Officers’ letters from the front, so freely published earlier in
the war, amazed experienced correspondents by their unconscious
indiscretions. The line officer who had been in a fight told all that
he saw. Twenty officers doing the same along a stretch of front and the
jig-saw experts, plus what information they had from spies, were in
clover. Editors said: “But these men are officers. They ought to know
when they are imparting military secrets.”
Alas, they do not know! It is not to be expected that they should.
Their business is to fight; the business of other experts is to
safeguard information. For a long time the British army kept
correspondents from the front on the principle that the business of
a correspondent must be to tell what ought not to be told. Yet they
were to learn that the accredited correspondent, an expert at his
profession, working in harmony with the experts of the staff, let no
military secrets pass.
At our mess we get the Berlin dailies promptly. Soon after the Germans
are reading the war correspondence from their own front we are reading
it, and laughing at jokes in their comic papers and at cartoons which
exhibit John Bull as a stricken old ogre and Britannia who Rules the
Waves with the corners of her mouth drawn down to the bottom of her
chin, as she sees the havoc that von Tirpitz is making with submarines
which do not stop us from receiving our German jokes regularly across
the Channel.
Doubtless the German messes get their _Punch_ and the London
illustrated weeklies regularly. In the time that it took the English
daily with the account of the action seen from the church tower to
reach Berlin and the news to be wired to the front, the German guns
made use of the information. Neutral little Holland is the telltale of
both sides; the ally and the enemy of all intelligence corps. Scores
of experts in jig-saw puzzles on both sides seize every scrap of
information and piece them together. Each time that one gets a bit from
a newspaper he is for a sharper press censorship on his side and a more
liberal one on the other.
We six correspondents have our insignia, as must every one who is free
to move along the lines. By a glance you may tell everybody’s branch
and rank in that complicated and disciplined world, where no man acts
for himself, but always on some one else’s orders.
“Don’t you know who they are? They are the correspondents,” I heard a
soldier say. “D. Chron., that’s the _Daily Chronicle_; M. Post, that’s
the _Morning Post_; D. Mail, that’s the _Daily Mail_. There’s one with
U. S. A. What paper is that?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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