Of all this kind of swordsmanship the most dashing feat was the circulation of the "corpse factory" story. German troops, it was written in part of our Press, had got, in certain places near their front, a proper plant for boiling down the fat of their own dead. It was not said whether the product was to be used as a food, or as a lubricant or illuminant only. Chance brought me into one of the reputed seats of this refinement of frugality. It was on ground that our troops had just taken, in 1918. At Bellicourt the St. Quentin Canal goes into a long tunnel. Some little way in from its mouth you could find, with a flash-lamp, a small doorway cut in the tunnel's brick wall, on the tow-path side of the canal. The doorway led to the foot of a narrow staircase that wound up through the earth till it came to an end in a room about twenty feet long. It, too, was subterranean, but now its darkness was pierced by one sharp-edged shaft of sunlight let in through a neat round hole cut in the five or six feet of earth above. Loaves, bits of meat, and articles of German equipment lay scattered about, and two big dixies or cauldrons, like those in which we stewed our tea, hung over two heaps of cold charcoal. Eight or ten bodies, lying pell-mell, nearly covered half of the floor. They showed the usual effects of shell-fire. Another body, disembowelled and blown almost to rags, lay across one of the dixies and mixed with the puddle of coffee that it contained. A quite simple case. Shells had gone into cook-houses of ours, long before then, and had messed up the cooks with the stew.
An Australian sergeant, off duty and poking about, like a good Australian, for something to see, had come up the stairs, too. He had heard the great fat-boiling yarn, and how this was the latest seat of the industry. Sadly he surveyed the disappointing scene. Ruefully he noted the hopelessly normal nature of all the proceedings that had produced it. Then he broke the silence in which we had made our several inspections. "Can't believe a word you read, sir, can you?" he said with some bitterness. Life had failed to yield one of its advertised marvels. The Press had lied again. The propagandist myth about Germans had cracked up once more. "Can't believe a word you read" had long been becoming a kind of catch-phrase in the army. And now another good man had been duly confirmed in the faith, ordained as a minister of the faith, that whatever your pastors and masters tell you had best be assumed to be just a bellyful of east wind.
IV
Partly it came of the nature—which could not be helped by that time—of war correspondence. In the first months of the war our General Staff, being what we had made it, treated British war correspondents as pariah dogs. They might escape arrest so long as they kept out of sight; that was about the sum of their privileges. Long before the end of the war the Chiefs of Staff of our several armies received them regularly on the eve of every battle, explained to them the whole of our plans and hopes, gave them copies of our most secret objective and barrage maps; every perilous secret we had was put into their keeping. A little later still an Army Commander would murmur, with very little indistinctness, if he thought the war correspondents had not been writing enough about his army of late. After the Armistice Sir Douglas Haig made them a speech of thanks and praise on the great bridge over the Rhine at Cologne, and at the Peace all the regular pariah dogs were offered knighthoods.
The Regular Army had set out by taking a war correspondent to be, ex officio, a low fellow paid to extract kitchen literature from such private concerns of the military profession as wars. It harboured the curious notion that it would be possible in this century to feed the nation at home on communiqués from G.H.Q. alone or eked out with "Eye-Witness" stuff—official "word-painting" by some Regular Officer with a tincture of letters. With that power of learning things, only just not too late, which distinguishes our Regular Army from the Bourbons, it presently saw that this plan had broken down. About the same time the Regular Army began to recognise in the abhorred war correspondent a man whom it had known at school, and who had gone to the university about the time when it, the Army, was going into the Army Class. That was enough. Foul as was his profession, still he might be a decent fellow; he might not want to injure his country.
When these reflections were dawning slowly over the Regular Army mind it happened—Sir Douglas Haig having a mind himself—that his Chief of Intelligence was a fully educated man with a good fifty per cent. more of brains, imagination, decision, and initiative than the average of his fellow-Regulars on the Staff. He knew something of the Press at first hand. Being a Scotsman, he regarded writers and well-read people with interest and not with alarm. Under his command the policy of helping the Press rose to its maximum. War correspondents were given the "status," almost the rank, of officers. Actual officers were detailed to see to their comfort, to pilot them about the front, to secure their friendly treatment by all ranks and at all headquarters. Never were war correspondents so helped, shielded and petted before. And, almost without an exception, they were good men. Only one or two black sheep of the trade would try to make a reader believe that they had seen things which they had not. The general level of personal and professional honour, of courage, public spirit, and serious enterprise, was high. No average Staff Officer could talk with the average British correspondent without feeling that this was a sound human being and had a better mind than his own—that he knew more, had seen more, and had been less deadened by the coolie work of a professional routine. When once known, the war correspondents were trusted and liked—by the Staff.
V
There lay the trouble. They lived in the Staff world, its joys and its sorrows, not in the combatant world. The Staff was both their friend and their censor. How could they show it up when it failed? One of the first rules of field censorship was that from war correspondents "there must be no criticism of authority or command"; how could they disobey that? They would visit the front now and then, as many Staff Officers did, but it could be only as afternoon callers from one of the many mansions of G.H.Q., that heaven of security and comfort. When autumn twilight came down on the haggard trench world of which they had caught a quiet noon-day glimpse they would be speeding west in Vauxhall cars to lighted châteaux gleaming white among scatheless woods. Their staple emotions before a battle were of necessity akin to those of the Staff, the racehorse-owner or trainer exalted with brilliant hopes, thrilled by the glorious uncertainty of the game, the fascinating nicety of every preparation, and feeling the presence of horrible fatigues and the nearness of multitudinous deaths chiefly as a dim, sombre background that added importance to the rousing scene, and not as things that need seriously cloud the spirit or qualify delight in a plan.
"Our casualties will be enormous," a General at G.H.Q. said with the utmost serenity on the eve of one of our great attacks in 1917. The average war correspondent—there were golden exceptions—insensibly acquired the same cheerfulness in face of vicarious torment and danger. In his work it came out at times in a certain jauntiness of tone that roused the fighting troops to fury against the writer. Through his despatches there ran a brisk implication that regimental officers and men enjoyed nothing better than "going over the top"; that a battle was just a rough, jovial picnic; that a fight never went on long enough for the men; that their only fear was lest the war should end on this side of the Rhine. This, the men reflected in helpless anger, was what people at home were offered as faithful accounts of what their friends in the field were thinking and suffering.