Hilaire Belloc, the man and his work

by C. Creighton Mandell; Edward Shanks

CHAPTER V

THE STUDENT OF MILITARY AFFAIRS

Mr Belloc's most important writings on the war are to be found in Land and Water, the Illustrated Sunday Herald, and Pearson's Magazine. To these must be added his series of books of which only one has so far appeared—A General Sketch of the European War. His series of articles in Pearson's Magazine has also been reprinted in book-form under the title The Two Maps.

Of these his writings in Land and Water are, at the present time, the most important. Since the earliest stages of the war Mr. Belloc has contributed to Land and Water a weekly article. What is the nature of this article? In the first place, it is a commentary on the current events of the campaign. Mr. Belloc himself, when challenged recently to defend his work, said very modestly (as we think)—"My work ... is no more than an attempt to give week by week, at what I am proud to say is a very great expense of time and of energy, an explanation of what is taking place. There are many men who could do the same thing. I happen to have specialized upon military history and problems, and profess now, with a complete set of maps, to be doing for others what their own occupations forbid them the time and opportunity to do."

With part of this description we may heartily agree; with the rest we must disagree. We agree with Mr. Belloc when he refers to his work as being accomplished "at a very great expense of time and of energy." There may be some who doubt the truth of this statement. There is undoubtedly a large section of the public which, led astray by that cynicism and that distrust of newspapers and journalists which a certain section of our Press has engendered in the public, has come to regard all newspaper reports on the war as unreliable and the writings of so-called "experts" as mere vapourings, undertaken in the hope of assisting the circulation of the paper in which they appear rather than the circulation of the truth. If, then, any reader be inclined to include Mr. Belloc in such a denunciation and to doubt that his weekly commentary in Land and Water is written as he says, "at a very great expense of time and of energy," let him turn to one of Mr. Belloc's articles, reprinted in The Two Maps, on "What to Believe in War News."

In this article Mr. Belloc asks the question—"How is the plain man to distinguish in the news of the war what is true from what is false, and so arrive at a sound opinion?" His answer to this question is that "in the first place, the basis of all sound opinion are the official communiqués read with the aid of a map." And to this he adds the following explanation:

When I say "the official communiqués" I do not mean those of the British Government alone, nor even of the Allies alone, but of all the belligerents. You just 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.

Mr. Belloc then proceeds to show what characteristics all official communiqués have in common, and then to outline the peculiar characteristics of the communiqués of each belligerent. Although not one unnecessary sentence is included, this short summary of his own discoveries covers seven pages. The final sentence of the article is as follows: "Nevertheless, unless you do follow fairly regularly the Press of all the belligerent nations, you will obtain but an imperfect view of the war as a whole."

This comparison of the communiqués of the belligerents, which is seen in these pages to be no light task, naturally forms but a small part of Mr. Belloc's work; so that further proof of his own statement, that his work necessitates the expenditure of much time and energy, need hardly be adduced.