The Belgian Government at the beginning of the war allowed very full accounts to go through and permitted the presence of correspondents at the front itself. That phase is now over and does not immediately concern us.
The French Government is by far the most reticent. It occasionally mentions the capture of a colour, but it publishes no casualty lists, no account of the field guns taken by French troops, and only now and then hints at the number of prisoners. It is, however, minutely accurate and even detailed in helping us to locate the fluctuations of the front, and by the aid of the French communiqués we can follow the war upon the map better than by the aid of any other. In its control of the Press the French General Staff is absolute. There has been nothing like it before, and it has been perfectly successful. You will see whole columns cut out of the newspapers in France and left blank, so certain are the military authorities of that country that the most vigorous censorship is vital to modern war. There is lastly to be noted in connexion with the French communiqués, especially after the first two months of the campaign, a remarkable frankness with regard to the occasional giving of ground by their own troops. The theory is that the enemy will know this in any case, and that as the position is secure, details of the sort though adverse, lend strength to the general narrative. In all this it must be remembered, of course, that the French Government, and, at this moment, the French Army, is far more powerful than any newspaper proprietor or other capitalist, and it is well for any nation at war to be able to say that.
The Russian Government is accurate, and, if anything, a little too terse in what it communicates to the public, but its censorship is far less strict than that of the French or even the English. Thus during the fighting round Lodz in defence of Warsaw at the beginning of December, correspondents from Petrograd were allowed to telegraph the most flamboyant descriptions of an immediately approaching German retreat which never took place. But, I repeat, the official Russian news is sober and restrained and accurate to a fault.
When we turn to the enemy’s communiqués, we note first that the Austro-Hungarians are rare, insufficient, and confused. They are of little service, and may almost be neglected. But the German ones are numerous, extended and precise, and it is our particular business to judge them accurately if we are to understand the war, for when or if they tell the truth it is from them that we learn what would otherwise be hidden.