Part 5 (1/2)
Some of the correspondents--one in particular--overcame a secretive military system and a harsh censors.h.i.+p by the use of a skilled imagination, and of a friendly telegraph line outside the area of censors.h.i.+p. At the Staff headquarters at Stara Zagora during the early days of the campaign, when we were all straining at the leash to get to the front, waiting and fussing, he was working, reconstructing the operations with maps and a fine imagination, and never allowing his paper to want for news. I think that he was quite prepared to have taken pupils for his new school of war correspondents. Often he would come to me for a yarn--in halting French on both sides--and would explain the campaign as it was being carried on. One eloquent gesture he habitually had--a sweeping motion which brought his arms together as though they were gathering up a bundle of spears, then the hands would meet in an expressive squeeze. ”It is that,” he said, ”it is Napoleonic.”
Probably the censor at this stage did not interfere much with his activities, content enough to allow fanciful descriptions of Napoleonic strategy to go to the outer world. But, in my experience, facts, if one ascertained something independently, were not treated kindly.
”Why not?” I asked the censor vexedly about one message he had stopped.
”It is true.”
”Yes, that is the trouble,” he said,--the nearest approach to a joke I ever got out of a Bulgarian, for they are a sober, G.o.d-fearing, and humour-fearing race.
The idea of the Bulgarian censors.h.i.+p in regard to the privileges and duties of the war correspondent was further ill.u.s.trated to me on another occasion when a harmless map of a past phase of the campaign was stopped.
”Then what am I to send?” I asked.
”There are the bulletins,” he said.
”Yes, the bulletins which are just your bald official account of week-old happenings which are sent to every news agency in Europe before we see them!”
”But you are a war correspondent. You can add to them in your own language.”
Remembering that conversation, I suspect that at first the Bulgarian censors.h.i.+p did not object to fairy tales pa.s.sing over the wires, though the way was blocked for exact observation. An enterprising story-maker had not very serious difficulties at the outset. Afterwards there was a change, and even the writer of fairy stories had to work outside the range of the censor.
The Mustapha Pasha censors.h.i.+p would not allow ox wagons, reservists, or Serbians to be mentioned, nor officers' names. The censors.h.i.+p objected, too, for a long time to any mention of the all-pervading mud which was the chief item of interest in the town's life. Yet you might have lost an army division in some of the puddles. (But stop, I am lapsing into the picturesque ways of the new school of correspondents. Actually you could not have lost more than a regiment in the largest mud puddle.)
Let the position be frankly faced that if one is with an army in modern warfare, common sense prohibits the authorities from allowing you to see anything, and suggests the further precautions of a strict censors.h.i.+p and a general hold-up of wires until their military value (and therefore their ”news” value) has pa.s.sed. If your paper wants picturesque stories hot off the grill it is much better not to be with the army (which means in effect in the rear of the army), but to write about its deeds from outside the radius of the censors.h.i.+p.
Perhaps, though, your paper has old-fas.h.i.+oned prejudices in favour of veracity, and will be annoyed if your imagination leads you too palpably astray? In that case do not venture to be a war correspondent at all. If you do not invent, you will send nothing of value. If you invent you will be reprimanded.
Here is my personal record of ”getting to the front” and the net result of the trouble and the expense. I went down to Mustapha Pasha with the great body of war correspondents and soon recognised that there was no hope of useful work there. The attacking army was at a stand-still, and a long, wearisome siege--its operations strictly guarded from inspection--was in prospect. I decided to get back to Staff headquarters (then at Stara Zagora) and just managed to catch the Staff before it moved on to Kirk Kilisse. By threatening to return to London at once I got a promise of leave to join the Third Army and to ”see some fighting.”
The promise antic.i.p.ated the actual granting of leave by two days. It would be tedious to record all the little and big difficulties that were then encountered through the reluctance of the military authorities to allow one to get transport or help of any kind. But four days later I was marching out of Mustapha Pasha on the way to Kirk Kilisse by way of Adrianople, a bullock wagon carrying my baggage, an interpreter trundling my bicycle, I riding a small pony. The interpreter was gloomy and disinclined to face the hards.h.i.+ps and dangers (mostly fancied) of the journey. Beside the driver (a Macedonian) marched a soldier with fixed bayonet. Persuasion was necessary to force the driver to undertake the journey and a friendly transport officer had, with more or less legality, put at my command this means of argument. A mile outside Mustapha Pasha the soldier turned back and I was left to coax my unwilling helpers on a four days' journey across a war-stricken countryside, swept of all supplies, infested with savage dogs (fortunately well-fed by the harvest of the battle-fields), liable to ravage by roving bands.
[Ill.u.s.tration: GENERAL SAVOFF]
That night I gave the Macedonian driver some jam and some meat to eke out his bread and cheese.
”That is better than having a bayonet poked into your inside,” I said, by pantomime. He understood, grinned, and gave no great trouble thereafter, though he was always in a state of pitiable funk when I left the wagon to take a trip within the lines of the besieging forces.
So to Kirk Kilisse. There I got to General Savoff himself and won not only leave, but a letter of aid to go down to the Third Army at the lines of Chatalja. But by then what must be the final battle of the war was imminent. Every hour of delay was dangerous. To go by cart meant a journey of several days. A military train was available part of the way if I were content to drop interpreter, horse, and baggage, and travel with a soldier's load.
That decision was easy enough at the moment--though I sometimes regretted it afterwards when the only pair of riding breeches I had with me gave out at the knees and I had to walk the earth ragged--and by train I got to Chorlu. There a friendly artillery officer helped me to get a cart (springless) and two fast horses. He insisted also on giving me a patrol, a single Bulgarian soldier, with 200 rounds of ammunition, as Bas.h.i.+-Bazouks were ranging the country.
It was an unnecessary precaution, though the presence of the soldier was comforting as we entered Silviri at night, the outskirts of the town deserted, the chattering of the driver's teeth audible over the clamour of the cart, the gutted houses ideal refuges for prowling bands. From Silviri to Chatalja there was again no appearance of Bas.h.i.+-Bazouks. But thought of another danger obtruded as we came near the lines and encountered men from the Bulgarian army suffering from the choleraic dysentery which had then begun its ravages. To one dying soldier by the roadside I gave brandy; and then had to leave him with his mates, who were trying to get him to a hospital. They were sorely puzzled by his cries, his pitiful grimaces. Wounds they knew and the pain of them they despised. They could not comprehend this disease which took away all the manhood of a stoic peasant and made him weak in spirit as an ailing child.
From Chatalja, the right flank of the Bulgarian position, I pa.s.sed along the front to Ermenikioi (”the village of Armenians”), pa.s.sing the night at Arjenli, near the centre and the headquarters of the ammunition park.
That night at Arjenli seemed to make a rough and sometimes perilous journey, which had extended over seven days, worth while. The Commander, an artillery officer, welcomed me to a little mess which the Bulgarian officers and non-commissioned officers (six in all) had set up in a clean room of a village house. We had dinner, ”Turkish fas.h.i.+on,”
squatting round a dish of stewed goat and rice, and then smoked excellent cigarettes through the evening hours as we looked out on the Chatalja lines.
Arjenli is perched on a high hill, to the west of Ermenikioi. It gave a view of all the Chatalja position--the range of hills stretching from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmora, along which the Bulgarians were entrenched, and, beyond the invisible valley, the second range which held the Turkish defence. Over the Turkish lines, like a standard, shone in the clear sky a crescent moon, within its tip a bright star. It seemed an omen, an omen of good to the Turks. My Australian eye instinctively sought for the Southern Cross ranged against it in the sky in sign that the Christian standard held the Heavens too. I sought in vain in those northern lat.i.tudes, s.h.i.+vered a little and, as though arguing against a superst.i.tious thought, said to myself: ”But there is the Great Bear.”
Now there had been ”good copy” in the journey. At Arjenli I happened to be the witness of a vivid dramatic scene (more stirring than any battle incident). It was a splendid incident, showing the high courage and _moral_ of these peasant soldiers at an anxious time. To have witnessed it, partic.i.p.ated in it, was personal reward sufficient for a week of toil and anxiety. To my paper, too, the reader might say, it was of some value, if properly told and given to the London reader the next morning, the day before the battle of Chatalja.