Considering our high hopes for a general uprising the day passed quietly enough. Only a bomb episode along in the afternoon testified that the spirit of anarchy and revolution still smoldered beneath the surface. Not much of an event it was, even at that. Only an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate one of the local tyrants of the detective force. It would make a scare head for a local police story perhaps, but out here for the man who had the only access to the world’s cable, it was only a “significant incident.” The immediate scene is dramatic, terrible. A cold gray court-yard rises beyond a gate, at which stood a half frozen sentinel, gloomy, imperturbable, silent. Across the court was the office of the victim sought. Within the compound a half dozen bodies, now torn and mangled, masses of clothing and human flesh, lie steaming in the cold, while pools of blood freeze in little lakes of red stained snow. The frost-bitten earth crunches dryly under the feet of the clumsy officers, who, note-books in hand, are compiling their reports of the incident. One of them turns over with his heavy boot the stiffening carcass of the perpetrator of the outrage, himself torn to shreds by the explosion of his own bomb. With white teeth clinched, and glassy eyes glaring up to the gloomy December sky, he lies, soaked in his own blood, amidst the wreckage he has created, a grim evidence that no tyrant is safe in a country where there are dozens willing and eager to sacrifice their own lives to remove even one of the cogs of the vast engine of despotism, the machine that has been grinding them smaller and smaller during these many centuries. No wonder the prefect of police turns his heavy visage from the scene in which he was cast to play such an important role. He is putty colored beneath his beard as he passes to his carriage, saber dragging in the snow and spurs ringing sharply on the threshold of the great gate. The dull sentry hears the sound and comes to a present. The police officers salute. The prefect climbs into his sleigh, weighted down with rich furs, the driver cracks his whip, and they are off up the street at a gallop. He has escaped this bomb, but how about the next, and yet again the one to follow that? Perhaps he is thinking what will be the ultimate end, as he is driven away through the softly falling snow.
The uninitiated, no doubt, view with skepticism the accuracy of quickly gathered news, and perhaps think that a few days on the situation is a ridiculously short time in which a man can gather any definite information. This is in a measure true. There are times where weeks of study are essential, but these are not the stories a special war correspondent is after. Where he is in demand is on the spot where there is a “visible” situation. When things quiet down he usually withdraws, and the political and economic correspondents send the more analytical and perhaps profounder stuff. But these men in a riot, disaster or “emergency” are often lost in the shuffle, and here it is where the war correspondent can often cut in and beat by days the men who have been on the spot gathering routine political news for years. Unimpeded by long association the special man sees at a glance the most picturesque and prominent features. Trained as he must be to quick action, and methods of getting out his copy, his reports are often days ahead of the resident correspondent.
The first thing for a “story” is a general view of the situation. Two hours divided among the consulates and embassies of America, Great Britain, France and Germany give the general official idea, which is always conservative. Next a round of the newspaper offices and one gets the (sensational) radical impressions. If there is anything big one can always find a half dozen war correspondents in the bar of the biggest and best hotel in town. From them one gets the sensational and spectacular elements and an unlimited amount of exaggeration. Three hours’ driving about town with an interpreter interviewing and talking with everybody available, from the man loafing on the corner to the prefect of police, gives the local color and atmosphere for your cable. Late in the afternoon a man has in his head a mass of material ranging from the most lurid stories of the correspondents to the “official protests” that “all is well and no further trouble anticipated.” The rest is merely a matter of perspective. As he writes, the correspondent must weigh the sources of his information and estimate their probable accuracy. Experience and many previous failures, and a sort of sixth sense, acquired perhaps in work on a local paper, render quick and almost subconscious judgments on news values more accurate than the uninitiated might imagine. It is at this point that a man’s work ruins him with his office, or he makes good. The editor is not asking for literature, but for a quick survey of the situation. So it is that the man who can talk with the most people in the shortest time, and from such evidence make a connected and truthful story, is the man that is wanted. From the combined conversations of perhaps forty informants, ranging through all classes in the community, he must pick and choose the salient features and the most reliable evidence on which to base his story. In ten hours a good newspaper man can get the material for a column cable on almost any “visible situation.” This in the main will be accurate and correct. The moment he has gotten his message off, he begins to sketch out his campaign for the coming days or weeks which he expects the trouble to last. He picks out a half dozen reliable agents and sends them all over town, interviewing, observing, collecting data and local color in all quarters. If he knows his business he has a small but efficient staff in forty-eight hours, which keep him posted as to the general trend of affairs all over the city. If the wires are working, he can probably pick up local informants in neighboring towns to reinforce his story with ideas and viewpoints. If there is fighting going on he tries to see it without too much risk, so as to get the “local color,” which only presence on the scene can give. The dull days are filled in by interviews with as many prominent people as can be induced to talk. Thus, what seems to an outsider as a difficult proposition and one involving guesswork and inaccuracy, becomes a very simple matter.
It was in much this way that I gathered material for my Odessa cable. I had not time to collect a local staff, for I only remained thirty-six hours, but I made out fairly well on the collection of local information by turning Morris and three or four members of my crew loose for the day to talk with everyone possible. My dispatches to the consulate gave me quick and easy access to the official view, while a number of stranded war correspondents at the hotel regaled me with information, which they could not get out themselves on account of the telegraph and postal tie-up all over Russia. One rarely drops on a good situation without meeting a handful of old friends on similar business bent. In Odessa almost the first man I met ashore was Lionel James of the London Times, in my opinion the best of all the English cable correspondents. He had been in command of the Times dispatch boat Haimun in the Russo-Japanese war, and for months had been competing in the news zone against the dispatch boat I was operating for the Chicago Daily News. I first met him in Chefoo Harbor and again in Ping Yang Inlet in Korea. He joined the second army and scored a beat on the cable from Lioa Yang, which broke the Japanese securities in the London money market. I lost track of him and did not see him again until Red Sunday days in Petersburg. I was hurried up from a little investigation of a war scare in the Balkans and almost the first man I met in the hotel in Petersburg was James. For a few weeks I saw him daily, and again we parted. He had been on half a dozen assignments and I around the world when we met on the street in Odessa that cold December day.
By six that night I had my evidence all in and was aboard the France ready for the run to the uncensored cable in Roumania.
CHAPTER VII
The France Does Her Best in the Run for the Uncensored Cable, Sticks in the Mud, but Gets Away and Arrives at Sulina Mouth with an Hour to Spare
Every line of enterprise is subject to disappointment and the newspaper business is no exception. I arrived on board the France with my mind picturing an eight-hour drive for the Roumanian cable, and my story in print in the afternoon edition of my paper the next day.
“All right,” I called from the rowboat as soon as I was in hearing distance of the France. “Get up the anchor—let her go,” but the only reply I had as I climbed over the side of my ocean-going greyhound of a tug was the sad face of old man Gileti and a series of deprecating shrugs and gestures accompanied by a line of guttural explanations in Greek. Nothing is more exasperating than delays on a cable story, and the language that floated over the expanse of Odessa harbor when I finally learned what my skipper had to say was certainly a disgrace, even for a journalist. In a word, the old Greek had failed to get the France port clearance, which meant that we could not get away until the next day, and that my precious “beat” must be delayed at least 24 hours.