Part 5 (2/2)

Yes. But it was the next afternoon before I could get to a telegraph office within the Bulgarian lines. Then the censor said any long message was hopeless. I was allowed to send a bare 100 words. They reached London eight days later, a week after the battle had been fought, when London was interested no longer in anything but the armistice negotiations. The reason was that the single telegraph line was monopolised for military business. My account of the battle of Chatalja reached London a full fortnight after the event, though I had the advantage of the highest influence to expedite the message.

Thus from a daily-newspaper point of view all the expense, toil, danger were wasted.

Summing up, an accurate and prompt Press service as war correspondent with the Bulgarian army was impossible, because--

1. The Bulgarian authorities were keen that correspondents should see nothing.

2. A rigid first censors.h.i.+p checked a full record of what little was seen.

3. The first censors.h.i.+p being pa.s.sed, despatches often had still to pa.s.s a second censors.h.i.+p at Staff headquarters, a third censors.h.i.+p at Sofia.

4. Despatches pa.s.sing through Roumania underwent another censors.h.i.+p there, and yet another in Austria, possibly yet others in other European countries.

5. In addition to these censors.h.i.+p delays the Bulgarian authorities made newspaper messages yield precedence to military messages, and at the front this meant that Press messages were sent on by mail (ox transport most of the way) to the Staff headquarters or the capital.

6. In the meanwhile the imaginative accounts written nearer Fleet Street had been published, and the accurate news was ”dead” from a point of public interest.

Most of these conditions will rule over all future wars. Therefore I conclude that the day of the war correspondent--in the sense of a truthful observer of a campaign--has gone, and he died with the Balkan War. He can only survive if newspapers are willing to incur the very great expense of sending out war correspondents not for the news, day by day, but for what observation and criticism they could supply after the campaign was over. To a daily newspaper such matter is almost valueless, especially as during the progress of the campaign the correspondents of the ”new” school would be at work with their many inventions, raising the hair of the public and the circulation of their journals with bright feats of imagination.

CHAPTER VII

JOTTINGS FROM MY BALKAN TRAVEL BOOK

These observations I will quote from my diary during 1912 in ill.u.s.tration of phases of Balkan character, dating them at the time and place that they were made.

Belgrade, _October 21_.--The declaration of war has not set the Serbians singing in the streets. In the chief cafe there is displayed a great war map. Young soldiers not yet sent to the front lounge about in all the cafes and are lionised by the older men. They are the only signs of war.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Underwood & Underwood_

BULGARIAN INFANTRY]

The patriotic Serbian ill.u.s.trates his case against the Turk by taking you for a ramble around his capital. The old Turkish quarters of the town are made up of narrow unpaved muddy lanes lined with low hovels.

The modern Serbian town has handsome buildings markedly Russian in architecture, electric trams, and wood-blocked pavements. Near the railway station one side of a street is as the Turks left it and shows a row of hovels: the other side is occupied by a great school. The shops, because it is war-time and business is largely suspended, are mostly closed. But a few remain open with reduced staffs. The goods displayed are as a rule woefully expensive when they are not of local origin.

Landlocked Serbia, surrounded by commercially hostile countries, finds imports expensive. British goods are very much favoured, but are hard to obtain.

The Serbians speak bitterly of the efforts of Austria ”to strangle them commercially.” ”Whenever they wish to put diplomatic pressure upon us,”

said one Serbian to me, ”they discover that swine fever has broken out in our country and stop our exports of pigs and bacon--our chief lines of export. What can we do? Once, in retaliation, we found that we suspected a consignment of Austrian linen goods of carrying swine fever and stopped it on the frontier. It almost caused war.”

Nish (Serbia), _October 22_.--A military train carrying some members of the army and Staff has brought also a band of war correspondents this far. We were a merry but rather a hungry lot. The train has been sixteen hours on the journey, and as we started at 6 a.m. most of us did not bring any stores of food except such as were packed away and inaccessible in the big baggage. The wayside refreshment rooms are swept clean of all food. Finally we manage to obtain some bread, and five hungry correspondents in one carriage eat at it without enthusiasm, whilst in a corner sits a Serbian officer having a good meal of sausage and onions and bread. We make remarks, a little envious, a little jocose, in English, on his selfishness. ”He is a greedy pig, anyhow,”

said one, putting the final cap on our grumbles. The Serbian officer had not betrayed by a smile or a frown that he understood but now in good English he remarked: ”Perhaps you gentlemen will be so kind as to share this with me.” We all laughed and he laughed then: and we took a little of the sausage, and liked that Serbian rather well: and no reference was made to what had gone before. At nightfall we stop at Nish and all my Press comrades leave the train to go on in the rear of the Serbian army.

I push on to Sofia. Clearly these Balkan peoples are not quite so savage as I had thought once.

Sofia, _October 24_.--The position of the Bulgarian nation towards its Government on the outbreak of the war is, I think, extremely interesting as a lesson in patriotism. Every man has gone to fight who could fight.

But further, every family has put its surplus of goods into the war-chest. The men marched away to the front; and the women of the house loaded up the surplus goods which they had in the house, and brought them for the use of the military authorities on the ox wagons, which also went to the military authorities to be used on requisition. A Bulgarian law, not one which was pa.s.sed on the outbreak of the war--they were far too clever for that,--but a law which was part of the organic law of the country, allowed the military authorities to requisition all surplus food and all surplus goods which could be of value to the army on the outbreak of hostilities.

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