Part 33 (2/2)

The recent American note to Sir Edward Grey and his reply, with the press comments on both, led to this statement. The possibility of Germany's intentionally antagonising America was discussed, but not at length.

From the press to the censors.h.i.+p was but a step. I objected to the English method as having lost us our perspective on the war.

”You allow anything to go through the censor's office that is not considered dangerous or too explicit,” I said. ”False reports go through on an equality with true ones. How can America know what to believe?”

It was suggested by some one that the only way to make the censors.h.i.+p more elastic, while retaining its usefulness in protecting military secrets and movements, was to establish such a censors.h.i.+p at the front, where it is easier to know what news would be harmful to give out and what may be printed with safety.

I mentioned what a high official of the admiralty had said to me about the censors.h.i.+p--that it was ”an infernal nuisance, but necessary.”

”But it is not true that messages are misleadingly changed in transmission,” said one of the officers at the table.

I had seen the head of the press-censors.h.i.+p bureau, and was able to repeat what he had said--that where the cutting out of certain phrases endangered the sense of a message, the words ”and” or ”the” were occasionally added, that the sense might be kept clear, but that no other additions or changes of meaning were ever made.

Luncheon was over. We went into the library, and there, consulting the map, Colonel Fitzgerald and General Huguet discussed where I might go that afternoon. The mist of the morning had turned to rain, and the roads at the front would be very bad. Besides, it was felt that the ”Chief” should give me permission to go to the front, and he had not yet returned.

”How about seeing the Indians?” asked Colonel Fitzgerald, turning from the map.

”I should like it very much.”

The young officer was turned to, and agreed, like a British patriot and gentleman, to show me the Indian villages. General Huguet offered his car. The officer got his sheepskin-lined coat, for the weather was cold.

”Thirty s.h.i.+llings,” he said, ”and nothing goes through it!”

I examined that coat. It was smart, substantial, lined throughout with pure white fur, and it had cost seven dollars and a half.

There is a very popular English word just making its place in America.

The word is ”sw.a.n.k.” It is both noun and verb. One sw.a.n.ks when one swaggers. One puts on sw.a.n.k when one puts on side. And because I hold a brief for the English, and because I was fortunate enough to meet all sorts of English people, I want to say that there is very little sw.a.n.k among them. The example of simplicity and genuineness has been set by the King and Queen. I met many different circles of people.

From the highest to the lowest, there was a total absence of that arrogance which the American mind has so long a.s.sociated with the English. For fear of being thought to swagger, an Englishman will understate his case. And so with the various English officers I met at the front. There was no sw.a.n.k. They were downright, una.s.suming, extremely efficient-looking men, quick to speak of German courage, ready to give the benefit of the doubt where unproved outrages were in question, but rousing, as I have said, to pale fury where their troops were being unfairly attacked.

While the car was being brought to the door General Huguet pointed out to me on the map where I was going. As we stood there his pencil drew a light semicircle round the town of Ypres.

”A great battle,” he said, and described it. Colonel Fitzgerald took up the narrative. So it happened that, in the three different staff headquarters, Belgian, French and English, executive officers of the three armies in the western field described to me that great battle--the frightful slaughter of the English, their re-enforcement at a critical time by General Foch's French Army of the North, and the final holding of the line.

The official figures of casualties were given me again: English forty-five thousand out of a hundred and twenty thousand engaged; the French seventy thousand, and the German over two hundred thousand.

Turning to the table, Colonel Fitzgerald picked up a sheet of paper covered with figures.

”It is interesting,” he said, ”to compare the disease and battle mortality percentages of this war with the percentages in other wars; to see, considering the frightful weather and the trenches, how little disease there has been among our troops. Compare the figures with the Boer War, for instance. And even then our percentage has been somewhat brought up by the Indian troops.”

”Have many of them been ill?”

”They have felt the weather,” he replied; ”not the cold so much as the steady rain. And those regiments of English that have been serving in India have felt the change. They particularly have suffered from frostbitten feet.”

I knew that. More than once I had seen men being taken back from the British lines, their faces twisted with pain, their feet great ma.s.ses of cotton and bandages which they guarded tenderly, lest a chance blow add to their agony. Even the English system of allowing the men to rub themselves with lard and oil from the waist down before going into flooded trenches has not prevented the tortures of frostbite.

It was time to go and the motor was waiting. We set off in a driving sleet that covered the windows of the car and made motoring even more than ordinarily precarious. But the roads here were better than those nearer the coast; wider, too, and not so crowded. To Ham, where the Indian regiment I was to visit had been retired for rest, was almost twenty miles. ”Ham!” I said. ”What a place to send Mohammedans to!”

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