XVIII
Fleet Street in the days before the declaration of war was like the nerve center of the nation’s psychology, and throbbed with all the emotions of fear, hysteria, incredulity, and patriotic fever, deadened at times by a kind of intellectual stupor, which took possession of her people.
It was self-convicted of stupendous ignorance. None of those leader writers, who for years had written with an immense assumption of knowledge, had revealed this imminence of the world conflict. Some of them had played a game of party politics with “the German menace,” and had used it as a stick for their political opponents. The Daily Mail, favoring a big navy, and more capital ships, had led the chorus of “We want eight and we won’t wait.” The Daily News, favoring disarmament, had denied the existence of any aggressive spirit in Germany. According to the political color of the newspapers, Liberal or Tory, the question of German relations had been written up by the leader writers and news had been carefully selected by the foreign news editors. But the public had never been given any clear or authoritative guidance; they had never been warned by the press as a whole, rising above the political game, that the very life of the nation was in jeopardy, and that all they had and were would be challenged to the death. Murder trials, suffragette raids, divorce court news, the social whirligig, the passionate folly in Ireland, had been the stuff with which the press had fed the public mind to the very eve of this crash into the abyss of horror.
Even now, when war was certain, the press said, “It is impossible!” as indeed the nation did, in its little homes, because their imagination refused to admit the possibility of that monstrous cataclysm. And when war was declared, the press said, “It will be over in three months.” Indeed, men I knew in Fleet Street, old colleagues of mine, said, “It will be over in three weeks!” Their theory seemed to be that Germany had gone mad and that with England, France, and Russia attacking on all sides, she would collapse like a pricked bladder.
Looking back on that time, I find a little painful amusement in the thought of our immeasurable ignorance as to the meaning of modern warfare. We knew just nothing about its methods or machinery, nor about its immensity of range and destruction.
After the first shock and stupor, news editors began to get busy, as though this war were going to be like the South-African affair, remote, picturesque, and romantic. They appointed a number of correspondents to “cover” the various fronts. They engaged press photographers and cinema men. War correspondents of the old school, like Bennett Burleigh, H. W. Nevinson, and Frederick Villiers, called at the War Office for their credentials, collected their kit, and took riding exercise in the Park, believing that they would need horses in this war on the western front, as great generals—dear simple souls—believed that cavalry could ride through German trenches.
The War Office kept a little group of distinguished old-time war correspondents kicking their heels in waiting rooms of Whitehall, week after week, and month after month, always with the promise that wonderful arrangements would be made for them “shortly.” Meanwhile, and at the very outbreak of war, a score of younger journalists, without waiting for War Office credentials, and disobeying War Office orders, dashed over to France and Belgium, and plunged into the swirl and backwash of this frightful drama. Some of them had astounding and perilous adventures, in sheer ignorance, at first, of the hazards they took, but it was not long before they understood and knew, with a shock that changed their youthful levity of adventure into the gravity of men who have looked into the flames of hell, and the torture chamber of human agony. Henceforth, between them and those who had not seen, there was an impassable gulf of understanding....
Owing to the rigid refusal of the War Office, under Lord Kitchener’s orders, to give any official credentials to correspondents, the British press, as hungry for news as the British public whose little professional army had disappeared behind a deathlike silence, printed any scrap of description, any glimmer of truth, any wild statement, rumor, fairy tale, or deliberate lie, which reached them from France or Belgium; and it must be admitted that the liars had a great time.
A vast amount of lying was done by newspaper men who accepted the official statements of French Ministers, hiding the frightful truth of the German advance. It was an elaboration of the French communiqués which in the first weeks of the war were devoid of truth. But a great deal of imaginative lying was accomplished by young journalists, who at Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk, Ghent, or Paris, invented marvelous adventures of their own, exaggerated affairs of outposts into stupendous battles, and defeated the Germans time and time again in verbal victories, while the German war machine was driving like a knife into the hearts of Belgium and France.
Reading the English newspapers in those early days of the war, with their stories of starving Germany, their atrocity-mongering, their wild perversions of truth, a journalist proud of his profession must blush for shame at its degradation and insanity. Its excuse and defense lie in the psychological storm that the war created in the soul of humanity, from which Fleet Street itself—very human—did not escape; in the natural agony of desire to find some reason for hopefulness; in the patriotic necessity of preventing despair from overwhelming popular opinion in the first shock of the enemy’s advance; and in the desperate anxiety of all men and women whose heritage and liberties were at stake, to get some glimpse behind the heavy shutters of secrecy that had been slammed down by military censorship.
I was one of those who did not wait for official permits, and plunged straightway into the vortex of the war game. In self-defense I must plead that I was not one of the liars! I did not manufacture atrocities, and had some temperamental difficulty in believing those that were true, because I believed in the decency of the common man, even in the decency of the German common man. I did not invent imaginary adventures, but found tragedy enough, and drama enough, in the things I saw, and the truth that I found. As I had two companions most of the time in those early days, whose honor is acknowledged by all who know them—H. M. Tomlinson and W. M. Massey—their evidence supported my own articles which, like theirs, revealed something to our people of the enormous history that was happening.
Strangely, as it now seems to me, I was appointed artist correspondent to The Graphic, as I had been in the Bulgarian war, and I actually made some sketches of French mobilization and preparations for war, which were redrawn and published. But my old paper, The Daily Chronicle, desired my services and I changed over to them, and abandoned the pencil for the pen, with The Graphic’s consent, a few days after the declaration of war.
I had crossed over to Paris on the night the reservists had been called to the colors in England, although so far war had not been declared by England or France. But the fleet was cleared for action, and ready, and that night destroyers were out in the English Channel and their searchlights swept our packet boat, where groups of Frenchmen who had been clerks, hairdressers, and shop assistants in England were singing “The Marseillaise” with a kind of religious ecstasy, while in the saloon a party of Lancashire lads were getting fuddled and promising themselves “a good time” on a week-end trip to Paris, utterly unconscious of war and its realities.
In The Daily Chronicle office in Paris, where I had done night duty so often, my friend and colleague, Henri Bourdin, was white to the lips with nervous emotion, and constantly answered telephonic inquiries from French journalists: “Is England coming in? Nothing official, eh? Is it certain England will come in? You think so? Name of God! why doesn’t England say the word?”
It was the consuming thought in all French minds. They were desperate for an answer to their questions. Because of the delay, Paris was suspicious, angry, ready for an outbreak of passion against the English tourists, who were besieging the railway stations, and against English journalists, who were in a fever of anxiety.
I saw the unforgetable scenes of mobilization in Paris, which made one’s very heart weep with the tragedy of those partings between men and women, who clung to each other and kissed for the last time—so many of them for the last time—and on the night of August 2nd I went with the first trainload of reservists to Belfort, Toul, and Nancy. All through the night, at every station in which the train stopped, there was the sound of marching men, and the song of “The Marseillaise”:
“Formez vos bataillons!”
The youth of France was trooping from the fields and workshops, not in ignorance of the sacrifice to which they were called, not light-heartedly, but with a simple and splendid devotion to their country which now, in remembrance, after the years of massacre and of disillusion, still fills me with emotion....
I do not intend here to give a narrative of my own experiences of war. I have written them elsewhere, and what do they matter, anyhow, in those years when millions of men faced death daily and passed through an adventure of life beyond all power of imagination of civilized men? I will rather deal with the subject of the Press in war, and with the peculiar difficulties and work of the correspondents, especially in the early days.
For the first few months of the war we had no status whatever. Indeed, to be quite plain, we were outlaws, subject to immediate arrest (and often arrested) by any officer, French or British, who discovered us in the war zone. Kitchener refused to sanction the scheme, which had been fully prepared before the war, for the appointment of a small body of war correspondents whose honor and reputation were acknowledged, and gave orders that any journalist found in the field of war should be instantly expelled and have his passport canceled. The French were even more severe, and sent out stern orders from their General Headquarters for the arrest of any journalist found trespassing in the zone of war.
For some time, however, it was impossible to enforce these rules. The German advance through Belgium and Northern France was only a day or two, or an hour or two behind the stampede of vast populations in flight from the enemy. The roads were filled with these successive tides of refugees. The trains were stormed by panic-stricken folk, and even the troop trains found room in the corridors and on the roofs for swarms of civilians, men and women. Dressed in civilian clothes, unshaved and unwashed, like any of these people, how could a correspondent be distinguished or arrested? Who was going to bother about him? Even the spy mania which seized France very quickly and feverishly did not create, for some time, a network of restriction close enough to catch us. I traveled for weeks in the war zone on a pass stamped by French headquarters, permitting me to receive the daily communiqué from the War Office in Paris. I had dozens of other passes and permis de séjour from local authorities and police, which enabled me to travel with perfect facility, provided I was able to bluff the military guards at the railway stations, who were generally satisfied with those bunches of dirty passes and official-looking stamps. There was, too, a dual control in France, and a divergence of views regarding war correspondents. The civil authorities—prefects, mayors, and police—favored our presence, desired to let us know the suffering and heroism of their people, and welcomed us with every courtesy, because we were English and their allies. Often they turned a blind eye to military commands, or were ignorant of the orders against us.
Massey, Tomlinson, and I, working together in close comradeship, in those first weeks of war, traveled in Northern France and Belgium with what now seems to me an amazing freedom. We were caught up in the tide of flight from French and Belgian cities. We saw the retreat of the French army through Amiens, from which city we escaped only a short time before the entry of Von Kluck’s columns. We came into the midst of the British retreat at Creil, where Sir John French had set up his headquarters; mingled with the crowds of English and Scottish stragglers, French infantry and engineers, who were falling back on Paris, before the spearheads of the German invasion, with a world of tragedy behind them, yet with a faith in victory that was mysterious and sublime. We had no knowledge of the enemy’s whereabouts and set out in simple ignorance for towns already in German hands, or alighted at stations threatened with immediate capture. So it was at Beauvais, where we were the only passengers in a train that pulled over a bridge where a cuirassier stood by bags of dynamite ready to blow it up, and where the last of the civilian population had trudged away from streets strewn with broken glass. Only by a strange spell of luck did we escape capture by the enemy, toward whose line we went, partly in ignorance of the enormous danger, partly with foolhardy deliberation, and always drugged with desire to see and know the worst or the best of this frightful drama.
We were often exhausted with fatigue. On the day we came into a deserted Paris, stricken with an agony of apprehension that the Germans would enter, I had to be carried to bed by Tomlinson and Massey, as helpless as a child. A few days later, Massey, a strong man till then, but now ashen-faced and weak, could not drag one leg after another. We had worn down our nervous strength to what seemed like the last strand, yet we went on again, in the wagons of troop trains, sleeping in corridors, the baggage rooms of railway stations, or carriages crammed with French poilus, who told narratives of war with a simplicity and realism that froze one’s blood.
We followed up the German retreat from the Marne, when the bodies of the dead were being buried in heaps and the fields were littered with the wreckage of battle, and then went north to Dunkirk, bombed every day by German aëroplanes, but crowded with French fusiliers, marins, Arabs, British aviators of the Royal Navy, and Belgian refugees. Here I parted for a time with Massey and Tomlinson, and in a brief experience as a stretcher bearer with an ambulance column attached to the Belgian army, saw into the flaming heart of war, at Dixmude, Nieuport, and other places, where I became familiar with the sight of death, dirty with the blood of wounded men, and sick with the agony of this human shambles—a story which I have told in my book, The Soul of the War.
Other men, old friends of mine in Fleet Street, were having similar adventures, taking the same, or greater, hazards, dodging the military authorities with more or less luck. Hamilton Fyfe, then of The Daily Mail and now editor of The Daily Herald, was caught in a motor car by a patrol of German Uhlans, and only escaped becoming a prisoner of war by an amazing freak of fortune. George Curnock, also of The Daily Mail, was arrested by the French as a spy, and very nearly shot. A little group of correspondents—among them Ashmead Bartlett—were flung into the Cherche Midi prison and treated for a time like common criminals. I happened to fall into conversation with a French officer, who had actually arrested them. He was strongly suspicious of me, and asked whether I knew these gentlemen, all of whose names he had in his pocket book. I admitted that I had heard of one or two of them by repute, and expected to be arrested on the spot. But this officer had been French master at an English public school and was anxious, for some reason, to get an uncensored letter to the head master. I told him I was going to England, and offered to take it.... I was not arrested that time.
Another adventurer was young Lucian Jones, son of the famous playwright, Henry Arthur Jones. He made frequent trips to the Belgian front and was one of the last to leave Antwerp after the siege, which was not a pleasant adventure when heavy shells smashed the houses on every side of him. As he made no disguise whatever of his profession and purpose, he was sent back to England and forbidden to show his face again. He took the next boat back, and was again arrested and flung into a dirty prison. His editor, who received word of his plight, sent a message to General Bridges, asking for his release, and obtained the brusque answer, “Let the fellow rot!”—only it was a stronger word than “fellow.”
One great difficulty we had in those days was to get our messages back to our newspapers. Sometimes we intrusted them to any chance acquaintance who was making his way to England. Several times we had to get back to the coast, in those terrible refugee trains, to bribe some purser on a cross-Channel steamer. When that became too dangerous—because it was strictly forbidden by the military and naval authorities—we made the journey to London, handed in our messages, and hurried back again the same day to France. The mental state of our newspaper colleagues exasperated us. They seemed to have no understanding whatever of what was happening on the other side, no conception of that world of agony. “Had a good time?” asked a sub-editor, hurrying along the corridor with proofs—and I wanted to choke him, because of his placid unconsciousness of the things that had seared my eyes and soul.
I could not bear to talk with men who still said, “It will be over in three months,” and who still believed that war was a rather jolly, romantic adventure, and that our little professional army was more than a match for the Germans who were arrant cowards and no better than sheep. In Fleet Street, at that time, there was no vision of what war meant to the women of France and Belgium, to the children of the refugees, to the mothers and fathers of the fighting men. It had not touched us closely in those first weeks of war.
My vexation was great one morning, after one of these journeys home, when I missed the train to Dover, and my good comrades Massey and Tomlinson—by just a minute. Perhaps I should never see them again. They would be lost in the vortex.
“Take a special train,” said my wife.
The idea startled me, not having the mentality or resources of a millionaire.
“It’s worth it,” said my wife, who is a woman of big ideas.
I turned to the station master, who was standing at the closed gates of the continental platform.
“How long would it take you to provide a special train?”
He smiled.
“No longer than it would take you to pay over the money.”
“How much?”
“Twenty-two pounds.”
I consulted my wife again with raised eyebrows, and she nodded.
I went into a little office, half undressed, and pulled out of my belt a pile of French gold pieces. By the time they had been counted and a receipt given—no more than three minutes—there was a train with an engine and three carriages, a driver and a guard, ready for me on the line to Dover. My small boy (as he was then) gazed in awe and admiration at the magic trick. I waved to him as the train went off with me. I was signaled all down the line, and in the stations we passed porters and officials stared and saluted as the train flashed by. Doubtless they thought I was a great general going to win the war! At Dover I was only one minute behind the express I had lost. Massey and Tomlinson were pacing the platform disconsolately at the loss of their comrade. They could not believe their eyes when I walked up and said “Hello!” So we went back to a new series of adventures.
I used with success, three times running, another method of getting my “dispatches” to Fleet Street. After the third time some intuition told me to change the plan. At that time, as all through the war, a number of King’s messengers—mostly men of high rank and reputation—traveled continually between British G.H.Q. and the War Office, with private documents from the Commander-in-Chief. Three times did I accost one of these officers—a different man each time—in an easy and confidential manner.
“Are you going back to Whitehall, Sir?”
“Yes. What can I do for you?”
“I shall be much obliged if you will put this letter in your bag, and deliver it at the War Office.”
“Certainly, my dear fellow!”
My letter was addressed to The Daily Chronicle, care of the War Office, and, much to the surprise of my editor, was punctually delivered, by a War-Office messenger. But my intuition was right. After the third time the editor of The Daily Chronicle received word from the War Office that if Gibbs sent any more of his articles by King’s messenger, they would be destroyed.
The method of delivery became easier afterward, because the newspapers organized a series of their own couriers between England and France, and that system served until the whole courier service was rounded up and forbidden to set foot in France again.
It was amazing that my articles, and those of my fellow correspondents, were allowed to appear in the newspapers, in spite of military prohibition. But the press censorship, which had been set up by the government under the control of F. E. Smith, now Lord Birkenhead, was not under direct military authority, and was much more tolerant of correspondents who evaded military regulations. I wrote scores of columns during the first few months of the war, mostly of a descriptive character, and very few lines were blacked out by the censors. So far from being in the black books of the press censorship as established at that time, I was sent for by F. E. Smith, who thanked me for my narratives and promised to give personal attention to any future dispatches I might send. This was at the very time when Kitchener himself gave orders for my arrest, after reading a long article of mine from the Belgian front.
I was also received several times by Sir William Tyrrell, Secretary to the Foreign Office, who questioned me about my knowledge of the situation and begged me to call on him whenever I came back, although he knew that orders had been given to cancel my passport and that I was in the black book, for immediate arrest, at any port. It was Sir William Tyrrell, indeed, who, with great kindness provided me with a new passport after I had fallen into very hot water indeed.
It was F. E. Smith who read, approved, and even strengthened by a phrase or two, a sensational dispatch written by my friend Hamilton Fyfe and a colleague named Moore, which revealed for the first time to the British nation the terrible ordeal and sacrifice of the little Regular Army in the retreat from Mons. It was too sensational, perhaps, in its account of “broken divisions,” and “remnants of battalions”; and its tone was too tragic and despairing, so that there was one black Sunday in England which will never be forgotten by those who lived through it, because there seemed no hope for the British Army, or for France.
As it happened, Massey, Tomlinson, and I had covered the same ground as Fyfe and his companion, had seen the same things, and had agonized with the same apprehension. But owing largely, as I must honestly and heartily say, to the cool judgment and fine faith of Tomlinson, our deduction from those facts and the spirit of what we wrote was far more optimistic—and future history proved us to be right—so that they helped to restore confidence in England and Scotland, when they appeared on Monday morning, following Fyfe’s terrible dispatch.
But Fyfe did a great service to the nation and the Allies, by the truth he told, somewhat overcolored as it was. It awakened Great Britain from its false complacency. It revealed to the nation, for the first time, the awful truth that our little Regular Army, magnificent as it was, could not withstand the tremendous weight of the German advance on the left flank of the French, was not sufficient to turn the scales of victory in favor of France, and was in desperate need of reinforcements from the untrained manhood at home. It shook the spirit of England like an earthquake, and brought it face to face with the menace of its life and liberties. For if France went down, we should follow.... The recruiting booths were stormed by the young manhood of England and Scotland, who had not joined up because they had believed that myth: “The war will be over in three months.”
There was tremendous anger in the War Office at the publication of that article by Fyfe and Moore, and F. E. Smith, as the press censor, was severely compromised.
The truth was that the military mind was obsessed with the necessity of fighting this war—“our war” as the regulars called it—in the dark, while the nonmilitary mind knew that such a policy was impossible, and might be disastrous, in a war costing such a frightful sum of life, and putting such a strain upon the nation’s heart and spirit.
Looking back on my experiences as an unauthorized correspondent in that early part of the war, I must confess now that I was hardly justified in evading military law, and that I might have been found guilty, justly, of a serious crime against the Allied cause. By some frightful indiscretion (which I did not commit) I or any other of those correspondents might have endangered the position of our troops, or the French army, by giving information useful to the enemy.
The main fault, however, lay with the War Office, and especially with Lord Kitchener, whose imagination did not realize that this war could not be fought in the dark, as some little affair with Indian hillmen on the northwest frontier. The immense anxiety of the nation, with its army fighting behind the veil while the fate of civilization hung in the balance, could not and would not be satisfied with the few lines of official communiqués which told nothing and hid the truth....
Gradually the net was drawn tighter, until, in the first months of 1915, it was impossible for any correspondent to travel in the war zone without arrest. I had come home to get a change of kit, as my clothes were caked with blood and mud, after supporting wounded men in Belgium. It was then that I heard of Kitchener’s orders for my arrest and was greeted with surprise and apprehension by Robert Donald and the staff of The Daily Chronicle, who had sent over two messengers (who had never reached me) to warn me of my peril.
Next time I went to France I was provided with wonderful credentials as a special commissioner of the British Red Cross, with instructions to report on the hospital and medical needs of the army in the field. These documents were signed by illustrious names, and covered with red seals. I was satisfied they would pass me to any part of the front.... I was arrested before I left the boat at Havre and taken by two detectives to General Williams, the camp commander. He raged at me with an extreme violence of language, took possession of my passport and credentials, and put me under open arrest at the Hotel Tortoni, in charge of six detectives. Here I remained for ten days or so, unable to communicate my ignominious situation to the authorities of the Red Cross, upon whose authority I had come. Fortunately I became good friends with the detectives, who were excellent fellows, and with whom I used to have my meals. It was by the kindness of one of them that I was able to send through a message to the editor of The Daily Chronicle, and shortly afterward General Williams graciously permitted me to return to England.
It looked as though my career as a war correspondent had definitely closed. I had violated every regulation. I had personally angered Lord Kitchener. I was on the black books of the detectives at every port, and General Williams solemnly warned me that if I returned to France, I would be put up against a white wall, with unpleasant consequences.
Strange as it appears, the military authorities blotted out my sins when at last they appointed five official war correspondents with a recognized status in the British armies on the Western Front. No longer did I have to dodge staff officers, and disguise myself as a refugee. In khaki, with a green armlet denoting my service, I could face generals, and even the Commander-in-Chief himself, without a quiver, and with my four comrades was recognized as an officer and a gentleman, with some reservations.