January 27, 1916. 
LAND AND WATER. 
MR. TENNANT'S FIGURES. 
By HILAIRE BELLOC. 
PUBLIC opinion in the present phase of 
the war hesitates in judgment much 
more than it did in the earlier phases. 
That hesitation may turn ill. It may 
produce weariness or an unreasonable depression 
or perhaps, what is worst of all, confusion. 
Against such a danger there is a preventive 
to hand, which I will take the liberty of suggesting 
to those in authority at this moment. It is 
possible for them to undertake a policy which 
would, I am convinced, be of the greatest value in 
strengthening and moderating that general civilian 
judgment upon which ultimately all governments 
at war depend, and which, therefore, in the last 
resort, decides the fate of the armies themselves. 
This policy consists in the official publication 
at fairly regular and jairly short intervals of state- 
ments upon the general position — e.g. : upon the 
enemy's presumed condition of supply, wastage 
and recruitment ; upon the nature of the ground 
in this or that field of action ; summaries of the 
results of special actions, criticisms of enemy 
statements, etc. 
It may be of value to give first the arguments 
in favour of such a policy before proceeding to 
examples which show what follows in its absence. 
The public now receives its information upon 
the war in the following form : — 
1. Oihcial Communiques, very brief and un- 
digested, issued daily by the various belligerent 
Powers. The average educated and intelligent 
man who is concerned to understand the course of 
the war (and therefore his own fate !) reads daily 
half a dozen things like this : "On the Strypa 
near Zudka-Gora we occupied yesterday 2 kilo- 
metres of the enemy's trenches and successfully 
repelled three important counter-attacks. In the 
region of Chartoriysk we have maintained all our 
positions." 
To aid his assimilation of such a statement 
there is nothing : no map, no recapitulation of 
the past, no commentary. 
2. He further receives (what is more valuable 
to him) expanded descriptions from the pens of 
accredited correspondents, a very few of whom are 
permitted to visit the actual fronts. These give 
him pictures often enough vivid and always 
interesting. They are written by men of abihty 
and not infrequently they convey a real military 
lesson. But they are not consecutive. They are 
even highly sporadic. Piece together all such 
description provided in our Press during the year 
1915 and you obtain no more view of the war than 
does a traveller on the railway along the Ligurian 
Coast obtain an impression of the general landscape 
from the brief gUmpses of sea that he gets between 
the tunnels. 
3. You have further the expansion, explana- 
tion and commentary upon all the information 
that reaches us written by writers who collect it 
here and whose business it is to put it into a general 
and comprehensible form. Such work is being 
done, for instance, upon the Manchester Guardian, 
by that very excellent writer who signs himself 
" A Student of the War " and by the " military 
correspondents " of all the great dailies and 
weeklies. • The Monthly reviews also publish such 
summaries ; as does this paper. This form of 
information is that upon which the public as a 
whole most relies. But it suffers from two 
disabilities. First that, as it represents the judg- 
ment of varying men, it is not homogeneous : 
Secondly that, in a campaign where the necessity 
for secrecy has been so thoroughly realised it is not 
" official " and does not carry to the public that 
hall-mark it'hich, under present circumstances, is 
of the highest possible value. 
This leads me to the next category of informa- 
tion : — 
4. Brief statements — often mere sentences — 
are given from time to time, irregularly, and 
often at very great intervals, either in reply to 
questions in Parliament or by men holding public 
authority and speaking from the platform. These, 
being official, are in spite of their rarity and 
incompleteness universally believed and always 
produce a deep effect. It is this category in 
particular for the expansion and regularising of 
which I am pleading. At present it is of all forms 
of information at once the most accepted and the 
rarest — as also the least regularly supplied. 
5. Lastly, there is the flood of suggestion and 
" tendency writing " with which the Press is 
filled and which whether it is calculated to depress 
our spirits unduly or to raise them unduly is 
almost equally pernicious. It takes the form 
chiefly of headlines — that is, its efifect of suggestion 
upon the mind is principally an affair of head-lines 
— and it only too frequently represents individual 
and personal policy, the desire to influence the 
public for such and such private ends. This last 
element of information has but little weight in 
contrast to official pronouncement when the one 
can be set against the other. But for one official 
statement there are hundreds or thousands of 
such unofficial suggestions and their effect upon 
public opinion is unfortunately profound. It 
would, in the face of regular official information, 
disappear. 
These various sources of information stand 
in the proportion described above so far as this 
country is concerned. The proportion is far 
different in other belligerent countries. The 
French Government has, wisely I think, added 
largely to expanded official statement and has at 
the same time, by a strict Censorship, curtailed the 
bad influence of mere political suggestion. The 
German and Austrian governments have virtually 
reduced all information to official information or 
comment agreeable to the official point of view. 
That is an extreme we are not likely to follow, 
and it is, further, a policy which has, on the side 
of the enemy, been abused, though the abuse is 
not yet fully apparent because the time for 
liquidating the moral debt it implies has not yet 
come. Other belligerent governments have in 
other different proportions combined correspond- 
ence at the front, domestic commentary and 
oificial statement. In this country alone has the 
Matter been almost negligible in amount. 
Now, having put the arguments in favour of 
such a policy as briefly as possible, let me proceed 
[Copyright in America by " The New York Atnerican."] 
