no military value; of no value, that is, for following the campaign. For if these narratives were of that kind the object of the censorship would be defeated.
The Belgian Government at the beginning of the war allowed very full accounts to go through and permitted the presence of correspondents at the front itself. That phase is now over and does not immediately concern us.
The French Government is by far the most reticent. It occasionally mentions the capture of a colour, but it publishes no casualty lists, no account of the field guns taken by French troops, and only now and then hints at the number of prisoners. It is, however, minutely accurate and even detailed in helping us to locate the fluctuations of the front, and by the aid of the French communiqués we can follow the war upon the map better than by the aid of any other. In its control of the Press the French General Staff is absolute. There has been nothing like it before, and it has been perfectly successful. You will see whole columns cut out of the newspapers in France and left blank, so certain are the military authorities of that country that the most vigorous censorship is vital to modern war. There is lastlyto be noted in connexion with the French communiqués, especially after the first two months of the campaign, a remarkable frankness with regard to the occasional giving of ground by their own troops. The theory is that the enemy will know this in any case, and that as the position is secure, details of the sort though adverse, lend strength to the general narrative. In all this it must be remembered, of course, that the French Government, and, at this moment, the French Army, is far more powerful than any newspaper proprietor or other capitalist, and it is well for any nation at war to be able to say that.
The Russian Government is accurate, and, if anything, a little too terse in what it communicates to the public, but its censorship is far less strict than that of the French or even the English. Thus during the fighting round Lodz in defence of Warsaw at the beginning of December, correspondents from Petrograd were allowed to telegraph the most flamboyant descriptions of an immediately approaching German retreat which never took place. But, I repeat, the official Russian news is sober and restrained and accurate to a fault.
When we turn to the enemy’s communiqués, we note first that the Austro-Hungarians are rare, insufficient, and confused. They are of little service, and may almost be neglected. But the German ones are numerous, extended and precise, and it is our particular business to judge them accurately if we are to understand the war, for when or if they tell the truth it is from them that we learn what would otherwise be hidden.
Well, in my judgment, these official Germancommuniqués are in the main remarkably exact, and I believe it is possible to say why they are so exact. The German General Staff makes war in a purely mechanical fashion. It gravely exaggerates, as do all modern North Germans, the calculable element in human affairs. It is what used to be called “scientific.” It is obvious that if you get a reputation for exactitude your falsehood, where it pays you to tell the falsehood, will be the more likely to work. The remarkable general accuracy of the official German communiqués cannot be due to any other object. It cannot be due to a mere love of truth, for the same Government deliberately circulates to its own provincial Press and to certain neutrals stories which cannot in the nature of things be true. Nor is this inaccuracy the result either of haste or of stupidity, it is very intelligent and obviously deliberate.
When, therefore, a German communiqué tells an untruth, that untruth is deliberate and upon an effective scale, and we have to consider what object it has, if we are to understand the news. We may take it that the object is nearly always domestic and political. Remember that these official German falsehoods, countersigned by the General Staff and the Government, are as rare as they are solid. They do not slip in. They are not vague or led up to by doubtful phrases.
Let me take two of them. Scarborough was officially described as a fortified port, like Sheerness or Cherbourg. That takes one’s breath away. But monstrous as it is, it is not childish, because it was intended to give to the public that read it at home a certain effect which was, in fact, produced.
So successfully was that effect produced that a competent military critic in the German Press, writing the day after, had already got the idea that Scarborough was the most important naval base upon the East Coast. We must remember when we read such things that very few educated men out of a thousand in our own country could give the names of the fortified naval bases upon, say, the Adriatic, or even the Atlantic coast of France.
Another example of the same thing in a rather different line is the illumination of Berlin, the giving of a holiday to the school children and the official proclamation of a great and decisive victory in Poland during the course of the second battle for Warsaw, an action which had already lasted a fortnight, which was destined to last for many more days, and which remained at that time utterly undecided.
According to fairly reliable accounts of what was passing in Berlin at the moment, the Government was under some necessity of acting thus because the beginning of popular unrest had appeared. But whatever the cause, my point is that these German inaccuracies when they occur, which is rarely, are easily distinguishable. They stand out from the rest of the sober narrative by their conspicuous nonsense. They do not disturb the judgment of a careful reader. They should not prevent our continuing to collate most closely German statements in detail with those of the Allies, if we wish to understand the war.
There is one other point which I have already alluded to briefly, in which German communiquésmay mislead, and that is in the way they handle statistics. The actual wording of news is often chosen in order to deceive, although the figures may be accurate. For instance, under the title “prisoners,” the Germans include all wounded men picked up, all civilians which in this singular war are carried away into captivity, and, probably, when it is to their interest to swell the number of captured, they include certain numbers of the dead. In the same way they will talk of the capture of Verdun, and not infrequently include such of their own pieces as a re-advance has rediscovered upon the field.
It may be added in conclusion that while German communiqués rarely wander into conjecture, when they do they are idiotic, and exactly the same reason made German diplomats wholly misunderstand the mind of Europe immediately before the war. A German induction upon something other than material elements is worthless, and you see it nowhere more than in the careful but often useless, though monumental, work of German historians, who will accumulate a mass of facts greater in number than those of the scholars of any other nation, and then will draw a conclusion quite shamefully absurd; conclusions which, during the last forty years, have usually been followed by the dons of our own universities.
There is one last element for the formation of a sound opinion on the war which must be mentioned at the end of this, and that is the private evidence which occasionally but rarely comes through. Here there is no guide but that of one’s own experience in travel, or that of one’s own knowledge of thenewspaper or the authority printing it. The occasions upon which such evidence is available are very infrequent, but when they do come the evidence is far more valuable than any official communiqué Let me quote as an example the letters from Hungary which appeared in theMorning Postupon various occasions during the autumn and early winter. They were quite invaluable.
Lastly, one might add for those who have the leisure and the confidence, the use of the foreign Press—especially the French and the German. It is biased, as is our own, and often belated in news. The German Press in particular suffers from the calculated policy of the Government of the German Empire, which at this moment believes it to be of service to stimulate public confidence of victory in every possible manner. Nevertheless, unless you do follow fairly regularly the Press ofallthe belligerent nations, you will obtain but an imperfect view of the war as a whole.