BALKANS
Being a war correspondent with the Bulgarian army gave one far
better opportunities of studying Balkan scenery and natural
characteristics than war operations. After getting through to Staff
headquarters at Stara Zagora and to Mustapha Pasha, which was
about twelve miles from the operations against Adrianople, I found
myself a kind of prisoner of the censor, and recall putting my
complaint into writing on November 7:
It is the dullest of posts, this, at the tail of an army which is moving forward and doing brave deeds whilst we are cooped up by the
censor, thirsting for news, and given an occasional bulletin which tells
us just what it is thought that we should be told. True, we are not prisoners exactly. We may go out within a mile radius. That is the rule
which must be faithfully kept under pain of being sent back to
headquarters. Perhaps, now and again, a desperate correspondent,
thinking that it
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would not be such a sad thing after all to be sent back to
headquarters, takes a generous view of what a mile is. (Perhaps he has been used to Irish miles, which are of the elastic kind; short when
you pay a car fare, long, very long, at other times.) But, supposing, with great energy and at dread risk of being sent back to
headquarters a correspondent has walked one mile and one yard; or
his horse, which cannot read notices, has unwittingly carried him on;
and supposing that he has made all kinds of brilliant observations, analysing a speck of shining metal showing there, a puff of smoke elsewhere, a flash, or a scar on the earth, still there remains the censor. A courteous gentleman is the censor, with a manner even
deferential. He cuts off the head of your news with the most
malignant courtesy. "I am sorry, my dear sir, but that refers to movements of troops; it is forbidden. And that might be useful to the
enemy. Ah, that observation is excellent; but it cannot go."
Afterwards, there remains in your mind an impression of your
wickedness in having troubled so amiable a gentleman, and on your
telegraph form nothing, just nothing. Of course, if you like, you can pass along the camp chatter, the stories brought in by Greeks
anxious to curry favour, the descriptions of the capture of
Constantinople by peasants whose first cousins were staying at the
Pera Hotel the day it happened. The censor is too wise a gentleman
to interfere with the harmless amusement of sending that on. It does
not harm; it may entertain somebody.
So at the rear of the army, which is making the Christian arm more respected than it has been for some time in this Balkan Peninsula, we
sit and growl. Those of us who are convinced that we possess that supreme
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capacity of a general "to see what is going on behind the next hill" are particularly sad. There are so many precious observations being
wasted, theories which cannot be expressed, sagacious "I told you so's" which are smothered. We are at the rear of an army, and endless trains of transport move on; and if we can by chance catch the sound of a distant gun we are happy for a day, since it suggests
the real thing. Some of us are optimists, and feel sure that we shall go forward in a day or two; that we shall be allowed to see the bombardment of Adrianople; if not that, then its capture; if not that, then something. Others are pessimists, and have gone home.
It is easy to understand the anxiety of the Bulgarians. They are
engaged in a big war. They know that some of the Great Powers are
watching its progress with something more than interest and
something less than sympathy. It is their impression that they can beat the Turks; but that afterwards they may have to meet an attempt
to neutralise their victory. So they are anxious to mask every detail of
their organisation. Secrecy applies to the past as well as to the present and the future. But it is very irritating; and one goes home, or
holds on in the hope that something better will come after a time.
Meanwhile one may learn a little of the country and its people—this country which has been riven by many wars. The map—with its
names in several languages—gives indications of the wounds they
inflicted. In Bulgaria, too, it shows how determined is the nationality of
the people who have within a generation reasserted their right to be a
nation. They permit no Turkish names to remain on their maps. Not only do the Arabic characters go, but also the Turkish names. Eski
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Sagrah, for example, gives place to the title it has on the best English
maps. "Sagrah" means in Turkish a "dell," a place sheltered by a wood. "Eski" means "old." The Bulgarian has changed that to Stara Zagora, Bulgarian words with exactly the same significance. He
wishes to wipe away all traces of the defiling hand of the Turk from his country, though tolerant of his Turkish fellow-subjects.
Almost completely he succeeds, but not quite completely. The
Turkish sweetmeats, the Turkish coffee keep their hold on the taste of
the people, and away from the towns, among the peasants who till
rich fields with wooden ploughs, there remain traces of the Eastern disregard for time. But even in the country the people are waking up
to modern ideas, aroused in part by the American "drummer" selling agricultural machinery. But in his city of Sofia, "the little Paris," as he likes to hear it called, and in his towns the Bulgarian has become keen and bustling. He rather aspires to be thought Parisian in
manner. A "middle class" begins to grow up. The Bulgarian prospers mightily as a trader, and when he makes money he devotes his son
to a profession, to the staff of the army, the law, to public life. Also the Bulgarian is keen to add manufacturing industries to his agricultural resources, and there are cotton mills and other factories springing up
in different places. The Bulgarian has a great faith in himself.
Thinking over what he has done within forty years, it is easy to share
that belief and to think of him one day with a great seaport on the Mediterranean aspiring to a place in the family council of Europe.
Afterwards, when by dint of hard begging,
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hard travelling, hard living, and some hard swearing, I had forced my
way through to the front, I concluded that with the exception of
Mustapha Pasha—where the Second Army had failed at its task and
was set to work on a dull siege, and was consequently very bad-
tempered—the famous censorship of the Bulgarian Army was not so
vexatious to the correspondents as to their editors. The censors were
usually polite, and tried to make a difficult position agreeable.
When the correspondents were despatched it was thought that the
Balkan States, needing a "good Press," would be fairly kind. The expectation was realised in the case of the Montenegrins and the
Greeks. The Serbians allowed the correspondents to see nothing.
The Bulgarian idea was to allow nothing to be seen and nothing to be
despatched except the "Te Deums." It was an aggravation of the Japanese censorship, and if it is accepted as a model for future
combatant States the "war correspondent" will become extinct. I am not disposed to claim that an army in the field should carry on its operations under the eyes of newspaper correspondents; and there
were special circumstances in regard to the campaign of the
Bulgarian
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army (which was a desperate rush against a big people of a little people operating with the slenderest of resources) that made a
severe censorship absolutely necessary. But, that allowed, there are
still some points of criticism justified.
One correspondent, and one only, was exempted from censorship,
and he was not at the front but at Sofia. His special position as an informal member of the Cabinet led to a concession which, to a man
of honour, was more of a responsibility than a privilege. At the outset
the Russian and French correspondents were highly favoured, and
two English correspondents—who were working jointly—were
granted passes of credit to all the armies. That privilege was
afterwards granted to me towards the end of the war. It should have
been granted to all or none. A censorship which is harsh but has no
favouritism may be criticised, but it cannot be held suspect.
Throughout the campaign there was some favouritism, the Russians
having first place, the French next, the English and Americans next, the Italians, Germans, Austrians, and others coming last. The
differentiation between nations was comprehensible enough, in view
of the
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political situation in Europe, but differentiations between different papers of equal standing of the same country cannot be defended. As
I ended the campaign one of the three favoured English
correspondents, I speak on this point without bitterness. Indeed, I found no valid grounds for abusing the censorship until just as I was
leaving Sofia, when I found that some of my messages from Kirk
Kilisse to the Morning Post had been seriously (and, it would seem, deliberately) mutilated after they had passed the censor. They were of some importance as sent—one the first account from the Bulgarian
side of the battle of Chatalja, the other a frank statement of the position following that battle, which I did not submit to the censor until
after close consultation with high authority, and which was passed
then with some modifications, and, after being passed, was mutilated
until it had little or no meaning.
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Exclusive News Agency
SOFIA
Commercial Road from Commercial Square
In lighter vein I may record some of the humours of the censorship, mostly from Mustapha Pasha, where the Second Army was held up
and everybody was in the worst of tempers. Mustapha Pasha would
not allow ox wagons to be mentioned, would not allow photographs of
reservists to be sent forward because they were not in full uniform, would not allow the fact that Serbian troops were before Adrianople to
be recorded. Indeed, the censorship there was full of strange
prohibitions. Going down to Mustapha Pasha I noticed aeroplane
equipment. The censor objected to that being recorded then, though
two days after the official bulletin trumpeted the fact.
At Mustapha Pasha the custom was after the war correspondent had
written a despatch to bring it to the censor, who held his court in a room surrounded by a crowd of correspondents. The censor insisted
that the correspondent should read the despatch aloud to him. Then
the censor read it over again aloud to him to make sure that all heard.
Thus we all learned how the other man's imagination was working,
and telegraphing was reduced to a complete farce. Private letters had
to pass through the same ordeal, and one correspondent, with a turn
of humour, wrote an imaginary private letter full of the most fervent love messages, which was read out to a furiously blushing censor
and to a batch of journalists, who at first did not see the joke and tried
to look as if they were not listening. I have described
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the early days of Mustapha Pasha. Later, when most of the men had
gone away, conditions improved.
The "second censorship"—the most disingenuous and condemnable part of the Bulgarian system—was applied with full force to Mustapha
Pasha. After correspondents, who were forbidden to go a mile out of
the town and forbidden to talk with soldiers, had passed their pitiful little messages through the censor, those messages were not
telegraphed, but posted on to the Staff headquarters and then
censored again, sometimes stopped. Certes, the treasures of
strategical observation and vivid description thus lost were not very great, but the whole proceeding was unfair and underhand. The
censor's seal once affixed a message should go unchanged.
Otherwise it might be twisted into actual false information.
In almost all cases the individual censors were gentlemen, and
personally I never had trouble with any of them; but the system was
faulty at the outset, inasmuch as it was not frank, and was made worse when it became necessary to change the plan of campaign
and abandon the idea of capturing Adrianople. Then the Press
correspondents who had been allowed down to
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Mustapha Pasha in the expectation that after two days they would be
permitted to follow the victorious army into Adrianople, had to be kept
in that town, and had to be prevented from knowing anything of what
was going on. The courageous course would have been to have put
them under a definite embargo for a period. That was not followed, and the same end was sought by a series of irritating tricks and evasions. The facts argue against the continuance of the war
correspondent. An army really can never be sure of its victory until the battle is over. If it allows the journalists to come forward to see an
expected victory and the victory does not come, then awkward facts
are necessarily disclosed, and the moving back of those
correspondents is tantamount to a confession of a movement of
retreat. If I were a general in the field I should allow no war correspondents with the troops except reliable men, who would agree
to see the war out, to send no despatches until the conclusion of an
operation, and to observe any interdiction which might be necessary
then. Under these circumstances there would be very few
correspondents, but there would be no deceit and no ill-feeling.
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The holding up of practically all private telegraphic messages by the
authorities at the front was a real grievance. It was impossible to communicate with one's office to get instructions. One correspondent,
arriving at Sofia at the end of the campaign, found that he had been
recalled a full month before. The unnecessary mystery about the
locality of Staff headquarters added to the difficulty of keeping in touch with one's office.
The Bulgarian people made some "bad friends" on the Press because of the censorship; but the sore feeling was not always
justifiable. The worst that can be said is that the military authorities did in rather a weak and disingenuous way what they should have
had the moral courage to do in a firm way at the outset. The
Bulgarian enterprise against the Turks was so audacious, the need of
secrecy in regard to equipment was so pressing, that there was no place for the journalist. Under the circumstances a nation with more experience of affairs and more confidence in herself would have
accredited no correspondents. Bulgaria sought the same end as that
which would have served secrecy by an evasive way. Englishmen,
with centuries of
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greatness to give moral courage, may not complain too harshly when
the circumstances of this new-come nation are considered.
When the army of Press correspondents were gathered, it was seen
that there were several Austrians and Roumanians, and these
countries were at the time threatening mobilisation against the Balkan
States. It was impossible to expect that the Bulgarian forces should allow Roumanian journalists and Austrian journalists to see anything
of their operations which might be useful to Austria or Roumania in a
future campaign. Yet it would not have been proper to have allowed
correspondents other than the Austrians and Roumanians to go to
the front, because that would perhaps have created a diplomatic
question, which would have increased the tension. It certainly would have given offence to Austria and to Roumania. It would have been said that there was an idea that war was intended against those
nations; and diplomacy was anxious to avoid giving expression to any
such idea. The military attachés were in exactly the same position.
There were the Austrian attaché and the Roumanian attaché, and
their duty was to
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report to their Governments all they could find out that would be to the advantage of the military forces of their Governments. The
Bulgarians naturally would not allow the Roumanian nor the Austrian
attaché to see anything of what went on. The attachés were even
worse treated than the correspondents, because, as the campaign
developed, the Bulgarians got to understand that some of us were
trustworthy, and we were given certain facilities for seeing. But we were still without facilities for the despatch of what we had seen. But
the military attachés were kept right in the rear all the time. They were
taken over the battle-fields after the battles had been fought, so that
they might see what victories had been gained by the Bulgarians.
The Bulgarians were much strengthened in their attitude towards the
war correspondents by the fact that they admitted receiving much
help in their operations from the news published in London and in French newspapers from the Turkish side. The Turkish army, when
the period of rout began, was in the position that it was able to exercise little check on its war correspondents; and the Bulgarians had everything which was recorded as being done in the Turkish
army
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sent on to them. They said it was a great help to them. I think the outlook for war correspondents in the future is a gloomy one, and the
outlook for the military attaché also. In the future, no army carrying on
anything except minor operations with savage nations, no army
whose interests might be vitally affected by information leaking out, is
likely to allow military attachés or war correspondents to see anything
at all.
The Balkan War probably will close the book of the war
correspondent. It was in the wars of the "Near East" that that book was first opened in the modern sense. Some of the greatest
achievements of the craft were in the Crimean War, the various
Turco-Russian wars, and the Greco-Turkish struggle. It is an
incidental proof of the popularity of the Balkan Peninsula as a war theatre that the history of the profession of the war correspondent would be a record almost wholly of wars in the Near East.
Certainly if the "war correspondent" is to survive he will need to be of a new type. I came to that conclusion when I returned to Kirk Kilisse
from the Bulgarian lines at Chatalja, and had amused myself in an odd hour with
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burrowing among a great pile of newspapers in the censor's office, and reading here and there the war news from English, French, and
Belgian papers.
Dazed, dismayed, I recognised that I had altogether mistaken the
duties of a war correspondent. For some six weeks I had been
following an army in breathless anxious chase of facts: wheedling
censors to get some few of those facts into a telegraph office;
learning then, perhaps, that the custom at that particular telegraph office was to forward telegrams to Sofia, a ten days' journey, by bullock wagon and railway, to give them time to mature. Now here, piping hot, were the stories of the war. There was the touching prose
poem about King Ferdinand following his troops to the front in a
military train, which was his temporary palace. One part of the
carriage, serving as his bed-chamber, was taken up with a portrait of
his mother, and to that picture he looked ever for encouragement, for
advice, for praise. Had there been that day a "Te Deum" for a great victory? He looked at the picture and added, "Te Matrem."
Exclusive News Agency
BUCHAREST
The Roumanian House of Representatives
It was a beautiful story, and why should any one let loose a brutal bulldog of a fact and point
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out that King Ferdinand during the campaign lived in temporary
palaces at Stara Zagora and Kirk Kilisse, and when he travelled on a
visit to some point near the front it was usually by motor-car?
In a paper of another nationality there was a vivid story of the battle of
Chatalja. This story started the battle seven days too soon; had the positions and the armies all wrong; the result all wrong; and the picturesque details were in harmony. But for the purposes of the
public it was a very good story of a battle. Those men who, after great
hardships, were enabled to see the actual battle found that the poor
messages which the censor permitted them to send took ten days or
more in transmission to London. Why have taken all the trouble and
expense of going to the front? Buda-Pest, on the way there, is a lovely city; Bucharest also; and charming Vienna was not at all too far
away if you had a good staff map and a lively military imagination.
In yet another paper there was a vivid picture—scenery, date,
Greenwich time, and all to give an air of artistic verisimilitude—of the
signing of the Peace armistice. The armistice had not
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been signed at the time, was not signed for some days after. But it would have been absurd to have waited, since "our special
correspondent" had seen it all in advance, right down to the embrace
of the Turkish delegate and the Bulgarian delegate, and knew that
some of the conditions were that the Turkish commissariat was to
feed the Bulgarian troops at Chatalja and the Bulgarian commissariat
the Turkish troops in Adrianople. If his paper had waited for the truth
that most charming story would never have seen the light.
So, in a little book I shall one day bring out in the "Attractive Occupations" series on "How to be a War Correspondent," I shall give this general advice:
1. Before operations begin, visit the army to which you are
accredited, and take notes of the general appearance of officers and
men. Also learn a few military phrases of their language. Ascertain all
possible particulars of a personal character concerning the generals and chief officers.
2. Return then to a base outside the country. It must have good
telegraph communication with your newspaper. For the rest you may
decide
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its locality by the quality of the wine, or the beer, or the cooking.
3. Secure a set of good maps of the scene of operations. It will be handy also to have any books which have been published describing
campaigns over the same terrain.
4. Keep in touch with the official bulletins issued by the military authorities from the scene of operations. But be on guard not to
become enslaved by them. If, for instance, you wait for official notices
of battles, you will be much hampered in your picturesque work. Fight
battles when they ought to be fought and how they ought to be
fought. The story's the thing.
5. A little sprinkling of personal experience is wise: for example, a bivouac on the battle-field, toasting your bacon at a fire made of a broken-down gun carriage with a bayonet taken from a dead soldier.
Mention the nationality of the bacon. You cannot be too precise in details.
Ko-Ko's account of the execution of Nankipoo is, in short, the model
for the future war correspondent. The other sort of war
correspondent, who patiently studied and recorded operations,
seems to be doomed. In the nature of things it must be so. The more
competent and the more
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accurate he is, the greater the danger he is to the army which he accompanies. His despatches, published in