Burnham of The Telegraph was now a Viscount, but, unlike Lord Northcliffe, he supported whatever government was in power and had no personal vendetta against politicians or policies.
Max Aitken, once a company promoter in Canada, and now proprietor of The Daily Express, became Lord Beaverbrook as his reward for the part he played in unseating Asquith and bringing in Lloyd George. Another peer was Lord Riddell, owner of the “News of the World,” which is not generally regarded as a spiritual light in the land. As one of the most intimate friends of Lloyd George, he merited the reward of loyalty. Not only peerages, but baronetcies and knighthoods were scattered in Fleet Street and its tributaries by a Prime Minister who understood the power of the press, but, in spite of a free distribution of titles, did not possess its loyalty when the tide of public favor turned from him.
The five war correspondents on the Western front—Perry Robinson, Beach Thomas, Percival Phillips, Herbert Russell, and myself—received knighthood from the King, at the recommendation of the War Office. I had been offered that honor before the war came to an end, but it was opposed by some of the newspaper proprietors who said that if I were knighted the other men ought also to receive this title—a perfectly fair protest. I was not covetous of that knighthood, and indeed shrank from it so much that I entered into a compact with Beach Thomas to refuse it. But things had gone too far, and we could not reject the title with any decency. So one fine morning, when a military investiture was in progress, I went up to Buckingham Palace, knelt before the King in the courtyard there, with a top hat in my hand, and my knee getting cramped on a velvet cushion, while he gave me the accolade, put the insignia of the K.B.E. round my neck, fastened a star over my left side, and spoke a few generous words. I should be wholly insincere if I pretended that at that moment I did not feel the stir of the old romantic sentiment with which I had been steeped as a boy, and a sense of pride that I had “won my spurs” in service for England’s sake. Yet, as I walked home with my box of trinkets and that King’s touch on my shoulder, I thought of the youth who had served England with greater gallantry, through hardship and suffering to sudden death or to the inevitable forgetfulness of a poverty-stricken peace.
That knighthood of mine deeply offended one of my friends, whose good opinion I valued more than that of most others. This man, who had been in the ugly places with me, could hardly pardon this acceptance of a title which seemed to him a betrayal of democratic faith and an allegiance to those whom he regarded as part authors of the war, traitors to the men who died, perpetrators of hate, architects of an infamous peace, and profiteers of their nation’s ruin. A harsh judgment! The only difference I find that knighthood has made to my outlook on life is the knowledge of a slight increase in my tradesmen’s bills.
One change in the editorial side of Fleet Street affected me in a personal way, and was a revelation of the anxiety of the Coalition Government to capture the press in its own interests. Robert Donald, under whose Directorship I had served on The Daily Chronicle for many years—with occasional lapses as a free lance—had been a close personal friend of Lloyd George, but toward the end of the war permitted himself some liberty of criticism—very mild in its character—against the Prime Minister. It was his undoing. Lloyd George was already under the fire of the Northcliffe press which had helped to raise him to the Premiership and now tired of him, for personal reasons by Lord Northcliffe, and he foresaw the time when, after the war, he would need all the support he could get from the press machine. A group of his friends, including Sir Henry Dalziel (afterward promoted to the peerage) and Sir Charles Sykes, a rich manufacturer, approached the Lloyds, who owned The Daily Chronicle, and bought that paper and Lloyds Weekly News for over £1,000,000. Robert Donald found it sold over his head, without warning, and felt himself obliged to resign his editorship. Ernest Perris, the former news editor, who had managed that department with remarkable ability, reigned in his stead, and The Daily Chronicle became the official organ, the defender through thick and thin, fair and foul, of Lloyd George and his Coalition.
A series of dramatic telegrams reached me at the front, but I paid very little heed to them and failed to understand the inner significance of this affair. But in loyalty to Robert Donald, and by his advice, I signed a contract with The Daily Telegraph. It made no difference to my readers, as my articles continued to appear in The Daily Chronicle, as well as in The Telegraph, as they had done throughout the war, by arrangement of the Newspaper Proprietors Association and the War Office.
Nominally Lord Burnham was my chief instead of Robert Donald. I liked him thoroughly, as he had always been particularly kind to me, especially on a night when I was deeply humiliated by one of those social faux pas which hurt a man more than the guilty knowledge of a secret crime.
This was during the war, when I arrived home on leave to find a card inviting me to dine with Lord Burnham at the Garrick Club. I had often dined at the Garrick with my brother, who was a member of the club, and remembered that evening clothes had not been worn by most of the men there. Anyhow, I arrived from a country journey in an ordinary lounge suit, with rather muddy boots, owing to a downpour of rain, and then found, to my consternation, that I was the guest of a distinguished dinner party assembled in my honor. The first man to whom I was presented was Field Marshal Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial Staff, and behind him stood Admiral Lord Charles Beresford (old “Charlie B.”) and a number of important people who were helping to “win the war.” Lord Burnham entirely disregarded my miserable clothes, but I was damnably uncomfortable until I forgot my own insignificance in listening to the conversation of these great people who were as gloomy and pessimistic a crowd as I have ever met, and seemed to have abandoned all hope. The one exception was Sir William Robertson, who sat rather silent until at the end of the meal he said “We may be puffed, and breathing hard, but all I can say is, gentlemen, that the Germans are more exhausted.”
That reminiscence, however, only leads me to the fact that after the Armistice I again transferred to The Daily Chronicle and remained with them until Lloyd George’s policy of reprisals in Ireland filled me with a sudden passion of disgust and led to my resignation from the paper which supported it.
I think every journalist must now admit that the English press, with very few exceptions, fell to a very low moral ebb after the Armistice. The “hate” campaign was not relinquished but revived with full blast against the beaten enemy. A mountain of false illusion was built up on the basis that Germany could be made to pay for all the costs of war in all the victorious nations, and a peace of vengeance was encouraged, full of the seeds of future wars, at a time in the history of mankind when by a little spirit of generosity, a little drawing together of the world’s democracies, even a little economic sanity in regard to the ruined state of Europe as a whole, civilization itself might have been lifted to a higher plane, future peace might have been secured according to the promise of “the war to end war,” and at least we should have been spared the squalor, the degradation, the bitterness of the last four years. But the English press led the chorus of “Hang the Kaiser,” “Make the Germans pay,” “They will cheat you yet, those Junkers!” and all the old cries of passionate folly, instead of concentrating on the defeat of militarism now that Germany was down and out, the economic reconstruction of Europe after the ruin of war, and the fulfilment of the pledges that had been made to the men who won the war. For, as we now know, and as I foretold, the German people could not pay these colossal, unimaginable sums upon which France and Great Britain reckoned, and the whole argument of these “fruits of victory” was built upon a falsity which demoralized the peoples of the allied Powers, and kept Europe in a ferment. The English press (apart from a few papers) refused to bear witness to the real truth, which was that the Peace of Versailles was impossible of fulfillment, that Europe could not recover under its economic provisions, and that the victor nations would have to face poverty, an immense burden of taxation, a stagnation of trade, the awful costs of war, with no chance of getting rich again by putting a stranglehold on the defeated peoples.