CHAPTER XXIV

HOLT WHITE'S STORY OF SEDAN AND HOW IT REACHED THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE

I pass over the interval between Worth and Sedan, crowded as it was with events, stopping only to remark that _The Tribune_ was indebted to an American writer on _The Daily News_ for its account of Gravelotte, but not to _The Daily News_ except for the opportunity of buying that account, at a high price. There was an entangling alliance which forbade _The Daily News_ to hand it over to _The Tribune_, but did not prevent the correspondent of that paper from selling it. I am not sure whether the name of the writer is known but in the circumstances it is not for me to disclose it. The narrative was, of course, cabled to _The Tribune_ at once. Gravelotte was fought on the 18th of August. The account of the battle reached New York, I think, on the 21st. It was, at any rate, the first, and for some time the only narrative published. The defeated French called it the battle of Rézonville, and under that name was this description first printed. From a military point of view the account had no great value, but it was picturesquely written and in those {236} difficult days anything from the field was eagerly read.

Greater days were at hand. The battle of Sedan was fought on Thursday, September 1st, 1870, followed by the surrender of the town, the army, and the Emperor Napoleon on the day following. The news of the catastrophe was not known in London till Saturday morning at ten o'clock, and then only in the briefest form; the mere fact and not much more; through the general Press agency; I suppose Reuter's. Mr. Robinson wired me and I went to _The Daily News_ office. But the bare news was of no great use for my purposes. I went back to _The Tribune_ office in Pall Mall wondering what I was to do, and still more what _The Tribune_ correspondent in the field were doing. I had not long to wait. A dispatch arrived from Mr. Holt White saying he should be in London that afternoon, and at five o'clock he walked into the office.

Seldom have I been so glad to see any man's face as I was to see his, but there was hardly so much as a greeting between us. I asked first:

"Is your dispatch ready?"

"Not a word of it written."

"Will you sit down at once and begin?"

"I cannot. I am dead tired, and have had no food since daybreak. I must eat and sleep before I can write."

He looked it; a mere wreck of a correspondent, haggard, ragged, dirty, incapable of the effort which nevertheless had to be made. It was no {237} time to consider anybody's feelings. A continent was waiting for the news locked up in that one man's brain, and somehow or other the lock must be forced, the news told, and the waiting continent supplied with what it wanted. Incidentally, it was such an opportunity for _The Tribune_ as seldom had come to any newspaper. It was necessary to use a little authority. I said to Mr. Holt White:

"You shall have something to eat, but sleep you cannot till you have done your dispatch. That must be in New York to-morrow morning."

So we went over to the Pall Mall Restaurant, which was then in the building now replaced by the Oceanic House, the headquarters of the International Marine Navigation Company; if that be its name. Food and drink refreshed him. We were back in _The Tribune_ office not long after six and work began.

Mr. Holt White wrote one of the worst hands ever seen, so I said to him I would copy as he wrote and my copy would go to the cable operators. Bad or good, mine was a hand they were familiar with. We sat opposite each other at the same table, and I copied sheet by sheet till there was enough to give the cable a start, then took it to the Anglo-American cable office in Telegraph Street. I went myself for two reasons: first to make sure it was delivered, and second to make sure it went without interruption. The latter, indeed, was a point of which it was impossible, under the Weaver régime, to make sure. But I {238} could at least hand in the message over the counter. Many a message have I trusted myself and nobody else with, and many a letter have I posted with my own hands; everything, in fact, of importance ever since I had anything to do with journalism. It is often inconvenient but I have found it a good rule.

I dwell on these details. Few things in American journalism, the Civil War excepted, have made more stir than this exploit of Mr. Holt White. But the full credit which belongs to him he has never had. Consider what he had done. He had been all through the battle; he had been in the saddle all day from four o'clock in the morning till nightfall. The battle over, he started for London. He rode with his life in his hand. He had to pass the lines of three armies, the Prussians who refused him a permit, the French outposts to the north of Sedan, and the Belgians, who made a pretence of guarding their frontier and the neutrality of Belgian territory. He could not explain how he managed it. When he reached Brussels he thought it might be possible to write there and to wire his account from Brussels to London. But at the chief telegraph office in Brussels the official in charge told him flatly he would accept no dispatch relating to the war. The issue of the battle was unknown in Brussels. Anything handed in for transmission to London or elsewhere would be submitted first of all to the censor; and in Brussels, as elsewhere, the censorship is a heart-rending business; delay inevitable; and there was {239} no time for delay. It was, as I explained in an earlier chapter, one reason why all correspondents were directed to come straight to London where the censorship did not exist. Mr. Holt White was soon satisfied that it was useless to try to telegraph from Brussels, and he came on by train to Calais, missed the Calais boat, caught a later one, which did not connect with the Dover-London service, and, once at Dover, chartered a special train to London and so at last arrived.

I asked him if any other correspondent had come with him. He thought not; at any rate, no one whom he knew as correspondent and, of course, no one came by the special train. Still, there was no certainty. It was already two days since the sun had gone down on the beaten French in sedan. There was nothing to do except to hurry on the dispatch to New York.

With indomitable courage White wrote on. After a time I asked him if he would rest a little before finishing.

"No," he said, "if I stop I shall go to sleep, and if I go to sleep I shall not wake."

The man's pluck was a splendid thing to see. His answer was like the answer of an Atlantic captain who, in the old days when there was no telephone and designers had not learned how to make the captain's cabin the nerve centre of the ship, had been for three days and nights on the bridge. I asked him how he lived through it. He said it was rather trying to the knees.

"But did you never sit down?"

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"Oh, if I had sat down I should have gone to sleep."

There are heroisms of that kind in the routine of life, professional and other, and even in the profession of journalism of which the newspaper reader in the morning over his coffee and rolls never thinks. But they are real and without them, and without the loyalty and devotion of such men, there might sometimes be nothing for the man with his coffee and rolls to read.

White sat at his table till midnight and later. It was nearer two o'clock than one before the last of his message was filed in Telegraph Street. Whether by Mr. Weaver's intervention or not I cannot say, but there was a delay on the wires. The delay, I was afterwards told, was on the Newfoundland land lines to New York. It may be so. It was a message six columns long and not all of it appeared in _The Tribune_ that next Sunday morning though all of it had been filed in ample time; two o'clock in the morning in London being only nine o'clock of the evening before in New York.

No matter. It was a clear, coherent, vivid battle story, and it was the only one. No morning paper in London had any account of the battle till the Tuesday following; and all New York accounts, _The Tribune_ excepted, were from the London Press or Press agencies. It is not worth while to recall the comments of _The Tribune's_ rivals. They were angry, naturally enough, and they resorted to conjectures which might as well {241} have been left unexpressed. It is enough to explain further that Mr. Holt White's narrative did not appear in _The Daily News_ because he had an agreement with _The Pall Mall Gazette_. Part of this account, therefore, was printed in an abridged form in _The Pall Mall_ of Monday, for which it was written separately. _The Pall Mall_ is an evening paper, and when that was cabled to New York and found to be obviously from the same source as _The Tribune's_ the guesses grew wild. But the plain truth is now told, and is simple enough.

Mr. Holt White was a journalist but not at that time a journalist of any exceptional reputation or position. This, I think, was the first very considerable thing he had done. I am sorry to have to add that it was also the last. He was a man to whom, after such an achievement as this, a long repose became necessary. He rejoined the Prussian headquarters, spent the winter at Versailles, and during all those months did practically nothing. Of his great gifts and capacities he made no further use, even down to the end of his life, and the end came early. But he is entitled to be remembered as a man who at one supreme moment accomplished one of the most brilliant exploits in the history of journalism. Let us judge him by his best, and, so judged, his name must take its place with those of Russell, McGahan, Forbes, Steevens, and others of that rank if there are any others.

One more remark, to remind you how alien from {242} the mind of the British journalist at that time was the free use of the telegraph, which in America had become a thing of every day. When White sat down to write he said to me: "I suppose I am to condense as much as possible?"

"No, write fully."

"But it is going by cable."

"Yes."

"It will be some columns long."

"The longer the better."

He thought a little, then said:

"I still don't quite understand."

"Then please put the cable out of your mind, and write exactly as if you were writing for a London paper and the printer's devil waiting." And he did.

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