Anglo-American Memories

by George W. Smalley

"Will you sit down at once and begin?"

"I cannot. I am dead tired, and have had no food since daybreak. I must eat and sleep before I can write."

He looked it; a mere wreck of a correspondent, haggard, ragged, dirty, incapable of the effort which nevertheless had to be made. It was no time to consider anybody's feelings. A continent was waiting for the news locked up in that one man's brain, and somehow or other the lock must be forced, the news told, and the waiting continent supplied with what it wanted. Incidentally, it was such an opportunity for The Tribune as seldom had come to any newspaper. It was necessary to use a little authority. I said to Mr. Holt White:

"You shall have something to eat, but sleep you cannot till you have done your dispatch. That must be in New York to-morrow morning."

So we went over to the Pall Mall Restaurant, which was then in the building now replaced by the Oceanic House, the headquarters of the International Marine Navigation Company; if that be its name. Food and drink refreshed him. We were back in The Tribune office not long after six and work began.

Mr. Holt White wrote one of the worst hands ever seen, so I said to him I would copy as he wrote and my copy would go to the cable operators. Bad or good, mine was a hand they were familiar with. We sat opposite each other at the same table, and I copied sheet by sheet till there was enough to give the cable a start, then took it to the Anglo-American cable office in Telegraph Street. I went myself for two reasons: first to make sure it was delivered, and second to make sure it went without interruption. The latter, indeed, was a point of which it was impossible, under the Weaver régime, to make sure. But I could at least hand in the message over the counter. Many a message have I trusted myself and nobody else with, and many a letter have I posted with my own hands; everything, in fact, of importance ever since I had anything to do with journalism. It is often inconvenient but I have found it a good rule.

I dwell on these details. Few things in American journalism, the Civil War excepted, have made more stir than this exploit of Mr. Holt White. But the full credit which belongs to him he has never had. Consider what he had done. He had been all through the battle; he had been in the saddle all day from four o'clock in the morning till nightfall. The battle over, he started for London. He rode with his life in his hand. He had to pass the lines of three armies, the Prussians who refused him a permit, the French outposts to the north of Sedan, and the Belgians, who made a pretence of guarding their frontier and the neutrality of Belgian territory. He could not explain how he managed it. When he reached Brussels he thought it might be possible to write there and to wire his account from Brussels to London. But at the chief telegraph office in Brussels the official in charge told him flatly he would accept no dispatch relating to the war. The issue of the battle was unknown in Brussels. Anything handed in for transmission to London or elsewhere would be submitted first of all to the censor; and in Brussels, as elsewhere, the censorship is a heart-rending business; delay inevitable; and there was no time for delay. It was, as I explained in an earlier chapter, one reason why all correspondents were directed to come straight to London where the censorship did not exist. Mr. Holt White was soon satisfied that it was useless to try to telegraph from Brussels, and he came on by train to Calais, missed the Calais boat, caught a later one, which did not connect with the Dover-London service, and, once at Dover, chartered a special train to London and so at last arrived.

I asked him if any other correspondent had come with him. He thought not; at any rate, no one whom he knew as correspondent and, of course, no one came by the special train. Still, there was no certainty. It was already two days since the sun had gone down on the beaten French in sedan. There was nothing to do except to hurry on the dispatch to New York.

With indomitable courage White wrote on. After a time I asked him if he would rest a little before finishing.

"No," he said, "if I stop I shall go to sleep, and if I go to sleep I shall not wake."