SOFIA
Commercial Road from Commercial Square
In lighter vein I may record some of the humours of the censorship, mostly from Mustapha Pasha, where the Second Army was held up and everybody was in the worst of tempers. Mustapha Pasha would not allow ox wagons to be mentioned, would not allow photographs of reservists to be sent forward because they were not in full uniform, would not allow the fact that Serbian troops were before Adrianople to be recorded. Indeed, the censorship there was full of strange prohibitions. Going down to Mustapha Pasha I noticed aeroplane equipment. The censor objected to that being recorded then, though two days after the official bulletin trumpeted the fact.
At Mustapha Pasha the custom was after the war correspondent had written a despatch to bring it to the censor, who held his court in a room surrounded by a crowd of correspondents. The censor insisted that the correspondent should read the despatch aloud to him. Then the censor read it over again aloud to him to make sure that all heard. Thus we all learned how the other man's imagination was working, and telegraphing was reduced to a complete farce. Private letters had to pass through the same ordeal, and one correspondent, with a turn of humour, wrote an imaginary private letter full of the most fervent love messages, which was read out to a furiously blushing censor and to a batch of journalists, who at first did not see the joke and tried to look as if they were not listening. I have described the early days of Mustapha Pasha. Later, when most of the men had gone away, conditions improved.
The "second censorship"—the most disingenuous and condemnable part of the Bulgarian system—was applied with full force to Mustapha Pasha. After correspondents, who were forbidden to go a mile out of the town and forbidden to talk with soldiers, had passed their pitiful little messages through the censor, those messages were not telegraphed, but posted on to the Staff headquarters and then censored again, sometimes stopped. Certes, the treasures of strategical observation and vivid description thus lost were not very great, but the whole proceeding was unfair and underhand. The censor's seal once affixed a message should go unchanged. Otherwise it might be twisted into actual false information.
In almost all cases the individual censors were gentlemen, and personally I never had trouble with any of them; but the system was faulty at the outset, inasmuch as it was not frank, and was made worse when it became necessary to change the plan of campaign and abandon the idea of capturing Adrianople. Then the Press correspondents who had been allowed down to Mustapha Pasha in the expectation that after two days they would be permitted to follow the victorious army into Adrianople, had to be kept in that town, and had to be prevented from knowing anything of what was going on. The courageous course would have been to have put them under a definite embargo for a period. That was not followed, and the same end was sought by a series of irritating tricks and evasions. The facts argue against the continuance of the war correspondent. An army really can never be sure of its victory until the battle is over. If it allows the journalists to come forward to see an expected victory and the victory does not come, then awkward facts are necessarily disclosed, and the moving back of those correspondents is tantamount to a confession of a movement of retreat. If I were a general in the field I should allow no war correspondents with the troops except reliable men, who would agree to see the war out, to send no despatches until the conclusion of an operation, and to observe any interdiction which might be necessary then. Under these circumstances there would be very few correspondents, but there would be no deceit and no ill-feeling.
The holding up of practically all private telegraphic messages by the authorities at the front was a real grievance. It was impossible to communicate with one's office to get instructions. One correspondent, arriving at Sofia at the end of the campaign, found that he had been recalled a full month before. The unnecessary mystery about the locality of Staff headquarters added to the difficulty of keeping in touch with one's office.
The Bulgarian people made some "bad friends" on the Press because of the censorship; but the sore feeling was not always justifiable. The worst that can be said is that the military authorities did in rather a weak and disingenuous way what they should have had the moral courage to do in a firm way at the outset. The Bulgarian enterprise against the Turks was so audacious, the need of secrecy in regard to equipment was so pressing, that there was no place for the journalist. Under the circumstances a nation with more experience of affairs and more confidence in herself would have accredited no correspondents. Bulgaria sought the same end as that which would have served secrecy by an evasive way. Englishmen, with centuries of greatness to give moral courage, may not complain too harshly when the circumstances of this new-come nation are considered.
When the army of Press correspondents were gathered, it was seen that there were several Austrians and Roumanians, and these countries were at the time threatening mobilisation against the Balkan States. It was impossible to expect that the Bulgarian forces should allow Roumanian journalists and Austrian journalists to see anything of their operations which might be useful to Austria or Roumania in a future campaign. Yet it would not have been proper to have allowed correspondents other than the Austrians and Roumanians to go to the front, because that would perhaps have created a diplomatic question, which would have increased the tension. It certainly would have given offence to Austria and to Roumania. It would have been said that there was an idea that war was intended against those nations; and diplomacy was anxious to avoid giving expression to any such idea. The military attachés were in exactly the same position.