Now It Can Be Told | Page 4

soldiers on all the
fronts where conditions were the same.
What I have written here does not cancel, nor alter, nor deny anything
in my daily narratives of events on the western front as they are now
published in book form. They stand, I may claim sincerely and humbly,
as a truthful, accurate, and tragic record of the battles in France and
Belgium during the years of war, broadly pictured out as far as I could
see and know. My duty, then, was that of a chronicler, not arguing why

things should have happened so nor giving reasons why they should not
happen so, but describing faithfully many of the things I saw, and
narrating the facts as I found them, as far as the censorship would allow.
After early, hostile days it allowed nearly all but criticism, protest, and
of the figures of loss.
The purpose of this book is to get deeper into the truth of this war and
of all war--not by a more detailed narrative of events, but rather as the
truth was revealed to the minds of men, in many aspects, out of their
experience; and by a plain statement of realities, however painful, to
add something to the world's knowledge out of which men of good-will
may try to shape some new system of relationship between one people
and another, some new code of international morality, preventing or at
least postponing another massacre of youth like that five years' sacrifice
of boys of which I was a witness.

I
When Germany threw down her challenge to Russia and France, and
England knew that her Imperial power would be one of the prizes of
German victory (the common people did not think this, at first, but saw
only the outrage to Belgium, a brutal attack on civilization, and a
glorious adventure), some newspaper correspondents were sent out
from London to report the proceedings, and I was one of them.
We went in civilian clothes without military passports--the War Office
was not giving any--with bags of money which might be necessary for
the hire of motor-cars, hotel life, and the bribery of doorkeepers in the
antechambers of war, as some of us had gone to the Balkan War, and
others. The Old Guard of war correspondents besieged the War Office
for official recognition and were insulted day after day by junior
staff-officers who knew that "K" hated these men and thought the press
ought to be throttled in time of war; or they were beguiled into false
hopes by officials who hoped to go in charge of them and were told to
buy horses and sleeping-bags and be ready to start at a moment's notice
for the front.

The moment's notice was postponed for months . . . .
The younger ones did not wait for it. They took their chance of "seeing
something," without authority, and made wild, desperate efforts to
break through the barrier that had been put up against them by French
and British staffs in the zone of war. Many of them were arrested, put
into prison, let out, caught again in forbidden places, rearrested, and
expelled from France. That was after fantastic adventures in which they
saw what war meant in civilized countries where vast populations were
made fugitives of fear, where millions of women and children and old
people became wanderers along the roads in a tide of human misery,
with the red flame of war behind them and following them, and where
the first battalions of youth, so gay in their approach to war, so
confident of victory, so careless of the dangers (which they did not
know), came back maimed and mangled and blinded and wrecked, in
the backwash of retreat, which presently became a spate through
Belgium and the north of France, swamping over many cities and
thousands of villages and many fields. Those young writing-men who
had set out in a spirit of adventure went back to Fleet Street with a
queer look in their eyes, unable to write the things they had seen,
unable to tell them to people who had not seen and could not
understand. Because there was no code of words which would convey
the picture of that wild agony of peoples, that smashing of all civilized
laws, to men and women who still thought of war in terms of heroic
pageantry.
"Had a good time?" asked a colleague along the corridor, hardly
waiting for an answer.
"A good time!" . . . God! . . . Did people think it was amusing to be an
onlooker of world-tragedy? . . . One of them remembered a lady of
France with a small boy who had fled from Charleville, which was in
flames and smoke. She was weak with hunger, with dirty and