Evening Star Newspaper, October 20, 1935, Page 57

Stage — Screen Autos — Radio —_— Part 4—12 Pages WASHINGTON, D. C., FEATURES he Sundny Stad SUNDAY MORNING, OCTOBER 20, 1935. -Children’s Page '_rBooks—Music MATCHING WITS WITH CENSORS-ON THE NEWS OF WAR Here’s the Story of the Men W ho Match Newspaper Wits With Military Wiles, Often Plunging Into the Thick of Bat- e to Cover the War Front and Be First With the News. By John Jay Daly. ELDOM fair weather, when war correspondents get together— for, usually, they are out in the muck and the rain, men behind | the men behina the lines, rushing to | telegraph and cable wires, trying to file their dispatches to a waiting| world. On Thursday, however, a bunch of | the boys gathered round the round | table in the National Press Club, all members of the Overseas Writers, to honor the dean of the American War Correspondents, Stephen Bonsal, cele- brating his fiftieth year in the profession. Just returned from Germany, where he made a thorough study of the cur- rent situation, Mr. Bonsal told his confreres—men who covered the wars on all fronts—that he has his bags packed, ready to jump into the next campaign. Seated around Bonsal, at the head of the table, were men who had seen service in the Russo-Japanese War, the Philippine Insurrection, the Spanish-American campaigns, the Chinese-Japanese skirmishes, and the World War, All of them now have their eyes on the Abyssinian frontiers where the armies of Premier Benito Mussolini «and Emperor Haile Selassie are squared off—while the world watches. Down there in that hell hole called Addis Ababa, there are 80 American mnewspapermen, with a scattering of German, English and French corre- spondent dangling at the end of wires, h&m to get through messages which mean something to readers in the United States. The old-fime war correspondents here in Washington know what these boys are up against—rigid censorship and the matching of newspaper wits against military wits in the game of repression against expression. Most of the men in Addis Ababa are just sprouting their wings as war corre- spondents. Only two men who cov- ered the World War and later ex- ploits in the field of military tactics are out in the front lines. This, then, is the dav of the new war correspondent. New methods in the gathering and transmission of news are in vogue. Gone are the olden, golden days of the war correspond- ent—the days that produced such men as Henry M. Stanley, Archibald Forbes, Richard Harding Davis, Aloy- sius Januarius MacGahan and Ste- phen Bonsal. It was Stephen Bonsal who started Richard Harding Davis on his merry ‘Way as & war correspondent, labeling him “the greatest of the present, cen-. - | GREATER, by far, than them all, however, was MacGahan, “The Great MacGahan,” who died at the age of 34 years, leaving behind him a record as a war correspondent that | will be revered for all time by the men who write for the papers. MacGahan, an Ohio boy, and a cousin of Gen. Phil Sheridan, became famous ffm' his ride into the desert of Cen- tral Asia in 1873. According toeEu- gene Schuyler, American secretary of the legation at old St. Petersburg, this was “spoken of everywhere * * * as by far the most wonderful thing that ever had been done there.” This young American, MgcGahan, defied the Russian embargo on news- paper men to find the expedition sent out under Gen. Kauffmann to reduce the Khanate of Khiva. Cossacks pur- sued him for a thousand miles. He evaded them, and after 29 days—with two attendants who could not under- stand his language—he reached the camp, after encounters with death, one time lost in the desert, buried to his hips in sand. As an American he was permitted to stay. As a molodyetz—a hero—he instantly be- came popular. With the army, he went through the campaign against Khiva and the war with the Turko- mans, but the greatest exploit of Mac- Gahan was the liberation of Bulgaria —and while Washingtonians are gen- erally unaware of the fact, Bulgarian enyoys from this city make regular ceremonial pilgrimages to pay him honor at the monument marking his grave near New Lexington, Ohio. Though Stephen Bonsal, on whose shoulders fell the toga of MacGahan, never saw this great war correspond- ent, the man all war correspondents now claim as their dean recalls the Bulgarian exploits of his hero: “MacGahan brought to light the atrocities in Bulgarid, first directed attention to a terrific state of affairs, and in this way fermented war be- tween Russia and Turkey, which re~ sulted in the liberation of Bulgaria. “Back in London, after the Carlist campaign in the Pyrenees, in 1874, and then the expedition to the Arctie of the bark Pandora, in 1874, pro- moted by the younger James Gordon Bennett, on whose newspaper he worked, MacGahan heard rumors of the bashi bazouk massacres in Bul- garia. He got his greatest oppor- tunity when the Daily News sent him to make a special investigation. His facility as a descriptive writer with an eye for drama displayed itself in his letters of July and August, 1876. They wrought a great change in British sentiment and did much to produce the political reaction which made war inevitable between Russia and Turkey. He followed the campaign, much of the time as & comgade of Gen. Sko- —————————————— Larry Lehrbas on the Si- berian front. belev, whom he had met at Khiva. They became affectionate friends. MacGahan rendered distinguished service even when almost fully dis- abled. After the fall of Plevna he went to Constantinople to nurse a stricken comrade, only himself to fall a victim of typhus. That was the end'of “The Great MacGahan.” They buried him at Pera, with Gen. Sko- belev as a mourner. On the initiative of the General Assembly of Ohio Mac- Gahan's body was brought to America on a United States cruiser—and so the Buckeye State clutches to her bosom all the mortal remains of Amer- ica’s greatest war correspondent. STEP!EN BONSAL waxes eloquent when he talks of MacGahan, and Forbes, and Davis, and all the rest of that gallant crew who covered the wars in all parts of the world. Many of them are gone: Arthur Ruhl, who died last year; Richard Harding Davis, Henry Morton Stanley. Into their places now step the youngsters, and men who are not so young—war correspondents who saw service as soldiers in the World War, men like Lawrence Stallings, in Eth- iopia for the North American News- paper Alliance. He was a captain of Marines and lost a leg in the late conflict. Now, Stallings and all the rest of them are on or near the firing lines trying to do the best they can under adverse conditions. Whereas the old- line war correspondent could take his time, write a glowing descriptive dis- patch that had the flavor of literature, and post his product in a leisurely way, getting it in print perhaps a month later, the present-day crew is up on its collective toes like reporters at a five-alarm fire, flashing bulletins. Because of the greatly improved facilities of news transmission, the various armies at war must be rather cagey about the correspondents who follow the news of the day. If only for this reason: *The King of Kings has a radio at his headquarters. A news dispatch telling secrets of the Italian Army would find itself ‘howled over the radio’ & few minutes after it was flashed on the wire. So says Stephen Bonsal, and he knows. That is one reason why the dispatches out of Addis Ababa have yet to bring the complete story. Not because there are insufficient numbers of war corre- spondents on' the job. Hundreds of conflicting reports must, by the very nature of the situation, find their way out of Addis Ababa. The main problem is the rearrange- ment of these stories in New York— for Amercan consumption. Aside from the barriers imposed by censorship, the correspondents in Ethiopia are confronted with travel and communi-~ cation difficulties. Their object is to get stories back to desks in city rooms 8,000 miles away—and from a land where the American language is & rarity. Over wires such as those shown at the top of this page, being strewn from poles in Addis Ababa streets, war news is humming on its way to cable and radio station. At the left are scenes reminiscent of World War days—British howitzers in action, and Italy’s soldiers mobilizing near the Austrian front in 1915. At the right are scenes in the present conflict—Premier Mussolini firing the opening shot in a rifle training match in Rome, and torpedo boats of the Italian fleet in Medit- teranean war maneuvers. Above: A crack detachment of Ethiopian cavalry passing in review before Emperor Haile Selassie. Underwood & Underwood.) the Ethiopian government which put) into force a strict military censorship | limiting dispatches out of Addis Ababa | to 100 words each. | On the Italian side, the censorship | is no less strict. All communications | from American newspaper correspond- | ents must go over the regular military wireless route—with a double censor- | ship—first at Asmara and again at | Rome. As the regular military dis- | get the right of way there is a time element attached to censorship. News dispatches come through when they | can get through. (Photos by A. P, Wide World and French Somaliland, which takes their dispatches either to France or Eng- land, with press rates established at 26 cents a word—a sum that has rated $100,000 each month since the Italo- Ethiopian campaign began. If not this method, the correspond- ents must resort to another difficult and expensive way of getting their stories to the American people. There is one radio station in Addis Ababa. | patches from the regular Italian Army | 1t operates under the supervision of | chiefs to their headquarters at Rome | Frenchmen, with natives who are fa- miliar only with their own language— Ambaric. In other words, the boys on the Ethiopian front are having a time of it. Stephen Bonsal, who has been in Stephen Bonsal, dean of American War Writers. dismal spot would bring from the burning sands ripe cases of malaria. | That's what laid him low—heart fail- jure due 0 toxamia combined with | infected kidneys and malaria. death came through the regular channels, his father at Nyack, N. J,, O FAR no war correspondents are | Abyssinia many times, says the main | Was called upon to write his own son's authorized to operate on the Ethi- opian frontiers. The King of ngsi was first afraid that one of his war- riors might mistake an American newspaper man for an Italian. Since | the Italian Army has the benefit of all | news services, moving the correspond- ents to a position several miles to the rear of the fighting forces, Mussolini’s | outfit naturally gets a better play in the newspapers. Under the ministry of foreign af-| fairs, ‘the Italian government estab- lished an official press bureau. It amounts to little, since the men in charge of it have other duties to per- form. So the entire load falls upon what is virtually an office boy who can do nothing until he gets orders from his superiors,.and he can seldom find his superiors. These are the com- plaints trickling back from the war correspondents. What the correspondents try to de- pend on is the land line to Djibouti, in Gathered at'the Overseas Il.!‘un-lnrpiylnd thing they must fear is tick typhus. “Tick typhus? What's that?” he was asked. “A tick, like you get if you were shooting in Virginia. Only it's a poi- sonous tick—and it gives you typhus.” Already one war correspondent has fallen before the onslaught of this dis- eese. Will Barber, Chicago Tribune cor- respondent in Addis Ababa, was the first American newspaper man to lose his life covering the Italo-Ethiopian conflict. He died October 6, only 32 years old. Son of Frederick Courtney Barber, veteran New York newspaper man, Wilfred Courtney Barber was the first correspondent to reach Ethiopia— June 23, 1935. He scooped the world, going into the yellow hell of the Oga- den desert to get the first story of Ethiopia’s front lines—and his dis- patches carried the warning that any white men who ventured into that | obituary—which followed the main story. | reached the wires it contained this note to the editors: “Dictating my son’s obituary has crucified me, but there is nobody else here to do it. F. C. B.” On the front page of the Chicago Tribune, preceding the news story of Barber, was this editorial note: “(A newspaper man is not often news. But when he is the son, the grandson, the great-grandson, and the great-great-grandson of soldier war correspondents; when he is first on an Ethiopian battle front; when he plunges into a pestilential desert to be' first with the news; when he dies of a malignant fever; when a fellow war correspondent cables the report of his death, and when his father writes his obituary, the rules are suspended.)” Such deeds as this bring about a close comeraderie among war corre- spondents. They have been places Writers’ luncheon in the Press Club to honor Stephen war corréspondents, men who covered the World War get together for the first time. Oswald F. Schuette, Raymond Gram Swing, Frederic Willlam Wile, Paul Wooten, Stephen Bonsal, Herbert Prederick Simpich. 2 * L4 “7HKN the news of young Barber’s | When that bit of writing | o AR € g and seen things—together. So, when they sit around a luncheon table, as | they did on Thursday, and begin to recall the old days, there are stories | for the books. Naturally, Steve Bonsal can tell the | longest line. As he remarks in open- | ing a yarn, “They caught me young.” | He went to his first war—that conflict | between Bulgaria and Serbia, in 1885 | —when he was only 20 years of age. | And he has been at it ever since. Not a war in any part of the globe, or a battle, or a skirmish, but there you found the redoubtable Stephen Bon- sal, clad in the khaki of the war cor- respondent. some one said. Hitting only the high spots, here they are—the wars recorded Stephen Bonsal from 1885: Bulgarian-Servian, 1885; Morocco, 1889; Macedonian Uprising, 1890; Chino-Japanese War, 1895; Cuban In- surrection, 1897; Spanish-American War, 1898; Samar, Batangas and Min- danao, Philippine Island, campaign, 1901; Venezuelan Revolution, 1903; Russo-Japanese War, 1904; Madero and he remained with the Germa Army until America entered the war, when he came to America and joined forces with the American Army as & major of Infantry. In 1918 he was with the A. E. F. in France and saw active service. So here, in truth, is a soldier war correspondent. After the war he was attached to the American mission to the Peace Conference. ‘When not engaged as an active war correspondent Mr. Bonsal finds time to travel as a special correspondent. For instance, he traveled 10,000 miles through Soviet Russia in 1931 and now has completed a journey all through Germany, itching to get into the next big war as a correspondent. ‘While Stephen Bonsal was the cen- ter of all the glory at the Press Club on Thursday, at his feet sat many men who could recount similar ad- ventures with the armies of the world— men like Kirke Simpson of the Asso- ciated Press, who won the Pulitzér Prize for his remarkable story on “The Unknown Soldier.” Kirke Simpson went with the American Navy at the time of the capture of Vera Cruz— and if you back him into a corner and get him in a good mood he can tell a fantastic tale of that adventure. I‘l‘ ‘WAS back in 1914. Huerta, Presi- dent of Mexico, has come to grips with the United States Government mmmuo?umuunmnm Read off the names of the wars, | by | Revolution, 1910-11, and the World | War. In 1915 Bonsal was with Hinden- burg’s army on the eastern front—| This Is the Day of the New \War Correspondent, as Nezw \and Faster Methods in Gather- ing and Transmission of Nezws Have Changed the Old Order of Reporting. orderly at Tampico. Uncle Sam de- manded an apology—that Huerta sa- lute the American flag. Anyway, the Atlantic fleet was sent down into Mexico waters to back up the demand—and with it went Kirke Simpson, Archie Jameson, Charley Michaelson, now publicity director for the Democrats; Dudley Harmon and | & host of Washington correspondents, | including Stephen Bonsal, Richard | Harding Davis, Jimmy Hare, the old | photographer for Colliers, and Fred- erick Remington, the artist. That was the first time Kirke Simp- son ran afoul of naval censorship. On the way down to Mexico, he saw the sailor boys throwing boxes over the side of the ship, stripping the deck for action, and getting out the ma- chine guns for target practice. It was a beautiful sight, and it looked like preparation for war — but they wouldn't let him send a word of it. Naturally, when they hit Vera Cruz they were going to go ashore—and they were going to do some fighting, As the white sailor pants and the white jackets and the white caps | would be conspicuous targets, the cap- in ordered that all the clothes be dyed—but the ships had left so hur- riedly there was no dye. So, the old man ordered that all hands boil their clothes in coffee. That is, the ship- | mates of Kirke Simpson boiled their clothes in coffee—and so got ashore with a very beautiful array of clothe ing, something the color of a mud cake. The other ships used different brands and methods of dying, so that the American force, when it landed at Vera Cruz looked like a belated edition of the Aurora Borealis. The sniping began soon as the boys left their ships—and Simpson and his comrades got their first baptism of fire. It was about 2 o'clock in the (Continued on Third Page.) Guide for Readers PART FOUR Paj John Clagett Proctor writes o the story of an Old Church -.F-2 “Those Were the Happy Days,” by Dick Mans- field -F-2 -F-3 Radio News._ Automobiles. -e-F-10 Children’s Page. .........F-11 s