ON EVERY FRONT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22628, 20 July 1935, Page 24

ON EVERY FRONT

A JOURNALIST AT WAR BLUFFS AND OTHER DEVICES | BREATH-HOLDING MOMENTS. A war correspondent sees more of war than most actual combatants do. hor one thing he is able to move about more, and also he has a good chance of living longer. On August 1, 1914, Mr J. MN. Jeffries, so he tells us m his memories of a journalist s life, left hurriedly for Belgium. He was a young man who had been on the Daily Mail baiely 1 months. Two of his colleagues had to 1 ““Pemberton and Atkinson both lived j out of London and could not hope to g t , home before they left. Atkinson had to ; cross to Holland in silk hat and tail coat, luggageless. Pemberton s luggage , was a solitary spare collar, mysteriously ; acquired. I forget frorn where he had . been summoned to the office, but ho has been pruning roses or was about to do so. Probably, though, rose-pruning costume would pass unperceived in Switzerland, j THE OFFICER’S MONOCLE. ; From Brussels Mr Jeffries went to i doomed Liege. His first piece of jour- , nalistic luck was to be on the spot ! just after the first German officer was captured. Mr Jeffries himself was m the hands of some Belgian soldiers who thought he was a spy, when, fortunately, ■ their officer arrived with his prisoner , “A German officer had been isolated, and had fought with hie back to a tree, defending himself with his sabre, till he was surrounded and received a disabling wound in {be arm. ‘lt was a miracle that we did not kill him in the failing light, said the Belgian officer, betraying in his phrase the humanity of his race. . . • ‘ He was brave,’ continued Borchardt. and when we got him we saw that he had his monocle still firmly fixed in his eye. He had worn it through our little combat. In his despatch to his paper, Mr Jeffries naturally mentioned this monocle as de- j serving of record: — , , I “ But the censor thought otherwise. . Later, in Brussels, I asked this censor why he had struck out the reference. Was the meaning not clear in the compressed context? Quite dear, answered the official; the. meaning was understood immediately. ‘ Why did you strike it out , then?' I repeated. ‘Well’ said he, it j gave an impression at once that the Lev- | mans were courageous! ’ So, as 1 have i said, a standard was set which unforinnately lasted for most of the war. ,

THE GERMANS ARRIVE. Later, in France, Mr Jeffries saw the Germans entering Compiegne, less than 50 miles from Paris. With his car handy he waited near the deserted town, only recently evacuated by the British: “ Towards 6 o’clock the Germans canie in flight, cavalry in close formation, riding stirrup by stirrup, a flood of them, all dust covered so that they were difficult to distingush, and at first I thought that they were some of our own dragoons, they came steadily towards the broken bridge. Heavier columns of duet rose behind them, from marching columns presumably, but the evening was approaching and it was not easy to distinguish very much owing to the dust. , ... “I- waited till they were about 400, yards away, and then thought I dared stay no longer. At least I had witnessed an invasion, an oncoming host as in ancient battle-stories. ...” Before he left Compiegne he was faced with it problem. The hotel manager, who stayed on, came to him and_ explained that some members of the British Staff had left behind a suitcase. What should he do about it? “ I tried to open it, but could not. Should I leave it behind or take, it with me? It was a difficult decision, i judged that as I could not associate G.H.Q.’s departure with haste, and as GH Q. after all was G.H.Q. and not likely to leavd belongings of importance behind, I had best not meddle. It might well be that this was a ruse, that the capture of the suitcase and its, examination by the Germans was desired. I told this to the manager, and he put it back where he had found it.” What happened to it nobody will ever know! A BLUFF THAT SUCCEEDED. Mr Jeffries’s own invasion of Compiegne was a brilliant piece of bluff. At that time correspondents were absolutely banned by the British, even on the fringe of the war zone. But Mr Jeffries had an imposing-looking car, and with a colleague he drove with a flourish up to, the bote* where G.H.Q. was installed:— “We alighted and I walked with, 1 trust, the proper air of quiet unconcern, past groups of orderlies and a few very worn-looking staff officers gathered on the steps. Dawbarn followed with lus petit air of being the Archbishop of Canterbury in lay clothes. A large double-bedded room was available, and we took it, ordered the car round to the garage, and proceeded to our room. I aver that we did not burry; we proceeded to it calmly, through instalments of general headquarters in corridors. Once inside, we sat down and grinned at each other.” - . Many times in France Mr Jeffries admits that he made use of a Belgian “Ordre de Laisser Passer”:— . “It was signed by the Minister ot War, by this title, that is, without surname or indication of nationality. Since its brief formula was in the French language, I saw no reason why it should not be respected by British military police, sentries, officers, or others ignorant of that tongue. So it was. indeed, as I am sure surviving provost-marshals (if any) will be glad to learn.”

“ C’EST SIR GREY." But one of his colleagues, Douglas Crawford, did better than this. Early on in the war, at some hamlet—--11 He produced the splendid passport or those times, a parchment approaching a foot and a-half long, crowned with an imposing royal escutcheon, and under this in inch-high letters topping the text, the opening sentence: ‘'We, Sir Edward Grey.’ The effect was beyond expectation. The village seigniory, with awed eyes, took their hats off and bowed low to Crawford, while through their ranks ran an excited murmur of ‘Sir Grey! C’est Sir Grey! ’ , . «To this day, no doubt, there is a tradition in the little place that at the onset of the European War there passed through it upon some strange, high errand in a disguised car the statesman who then was ruminating uncertainty in Whitehall.” ... , ~ Even this, however, is beaten by the exploit of Allan Upward, who was in Brussels when the Germans entered. Next day be decided to walk out of the city. For this he donned —of nil things his scoutmaster's uniform, almost asking to be interned! . . . , , “But the divine eccentricity which led him to use such a costume actually saved him. W 7 hen he reached the final German post on the outskirts of Brussels the officer in charge, seated on horseback to examine departures like a traffic policeman, burst into roars of laughter at the sight of the bearded man dressed like a small boy. The dress, as I say, was not universal 20 years a(;o. He waved the apparition gaily forward, without demanding papers or anything. (It is possible that he had been lunching well, celebrating victory.) Poor Upward struck me as just a trifle dissatisfied with the manner of his escape." MR CHURCHILL IN CHARGE.

During the hurried retreat from Antwerp, Mr Jeffries came upon a terrible block in the road —cars, horses, ambulances, pedestrians, all hopelessly mixed up together. There was no one to dispel the confusion until a man dressed in a flowing cloak jumped from a car and hoisted himself upon some point of vantage:— . “ There was purpose in his gestures and power in his voice, and under his direction cars and carts were unlocked from each other, and the traffic gradually sorted into streams. The car in which I was fell into its own channel and went past with the others, but as I looked back be was still at his post, poised like a statue, watching til! the order he had created was installed with durable momentum. It was Mr Winston Chu chill.”

But Mr Jeffries’s mention of this incident in his telegram was deleted by the London censors. _ After witnessing the exodus from Antwerp, Air Jeffries slipped over to Holland. From the frontier he saw the Germans preparing to hoist their flag on the last yards of conquered Belgian territory. He told his friend. Grant Marshall, the press photographer, that he was determined to be present at this ceremony. So ho made a slight detour,

got over two hedges, and re-entered Belgium;— “The sailors were on the point or hoisting the flag, I came right up to them, the allurement of the situation getting more and more hold of me till I felt obliged to touch the flagstaff with my arm. And then . I perceived Marshall, his eyes exorbited but his whole body instinct with that crisp motionlessness which marks the true photographer in a crisis. His camera was levelled from a point of vantage on the verge of the barbed wire, ready to record the scene. That was splendid. I had not thought of a photograph. It would be better by far than the cutest description in a telegram. How admirably you can flout with a photograph; not a superfluous word on the plate! ” A NARROW ESCAPE. And this photograph is reproduced in his book. The next problem was to get back into Holland again. He saw that the German officer was talking to the Hutch captain at the barbed wire barrier: — “As I noted him I caught sight of my friend of the Customs by that oiffcer’s side. He gave me a glance and made a rapid gesture hidden from the other two. which intimated ‘ Get back instantly.’ I slipped into the passage by the farm at the very moment the German was turning round, plunged in a few seconds round the farm sheds and over the first hedge, all view of which was covered from the German officer by the buildings, a few yards before 'me in the open. I was over the second hedge. I was back in Holland.” The German officer had noticed Mr Jeffries and had been trying to find out who he was before having him arrested!