War Notes From a Newspaper Desk
I
TO-DAY, June 18, forty-six weeks after the Kaiser’s declaration of war, Bernhardi is selling at five cents a copy on Broadway. He was a dime only a week ago, and I cannot say whether the price has been forced down by the pressure of competition or by the approach of peace. I have read somewhere that great calamities like the present — war, plague, famine, earthquake — frequently usher in a revolt against ordinary methods of reason and in the direction of mysticism. In some such mystic yearning for relief, for escape from the monotony of forty-six weeks of casualty lists and seven-column headlines, I find myself turning to Bernhardi for a sign, fancying his decline on the Broadway curb as bound up in some way with the weariness, the longing for peace, which now rises out of the official dispatches, the notes and counter-notes, the billion-dollar credits in Parliament, and out of the very speeches of chancellors and prime ministers when they express their utter conviction of the justice of their cause and their confidence in ultimate victory.
Forty-six weeks do not measure the length of this war to me. Nor am I much better off when I think of the landmarks of the months, back through Lemberg and Przemysl to the Carpathians, to the Lusitania, to the second battle of Ypres, to the first battle of Ypres, to the Aisne, to the Marne, to Liége. The long horror comes home closest when measured in terms of Bernhardi, who was 75 cents in cloth before the outbreak of hostilities, who was 50 cents in paper when Louvain gave us our first taste of the Will to Conquer, who came down to 25 cents on the bookstands, along with ‘Poultry-Raising at a Profit ’ and ‘ 300 Easy Parlor Tricks, ’ as the theory of modern war seeped into the popular consciousness, and who is now offered at 5 cents a copy to a world familiarized with war on three fronts, with francs-tireurs and operations on inside lines, with air bombardments and asphyxiating gas.
How long this frightful nightmare has been upon us you can realize only when you pronounce ‘Bernhardi’ and the name stirs old, vague memories. Bernhardi belongs in the dim past with such half-forgotten names as Von Kluck, the Crown Prince, King Albert, Nicholas Nicholaievitch, Sir John French — even Hindenburg has faded into the background, even Joffre, even the Kaiser, who began the war as a very vivid personality and has petrified into a symbol, a phrase. Von Kluck, of the two-inch scare heads, for whom no task was too great and no task too small — ‘Von Kluck Threatens Paris,’ ‘Von Kluck Captures Machine Guns,’ ‘Von Kluck Advances on Forty-Mile Front,’ ‘Von Kluck Wins Bridge Head’ — his name is a shadow. All names are now shadows, for the romance of great leaders, the magic of personal combat, has long vanished out of this war which has resolved itself into a slow grinding of anonymous masses against each other.
For that matter, we have even given up thinking of masses and nations. The hearts of half the world, the minds of the rest of humanity are fixed upon one thing — shells. Neither strategy, nor tactics, nor fanaticism, nor courage, nor hate, enter into the dispatches, the special correspondence, the war expert’s speculations, the editorials, the forecasts of chancellors and prime ministers, but shrapnel only and high explosive, barbed-wire and incendiary bombs. These are the protagonists, who have seized not merely the centre of the stage, but the entire proscenium, ousting men, issues, passions, ideals, principles. After thousands of years of speculation regarding the nature and purpose of the state, we know to-day. The state exists for the production of shells, government is for the regulation of shells. Not progress, not happiness, not virtue, not efficiency, is the purpose of society, but shells; and if not shells, then shrapnel. Civilization has reached the point where we have a Minister of Munitions. Civilization moves on, and future wars, or perhaps this war before it ends, will see a higher specialization, a Minister of High Explosives, a Minister of Low Explosives, a Lord Chancellor of Shrapnel, Secretary of State for Lyddite, for Melinite, for Shimose Powder, with Under Secretaries for Picric Acid, for Hydrochloric Acid, for Saltpetre, and — who knows? if the war goes on, if the Will to Conquer persists — a Minister of Dum-dum Bullets and Arsenic.
II
A little before nine o’clock in the morning, six days in the week, a slim, thin-haired man, with an iron-gray moustache and humorous eyes of a light blue, sits down at a desk in our office, adjusts his pince-nez gently but firmly, and draws to his ear, figuratively speaking this time, a knotted mass of wires that stretch out to the six continents and the seven seas. Several million puppets dance at the further ends of the wires, — some of them are called Joffre, Asquith, Mackensen, Hindenburg, Bethmann-Hollweg, Nicholas Nicholaievitch, — and at the near end of the wires is he, our Telegraph Editor. You have read in magazine stories of the heaven-born newspaper man who unerringly rips out the heart of a ‘story’ and so rises to fame and fortune. Ripping out the heart of a ‘story’ calls up the picture of a vast mass of detail into which the great newspaper man reaches his hand and grasps the essentials. Our telegraph editor has found comparatively little opportunity in the war news for such major operations. His business has been rather to build muscles and flesh around the bare skeleton of the official dispatches which the cables bring him.
His work is constructive engineering of a high kind. He must find in the curt summary of a hundred words sufficient material for an honest narrative that shall not be crushed under the weight of the ornamental cornice which is the headline. His task is infinitely harder than the problems that Joffre and Hindenburg must deal with. For the time is past when commanders in the field must make instant decisions on the basis of fragmentary reports brought in by sweating aides-de-camp. A skirmish nowadays lasts three days and a battle two months, and the deliberations of the General Staff are like the papers read at the Philadelphia Academy of Political Science. But our telegraph editor must frame his decisions between 10:15 and 11:15 for the first edition; he must rectify his lines between 11:45 and 12:45 for the second edition; he must reshape his strategy for Wall Street, and see to it that matters are definitely pointed to victory or defeat for the Final, at 3:35.
For this purpose the telegraph editor makes no use of textbooks, which are all in the Military Expert’s office. Behind his desk, it is true, hangs a large map of Central Europe, but it is largely interior decoration. He has a simpler method for the geography of Europe and the chronology of the war. He carries them in his head. He recalls automatically the A. P. story of a Zeppelin flying over Denmark, which came on October 4 via Amsterdam, and identifies it as an early version of the story of a Zeppelin in distress over the North Sea, which came to him via Paris on October 15. Long experience of human fallibility in times of peace has given him an instinct for piercing to the truth behind the reticencies, the paraphrases, and the afterthoughts of the war dispatches. Just as before the war he had his comparative scale of veracity completely worked out, — knowing just how far you could believe the A. P. correspondent at Peking and the United Press representative at Los Angeles, — so now he has Paris, Berlin, London, Petrograd, Stockholm, and Geneva classified in the scale of authenticity, not formally, but by instinct, as I have said. Automatically the spluttered lines of the ‘flimsy’ shape themselves to him as a double-column head, a single 51, or a mere stickful somewhere in the inside pages near the realestate news.
He has his difficult moments. There have been weeks in this war when the telegraph editor was in the same position as Field-Marshal French, a nation behind him crying for heavy results in the shape of fat headlines, and no ammunition with which to get his results; only two lines from Paris saying that the situation shows no change from the statement of last night; only a remark from Berlin that operations are progressing quite as foreseen. For the yellow editor there is a way out. He can always pick up a story of Francis Joseph berating his defeated generals, with a faithful paraphrase of the imperial scolding, and put a seven-column head over that. He can always print a story of the imminent fall of the Dardanelles as reported by a Greek merchant from Sophia who reaches Rome via Salonica, Lesbos, Venice, and Alexandria, and put a scare head over that. The most conservative of telegraph editors have been compelled to write double-column heads on the capture of very small trenches; but sometimes even the necessary fifty yards of trenches have not been forthcoming. On such occasions, while the Russian lines on the Bzura are holding firm under Hindenburg’s fire, while General Foch is countercharging north of Arras, our telegraph editor bites at an apple and wishes the horrible slaughter were over. Among the victims of the slow-grinding deadlock in the trenches of northern France you must not forget our telegraph editor.
His sufferings are acutest perhaps at 10:30 in the morning. This war, as you have read, has been emphatically an afternoon paper’s war. The official war bulletins at Paris, Berlin, Petrograd, London, are given out some time in the afternoon, which means five to six hours earlier in New York and so beyond the reach of the morning papers. It is we of the afternoon press that have scored the most important victories. Only during the first months of the war, when there were important occurrences in the Pacific, did the morning papers have a chance. If I were the proprietor of a great morning daily in New York I wonder if I could resist the temptation to have the war spread to China and eastern Siberia. The greatest ‘story’ of the war, so far as we of neutral America are concerned, the destruction of the Lusitania, was entirely an afternoon story. For us the sinking of the great ship, and the appalling loss of life; for the morning papers merely the exact counting of the dead, the hunt for survivors, and the recording of the amazement and horror of mankind.
No, a newspaper office on the afternoon of a Lusitania story is decidedly not the storm centre which you have read about in the magazines or seen on the stage — city editors in shirt sleeves shouting like Richard III on Bosworth Field, reporters dashing madly through slamming doors, copy boys hurdling the desks toward the pneumatic dispatch-tubes. A Lusitania afternoon in our office finds the city room in a hush, the men at the typewriters a little faster than usual, but quieter, too, the copy boys moving a little more swiftly, but with no turmoil. It is among the editorial writers on the other side of the house that you will find excitement, strain, a feverish exchange of opinion. For they are the men who must write to-morrow their reasoned opinion on what it all means — and what does it mean?
The men in the telegraph room and city room, having immediate work to do, do it with silent efficiency. The city editor turns frequently to the telephone, but he does not bawl through half a dozen telephones at once as you have seen him do on the stage. He shouts up the speaking tube to the composing room, but his voice does not rise to a shriek of agony. And the telegraph editor, fixing his eyeglasses a little more firmly on his nose, sinking a little deeper into his chair, reads, cuts, writes, adjusts, transposes, condenses, expands, rebuilds for the first extra, rebuilds for the second extra, glances at the clock, finds he has still three minutes for his summary, revises his list of survivors, writes a new head for the London Cunard office story, shifts a first-page London item, 6.35, on to the inside to make room for a Queenstown, 6.55 — and the sheets fly from his hand to the hook, and from the hook they are carried to the tube, and the ‘takes’ descend by tube, until the managing editor announces that there are no more extras.
III
Ever since official war reports have been written, I suppose, they have followed a literary technique of their own. Among the rules of bulletin-writing that will never be changed are those which prescribe that little victories shall be described at much greater length than big victories, that small defeats shall be promptly acknowledged for the purpose of creating an atmosphere of absolute frankness, and that serious reverses shall at first be passed over in silence, then alluded to as a matter of course, and ever after that characterized as a strategic retirement, a rectification of the front, a readjustment of the wings in closer coöperation with the centre, a consolidation of position, a withdrawal from positions that had lost importance, and so forth. These are the classical methods, and they have been liberally employed in the present war. If, for instance, one were to reread the official dispatches from Petrograd during the Galician battles of May and June, one would seldom find the word retreat or retirement. But on successive days or in successive weeks the dispatches calmly speak of the fighting before Tarnow, the fighting on the Wisloka, the fighting at Przemysl, our front west of Lemberg, our front east of Lemberg, each position being from ten to twenty miles in the rear of the position last mentioned. An army is never beaten, an army seldom retreats, and yet somehow an army is found a good deal farther behind where it was the week before.
It is a method which deceives no one who compares the reports of one day with those of the day before. Only, official war bulletins are written not for information but for moral effect, and are intended, not for the enlightened, but for the unlearned and anxious masses who live only from day to day. Upon them, too, the truth ultimately comes. Vaguely they feel that all is not going well at the front, but by the time the truth is realized there is always at hand a fuller explanation of the comparative insignificance of what might at first seem a serious defeat, and of the real advantages won by our army falling back intact. In that word ‘intact’ the writer of official dispatches finds great comfort. When important positions are lost it is reassuring to know that, though our positions are lost, our army is intact. And when the army itself has been badly beaten it is a comfort to know that the morale of the army is intact. And when the morale of the army comes under suspicion, there is still the Will of the Nation, the Determination to Conquer, which remains intact. Even in the bitter business of war, the phrase-makers have their rôle.
Teachers of rhetoric must admire the admirable brevity of the average official war report. It has some of the qualities which we were taught at college to look for in Matthew Arnold, — simplicity, conciseness, force. What it does not have of the Matthew Arnold style is Matthew Arnold’s orderly lucidity and his sense of proportion. The style is rather that of Picasso and Cézanne. It is the habit of the official reporter, in describing a battle-front 400 miles long, to jump 100 miles after a comma, and to put the capture of 150 men, 2 machine guns, and 3 minethrowers in the same sentence with the retirement of a couple of army corps on a front of 20 miles. If, for example, I had to issue an afternoon bulletin dealing with events on a battle-front extending from Albany, New York, to Richmond, Virginia, my report, according to the classical formula, would run somewhat as follows: —
‘In the sector of Poughkeepsie our artillery has bombarded the enemy’s positions. We destroyed an ammunition train on the road from Asbury Park to Ocean Grove, and forced an airship to descend within the enemy’s lines near Old Point Comfort. During the evening of the 19th our forces delivered an attack to the east of Yonkers, and took possession of two lines of trenches on a front of 150 yards, extending to the tenth green on the Van Cortlandt golf links; between Trenton and the James River we have effected a regrouping of our forces some distance in the rear of our advanced positions, which were no longer essential to our strategic purpose. There have been artillery exchanges at Valley Forge, and in the vicinity of Saratoga and Princeton.’
Over this report the Evening Telegram would put a seven-column headline, ‘Americans Smash Invaders’ Lines in Furious Drive Against Van Cortlandt.’
Am I making merry over a rather sad business, blind to the ache and the blood and tears that are concealed behind the dry, disjointed, chaotic formulas of the official reporter? I am not in the least light-hearted. I can see clearly the anxious millions in the towns, in the villages, in the lonely farms and woodcutters’ huts to whom these bulletins are offered for anything but information — for consolation, for good cheer, for sustained courage, for readiness to make greater sacrifices still. And, if the story is one of disaster, I can see the mercy as well as the possible policy of appeasing those anxious hearts with a medley of geography, tactics, and mathematics. I often think with sympathy of the official in the War Office at Paris, Petrograd, Vienna, London, Berlin, to whom falls the final revision of these official reports. He is himself a man, subject to fears, hopes, passions. Defeat must come as dark to him as to any one of us; yet it is his business, like the clown in the comedy, to laugh while his heart is breaking, to laugh in the form of vaguely defined trenches, indefinite bombardments, a dozen prisoners captured, an army corps ‘holding its own.’
I cannot help thinking of those utterly bitter days for France when Von Kluck was driving into the heart of the country, when the armies were falling back and back, when Paris seemed doomed, and the bulletins kept coming out regularly about our left wing retiring in order across the Meuse, and then across the Aisne and across the Marne, and still south, falling back intact, its morale unimpaired, inflicting huge losses on the enemy, falling back to positions chosen beforehand by our generals. I cannot help thinking of the author of the Russian bulletins between the Dunajec and Lemberg. Being, after all, a man and a Russian, he must have bent under the pall of defeat; he must have felt the loss of hundreds of thousands of men, the vanishing of great dreams, — Hungary, Constantinople, the open sea. I cannot help thinking even of the stiff Prussian official who penned the phrase about the strategic withdrawal of Von Kluck’s right wing to the Aisne. He, too, must have felt the bitterness of vanished dreams, — Paris taken, the French beaten, the English destroyed, the armies marching under the Arc de Triomphe. Much more exhausting, I imagine, than the attacks and counter-attacks of the trenches must be the strain of sitting in a censor’s office and distilling artificial consolation out of the bitter facts of defeat.
IV
We newspapermen printed a vast amount of rubbish during the year of war. By reflecting the nonsense of diplomats, chancellors, war experts, statisticians, professors, scientists, and young women just landed from Rotterdam and convinced that the Germans were bound to win, we justified our claim to be the mirror of the universe. Some of this rubbish we printed unconsciously, in sheer ignorance, but a great deal we inserted, I imagine, for relief. As newspapermen we wanted to break up the monotony of long columns on the first page. As neutrals we were glad to vary the monotony of long German victories with a perfectly disastrous bit of secret information regarding conditions in Berlin, by way of Zurich and Venice to London and so to us.
Most of this rubbish was of antiGerman cast, and it is these small ‘ fillers’ that the Germans had in mind when they cried out at the campaign of lies that was waged against them. Lies they may have been, but to call them a campaign is absurd, when you consider their purpose, which was mental relief, and their effect, which was utter futility. In your heart can you blame the telegraph editor who gave a stickful on the first page to the first resplendent bit of war news, the story of how Roland Garros, king of French aviators, on the day after war was declared hurled his aeroplane full speed against one of the Kaiser’s Zeppelins and with it went down to destruction? As it turned out, as we might have known from the first, this was not real war news, but it was magnificent.
We, of the ultra-respectable press, grew cautious very soon. We even went to the extent of appointing expert editorial watchers to run down and destroy such lurid passages as might have escaped the Argus-eyed telegraph editor. We sifted the news rigorously and built up a reputation for impartiality and authoritativeness which made people turn to us for the truth about things. Yes, they looked for the truth about the war in our carefully sifted columns and then turned eagerly to the tit-bits in the yellow and semiyellow press. If things went ill for the Belgians round Liége, it was heartening to think of Garros’s magnificent act of self-devotion, which the Will to Believe made true for a good many of us. People read eagerly enough of old Von Emmich committing suicide with the despairing cry, ‘Liége will be the tomb of the German army.’ How many times did the German Crown Prince perish, simultaneously or consecutively? How many times did the Kaiser stalk through the night, a bent figure of grief, his hair turned snowwhite? There was a particularly glorious afternoon, eight columns wide, when Von Kluck, after the battle of the Marne, asked permission of Joffre to withdraw unmolested into Germany, offering never to take up arms against France. There was that other occasion when Von Kluck, bitterly upbraided by the Kaiser, went forth into the trenches and had himself severely wounded.
This silly gossip of the cables was generally against Germany, but not always. German ingenuity received grudging tribute. I recall clearly the oil casks that the German Admiralty sank off the British coast as storage reservoirs for submarines. I recall the fog bombs that Count Zeppelin invented for the invasion of England, and even German thoroughness could hardly go beyond carrying fog to London.
V
I am not apologizing for the telegraph editor who yielded to temptation and printed news infinitely more gripping than the official dispatches, though quite untrue. And yet it is hard to blame human telegraph editors and common readers for sometimes believing, when even the experts were frail and believed extraordinary things, or at least professed to believe them. I frequently think of this war, which can be classified into various phases under so many different heads, as the history of the rise and fall of a long line of experts. Colonel Repington, of the London Times, dominated our columns for several weeks, until it became apparent that he was fallible, both as an expert in the face of a war that proved the undoing of experts and as an Englishman who wanted England to win. Repington, of the Times, made way for Lieutenant-Colonel Rousset, of the Petit Parisien. He had his day, and the fighting shifted to the east, and for a brief space we sat at the feet of Colonel Shumsky, of Petrograd. For a few days, too, the papers paid cable tolls on the commentaries of a retired major-general on the Giornale d’Italia, in Rome, and then for a good many Sundays the cable editors plunged heavily on the eloquent and copious J. L. Garvin, of the Pall Mall Gazette. From time to time we have had Hilaire Belloc, the best of all the Englishmen, with the exception of Spenser Wilkinson, and in the days of Allied adversity it was stimulating to turn to Belloc and watch him add up the German casualty lists into the millions. On the German side we had Major Moraht, of the Tageblatt, sober but patriotic. At the moment of writing the floor is to Sir W. Robertson Nicoll, friend of Lloyd George.
If the world turned rapidly from one expert to another, it was not merely because we soon recognized their limitations. If the war turned out so new in its methods, its spirit, its size, as to make a hash of all expert information, we might have been reconciled. But worse than that, the experts argued in a way that made us all M. Jourdains; we all recognized we had been experts all our lives without knowing it. For they all started out with the same assumption: Repington, Garvin, Belloc, and Nicoll, that England would win, Moraht that Germany must win, and Rousset that the French would win. For Garvin the English were never beaten, but only retired, for Rousset the French always fell back on stronger positions, and for Moraht the extraordinary regrouping effected by Hindenburg while marching backwards from Warsaw was a guarantee of the realization of the Will to Conquer.
We, the military experts of neutral American newspapers, drafted for sudden service from various departments of journalism, started with a decided advantage over the Repingtons and the Morahts. In the first place we were somewhat outside the swirl of national hopes and fears, and in the second place we were not hampered by excess of specialized knowledge. It is true that for a time we were under the influence of established military literature. We spoke of river valleys and natural lines of invasion, until the war showed us that armies could go anywhere. Wc spoke of railways feeding the armies, until motor traction showed the armies to be independent of railways. We spoke of rivers holding up the enemy’s advance, until Von Kluck had crossed six rivers in two weeks and recrossed three rivers in three days. We spoke of flanks and centres, until the battle lines stretched from sea to mountain, and there were no flanks. Then we spoke of the impossibility of flanking operations, until Hindenburg outflanked the Russians. Then we spoke of deadlock and the impossibility of breaking through, until the English broke through at Neuve Chapelle and the Germans in Galicia.
The method of sticking colored pins into a large-scale map proved a failure from the beginning. During the first three weeks in Belgium we did not know where to put in the pins. That was before the time of official reports. On the strength of highly imaginative dispatches from Paris and Amsterdam we ran long lines of red pins, denoting Britons, through Brussels and up to Antwerp. Thick files of blue pins denoting Frenchmen were mobilized on the plain of Waterloo and to the outskirts of Liége. When we learned that there were no Britons in Brussels, no Frenchmen backing up the Belgians south of Liége, it was too late. The armies were all in northern France, and for two weeks moved forward so swiftly that the pins could not keep up. And, when the lines assumed fixity and the pins began to justify themselves, the armies became deadlocked, and for ten months the pins remained immovable on the Aisne and in Flanders, until the sight of them became a weariness.
As prophets, we proved a failure, we experts. But in explaining how things had happened after the event we did not do so badly. To the extent that we helped to clear up a bit of the fog that hung over the battle line, we did it by discarding military history, Napoleonic precedents, the matching of division against division, casualty list against casualty list, and gun weight against gun weight. We went to the maps and read the official reports, and, by checking one against the other, by allowing for exaggerations, regroupings, readjustments, and by reading a bit between the lines, we were enabled to call up some picture of what was going on in Flanders and Galicia. We tried to be neutral (at least, some of us did), but never reached the ideal of non-partisanship. Too frequently we turned for Allied consolation, for signs of a Russian advance, for indications of a German breakdown, to the unrivaled maps of the German atlas-makers. In our hearts we felt that the Allies were fighting for the freedom of the human soul against the formalism, the oppressive systematization, the drill and preparedness of the Prussian, and so we looked for comfort in the pages of Justus Perthes of Gotha, and in Baedeker. And the starred hotels in Baedeker, the highly recommended pensions, the art-galleries and theatres and shops and beer-gardens, were like the echoes of a dead past.
VI
During a year of war I must have read several thousand columns of special correspondence, — in English, in German, in French, in Italian, — and the vast bulk of this mass of special observation has been meaningless. The Will to Believe has run riot among the special correspondents. They have reported what they expected to see, or what we might have known without going out to see, and only at rare intervals what they have seen with the eye of the specialist. They went to England prepared to meet the awkward, inarticulate, resolute Englishman, and they found him. They went to France for French courage beneath French gayety, and they found it. In Berlin they went to see the crowds escorting their men to the railway stations, tearful but disciplined, sober but rigorously determined to win, the Prussian spirit dominating a nation, and they found it. They found the Viennese gay, the Russian fatalistic. Any one having a fair acquaintance with the popular novels of the nations, or, better still, with the book reviews of such novels when translated, could have written the greater part of the correspondence that has come from the front. At my desk I could have written of tongue-tied English subalterns who cannot bring themselves to say ‘Good-bye’ to their fathers, of French lieutenants who kissed before going off on perilous missions, of Russian lieutenants who said, ‘Nitchevo.’ Altogether the war has been too big for the correspondents.
And when you have collated all the special dispatches from Petrograd, from Cologne, from Przemysl, from Somewhere in France, and struck out the obvious misstatements and conjectures, and deleted all traces of the Will to Believe, and in every way treated them with rigorous scholarship as if you were editing an utterly unimportant play by a totally unimportant Elizabethan, there emerges from this mass of special correspondence nothing special at all, but a picture which is the same for northern France as for Galicia, for the Yser as for the Vistula. It is a picture of the sameness of modern war, but more than that, of the sameness of the spirit of man, that incorrigible human soul which is one beneath the mask of national habits and idiosyncrasies. To this extent I imagine the advocates of war are right when they speak of war as a normal function of the race. For in times of peace the nations differ — they differ in creed, in clothes, in speech, in social ideals, in art, in their soups and stews and biscuits; but war makes them uniform, dresses them in the same dustcolored khaki, puts them into the same five-foot trench, with or without cement, with or without footboards, and gives them the same outlook, the same appetites, the same fears, the same whimsies and relaxations. The trooptrains from Berlin are scrawled over with chalk, ‘ Nach Paris.’ The trooptrains from Paris are scribbled over, ‘A Berlin.’ The troop-trains from Petrograd are decorated with effigies of the Kaiser, the trains from Munich with effigies of King George and Poincaré.
The special correspondent imagines that he draws a picture of the German battle-lines when he describes the Landwehrmen with their harmonicas. But he is only depicting our common humanity. For in the French trenches across a hundred yards of barbedwire ground they are giving recitals on the trombone, and in the English trenches they are playing on the mouth-organ. The English Tommy calls the shrapnel puffs ‘Archibald,’ and the Frenchman calls them ‘Petite Marmite,’ and I am certain that there are German, Russian, Serb, and Turkish equivalents. The Kaiser’s Landwehrmen call their subterranean bombproofs’ Villa-Sommerfrisch,’ the Brhish nail up signs, ‘Ritz,’ ‘Regent Street,’ and the French call them ‘Au Moulin Rouge.’
I sometimes wonder why this war or any war should be described as marking the breakdown of civilization when every dispatch from Petrograd, by its sameness to every dispatch from Berlin, London, Paris, Rome, describes a set of common conditions which attest the essential brotherhood of man.
VII
Always the same, our poor human nature, and not the least in its Will to Believe. I have stood at the telegraph editor’s desk and read official dispatches spelling disaster for the Allies, the Russians breaking up fast on the Vistula, the French battering in vain at the lines around Arras, cargo boats and trawlers torpedoed in the North Sea, a British battleship torpedoed in the Dardanelles, and the war-expert part of me has said things looked dark, but the Will has insisted on believing that it was n’t as bad as all that: that the Russians had plenty of men, that over there on the extreme left wing in Bukowina there might yet come a blow that would send the Austro-Germans reeling, that once the French started moving forward there would be no stopping them, that England had plenty of battleships, that the German casualty lists were growing at an enormous rate; and I have cheered up. This lower element in me, the Will, has sometimes taken control of the rational war expert in me, and set him to hunting in the largest available maps of Galicia for a river upon the farther bank of which the Russians might make a stand. And when no rivers were available, no swamps, no mountain chains, no bridge-heads, when the plain wording of the triumphant dispatches from Berlin refused to be explained away, to be modified, to be postponed, I have gone out on the street and bought a copy of the Evening Telegram, and there, over the same disheartening dispatch I have just read from the wire, I have found comforting head-lines: ‘Enormous German Losses as Germans Press on,’ ‘Czar’s Forces Smash Kaiser’s Lines’ — smash fifty yards out of a line of 900 miles. And if the Telegram’s head-lines are by any chance reinforced by an interview with a Peoria citizen returning from Germany, who says Berlin feels the pressure of famine, I am altogether cheered up. I know that the Peoria citizen spent twelve hours in Berlin, and that his observations are based on his dinner at the Kaiserbrau in Unter den Linden, and that he thought Berlin was starving because he could not make the waiter understand; but nevertheless I am comforted.