Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918

by Sir C. E. Callwell

The Press Bureau which was established at the commencement of the war was a civil department, entirely independent of the Admiralty and the War Office although it was in close touch with those institutions, as also with the Foreign Office, the Board of Trade and other branches of the Government. In so far as the War Office was concerned, the Bureau dealt with the Operations Directorate, which was responsible for watching the censorship of newspapers in general, just as it was responsible for actually controlling the censorship of cables and foreign correspondence. As the primary raison d'être of newspapers is to provide their readers with news, it was inevitable that restrictions placed upon publication of information, however necessary they might be in the interest of the State, would hamper the activities of those in charge and be regarded as a nuisance. It was natural that the Press should chafe at the restraint and should be disposed to exaggerate the inconvenience to which it was put. But the public, it must be remembered, have heard only one side of the story. The country has derived its information concerning the Press censorship from the Press itself—in other words, from what is to all intents and purposes a tainted source. The nation has had to decide on a subject of general interest on one-sided evidence.

In so far as the military share of the Press censorship was concerned, some of the groans of its victims were, no doubt, well justified. Delays were inevitable. But cases of unnecessary delay no doubt occurred. Instances could be mentioned of one censor sanctioning the publication of a given item of news while another forbade mention thereof. It is human to err, and individual censors were guilty of errors of judgment on occasion. Examples of information, which might have been given to the world with perfect propriety, being withheld, could easily be brought to light. How the humorists of the Fourth Estate did gloat over "the Captains and the Kings"! There was at least one instance early in the conflict of an official communiqué that had been issued by the French military authorities in Paris being bowdlerized before publication on this side of the Channel.

Few of the detractors of the military Press Censorship, on the other hand, gave evidence of possessing more than a shadowy conception of the difficult and delicate nature of the duties which that institution was called upon to carry out. There is little evidence to indicate that the critics had the slightest idea of the value of the services which it performed. Nor would they appear to be aware that the blunders committed by the censors, such as they were, were by no means confined to malapert blue-pencilling of items of information that might have appeared without disclosing anything whatever to the enemy. As a matter of fact, cases occurred of intelligence slipping through the meshes which ought not on any account to have been made public property.

When, for example, one particular London newspaper twice over during the very critical opening weeks of the struggle divulged movements of troops in France, the peccant passage was, on each occasion, found on investigation to have been acquiesced in by a censor—lapses on the part of overworked and weary men poring over sheaves of proof-slips late at night. Nearly all our newspapers published a Reuter's message which stated the exact strength of the Third Belgian Division when it got back by sea to Ostend—not a very important piece of information, but one that obviously ought not to have been allowed to appear. At a somewhat later date, a journal, in reporting His Majesty's farewell visit to the troops, contrived to acquaint all whom it might concern that the Twenty-eighth Division, made up of regular battalions brought from overseas, was about to cross the Channel.

It will readily be understood that incidents of this kind—those quoted are merely samples—worried the officials charged with supervision, and tended to make them almost over-fastidious. Soldiers of experience, as the censors were, remembered Nelson's complaint that his plans were disclosed by a Gibraltar print, Wellington's remonstrances during the Peninsular War, the details as to the siege-works before Sebastopol that were given away to the enemy by The Times, and the information conveyed to the Germans by a Paris newspaper of MacMahon's movement on Sedan. They were, moreover, aware that indignant representations with reference to the untoward communicativeness of certain of our prominent journals were being made by the French and Belgians. So the Press Bureau took to sending doubtful passages across for our decision—a procedure which necessarily created delay and caused inconvenience to editors. Publication, it may be mentioned, was approved in quite four cases out of five when such references were made. One rather wondered at times, indeed, where the difficulty came in.

But a verdict was called for in one case which imposed an uncomfortable responsibility upon me. This was when a telegram from the Military Correspondent of The Times from the front, revealing the shell shortage from which our troops were suffering, was submitted from Printing House Square to the Press Bureau in the middle of May 1915, and was transmitted by the Press Bureau to us for adjudication. It was about three weeks after Mr. Asquith's unfortunate reference to this subject in his Newcastle speech. Publication of the message could at the worst only be confirmatory to the enemy of information already fully known, and national interests did seem to demand that the people of the country should be made aware how this particular matter stood, seeing that the labour world had not yet fully risen to its responsibilities in connection with the prosecution of the war which depended to so great an extent upon our factories. Choice of three alternatives presented itself to me—leave might be refused, higher authority might be referred to, publication might be sanctioned then and there. The third alternative was adopted, although one or two minor details in regard to particular types of ordnance were excised. It seems to be generally acknowledged that publication of the truth about the shell shortage was of service to the cause; but for some of the attacks upon the War Office to which the publication of the truth gave rise there was no justification whatever. The attacks, indeed, took the form of a conspiracy, which has only been exposed since mouths that had to remain closed during the war have been opened.

For the General Staff at the War Office to have formulated apposite, hard-and-fast regulations for the guidance of the Press Bureau covering all questions likely to arise, would, it may be observed, have been virtually impracticable, or at all events would not have really solved the problem. Sir S. Buckmaster, when in charge of the Bureau, pressed me as regards this subject more than once, but there were serious objections to hard-and-fast rules. Everything must necessarily depend upon the interpretation placed on such ordinances by the individuals who were to be guided by them. Thus a rigorous enactment governing any particular type of subject, if strictly interpreted by harassed censors, would prevent any tidings as to that subject leaking out at all; while an indulgent enactment, if loosely interpreted by the staff of the Bureau, might well lead to most undesirable disclosures being made in the columns of the Press. Censors planted down in London could not, furthermore, be kept fully acquainted with the position of affairs at the front—a factor which greatly aggravated the perplexities of their task. We of the General Staff in Whitehall were in this respect very differently situated from G.H.Q. Over on the other side, where the situation of our own troops and of the French and the Belgians was known from hour to hour, newspaper representatives could always have been instructed by the bear-leaders in charge of them as to exactly what they might, and what they might not, touch upon in reference to any operations in progress.

Matters in connection with the air service and the anti-aircraft service—the two things to a great extent go together—are primarily problems for experts; but it seemed to me, as an outsider, that certain powerful organs of the Press made themselves so great a nuisance over the subject of air-raids at one time that they constituted an actual danger. Ridicule was poured upon the plan of darkening the streets of the metropolis until an attack took place; the first Zeppelin visit put an end to that. Then, when the threat of raids became a serious reality, the demand for retaliation was loudest from a combination of journals which happens to be extremely well informed, although it was almost a matter of common knowledge that anything of the kind was impracticable at the time because we had not got the requisite long-distance machines. It was even contended that the physical difficulties to be overcome in an attack upon the Westphalian cities were far less than those which an enemy faced when flying to London from the Belgian coast, although the distance to be traversed over territory in the antagonist's hands was three or four times as great in the former case as in the latter. (Not one reader in fifty will look at the atlas in a case like this and learn, at a glance, that he is being made a fool of.) This Press campaign did grave mischief. Dwellers in the East End, who were suffering seriously from the raids and were almost in a condition of panic, were induced to believe that pro-German influence in high places was at the bottom of our failure to resort to retaliatory counter-measures.

When the Prime Minister placed a newspaper proprietor in charge of the Air Service, he made in some respects a clever move. Press criticism practically ceased, and what there was of it mainly took the form of demands for a separate Ministry of Air. It would have been far better, however, if no decision had been arrived at on this subject until after the war was over, when the question could have been gone into carefully, and when a newspaper man would not have been actually in charge.

It may be remarked in conclusion that, had procedure within the War Office subsequent to mobilization more nearly followed the lines contemplated before the war, and which were only resumed some months later, there would probably have been less friction with the Press. The question of the war correspondents which has been mentioned above is a case in point. Then, again, a branch like mine which possessed an adequate staff, had it been given a freer hand, had it been allowed the requisite responsibility, and had it been kept better informed of what was actually going on in respect to operations, could have furnished newspapers with useful hints on many subjects. Take, for instance, that incessant outcry during the first two years or so of the war over the services of individual corps in action not being made known. As far as I am aware, journalists were never informed that the chief grounds for reticence in this matter arose from a simple sense of fairness. Everybody who has had to deal with history of military operations knows how hard it is to discover the actual facts in connection with any tactical event, and what careful weighing of different reports is necessary before the truth can be established. In these days of electric communications, official reports are sent off at very short notice and before details can possibly be known. If some unit is especially singled out for praise, injustice is likely to have been done; some other unit, or units, may in reality have done better without the full story having come to hand when the report was despatched.