Herbert Corey's Great War

A Memoir of World War I by the American Reporter Who Saw It All

John Maxwell Hamilton, Peter Finn, John Maxwell Hamilton, Peter Finn

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780807178072
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Première Guerre mondiale

In 1914, the Associated Newspapers sent correspondent Herbert Corey to Europe on the day Great Britain declared war on Germany. During the Great War that followed, Corey reported from France, Britain, and Germany, visiting the German lines on both the western and eastern fronts. He also reported from Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, and Serbia. When the Armistice was signed in November 1918, Corey defied the rules of the American Expeditionary Forces and crossed into Germany. He covered the Paris Peace Conference the following year. No other foreign correspondent matched the longevity of his reporting during World War I. Until recently, however, his unpublished memoir lay largely unnoticed among his papers in the Library of Congress.With publication of Herbert Corey's Great War, coeditors Peter Finn and John Maxwell Hamilton reestablish Corey's name in the annals of American war reporting. As a correspondent, he defies easy comparison. He approximates Ernie Pyle in his sympathetic interest in the American foot soldier, but he also told stories about troops on the other side and about noncombatants. He is especially illuminating on the obstacles reporters faced in conveying the story of the Great War to Americans. As his memoir makes clear, Corey didn't believe he was in Europe to serve the Allies. He viewed himself as an outsider, one who was deeply ambivalent about the entry of the United States into the war. His idiosyncratic, opinionated, and very American voice makes for compelling reading.

1

Three things in my life I regret. Once I hit a mule over the eyes. She was a nice little mule and meant no harm and I was tired and wet and lost my temper. It was a rotten thing to do. Once Dan Edwards telephoned my hotel room to ask if he might come up.¹ I said, “No.” A party was going on in my room and the party was drunk and Dan was drunk. But I was a pretty poor fish to bar my door to the gamest man who fought in the war. Once I bought a house. That was a piece of foolishness. What do I want with a house? Except for these things I’ve behaved pretty well. I’ve had a grand time.

The best time of all was during the war. I did not write a book about it while it was going on, for I was too busy enjoying it. Too lazy, too, perhaps. When the daily stint of copy had been turned off, the young man’s fancy lightly turned to thoughts of a drink on a café terrace or a restaurant with a tasty poulet à la maison—or the next day’s work and a long, freezing ride over dark roads to some other point which would shortly have hell shelled out of it. Civilization was putting on the gaudiest show since the days of Genghis Khan, and I did not propose to miss any more of it than I had to. Perhaps I am not very serious minded. The war seemed to me then and still seems to me mostly foolishness.

Lord knows I had all the chance in the world to write books about it. For the five years from 1914 to 1919 I had a roaming commission in Europe for the Associated Newspapers of New York City. My only responsibility was to get a story in the mail each day. I saw something of every belligerent nation except, I think, Romania. I saw most of the statesmen of the day and liked our own statesmen the least. Any sane man—I thought that I was sane—could see that the smartest thing the United States could do was to keep out of the war. I mean just that. The smartest. Nations have no right to go noble. American editors sold us on the war because their business managers wanted good stories so they could get more circulation.

The only bad moment I had during the war was when Colonel Hamilton Smith and Colonel Clark Elliott and most of the 26th Regiment were wiped out at Soissons. I loved them like brothers and I cried like a child.

I had no more fraternal feeling for our Gallant Allies than I have for the Solomon Islanders. They were trying too hard to trim us. I wanted to boot the Red Cross nurses and the YMCA girls and the dancing units out of France. They were the most noisome nuisances I have ever seen. Only the Salvation Army made good. I thought the Germans would have whipped the whey out of the French if we had not come in. They would not have licked the British, however. In the end the British would have either out-fought or out-traded them.

It was evident that I could not have written a book about the war in this tone while the war was on. I would have landed in Leavenworth in an Oregon boot.² Nor did I want to write this kind of book about it after we went in. Then it was up to me to boost the war effort. I did boost, too, except on one occasion. The essentially fat-headed General Staff of the American Expeditionary Forces had ordered that the 42nd Division make a practice march of one hundred miles in the middle of the winter of 1917–18. The division was lousy. I mean lousy. It had no delousers. It lacked good, thick, woolen underclothes. Some of the men had not yet received service shoes and left bloody marks on the hard ice of the French roads. Their overcoats were the shoddy, paper-thin affairs that go-getting manufacturers were then turning out. Douglas MacArthur was chief of staff of the division.³ He said to me:

“You damned cowardly correspondents do not dare tell the truth about this thing that those patent leather sons of bitches at GHQ ordered us to do.”

“I’m not afraid,” I said. “But what’s the use? The censor will not let it through.”

“You’re afraid to write it.”

“I’ll write it if you’ll stand by it.”

MacArthur stood by it, all right. There isn’t any run in him. He used to go over the top every time he got the chance—often having only a swagger stick in his hand—just for exercise. But the story did not get through. When I put on a show at the censor’s office I was told that GHQ had stopped it.

“Old General So-and-so is chief of ordnance,” GHQ had said. “That story would grieve him.”

I am not using the old general’s name here. My slant on that situation has changed. It was not his fault that American soldiers in France had joke blankets and dissolving shoes and cotton underwear in a climate that would put chilblains on a Siberian tiger. For two years the greatest war in history had been going on. Anyone with the mental capacity of a barn owl could see that we would be tipped into it for one side or the other. Or against both. Our newspapers and our professors—especially, Dear God, the professors—and our old ladies and our politicians had been busy trying to get us into it.⁴ We made no pretense of preparation for what must almost certainly come. No. It would not be fair to blame the old general. But at the time I did blame him.

It was sometime in 1915 that E. Alexander Powell and I were living in the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris, along with M. Henri, the manager, a doubtful but extremely good-looking lady, two or three waiters, and a bartender.⁵ There may have been other residents but I do not recall them. France was busily trying to make herself fit for fighting. Guests and servants were scarce. William Jennings Bryan had uttered that immortal prophecy that if we were forced to go to war “a million men would spring to arms overnight.”⁶ Powell and I ran into U.S. Ambassador Sharp in the hall. Sharp was a stove manufacturer from Ohio who had been in Congress and had given some money to Bryan’s campaign fund.⁷ He was a fat joke. Powell and I snarled Bryan’s hooey at him, and he went right into his loyal routine.

“Maybe they’ll spring to arms,” I said, “but how about springing to shoes or overcoats or rifles or—”

Sharp stopped me. He said that I was disloyal. Powell asked him how many portable army stoves he, as a stove manufacturer, could promise the army that would spring to arms overnight. Sharp said he could supply the army with all the stoves it needed. We both laughed.

“You insult the flag of your nation,” said Sharp, waddling away. No. It would not be fair to blame that poor old general back in Washington because the 42nd Division’s cooties ate holes in the beams of the huts in which its men were billeted. I thought then and I still think that if we had known the truth and all the truth we would never have gone to war. I think that if the censorship had been limited to the expurgation of lies we would have had a decently equipped army in France months earlier and the more blatant follies of the more bladder-headed staff officers would have been prevented.

If I am writing about the war, it is because the time may have come when people will read the truth about it. One man’s truth about it, I mean. What is truth to me would not make truth to Sir Philip Gibbs, for instance.⁸ There are many who believe that we did not go in early enough and that we should forgive the Allies all the money they will never pay us anyhow for saving them. I believe that if we as a people had had the sense that God gave geese we would be a good many billions of dollars—and a lot of arms and legs—better off, and the rest of the world no worse off. It wasn’t our fight anyhow. The only promise to be made in advance about this book is that it will be sordid and frank. If I find myself going high-minded, I’ll tear up the copy and go fishing. I might lie a little, of course. I got into a terrible habit of lying during those years when we were all noble. But I’ll do my best. If there may seem to be too many capital I’s in it, the defense must be that it is being written about a person in whom the author is intensely interested.

This rambling first chapter is, perhaps, the proper place for a tribute to Heywood Broun, socialist and columnist. It—the tribute—is made up partly of roses and mostly of poison ivy. Broun told the truth, or some of the truth, in a book about the AEF in the first days of the organization in France. To do so he violated his oath as an accredited correspondent and might have been kicked out of France if he had not left voluntarily. This is unlikely, of course. The AEF did not kick correspondents very far during the war. I rated being tossed out myself two years later but was not. That story will wait.⁹

It may be that my feeling against Broun was purely personal. He was a poser in a big way, being especially given to spotlighting his sartorial sloppiness, and at the time I resented this. Many an officer who had never heard of the correspondent of the Tribune would remember him forever after seeing him in his regalia. Broun wore his hair in a large, black bunch like Lord Byron’s, which stuck out from beneath his cap in a frowsy halo, and he preferred to loosen a few buttons of his blouse and unbuckle his Sam Browne belt when in public. This might have been dismissed as the protest of a great soul against the shackles of a uniform, but his treatment of his leggings seemed to me evidence of a form of dementia. I was then and am now simple and ingenuous and as anxious to be of service as was little Marcel, who clowned it in the old Hippodrome when New York was still a town worth living in and when Frank Ward O’Malley and Irvin Cobb and a score of other regular men sat nightly in Jack’s.¹⁰

“Heywood,” I said out of the side of my mouth one day, “Heywood, you’ve got your leggings on wrong.” I wanted to spare him. It seemed to me that he would be bitterly humiliated if his mistake were to be noticed by some thousands of men and officers who were trying to keep themselves clean and decent looking under a handicap of mud and shoddy clothing. His right leg legging was on his left leg and his left legging on his right leg, and each bulged wide between ankle and knee and a large puff of white underpants protruded through the gap. Broun glared at me angrily. I do not recall that he made any reply whatever. His sensitive ego was too greatly bruised, perhaps, and it became immediately apparent to me that the leggings were a part of Broun’s personal show.

He continued to wear his leggings wrong side to, and I brooded heavily over this evidence of weakness in a man whose professional work I had long admired even though I disagreed with it. Some nights later the argument at the dinner table in the correspondents’ mess rose to unusual heights. I presume that a certain latitude of expression is permitted in the refectories of Yale and at socialist gatherings, and when Broun and Lincoln Eyre, who represented the New York World, had a difference of opinion, Broun called Eyre a liar. Perhaps the fighting word was not used. I am not certain. In any case, the two men leaped up—Broun tall and bulky and Byronesque and unbuttoned and Eyre equally tall and forty pounds lighter—and Eyre socked him. Broun went down and stayed down until Eyre had been secured. One of Broun’s friends explained that Broun’s heart is bad. I do not precisely know what he meant by this.¹¹

In any case, Broun’s book about the defects of the AEF was true in large part and had a good sale, because it was one of the first, and may have been inspired by pure patriotism. I could not have written anything in the tone at that time, for I had promised to submit every word I wrote to the censor, and I still attached some value to my oath. In any event, I would not have written anything of the sort, for fear of being kicked out of the war, and I would not have that happen for anything in the world. I point with pride to the fact that I did not violate my own oath until after the Armistice, and then only in an effort to help restore American independence and throw a little sand in the smoothly running gears of our allies.

In 1914 I began covering the war in Europe in precisely the spirit of an American reporter covering a fire. That was the way I had been trained to do things. As correspondent or copy-handler I had covered several large-scale disasters—the sinking of the Slocum and the Iroquois fire and the wreck of the Titanic—and in none of them had it ever occurred to me to kick the slate out of the Fire Demon or dig up the history of navel architecture.¹² My job was simply to write a piece each day about some phase of the great spe...