Part 21

Army, Corps, and Divisional Generals, occasionally some tremendous man from G.H.Q., like our supreme chief, General Charteris, favored us with their company, and discussed every aspect of the war with us without reserve. Their old hostility had utterly disappeared, their old suspicion was gone, and for three years we possessed their confidence and their friendship.

In a book of mine--“Realities of War,” published in the United States under the title of “Now It Can Be Told”--I have been a critic of the Staff, and have said some hard and cruel things about the blundering and inefficiency of its system. But for many of the Generals and Staff officers in their personal character I had nothing but admiration and esteem. Their courage and devotion to duty, their patriotism and honor, were beyond criticism, and they were gentlemen of the good old school, with, for the most part, a simplicity of mind and manner which doesn’t, perhaps, belong to our present time. Yet I could not help thinking, as I still think, that those elderly gentlemen who had been trained in the South-African school of warfare, had been confronted with problems in another kind of war which were beyond their imagination and range of thought or experience. Even that verdict, however, which is true, I believe, of the High Command, must be modified in favor of men who created a New Army, marvelously perfect as a machine. Our artillery, our transport, our medical service, our training, were highly efficient, as the Germans themselves admitted. The machine was as good as an English-built engine, and marvelous when one takes into account its rapid and enormous growth in an untrained nation. It was in the handling of the machine that criticism finds an open field--and it’s an easy game, anyhow!

Apart from Generals, staff officers, and battalion officers who came to our mess, there were other visitors, now and then, from that remote world which had been ours before the war--the civilian world of England.

During the latter part of the war all sorts of strange people were invited out for a three-days’ tour behind the lines, with a glimpse or two of the battlefields, in the belief that they would go back as propagandists for renewed effort and strength of purpose and “the will to win.” A guest house was established near G.H.Q., to which were invited politicians, labor leaders, distinguished writers, bishops, and representatives of neutral countries.

In their three-days’ visit they did not see very much of “the real thing,” but enough to show them the wonderful spirit of the fighting men and the enormous organization required for their support, and the unbroken strength of the enemy. Now and then these visitors to the guest house came over to our mess, more interested to meet us, I think, than Generals and officers at the Base, because they could get from us, in a more intimate way, the truth about the war and its progress.

Among those apparitions from civil life, I remember, particularly, Bernard Shaw, because it was due to a freakish suggestion of mine that he had been invited out. It seemed to me that Shaw, of all men, would be useful for propaganda, if the genius of his pen were inspired by the valor and endurance of our fighting men. Anyhow, he would, I thought, tell the truth about the things he saw, with deeper perception of its meaning than any other living writer.

Bernard Shaw, in a rough suit of Irish homespun, and with his beard dank in the wet mist of Flanders, appeared suddenly to my friend Tomlinson as a ghost from the pre-war past. His first words were in the nature of a knock-out blow.

“Hullo, Tomlinson! Are all war correspondents such bloody fools as they make themselves out to be?”

The answer was in the negative, but could not avoid an admission, like the answer yes or no to that legal trick of questioning: “Have you given up beating your wife?”

Bernard Shaw was invited, by suggestion amounting to orders from G.H.Q., to lunch with various Generals at their headquarters. I accompanied him two or three times, and could not help remarking the immense distinction of his appearance and manners in the company of those simple soldiers. Intellectually, of course, he was head and shoulders above them, and he could not resist shocking them, now and then, by his audacity of humor.

So it was when an old General who had sat somewhat silent in his presence (resentful that this “wild Irishman” should have been thrust upon his mess) enquired mildly how long he thought the war would last.

“Well, General,” said Shaw, with a twinkle in his eye, “we’re all anxious for an early and dishonorable peace!”

The General’s cheeks were slightly empurpled, and he was silent, wondering what he could make of this treasonable utterance, but there was a loud yelp of laughter from his A.D.C.’s at the other end of the table.

Before entering the city of Arras, in which shells were falling intermittently, Shaw, whose plays and books had had a great vogue in Germany, remarked with sham pathos, “Well, if the Germans kill me to-day, they will be a most ungrateful people!”

I accompanied him on various trips he made--there was “nothing doing” on the front just then, and he did not see the real business of war--and in conversation with him was convinced of the high-souled loyalty of the man to the Allied Cause. His sense of humor was only a playful mask, and though he was a Pacifist in general principles, he realized that the only course possible after the declaration of war was to throw all the energy of the nation into the bloody struggle, which must be one of life or death to the British race.

“There is no need of censorship,” he told me; “while the war lasts we must be our own censors. All one’s ideas of the war are divided into two planes of thought which never meet. One plane deals with the folly and wickedness of war. The other plane is the immediate necessity of beating the Boche.”

He has surprising technical knowledge of aviation, and talked with our young aviators on equal terms regarding the science of flight. He was also keenly interested in artillery work. Unfortunately his articles, written as a result of his visit, were not very successful, and the very title, “Joy-riding at the Front,” offended many people who would not tolerate levity regarding a war whose black tragedy darkened all their spirit.

Sir J. M. Barrie was another brief visitant. He dined at our mess one night, intensely shy, ill-at-ease until our welcome reassured him, and painfully silent. Only one gleam of the real Barrie appeared. It was when one of my colleagues asked him to write something in the visitors’ book. He thought gloomily for a moment, and then wrote: “_Beware of a dark woman with a big appetite_.” The meaning of this has kept us guessing ever since.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a great sensation along the roads of Flanders when he appeared for a few days, not because the troops recognized him as the writer of Sherlock Holmes and other favorite books, but because he looked more important than the Commander-in-Chief, and more military than a Field Marshal. He wore the uniform of a County Lieutenant, with a “brass hat,” so heavy with gold lace, and epaulettes so resplendent, that even Colonels and Brigadiers saluted him as he passed.

John Masefield was more than a three-days’ guest. After his beautiful book “Gallipoli,” he was asked to study the Somme battlefields from which the enemy had then retreated, and to write an epic story of those tremendous battles in which the New Armies had fought the enemy yard by yard, trench by trench, wood by wood, ridge by ridge, through twenty miles deep of earthworks, until, after enormous slaughter on both sides, the enemy’s resistance had been broken.

Masefield arrived late on the scene, and was only able to study the ground after the line of battle had moved forward, and to get the stories of the survivors. I had had the advantage of him there, as an eyewitness of the tremendous struggle in all its phases and over all that ground. When I republished my daily narrative in book form under the title of “The Battles of the Somme,” Masefield abandoned his plan, and so deprived English literature of what I am certain would have been a deathless work. All he published was an introduction, which he called “The Old Front Line,” in which, with most beautiful vision, he described the geographical aspects of that ground on which the flower of our British youth fell in six weeks of ceaseless and terrible effort.

I met Masefield at that time. He was billeted at Amiens with Lytton’s wild team of foreign correspondents. They were all talking French, arguing, quarreling, gesticulating, noisily and passionately, and Masefield sat silent among them, with a look of misery and long suffering.

The most important visitor from the outside world whom we had in our own mess was Lloyd George, then Minister for War. He came with Lord Reading, the Lord Chief Justice of England. Like most other visitors, they did not get very far into the zone of fire, and it would, of course, have been absurd to take Lloyd George into dangerous places where he might have lost his life. He did, however, get within reach of long-range shells, and I remember seeing him emerge from an old German dugout wearing a “tin hat” above his somewhat exuberant white locks. Some Tommies standing near remarked his somewhat unusual appearance. “Who’s that bloke?” asked one of them.

“Blimy!” said the other. “It looks like the Archbishop of Canterbury.”

The visit of Lloyd George was regarded with some suspicion by the High Command. “He’s up to some mischief, I’ll be bound,” said one of our Generals in my hearing. It was rumored that his relations with Sir Douglas Haig were not very cordial, and I was personally aware, after a breakfast meal in Downing Street, that Lloyd George had no great admiration of British Generalship. But it was amusing to see how quickly he captured them all by his geniality, quickness of wit, and nimble intelligence, and by the apparent simplicity in his babe-blue eyes. Officers who had alluded to him as “the damned little Welshman,” were clicking heels and trying to get within the orbit of his conversation.

He was particularly friendly and complimentary to the war correspondents. I think he felt more at ease with us, and was, I think, genuinely appreciative of our work. Anyhow, he went out of his way to pay a particular compliment to me when, in 1917, Robert Donald of _The Daily Chronicle_, was kind enough to give a dinner in my honor. The Prime Minister attended the dinner, with General Smuts, and made a speech in which he said many generous things about my work. It was the greatest honor ever given to a Fleet-Street man, and I was glad of it, not only for my own sake, but because it was a tribute to the work of the war correspondents--handicapped as they were by many restrictions, and by general distrust.

I had an opportunity that night of saying things I wanted to say to the Prime Minister and his colleagues, and the memory of the men in the trenches, and of the wounded, gassed, and blinded men crawling down to the field hospitals, gave me courage and some gift of words.... I do not regret the things I said, and their emotional effect upon the Prime Minister.

At that time, I confess, I did not see any quick or definite ending to the war. After the frightful battles in Flanders of 1917, with their colossal sum of slaughter on both sides, the enemy was still in great strength. Russia had broken, and it was inevitable that masses of German troops, liberated from that front, would be brought against us. America was still unready and untrained, though preparing mighty legions.

There was another year for the war correspondents to record day by day, with as much hope as they could muster, when in March of ’18 our line was broken for a time by the tremendous weight of the last German attack, and with increasing exaltation and enormous joy when at last the tide turned and the enemy was on the run and the end was in sight.

That last year crammed into its history the whole range of human emotion, and as humble chroniclers the small body of war correspondents partook of the anguish and the exaltation of the troops who marched at last to the Rhine.

The coming of the Americans, the genius of Foch in supreme command, the immortal valor of the British and French troops, first in retreat and then in advance, the liberation of many great cities, the smashing of the German war machine, and the great surrender, make that last year of the war unforgettable in history. I have told it all in detail elsewhere. Here I am only concerned with the work of the war correspondents, and the supreme experience I had in journalistic adventure.

On the whole we may claim, I think, that our job was worth doing, and not badly done. Some of us, at least, did not spare ourselves to learn the truth and tell it as far as it lay in our vision and in our power of words. During the course of the battles it was not possible to tell all the truth, to reveal the full measure of slaughter on our side, and we had no right of criticism. But day by day the English-speaking world was brought close in spiritual touch with their fighting men, and knew the best, if not the worst, of what was happening in the field of war, and the daily record of courage, endurance, achievement, by the youth that was being spent with such prodigal unthrifty zeal.

I verily believe that without our chronicles the spirit of the nation would not have maintained its greatness of endeavor and sacrifice. There are some who hold that to be the worst accusation against us. They charge us with having bolstered up the spirit of hatred and made a quicker and a better peace impossible. I do not plead guilty to that, for, from first to last no word of hate slipped into my narrative, and my pictures of war did not hide the agony of reality nor the price of victory.

XXI

The coming of Peace, after four and a half years of a world in conflict, was as great a strain to the civilized mind as the outbreak of war. Indeed, I think it was more tragic in its effect upon the mentality and moral character of the peoples who had been strained to the uttermost.

The sudden relaxation left them limp, purposeless, and unstrung. A sense of the ghastly futility of the horrible massacre in Europe overwhelmed multitudes of men and women who had exerted the last vibration of spiritual energy for the sake of victory, now that all was over, and the cost was counted. The loss of the men they had loved seemed light and tolerable to the soul while the struggle continued and the spirit of sacrifice was still at fever heat, but in the coldness which settled upon the world after that fever was spent, and in homes which returned to normal ways of life, after the home-coming of the Armies, the absence of the breadwinner or the unforgotten son, was felt with a sharper and more dreadful anguish. A great sadness and spirit of disillusion overwhelmed the nations which had been victorious, even more than those defeated. What was this victory? What was its worth, with such visible tracks of ruin and death in all nations exhausted by the struggle?

As a journalist again, back to Fleet Street, in civil clothes, which felt strange after khaki and Sam Brown belts, I found that my new little assignment in life was to study the effects of the war which I had helped to record, and to analyze the character and state of European peoples, including my own, as they had been changed by that tremendous upheaval.

Fleet Street itself had changed during the war. In spite of the severity of the censorship under the Defense of the Realm Act, and the almost slavish obedience of the press to its dictates, the newspaper proprietors had risen in social rank and power, and newspaper offices which had once been the shabby tenements of social outcasts--the inhabitants of “Grub Street”--were now strewn with coronets and the insignia of nobility. Fleet Street had not only become respectable. It had become the highway to the House of Lords.

The Harmsworth family had become ennobled to all but the highest grade in the peerage, this side of Dukedom. As chief propagandist, the man I had first met as Sir Alfred Harmsworth (when General Booth forced me to my knees and prayed for him!) was now Viscount, with his brother Harold as Lord Rothermere. He aspired to the dictatorship of England through the power of the press, and, but for one slight miscalculation, would have been dictator.

That miscalculation was the growing disbelief of the British public in anything they read in the press. The false accounts of air raids (when the public knew the truth of their own losses), such incidents as the press campaign against Kitchener, and that ridiculous over-optimism, the wildly false assurances of military writers (I was not one of them) when things were going worst in the war, had undermined the faith of the nation in the honesty of their newspapers. Nevertheless, the power of men like Northcliffe was enormous in the political sphere, and Cabinet Ministers and members of Parliament acknowledged their claims.

Burnham of _The Telegraph_ was now a Viscount, but, unlike Lord Northcliffe, he supported whatever government was in power and had no personal vendetta against politicians or policies.

Max Aitken, once a company promoter in Canada, and now proprietor of _The Daily Express_, became Lord Beaverbrook as his reward for the part he played in unseating Asquith and bringing in Lloyd George. Another peer was Lord Riddell, owner of the “News of the World,” which is not generally regarded as a spiritual light in the land. As one of the most intimate friends of Lloyd George, he merited the reward of loyalty. Not only peerages, but baronetcies and knighthoods were scattered in Fleet Street and its tributaries by a Prime Minister who understood the power of the press, but, in spite of a free distribution of titles, did not possess its loyalty when the tide of public favor turned from him.

The five war correspondents on the Western front--Perry Robinson, Beach Thomas, Percival Phillips, Herbert Russell, and myself--received knighthood from the King, at the recommendation of the War Office. I had been offered that honor before the war came to an end, but it was opposed by some of the newspaper proprietors who said that if I were knighted the other men ought also to receive this title--a perfectly fair protest. I was not covetous of that knighthood, and indeed shrank from it so much that I entered into a compact with Beach Thomas to refuse it. But things had gone too far, and we could not reject the title with any decency. So one fine morning, when a military investiture was in progress, I went up to Buckingham Palace, knelt before the King in the courtyard there, with a top hat in my hand, and my knee getting cramped on a velvet cushion, while he gave me the accolade, put the insignia of the K.B.E. round my neck, fastened a star over my left side, and spoke a few generous words. I should be wholly insincere if I pretended that at that moment I did not feel the stir of the old romantic sentiment with which I had been steeped as a boy, and a sense of pride that I had “won my spurs” in service for England’s sake. Yet, as I walked home with my box of trinkets and that King’s touch on my shoulder, I thought of the youth who had served England with greater gallantry, through hardship and suffering to sudden death or to the inevitable forgetfulness of a poverty-stricken peace.

That knighthood of mine deeply offended one of my friends, whose good opinion I valued more than that of most others. This man, who had been in the ugly places with me, could hardly pardon this acceptance of a title which seemed to him a betrayal of democratic faith and an allegiance to those whom he regarded as part authors of the war, traitors to the men who died, perpetrators of hate, architects of an infamous peace, and profiteers of their nation’s ruin. A harsh judgment! The only difference I find that knighthood has made to my outlook on life is the knowledge of a slight increase in my tradesmen’s bills.

One change in the editorial side of Fleet Street affected me in a personal way, and was a revelation of the anxiety of the Coalition Government to capture the press in its own interests. Robert Donald, under whose Directorship I had served on _The Daily Chronicle_ for many years--with occasional lapses as a free lance--had been a close personal friend of Lloyd George, but toward the end of the war permitted himself some liberty of criticism--very mild in its character--against the Prime Minister. It was his undoing. Lloyd George was already under the fire of the Northcliffe press which had helped to raise him to the Premiership and now tired of him, for personal reasons by Lord Northcliffe, and he foresaw the time when, after the war, he would need all the support he could get from the press machine. A group of his friends, including Sir Henry Dalziel (afterward promoted to the peerage) and Sir Charles Sykes, a rich manufacturer, approached the Lloyds, who owned _The Daily Chronicle_, and bought that paper and Lloyds _Weekly News_ for over £1,000,000. Robert Donald found it sold over his head, without warning, and felt himself obliged to resign his editorship. Ernest Perris, the former news editor, who had managed that department with remarkable ability, reigned in his stead, and _The Daily Chronicle_ became the official organ, the defender through thick and thin, fair and foul, of Lloyd George and his Coalition.

A series of dramatic telegrams reached me at the front, but I paid very little heed to them and failed to understand the inner significance of this affair. But in loyalty to Robert Donald, and by his advice, I signed a contract with _The Daily Telegraph_. It made no difference to my readers, as my articles continued to appear in _The Daily Chronicle_, as well as in _The Telegraph_, as they had done throughout the war, by arrangement of the Newspaper Proprietors Association and the War Office.

Nominally Lord Burnham was my chief instead of Robert Donald. I liked him thoroughly, as he had always been particularly kind to me, especially on a night when I was deeply humiliated by one of those social _faux pas_ which hurt a man more than the guilty knowledge of a secret crime.

This was during the war, when I arrived home on leave to find a card inviting me to dine with Lord Burnham at the Garrick Club. I had often dined at the Garrick with my brother, who was a member of the club, and remembered that evening clothes had not been worn by most of the men there. Anyhow, I arrived from a country journey in an ordinary lounge suit, with rather muddy boots, owing to a downpour of rain, and then found, to my consternation, that I was the guest of a distinguished dinner party assembled in my honor. The first man to whom I was presented was Field Marshal Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial Staff, and behind him stood Admiral Lord Charles Beresford (old “Charlie B.”) and a number of important people who were helping to “win the war.” Lord Burnham entirely disregarded my miserable clothes, but I was damnably uncomfortable until I forgot my own insignificance in listening to the conversation of these great people who were as gloomy and pessimistic a crowd as I have ever met, and seemed to have abandoned all hope. The one exception was Sir William Robertson, who sat rather silent until at the end of the meal he said “We may be puffed, and breathing hard, but all I can say is, gentlemen, that the Germans are more exhausted.”