Chapter VI: Part IV: Diplomatic Papers Relating to the Origin of the War, (5)

In Germany, however, as in France, at least during the first year of the war, each correspondent, particularly a foreigner, was merely a privateer, making his own fight for a chance to work, and pulling what wires he could. After his brief excursion he returned to Berlin, a mere tourist, so to speak, and had to begin the old tiresome round--his own embassy--the German Foreign Office--the War Office--all over again. There was no organization in which he could enroll, so to speak, he had no permanent standing. This drawback--from the correspondent's point of view--was met in Austria-Hungary by the Presse Quartier, an integral part of the army like any other branch of the service, whose function it was to handle the whole complicated business of war correspondence.

The Austro-Hungarians, prepared from the first for a large number of civilian observers, including news and special writers, photographers, illustrators and painters, and, to handle them satisfactorily, organized this Presse Quartier, once admitted to which--the fakers and fly-by-nights were supposed to be weeded out by preliminary red tape--they were assumed to be serious workmen and treated as the army's guests.

The Presse Quartier--the Germans later organized one on somewhat different lines--was in two sections; an executive section with a commandant responsible for the arrangement of trips to the various fronts and the general business of censorship and publicity; and a second, an entertainment section, so to speak, also with its commandant, whose business it was to board, lodge, and otherwise look after correspondents when they were not on trips to the front. At the time I visited the Presse Quartier the executive section was in the city of Teschen, across the border of Silesia; the correspondents lived in the village of Nagybicse in Hungary, two or three hours' railroad journey away. In this village--the most novel part of the scheme--some thirty or forty correspondents were living, writing their past adventures, setting forth on new ones, or merely inviting their souls for the moment under a régime which combined the functions of tourists' bureau, rest cure, and a sort of military club.

For the time being they were part of the army--fed, lodged, and transported at the army's expense, and unable to leave without formal military permission. They were supposed to "enlist for the whole war," so to speak, and most of the Austro-Hungarian and German correspondents had so remained--some had even written books there--but a good deal of freedom was allowed observers from neutral countries and permission given to go when they felt they had seen enough.

Isolated thus in the country--the only mail the military field post, the only telegrams those that passed the military censor--correspondents were as "safe" as in Siberia. They, on the other hand, had the advantages of an established position, of living inexpensively in pleasant surroundings where their relations with the censor and the army were less those of policemen and of suspicious characters than of host and guest. To be welcomed here, after the usual fretful dangling and wire-pulling in war office anterooms and city hotels was reassuring enough.

Correspondents were quartered in private houses, and as there was one man to a family, generally, he was put in the villager's room of honor, with a tall porcelain stove in the corner, a feather bed under him and another on top. Each man had a soldier servant who looked after his boots and luggage, kept him supplied with cigars and cigarettes from the Quartier commissariat--for a paternal government included even tobacco!--and whack his heels together whenever spoken to and flung back an obedient "Ja wohl!" We breakfasted separately, whenever we felt like it, lunched and dined--officers and correspondents--together. There were soldier waiters, and on every table big carafes of Hungarian white wine, drunk generally instead of water. For beer one paid extra.

The commandant and his staff, including a doctor, and the officer-guides not on excursions at the moment, sat at the head of the long U-shaped table. Anyone who came in or went out after the commandant was supposed to advance a bit into this "U," catch his eye, bow and receive his returning nod. The silver click of spurs, of course, accompanied this salute when an officer left the room, and Austro-Hungarian and German correspondents generally snapped their heels together in semi-military fashion. All our goings and comings, indeed, were accompanied by a good deal of manner. People who had seen each other at breakfast shook hands formally half an hour later in the village square, and one bowed and was bowed to and heard the sing-song "habe die Ehre!" a dozen times a day.

With amenities of this nature the Quartier guests passed their time while waiting their turn to go to the front. There were always, while I was there, one or more parties in the field, either on the Italian or the Russian front, or both, while a few writers and artists were well enough known to be permitted to go out alone. The Hungarian, Mr. Molnar, for instance, whose play, "The Devil," was seen in America a few years ago, was writing at that time a series of letters under the general title, "Wanderings on the East Front," and apparently, within obvious military limitations, he did wander. One day, another man came into lunch with the news that he was off on the best trip he'd had yet--he was going back to Vienna for his skis, to go down into the Tyrol and work along glaciers to the battery positions. Another man, a Budapest painter, started off for an indefinite stay with an army corps in Bessarabia. He was to be, indeed, part of the army for the time being, and all his work belonged to the army first.

Foreigners not intending to remain in Austria-Hungary could not expect such privileges, naturally; but if they were admitted to the Quartier at all they were sent on the ordinary group excursions like the home correspondents themselves. Indeed, the wonder was--in view of the comparative ease with which neutral correspondents drifted about Europe; the naiveté to put it mildly, with which the wildest romances had been printed in American newspapers--that we were permitted to see as much as we did.

When a group started for the front it left Nagybicse in its own car, which, except when the itinerary included some large city--Lemberg, for instance--served as a little hotel until they came back again. The car was a clean, second-class coach, of the usual European compartment kind, two men to a compartment, and at night they bunked on the long transverse seat comfortably enough. We took one long trip of a thousand miles or so in this way, taking our own motor, on a separate flat car, and even an orderly servant for each man.

Each of these groups was, of course, accompanied by an officer guide--several were detailed at the Quartier for this special duty--whose complex and nerve-racking task it was to answer all questions, make all arrangements, report to each local commandant, pass sentries, and comfortably waft his flock of civilians through the maze of barriers which cover every foot, so to speak, of this region near the front.

The things correspondents were permitted to see differed from those seen on the other fronts less in kind than in quantity. More trips were made, but there is and can be little place for a civilian on a "front," any spot in which, over a strip several miles wide, from the heavy artillery positions of one side to the heavy artillery of the other, may be in absolute quiet one minute and the next the center of fire.

There is no time to bother with civilians during an offensive, and, if a retreat is likely, no commander wishes to have country described which may presently be in the hands of the enemy. Hidden batteries in action, reserves moving up, wounded coming back, flyers, trenches quiet for the moment--this is about as close to actual fighting as the outsider, under ordinary circumstances, can expect to get on any front.

The difference in Austria-Hungary was that correspondents saw these things, and the battle fields and captured cities, not as mere outsiders, picked up from a hotel and presently to be dropped there again, but as, in a sense, a part of the army itself. They had their commandant to report to, their "camp" and "uniform"--the gold-and-black Presse Quartier arm band--and they returned to headquarters with the reasonable certainty that in another ten days or so they would start out again.

Another advantage of the Quartier was the avoidance of the not uncommon friction between the civilians of the Foreign Office and the soldiers of the War Office. The Foreign Office runs things, so to speak, in times of peace and it is to the Foreign Office that the diplomatic representatives of foreign powers apply for favors for their own fellow-citizens. But in war time the army runs things, and the Foreign Office official who has charge of correspondents is continually promising things or wishing to do things he is not sure of being able to carry out. The result is often a rather unpleasant sort of competitive wire-pulling between correspondents, some trying the Foreign Office, some the War Office, some attacking both at the same time--one would even hear it said now and then that the surest way to get anything from the soldiers was to complain to them that the Foreign Office civilians wouldn't do anything for you!

In Austria-Hungary the Presse Quartier acted as a bridge between the two. It was the definite court to which all applicants were referred and a good deal of aimless waiting about and wire-pulling eliminated at once. And having cleared away the preliminary red-tape, the correspondent had, in the Quartier commandant, an agent more likely to push his interests than the civilian officials back in the capital and more likely to be listened to by those at the front.

The war correspondent had been "killed off" so many times in newspapers and magazines of late years that one might expect him to be as dead as the dodo, and of course the old-fashioned "horseback" correspondent--a sort of unofficial envoy extraordinary from the reading public, who carried his own elaborate outfit and rode more or less where he pleased--is extinct. A horse would have been about as useful on most of the European fronts, under the conditions prescribed, as a rowboat. What the correspondent needed, in the few hours he was permitted to see anything, was a fast motor car, and quite as much as the car itself the pass, without which it would have been stopped at the first crossroads.

Wandering round the active front where any point in a strip of several miles wide, however apparently peaceful, is under observation and likely to be at any moment under fire, is not practicable even were it permitted. Modern artillery, long range rifles, aeroplanes and field telephones have put an end to such strolling; while the elaborate system of communication in such highly civilized neighborhoods as those in which the present war is being fought, and the care with which every scrap of information about the enemy is pieced together and coordinated, makes it imperative that every possible source of such information shall be controlled.

Nevertheless the Great War had no sooner started than the old guard bobbed up serenely, and with them new ones--men and women writers, adventurous novelists, privateers of all sorts. They have kept on working and seeing more or less, and have performed necessary and valuable service. They have described the life behind the front, the life in towns, camps, prisons, hospitals and given the news--the rough general outlines--of the swiftly changing drama. Very few have seen any fighting, properly speaking, and although bits of their work here and there deserve to become part of the permanent history of the war, they themselves would be the last to suggest that they have told the real story.

The real story is of two kinds. There is the narrative of the events, the orderly, understanding arrangement and coordination of the showers of facts and rumors that blow in from a hundred sources to the great news centers far from the front. And there is the story of personal experience, the sensations of the individual as he looks into the face of war. The first tells what happened, the other how it felt. For the one, the correspondent is too near, for the other too far away.

The division of the enormous battle fronts into innumerable little news-tight compartments, so to speak, understood in their entirety only by the commanders in chief at the centers of the telegraph and telephone network far behind the front, makes it impossible for a correspondent to see very far beyond his own nose. Even were he permitted to understand the general plan of his own army he could scarcely know, while still at the front, the general plan of the enemy. A well-informed observer working comfortably at his desk in one of the capitals, with the news of the world at his disposal, with experts on every subject within easy calling distance, and with every sort of map and reference book, is much better able to write a story of the war--such a story as this, for instance--than any correspondent actually at the front, however fortunately situated. There have been many such "correspondents at home" and reporters returning from first-hand glimpses of this and that, have often for the first time understood the significance of such details when they were seen through the broad perspective and leisurely analysis of such long-distance observers.

The nourishing flavor of such a little book as Fritz Kreisler's "Four Weeks in the Trenches"--scarcely more than a magazine article, with no sensational adventures and no attempt at rhetorical effect, and of several little collections of published letters--reveals at once the correspondent's other disability. People feel that this man really was _there_--this is what one real man with a gun in his hand did feel, and not what some civilian, sitting safely out of range, imagines crowds of men might have felt. Its very incompleteness, things left out because of sensibilities so stunned that events made no mark as they whirled by, is often more impressive than the conventional war correspondent's cocksureness and windy eloquence. There are scores of men like this gifted violinist--playwriters, painters, journalists, men trained to see things in various ways--drawn in by universal service and now buried in the mass, but destined some day to emerge to normal life.

From them the story of the individual, of the fighting itself, must come long after the war is over. It will come piecemeal, from diaries now stuck away in the soldiers' pockets, from memories that will only begin to act when peace has given weary brains a chance to work again, from men now tired and dirty and horror-stunned and scarcely able to remember their own names.