CHAPTER VI

MR. BELLOC AND THE WAR

Having contrasted these two summaries, we will leave the reader to form his own estimate of the nature of Mr. Belloc's work and of the qualifications he brings to it. There remains to be determined the measure of success which has attended Mr. Belloc's "attempt to give an explanation of what is taking place." "There are many men," he says, "who could do the same thing." On this point we cannot argue with Mr. Belloc. He may know them: we do not. What we do know is that there are many men who are trying to do the same thing. In saying this we have no wish to belittle either individuals or as a class those courageous gentlemen, among whom the best-known, perhaps, are Colonel Repington and Colonel Maude, who are striving, and striving honestly, we believe, to provide the readers of various papers with an intelligent explanation of the courses taken by the different campaigns. Nor do we regard them as in any way imitators of Mr. Belloc. We merely assert that no single one of them is achieving his object so nearly as Mr. Belloc is achieving his. This should not be understood to mean that the course of events has proved Mr. Belloc to be right more often than it has proved his contemporaries to be right, though if it were possible to collate all the necessary evidence, such a statement might conceivably be proved correct. This assertion should be understood, rather, to mean that no single commentary on the war, regularly contributed to any journal or newspaper, displays those merits of dispassionate honesty, detailed explanation and lucid exposition in so marked a degree as does Mr. Belloc's weekly commentary in _Land and Water_.

Were there any necessity to adduce proof of this it would be sufficient to regard the great gulf fixed between the circulation of _Land and Water_ and any other weekly journal of the same price. It is of greater service, however, to realize how and why Mr. Belloc surpasses his contemporaries than to waste space and time in proving what is already an admitted fact. The two outstanding features of Mr. Belloc's work in _Land and Water_--two of the most conspicuous features, indeed, as will be seen in the course of this book, of all his work--are his fierce sincerity and amazing lucidity. In this first characteristic we are willing to believe that his respectable contemporaries equal though they cannot surpass him. We will suppose, though we can find no signs of it, that they equal him in that extraordinary combination of qualifications acquired by study, travel and experience which he has been seen to possess. Even then, all other things being supposed equal, they fall far short of him in this quality of lucidity.

This is not merely the gift of the journalist to state things plainly. It is the gift of the Latin races which Mr. Belloc was given at his birth: it is the furnace of thought in which Mr. Belloc has forged his prose style into a finely-tempered instrument.

Two of life's chief difficulties, it has often been said, are, first, to think exactly, and, second, to give your thought exact expression. It is the lot of the majority of men to know what they want to say but to be unable to say it. Many men are shy of expressing their thoughts because of the very present but indefinite feeling they have that their thoughts, though real and sound in their minds, become in some extraordinary way unreal and unsound when expressed. That this curious transformation takes place we all know; newspaper reporters carry incontestable evidence of it in their notebooks. Few public speakers, indeed, realize how deeply in debt they are to reporters, who are trained in the art of reproducing in their reports and conveying to the public, not what the speaker said, but what he intended to say. And this curious transformation of our thoughts in the process of expression from reality to unreality, from sense to nonsense; this divergence between thought and language; this disability under which we all labour, but which so few of us overcome, which is so common among men as almost to justify the jibe that "language was given to men to conceal their thought," is due entirely, of course, to the insufficiency of our power of expression. A speaker or writer is great in proportion as his power of expression nears perfection.

According as we are satisfied to read in print what a writer says, and do not find it necessary to read between the lines what he intended to say, we may regard him as possessed of lucidity of thought and lucidity of style.

Many of the ideas, emotions and actions to which Mr. Belloc has given expression in his essays are so intimate a part of the collective experience of man as to allow each one of us to see that he has visualized and expressed them with exactness; and so to realize that he possesses in his style a wonderful instrument.

With the aid of that instrument it has been said he can expose the technicalities of a battle or the transformations of the human heart. How great is the power of that instrument is at no time so generally susceptible to proof as when it is seen applied to facts as in the writings of Mr. Belloc on the war, which it is proposed to examine in this chapter. But before we enter upon our examination of the nature and influence of those writings, it may be well to emphasize their importance as an example of style.

In his writings on the war, and more especially in his weekly chronicle in _Land and Water_, Mr. Belloc is not expressing views or ideas of his own; he is not writing in support of the thesis or argument; he is stating facts. He is stating the facts of military science, which may be found in a hundred books, side by side with the facts of the war, which may be found in a thousand official _communiques_; and he is stating both sets of facts, so that the one set is explanatory of the other set, and so that both may be easily understood. This Mr. Belloc is only able to accomplish by virtue of his peculiar power of lucid expression.

Not alone, then, in this particular, but supremely alone in this particular, Mr. Belloc towers above other contemporary writers on the war. He can explain as they can never explain: expound as they can never expound: describe as they can never describe. His meaning stands clear in print while theirs must be read between the lines. He makes himself understood while we must make ourselves understand them.

This is the supreme power that has carried all his other powers to fruition. We do not think that "there are many men who could do the same thing."

That this great power, tremendous as it is, is afflicted by weaknesses in practice is unfortunately true. These weaknesses arise mainly from the clash of Mr. Belloc's overpowering honesty with the cynical attitude towards newspapers in general which recent methods in journalism have engendered in the public. There was a time in the history of journalism when it was a crime to be wrong. For "wrong" modern journalism has substituted "dull." In recent years competition among newspaper proprietors and editors of newspapers has not been, as in times past, for the most reliable news or the most trustworthy views on important events, but for the latest news and the brightest "stories." The reputation for a newspaper which has been looked upon as pre-eminently desirable is not that it should be regarded by the public as well-informed or as expressing a sound judgment, but as pithy and interesting. The inevitable consequence of this tendency is that the great mass of English daily newspapers have lost their former high place in the estimation of the public as serious and necessary institutions, and have descended to the level of an amusement. The only exceptions that can be made from this sweeping condemnation are the _Daily Telegraph_, the _Morning Post_, the _Manchester Guardian_, and the _Westminster Gazette_. Of the rest, some are of a higher, some of a lower type, but all are virtually forms of amusement and of distraction rather than of learning and instruction. What differences exist between them are differences of degree, not differences of kind. Some of them may be compared to a good comedy; others to those musical plays which are less plays than exercises in the production of plays; many rank no higher than the picture palace. The most base of all, though they rank as distractions, can scarcely be classed as amusements. They are patent medicines. It has been well said that the _Daily Mail_ has achieved what no other paper has ever achieved, in enabling some millions of the English proletariat to be whisked from the breakfast to the office table every day of the week and to forget in the process the discomfort they undergo.

Viewed from the other side, the existence of this state of affairs argues a curious temper of mind in the public, which permitted and assisted, even if it did not always quite approve of its continuance. That is to say, English people bought and read the papers which were pithy and interesting, but did not imagine that they were learned or instructive, and when, by chance, they sought some statement on which they could place reliance, they realized that it could not be found in the newspapers. This strange development in the attitude of the public towards newspapers in general, real as it is, is hard to follow and difficult to define. It was due in great measure to the fact that the public in ever-increasing numbers was gradually ceasing to regard as real what the newspapers regarded as real. The chief realities for the newspapers remained the various aspects of capitalism and party politics, when to the public eye other things already appeared more real. The whole effect of this development may best be summed up, perhaps, in the expression, half of annoyance, half of resignation, so usual on the lips of newspaper readers: "It says so in the paper, but who knows how much to believe."

Some such pass had been reached in the growing estrangement between the public and the Press when the war broke out and the public was faced by an event of overwhelming interest. The people of England woke to a desire for the truth and clamoured for the newspapers to give it to them. The newspapers were helpless. They had forgotten where truth was to be found. So far as any of our modern newspaper men could remember it was one of those antiquated encumbrances, such as wood-cuts and flat-bed machines, which they had banished long ago. The only distinct impression of it they retained was that it had been plainly labelled "not interesting." So they met the emergency by buying a new set of type, blacker and deeper than any they had used before, and introducing the page headline.

We have seen how, while the mass of the English Press was left fatuously floundering before the spectacle of the greatest military event the world has ever seen, Mr. Belloc set out quite simply to give the public an account, week by week, of the progress of that event which was as plain and as truthful as he could make it. That approximately a hundred thousand persons are willing to pay sixpence a week to read this account we already know. It is inevitable, however, that a considerable percentage of Mr. Belloc's readers should approach his commentary in _Land and Water_ in the same attitude of mind as they have for so long approached the perusal of the daily newspaper. They will tend to speak of Mr. Belloc's articles as "interesting" or "dull," forgetting that criticism on these lines can rightly be directed only to the events of which Mr. Belloc is writing. For it is not Mr. Belloc's object to make the events of the war interesting to his readers. It does not even remotely concern him whether those events are interesting or not. His sole object is to give his readers as detailed an explanation of the nature of those events and as clear an account of their progress as it is possible for him to give.

There is one other point in which Mr. Belloc's amazing lucidity is afflicted by a peculiar weakness in practice. The method which he adopts so extensively of explaining situations by means of diagrams is undoubtedly very successful. It has, however, its limitations. So long as the situation which he is concerned to describe is of a simple nature it may be admirably expressed in diagrammatic form. When, however, the situation itself is complex the diagram is also necessarily complex, which results, in the text of his writing, in long strings of letters or figures which lead to almost greater confusion than would the enumeration of the objects they are intended to represent. This weakness appears very plainly in a passage in _A General Sketch of the European War_, in which Mr. Belloc describes how the Allied force in the operative corner before Namur stood with relation to the two natural obstacles of the rivers Sambre and Meuse and the fortified zone round the point where they met. To illustrate the position of the Allied force he draws a diagram which is excellently clear. In describing this diagram, however, he falls into difficulties which may be seen very plainly in the following extract in which he describes the French plan:

Now, the French plan was as follows. They said to themselves: "There will come against us an enemy acting along the arrows VWXYZ, and this enemy will certainly be in superior force to our own. He will perhaps be as much as fifty per cent. stronger than we are. But he will suffer under these disadvantages:

"The one part of his forces, V and W, will find it difficult to act in co-operation with the other part of his forces, Y and Z, because Y and Z (acting as they are on an outside circumference split by the fortified zone SSS) will be separated, or only able to connect in a long and roundabout way. The two lots, V and W, and Y and Z, could only join hands by stretching round an awkward angle--that is, by stretching round the bulge which SSS makes, SSS being the ring of forts round Namur. Part of their forces (that along the arrow X) will further be used up in trying to break down the resistance of SSS. That will take a good deal of time. If our horizontal line AB holds its own, naturally defended as it is, against the attack from V and W, while our perpendicular line BC holds its own still more firmly (relying on its much better natural obstacle) against YZ, we shall have ample time to break the first and worst shock of the enemy's attack, and to allow, once we have concentrated that attack upon ourselves, the rest of our forces, the masses of manoeuvre, or at any rate a sufficient portion of them, to come up and give us a majority in _this_ part of the field."

Alongside these slight criticisms we may mention, perhaps, another criticism which has been publicly levelled against Mr. Belloc's writings on the military aspect of the present war. The issue of the _Daily Mail_ of September 6, 1915, contained an article in which Mr. Belloc was charged with grave errors of judgement. The gist of this article was that Mr. Belloc had regarded an enemy offensive in the West in the spring of 1915, as certain to take place, whereas, in point of fact, the Germans made their great effort against the Russians in the East. This was the chief charge brought against Mr. Belloc; and to it were added a number of lesser charges of which the majority were perfectly just, showing how in this place and in that Mr. Belloc had overrated one factor or underrated another.

With this criticism it is unnecessary to concern ourselves further than to note the nature of Mr. Belloc's reply, which appeared in _Land and Water_ on September 18, 1915:

There is in such an indictment as this [he says] nothing to challenge, because I would be the first, not only to admit its truth, but, if necessary, to supplement the list very lengthily. To write a weekly commentary upon a campaign of this magnitude--a campaign the facts of which are concealed as they have been in no war of the past--is not only an absorbing and very heavy task, but also one in which much suggestion and conjecture are necessarily doubtful or wrong, and to pursue it as I have done steadily and unbrokenly for so many months has tried my powers to the utmost.

But I confess that I am in no way ashamed of such occasional errors in judgment and misinterpretations, for I think them quite unavoidable. They will be discovered in every one of the many current commentaries maintained upon the war throughout the Press of Europe and even in the calculations of the General Staffs. Nay, I will now add to the list spontaneously: In common with many others, I thought that an invasion of Silesia was probable last December. At the beginning of the war I believed that the French operations in Lorraine would develop towards the north--an opinion which will be found registered many months later in the official records recently published. In the matter of numbers my early estimates exaggerated the proportion of wounded to killed, while only a few weeks ago I guessed for the number of German prisoners in the West a number which subsequent official information conveyed to me proved to be erroneous by between 17 and 18 per cent. I long worked on the idea that the line from Ivangorod to Cholm was a double line--a matter of some importance last July. I have since found that it was single. The total reserve within and behind Paris which decided the battle of the Marne was, I believe (though the matter is not yet public), less large than I had suspected, and the figures I gave would rather include the Sixth Army as well as the Army of Paris. A few weeks ago I suggested that there was difficulty in moving a great body of men rapidly across the Upper Wierpz. Yet the movement, when it was made, might fairly be described as rapid. At any rate, the aid lent to the Archduke came more promptly than had seemed possible. I certainly thought, though I did not say so in so many words, that the capture of the bridgehead at Friedrichstadt would involve an immediate and successful advance by the enemy upon Riga, and in this opinion, I believe, no single authority, enemy or ally, differed. What has caused the check to the enemy advance here for ten full days no one in the West can tell, nor, for that matter, does any news from Russia yet enlighten us.

To this criticism of the writer in the _Daily Mail_ Mr. Belloc's reply is so final and complete that any addition would be out of place. It is very necessary, however, that we should devote careful consideration to the facts which prompted the publication of this criticism; and this will be done in the succeeding chapter.