TELLING THE WORLD ABOUT A WAR

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22582, 21 November 1936, Page 17 (Supplement)

TELLING THE WORLD ABOUT A WAR

SIX war correspondents—Major General J. F. C. Fuller, of the Daily.- Mail, Mr. Patrick Balfour of the Evening Standard, Mr. Mortimer Duraiul, of the Daily Telegraph, M. Edmund Demaitre, of the Excelsioj (Paris), Mr. Stuart Emenv, of the .News Chronicle, and Mr. Ladislas Farago, of the New York Times and Sunday Chronicle have contributed the chapters of a most interesting book, "Abyssinian Stop Press.'' Each viewed the war —or endeavoured to do so from a distance or under difficulty—from a different angle and each, alsoj writes with his own standard of news value in mind. Tho result is a wide bird's eye view of the tragic war which has brought the huge and little known country of Abyssinia into tho Italian Empire. Lesson lor Europe Major-General Fuller, who writes as a soldier-journalist concludes his section as follows: • "This war will be looked back upon as one of the most remarkable ever fought. Not only does it show beyond dispute the enormous influence of modern weapon-power in such undertakings, but also it demonstrates clearly enough the changing nature or war between civilised nations. It is true that, in such wars, armaments aro j far more equal; yet it is also true that j in them aircraft targets aro far more j abundant, because the population is j more dense.

"If it is possible by means of chemical and high explosive bombs to demoralise the tribesmen of a mountainous region, how much more possible is it to demoralise the inhabitants in the overcrowded cities and industrial areas of the great civilised powers. Again, it may well be asked, what place have the old arms in battle when confronted by the new? Hud the Xegus been supported by a vast army of European cavalry, infantry and horse-drawn artillery, would he have been much better off? Irf many ways he would have been far worse off; because he would have had more mouths to feed and the air targets would have grown larger. "What does this then lead us to suppose? That in another European war the decisive weapon will be the aeroplane, and when it has defeated or mastered its like, the masses below are at its mercy, and that the larger the.y are not only the more vulnerable will they become, but the greater will be the social upheaval following their catastrophe." A Gay Scribbler "Fiasco in Addis Ababa" is the title of the section Jby Mr. Patrick Balfour, who was one of the many correspondents cooped up in the capital. He writes tellingly on a somewhat flippant note. This, for instance: —

"Usually you get dysentery on the way up. Parched by the sand and the heat and the early morning start you shovel far too much ice (bad ice) into your mineral water from your large •Japanese thermos; and when you stop at a station for food (Greek food: too much food) they shovel a lot more into your beer (Abyssinian beer). So you usually get dysentery. "But I was lucky. I only had my passport stolen. It was stolen at Diredawa, by one of the yattering Abyssinian mob in the Customs House, while I was trying to restrain ■.he Abyssinian customs officer from rifling my suitcase entirely. One of the mob took it out of my pocket, and I never saw it again." Again:—

"The correspondents and other vultures, smelling war, began to arrive in Addis Ababa in June. Br August they numbered fifty. By October, when the war started, they had topped the hundred. Before the exodus began in December oyer one hundred and fifty Press cards had been issued: yellow cards, decorated with the Lion of Judah and an unrecognisable Armenian photograph of yourself, which, in Amharic, requested whom it might concern to grant you every facility to move and photograph freely. Of course, the freedom of circulation was a mockery, since it confined you to Addis Ababa, Harar, and the railway. But that is neither here nor there." A "League ol Nations" Furthermore:— "There wore Englishmen, Frenchmen, quantities of Americans, Germans, Austrians, Poles, Swiss, Spaniards, Czechs, Soviet Russians, Dutchmen, Danes, Swedes, Egyptians, a " but Italians, to add to the already Polyglot nature of Addis Ababa's five thousand white (or off-white) inhabitants. "There was ji Latvian colonel with an eyeglass, in impeccable ridingcostume on n fine white horse, who wore a variety of uniforms with rows of medals, who seemed familiar with the circus ring and who proudly flourished a certificate from the French Consul in Berlin to say that lie had crossed the Sahara on a camel. " There was Colonel Haroun-al-Raschid ("H. al 11." with a crown, emblazoned on his luggage): a hald little Prussian who had instructed a 1 urkish machine-corps in the war and earned tlie title of King of MachineRuns (which apparently sounded enough like Haroun-al-Kasehid to make no difference). "There was the persistent American lady who, when received by the wnperor, brought her own photographer to photograph them together, I w hom none of the Court officials could

lure from His Majesty's -side, on State occasions, and who wept (she said from religious emotion) when removed from the Empress' entourage where (with her photographer opposite) she had planted herself in church. "There was a round-faced little Jap, cryptic and discreet, with a falsetto laugh, who sent endless cables to Tokio, in Japanese (which none of the operators understood), stringing all the words together into one. to save money. "There was an ixcitable Spaniard in plus-fours on a horse, who complained about tho quality of the sherry, was always losing wads of notes, and wrote long messages home about the Catholics being behind the Government of Abyssinia. There was a Swedish biggame hunter with a wife like Greta Garbo. There was a Sudanese, like a monkey, with a Brazilian passport, who would skip up trees or crawl under the horses' hoofs to secure a good photograph. There was an airman from Cuba, an airman from Harlem, an airman from Monte Carlo. There was a Turkish general who was given command of an army. And there were cameramen, faking glorious battle-films, living six in a room, developing their negatives at the washstand, and facetiously photographing one another in bed when there was nothing else to photograph." Tribulations of the Press "Pound the army of journalists and adventurers grew an army of retainers," remarks Mr. Balfour. "Each had his servant and interpreter, each his spies. Speaking the most curious versions of English and French were servants too well-educated to deign to

brush your trousers, servants too illeducated to be able to do so, servants who drank and servants who stank, interpreters from mission schools who read the Bible all day long instead of interpreting, interpreters who were medical students as well and continually left you in the lurch to attend an important surgical operation: all sorts of servants and interpreters." It was not surprising that flippancy possessed Mr. Balfour. " But on the surface all was courtesy," he says. "Every assistance would be given you. There was a Press Bureau which you visited, as a sort of conventional rite, each morning. You waited for an hour or so in a bare room with a large map of Switzerland and a few Italian shipping posters on the walls. One day a wit marked -Addis Ababa and Harar on the Swiss map, and you saw newcomers studying it with earnest, puzzled expressions, wondering why they had never noticed all those lakes before. You waited for the Press Director to arrive. Menials politely and laboriously noted down your questions, and requested you to return to-morrow, when the Press Director would be there. You returned to-mor-row. The Press Director was not there. Your questions remained unanswered. And so it went on War—at a Distance

When the war started the Press Hureau became simply a Propaganda Bureau, whence emanated eternal communiques about Abyssinian victories and Italian losses, together with the latest protest to the council of the League of Nations. Soon you ceased to frequent it altogether. "To the. journalist it was like sitting in a coffee-house in London, in the eighteenth century, to report a Jacobite rebellion in the north of Scotland. "There were continual fights at the radio stndon. where people cribbed and

i stole and destroyed each other's mesI slices without scruple. Once an Armenian spy sneakeu into the office with'a message, after closing time. The correspondent of a worthy English newspaper caught him and proceeded to kick and belabour liiiu for some twenty minutes, in spite of comic protestations regarding his 'parole d'honneur.' After twenty minutes undignified buffeting the Armenian turned to his aggressor and said, 'Be careful, now, or you will provocate me.' Later he told me that he had planned to satisfy his honour with revenge. He hired some men to beat up the English correspondent while lie slept. But ho thought better of the idea. "The chief occasions of disagreement were the meetings of the Foreign Press Association, where you discussed, in theory, grievances against the authorities but, in practice, grievances against one another. These meetings provided an unanswerable argument against the feasibility of a League of Nations (at any rate at eight thousand feet). The French were perpetually 'insulte* liecause of American or English breaches of manners toward them, because they had not been placed properly at the Emperor's banquet, because they had not been given medals ; at every meeting they resigned in a body and were coaxed back. The Germans complained that no one could speak their language and they couldn't translate the communiques. The Americans complained that tlie English treated the proceedings with too great levity. The English complained that the Americans took things too seriously. "The committee was continually resigning and re-electing itself. The one word of sense, in all the meetings I attended, came from the Spaniard, who moved a motion 'that there be more news.' Thereupon, iu spite of his protests, he was at once elected a vicepresident of the association. The meeting always ended in pandemonium, from which the secretary contrived to word some unanimous request to the Government for improved facilities. The Government politely acknowledged it, and that was that. Censorship

"The only situation on which the Foreign Press Association became really unanimous was the great censorship row. Censorship of telegrams was not introduced until several weeks after the war started. The sensational messages which were emanating from Addis Ababa (including one to the effect that the city had been bombed., with five thousand casualties) made it imperative. It at once raised a storm of protest, less against the principle than the manner of its introduction. "A few weeks before there had arrived in Addis a heterogeneous detachment of Belgian officers. They came partly to succeed the recognised detachment which had trained the Imperial Guard, but was obliged, at the instance of its Government, to resign on the outbreak of war. They were a mixed lot, not countenanced by their Government and not much caring. The Emperor gave them a joint contract and various jobs. One of them, who only knew French, was appointed censor. "Without warning lie appeared, one morning, at the radio station and began censoring telegrams with arbitrary gusto, chiefly because lie did not understand what they meant. He admitted that he 'unspoke English,' though from the telegraphese phraseology of his attempts to do so, it was clear that he was trying to learn it from our cables, as he went along. A concerted protest was made. An ultimatum was delivered to the Government that the foreign correspondents would ask for their recall if the Belgian was not relieved of his responsibilities within twenty-four hours. In Somaliland "A strike was organised by which it was agreed to send no telegrams pending the Government's reply. But this petered out because too many blacklegs sneaked into the radio station to do so on the sly. No reply was received from the Government and slowly the correspondents discovered that an occasional whisky and soda to the censor 'met the case as well as any protest. So he remained, and the excitement died. Ultimately he was replaced by another Belgian, who did know a few words of Knglish. and the censorship became reasonable enough.

"When 1 returned to Addis after a two months' journey in the Red Sea and Somaliland, war among correspondents was still the chief excitement. An American correspondent had given a Latvian einematographer a sock in the jaw, when nerves were frayed on the day of the bombardment at Dessvo. The Latvian was suing him in the American Consular Court for ten thousand dollars damages. The case was still going on when I left." "According to the social code of the Somalis," says Mr. Demaitre, who was with tiie Italian army in the South, "there is no greater shame than to earn one's living by physical exertion, and they put the shepherd? at the top of their social hierarchy; all their labour consists in lying in the shade of