drawn from such sources, and varying according to the common sense of the writer, forming the substance of their home news; the trustworthiness of it depending entirely on the character and ability of the sender. The reliance placed at home upon information so derived, and in many cases the results from it, have been out of all proportion to the sources from which it sprang. Now, I am not one of those who loathe the sight of a war correspondent. There are men who can scarcely be civil to them on service; who seem unable to get rid of the feeling that A chiel's amang them takin notes, And, faith, he'll prent it; who look upon them as spies, and treat them with offensive curtness. I have had many friends amongst them. It is impossible not to admire their spirit of adventure, their fund of anecdote, their abundance of resource. Mr. Forbes's Plevna telegram, which he refers to in his article, was a professional triumph. For some time it was adopted as the Russian official report. His individual energy, his great experience, his quick perception, fairly entitle him to rank amongst the best military critics of the day. We must not gauge all correspondents by his standard, neither must we grant to any of them, however able, the recognised position of military censors. It is this position of capable critic and censor of things military which they assume that is injurious to the well-being of our armies. Why should the fact of a man being a war correspondent enable him to form more just opinions than any other civilian? Nowadays a stipulated form of preparation is deemed necessary for candidates for any profession, yet anyone is at liberty to go fresh from the London pavements to the seat of war, never having seen a battalion field-day in his life, and to write, forsooth, as if he had studied military details from his babyhood. The oi Toλλoì take the doctrines of his 'prentice hand' as infallible, and on the strength of them scream for promotion or recall as he recommends.. By all means let us have letters from the seat of war, but let them remain what they were originally intended to be, the everyday narrative of a campaign, but of no professional consequence. The question at issue is, Is the presence of uncontrolled and irresponsible writers with an army in the field injurious to its efficiency? Decidedly, Yes; and chiefly for these reasons, viz. Mr. Forbes's supposed objections to their presence : 1. That they may detrimentally affect public opinion at home, either by unpleasant and inopportune truth-telling, or by wanton lying. t 2. That they may produce discontent and want of confidence in an army in the field, by hostile criticisms on its leader. 3. That they may give information to the enemy by revealing prematurely intentions and combinations, or by forwarding for publication details of strengths, fortifications, means of or shortcomings in transport, supplies, &c., of which the enemy may take advantage. And I would wish to add two more : 4. The custom of parading officers' names before the public for admiration on no official authority. 5. The danger of sensational writing. Mr. Forbes almost playfully disposes of the first two, and seems to think the third of little importance, as it is the recognised custom of correspondents to give information to the enemy. Now, all Mr. Forbes's objections, and most of the remarks of the press, are based on the assumption that without the presence of uncontrolled correspondents in the field we shall never get fair criticism. They assume that newspaper representatives at the seat of war are unprejudiced judges; they assume that they are capable military critics; and they assume that it is for the public good that every military detail of an army in the field should be liable to ventilation in the public press; also they claim for correspondents to be accepted by the public as critics, thereby placing in their hands much of that public's' power. Nay, more than this; they claim for them to be military advisers. The correspondent of the Daily News, telegraphing from the seat of war in Zululand, dated Durban, July 14, after making the most violent strictures on an officer then holding a high command, reports that he has made certain representations as to a purely military matter which have not been followed. 'Three months have elapsed since, having passed down the Zulu coast from Mozambique, I made strong representations in favour of the possibility of effecting a landing thereon, and the project has only just been carried into effect.' The representative of a London journal telegraphs home that a general of division has neglected his advice! We had better, forsooth, make over the command of our armies to our correspondents. It is the assumptions upon which the arguments against the new rules are based which are misleading; it is the claims which are put forward which are dangerous. The army is a machine employed by a nation to gain a nation's ends; and if it can be proved that under certain conditions the efficiency of the machine suffers, the nation suffers, and it is a shortsighted, unpractical, theoretical policy for the nation to insist upon what are no doubt in the abstract its rights, if by so doing it cripples itself. The British public has, without doubt, the right to inquire into every detail of the working of its own establishments, to require, should it deem fit, that those details should be laid before the world, and to form its own judgments accordingly; but even the most ordinary events of campaigning life would be hardly judged by the 1880. WAR CORRESPONDENTS. 437 multitude cognisant only of everyday English existence: the necessary horrors of war alone if laid truly bare, still more if helped by effective word-painting, would incapacitate much native common sense. Every one has a perfect right to pick his own watch to pieces, to expose every part of its intricate machinery to the air; but he could hardly expect it to go well on such terms. He had better leave its works to the watchmaker. The English press is a great power. In no other country does it possess such influence over the public mind; in this respect neither French nor Prussian journals can compare with it, and therefore the letters of correspondents with their armies are deprived of much of their importance. It is therefore no argument to say that because these nations permit uncontrolled criticism, we should do likewise ; for with them it would be barren of consequences. We are differently situated. . In war, our newspapers gain much of their knowledge from their correspondents, and that knowledge, as laid before the world, has much to do with the formation of English opinion, at such a time at fever heat, quick to take any impression, quicker still to exaggerate it and jump to conclusions. Events pass rapidly, and a false impression once created is difficult to remove. Few men will deny that the Bulgarian atrocity agitation in this country had its rise in clever letters to a London newspaper, since proved to have been strangely exaggerated, that they roused Mr. Gladstone's eloquence, and wonderfully influenced the course of European events. Yet now the 60,000 massacred Bulgarians have dwindled down to 3,000. It is this great irresponsible power which claims to be allowed unfettered to have the surveillance of officers and armies in the field. Every war has its political as well as its purely military aspect. Our influential newspapers have their political opinions, and approve or disapprove of that war accordingly; but both sides send their representatives to report upon it, and neither would for choice employ men likely to write directly opposite to the declared sentiments of their party. The telegram announcing the success of British troops does not appear equally prominent in all journals, and -shame though it be to say so-does not some slight British reverse, passed over by some, appear glaringly obtrusive in others? But why impute blame to war correspondents for the narrow-mindedness of their home authorities? I answer, Why should there be more patriotism at one end of a wire than another? Early in July 1877, I was with a Turkish general and his staff in a village of Roumelia. The village had been looted; ruin and massacre reigned supreme. Suliman had not yet arrived at Adrianople, Gourko had just crossed the Balkans, and Reouf could spare few VOL. VII.--No. 37. G G men from his wretched force to save the life of Christian or Turk. His business was to fight the Russians; and in the midst of all this cruel confusion was the able correspondent of a London newspaper openly stating that he would give 11. for every Turkish dead body that was brought to him, that he had searched the gardens of the village, that he had found nothing but dead Bulgarians, that the blame was all on one side, that there was not a dead Turk amongst them: let them bring a Turkish corpse if they could, and he would give them 17. for it. The journal represented was ultraRussian. In the same ransacked little town, the representative of another English journal, more violently Turkish than the other was Russian, visits the same scenes of slaughter, and what does he see? Nothing but dead Turks; if he could find a murdered Bulgarian he might believe in Turkish atrocities, but there were none, he said, and to make sure of this, and satisfy himself of Turkish leniency, he bids 10. for every dead Bulgarian. Here were two war correspondents of two London newspapers bidding for dead bodies, both very able men, but it was surely strange that they should both see through the spectacles of the party they represented. They would send home different stories. Again, let any one who has accompanied an army in the field glance over the letters from the seat of war, and see how much of praise and blame, however slight, he can trace to personal causes. A name mentioned here, another omitted there, and why? Personal like or dislike and nothing else. There are hundreds of cases of it. I believe the home-staying public have little inkling of the extent to which it has been carried. The editor of an influential newspaper has been known to go to an officer of a British force, and thus to address him: 'I want news from your column, will give you so much for all you send; but remember I want nothing favourable to your general: so much for all news, so much more for anything adverse to your chief.' Needless to say the request was refused; but why should our armies be subject to the possibility of such infamy? It is unfair that the public should be told that the evidence of their civilian representatives is alone unbiassed. Long before the publication of the press regulations, our best generals had recognised the danger of irresponsible writing, and much had been done towards the taming by judicious means of the unreasonable war correspondent. The personal feeling of which he is so susceptible had in many cases been worked upon for his own subjugation. Kindness has been found to answer well with him. Well fed, he is not apt to be so vicious. Human nature, when hungry and thirsting not only for information, will take a more cheery view of passing events after a glass of champagne at head-quarters than t after a few words from an A.D.C. that the general is busy and cannot be disturbed. But this general who refuses to be disturbed may be a hard matter-of-fact soldier, caring not much what people think of him, with a stern sense of duty which he feels he owes, not to the newspapers, but to his Queen and country. In his heart he looks upon the war correspondent as an interloper, but knows that according to custom he must accompany his force. He may proudly disdain to buy his good will by word or deed, and yet for the sake of the army he commands he knows that the man must not have 'his head loose.' He therefore makes rules to be observed by correspondents accompanying him, and in so doing makes powerful enemies of them, until he shows that he is the stronger of the two, that he is so strong that he can fairly beat them. Till he does he will get no quarter; he has made himself obnoxious; no stone will be left unturned in order to write him down, till success after success has stamped the man a thorough soldier, and then the barking cur begins to fawn. Let us now return to the specified objections to the presence of correspondents with an army. As regards the first, it will be admitted that English public opinion is much formed in time of war by the news it receives from its newspapers-their reports being usually the first which are laid before the public eye. This English opinion is a great power, and occasionally loses its head, when it may become dangerous. And if, as I have endeavoured to show, its information is frequently biassed and false, it must be frequently detrimentally affected. 'Wanton lying' I consider an unnecessarily strong word in the objection, as total ignorance of all things military would be capable of producing the same effect. The second objection refers to the effect produced on an army by hostile criticism on its leader. A general should be a powerful autocrat first of all-a reader, a beloved, infallible leader, to his men ; cripple that feeling, and you cripple his force. It will not be in the same heart. The home papers arrive in camp and are greedily devoured by all. The injustice of their remarks may be perceived; but a little of the mud sticks, and in proportion is the loss of confidence in the commander. Men have been set talking, a doubt as to the competence of the general has been raised. It is all very well to say So it may; but it is a bad 6 an army in the field does its own criticism.' |