Just who was responsible for annihilating the elementary rights of the British Press never became quite clear. Some blamed Kitchener. His hostility to journalists and journalism was notorious, though "With Kitchener to Khartoum," by the most distinguished special correspondent of our time, the late G. W. Steevens, who died in The Daily Mail's service during the South African war, probably did as much to give "K." a reputation as anything which England's War Minister ever did in the field. Others said Joffre was the man who had put the lid on. Whoever laid down the law saw that it was relentlessly enforced. Petitions, protests, cajolings, threats, complaints, abuse--all were in vain. The antics of the "Press Bureau" became more exasperating and inexplicable from day to day. Also more domineering, if common report could be believed, for presently Fleet Street heard that "K." had intimated to a mighty newspaper magnate that if the latter did not mend his ways, and abate his insistence, "K." had the power, and would not shrink from using it, to incarcerate even a peer of the realm in the Tower and turn his entire "plant" into junk. That dire threat, I imagine, was just one of the myriad of chatterbox rumors with which the air in England, all through the war, fairly sizzled. At any rate, it failed utterly to curb the stormy petrel to terrorize whom it was said to have been uttered, for his onslaughts on the censorship grew, instead of diminishing, in intensity as the "war in the dark" proceeded.
But it was in its treatment of news destined for the United States that the Press Bureau most convincingly revealed its lack of imagination. Here was Germany leaving no stone unturned to take American sympathy by storm. The Bernstorff-Dernburg-Münsterberg campaign was in full blast. Von Wiegand in Berlin was interviewing the Crown Prince and Princess, von Tirpitz and von Bernhardi, Zeppelin, Hindenburg and Falkenhayn, and only narrowly escaped interviewing the Kaiser himself. American correspondents arriving in Germany were received with open arms, and had but to ask, in order to receive. Sometimes they received without asking. They could see anybody and go anywhere. That was German efficiency--and imagination--at work. The Germans realized that we are a newspaper-reading community. They knew that the best way in the world to win American newspapers' and American newspapermen's sympathy is to give them news. So they did it. When the German Crown Prince told the correspondent of the United Press that he would "love" to see American baseball, that he longed to hunt big game in Alaska, and that Jack London was his favorite author, he broke a lance for the Fatherland's cause in the United States that a four-hundred-fifty-paged "unhuman" British White Paper could never hope to equal. Somebody with an imagination--probably Bernstorff--had put a flea in Berlin's ear, and the result was open-house for American journalists for the duration of the war.
What was happening in London? There were plenty of American newspapermen on the ground, not only special correspondents who had come over to join the British army in the field, like Will Irwin, "Bell" Shepherd, Alexander Powell, Arthur Ruhl, or Frederick Palmer, to name only a few of them, but resident London correspondents who had lived in England a dozen years, like Edward Price Bell of the Chicago Daily News, Ernest Marshall of the New York Times, or James M. Tuohy of the New York World, who were well known to the British authorities as men of judgment, integrity and responsibility. But resident or newcomer, nothing but inconsequential facilities or the cold shoulder awaited them when they went to the Press Bureau, cap in hand, to ask even the most rudimentary professional courtesies for themselves or their papers. Quite apart from the indignities thus heaped on American correspondents, the Press Bureau, when it suppressed or butchered their dispatches, left pitiably out of account the susceptibilities of the great neutral news-devouring community which these men represented. Therein lay the real infamy. Think of it. Here was Great Britain and her Government confessedly anxious for American moral support in the war, and something more than that, and yet a subordinate department seemed clothed with authority to flout, exasperate and bully the agency directly responsible for the production of public sentiment in the United States. I call it a tremendous tribute to the sincerity and depth of our loyalty to the Allies' cause that we never for a moment allowed it to waver, even in the face of the British Press Bureau's arrant provocation. The American Press, asking for bread in England, received a stone. That it accepted it, and went on playing the Allies' game, has been one of the miracles of the war, for which these British Isles have reason to be profoundly grateful.
5 Questions to those who employ male servants
Inherent imperturbability and unimaginative censorship thus combined in the early weeks of the war, on the one hand to minimize popular conceptions of the struggle's magnitude in England, and on the other to smother enthusiasm for it. You can not fully realize the immensity of the task if you are not permitted by your overlords to see it in its true proportions. You can certainly not become ecstatic about it if they insist on having it painted in exclusively drab, routine and joy-killing tints, when they are not covering it up altogether. Yet British patriotism was triumphing over all these natural and artificial handicaps. Kitchener was not only calling for five hundred thousand volunteers, but intimated that he would soon be asking for another five hundred thousand. He was getting them. London and the provinces were now plastered with recruiting posters, calling in compelling language for soldiers. "Your King and Country Need You!" Thus ran the most direct and frank appeal. By the tens of thousands men answered it. The desecrating bill-board which we know in America is an unknown excrescence in the British Isles, but, for the purposes of advertising for men for "Kitchener's Army," practically every vacant space in the Kingdom was now turned into a hoarding. The base of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square was splashed red, white and blue, black and yellow, green and orange, and every other shade capable of lending distinction to an eye-arresting poster. The great hotels and theaters, banks, government offices, and even churches, turned their walls and windows over to Kitchener's advertising department for recruiting-bills, and occasionally themselves put up huge signs across their most imposing facades with such legends as:
TO ARMS! RALLY ROUND THE FLAG!
TO ARMS! YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!
TO ARMS! ENLIST AT ONCE FOR THE WAR ONLY!
or
TO-DAY, YOUNG MAN, YOU ARE NEEDED
TO FIGHT FOR YOUR COUNTRY'S DEFENSE!
FALL IN! JOIN THE ARMY AT ONCE!
or