Famous war correspondents

Preface

As this preface is written, journalistic enterprise is confronted with a clamoring demand for news of a war which promises to be the greatest in modern history and with an absolute embargo decreed upon publicity by nearly all the nations of Europe. Heretofore war correspondents have been able to cross frontiers and reach neutral cities and uncensored cable and telegraph stations, whence they have forwarded their despatches. London often has been a great clearing house for war news. In the Russo-Japanese war, correspondents several times rode to Chinese ports with budgets of important despatches; in the Balkan war they made their way out of the rout and welter of Turkish defeats to Roumania. But there is no place in this Continental struggle to which a correspondent may go with the hope of finding a free wire. Moreover, the movements of news men with the armies are likely to be more restricted than in any previous war and this because of the new conditions brought about by modern science. -Methods of communication are so nearly instantaneous, and means of travel so swift, that governments will not permit reporters to enjoy the intimate touch with armies in the field which gave such men as William Howard Russell, Archibald Forbes and Januarius A. MacGahan the materials for their thrilling narratives. The tendency to apply the muffler has been apparent for years; Lord Roberts in South Africa tolerated only the free

Vil vill PREFACE use of the mails; the Japanese in Manchuria “entertained”’ the press men elaborately but kept them a long way from the front; in the Balkan war only the correspondents with the Turks had any degree of liberty. Today the cables of Europe are controlled by the war departments of the Powers. No such rigid censorship has before been known. Upon the day on which this is written a despatch comes to my attention stating that cables for publication must pass the scrutiny of nine censors before delivery to the papers addressed.

The general result is likely to be not the suppression of the news but the delaying of it. The facts will be told sooner or later. But military strategy will restore the conditions of the early years of war correspondence, when Washington waited for weeks to learn that General Taylor had not been annihilated at Buena Vista and London read the “‘Crimean Letters’’ long after Russell had penned them. Nevertheless several American correspondents have been sent across the Atlantic, Richard Harding Davis among them, and many of the best known English correspondents are going to do what can be done at the front, among whom is Frederic Villiers, who may soon add a new chapter to his picturesque career. Upon the other hand, one American periodical will employ a “‘correspondent”’ whose desk will be in its own office and whose function will be to summarize the history of the war at long range. Personally I am of the opinion that it is of vast importance to humanity that the truth shall be told about war, and that publicity is the greatest agency for the promotion of the cause of peace; also that in time a way will be found for the competent news man to tell what he sees, his freedom being restricted perhaps

PREFACE 1x for weeks at a stretch by the exigencies of the military situation.

This book contains a collection of biographical sketches of representative war correspondents. I am well aware that many men with valid claims to distinction as followers of the warpath are merely mentioned, if they are alluded to at all, and that a volume of vivid tales could be compiled from the lives of such artists and reporters as Melton Prior, H. C. Seppings Wright, Julius Mendes Price, “Crimean” Simpson, John Alexander Cameron, Lionel James, Frederick Boyle, William Beattie Kingston, and “Fred” Burnaby, to name but a few of the long list. A large amount of material remains unused in my hands. This selection has been based upon principles easy to understand: that both men of action like Bennet Burleigh and men of distinguished literary artistry like George Warrington Steevens should be included; that while treating of correspondents who “cover” the same wars for rival journals, duplication should be avoided by a judicious choice of incidents, and that the range and variety of the work of the special correspondent should be indicated by taking the reader to campaigns in all quarters of the world. Also the method of arrangement has been such that practically a history of war correspondence is contained in the volume. The citations from despatches are intended both to aid in the narration of their adventures and to indicate the quality of the prose that was written by the earlier correspondents who used the mail and the later ones who dashed for the wire. I do not claim to have discovered new facts, but I have a measure of pride in the attempt to rescue from forgetfulness the exploits of George Wilkins Kendall and the other Americans whose xX PREFACE pioneer work for the press has never been recognized in the history of journalism.

My sources of information have been numerous. It is a pleasant duty to refer to the books and articles by the correspondents themselves from which I have gleaned most of my facts, and to such biographies as that of Russell, by John Black Atkins. I have been a diligent student of the files of the newspapers and pictorial weeklies of England and the United States. Of those who have rendered personal assistance I would thank especially Dr. Frank Horace Vizetelly, whose kindly generosity in the loan of documents and photographs is greatly appreciated; Mrs. Georgina K. Fellowes, the daughter of Major Kendall; Mr. Paul MacGahan, the son of the “Liberator of Bulgaria”; John M. LeSage, Esq., the managing editor of the Daily Telegraph; Mr. William Beer, of the Howard Memorial Library of New Orleans; Prof. Albert Bushnell Hart; General T. Dimitrieff, of Sofia, Bulgaria; the Rev. Henry E. Wing; and others who have helped me to ascertain facts difficult to verify.

I am under obligations also to Mr. J. B. Millet for the loan of the portrait group of his brother, the late Francis D. Millet, and Mr. MacGahan; to the Century Company, for the portrait of William H. Russell; to Smith, Elder & Company, for the portrait of Edmond O’Donovan; and to Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner & Company, for that of Henry Richard Vizetelly.

F. Lauriston Bunuarp.

Boston, September 1, 1914.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Acknowledgement is made of the courtesy of the following publishers who gave permission for the use of quoted material as here listed:

William Blackwood & Sons, from G. W. Steevens’s “ With the Conquering Turk” and “ With Kitchener to Khartoum”’;

The Canadian Magazine, from articles by Frederic Villiers;

Cassell & Company, Ltd., from Archibald Forbes’s “Memories of War and Peace’”’;

Chapman & Hall, Ltd., from Bennet Burleigh’s “‘ Desert Warfare,” “Sirdar and Khalifa” and “The Khartoum Campaign”;

Chatto & Windus, from E. A. Vizetelly’s “The Lover’s Progress”’;

Dodd, Mead & Company, from Steevens’s “Capetown to Ladysmith,” and to Mr. James B. Pinker, owner of the English copyright of the work;

Duckworth & Company, from the English edition of George W. Smalley’s “Anglo-American Memories”’;

Longmans, Green & Company, from E. F. Knight’s _ “Madagascar in War Time,” Winston Churchill’s “Story of the Malakand Field Force” and “ From Londonto Ladysmith”;

Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Company, from James Creelman’s “On the Great Highway ’”’;

McClure’s Magazine, from an article by George W. Smalley;

Macmillan & Company, Ltd., from Forbes’s ‘Souvenirs of Some Continents” and “The War Correspondence of the Daily News”’;

C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd., from E. H. Vizetelly’s “Cyprus to Zanzibar’’;

G. P. Putnam’s Sons, from Smalley’s “Anglo-American Memories”’;

xl xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., from W. H. Russell’s “The Crimean War,” “My Diary in India,” and “My Diary during the Last Great War’”’;

Sampson, Low, Marston & Company, from J. A. Mac- Gahan’s “Campaigning on the Oxus”’;

Smith, Elder & Company from E. O’Donovan’s “The Merv Oasis”’;

T. Fisher Unwin, from Burleigh’s “Two Campaigns. ’’

CHAPTER

Contents

PAGE

The War Correspondent: His Rise and the Problematical Future of his Profession........... 1 mevulism Howard Russell... 0... 60... 62. 31 MRRRER RCPS OT DCS 85 oF Reels We ese ee was 69 Januarius Aloysius MacGahan................. 115 Merereren Villiers 20050803 legs Bho ees 155 MPEP IOIO Tove tiene Viva es Sy alc hfs 192 mentee ©) Donovan: (clo ee ee eee 231 tune ive Vizetellys . ov... leaden Q47 Edward Frederick Knight.................... 286 George Warrington Steevens ................. 304 Winston Spencer Churchill................... 320 EEE CRCHTUSN «53 sept oto oureano ie nat oo kc ra 336 George Wilkins Kendall ...................... 351 ** Covering’ the Civil War in America ........ 8375 Reporting the Spanish-American War.......... 409

4 ioe he a

Chapter I

Toe War CoRRESPONDENT: His RISE AND THE PROBLEMATICAL FutTURE OF His PROFESSION

“|. . the extraordinary devotion and energy of the press, of which

the country may well be proud, have created, under very great difficulty,

what may be called a war literature, unexampled in ability and interest,

putting before the public all the various astonishing events which have so rapidly succeeded each other in this tremendous struggle.” — Lord Granville, 1870.

“Those newly invented curses to armies — I mean newspaper correspondents.”

— Sir Garnet Wolseley.

“The life of the modern war correspondent cannot be described as being exactly a bed of roses. The glorious days of the profession, when William Russell and Archibald Forbes and their like flourished, have gone, never to return.”’

— Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett

WE are told that the profession of war correspondence is out of date. War has become as much a matter of business calculation as any industrial enterprise, and in the interest of efficiency the newspaper man has been eliminated. Daring and dash no longer win battles. Close range actions and cavalry charges have faded into the picturesque past. The application of scientific methods to what was once the splendid game of kings has stretched the little battle line of Waterloo to the one hundred and fifty miles of Mukden, and has relegated the commanding generals to some point far in the rear of the firing trenches, where, with a battery of telephones, a corps of telegraphers and a roll of charts, they receive reports and send orders, not by galloping aides, but by wire.

The contending armies thus pushed apart and the lines of battle thus extended, the artist and the correspondent find themselves confronted by insuperable obstacles which render impossible the duplication of the feats of men like Archibald Forbes and William Howard Russell. They cannot see a battle. Episodes and incidents may come under their observation — provided they are permitted to get within reach of the firing line. ‘These experiences may furnish the materials for articles which editors will welcome as “good stuff,’ if the press men are allowed to forward their copy. But the blue pencil relentlessly takes the thrill and throb out of their despatches. Wires do not sizzle and cables do not oscillate nowadays with the stories from the “specials at the front.”” Correspondents are kept in ‘straight-jackets, “cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d,”’ hampered, limited, and circumscribed. And therefore, we are assured, the alluring profession of the war special no longer ‘nvites the newspaper man.

Yet all these things have been said before. In 1880 the then Lieutenant, now General, Francis Vinton Greene, U.S. A., the friend of Januarius Mac- Gahan, was writing of the drab colors of the military pageant which once had made so brave ashow. ‘How very prosaic the modern battle can be with its longrange muskets,” he said. “How tame as a mere spectacle — how little action there is in it. Yet this is characteristic of nearly all battles now. Up to the last moment of the final advance, which is decisive of victory or defeat, but which seldom lasts half an hour,

.. . the dramatic features of battle have become short-lived. and infrequent.” In one of his books upon the Boer War, Winston Spencer Churchill exclaimed: “‘Alas! the days of newspaper enterprise in war are over. What can one do with a censor, a forty-eight-hour delay, and a fifty-word limit on the wire?’”? And Alexander Innes Shand, relating the situation after the Russo-Japanese War, declared: “The war correspondent is notably the victim of the cycles. He was, he is, and it seems likely that he may cease to be.”

IT do not think that he will cease to be, and for reasons which will presently appear. His province will be more defined and his sphere of action will be more circumscribed. Times change and he must change with them. The policies of the newspapers and of the war offices will be determined by two fundamental considerations: the right of the public — which pays the bills, furnishes the soldiers and mourns the dead — to know how well, or ill, a war is planned and fought, and the right of the men entrusted with the command of armies and navies to impose such restraints and compel such concealments as the strategy of a campaign may require.

The war correspondent is a newspaper man assigned to cover a campaign. He goes into the field with the army, expecting to send his reports from that witching region known as “the front.” He is a special correspondent commissioned to collect intelligence and transmit it from the camp and the battle ground. A non-combatant, he mingles freely with men whose business it is to fight. He may be ten thousand miles from his home office, but he finds competition as keen as ever it is in Fleet Street or Newspaper Row. He is engaged in the most dramatic department of a profession whose infinite variety is equalled only by its fascination. If he becomes a professional rather than an occasional correspondent, wandering will be his business and adventure his daily fare. Mr. A. G. Hales is of the opinion that the newspaper man who is chosen as a war correspondent has won the Victoria Cross of journalism. For the making of a first-rate war correspondent there are required all the qualifications of a capable reporter in any other branch of the profession, and others besides. Perhaps it is true that the regular hack work of an ordinary newspaper man is the best training for the scribe of war. The men who had reported fires and train wrecks in American cities proved themselves able to describe vigorously and clearly the campaign in Cuba. William Howard Russell had been doing a great variety of descriptive writing before he was sent to the Crimea. The prime requisites for a satisfactory war correspondent are those fundamental to success in any kind of newspaper service, the ability to see straight, to write vividly and accurately, and to get a story on the wire.

Occasionally a brilliant workman appears from nowhere, the happy possessor of an almost uncanny intuition of movements and purposes. Such a man was Archibald Forbes. But Forbes, no less than the average special, had to have the physical capacity to march with the private soldier, to ride a hundred miles at a clip at top speed over rough country, to sleep in the open, to stand the heat of the desert and the cold of the mountain height, to endure hunger and thirst and all the deprivations of a hard campaign. Every correspondent at times must keep going until his strength is utterly spent. He must have the tenacity which does not yield to exhaustion until his messages are written and on the way to his paper. When the soldier ceases fighting the correspondent’s work is only begun. He needs also to have a degree of familiarity with the affairs of the present and the history of the past which will secure him the respect of the officers with whom he may associate. Along with the courage of the scout he should possess the suavity and tact of the diplomat, for he will have to get along with men of all types, and occasionally, indeed, his own influence may lap over into the field of international diplomacy. British correspondents, having covered many wars, small and great, since 1870, usually are acquainted with several languages, and often have acquired a knowledge of the technicalities of military science. Students of the history of journalism pronounce the influence of the wars in the Low Countries upon the development of English periodicals to have been considerable. A precedent for the work of the war correspondent may be found in the “Swedish Intelligence” which contains entertaining reports about the armies of Gustavus Adolphus. But the first observers to whom it is possible to apply the term are Henry Crabbe Robinson and Charles Lewis Gruneisen, and only the latter was an actual spectator of the events he described. Usually William Howard Russell is called the inventor of war correspondence, and the first professional war correspondent he certainly was. But what is said in the biography of the famous editor of The Times, John Thaddeus Delane, that when Russell was sent to the Crimea the “idea of having a special correspondent with the army, moving with the troops and describing in detail every action and incident of the camp, was an entirely new feature in journalism,” is not quite true, for precisely that thing was done eight years previously in the war between the United States and Mexico. In America the fact has been almost forgotten and in England it never perhaps has been known, but it is true that in 1846 and 1847 the newspapers of New Orleans were manifesting a degree of enterprise in reporting the campaigns of Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott which would be entirely worthy of the most celebrated dailies of today.

Even a century ago the Duke of Wellington was registering protests against such a mild type of war reporting as that done by Crabbe Robinson in the Peninsula. In 1809 he declared that “in some instances the English newspapers have accurately stated not only the regiments occupying a position, but the number of men fit for duty of which each regiment was composed; and this intelligence must have reached the enemy at the same time as it did me, at a moment at which it was most important that he should not receive it.” Verily that protest has a most modern sound. Mr. Atkins suggests in his biography of Russell that it may have been because of the repeated warnings of the -English commander that there was no correspondent in the later Peninsular campaigns and none at Waterloo. That final conflict of the Napoleonic Wars had a little more than a column in the Morning Chronicle, and three-fourths of that space was devoted to the list of |; the killed and wounded. ry

Henry Crabbe Robinson really was more of a foreign special than a war correspondent. Between the months of March and August, 1807, he sent letters “from the Banks of the Elbe” to The Times. He took up his residence at Altona, where arrangements were made with a German editor to place at his disposal not only

THE WAR CORRESPONDENT is all public documents, but a quantity of information which the limits imposed upon the German press prevented the editor himself from using, a fact which suggests interesting inquiries as to the censorship of a century ago. A very comfortable and pleasurable time he had at Altona, mingling freely in the social life of the town, and sending duly to his paper accounts of the hopes and fears and rumors which made the gossip of the courts of Europe. Napoleon had won Jena and advanced into Poland. It was a time of grave anxiety in every capital. The battle of Friedland was fought on June 14, but the correspondent did not have the news until June 20.

The next year Robinson went out again for The Times, and from August, 1808, to the first of the following February he was dating his letters “from the Shores of the Bay of Biscay.” On July 19, immediately after the outbreak of the Spanish Revolution, he started from London with instructions to collect news and forward it by every vessel that left the port of Corunna where he landed on the last day of the month. From a local editor he secured the papers published in the Spanish capital, and the time between sailings was devoted to the translation of public documents and the writing of comments upon them, and to social intercourse with the “grand ladies and noblemen” who were numerous in the city. It is altogether likely that he did not see a shot fired in the whole campaign unless at a great distance. The battle of Corunna was fought and the death of Sir John Moore occurred on January 16, 1809, but he knew nothing of the fighting until he went to dine and found the great room, usually full of gay life, deserted and not a red coat in sight. A waiter said to him: ‘Have you not heard, sir? The French are come;

they are fighting.” The correspondent walked a mile or more out of town and remained until dark, when he went aboard a ship in the harbor. He heard the cannonading which seemed to “come from the hills about three miles from Corunna,” and he saw the wounded and the French prisoners brought into the city. Yet, although the vessel remained for two days, he seems not to have secured any details of the battle nor even to have heard of the death of the English commander.

The next war special was Mr. Gruneisen, who, in March, 1837, was sent by the Morning Post (whose foreign department he had managed) to observe the fighting in Spain. He made his start with all the speed of a modern, for within two hours he received his first notice, took his instructions, obtained his passport, and boarded the night mail for Dover. Having reported upon conditions at San Sebastian, he accompanied the British Legion and for some time was attached to the headquarters of Don Carlos. Although he is better remembered as a musical critic, Gruneisen proved himself a good journalist. He did not spare himself in his efforts to see the incidents of which he wrote, and he was present at several small actions and at the battle of Villar de los Navarros. After one victory the soldiers, contrary to the orders of Don Carlos, were about to massacre a number of prisoners, when the correspondent, having tried several expedients in vain, at last managed to save their lives by revealing himself to the commander as a Freemason. He was with the army in the advance upon Madrid, and in the retreat which followed he endured severe hardships and several times was in danger of death.

In October was fought the battle of Retuerta, after which he determined to quit Spain, but instead he fell into the hands of the Christinos. For a time he was in peril of execution as a Carlist, and once he was actually led out to be shot. He trusted to his neutral position for deliverance, and made no use in his own behalf of the appeal which had saved the Carlist prisoners. After a period of imprisonment at Pamplona and much suffering, the influence of Lord Palmerston and of Count Mole, then the French Premier, effected his release. Gruneisen returned to England in January, 1838. Later he served as the Paris correspondent of the Morning Post, and organized a carrier pigeon service between the French city and London, which was regarded as a remarkable stroke of energy. In this connection it should be noted that in the Carlist struggle The Times received letters from the noted C. F. Henningsen, who fought in Spain as a soldier of fortune, and was also made prisoner by the Christinos. He was liberated at the same time as Gruneisen and upon the same condition, that he stay out of Spain during the continuance of the war.

But the custom of sending special correspondents to report campaigns dates in America only from the time of the Mexican War and in Europe from the campaign in the Crimea. When General Scott entered the City of Mexico in 1847 there were only a few hundred miles of telegraph in the United States, and in the whole Crimean War Russell sent but one telegram, a few words announcing the fall of Sebastopol. Not until November, 1851, was direct telegraphic communication established between London and Paris, and at about that time Algernon Borthwick, later known as Lord Glenesk and then the Paris representative of the Morning Post, wrote his father that the use of the wire “cleaned out his pockets sadly.”” He went on to ask for £20, as there was ‘‘a prospect of warm work”’ and he would “have to keep the electric fluid constantly flowing.” Truly that was the day of small things.

Expense accounts have mounted very fast since then. The cable tolls of The Times for despatches from Egypt in 1882 and 1883 when C. F. Moberly Bell was its correspondent footed up more than £18,000 for fourteen months. The cost of cabling Mr. Bell’s account of the bombardment of Alexandria was £800. For ten columns of news from Uganda a few years later the paper paid £2200. Among the large sums paid by American papers probably the earliest for the cabling of important news were the $7000 in gold by the New York Herald for the transmission of the whole of the speech of the King of Prussia after the battle of Sadowa in 1866, and the $5000 paid in 1870 by the New York Tribune for its account of the battle of Gravelotte. These amounts have many times been exceeded in the last score of years. At the time of Russell’s departure for the East newspaper circulations also were small as compared with today’s figures. The Tumes, in 1852, had a circulation of about 40,000. After about twenty years Shirley Brooks was saying to Sir John Robinson: “You and Bismarck are the only persons who have gained in this war,’’ referring to the enormous increases in the circulation of the Daily News which were the reward of its exertions in the Franco-Prussian War. In one week the paper is supposed to have jumped from a circulation of 50,000 to three times that number of copies.

The “war extra”’ is one of the most common tokens of present-day newspaper enterprise, but one has only to go a little way into the past to see how great is the contrast between the conditions in Fleet Street and

Newspaper Row a half-century ago and today. To find the very first battle extra, however, the search must be extended back to 1759, when there was published “‘by authority”? an issue of the London Gazette *Extraordinary’”’ at the Whitehall Palace, telling of the capture of Quebec by General Wolfe. But consider how the news of the battle of the Alma was given to the city of London. The battle was fought on Wednesday, September 20, 1854. On the afternoon of Saturday, September 30, the publisher of the Gazette was in his office in St. Martin’s Lane when he received a message summoning him to the Secretary of War in Downing Street. He hurried to the War Office and found the Secretary greatly excited over the “glorious news”’ and much concerned as to how the people were to get the news on that Saturday evening as there were no papers. The publisher suggested that a special Gazette be printed and copies sent to the theatres to be read from the stage. It was done and a sudden stop came to most of the performances.

The stery of the battle had been carried to Constantinople and the British Ambassador there had written a telegram which had been sent away by messenger on Saturday, the twenty-third. The nearest place where there was a wire available was Belgrade, and the courier had ridden over the Balkans and through Servia taking a week for the journey. The special Gazette's report contained but a few lines and there were inaccuracies in these. On the Sunday there was a supplement issued with a brief telegram from Lord Raglan and then there was a wait of many days before the long lists of three thousand killed and wounded were received and printed.

The year 1870, when France and Germany were fighting the war out of which issued United Germany and the Third French Republic, was the transition period in the history of war correspondence. Up to that time the specials won their reputations by the graphic qualities of their descriptive articles. As Forbes says: “‘They had no telegraph wire to be at once their boon and their curse; for them, in the transmission of their work, there was seldom any other expedient than the ordinary post from the camp or the base; or, at the best, a special express messenger.” In the American Civil War the telegraph was used to a vast extent. Yet at the outbreak of the campaign of 1870, European journals had no notion of substituting the instantaneous wire for the laggard mail. They thought of the economies of the slower vehicle and relied upon Reuter’s Agency for their foreign news. Before the war was more than begun astounding feats were being achieved and the whole art of war reporting was being revolutionized. The revolution would not have been possible had there not been able and ingenious men in the field, and of these the most remarkable was Archibald Forbes. Yet it is a fact which is not generally understood that the celebrated special of the Daily News did not precipitate the change. The idea of substituting the wire for the mail seems to have been carried to England by George W. Smalley of the New York Tribune. But he was unwilling to trust the wire under some circumstances, and, as American correspondents had carried tidings from the battle fields of Virginia to Washington and New York City, so he directed his men to come with their copy from France to London. The story is related at length in Smalley’s “Memories” with which should be compared the account in “Fifty Years in Fleet Street,” by Sir John Robinson of the Daily News.