Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 308, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 December 1914 — HOPELESS FOR ANY MAN TO ATTEMPT TO DESCRIBE THE WAR, SAYS COBB [ARTICLE]

HOPELESS FOR ANY MAN TO ATTEMPT TO DESCRIBE THE WAR, SAYS COBB

It Is Too Big to Be Reported in Words and the Writer Is Simply Overwhelmed by the Immensity of It—Most Appalling Scenes Not Those of the Battlefields, But of the Base Hospitals —No Picturesqueness in the Struggle.

By IRVIN S. COBB,

Special War Correspondent of the Saturday Evening Post. New York. —Irvin Cobb, war correspondent and humorist, has brought back with him from the battlefields of Belgium and northern France the chief impression that it is hopeless for any man to attempt to describe the war. The English language cannot do it, he says, nor any other language, and it ig/interesting to hear Cobb, who is one of the best reporters who ever covered a story, tell why this war cannot be ; written. “We have used up all our adjectives on five-alarm fires, gang-murders, Slocum disasters, political Cobb said to a reporter of thp New York Evening Post. “We haven't got anything left for such a war, and it seems pitifully inadequate to fall back on the stock phrases. It’s too big to comprehend. You start out in the morning with the best intentions of grasping the facts of events and writing a bully story, and you come home in the evening dazed and brow-beaten. Ttyere never has been any thing like it Here you get a Gettysburg for breakfast, a Chancellorsville for lunch, Waterloo for supper, and, to make a good measure, they throw in a Sedan around tea-time. “It is simply impossible, for instance, to tell how a hundred thousand men died. You can’t write it and the people who read it couldn’t realize the horror of it. be too staggered, too amazed by the proportions of the statement. What you can do, though, is to pick out the story of how one man died, and tell that, making him typical of the hundred thousand or the million or whatever the figures may be. As for casualties, I’m convinced they have been much greater than any of the Combatants has admitted. I should not attempt to guess them, because it would be absurd to hazard a venture In figures so large. You could only approximate it by hundreds of thousands. The Track of an Army.' “One thing that impressed me was the way in which you become habituated to the terrible side of war. The first time I saw Germans enter a captured town, I thrilled all over; the first time I saw a dead soldier I felt that I could write a whole story around that one fact. But after a little time I found that the most distressing scenes of ruin, death and desolation made very little concrete impression upon me. As a matter of fact, one dead man is a great deal more distressing than several hundred or a thousand, and the most appalling scenes I witnessed were not those on the battlefields, but in the basei hospitals where poor chaps were dying out of sound of the guns. “Anyhow, the worst thing about a battlefield isn’t how it looks, but bow It smells —the .awful stench of unburied bodies, of stale gunpowder fumes, of human sweat, of trotting corn, of damp, ruined houses/ That is the way it affected me: Yetr it is remarkable how efficiently natufre works to cover up the traces of Visit the same scene a few weeks later, and you’ll mid grass growing in the ruts made by the "cannon, new foliage burgeoning on trees that were stripped bare, and most of the disagreeable traces of death removed. It takes very little time for nature to obliterate the track of an army. ° “Even so, however, I am convinced 'hat the aher-eOects of this war win

be incalculable. I should not care, to try to estimate the time it will take the winner to recover from it; 5.0 years is a moderate guess and means comparatively little except in a suggestive sense. The loser, I am convinced, will scarcely ever recover ■ from it. Belgium, it is true, is simply the wreck of a land today, but I am inclined to believe the Belgians will rehabilitate themselves a great deal faster than people think. Theirs is a fecund little country; their houses are all of stone, and even those burned as a general rule have walls and gable-ends still standing.*** . ’ ■ '' .Mr. Cobb dismissed the question of atrocities. Investigated Atrocity Stories. “The party of newspaper correspondents 1 Was with made a careful investigation., of every atrocity story that reached us,” he said. “They were almost invariably false, in the few cases that were true, exaggeration was the rule., This applies to the stories told by the Belgians of the Germans and by the Germans of the Belgians and French. Of course, when you take any large body of men, whether in war or in peace, you will find among them a certain percentage of defectives and degenerates. We have atrocities in New York city, so far as that is concerned. I am convinced that there has been nothing unusually brutal about the conduct of this war—at least, in the way of atrocities. War, itself, is absolutely brutal. There is no picturesqueness about it. *< have relegated the atrocity story to the limbo that contains the bayonetcharge story. I saw several hundred thousand German soldiers, many of them wounded, and thousands of Belgian, French and English prisoners, many of them also wounded; and besides this I talked to doctors, who, themselves, had attended to thousands of wounded. I did not see a single bayonet-wound, and I did not hear of any men who had been wounded by bayonets. While I was in England early In the campaign, one soldier was sent back from France with a bayonetwound, but it came out that he had been hurt accidentally by falling on a comrade’s bayonet Neither did I hear of any lance-wounds. Aside from the early days of the war, there has been very little cavalry-charging, I think. Most of the wounded we saw had been hit by shrapnel." Need of Censorship. The talk turned to the censorship and its merits and defects. ’’lf one side or the other ever gets the jump—gets it decidedly and indisputably," remarked Mr. Cobb, "I believe you will see that side let up on the censorship. They will issue a general invitation to the press ‘to come on over and watch us eat up this fellow.’ Of course, I may be wrong, but I shouldn’t be surprised if this happened. As for the censorship Itself, T am ready to concede the need for a rigid supervision of the nears in these days of rapid transmission of information. But I can’t see why the combatants should be unwilling to allow newspaper men at the front to send back the descriptive stuff which is what the public cares for most, after all. I* believe that if more of this stuff cOuld be written, it would tend to increase patriotism and recruiting. z “It’s a hackneyed subject, tp be sure, but I am glad to say that tfib war correspondent as he has been known, the professional. war you understand, has been knocked out. There is a lot of talk about the

glories that used to be his; how he consulted with generals, and bad his tent pitched beside the field marshal’s, and rode the best horse In the army, and always knew what was going to happen. Personally I think this Is all wrong. He probably was allowed to come along on sufferance, and because they had no wireless in those days, and telegraph lines were scarce, he had a great deal more liberty of action than he came to have later on. But when all is said and done, the so-called war correspondent hasn’t any place in the work. Covering a war is just the same kind of work as covering a big fire or any disaster. It calls for reporting, and ability to do the things that reporting entails —assembling of the concrete facts and the writing of them in lucid, terse language. If I were a newspaper proprietor, and 1 had to cover a war, I should simply call up my best reporters and send them out. And they would do the work a great deal better than professional war correspondents.” “Did you see any of the 42-centi-meter guns in action?” Saw No 42-Centimeter Guns. “No. We saw the 21-centimeters on the Aisne and before Antwerp, but we Vever saw the 42-centimeters. We did hear a great deal about the moral effect these big guns had, though. Surgeons told us they had cases of men who were not hit, but who suffered complete nervous breakdown simply from the shock of the explosion of the big shells. It’s odd the effect that war has on nervous temperaments. Alphonse Courlandet, who was Paris correspondent of the London Dally Express, went all to pieces and died from nervous breakdown brought on by the stress, add horrors all around him. .\ -x "Odd, wasn’t it? And Codrlander had been correspondent In several other wars, in which he had been actually under fire, so It was not a new sensation to him. I suppose It was just the appalling, awful bigness of this greatest of human tragedies. It doesn’t matter bow much you talk about this war, or what phase you take-up; in the end you come around to the starting point, the inconceivable immenseness of it No man can grasp it all. No man can take In completely the horrors, the splendors, the suffering, and the glory of it I saw the German army that attacked the British, at Mons, marching through Brussels, hundreds of thousands of men. hour after hour, day and night. But I could not convey an adequate im-, pression of tltat sight to you. It is impossible. I have an impression locked up inside me, but I shall never be able to give it to others. Nobody could. It was like all the other events In this war—beyond the power of one man’s brain to comprehend.” , .