Page:The Newspaper and the Historian.djvu/271

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respondence has reflected the current interest in the short story . Many columns published as war news have been in reality

stories or the writers' interpretation of news, and in no true sense news from the seat of war.

The past, present, and future of the war correspondent has been definitely passed on by one of the fraternity when he says,

ridicwar " The Russo - Japanese War killed the the ulousocorrespondent; believ m s a w b n o y e t t conflict in the Balkans may be said to have buried him . He has

become not merely a nuisance , but ridiculous.” 52 But the worm turns! The war correspondent believes that he holds the blue ribbon of the profession and that it is unfair and unreasonable to judge the experts in it by the bungling, bump

tious amateurs who have crept in under the fence. He has a long list of the handicaps under which he suffers and he has enum erated many of them . He does his work under the greatest difficulties, only to have his copy “ so scissored as to resemble Mexican drawn-work ,” 53 or absolutely rejected ,54 or cut down

to an irreducible minimum of words,55 or his best laid plans 62 Sydney Brooks, " The Press in War Time," Harper's Weekly, Decem ber 21, 1912. 63 E . Vizetelly relates that in 1882 he took a telegram for the Daily News to the press censor at the headquarters of Lord Wolseley' s army, in which he stated that soldiers mortally wounded were dying in great agony because

not a drop of morphia among medical stores there had been landed . The

information was given him by a doctor of the Army Medical Staff Corps attached to the hospital, and was perfectly true, but the paragraph was removed because of objections raised by the censor and the Chief of Staff .

The latter explained , “ We can 't have statements like this sent home, you know ! A telegram of that description would cause endless trouble and

annoyance ." — Reminiscences of a Bashi-Bazouk , pp. 320- 323. 54 Archibald Forbes tells of an account written by J . A . MacGahan of the second battle of Plevna , but the Russian censor at the telegraph office any Russian mishap .” — Czar and Sultan , pp. 78 -81.

Dr. Harry Stuermer, the correspondent of the Kölnische Zeitung in Constantinople in 1915 - 16 , sent to that paper , after the death of Prince Yussuf Izzedin under suspicious circumstances, an article in which he made " only very , very slight allusions to anything of a sinister character ; but it did not find favor with the censor at the Berlin Foreign Office. The editorial staff reported : 'We have revised and touched up your report so

as at least to save the most essential part of it :' but even the altered version

did not pass the censor's blue pencil.” — Two War Years in Constantinople, Pp . 235 - 236 .

66 The official version of the first important Zeppelin raid on London was limited to fifty words. “ Here was the biggest thing that had happened to London since the start of the war and even the Northcliffe press had t