La Belgique, Tuesday, 26th January, 1913,—Petrograd, 23rd January. (Official telegram from the Great General Staff).... German attempts to pass to the offensive in various places have been easily defeated by our artillery.... On the 21st January enemy troops, in strength about a division of infantry, and supported by artillery, attacked our front in the Kirlibaba region, but they were repulsed. Up to the morning of the 21st January our troops had maintained themselves in their positions. We have made 200 prisoners.
La Belgique, Monday, 1st February, 1913.—Paris, 29th January. (Official, 3 p.m.)—In Belgium, in the Nieuport sector, our infantry has gained a footing on the great dune which was mentioned on the 27th. A German aeroplane was brought down by our guns. In the sectors of Ypres and Lens, as in the sector of Arras, there have been, intermittently, artillery duels of some violence, and some attacks of infantry were attempted but immediately thrown back by our fire. Nothing fresh to report in the Soissons, Craonne, or Reims districts. It is confirmed that the attack repulsed by us at Fontaine-Madame on the night of the 27th cost the Germans dearly.... Paris, the 29th January (official, 11 p.m.).... This morning, the 29th, a German aeroplane was forced to the ground east of Gerbeviller. Its passengers, an officer and an under-officer, are prisoners.
La Belgique, Thursday, 4th February, 1915.—Paris, 1st February. (Official telegram, 3 p.m.).... To the south-east of Ypres the Germans have attempted an attack upon our trenches to the north of the canal, an attack which was immediately checked by our artillery fire.... In the Argonne, where the Germans appear to have suffered greatly in the recent fighting, the day has been comparatively quiet....
Paris, 1st February. (Official telegram, 11 p.m.).... On the morning of the 1st February the enemy violently attacked our trenches to the north, Béthune—La Bassée. He was thrown back and left numerous dead on the ground. At Beaumont-Hamel, to the north of Arras, the German infantry attempted to carry one of our trenches by surprise, but was forced to retreat, abandoning on the spot the explosives with which it was provided....
La Belgique, Friday, 12th February, 1915.—Paris, 9th February. (Official telegram, 3 p.m.).... Along the road from Béthune to La Bassée we have reoccupied a windmill in which the enemy had succeeded in establishing himself. Soissons was bombarded with incendiary shells.
La Belgique, Saturday, 13th February, 1915.—Paris, 10th February. (Official, 11 p.m.).... In Lorraine our outposts easily repulsed a German attack on the eastern edge and to the north of the Forest of Purvy.
La Patrie (Brussels).—Copenhagen, 2nd March.—According to a communication from London in the Berlingske Tidende the Swedish painter, Johnson, who was arrested as a spy, because he was making pretended luminous signals to German ships of war, is said to have been acquitted for lack of evidence.
To appreciate at its full value the mutilation of the official communiqués by the German censorship, it must be recalled (1) that it had undertaken to leave the official communiqués untouched, and (2) that the subservient portion of the press continued to call them "official telegrams."
Sincerity of the Censored Newspapers.
At the outset the censorship used to allow newspapers to leave a blank space in the place of an article, phrase, or words deleted. But this procedure was too frank for the Germans, and the readers were aware of it; so the German authorities forced the newspapers to fill up the blanks; and in order to facilitate their task they published a special typewritten journal, appearing in French and in Flemish, Le Courrier Belge, in which "all the articles had passed the censorship." Editors, therefore, had only to select an article of the desired length in order to fill the gaps left by the official scissors.
We may add that by the terms of a decision given in the Court of First Instance in Brussels, the journals at present appearing in Germany under the German censorship may not claim the title of Belgian newspapers.
It may readily be imagined what the censored journals have become under this delightful system. But a story which is told in Belgium will perhaps give the reader a better idea of their vicissitudes. The soul of a soldier presents itself at the gate of Paradise. "Who are you?" says St. Peter. After a long hesitating pause (for no one cares to make such a painful confession) the soul replies: "I am the soul of a German soldier." "You are an impudent liar!" cries St. Peter. "I read the Belgian newspapers with the greatest care, and they have not yet announced the death of a single German soldier!"
On the 7th June, 1915, the Germans had a unique opportunity of proving that the German journals in Belgian clothes, such as L'Ami de l'Ordre, La Belgique, Le Bien Public, etc., were still capable on occasion of speaking the truth. But they allowed the opportunity to slip. However, here are the facts:—
On the night of Sunday, the 6th June, 1915, towards 2.30 a.m., we were awakened by a furious cannonade and the explosion of bombs: Allied aviators were bombarding the shed of the dirigible at Evere, to which they set fire, destroying both shed and balloon. On the same day we learned that a second German dirigible had just been destroyed at Mont St.-Amand, near Gand, by a British aviator. We awaited the next day's papers with curiosity. Would they report the two incidents, making as little of them as possible, or would they keep silence? They merely stated that the German air-fleet had raided the English coast on the night of the 7th. Of what happened on its return, not a word. In the Kölnische Zeitung, again, there was nothing said as to the disasters at Evere and Mont St.-Amand. So the muzzled Press of Belgium and Germany may speak of German successes (we are supposing, of course, that the bombardment of open towns is a success), but as to the failures they are dumb. These are two facts which are known to hundreds of thousands of persons, and are therefore impossible of concealment. To keep silence, therefore, could have only one result, namely, to prove that the German communiqués are "faked," and that the Belgian journals are muzzled: in short, that all news which comes from Germany is adulterated. If our oppressors had published a short paragraph dealing with these two "accidents," then a few Belgians, more credulous than their fellows, might have continued to believe that the word "German" can still on occasion be spoken in the same breath as the word "sincerity." But in their incomparable stupidity the censors (who are doubtless diplomatists out of a job) failed to realize that by preserving silence as to the raids of the British aviators they were for ever destroying the value of their newspapers. They rendered us a similar service, on this occasion, to that which they rendered when they forbade M. Max to publish the statement that they were liars (p. [233]). We were well aware that the German was a shocking psychologist, but we hardly realized how shocking!... The incident is, as will be seen, the pendant of the story of the Liége Zeppelin. This dirigible raided Liége on the night of the 6th August, and the raid was described in the German newspapers and even illustrated. Unfortunately the raid never took place!
A few days later the Germans plunged even deeper into the mire. On the night of the 16th June the people of Brussels once again heard the sound of guns, this time from Berchem; but no one saw an aeroplane. Next day the papers contained a paragraph stating that an attack by enemy aviators had been repulsed. Did the raid really take place? It is doubtful; and in any case it does not matter. The essential point is that on this occasion the newspapers were allowed to speak.