Part 5 (1/2)
There was the vivid story of the battle of Chatalja. This story was started seven days too soon; had the positions and the armies all wrong; the result all wrong; and the picturesque details were in harmony. But for the purposes of the public it was a very good story of a battle.
Those men who, after great hards.h.i.+ps, were enabled to see the actual battle found that the poor messages which the Censor permitted them to send took ten days or more in transmission to London. Why have taken all the trouble and expense of going to the front? Buda-Pesth, on the way there, is a lovely city; Bucharest also; and charming Vienna was not at all too far away if you had a good staff-map and a lively military imagination.
In yet another paper there was a vivid picture--scenery, date, Greenwich time, and all to give an air of artistic verisimilitude--of the signing of the Peace armistice. The armistice had not been signed at the time, was not signed for some days after. But it would have been absurd to have waited, since ”our special correspondent” had seen it all in advance, right down to the embrace of the Turkish delegate and the Bulgarian delegate, and knew that some of the conditions were that the Turkish commissariat was to feed the Bulgarian troops at Chatalja and the Bulgarian commissariat the Turkish troops in Adrianople. If his paper had waited for the truth that most charming story would never have seen the light.
So, in a little book I shall one day bring out in the ”Attractive Occupations” series on ”How to be a War Correspondent,” I shall give this general advice:
1. Before operations begin, visit the army to which you are accredited, and take notes of the general appearance of officers and men. Also learn a few military phrases of their language. Ascertain all possible particulars of a personal character concerning the generals and chief officers.
2. Return then to a base outside the country. It must have good telegraph communication with your newspaper. For the rest you may decide its locality by the quality of the wine, or the beer, or the cooking.
3. Secure a set of good maps of the scene of operations. It will be handy also to have any books which have been published describing campaigns over the same _terrain_.
4. Keep in touch with the official bulletins issued by the military authorities from the scene of operations. But be on guard not to become enslaved by them. If, for instance, you wait for official notices of battles, you will be much hampered in your picturesque work. Fight battles when they ought to be fought and how they ought to be fought.
The story's the thing.
5. A little sprinkling of personal experience is wise; for example, a bivouac on the battlefield, toasting your bacon at a fire made of a broken-down gun-carriage with a bayonet taken from a dead soldier.
Mention the nationality of the bacon. You cannot be too precise in details.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A YOUNG WIDOW AT HER HUSBAND'S GRAVE]
Ko-Ko's account of the execution of Nankipoo is, in short, the model for the future war correspondent. The other sort of war correspondent, who patiently studied and recorded operations, seems to be doomed. In the nature of things it must be so. The more competent and the more accurate he is, the greater the danger he is to the army which he accompanies.
His despatches, published in his newspaper and telegraphed promptly to the other side, give to them at a cheap cost that information of what is going on _behind_ their enemy's screen of scouts which is so vital to tactical, and sometimes to strategical, dispositions. To try to obtain that information an army pours out much blood and treasure; to guard that information an army will consume a full third of its energies in an elaborate system of mystification. A modern army must either banish the war correspondent altogether or subject him to such restrictions of Censors.h.i.+p as to veto honest, accurate, and prompt criticism or record of operations.
The Bulgarian army had not the courage to refuse authorisation to the swarm of journalists which descended upon its headquarters. Editors had argued it out that the small Balkan States, anxious to have a ”good press” in Europe, would give correspondents a good show. But the Bulgarian authorities, anxious as they were to conciliate foreign public opinion, dared not allow a free run to the newspaper representatives.
Apart from the considerations I have mentioned, which must govern any modern war, there were special reasons why the Bulgarians should be nervous of observation. They were waging war on ”forlorn hope” lines with the slenderest resources, with the knowledge that officers and men--especially transport officers--had to do almost the impossible to win through. Further, they had the knowledge that in some cases the correspondents were representing the newspapers (and the Governments, for newspapers and cabinets often work hand in hand on the Continent) of nations which were at the very moment threatening mobilisation against the Balkan States. To have specially excepted Roumanian, Austrian, and German press representatives from permission to see operations would have been impossible. The method was adopted of authorising as many press correspondents as cared to apply, then carefully pocketing them where they could see nothing, and inst.i.tuting such a rigorous Censors.h.i.+p as to guard effectively against any important facts, gleaned indirectly, leaking out. A few managed to earn enough of the Bulgarian confidence to be allowed to go through to the front and see things. But, even then, the Censors.h.i.+p and the monopoly of the telegraph line for military messages prevented them from despatching anything.
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.
We were all allowed down to Mustapha Pasha, and considered that that was a big step to the front. ”For two days or so,” we were told, it would be our duty to wait patiently within the town (the battle-ground around Adrianople was about twelve miles distant). Some waited there two months and saw no real operations. The Censors.h.i.+p at Mustapha Pasha was so strict that all private letters had to be submitted, and if they were in English the English Censor insisted that they should be read to him aloud; and he re-read them, again aloud, to see if he had fully grasped their significance. Then they could go if they contained no military information and did not mention guns, oxen, soldiers, roads, mud, dirt, or other tabooed subjects. An amusing ”rag” was tried on the Censor there. A sorely tried correspondent wrote a letter of extreme warmth to an imaginary sweetheart. This began ”Ducksie Darling,” and continued in the same strain for two pages. He waited until there was a full house--the Censors had no private office, but did their censoring in a large room which was open to all the correspondents--and then submitted his ardent outburst. Other press-men did not see the joke at first, and began to sidle out of the room as, like a stream of warm treacle, the love-letter flowed on. But they came back.