Chapter 38

THE PRESS

The constant newspaper attacks upon the War Office -- Often arise from misunderstandings or sheer ignorance -- The mistake made with regard to war correspondents at the start -- The pre-war intentions of the General Staff -- How they were set on one side -- Inconvenience of this from the War Office point of view -- A breach of faith -- The mischievous optimism of newspapers in the early days -- Tendency of the military authorities to conceal bad news -- Experts at fault in the Press -- Tendency to take the Press too seriously in this country -- Some of its blunders during the war -- A proposal to put German officer prisoners on board transports as a protection -- A silly mistake over the promotion of general-officers -- Why were tanks not adopted before the war! -- A paean about Sukhomlinoff -- A gross misstatement -- Temporary officers and high positions in the field -- A suggestion that the Press should censor itself in time of war -- Its absurdity -- The Press Bureau -- Some of its mistakes -- Information allowed to appear which should have been censored -- Difficulties of the censors -- The case of the shell shortage -- Difficulty of laying down rules for the guidance of the censors -- The Press and the air-raids -- A newspaper proprietor placed at the head of the Air Service -- The result -- The question of announcing names of units that have distinguished themselves -- Conclusion.

It is inevitable, perhaps, that a rather time-honoured War Office hand--thirteen years of it, covering different periods between 1887 and 1918--should entertain somewhat mixed feelings with regard to the Press. As long as I can remember, practically, the War Office has provided a sort of Aunt Sally for the young men of Fleet Street to take cock-shies at when they can think of nothing else to edify their readers with, and uncommonly bad shots a good many of them have made. Assessment at the hands of the newspaper world confronts every public department. Nor can this in principle be objected to; healthy, well-informed criticism is both helpful and stimulating. But although many of the attacks delivered upon the War Office by the Fourth Estate, in the course of that perpetual guerilla warfare which is carried on by journalism in general against the central administration of the army, have been fully warranted, the fact remains that no small proportion of them has been based upon misapprehension, and that a good many of them can be put down to pure ignorance. Never has this been more apparent than during the progress of the Great War. But a reason for this suggests itself at once; many newspapers, no doubt, for the time being lost the services of members of their staff who possessed some qualification for expatiating upon military questions.

It has to be acknowledged that the Press was badly treated by the War Office and G.H.Q. at the outset. This circumstance may have contributed towards setting up relations during the contest between us in Whitehall and the world of journalism which were not always too cordial. The question of correspondents in the war zone naturally cropped up at a very early stage, and the decision arrived at, for better or for worse, was that none of them were to go. The wisdom of the attitude taken up by the military authorities in this matter is a question of opinion; but my view was, and still is, that the newspapers were treated injudiciously and that the decision was wrong. I was, indeed, placed in the uncomfortable position of administering a policy which I disliked, and which I believed to be entirely mistaken. It, moreover, practically amounted to a breach of faith.

The General Staff had for some years prior to 1914 always intended that a reasonable number of correspondents should proceed to the front under official aegis on the outbreak of a European war. A regular organization for the purpose actually took shape automatically within the War Office, in concert with the Press, on mobilization. A small staff, under charge of a staff-officer who had been especially designated for the job two or three years before, with clerks, cars, and so on, came into being _pari passu_ with G.H.Q. of the Expeditionary Force on the historic 5th of August. The officer, Major A. G. Stuart, a man of attractive personality and forceful character, master of his profession and an ideal holder of the post, had been in control of the Press representatives at Army Manoeuvres in 1912 and 1913, and he was therefore personally acquainted with the gentlemen chosen to take the field. (He was unfortunately killed while serving on the staff in France, in the winter of 1915-16.) The General Staff had, moreover, gone out of their way to impress upon correspondents at manoeuvres that they ought to regard the operations in the light of instruction for themselves in duties which they would be performing in the event of actual hostilities. They were given confidential information with regard to the programme on the understanding that they would keep it to themselves, and they always played the game.

But when war came, all this went by the board. Leave for correspondents to go to the front, whether under official auspices or any other way, was refused, and the staff and the clerks and the cars abode idle in London under my wing. The Press world accepted this development philosophically for the opening two or three weeks, realizing that the moment when the Expeditionary Force was being spirited over to France was no time for visitors in the war zone. But after that the Fourth Estate became decidedly restive. Enterprising reporters proceeded to the theatre of war without permission, while experienced journalists, deluded by past promises, remained patiently behind hoping for the best. The old hounds, in fact, were kept in the kennel, while the young entry ran riot with no hunt servants to rate them. Some unauthorized representatives of the British Press were, it is true, arrested by the French, and had the French dealt with them in vertebrate fashion--decapitated them or sent them to the Devil's Island--we should have known where we were. But as the culprits were simply dismissed with a caution the situation became ridiculous, because no newspaper man bothers about marching to a dungeon with gyves upon his wrists and tarrying there for some hours without sustenance. It is part of the game. So the military authorities were openly flouted.

One result of the abrupt change of policy also was that, instead of the supervision of messages emanating from the front falling upon officers at G.H.Q. who were in a position to wrestle with them to good purpose, this task devolved upon the Press Bureau in London, which naturally could not perform the office nearly so well and which was, moreover, smothered under folios of journalistic matter originating in quarters other than the theatre of war. Furthermore, editors and managers and proprietors of our more prominent organs considered that we had broken our engagements--as, indeed, we had. At the very fall of the flag, the Press of the country was in my opinion gratuitously fitted out with a legitimate grievance. This could not but react hurtfully from that time forward upon the relations between the military authorities and British journalism as a whole.

There was one direction in which the Fourth Estate did serious mischief in the early days of the war. As being behind the scenes during those strenuous, apprehensive months, when the process of transforming the United Kingdom into a great military nation at the very time when the enemy was in the gate was making none too rapid progress, I have no hesitation in asserting that one of the principal obstacles in the way was the excessive optimism of our Press. Every trifling success won by, or credited to, the Allies was hailed as a transcendent triumph and was placarded on misleading posters. When mishaps occurred--as they too often did--their seriousness was whittled down or ignored. The public took their cue only too readily from the newspapers, and the consequence was that a check was placed alike on recruiting and on the production of the war material which was urgently required for such troops as we could place in the field.

And yet, journalists could plead in excuse that they were in some measure following a lead set by the authorities. It has already been admitted in Chapter II. that a system of official secretiveness in connection with reverses was adopted, and that it did no good. This took the form of concealing, or at any rate minimizing, sets-back when these occurred--an entirely new attitude for soldiers in this country to take up, and one which was to be deprecated. We should never have gathered together those swarms of volunteers in South Africa in 1900, volunteers drawn from the United Kingdom and from the Dominions and from the Colonies, had Stormberg and Magersfontein and Colenso been artistically camouflaged. The facts were blurted out. The Empire rose to the occasion. Hiding the truth in 1914-15 was a blunder from every point of view, because there never was the slightest fear of the people of this country losing heart. No doubt the incorporation of ordinances directed against the propagation of alarmist reports calculated to cause despondency, as part of the Defence of the Realm Act, was necessary. But one at times positively welcomed the appearance of well-informed jeremiads in the newspapers, as an antidote to the exultant cackle which was hindering a genuine, comprehensive, universal mobilization of our national resources in men and material.

This excessive optimism which did so much harm was, it should be observed, to some extent the handiwork of "experts" whose names carried a certain amount of weight, who turned out several columns of comment weekly, and whose opinions would have been well enough worth having had they been better acquainted with the actual facts. For one thing, they did not realize that the augmentation of our military forces was hampered by the virtual impossibility of synchronizing development in output of equipment and munitions with the expansion of numbers in the ranks. They were, moreover, entirely unaware of the unfortunate condition of the Russian armies in respect to war material; they imagined that those hosts were far larger numerically than the insufficiency of armament permitted, and they consequently greatly overrated the potentialities of our eastern Ally in the conflict. To such an extent, indeed, was one of them unintentionally deceiving his readers as to the position of affairs in that quarter that I wrote to him privately giving him an inkling of the situation; he gave that side of Europe a wide berth for a long time afterwards.

The mischief done in this matter rather influenced one against the Press, and perhaps made one all the more ready to take cognizance of its blunders and to accept its criticisms (when these were ill-informed) in bad part. Are we not, however, in any case rather disposed to take our journals too seriously, and is not one result of this that we have the Press that we deserve? Public men have to treat the journalistic world with respect, or it will undo them; but that does not apply to mere ordinary people. Yet we all bow the knee before it, submissively accept it at its own valuation, and consequently it fools us to the top of our bent. We believe what we see stated in our paper as a matter of course, unless we happen by some accident to know that the statement is totally contrary to the actual fact. The Fourth Estate is exalted into an acknowledged autocrat because it is allowed to have things all its own way; and your autocrat, whether he be a trade union official or he be a sceptred potentate or he be the President of a republic saddled with a paradoxical constitution, is an anachronism in principle and is apt to be a curse in practice.

Autocracy is particularly to be deprecated in the case of the Press, seeing that here we have what is in reality the most widespread trade union in the country. Journalism harbours its internal squabbles and jealousies, no doubt, just as is the case with most great associations; but, assail it from without, and it closes up its ranks as a nation rent with faction will on threat from some foreign foe. It is generally acknowledged that in political life a formidable opposition in the legislature renders the government of the day all the more efficient. But the Press, in what may be called its corporate capacity, is not disciplined nor stimulated by any organized opposition at all, and the consequence is that it has perhaps got just a little too big for its boots. Judged by results in respect to its handling of military questions during the Great War, the Fourth Estate has not (taken as a whole, and lumping together journals of the meaner class with the representative organs which have great financial resources to refresh them) proved itself quite so efficient an institution as its protagonists claim it to be.

Before the war, one was disposed to accept as gospel the pontifical utterances of newspapers concerning matters with which one was unacquainted--the law, say, or economics, or art. But never again! Journalists on occasion gave themselves away too badly during those years over warlike operations, army organization, and so forth, for one to let oneself be bluffed in future. Given the leisure, the inclination, and the necessary access to a large number of the organs of the Press, a libraryful of scrap-books could have been got together, replete with gaffes and absurdities seriously and solemnly set out in print. One or two examples of such blunders may be given for purposes of illustration.

After a shameful U-boat outrage committed on a hospital ship, a London morning paper actually urged, in its first leader, that half a dozen German officers should be "sent to sea in every hospital ship _and in every transport_" (the italics are mine). Here was a case of an editor (surely editors read through the leaders which are supposed to give the considered opinion of the journal of which they are in charge) deliberately proposing that this country should play as dirty a trick as any Boche was ever guilty of. A belligerent has a perfect right to sink a transport in time of war, just as he has a perfect right to bomb a train full of enemy troops. The Japanese sank a Chinese transport at the outbreak of the war of 1894 in the Far East, causing serious loss of life; the vessel was conveying troops from Wei-hai-wei to the Korean coast. According to this newspaper, a hostile attack upon the flotilla of vessels of various sorts and kinds which conveyed our Expeditionary Force to France would have been as much an act of treachery and a breach of the customs of war, as would an attack upon the vessels covered by the Red Cross which brought the wounded back.

An Army Order in April 1918, again, laid down that promotion to the rank of general would in future be by selection, not by seniority. A number of newspapers of quite good standing thereupon promptly tumbled head over heels into a pitfall entirely of their own creation. They started an attack upon the War Office for not having recognized the principle of advancement in the higher grades of the army by merit sooner, having failed to notice that the Army Order concerned the question of promotion to the rank of full general. Of their own accord, and quite gratuitously, they exposed their ignorance of the fact that promotions to the ranks of brigadier-general, major-general and lieutenant-general had been effected by selection for several years previously; and they also exposed their ignorance of the fact that, up till the time of the Great War, there had never been any special importance attached to the rank of full general. In the South African War, when we had a far larger military force on active service than ever previously in our history, only three general officers of higher rank than lieutenant-general were employed--Lord Roberts, Sir R. Buller, and Lord Kitchener--and, although all three were in the field together, Lord Roberts was a field-marshal; when, later, Lord Kitchener was in supreme command he had no full general under him.

The Great War produced an entirely new condition of things, because we then came to have operating in the field, not merely one army but several armies, each consisting of several army corps, and each of those army corps commanded by a lieutenant-general. It was therefore convenient that the armies should be commanded by full generals, and the rank of full general suddenly assumed a real instead of merely a nominal importance. It thus became necessary to effect promotion to full general by selection instead of by seniority. Nobody expects editors to know details of this kind; but it surely is their duty to investigate before starting on a crusade. In the case of people who knew the facts, this particular blunder merely made the newspapers that committed it look ridiculous; but the majority of those who read the drivel in all probability had no idea of the facts, and were led to imagine that promotions to the various ranks of general officer had hitherto all been a matter of seniority. It is an example of the way in which the public have been misled about the War Office by the Press for years past.

A year or so after the Armistice, one of the London evening papers, when criticizing the disinclination of the War Office to adopt new ideas in respect to devices for use in the field (a fair enough subject of discussion in itself), gave itself away by complaining that "tanks were not adopted before the war"! In that case the absurdity was so obvious that its effect upon most readers of the article probably was to make them regard the whole of it as rubbish, which was not correct. One wonders whether the following passage, which appeared in the very early days of the war in one of our foremost newspapers, may not have had something to do with that entirely unwarranted confidence in the "steam-roller" on the Eastern Front which prevailed in England between August 1914 and May 1915: "I refer to General Sukhomlinoff, the Russian Kitchener, who is reorganizing the Russian armies. Thanks to him, the Tsar's armies are irreproachably equipped." Compare p. 283.

An article appeared in a leading Sunday newspaper in the spring of 1919, signalized by this amazing travesty of the actual facts. In a reference to our land forces of the early days of the struggle, the writer spoke of "armies sent to war lacking almost every modern requisite." Now, the Press generally manages to avoid grossly false statements of that kind when referring to individuals; if it does fall into such an error, the sequel is either an abject apology or else an uphill fight in the law courts followed by the payment of heavy damages. It is quite conceivable that the author of this unpardonable misrepresentation imagined himself to be telling the truth and that he erred out of sheer ignorance; but, if so, that merely serves to indicate how badly informed journalists often are of the matters which they are dealing with, when the question at issue happens to concern military subjects.

The expediency of affording greater opportunities to that great body of temporary officers who had joined up (many of them men of marked ability and advanced education), for occupying superior positions on the staff or for holding high command, was taken up warmly by a number of newspapers at the beginning of 1918. It is not proposed to discuss the theme on its merits--there was a good deal to be said for the contention. The matter is merely referred to because of the manner in which it was handled by the organs that were pressing it upon the notice of the public. Reference was very properly made to brains. But not one word was said about knowledge. Now, brains without knowledge may make an efficient Pressman--one is sometimes tempted to assume that the battalions of journalism are to some extent recruited from this source of supply. But brains without knowledge will no more make a superior staff officer who can be trusted, nor a commander of troops of all arms who will be able to make the most of them in face of the enemy, than will they make a successful physician or a proficient electrical engineer. It was also completely overlooked by the propagandists of this particular stunt that the experience which on every front, other than the Mesopotamian, temporary officers had been gaining was for practical purposes confined to trench warfare, and that, if a decision was ever going to be reached at all, it would be brought about under profoundly different tactical conditions from those which had been prevailing. The whole question hinged upon whether the requisite knowledge could be acquired, and upon what steps would be necessary to bring that desirable result about. The writers who dealt with the point perhaps recognized that brains were merely a means to the end, and not the end. But if they did, why did they fail ever even to mention the pinion upon which the whole question in reality hinged?

Journalists, when complaining of the censorship, have put forward the suggestion that this sort of thing ought to be left to the patriotism and honour of newspapers, that, if such a plan were adopted, the Press would of its own accord refrain from publishing any information that might be of value to the enemy in time of war, and that there would then be no need for any special official department dealing with this matter. That sounds plausible, but it will not stand examination for a moment. Granted that the great majority of editors and their staffs would never dream of wittingly disclosing information injurious to their country during hostilities, the fact remains that a chain is no stronger than its weakest link. If one journal, in its eagerness to attract, prints what ought to have been kept secret, the reticence of the remainder is of no avail. Nor is this merely a question of honour and patriotism. It is also a question of competence. Censorship responsibilities demand knowledge and call for certain qualifications which the personnel of the Press in general does not possess. A few editors, no doubt, could be trusted to do the work efficiently; but that claim to omniscience which is unobtrusively, but none the less insistently, put forward by the Fourth Estate has no solid foundation. One of the lessons of the Great War has been that censorship is an extremely difficult operation to carry out even when in the hands of individuals well versed in the conditions that arise in times of national emergency. The idea that the Press could censor itself is ridiculous. That such a theory should ever have been put forward argues a strange inability to understand the essentials of the subject, and sets up a doctrine of infallibility in the world of journalism for which there is no justification.

The Press Bureau which was established at the commencement of the war was a civil department, entirely independent of the Admiralty and the War Office although it was in close touch with those institutions, as also with the Foreign Office, the Board of Trade and other branches of the Government. In so far as the War Office was concerned, the Bureau dealt with the Operations Directorate, which was responsible for watching the censorship of newspapers in general, just as it was responsible for actually controlling the censorship of cables and foreign correspondence. As the primary _raison d'être_ of newspapers is to provide their readers with news, it was inevitable that restrictions placed upon publication of information, however necessary they might be in the interest of the State, would hamper the activities of those in charge and be regarded as a nuisance. It was natural that the Press should chafe at the restraint and should be disposed to exaggerate the inconvenience to which it was put. But the public, it must be remembered, have heard only one side of the story. The country has derived its information concerning the Press censorship from the Press itself--in other words, from what is to all intents and purposes a tainted source. The nation has had to decide on a subject of general interest on one-sided evidence.

In so far as the military share of the Press censorship was concerned, some of the groans of its victims were, no doubt, well justified. Delays were inevitable. But cases of unnecessary delay no doubt occurred. Instances could be mentioned of one censor sanctioning the publication of a given item of news while another forbade mention thereof. It is human to err, and individual censors were guilty of errors of judgment on occasion. Examples of information, which might have been given to the world with perfect propriety, being withheld, could easily be brought to light. How the humorists of the Fourth Estate did gloat over "the Captains and the Kings"! There was at least one instance early in the conflict of an official _communiqué_ that had been issued by the French military authorities in Paris being bowdlerized before publication on this side of the Channel.

Few of the detractors of the military Press Censorship, on the other hand, gave evidence of possessing more than a shadowy conception of the difficult and delicate nature of the duties which that institution was called upon to carry out. There is little evidence to indicate that the critics had the slightest idea of the value of the services which it performed. Nor would they appear to be aware that the blunders committed by the censors, such as they were, were by no means confined to malapert blue-pencilling of items of information that might have appeared without disclosing anything whatever to the enemy. As a matter of fact, cases occurred of intelligence slipping through the meshes which ought not on any account to have been made public property.

When, for example, one particular London newspaper twice over during the very critical opening weeks of the struggle divulged movements of troops in France, the peccant passage was, on each occasion, found on investigation to have been acquiesced in by a censor--lapses on the part of overworked and weary men poring over sheaves of proof-slips late at night. Nearly all our newspapers published a Reuter's message which stated the exact strength of the Third Belgian Division when it got back by sea to Ostend--not a very important piece of information, but one that obviously ought not to have been allowed to appear. At a somewhat later date, a journal, in reporting His Majesty's farewell visit to the troops, contrived to acquaint all whom it might concern that the Twenty-eighth Division, made up of regular battalions brought from overseas, was about to cross the Channel.

It will readily be understood that incidents of this kind--those quoted are merely samples--worried the officials charged with supervision, and tended to make them almost over-fastidious. Soldiers of experience, as the censors were, remembered Nelson's complaint that his plans were disclosed by a Gibraltar print, Wellington's remonstrances during the Peninsular War, the details as to the siege-works before Sebastopol that were given away to the enemy by _The Times_, and the information conveyed to the Germans by a Paris newspaper of MacMahon's movement on Sedan. They were, moreover, aware that indignant representations with reference to the untoward communicativeness of certain of our prominent journals were being made by the French and Belgians. So the Press Bureau took to sending doubtful passages across for our decision--a procedure which necessarily created delay and caused inconvenience to editors. Publication, it may be mentioned, was approved in quite four cases out of five when such references were made. One rather wondered at times, indeed, where the difficulty came in.

But a verdict was called for in one case which imposed an uncomfortable responsibility upon me. This was when a telegram from the Military Correspondent of _The Times_ from the front, revealing the shell shortage from which our troops were suffering, was submitted from Printing House Square to the Press Bureau in the middle of May 1915, and was transmitted by the Press Bureau to us for adjudication. It was about three weeks after Mr. Asquith's unfortunate reference to this subject in his Newcastle speech. Publication of the message could at the worst only be confirmatory to the enemy of information already fully known, and national interests did seem to demand that the people of the country should be made aware how this particular matter stood, seeing that the labour world had not yet fully risen to its responsibilities in connection with the prosecution of the war which depended to so great an extent upon our factories. Choice of three alternatives presented itself to me--leave might be refused, higher authority might be referred to, publication might be sanctioned then and there. The third alternative was adopted, although one or two minor details in regard to particular types of ordnance were excised. It seems to be generally acknowledged that publication of the truth about the shell shortage was of service to the cause; but for some of the attacks upon the War Office to which the publication of the truth gave rise there was no justification whatever. The attacks, indeed, took the form of a conspiracy, which has only been exposed since mouths that had to remain closed during the war have been opened.

For the General Staff at the War Office to have formulated apposite, hard-and-fast regulations for the guidance of the Press Bureau covering all questions likely to arise, would, it may be observed, have been virtually impracticable, or at all events would not have really solved the problem. Sir S. Buckmaster, when in charge of the Bureau, pressed me as regards this subject more than once, but there were serious objections to hard-and-fast rules. Everything must necessarily depend upon the interpretation placed on such ordinances by the individuals who were to be guided by them. Thus a rigorous enactment governing any particular type of subject, if strictly interpreted by harassed censors, would prevent any tidings as to that subject leaking out at all; while an indulgent enactment, if loosely interpreted by the staff of the Bureau, might well lead to most undesirable disclosures being made in the columns of the Press. Censors planted down in London could not, furthermore, be kept fully acquainted with the position of affairs at the front--a factor which greatly aggravated the perplexities of their task. We of the General Staff in Whitehall were in this respect very differently situated from G.H.Q. Over on the other side, where the situation of our own troops and of the French and the Belgians was known from hour to hour, newspaper representatives could always have been instructed by the bear-leaders in charge of them as to exactly what they might, and what they might not, touch upon in reference to any operations in progress.

Matters in connection with the air service and the anti-aircraft service--the two things to a great extent go together--are primarily problems for experts; but it seemed to me, as an outsider, that certain powerful organs of the Press made themselves so great a nuisance over the subject of air-raids at one time that they constituted an actual danger. Ridicule was poured upon the plan of darkening the streets of the metropolis until an attack took place; the first Zeppelin visit put an end to that. Then, when the threat of raids became a serious reality, the demand for retaliation was loudest from a combination of journals which happens to be extremely well informed, although it was almost a matter of common knowledge that anything of the kind was impracticable at the time because we had not got the requisite long-distance machines. It was even contended that the physical difficulties to be overcome in an attack upon the Westphalian cities were far less than those which an enemy faced when flying to London from the Belgian coast, although the distance to be traversed over territory in the antagonist's hands was three or four times as great in the former case as in the latter. (Not one reader in fifty will look at the atlas in a case like this and learn, at a glance, that he is being made a fool of.) This Press campaign did grave mischief. Dwellers in the East End, who were suffering seriously from the raids and were almost in a condition of panic, were induced to believe that pro-German influence in high places was at the bottom of our failure to resort to retaliatory counter-measures.

When the Prime Minister placed a newspaper proprietor in charge of the Air Service, he made in some respects a clever move. Press criticism practically ceased, and what there was of it mainly took the form of demands for a separate Ministry of Air. It would have been far better, however, if no decision had been arrived at on this subject until after the war was over, when the question could have been gone into carefully, and when a newspaper man would not have been actually in charge.

It may be remarked in conclusion that, had procedure within the War Office subsequent to mobilization more nearly followed the lines contemplated before the war, and which were only resumed some months later, there would probably have been less friction with the Press. The question of the war correspondents which has been mentioned above is a case in point. Then, again, a branch like mine which possessed an adequate staff, had it been given a freer hand, had it been allowed the requisite responsibility, and had it been kept better informed of what was actually going on in respect to operations, could have furnished newspapers with useful hints on many subjects. Take, for instance, that incessant outcry during the first two years or so of the war over the services of individual corps in action not being made known. As far as I am aware, journalists were never informed that the chief grounds for reticence in this matter arose from a simple sense of fairness. Everybody who has had to deal with history of military operations knows how hard it is to discover the actual facts in connection with any tactical event, and what careful weighing of different reports is necessary before the truth can be established. In these days of electric communications, official reports are sent off at very short notice and before details can possibly be known. If some unit is especially singled out for praise, injustice is likely to have been done; some other unit, or units, may in reality have done better without the full story having come to hand when the report was despatched.

In matters of this kind, the Press might advantageously have received greater assistance from the War Office. At all events that was so during the earlier portion of the time when the branch, which in pre-war days had been supposed to control such subjects, was under me, but only held restricted powers. The foregoing paragraphs have not been intended for one moment to suggest that British journalism did not, take it all round, behave admirably during the war. Newspapers almost always fell in readily with the wishes of the military authorities. On many occasions they were of the utmost assistance in making things known which it was desirable from the military point of view should be known. But there is no such thing as perfection in this world, and, even supposing the Press to be conscious of certain foibles of which it has been guilty, it can hardly be expected to advertise them itself. So an attempt has been made in this chapter to indicate certain directions in which it was occasionally at fault. The most important point of all, however, is that, when journalism and officialism happen to come into collision, the public in practice only hears the Fourth Estate's side of the story.