We can take the battle of Ypres as a single outstanding example. The full story of that great fight would have done more for recruiting in a week than all the displayed advertisements and elaborate placards with which our walls are so profusely adorned could achieve in a month!
Sir John French's despatch, as a military record, bears the hall-mark of military genius, but it is idle to pretend that it is a literary document calculated to stir the blood and fire the imagination of our countrymen. Admirable in its firm restraint from the military point of view, it takes no account of the civilian imagination. That is not Sir John French's business. He is a great soldier, and it is no reproach to him that his despatch is not exactly what is required by the urgency of the situation. Moreover, it came too late to exercise its full effect. Had the story of Ypres been given to the public promptly, and in the form in which it would have been cast by a graphic writer who understood the subject with which he was dealing and the public for whom he was writing, we should probably have been better off to-day by thousands and thousands of the much-needed recruits. The failure to take advantage of such a glorious opportunity for the stimulation of enthusiasm by purely legitimate means, convicts our censorship authorities of a total failure to appreciate the mentality of the public whose supposed interests they serve.
And as with successes, so with failures. It is the peculiar characteristic of the British people that either a great victory or a great disaster has the immediate result of nerving them to fuller efforts. We saw that in South Africa: it has been seen a hundred times in our long history. Let us turn for a moment to the affair at Givenchy on December 20th. Sir John French's despatch makes it clear that the repulse of the Indian Division on that occasion was a very serious matter, so serious, in fact, that it required the full effort of the entire First Division, under Sir Douglas Haig, to restore the position. Yet, at the time, the British public was very far from fully informed of what had happened: much of our information, indeed, was derived from German sources; and these sources being naturally suspect, the magnitude of the operations was never realised.
There may have been excellent military reasons for concealing, for the moment, the real position, though I strongly suspect that the Germans were quite as well informed about it as we were. But there could be no possible reason for concealing the fact from the public for a couple of months, and thus losing another opportunity of powerfully stimulating our national patriotism and determination.
THE PERIL OF THE PRESS BUREAU
It is one of the curses of our Parliamentary system that every piece of criticism is immediately ascribed to either party or personal motives, and politicians whose conduct or methods are impugned, for whatever reason, promptly assume, and try to make others believe, that their opponents are actuated by the usual party or personal methods.
At the present moment, happily, we have, for the first time within our memory, no politics; the nation stands as one man in its resolve to make an end of the Teutonic aggression against the peace of the world. In the recent discussion in the House of Commons, however, Sir Stanley Buckmaster, head of the Press Bureau, upon whom has fallen the rather ruffled and uncomfortable mantle discarded by Mr. F.E. Smith, seems to have interpreted the very unanimous criticism of the censorship as a personal attack upon himself. As a brilliant lawyer, of course he had no difficulty in making a brilliant reply to a fallacy originated entirely in his own brain.