August 1914

And it is less than three months since I was writing complacently about the Leipzig book exhibition! I wrote about the exquisite collections of bindings and drawings, the bands, the parading crowds of peaceful Germans, the pavilions of all nations from Holland to Siam, and the charming Tudor structure erected by Britain, with its long low halls containing cases of Shakespeare folios and editions from the Kelmscott Press. Enormous crowds from all over Europe would, it was hoped, visit the exhibition as the summer wore on. “August, of course,” said the officials to me, “will be the month.”

The buildings in the wide Street of Nations are still there, no doubt. The flags, perhaps, have been hauled down, but those files of white wood and plaster palaces still stand behind their flower-beds along the broad avenues. The crowds are dispersed. The officials in charge of the various buildings have fled to their respective domiciles. The cheerful male members of the Bavarian Peasants’ Band have taken off their green hats and put on helmets, left the women behind, and gone off to burn villages like their own, and disembowel sunburnt French peasants as naturally amiable as themselves. Memories so recent make the pit of one’s stomach sink. In May last a German barber in Berlin had his razor at my throat, and when he scratched my skin he was most concerned and apologetic. “Nescis, mi fili, quam parva sapientia regitur mundus.” The remark was made by a Swedish statesman in the eighteenth century. Voltaire, looking down from heaven—if one may risk his displeasure by presuming his presence in so uncongenial a place—must feel that since the eighteenth century there has been no great change, and that the human race is as horribly ridiculous an institution as ever it was.

But here we are.⁠[1] Like most other inhabitants of the “civilized” world, I have for the last week read no books, but only newspapers. Fourteen a day is about my average, which means nearly a hundred a week. And nine-tenths of them contain nothing that one did not know before. There never was a war, since telegraphs were invented, about which news was so scarce. Almost every rumour that comes through is dubious, and it is invariably contradicted. In successive issues and even in the same issue of a journal one reads that troops have and have not entered a certain village, that somebody’s neutrality has and has not been violated, and that a naval engagement has and has not taken place. If you go over the eight pages of “war news” in a daily and make a summary of the unquestionable facts contained therein, as distinguished from the doubtful reports and the office-written padding, you find it could all be got into a paragraph. We have frequently heard that the day of the war correspondent was over. We heard it during the Russo-Japanese War—of which we certainly got very little news—and we heard it during the Balkan campaign. But at the moment of writing I have scarcely seen a single item regarding a single encounter which looked indisputable or which appeared to come direct from an eye-witness. Almost all the information we have been getting has come either from rumour travelling across many tongues or from official sources. Both these founts of news are great liars, the former excelling in the suggestio falsi, and the latter both in that and in the suppressio veri.

The desperate straits in which we have been for news could be gathered (if in no other way) from the outlandish places of origin ascribed to reports that get into print. Stockholm informs one that advices from Teheran report a conflict at Toul; and we hear that the Mercure de Bruxelles states “on excellent authority” that something has happened at Basle. Deliberate fabrication has been at work all over the place. Our good old friend the doctor, with the cholera microbes which he puts into wells, even turned up at the very start. This mythical gentleman is at least as old as the Franco-German War of 1870, and his last appearance was in the Balkans. No sooner does a war start than one of the combatants hastens to describe his diabolical activities in the hope, presumably, of making the world’s blood boil at the thought of an “outrage against humanity.”

The papers cannot be blamed for printing rumours, but they might give the clearest indication, whenever possible, of the value of their sources. Rumours before they get into print presumably travel in much the same way as after they get into print. Of how rapidly “news” develops I had an experience in a club on Tuesday night. A late evening paper printed a brief report, stating that Aberdeen doctors had gone to attend to wounded who were being landed at Cromarty. Five minutes after I had seen this, I was told by a member that single British and German destroyers had had a brush off the Scottish coast. Five minutes after that the vessels had expanded into flotillas, and within the hour a club servant, with very gloomy face, remarked to me, “I don’t know if you’ve heard it, sir, but there’s been a great naval battle in the North Sea and the British Fleet has met with an awful disaster.” With correspondents kept out of the area of hostilities, it is no wonder that by the time reports of occurrences reach the persons who send them to our newspapers they bear very little relation to the events (if any) which have originally generated them. War correspondents in Europe to-day seem to be able to do little more than sit in friendly foreign capitals and send home little bits of news out of the local papers. And if we want a really accurate and full description of the big battles, especially the big naval battles, of the future we shall usually have to wait until peace allows combatants to publish such books as the Japanese Human Bullets, describing the attack on Port Arthur, and those vivid Russian books which told the story of Rozhdestvensky’s voyage to the China Sea with his mouldy squadron and the magnificent and pitiful end of it at Tsushima. But of no great modern war will the whole truth ever be properly known. Forces work over such vast areas that full information is impossible to collect.

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