Adventures in Journalism

by Philip Gibbs

It was amazing that my articles, and those of my fellow correspondents, were allowed to appear in the newspapers, in spite of military prohibition. But the press censorship, which had been set up by the government under the control of F. E. Smith, now Lord Birkenhead, was not under direct military authority, and was much more tolerant of correspondents who evaded military regulations. I wrote scores of columns during the first few months of the war, mostly of a descriptive character, and very few lines were blacked out by the censors. So far from being in the black books of the press censorship as established at that time, I was sent for by F. E. Smith, who thanked me for my narratives and promised to give personal attention to any future dispatches I might send. This was at the very time when Kitchener himself gave orders for my arrest, after reading a long article of mine from the Belgian front.

I was also received several times by Sir William Tyrrell, Secretary to the Foreign Office, who questioned me about my knowledge of the situation and begged me to call on him whenever I came back, although he knew that orders had been given to cancel my passport and that I was in the black book, for immediate arrest, at any port. It was Sir William Tyrrell, indeed, who, with great kindness provided me with a new passport after I had fallen into very hot water indeed.

It was F. E. Smith who read, approved, and even strengthened by a phrase or two, a sensational dispatch written by my friend Hamilton Fyfe and a colleague named Moore, which revealed for the first time to the British nation the terrible ordeal and sacrifice of the little Regular Army in the retreat from Mons. It was too sensational, perhaps, in its account of “broken divisions,” and “remnants of battalions”; and its tone was too tragic and despairing, so that there was one black Sunday in England which will never be forgotten by those who lived through it, because there seemed no hope for the British Army, or for France.

As it happened, Massey, Tomlinson, and I had covered the same ground as Fyfe and his companion, had seen the same things, and had agonized with the same apprehension. But owing largely, as I must honestly and heartily say, to the cool judgment and fine faith of Tomlinson, our deduction from those facts and the spirit of what we wrote was far more optimistic—and future history proved us to be right—so that they helped to restore confidence in England and Scotland, when they appeared on Monday morning, following Fyfe’s terrible dispatch.

But Fyfe did a great service to the nation and the Allies, by the truth he told, somewhat overcolored as it was. It awakened Great Britain from its false complacency. It revealed to the nation, for the first time, the awful truth that our little Regular Army, magnificent as it was, could not withstand the tremendous weight of the German advance on the left flank of the French, was not sufficient to turn the scales of victory in favor of France, and was in desperate need of reinforcements from the untrained manhood at home. It shook the spirit of England like an earthquake, and brought it face to face with the menace of its life and liberties. For if France went down, we should follow.... The recruiting booths were stormed by the young manhood of England and Scotland, who had not joined up because they had believed that myth: “The war will be over in three months.”

There was tremendous anger in the War Office at the publication of that article by Fyfe and Moore, and F. E. Smith, as the press censor, was severely compromised.

The truth was that the military mind was obsessed with the necessity of fighting this war—“our war” as the regulars called it—in the dark, while the nonmilitary mind knew that such a policy was impossible, and might be disastrous, in a war costing such a frightful sum of life, and putting such a strain upon the nation’s heart and spirit.

Looking back on my experiences as an unauthorized correspondent in that early part of the war, I must confess now that I was hardly justified in evading military law, and that I might have been found guilty, justly, of a serious crime against the Allied cause. By some frightful indiscretion (which I did not commit) I or any other of those correspondents might have endangered the position of our troops, or the French army, by giving information useful to the enemy.

The main fault, however, lay with the War Office, and especially with Lord Kitchener, whose imagination did not realize that this war could not be fought in the dark, as some little affair with Indian hillmen on the northwest frontier. The immense anxiety of the nation, with its army fighting behind the veil while the fate of civilization hung in the balance, could not and would not be satisfied with the few lines of official communiqués which told nothing and hid the truth....