-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
You Can't Print That! - The Truth Behind The News 1918-1928
George Seldes
Payson & Clarke Ltd©1929
New York, New York
465pps - out-of-print
-----
"All men were created free, and now they are everywhere in chains."
—J. J. Rousseau
INTRODUCTION—BILLIONS AND BUNKUM
True opinions can prevail only if the facts to which ,they refer are known;
if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not
a little more effective " . . .
Walter Lippmann, — " Liberty and the News."
IN his search for facts the newspaperman on foreign service contends with
more censorship, propaganda, intimidation and frequently terrorism in
Continental Europe nowadays than in that supposedly dark journalistic age
which preceded the world war. Progress has been made in the past ten years
but of all the liberties which were outlawed and debased during the great
conflict that of the press seems to have recovered least.
For many and mighty reasons all governmental agencies of suppression in many
countries continue to function with unrelenting thoroughness. They are
directed against public opinion in the United States and England because
these are the dominant nations. So long as Lombard Street ruled the money
market the Continent sought to influence British public opinion; now that the
United States has increased its foreign investments to $15,000,000,000,
European chancelleries are dividing their effort, but they are also
increasing it because they realize how much depends on the loans they raise
and the moral support they obtain from their creditors.
The British investment has always been conservative; the fifteen billion
dollars which America has spent has been plunged with a sometimes reckless,
frequently ignorant hand into the rehabilitation of Europe. Some of this
money has been used to raise wheat, some to build submarines and perfect
poison gases; billions may be safe and at work for material progress and
peace, but billions are unsafe because they prepare for new wars.
The presidents, kings and dictators of Continental Europe have been taught
the full power of the press but recently, yet they are making extreme use of
their knowledge. They have their friendly or their purchased press in Great
Britain; toward America, which knows so pathetically little about the
numerous lands over which it has cast its billions, the foreign offices have
exercised a refined, more subtle, sometimes Machiavelian system of propaganda
and censorship.
In one country the bankers' and manufacturers' associations have assumed
arbitrary power, in another a perverted philosophy is in control of human
fate; in a third an egomaniac rules and in a fourth medieval corruption has
temporarily crushed all liberal resistance; therefore the word is spread
throughout the dominant nations, America and Britain, that democracy is
unsuitable for most of Continental Europe, that it has proven a fraud and a
failure, that parliaments are a drag on the efficient expression of the will
of a people, freedom is a modern delusion, truth is a false god arid liberty
nothing but a chimaera. The new propaganda reigns.
It boasts material progress. It points to trains running on time, to roads
built, to budgets balanced, to efficiency in mines and factories. It says
nothing of the fear of death and the fear of violence which are crushing the
last remnants of those fighting for individual and mass liberty in many
lands. Anyone can see the trains running on time, but who is willing to open
his eyes to see the hidden terror which is holding many millions of civilized
people captive? The international bankers and all
their agencies of publicity, the foreign offices with their intimidation of
journalists and their censorships and all the silly tourists who travel by
the hundred thousand nowadays, all report to the holders of billions of bonds
that the sun is shining brightly in all the 7 and 8 per cent. lands, that
God's in his heaven and all's well with the postbellum world.
* * *
I believe with Mr. Lippmann that false ideas are frequently more effective
than true ones and I know that there is a world of a difference between the
mistakes which journalists make frequently but honestly and the official
propaganda, the half truths, the ballons d'essai, the canards, and, to drop
euphemism, the official lies of many dictators and premiers of Continental
Europe. I also cling to that very old-fashioned belief that the press is the
most powerful estate and that the journalist is (or should be) the great
moulder of public opinion. Yet for twenty years I have heard again and again
the layman's question: Why don't the papers print the truth; why don't the
reporters write the truth?
Many answers have been written concerning national journalism; this book, by
incident and adventure and the presentation of documents and facts, is an
attempt to illustrate the foreign situation. There are many reasons behind
the failure of the press to present the whole truth about Europe.
For one, there is censorship. In time of crisis almost every nation
establishes a censor bureau; in all dictatorships such bureaus function
continually, some openly, some secretly.
There are the bond issues of many billions. News must be suppressed when
unfavorable, otherwise the market will crash; news must be perverted at all
times, otherwise new loans will be more difficult, and rates will be too
high. The foreign offices and the bankers combine in this attack on a free
press and both are powerful and effective.
There is the political terrorism which still prevails in many lands and which
touches the pen of the foreign correspondent as well as the lives of the
suppressed citizens and subjects. You can't do much free writing when you
know there is a detective outside your door (as in Russia) or a secret agent
in your office (as frequently in Italy) or squads of police officials
detailed to watch you (as in Roumania and many other countries).
And, finally, there are so few great newspapers in America and England brave
enough to disregard the wishes of certain foreign offices and the "business
at any price " international bond houses and the tourist and steamship
organizations which spend large sums advertising, that when the truth is
published it reaches so small a public that it is ineffective beside the
half-truth which the majority of newspapers publish.
Almost always the foreign correspondent works honestly, but he is no modern
Prometheus to defy the gods of European Real Politik by waving an
iconoclastic torch over their conferences and their plans, their secret plots
and their open betrayals. Against governmental systems the journalist can do
little. He can, as witness a letter from one who had to submit to Mussolini's
terrorism, " break his heart " and remain silent.
Or, being all too human and able to distinguish the buttered side, and
finding encouragement in American editorial offices for a policy of
suppression, and being also susceptible to worldly flattery and the delights
of social advancement, the American journalist, once having found it doesn't
get him anywhere to be an iconoclast, may adapt himself to the desired
compromises. What Professor Salvemini says of the situation in Italy may be
read with a few necessary changes, for Russia, Poland, Hungary, Roumania,
Spain, Bulgaria, Greece, Portugal and several other nations and still hold
its truth. Salvemini says:
The difficulty of understanding the present situation of the Italian people
is increased by the fact that French, English or American journalists, as
soon as they arrive in Italy, are immediately surrounded by agents of Fascist
propaganda and are introduced into aristocratic and high Fascist bourgeois
circles; here they are flattered by every possible kindness and loaded down
with statistics, information, interpretations, explanations ad usum delphini.
Often they are salaried for translating and sending to their papers articles
and news concocted in the offices of Fascist propaganda. A few intelligent
and honest foreign journalists succeed little by little in seeing the light
but their letters must omit much that they know and if they wire their papers
accurate information, their telegrams are intercepted: they themselves are
expelled from Italy. The most enthusiastic are forced to send unsigned
articles to their papers and magazines, resorting to a thousand expediencies
in order not to be discovered. Telegraphed news, which is most likely to
impress the reading public, is ruthlessly controlled by the government
censorship if it does not coincide with the taste of the Mussolini government.
Or with the taste of the Soviet government, or the Primo de Rivera
government, or that of Horthy, Pangalos, Waldemiras, Bratianu I and Bratianu
II, Pilsudski, Kemal Pasha, or that of the French in Syria and Morocco, the
British in Mesopotamia and other protectorates, the Italians in Libya, or the
dictators of many other lands.
The American foreign correspondent who succumbs to flattery and the ribbons
of various legions of honor, to occasional meetings with princes and
marquesas, to handshakes with various Mussolinis and Stalins, to bows and
smiles from the Great of Our Age, usually finds many of the complexities of
everyday life removed and receives praise from New York and Chicago for his
diplomatic progress.
He who would be a man. and a nonconformist may find himself in jail.
Of the hundred or more American journalists abroad whom I know well, so many
have been imprisoned, so many have been expelled from countries and so many
have just evaded either imprisonment or deportation by hook or by crook,
usually by both, that it is only fair to emphasize their integrity and to do
considerable pointing with pride. Newspapers as a rule do not fuss over the
troubles of their representatives because editors believe the public is not
interested in newspaper men. Yet correspondents' troubles illustrate better
than anything else I know the vicious situation in many places.
Almost half of Europe today is governed by violence and terrorism. Proclaim
liberty tomorrow and you would have revolutions in twenty countries. Almost
half of Europe's population does not enjoy the fundamental rights of the days
before the so-called war of liberation. It is not true that the people of
Soviet Russia are happy or that the people of Italy are happy with their
dictatorships, or that the parliamentary system has failed. Suppression by
force does not mean failure. For corroboration of these statements I can
refer to ninety or more of the hundred American and British journalists I
know, who are working in Europe, who have investigated and who have the real
knowledge. The bond dealers and the tourists and the noted magazine writers
who make two-week visits (with half their articles written in advance in
accordance with the views and instructions of their editors) may tell you
differently, but the resident reporters know it is not so.
But it is too difficult to say the opposite when political police systems
hang around the office doors, and American ambassadors, most of whom cringe
before dictators, offer no protection, and when, after all, the editor
frequently is on the side of the tourists and bankers and the noted magazine
journalists. And what, let me ask, dare an American write about the success
or failure of the League of Nations when 48 per cent. of the American papers
for political party reasons are blindly opposed to it and another 48 per
cent. for the same reasons, are blindly in favor of it, and not one of the 96
per cent. wants an impartial and objective cablegram?
I defied anyone to challenge the statement that Roumania was the most
politically corrupt state in Europe in 1928 and that a loan would be a
considerable risk for American pocket-books. Dictatorial terrorism, unrest
and the danger of revolution prevailed under Vintila as under Jon Bratianu.
Yet when M. Quesnay and M. Rist of the Bank of France came to New York to
speak about an $80,000,000 loan (which is really a $2,000,000,000 French
political maneuvre to outwit Italian intrigue in Bucharest), certain American
journals began a campaign in favor of Roumania, aiming to hide the truth
about terrorism at a time when important minorities and the whole peasantry
threatened a revolt which would endanger the American dollar investments.
In what position does such a loan campaign place the American correspondent
in a capital such as Bucharest?
1. If his paper is supporting the loan, he is silenced. (If Queen Marie has
already visited his editor and let him kiss her hand, he is already
journalistically impotent.)
2. If the bankers favor the loan and are using the reporter's newspaper, he
is again silenced.
3. If neither 1 nor 2 is true, and he tries to write or cable an honest
warning, thereby doing a great service to thousands of Americans who might be
foolishly attracted by the 7 or 8 per cent. which such a speculative loan
must pay, he will be arrested or expelled, the frontiers permanently closed
to him, and his future usefulness curtailed.
The same holds for Russia, Italy, Poland, Spain, and other despotic lands.
* * *
Billions and bunkum. Billions of dollars, at home and abroad, are able to
control or hide the international truth, while bunkum, thanks to censorship —
of facts, frequently replaces them entirely. If America or England had known
the whole truth about the Continental European system, and there had been no
propaganda, would the necessary emotions have been aroused to bring either
into war?
If America were allowed by its editors to know the whole truth about Mexico,
would we ever engage in warfare there?
If America and England — the public not the politicians — had known the facts
of March 1917, could they not have insured a Russian democratic revolution
without Bolshevism?
If America knew the whole truth about Italy today, would it float the Italian
bonds? Likewise the Polish bonds? Or the bonds of other terroristic countries?
if America had known the truth about Queen Marie, would not the royal farce
of 1927 have been different?
These are typical questions the American journalist abroad, who cannot for
the life of him tell the whole truth, is asking pertinently.
He sees Continental Europe drifting towards new wars; dates are being
mentioned. He sees American relations with free England frequently grow cold
and distant, while our relationship with despotic regimes suddenly grow warm
and friendly, thanks to no sound reasons, but to efficient propa-ganda.
Misunderstandings undermine solid foundations. Solid foundations are
frequently replaced by dangerous golden ones. Billions and bunkum more and
more order our relationship to foreign nations. The journalist sees passions
pass for realism. He sees propaganda overwhelming truth. He sees the race for
armament continuing- American dollars frequently encourage it. False
frontiers and injustices more cruel than any before 1914 give cause for
bigger and better world wars. Many say the future of western white
civilization is endangered. Some believe only America, now the moral and
financial supernation, can save it. And yet our portion is so much bunkum and
propaganda that in ten years we have done almost nothing to further
international relations with the free nations.
If ever there was a voice crying in a political wilderness, it is that of the
American journalist on foreign service. Cassandra had a larger audience
despite the thunder and waves on the rocks of the Mediterranean. She at least
was close to the national ear. But the American correspondent does not seem
able to penetrate the curtain covered with $15,000,000,000 of gold on one
side and on the other the thickest veils of censorship that have ever existed.
Peacetime censorship exists for one reason only: to hide rotten affairs of
state. Wartime censorship alone is justifiable — but we who were in the press
section of the American Army in France may doubt if even then it has any
value, inasmuch as General Pershing always gave us the fullest information
about the enemy and, as we later learned, the enemy knew everything there was
to know about our side. (Three days before our attack the Germans moved out
of the St. Mihiel salient because they knew almost as much as Pershing did
about the plans for that battle.)
In the chapters which follow I have begun with wartime and armistice
censorship incidents; followed by experiences in those parallel despotisms,
Italy and Russia; the League of Nations mandated terrorities which should be
free from the domination of any European country but which are not; a visit
to Mexico where censorship exists from time to time, but which is not a tenth
as stupid or vicious as that practised in American newspaper offices where
owners and editors have policies of war and interventions which force their
editorial writers and reporters to prostitute themselves; and I have
concluded with side trips to several European countries, including the most
corrupt of all, Roumania, where censorship exists to cover not only political
terrorism as in other countries, but also moral corruption which begins in
the royal palaces.
I have given only my own experiences. Every one of a hundred colleagues, many
of whom I thank for aiding me in gathering the facts and bringing them up to
11929, could supplement this book, and a score could, if they were free,
easily surpass both in number and significance the episodes of censorship,
foreign office intimidation and the frequent national terrorisms here
recorded.
What I have tried to do is realize the hope of every one of my colleagues who
says: " Some day I am going to take a holiday and write THE TRUTH BEHIND THE
NEWS."
PARIS—NEW YORK, 1928-1929.
pps.8-18
=====
Part I — War
Chapter 1
MARCHING BACK TO THE TRENCHES AGAIN
THE Rainbow Division. Wallowing in the mud of the Luneville training sector.
Learning to hate like men, the night the enemy threw a shell into our line
which made a dugout the tomb for twelve. Raids and little encounters to take
the god-awful fear out of our bellies.
Standing up before a moving wall of flame and hot iron and blinding gas and
whirling infernos of the sand of Champagne. The first two lines given up to
the enemy. The artillery smashing hell out of them, foe and comrade alike,
there in the first two lines, where irresistibly wave after wave, five
inhuman times, the ugly gray surf had broken, subsided, and left only blood
and broken bodies on the dazzling chalk of Champagne.
St. Mihiel!
Days of anxious preparations, days of building up courage, all numbed in one
universal roar of barrage fire. Finally the zero silence. Finally release of
all emotions. Finally the command, let's go, come on you, and over the top
comes the unleashed bound of ten thousand men, and — nothing! Nothing. No
enemy. No sound.
Victory!
And then the Argonne.
And now, marching back to the trenches again.
Where were the old men of the Rainbow, eager youths of six months ago?
Scattered. In hospital. Dead. Over all the fields of France, from down there
near the neutral border, to up here on the road to Sedan. " Replacements "
forever arriving. The Rainbow Division forever marching back to the trenches.
A little rest — rest? — and marching back to the trenches. Then fire and
flame and blood, and a little rest, and again marching back to the trenches.
This war was never going to end. This war was never going to end.
They sang their moods.
Sometimes they sang:
K-k-k-k-katy, beautiful k-k-k-katy,
You're the only girl that I adore. . . .
Sometimes they sang lugubriously, but with humor, a macabre folk-song,
jerking the words to their step:
The worms — crawl in
The worms — crawl out
They crawl -in your eyes
And they crawl -in your mouth. . . .
And I some -times think
When I'm — dead and gone. . . .
Dead? Death? Why think of it? Why think of anything? Close your eyes and
erase your mind and think nothing. Until the first shell falls into your
hiding place and a white fear and a red hate bring fit thoughts for soldiers.
The mood changes.
A song is finished. Without losing a beat, as is custom, another is begun. As
the solemn ballad is ended, a mocking voice sings:
I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier
The singer smiles out of the corners of his eyes and out of the corners of
his mouth. Hardly has he finished the first stanza when a roar of ironic
laughter doubles up his squad, the men hardly able to compose themselves in
time to join in with
I raised him up to be my pride and joy
Laughter spreads with the singing, a strange commotion of laughs, the hearty
voluminous outbursts of new men up ahead and near behind them, their first
amazement at this mad choice of a marching song; and the soft dry laughter of
the men who had already bellowed their surprise and are now realizing that
for them, that day, that marching moment, this cheap meretricious jingle,
this drivel of a song, held a strange and terrible mockery, a prophetic irony.
Who dares to lay a musket on his shoulder
To shoot some other mother's darling boy?
Let nations arbitrate their future troubles,
It's time to put the sword and gun away. . . .
In a few minutes the song has roared towards the infantry on ahead, through
the Ohios and the New Yorks and the Alabams and the Iowas, and down the
artillery, Reilly's Chicagos, and all the rest. It leaps from regiment to
regiment, losing a few seconds in each skip, so that while the original Ohios
are singing
It's time to put the sword and gun away
the Kansans have just gotten wind of it and are beginning
I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier
I raised him up to be my pride and joy
and so the whole division is shaking with laughter and song as it is
marching, back to the trenches, back to the blood and mud, singing
There'd be no war today, if mothers all would say
I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier
* * * * *
When the Ohios finished it they were silent. There seemed to be no mood to be
tricked out with a new song, and when the New Yorks and the Alabams and the
Illinois and the Kansans finished their verses, they were silent too for a
few seconds, listening to the sound of nails and leather on hard stone road
and from the north the uninterrupted sputtering — like a man choking in the
sea — no louder at this distance, but somehow filling all the universe. Now
subterranean coughing — all the Titans of the earth and sky, invisible,
smiting their breasts and making incoherent sounds: that was the war front to
which they were marching back again. Occasionally a " jeeze " or a "
christamighty " from one of the singers. Twenty-five thousand men, volunteers
and conscripts, men out of colleges and men out of sewers, all going north
again, marching to meet death half way, up there where that choking
sputtering noise was the whole world at war — and singing a ridiculous song
that only two years ago had been the sentimental rage of a whole nation.
There'd be no war today, if mothers all would say
I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier
What a prophetic irony this foolish song had become. They all felt it in that
fleeting moment of silence. And being good soldiers they met it with
laughter. Yes, that was the only way to meet irony and tragedy at the front.
After their little silence they laughed again and looked at one another, each
to see if the next man detected any weak emotions behind the laughter, as
they kept pounding northward, towards the trenches.
I thought this episode was humor for the Homeric gods. I thought it the
grandest thing I ever could write about the spirit of our men. Nothing during
the war had so stirred me — not my first night in the trenches east of
Luneville with these same Ohios — nor the day of the St. Mihiel push when we
went to taunt death and found silence and sunshine — nor any lying out in the
open in the rain, with gas shells exploding like duds a few feet away — nor
any other encounter with victory or danger.
So the next day I did my best to draw this picture of heroic soldiers going
back to the trenches singing ironically "I didn't raise my boy to be a
soldier," and laughing as they marched. I thought it grand wartime stuff.
" Say, what the hell is all this? " said the army censor.
What are you trying to put over, Seldes? This is damned pacifist propaganda.
. . . Yes, I know it is true, but that doesn't matter. You can't print that.
. . ."
pps. 19-23
=====
CHAPTER 2
" U. S. INFANTRY WON THE WAR,"—HINDENBURG
THE charge against us was simply: first violation of the Armistice; crossing
into Germany; passing through the Great German Retreat; and interviewing
Hindenburg the week the war ended. We made no defense.
General Dennis Nolan, under special orders of General Pershing, conducted our
trial at Chaumont. The verdict put us into an awkward position — either
resign from the Press Section, lose our army standing, and depart for home,
or remain in the A. E. F. under technical arrest and refrain from writing the
greatest story of our lives. Thus spoke army discipline and military press
censorship.
Today we are proud of our crime, if crime it was. We can afford to forget the
humiliation of arrest, the discomfiture of the trial, but we remember the
thrill of that day we left Luxembourg, the sudden terror of being caught (in
the midst of his marching men) by a furious Prussian colonel, and the great
climax, the meeting with Hindenburg.
For it was then that the commander of the enemy, the one man in the world who
could best make a historical judgment, made an admission in the honesty of
tears, an admission which for political reasons he can never repeat:
"The American infantry," said Hindenburg, " won the World War in battle in
the Argonne."
* * * *
First, a word on the nature of our crime." We were all members of the Advance
Section, G-2-D, G. H. Q., A. E. F.
In other words, in that part of the Intelligence Corps of the American army
known as the Press Section. We were given the uniforms of officers without
insignia of rank and entitled to the privileges of generals. We ranked with
the doughboys when we were in the trenches and just below Pershing on our
visit to Chaumont. We found the question of saluting and getting saluted
difficult because we had refused to take the two bars of a captaincy which
our British colleagues wore. But more important, we considered ourselves more
free than a ranked and placed person in uniform the day the eager doughboys,
still hoping for laurels, fired cannon five minutes after eleven and the
Armistice hushed the thundering front.
That minute we felt ourselves civilians again. Again we felt free to use our
wits in getting scoops — to think up some big stunt which would rattle the
morale of our competitors and amaze the world.
" Let's cross into Germany."
Spoken as a joke — hiding a mighty desire — needing only a seconding motion
to light an enthusiasm which would carry us over that yesterday's horror
which was No Man's Land and that yesterday's hatred which was Enemy Land —
and to a tomorrow which was grand and thrilling and perhaps laden with death.
But someone must have suspected such a plan even before it was born. We had
already heard our sergeant and corporal chauffeurs whispering instructions
received either from Pershing's headquarters or through the major' commanding
us that there must be no violation of the Armistice, that while we might
drive into No Man's Land, we must never drive across the Armistice line.
" Youse guys can boss us anywhere you want to go," Sergeant Jack Corper, one
of the best drivers in the army, told me, " but dere's one thing you can't
make us do and dat's cross over. We got superior orders, see? "
I still believe the two chauffeurs innocent, but I do not credit it
altogether to our superior guile, for the spirit of adventure must have
blinded their eyes too, to the many false roads and wrong turns we
methodically took. They did protest at first.
" The map shows to the right —
" The map is wrong. Take the turn to the left."
Every half hour a similar conversation.
And so we rode out of gay Luxembourg, that lovely city on a cliff where our
doughboys had had the time of their lives what with being treated as a
quarter million heroes and dragged by squads and companies from the open
peaceful highways into the homes of happy and rich Luxembourgeoises where
champagne and song lasted a full seven days.
It was still Armistice week when we started, dull and early, towards Germany.
Well, it didn't take long to cross that tiny " Grand-Duchy," and as there was
no longer an organized German frontier, we must have ridden into Enemy Land
with no more excitement than the noise automobiles make on hard military
roads.
But excitement, which was to hold us breathless for a week and more, began
almost immediately. As we flew into the first German village we passed a
triumphal arch, if you please, all decked out with flowers and laurel and
bearing on its keystone the legend "Welcome Our Undefeated Heroes." And then
we saw the flag we had never dreamed we would ever see, the red, white and
black of the Kaiser's monarchy, waving in ignorant pride from many windows.
They say the civilians have the most hate and fear. At the front, Heaven
knows, we had had our share of both. But certainly the civilians across the
sea felt the war was over when the Armistice was signed while on the other
hand so many at the front who had been in or watched the slaughter and the
mud day by day, unchanging, unceasing, had felt there must be a catch in it
somewhere, that it wasn't really true, that it didn't mean what it seemed. So
when the chauffeurs of both cars put on the brakes bringing us to a crunching
huddled halt, we too had forgotten the Armistice and felt civilians' hate and
fear pointing at us in the snake-ends of the windsnapping enemy banners.
The chauffeurs argued perhaps half-heartedly. Army discipline had never
really existed in our outfit. Adventure lay ahead and nothing but
explanations behind. "You might as well go on, we are ten miles inside
Germany already," was someone's conclusive statement, and ahead we went.
In this town of Borg we found the German army in full retreat. We came up
behind it noting immediately the splendid discipline of the defeated. Their
lines were right and their step firm: even in facial expression there was no
sign of a collapsed morale. Their uniforms and equipment seemed shoddy.
" Amerikaner — Amerikaner."
Without hatred or passion the surprised soldiers passed the word along the
undulating ranks.
We rode slowly alongside, our hearts beating high.
Soon we were in the town square, a triangle between streets, where the German
colonel on a horse was directing operations. He saw us at a distance and rode
forward.
"Halt! " he commanded with a mean voice and uplifted hand.
We halted.
" What in thunder and lightning are you doing here?
Our spokesman stammered an answer.
"You are interfering with our military movements — you must go back to the
American line," the colonel said decisively.
" But — "
"I forbid an answer!"
At our left, meanwhile, hundreds of German soldiers with rifles on their
shoulders, an occasional 77, and a frequent "goulash cannon" were thudding
and clanking onward.
We all began to talk at once. The colonel became furious.
"I tell you to get out, and immediately, or I take the lot of you prisoner.
You are in great danger. Your lives are at stake here. You are the enemy —
the men might shoot you all — or the civilians attack you — any moment. I
tell you to return — "
At this black moment there was a civilian-flurry in the square from which a
sailor emerged, running towards us. He had that universality of blue serge
and seaworn face which make the sailors of all lands alike.
"What's the trouble here? " he asked.
We were immediately amazed by the daring of an enlisted man in the presence
of high officers. But we noticed also there was something different about
this sailor's uniform — a red band on his left arm. Later we read the black
print on it:
"Arbeiter — und Soldaten — Rat," or Workers and Soldiers Council, or Soviet.
Seeing sympathetic ears, we poured a broken German explanation into them. We
noted, too, a change in the behaviour of our swell colonel. His starch and
bluster were gone. He sat on his horse, looking disgusted and arguing less
vehemently than ourselves.
"They're in danger here," he repeated.
"Not while I'm in command in this area," replied the sailor cockily.
"They must leave at once I tell you," said the colonel.
But the colonel's antagonism reflexed the sailor's sympathy for us.
"You go and mind your own business," he ordered.
The colonel went.
"My name is Fritz Harris," the sailor beamed. " Does any one of you know my
uncle in Cleveland? " —
"But what does all this mean? " we asked, shaking negative heads.
"Well, I'm in control," replied the sailor, jumping on the running board and
shooing away the old men and women who now dared crowd our automobiles. "We
started the revolution in Kiel. On the ships. just before the Armistice.
Everything is going in good order. Don't worry. We did everything with
shipshape discipline. Each sailor was assigned a city, his own city usually,
and went with orders to proclaim the German revolution there. This is my
home. Not a drop of blood was shed here. It was different in Trier and
Frankfurt. Now, honoured gentlemen, what is it you want? "
This piece of diplomacy we left to our spokesman. He had considerable hold of
the language but I still believe it was a slight error that made the rest of
our adventure possible. He had tried to say we were a part of the press
section which had come to see how Germany had lived during the war, what the
food situation was, and all that, and sailor Fritz Harris interrupted him
with:
" Ah, the American Food Commission — yah, yah, we had heard you would send us
food. Willkommen, willkommen."
(This promise of white bread had been probably our most efiective propaganda.
For months our aviators had dropped cards over the German lines saying every
prisoner, and everyone who surrendered voluntarily, was getting two pounds of
white bread a day — and many a German came to claim his portion.)
We let Fritz's mistake go unchallenged and were conducted with rejoicing to
the Rathaus, where we were welcomed by the soldier and civilian Soviet of the
town. At our request they telephoned to Trier asking that everything be done
to insure safety for our lives and means for getting the information we
wanted.
On the road out of Borg we had a great panorama of the German forces
endlessly flowing eastward. Despite the seeming discipline peasants told us
how they had bought artillery horses for 50 marks and exchanged a goose for a
brace of rifles and an egg for a parabellum pistol. No bloodshed was reported
in the countryside.
In Trier a reception committee met us and wanted to entertain us but we
pressed on to Frankfurt which we reached the next day.
Up to now we had no thought of Hindenburg. Our secret ambition had been to be
the first Americans in Berlm. We confided it to our host at Frankfurt, the
usual Arbeiter-und-Soldatendrat, who agreed to help us, but first we had to
be given a banquet.
We sat in the spacious hall of the Frankfurterhof, now revolutionary
headquarters, and ate as bad a meal as one can imagine, thin soup whose only
distinguishing taste was salt, some goose, the only meat we found anywhere,
potatoes and very soggy black bread. The wine was excellent.
Our hosts held long discourses and our spokesman replied. My own contribution
was a one line speech: " Es lebe die Republik " — long live the Republic —
which was an excuse for draining another green decanter of Rhine.
During prolonged arrangements for continuing our journey, one of the council
said timidly:
" We would like you to see Hindenburg first."
Hindenburg!
It was almost as amazing as the Armistice itself. The latter was a bit
unreal, but this was a dream-desire — to call on and interview the leader of
the enemy, the second best-hated man in the world then, the general whose men
were killing our men, the apotheosis of German frightfulness, the incarnation
of that which six days before was all the evil in the world — such a thought
was beyond our still khaki-clad minds.
" It can be arranged," said the Rat.
Two German cars were given us, so we could release the doughboys who were
becoming indignantly mutinous—perhaps through ignorance of what was to come —
and with tires exploding every hour and engines going wrong every three, we
managed to arrive in Cassel, where Hindenburg had removed his grand
headquarters from Aix-la-Chapelle.
We came to the Rathaus confident all was well. But it wasn't. Hindenburg
politely refused to see us. He said he would meet no one in the uniform of
the enemy.
That day and the next we spent in, conferences with members of the Rat at
City Hall and sulking at our hotel, where, by the way, our presence was
objectionable. The owner was surly and the help mean. Our finances were low.
I still have a grudge against that hotel man who gave me 60 paper marks for
my reserve 20 dollar gold piece.
We decided to go to Berlin at once. We went to the Rathaus to say good-bye.
Then a sergeant-major member of the council took up the telephone and
insisted on speaking to Hindenburg him[s]elf.
It was a long conversation in which our sergeant-major, an ugly, emaciated
person with protruding yellow teeth, very much the " Hun " of British war
cartoons, became more and more exasperated. Finally he shouted:
" This is an order to you, Excellency, not a request."
A moment of silence for Hindenburg's reaction.
" Then at three o'clock, you will send one of your cars." —
He hung up the telephone and a proud smile came over his distorted face.
"At three this afternoon he will send his car."
The car came on the stroke. Our hotel keeper with almost oriental obeisances
directed seven employees who grovelled us into Hindenburg's grey monogrammed
limousine.
In the marble castle of Wilhelmshohe an aide-de-camp took us upstairs. A
squat stoutish man in a regulation general's uniform with an additional white
cloth around his head, received us.
" General Groener," he said to each, snapping his feet.
We shook hands.
" The general hasn't been wounded? " queried our spokesman.
" No," he smiled, " but I have a terrible headache."
Our spokesman interpreted. " He has a terrible headache."
" He should have," whispered the roughneck among us. "He has just lost a
world war."
General Groener bowed us into the next room, marvellous, rococo, pale blue
and gold and palatially uncomfortable.
Hindenburg arose.
He was dressed in field grey-blue. Tall, red-faced, broad-shouldered. The
usual officer's decorations on the wide chest were absent. Around his neck,
unbuttoned for comfort, was the small blue cross of the Pour le merite. His
head was covered with stiff toothbrush-like white hairs, cropped to about a
half-inch, and revealing, by their scarcity, a very pink scalp. But what I
thought was funny, was the famous Hindenburg moustache. It looked theatrical.
It looked false, and stuck on, and it certainly curved itself along the
cheeks as no non-Thespian moustache has ever done.
" Die Herrschaften sprechen Deutsch, nicht wahr? 0 said Hindenburg in a
kindly smiling voice, shaking hands for the first time since the war with men
in the uniform of his enemies.
Three disclaimed speaking German so Hindenburg fixed on our spokesman,
motioned us to a circle of chairs, and began:
" I will answer any military questions. I am a soldier. But I refuse to
answer any political questions." He shrugged his shoulders. " I am a soldier."
We had previously discussed no questions for this interview — it was one of
those cases where any word given us, on any subject, was precious.
"Is the demobilization proceeding satisfactorily -we have heard of some
fighting and bloodshed." Our first question.
" Yes," he replied, " although there is some trouble when the men
come to the cities, the return from the front is fully disciplined. Men and
officers remain in their usual relation-ship. The troubles are not serious
among the troops, officers and civilians, except when there is an attempt to
disregard the present change in government."
" What is your position at present?
" I have given my pledge to Mr. Ebert, who is in control of the government in
Berlin, that I will stay in command until all the troops are safely returned
from the front and to their home barracks. My functions then cease. I have
finished my duties. I mean to retire into private life."
" Do you think the present socialist government will remain or will fall
soon? "
" I cannot answer that. I am not a politician. I am a soldier."
Several questions followed. Either of minor importance or of a political
nature.
" I cannot answer. I am a soldier," was the inevitable reply to the latter
category.
All these minutes undoubtedly each of us was steeling himself for another
question—a question we were burning to ask, and which was merely "Who won the
war? heavily muffled in diplomatic garments. We fell to debating the next
question " among ourselves, and finally someone said:
" Go ahead — ask him — you know what."
So the spokesman with considerable throat clearing and much redundancy, asked
it.
When we asked " Who won the war? " we were ignorant of what home papers had
said. Our American papers in France, like the Entente press, from October to
November 10th reported nothing but French, British, Italian, Belgian
victories. " British troops advance 20 miles," " Brussels captured," " Lille
entered," " Italians cross three rivers." The three armies northwest of us
had advanced many miles each day. City after city was captured by them. But
what was the American army doing all this time? Merely fighting. Yes,
fighting. In the Argonne. Through dense, almost impassable forests, over
cliffs and hills, wading in ravines, struggling through mud thick as boiling
rubber, bombing, hand-grenading, machine-gunning, bayonetting their way
northward towards the jugular of the German armies, the Metz-Longuyon
railroad, the one means of retreat of the enemy.
Hindenburg was shortening his lines. He was quitting northern France and
Belgium. But he was holding the Argonne. Day by day the representative of our
G. H. Q. had shown us the map with every enemy division and reserve force
marked. Hindenburg had thirty-two reserve divisions at the beginning of our
Argonne drive. When November began two or three remained. What had become of
an army of German reserves ?
Very few had appeared on the French or British front — almost all were thrown
against us. We were doing almost all the fighting while the Allies were
marching unhindered into famous cities and famous battle fields Of 1914, and
capturing the headlines of the world. We were losing men and taking prisoners
and trenches — fighting most of the war then and getting no credit from the
press because our work was not spectacular. Hindenburg and Pershing knew what
we were doing. What would Hindenburg say?
" I will reply with the same frankness," said Hindenburg, faintly amused at
our diplomacy. " The American infantry in the Argonne won the war."
He paused and we sat thrilled.
" I say this," continued Hindenburg, " as a soldier, and soldiers will
understand me best.
"To begin with I must confess that Germany could not have won the war — that
is, after 1917. We might have won on land. We might have taken Paris. But
after the failure of the world food crops of 1916 the British food blockade
reached its greatest effectiveness in 1917. SO I must really say that the
British food blockade of 1917 and the American blow the Argonne of 1918
decided the war for the Allies.
" But without American troops against us and despite a food blockade which
was undermining the civilian population of Germany and curtailing the rations
in the field, we could still have had a peace without victory. The war could
have ended in a sort of stalemate.
" And even if we had not had the better of the fighting in the end, as we had
until July 18, 1918, we could have had an acceptable peace. We were still a
great force and we had divisions in reserve always which the enemy attacks
could never use up completely.
" Even the attack of July 18, which Allied generals may consider the turning
point in the war, did not use up a very important part of the German army or
smash all our positions. To win a war it is necessary, as you know, to place
the enemy forces hors de combat. In such a manner of warfare which began when
Japan and Russia met in the wheat fields of the Far East, you must engage and
defeat hundreds of thousands, millions of men.
"In the summer of 1918 the German army was able to launch offensive after
offensive — almost one a month. We had the men, the munitions and the morale,
and we were not overbalanced. But the balance was broken by the American
troops.
"The Argonne battle was slow and difficult. But it was strategic. It was
bitter and it used up division after division. We had to hold the
Metz-Longuyon roads and railroad and we had hoped to stop all American
attacks until the entire army was out of northern France. We were passing
through the neck of a vast bottle. But the neck was narrow. German and
American divisions fought each other to a standstill in the Argonne. They met
and shattered each other's strength. The Americans are splendid soldiers. But
when I replaced, a division it was weak in numbers and unrested, while each
American division came in fresh and fit and on the offensive.
"The day came when the American command sent new divisions into the battle
and when I had not even a broken division to plug up the gaps. There was
nothing left to do but ask terms.
"Until the American attack our positions had been comparatively satisfactory.
We had counted on holding the Argonne longer. The advantage of terrain was
with us. The American troops were unseasoned. We had also counted on their
impetuosity. There was great wastage in your army due to carelessness,
impetuosity and the disregard of the conditions of modern warfare.
" Yet from a military point of view the Argonne battle as conceived and
carried out by the American Command was the climax of the war and its
deciding factor. The American attack was furious — it continued from day to
day with increasing power, but when two opposing divisions had broken each
other, yours was replaced with 27,000 eager for battle, ours with decimated,
ill-equipped, ill-fed men suffering from contact with a gloomy and despairing
civilian population.
"I do not mean to discredit your fighting forces — I repeat, without the
American blow in the Argonne, we could have made a satisfactory peace at the
end of a stalemate or at least held our last positions on our own frontier
indefinitely — undefeated. The American attack decided the war."
A moment of silence.
" Ach, mein armes Vaterland — mein armes Vaterland — "
Hindenburg bowed his head and tears flooded his pale, watery eyes. His huge
bulk was shaken. He wept for his " poor fatherland."
We sat and wondered over so much emotion in a military leader supposedly
devoid of sentiment and sentimentality.
Thus the interview terminated with a strange human spectacle and in an
uncomfortable silence. A fallen Colossus. A broken Superman. Blood and iron
suddenly tears and clay.
There was no more to ask. Here we were with the biggest story in the world,
and even before Hindenburg was through speaking, our thoughts were searching
cable ends or messengers or some new means of communication with our papers.
There came the usual anticlimax. "Where do you go from here?" asked
Hindenburg. "Ach, Berlin, so? Well, gluckliche Reise."
"Auf Wiedersehen." A loose handclasp. We were ushered out by the snappy
aide-de-camp.
My colleagues started for Berlin; I got up at four the next morning to make
the 5 A.M. train for Luxembourg. As I reached the station I saw part of the
real German revolution.
Mingled with the monarchist flags and drapery over the Cassel railroad
station and triumphal arches were red streamers and bunting placed by the
revolutionary sailors and town Soviet. The troops coming by train knew
nothing of the Kaiser's cowardice or the change to a republic.
A regiment was detraining. As the colonel led his men from the station into
the public square he seemed lightning-struck when he beheld the revolutionary
color mingling with his Kaiser's.
" Tear the red rags down! " he ordered his captains.
A captain in turn spoke to his men, who refused to move.
" I'll do it myself," said the captain, and grabbing a red streamer from the
triumphal arch, he pulled.
Two soldiers with red arm-bands approached threateningly, and I stopped too.
"Pardon, captain," said one, " but we have had a revolution."
"Revolution, to the devil — " replied the captain, pulling.
The two soldiers raised their rifles.
The captain drew his pistol.
Click! — Crack!
At this precise moment the little experience I had had in the
Luneville-Baccaret section with the Rainbow Division, pulled my habit
muscles. I dropped flat.
A dozen rifles and a pair of revolvers snapped. A man fell partly on me. I
turned cautiously on my left side. His face was in pain, and his hands were
at his middle, and blood was flowing from his stomach. He was the captain
who- had pulled the red flag. The soldiers had shot him.
Men ran over us, around us. Lying flat, I had a panorama of flying feet in
the semi-darkness. Shooting was spasmodic, now near, now at a distance. I
wondered what I could do for the man lying over my feet. I pulled myself up.
I think he died without a groan.
Bodies were writhing in the open square. One wounded man was shrieking. But
the troops were gone and scared civilians were appearing from hiding places
and the station.
"Too bad," they murmured, "but these officers won't believe the guards who
tell them there has been a revolution—and a republic."
In three days and three nights the train meandered a hundred miles. It was
crowded with German officers who mistook me for a returning prisoner of war
and who were kindlier than any German civilians and who gave me their
precious bad bread.
At Wasserbillig, the Luxembourg frontier, was the most welcome sight in the
universe: a doughboy. He got me a car to Luxembourg. I was promptly arrested.
Pershing insisted the German government return my colleagues from Berlin, and
our trial at Chaumont followed.
I have seen Hindenburg since. No longer the broken old man weeping. Nor quite
Hindenburg of the iron-nailed statue. But times had changed in Germany. Seven
or eleven political parties were bitterly fighting for power, and the old
monarchists and the old militarists were spreading the myth that the war was
lost, not by Wilhelm's armies, but by the republican DoIschstoss — the
civilian " stab in the back."
I recalled the Cassel meeting. Hindenburg shook his head in acknowledgment.
But for political reasons he can never again repeat his con-fession of
Armistice week.
pps. 24-40
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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