As soon as not only the menace but the cruel reality of the occupation was lifted from the smaller towns and villages, some of which had suffered so far more terribly than Lunéville, M. Mirman and M. Linarés, the Prefects of Meurthe et Moselle and Vosges, and M. Minier, the Sous-Préfet of Lunéville, were engaged almost every day in visiting different parts of their Departments in the track of the ruthless invader, partly to take stock of the crimes and destruction of which he had been guilty, but chiefly with the object of doing what could be done to relieve the bitter distress of what was left of the population. It was principally owing to the courtesy, and, if I may say so, the wise tolerance of these gentlemen and of M. Simon, the Mayor of Nancy, that M. Lamure and I were able to see with our own eyes some of the handiwork of the Teuton Kulturists in that part of France. I say wise tolerance because, although I know from personal experience that newspaper correspondents are as a rule a despised race, I still believe that they have their uses. The newspapers which they help to supply with news and comments on news are read by every one, and not only, as is commonly supposed in some quarters, by the enemy. They are even read by the high authorities who to all appearances are minded to thwart them and throttle their vitality, partly, perhaps, because they think that they may catch them tripping (in spite of the watchful supervision of the censorship), but partly and still more because they have the natural and human craving for news and like to be interested and well-informed. When, therefore, ministers and other high officials try to suppress and do suppress as effectually as they have in this war the liberty of newspaper correspondents, they inevitably put themselves in a false position and even do harm to their country. No sensible man in such serious times as those in which we are now living objects to a thorough supervision of news published in the newspapers by men who are supposed to know more of the wider issues of the war than the editors who control them. That is what the censorship on the despatch and receipt of telegrams and all the calculated delay of the postal service exists for. But these well-meaning but autocratic gentlemen are not satisfied with that. They go a long step further and not only say to the newspapers (and their readers), “Everything in the shape of news about the war shall be censored”—which is right—but “As far as is possible we will prevent you from getting any real news about the war at all”—which is wrong. For truth, unfortunately for their theory, will out, and if it is violently suppressed it has a way of finding its way out like lava from a volcano, which will certainly do a great deal of harm before, as it must, because it is truth, it does good in the end. My own belief is that nations, like men and women, practically never gain anything by concealing the truth, because its place is certain to be taken by mistakes and doubts and lies—as has been proved over and over again during this war. It is partly because diplomacy is, perhaps necessarily, founded and built up on concealment that it is so often, as it has been more than once in the last eighteen months, a complete and dismal failure. And as for war—as my warrior friend said to me earlier in this book—“War is a serious matter: let us make it seriously.” By all means let us make it and take it with the utmost seriousness possible. But also let us be sensible about it. His own complaint against the journalists whom he implicitly accused of taking it lightly was that he could not move out of his quarters without the enemy knowing it. Yet till he met me, not a journalist, French or English, had been within miles of his quarters, as he knew perfectly well. What he did not appear to know, like many other people in authority, is that the Germans have no need to go to French or English newspapers for information about the movements of generals or of troops. They know in any case that to do so would be futile, since they are already checkmated in advance by the censor. Most of the information that matters they gain in open fight in the field. They knew long before even The Times knew it that the English army was short of shells and especially of the right kind of shells. A soldier does not take much time to learn whether he is being fired at with shrapnel or with high explosives. They knew long before any newspaper correspondent could have informed them of the fact (supposing there had been any at the front, which, of course, there were not) that the French and English were going to attempt a strong offensive movement in Champagne and at Loos on September 25th, 1915. Their informant was a preliminary bombardment along that particular part of the front which lasted for seventy-two hours. As for other kinds of useful military information, which cannot be gathered on the field of battle, but only from behind the enemy’s lines, for that they depend once again not on newspapers but on aeroplanes and spies (including, thanks to the scanty patriotism and common-sense of some soldiers, women belonging to the profession of Rahab). From each of these sources alone they probably get as much news in a week as all the correspondents of all the newspapers “behind the front” could gather in a year.
But there is another side to the question. Under an enlightened censorship there is practically no fear of newspapers and newspaper correspondents doing harm. Under enlightened editors there is every chance of their doing a great amount of good for the cause of their country and its navy and its armies in the field. Every body knows that, even the enlightened censorship itself, whose members have had precisely the same training at the same schools and universities as the purblind editorial staffs. But most of all the enemy know it, and, because they know it, they fear the newspapers and rejoice when their freedom of speech is curtailed. They fear first of all their own newspapers; and because of that fear they forbid them not only to tell the truth, but urge them, if they do not command them, to tell lies. That is the sort of thing, I suppose, which is meant when one is asked to take war seriously: as in most things, even in their follies, the Germans are more thorough than England and France. But even more than their own newspapers they fear those of London and Paris, for two reasons. They dread them first of all for the effect which they have on public opinion in the neutral countries, and secondly because they know that to them and their pressure are due practically all the political and military changes, useful to the Allies and detrimental to Germany, which have been brought about during the course of the war.
The second of these two points I will not labour to support by instances. They are written large in the leading articles and military articles of The Times and other newspapers. All the world knows what they are, though all the world does not as yet acknowledge them.
About the other point, the question of the effect which English and French newspapers have and might have (and might have had) on the opinions of neutrals, I have a word or two to say. I said just now that nations practically never gain anything by concealing the truth. There is an important exception to that rule. They gain, or at least they seem to gain, and do gain for the time being, when they conceal their own misdoings. That is exactly what happened in Belgium and in the invaded provinces of France. For a considerable time the horrible wrong-doings of Germany in those two countries were concealed from the world, and are even now not fully believed by those who do not wish to believe them, because they were not seen and recorded at the time by credible eye-witnesses, that is to say, by competent newspaper correspondents. A few days before those atrocities began to be committed in Belgium all the foreign newspaper correspondents were ordered by their own governments to leave the country. As a consequence practically every account of them which we have is second-hand, taken, that is to say, from the lips of the victims who escaped death some little time after they occurred, and therefore not made known to the public of the allied countries and to the rest of the world, except in general terms, till a further time still had elapsed. What England and France gained by this suppression of newspaper correspondents, and therefore of the truth, it is difficult to see. What Germany gained is obvious. I will take only one instance the evolution of which I happen to have watched on the spot.
At the beginning of the war most of the public opinion in Switzerland was strongly in favour of Germany. That this was only partly due to natural racial tendencies (for seven out of every ten Swiss are of German origin and speak or read the German language) is obvious from the way in which, after about six months of the war, a large proportion of the German-Swiss majority began to lose their pro-German proclivities and to come round to the side of the Allies. Naturally we all wish to have the neutral nations on our side, not only because it is our side, but for the higher reason that we believe it to be the side of right. But besides this there were and are particularly strong economic military reasons which made it desirable for us to secure the support, or at least the really benevolent neutrality, of the Swiss. While any considerable part of them, especially before Italy joined the alliance, were for the Germans and against us, secret contraband was bound to run riot, with disastrous consequences for our projected blockade of German war-material. And that is exactly what happened, chiefly owing to our policy with regard to the Press. At the beginning of the war, Switzerland, like America, could only form her views of the rights and wrongs of the conflict and the course which it was pursuing, from the newspapers. In German-Switzerland numbers of the newspapers are financed by German money and even written by German writers. Quite naturally the readers of these papers believed what they told them. In other words, they were convinced that the atrocities in Belgium were either imaginary or grossly exaggerated, that Germany would at the end of the war make good her promise to make up to Belgium for the violation of her neutrality, and that meanwhile she was winning all along the line.
That was the positive side of the newspaper evil in Switzerland, over which France and England had, of course, no control. The negative side, which they might have controlled, which was indeed of their own making, was that the true news, which should have acted as a corrective to the false, hardly existed at all on the question of the atrocities in Belgium, because there were no correspondents in Belgium to give it. If the Swiss had known then, as they know now, though many of them still do not choose to believe it, the real truth about Belgium, there is no doubt at all that the greater part of the old pro-German feeling would have perished at the beginning. It throve only on lies and the concealment and ignorance of the truth. That is a fact which can be very simply proved. As soon as the Swiss knew, because they saw it for themselves with their own eyes, something of the way in which Germany has made war, the revulsion against her and therefore in our favour began. It happened in this way. From the ruined villages of Lorraine and the other occupied provinces the Germans carried away to Germany at the beginning of the war a large number of what they called “hostages” and the French “internés,” old men and women and children, mainly of the poorest classes. They had committed no military or political crime, they had only lost their homes and their possessions and most of their relatives, and they could under no conceivable circumstances affect one way or the other Germany’s chances of winning or losing the war. For months, wretchedly clad and fed, they were kept in prison-camps in the fatherland. Then by the good offices of the compassionate Swiss and partly probably because the Germans were beginning to find them a nuisance and to wonder why they had ever taken them away from France, they were sent back in relays of three or four hundred at a time to their own country by way of Switzerland. At the same time the far smaller number of internés whom the French had detained in France or taken from Alsace in retaliation were sent back in exchange. I never myself saw any of the internés from France on their way back to Germany. But the Swiss, who worked untiringly day after day and month after month to show practical sympathy to all these unfortunates on their way through their country, constantly saw both the French and the Germans, and the effect on their judgment of the German nation, even against their own natural inclinations, showed very decidedly which nation had treated worst these innocent victims of the war. I never met a Swiss man or woman, German-Swiss, or French-Swiss, who had seen the French internés on their way back to France—not to their homes, for their homes in most cases no longer exist—who was not intensely shocked and indignant at the state in which they were and the sufferings which they had undergone, and from the date at which they first began to see them and act the good Samaritan to them, at Schaffhausen, at Basle, at Zurich, at Berne, at Lausanne, and at Geneva, from that moment the marked revulsion of a large part of the Swiss people against Germany and Prussian militarism took its rise. It is my firm opinion that it would have begun long before if only the correspondents of French and English newspapers had been allowed from the beginning to see for themselves, as nearly as they could, what happened in Belgium, and to publish it to Switzerland and the world.
All this is only a parenthesis—I am afraid rather a long one—to what I was saying some pages back about the large-minded tolerance as well as the great personal kindness which the Prefects and Sous-Préfets of the eastern provinces of France, from Belfort to Commercy, showed to M. Lamure and myself as representatives of the English Press. All of them, like every Frenchman who has talked to me on the subject, and, unfortunately, unlike some Englishmen, believed in The Times as a great power for good. With that feeling in their minds they took us with them, as they had, of course, an official right to do, on some of their official visits to the ravished districts, because they believed that the publication of the truth about them in The Times would be of service to the common cause. M. Mirman in particular held that view. He believed that the articles we sent to London, which, but for him and his fellow-Prefects and Sous-Préfets, could never have been written, were of real positive use for France and against the common enemy.
I seem, perhaps, to be getting a long way from the main purpose of this book, which is to state, as strongly as I can, the debt which I believe France and England owe to the generals and armies that have fought for the common cause in the east of France. But while I am on the subject I mean to go a little further, and to illustrate what I have said on the subject of newspaper correspondents (if the Censor will let me say it) by a reference to a personal matter, because as I see it, it is not a personal matter at all, but of real importance to the country. After we had been in Nancy for four months, during all which time we were in constant and friendly relations with many of the civil and military authorities, we were one morning politely but peremptorily ordered to leave the town within twenty-four hours. Otherwise we were told that we should be arrested and tried before a court-martial on a charge of espionage—not, of course, because we were spies, but because we were journalists exercising our métier within the zone of the armies (in which, up to a few days before that time, Paris was also included!). No complaint was made against us personally, because none could be. In a letter which M. Mirman wrote to me at the time, most of which is too personal to quote, though he gave me full liberty to show it to any French authorities whom I might meet, he expressly said that I had been guilty of no indiscretion during my stay, that my papers and my comings and goings had always been perfectly in order, and that he would be happy to see me come back to Nancy.
Photograph by Libert-Fernana, Nancy.