War's Brighter Side / The Story of The Friend Newspaper Edited by the Correspondents with Lord Roberts's Forces, March-April, 1900

by Julian Ralph

But the war correspondent with a camera has not gone home. He has no intention of doing so. He is unrepentant enough to believe that he, and not the man with a pencil, is going to "come out on top."

Let us have the point at issue clearly defined. War correspondents are with the army to report the war—some by word pictures, others by camera or pencil pictures. Sight-seeing is a passion with humanity. Every inhabitant of the British Isles would like to have a personal vision of the conflict in South Africa, but—save for two or three irresponsible persons whose presence at the front no one can understand—those inhabitants are compelled to rely upon the eyes of others. Now, leaving aside the correspondents who devote themselves to word pictures solely, the question to be decided is—does the man with the camera surpass the man with the pencil in depicting the actuality of warfare?

An astounding claim is made on behalf of the man with the pencil. He can, we are told by Mr. Wollen, show the public "an accurate bird's-eye view of what a battle is like." And he does it by "a few lines to indicate the background and characteristics of it." The same authority assures us that "the brain of the camera cannot take in all that is going on. The man with the pencil does so." Such is the case for the man with the pencil. Now for the test of cross-examination.

Modder River and Maghersfontein may be cited as two representative battles of the war, and so may be honestly used as touchstones to try the claim Mr. Wollen makes on behalf of the man with a pencil. In each case there was a battle-line of some five or six miles, in each case the enemy was invisible, in each case it was physically impossible for any one man to see more than a small portion of the battle. A spectator on the right flank at Modder River could have no personal knowledge of incidents which were happening in the centre of the bridge, or down the river on the left flank. Even of his own particular section on the right flank that spectator could not attain to a perfect knowledge. But the man with a pencil is untrammelled by such minor matters as time and space; he "takes in all that is going on." Or, if he does not take it all in, he puts it in his sketch. The result is no more "an accurate bird's-eye view of what a battle is like" than a photograph of Oom Paul is like a photograph of Mr. Chamberlain. In short, the facility with which the pencil-man can jot down what he did not see is his ruin.

It will be obvious that the man with the pencil, not being ubiquitous, cannot "take in" all that happens on a battlefield; he sees just as much as, and no more than, the man with the camera; for the rest—which forms so large a proportion of his sketch—he has to rely upon the testimony of others. Now, when the public have in their hands a result attained by this method, what is its value as an "accurate bird's-eye view of what a battle is like?" Absolutely nil. People at home want to see a battle as they would have seen it if they had been present, and no sane man will contest the assertion that the best medium for giving them that vision is the camera rather than the pencil. Try as he may after the actual, the man with the pencil thrusts his personality between the event he sees and the people at home for whom he wishes to reproduce it, and consequently his sketch becomes a miserable failure when considered as an "accurate bird's-eye view of what a battle is like."

On the other hand, what does the man with the camera do? He and his lens see at least so much of a given battle as any man with a pencil, and what they see they see with unfailing accuracy. Take that battery in action which Mr. Wollen choses to cite as a subject wherein the powerlessness of the camera is supposed to be illustrated. The camera man does not fear the test. He can show the guns coming into action, record their unlimbering, depict the preparation for firing, and time a photograph at the actual moment of firing. It is true that his picture will not show quite such a volume of smoke as the sketch of the man with the pencil. But why? Because the smoke is not there. The man with the pencil puts it in because other men with pencils have been putting it in for generations. Perhaps, too, the public would not mistake the sketch for a battle-scene if the smoke were absent. Anyhow, what becomes of the boast of accuracy? Moreover, the man with a camera will not present his public with a twelve-pounder firing from the carriage of a howitzer.

There is something more to be said for the man with a camera. Now-a-days he is in the habit of screwing a telephoto lens to the front of the camera, and with that lens he can immensely outdistance the vision of even that all-seeing man with the pencil. Objects a couple of miles off are brought near, and groups of men can be photographed at such distances as prevent them assuming any posing attitudes. In this way actuality takes on the added charm of natural grouping, and I shall be greatly surprised if some of the telephoto pictures of this war do not take rank as the most artistic as well as realistic records of its incidents.

After all, the man with a camera may safely leave his case in the hands of others. Take a negative and a positive witness on the question in the abstract. Mr. Julian Ralph writes that "the pictures of our battles which are coming back to us in the London weeklies are not at all like the real things," and then he adds: "I saw the other day a picture in one of the leading papers by one of the best illustrators. It showed the British storming a Boer position. In the middle ground was a Boer battery, and the only gunner left alive was standing up with a bandage round his head, while smoke and flame and flying fragments of shells filled the air in his vicinity. In the rush of the instant he must have been bandaged by the same shot that struck him, and as for smoke and débris in the air, there was more of this in a corner of that picture than I have seen in all the four battles we have fought."

Now for the positive witness. He is no less a person than the art critic of the Pall Mall Gazette, who can no more be charged with a predilection for photography than Messrs. Steyn and Kruger can be saddled with a predilection for truthfulness. This critic dwells, as Mr. Scott did in the letter which opened this discussion, upon the old and new methods of war illustration, and then candidly adds: "I would like to say that the artists score off the photographer, but they do not. The public wants the facts as near as may be, and are too deeply stirred to be put off with melodrama."

One other witness may be called to give Mr. Wollen an idea of how the work of the man with the pencil is faring at home. Here is a recent private letter from England, which makes merry in the following fashion over those sketches which are so inclusive and accurate: "There is a picture of two gunners standing to attention after having exhausted their ammunition. The man nearest the gun is looking straight in front of him, with a bandage round his head, a bullet-wound in his face (close to the left ear), two in the right side of his chest, and one in his right leg, some distance above the knee. Within a yard of him is a bursting shell. But that man ignores such trivial things. Still he stands. I suppose the weight of so much lead in him keeps him up. One wonders whether he is hollow inside, so that the bullets all drop down into his feet."