An Australian sergeant, off duty and poking about, like a good Australian, for something to see, had come up the stairs, too. He had heard the great fat-boiling yarn, and how this was the latest seat of the industry. Sadly he surveyed the disappointing scene. Ruefully he noted the hopelessly normal nature of all the proceedings that had produced it. Then he broke the silence in which we had made our several inspections. “Can’t believe a word you read, sir, can you?” he said with some bitterness. Life had failed to yield one of its advertised marvels. The Press had lied again. The propagandist myth about Germans had cracked up once more. “Can’t believe a word you read” had long been becoming a kind of catchphrase in the army. And now another good man had been duly confirmed in the faith, ordained as a minister of the faith, that whatever your pastors and masters tell you had best be assumed to be just a bellyful of east wind.
IV
Partly it came of the nature—which could not be helped by that time—of war correspondence. In the first months of the war our General Staff, being what we had made it, treated British war correspondents as pariah dogs. They might escape arrest so long as they kept out of sight; that was about the sum of their privileges. Long before the end of the war the Chiefs of Staff of our several armies received them regularly on the eve of every battle, explained to them the whole of our plans and hopes, gave them copies of our most secret objective and barrage maps; every perilous secret we had was put into their keeping. A little later still an Army Commander would murmur, with very little indistinctness, if he thought the war correspondents had not been writing enough about his army of late. After the Armistice Sir Douglas Haig made them a speech of thanks and praise on the great bridge over the Rhine at Cologne, and at the Peace all the regular pariah dogs were offered knighthoods.
The Regular Army had set out by taking a war correspondent to be, ex officio, a low fellow paid to extract kitchen literature from such private concerns of the military profession as wars. It harboured the curious notion that it would be possible in this century to feed the nation at home on communiqués from G.H.Q. alone or eked out with “Eyewitness” stuff—official “word-painting” by some Regular Officer with a tincture of letters. With that power of learning things, only just not too late, which distinguishes our Regular Army from the Bourbons, it presently saw that this plan had broken down. About the same time the Regular Army began to recognise in the abhorred war correspondent a man whom it had known at school, and who had gone to the university about the time when it, the Army, was going into the Army Class. That was enough. Foul as was his profession, still he might be a decent fellow; he might not want to injure his country.
When these reflections were dawning slowly over the Regular Army mind it happened—Sir Douglas Haig having a mind himself—that his Chief of Intelligence was a fully educated man with a good fifty percent more of brains, imagination, decision, and initiative than the average of his fellow-Regulars on the Staff. He knew something of the Press at first hand. Being a Scotsman, he regarded writers and well-read people with interest and not with alarm. Under his command the policy of helping the Press rose to its maximum. War correspondents were given the “status,” almost the rank, of officers. Actual officers were detailed to see to their comfort, to pilot them about the front, to secure their friendly treatment by all ranks and at all headquarters. Never were war correspondents so helped, shielded and petted before. And, almost without an exception, they were good men. Only one or two black sheep of the trade would try to make a reader believe that they had seen things which they had not. The general level of personal and professional honour, of courage, public spirit, and serious enterprise, was high. No average Staff Officer could talk with the average British correspondent without feeling that this was a sound human being and had a better mind than his own—that he knew more, had seen more, and had been less deadened by the coolie work of a professional routine. When once known, the war correspondents were trusted and liked—by the Staff.
V
There lay the trouble. They lived in the Staff world, its joys and its sorrows, not in the
