The Balkan Peninsula Part 5

Some of the correspondents--one in particular--overcame a secretive military system and a harsh censorship by the use of a skilled imagination, and of a friendly telegraph line outside the area of censorship. At the Staff headquarters at Stara Zagora during the early days of the campaign, when we were all straining at the leash to get to the front, waiting and fussing, he was working, reconstructing the operations with maps and a fine imagination, and never allowing his paper to want for news. I think that he was quite prepared to have taken pupils for his new school of war correspondents. Often he would come to me for a yarn--in halting French on both sides--and would explain the campaign as it was being carried on. One eloquent gesture he habitually had--a sweeping motion which brought his arms together as though they were gathering up a bundle of spears, then the hands would meet in an expressive squeeze. "It is that," he said, "it is Napoleonic."

Probably the censor at this stage did not interfere much with his activities, content enough to allow fanciful descriptions of Napoleonic strategy to go to the outer world. But, in my experience, facts, if one ascertained something independently, were not treated kindly.

"Why not?" I asked the censor vexedly about one message he had stopped.

"It is true."

"Yes, that is the trouble," he said,--the nearest approach to a joke I ever got out of a Bulgarian, for they are a sober, G.o.d-fearing, and humour-fearing race.

The idea of the Bulgarian censorship in regard to the privileges and duties of the war correspondent was further ill.u.s.trated to me on another occasion when a harmless map of a past phase of the campaign was stopped.

"Then what am I to send?" I asked.

"There are the bulletins," he said.

"Yes, the bulletins which are just your bald official account of week-old happenings which are sent to every news agency in Europe before we see them!"

"But you are a war correspondent. You can add to them in your own language."

Remembering that conversation, I suspect that at first the Bulgarian censorship did not object to fairy tales pa.s.sing over the wires, though the way was blocked for exact observation. An enterprising story-maker had not very serious difficulties at the outset. Afterwards there was a change, and even the writer of fairy stories had to work outside the range of the censor.

The Mustapha Pasha censorship would not allow ox wagons, reservists, or Serbians to be mentioned, nor officers' names. The censorship objected, too, for a long time to any mention of the all-pervading mud which was the chief item of interest in the town's life. Yet you might have lost an army division in some of the puddles. (But stop, I am lapsing into the picturesque ways of the new school of correspondents. Actually you could not have lost more than a regiment in the largest mud puddle.)

Let the position be frankly faced that if one is with an army in modern warfare, common sense prohibits the authorities from allowing you to see anything, and suggests the further precautions of a strict censorship and a general hold-up of wires until their military value (and therefore their "news" value) has pa.s.sed. If your paper wants picturesque stories hot off the grill it is much better not to be with the army (which means in effect in the rear of the army), but to write about its deeds from outside the radius of the censorship.

Perhaps, though, your paper has old-fashioned prejudices in favour of veracity, and will be annoyed if your imagination leads you too palpably astray? In that case do not venture to be a war correspondent at all. If you do not invent, you will send nothing of value. If you invent you will be reprimanded.

Here is my personal record of "getting to the front" and the net result of the trouble and the expense. I went down to Mustapha Pasha with the great body of war correspondents and soon recognised that there was no hope of useful work there. The attacking army was at a stand-still, and a long, wearisome siege--its operations strictly guarded from inspection--was in prospect. I decided to get back to Staff headquarters (then at Stara Zagora) and just managed to catch the Staff before it moved on to Kirk Kilisse. By threatening to return to London at once I got a promise of leave to join the Third Army and to "see some fighting."

The promise antic.i.p.ated the actual granting of leave by two days. It would be tedious to record all the little and big difficulties that were then encountered through the reluctance of the military authorities to allow one to get transport or help of any kind. But four days later I was marching out of Mustapha Pasha on the way to Kirk Kilisse by way of Adrianople, a bullock wagon carrying my baggage, an interpreter trundling my bicycle, I riding a small pony. The interpreter was gloomy and disinclined to face the hardships and dangers (mostly fancied) of the journey. Beside the driver (a Macedonian) marched a soldier with fixed bayonet. Persuasion was necessary to force the driver to undertake the journey and a friendly transport officer had, with more or less legality, put at my command this means of argument. A mile outside Mustapha Pasha the soldier turned back and I was left to coax my unwilling helpers on a four days' journey across a war-stricken countryside, swept of all supplies, infested with savage dogs (fortunately well-fed by the harvest of the battle-fields), liable to ravage by roving bands.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GENERAL SAVOFF]

That night I gave the Macedonian driver some jam and some meat to eke out his bread and cheese.

"That is better than having a bayonet poked into your inside," I said, by pantomime. He understood, grinned, and gave no great trouble thereafter, though he was always in a state of pitiable funk when I left the wagon to take a trip within the lines of the besieging forces.

So to Kirk Kilisse. There I got to General Savoff himself and won not only leave, but a letter of aid to go down to the Third Army at the lines of Chatalja. But by then what must be the final battle of the war was imminent. Every hour of delay was dangerous. To go by cart meant a journey of several days. A military train was available part of the way if I were content to drop interpreter, horse, and baggage, and travel with a soldier's load.

That decision was easy enough at the moment--though I sometimes regretted it afterwards when the only pair of riding breeches I had with me gave out at the knees and I had to walk the earth ragged--and by train I got to Chorlu. There a friendly artillery officer helped me to get a cart (springless) and two fast horses. He insisted also on giving me a patrol, a single Bulgarian soldier, with 200 rounds of ammunition, as Bashi-Bazouks were ranging the country.

It was an unnecessary precaution, though the presence of the soldier was comforting as we entered Silviri at night, the outskirts of the town deserted, the chattering of the driver's teeth audible over the clamour of the cart, the gutted houses ideal refuges for prowling bands. From Silviri to Chatalja there was again no appearance of Bashi-Bazouks. But thought of another danger obtruded as we came near the lines and encountered men from the Bulgarian army suffering from the choleraic dysentery which had then begun its ravages. To one dying soldier by the roadside I gave brandy; and then had to leave him with his mates, who were trying to get him to a hospital. They were sorely puzzled by his cries, his pitiful grimaces. Wounds they knew and the pain of them they despised. They could not comprehend this disease which took away all the manhood of a stoic peasant and made him weak in spirit as an ailing child.

From Chatalja, the right flank of the Bulgarian position, I pa.s.sed along the front to Ermenikioi ("the village of Armenians"), pa.s.sing the night at Arjenli, near the centre and the headquarters of the ammunition park.

That night at Arjenli seemed to make a rough and sometimes perilous journey, which had extended over seven days, worth while. The Commander, an artillery officer, welcomed me to a little mess which the Bulgarian officers and non-commissioned officers (six in all) had set up in a clean room of a village house. We had dinner, "Turkish fashion,"

squatting round a dish of stewed goat and rice, and then smoked excellent cigarettes through the evening hours as we looked out on the Chatalja lines.

Arjenli is perched on a high hill, to the west of Ermenikioi. It gave a view of all the Chatalja position--the range of hills stretching from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmora, along which the Bulgarians were entrenched, and, beyond the invisible valley, the second range which held the Turkish defence. Over the Turkish lines, like a standard, shone in the clear sky a crescent moon, within its tip a bright star. It seemed an omen, an omen of good to the Turks. My Australian eye instinctively sought for the Southern Cross ranged against it in the sky in sign that the Christian standard held the Heavens too. I sought in vain in those northern lat.i.tudes, shivered a little and, as though arguing against a superst.i.tious thought, said to myself: "But there is the Great Bear."

Now there had been "good copy" in the journey. At Arjenli I happened to be the witness of a vivid dramatic scene (more stirring than any battle incident). It was a splendid incident, showing the high courage and _moral_ of these peasant soldiers at an anxious time. To have witnessed it, partic.i.p.ated in it, was personal reward sufficient for a week of toil and anxiety. To my paper, too, the reader might say, it was of some value, if properly told and given to the London reader the next morning, the day before the battle of Chatalja.

Yes. But it was the next afternoon before I could get to a telegraph office within the Bulgarian lines. Then the censor said any long message was hopeless. I was allowed to send a bare 100 words. They reached London eight days later, a week after the battle had been fought, when London was interested no longer in anything but the armistice negotiations. The reason was that the single telegraph line was monopolised for military business. My account of the battle of Chatalja reached London a full fortnight after the event, though I had the advantage of the highest influence to expedite the message.

Thus from a daily-newspaper point of view all the expense, toil, danger were wasted.

Summing up, an accurate and prompt Press service as war correspondent with the Bulgarian army was impossible, because--

1. The Bulgarian authorities were keen that correspondents should see nothing.

2. A rigid first censorship checked a full record of what little was seen.

3. The first censorship being pa.s.sed, despatches often had still to pa.s.s a second censorship at Staff headquarters, a third censorship at Sofia.

4. Despatches pa.s.sing through Roumania underwent another censorship there, and yet another in Austria, possibly yet others in other European countries.

5. In addition to these censorship delays the Bulgarian authorities made newspaper messages yield precedence to military messages, and at the front this meant that Press messages were sent on by mail (ox transport most of the way) to the Staff headquarters or the capital.

6. In the meanwhile the imaginative accounts written nearer Fleet Street had been published, and the accurate news was "dead" from a point of public interest.

Most of these conditions will rule over all future wars. Therefore I conclude that the day of the war correspondent--in the sense of a truthful observer of a campaign--has gone, and he died with the Balkan War. He can only survive if newspapers are willing to incur the very great expense of sending out war correspondents not for the news, day by day, but for what observation and criticism they could supply after the campaign was over. To a daily newspaper such matter is almost valueless, especially as during the progress of the campaign the correspondents of the "new" school would be at work with their many inventions, raising the hair of the public and the circulation of their journals with bright feats of imagination.

CHAPTER VII

JOTTINGS FROM MY BALKAN TRAVEL BOOK

These observations I will quote from my diary during 1912 in ill.u.s.tration of phases of Balkan character, dating them at the time and place that they were made.

Belgrade, _October 21_.--The declaration of war has not set the Serbians singing in the streets. In the chief cafe there is displayed a great war map. Young soldiers not yet sent to the front lounge about in all the cafes and are lionised by the older men. They are the only signs of war.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Underwood & Underwood_

BULGARIAN INFANTRY]

The patriotic Serbian ill.u.s.trates his case against the Turk by taking you for a ramble around his capital. The old Turkish quarters of the town are made up of narrow unpaved muddy lanes lined with low hovels.

The modern Serbian town has handsome buildings markedly Russian in architecture, electric trams, and wood-blocked pavements. Near the railway station one side of a street is as the Turks left it and shows a row of hovels: the other side is occupied by a great school. The shops, because it is war-time and business is largely suspended, are mostly closed. But a few remain open with reduced staffs. The goods displayed are as a rule woefully expensive when they are not of local origin.

Landlocked Serbia, surrounded by commercially hostile countries, finds imports expensive. British goods are very much favoured, but are hard to obtain.

The Serbians speak bitterly of the efforts of Austria "to strangle them commercially." "Whenever they wish to put diplomatic pressure upon us,"

said one Serbian to me, "they discover that swine fever has broken out in our country and stop our exports of pigs and bacon--our chief lines of export. What can we do? Once, in retaliation, we found that we suspected a consignment of Austrian linen goods of carrying swine fever and stopped it on the frontier. It almost caused war."

Nish (Serbia), _October 22_.--A military train carrying some members of the army and Staff has brought also a band of war correspondents this far. We were a merry but rather a hungry lot. The train has been sixteen hours on the journey, and as we started at 6 a.m. most of us did not bring any stores of food except such as were packed away and inaccessible in the big baggage. The wayside refreshment rooms are swept clean of all food. Finally we manage to obtain some bread, and five hungry correspondents in one carriage eat at it without enthusiasm, whilst in a corner sits a Serbian officer having a good meal of sausage and onions and bread. We make remarks, a little envious, a little jocose, in English, on his selfishness. "He is a greedy pig, anyhow,"

said one, putting the final cap on our grumbles. The Serbian officer had not betrayed by a smile or a frown that he understood but now in good English he remarked: "Perhaps you gentlemen will be so kind as to share this with me." We all laughed and he laughed then: and we took a little of the sausage, and liked that Serbian rather well: and no reference was made to what had gone before. At nightfall we stop at Nish and all my Press comrades leave the train to go on in the rear of the Serbian army.

I push on to Sofia. Clearly these Balkan peoples are not quite so savage as I had thought once.

Sofia, _October 24_.--The position of the Bulgarian nation towards its Government on the outbreak of the war is, I think, extremely interesting as a lesson in patriotism. Every man has gone to fight who could fight.

But further, every family has put its surplus of goods into the war-chest. The men marched away to the front; and the women of the house loaded up the surplus goods which they had in the house, and brought them for the use of the military authorities on the ox wagons, which also went to the military authorities to be used on requisition. A Bulgarian law, not one which was pa.s.sed on the outbreak of the war--they were far too clever for that,--but a law which was part of the organic law of the country, allowed the military authorities to requisition all surplus food and all surplus goods which could be of value to the army on the outbreak of hostilities.