I saw a brilliant example of the German Press Bureau’s attention to details in the late autumn of 1914.  I was on a point of vantage half way up the Schlossberg behind Freiburg during the first aerial attack by the French in that region.  In broad daylight a solitary airman flew directly over the town and went on until he was directly over the extensive barracks just outside.  Freiburg is a compact city of 85,000 inhabitants, and it would have been easy to have caused damage, and probably loss of life to the civilian population.  It was clear to me in my front-row position and to the natives, with many of whom I afterwards discussed the matter, that the Frenchman was careful to avoid damaging the town, and circled directly over the barracks on which he dropped all his bombs.  The Freiburg papers said little about the raid, but to my surprise when I reached Frankfurt and Cologne a week later, newspaper notices were still stuck about the cities calling upon Germans to witness again the dastardly methods of the enemy who attack the inhabitants of peaceful towns outside of the zone of operations.

The French very properly and effectively practised reprisals later, but the Germans believe that the shoe is on the other foot.  And so it is in, everything connected with the war.  The Germans tell you that they use poisonous gas because the French used it; in fact, only their good luck in capturing some of the French gas generators enabled them to learn the method.  Britain, not Germany, violates the laws of the sea.  It was the Belgians who were cruel to German troops, especially the Belgian women and the Belgian children.

When the Verdun offensive came to a standstill a spirit of restlessness developed which was reflected in the Reichstag, where a few Social Democrats attacked the Government because they believed that Germany could now make peace if she wished, and that further bloodshed would be for a war of conquest, advocated by the annexationists.

During the succession of German military victories, especially in the first part of the war, there was plenty of “front copy” both as news and filler.  Some of the accounts were excellent.  The reader seldom got the idea, however, that German soldiers were being killed and wounded, and after a time most of the battle descriptions contained much of soft nocturnal breezes whispering in the moonlight, but precious few real live details of fighting.

Regarding this point, a German of exceptional information of the world outside his own country expressed to me his utter amazement at the accounts appearing in the British Press of the hard life in the trenches.  “I don’t see how they hope to get men to enlist when they write such discouraging stuff,” he said.  After the Battle of the Somme opened, the German newspapers used to print extracts from the London papers in which British correspondents vividly described how their own men were mown down by German machine-guns after they had passed them, so well was the enemy entrenched.  On that occasion one of the manipulators of public opinion said to me, “The British Government is mad to permit such descriptions to appear in the Press.  They will have only themselves to blame if their soldiers soon refuse to fight!”