The Daily News. THURSDAY, JUNE 21, 1900. THE PRESS AND THE WAR.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XXXXII, Issue 104, 21 June 1900, Page 2

The Daily News. THURSDAY, JUNE 21, 1900. THE PRESS AND THE WAR.

The part played by the newspaper Press in the present war has been a prominent one. It has been the means of gathering and disseminating every possible item of news, thereby keeping its unnumbered millions of readers in full knowledge of what was going on at the front, and of any and svrjy circumstance of the war. More than this, it has voiced the feelings and opinions of every phase of seciety concerning the cause, the justice, and the conduct of the war, and has kept everything in full view of the public—so much so, indeed, that the fighting has been referred to as being carried on " under the microscope." But it is not these or the many other things that might be I mentioned in this connection that the -o.vspaper Press will have reason to ijjiember the war for. The great ulr.g that the war has done for the .l/iiks is uo'u GiJy the collossal increasing cf its circulation, but the revelation of the newspapers' place in literature and of the poL-itiou journalists are now seen to have a 8 leaders of the literature of to-day. Books are being written about the war, aad histories of the war will follow in rapid succession, but in the mind of the reading public the story of the war as told in the newspapers, its histoiy as written by journalists on the spot where and at the time it was being made in heat and hurry and blood, will, in the public estimation, rank far ahead of the works of the most talented authors, and will be remembered by reason of its power when the works now being published will be lying dirty on forgotten shelves. At one splendid leap the journalists have gained the highest place in the literature of the day, and by the sheer merit of their work have made the pages of their journals more moving and fascinating, more instructive and interesting than any other description of literature can ever hope to be. The key to this is to be found in the fact that the newspaper men have dealt with life at close quarters and in a living way j have day by day told in graphic language the happenings and the heroism, the faults and the failures, the comedy and the tragedy of life as we feel it is being lived. They have used the finest and strongest Anglo-Saxon speech, and proved how splendid a medium this is for telling the story of life's rugged way and humanity's many experiences. This; faculty of mind and rich resource of words has had its great occasion for display during, the proceedings of war, and few will deny that the result has been to bring about the change we have mentioned. Again, some of thesi men, notably G. W. Steevens, the prince of the new order of Journalist-Literateurs, have laid down their lives for the love of their work; others?, like Winstone Ohurchill, have gone through such dangers that they must rank as heroes amongst the most heroic; while the rank-and-file have all suffered to prove of what sterling and courageous mi tonal they are mude. Speaking of il'ifo men the Cape Times says:— " Tl.ey have suffered more or less, and ; i'e.v indeed have escaped the eouse--1 jus of seven months' campaigning ;,. ' .. conditions of a most trying

' . :vm. Scaceclj' one but has been in '!i , i!i f ,1. TV 5 'ax upon the war corres-jior-'ev-t', pL;,'cil and mental, is exceptioiially lieviro. The newspaper re prasrjiitativya i-ave to take to the fielc upon every occ .sion that business ir afoot, and aw allowed but little rest and no leisure. They are a band o: men to whom the world is indebted fo: the contemporary history of the cam paign, and their work is invariably per formed under conditions of a ver trying character, Bully beef and sand an entire absence of fresh vegetable! and fruit, and bad water—all these tel the tale. The soldier is trained for ihi hardships and privations which a cam paign imposes, but ordinarily the wa: correspondent is under no obligation fe pn pare for strain of this nature, anc when it comes he feels it, maybe, al the more severely." The reading pub lie remembers these things, whicl teem to add yet moro power am realism and pathos to the description these correspondents pen. For som South Africa Las been the grav-i—; grave that will not be forgotten, whil I hair work lives to tell the story if wha was done there: others have f .urn fara-, and well have they deseivei i Mm 'he IcHRf. of t.lieKH ;-r<- m n frni iii. . in,;.;. . f A'J.s la'lHii j ■nun il »sM'd I d Ili.l-N ,i. p i-t.ciul:

• .1 ...iv ui.ks. wii.li tint of this mi is fiOiuuti Eugliuh correspondent?, and ha, in it some indefinable touch that is as iairnitabls as it is natural. Take fur instance ibis sauiplo from the Daily A'ews of Mr. Hales's eloquence ia dtscribiiig a night attack at Springfontein : - " In the blackness, whom no eye but the eye of God could reach, we each man stood face to faeo with his own soul, an J few were there who did not wish some pages of his pnst had nover been written in the Book of Lif •. It was a sermon in eiUnte, yet m. tl'.xjiient that every sail bm Jiu-nd. Soma of ug thought of home, of wjfe,

and child; others let their fancy rove to her whose girlish lips had clung to theirs when the dear Louie ties were broken by the rude hand of war. Others in that grim period thought [fondly of a large and healthy rock to hide behind —and he whose hand traces these lines owns readily that he was one of them. For it had dawned upon him in that evil hour that all the fame and glory in the world woald not be big enough to plug a tiny hole a Mauser bullet makes. Then came the shells, shrieking and wailing through the horrible clouds of night like devils driven for ever in hopeless horror from the gates of the Eternal Oity. We knew not whence they came nor whither they were going. We only knew, and cared to know, that they were made ef iron, whilst we were made of something not much harder than mud, and ft voice within told us that if there were ft collision it would not damage the shells." In another passage Mr. Hales says of the projectiles: " They seemed to weep as they sped towards us, like women who had been widowed through the deeds of evil men. They lifted up their voices in the night, and screamed as I have heard a horse scream in the quicksands. They laughed as a drunkard laughs when delirium has possession ol his brain; they howled as wolves howl through the snow-covered forests of Canada; and we tried to sooop holes in the earth to put our heads in," There is a strain of grim humour that relieves the intense emotion that otherwise would leave the narrative all pathos, and life is not all pathos, even on the battlefield, where a saving sense of humour will, as elsewhere, help to keep a man sane and steady amidst the most maddening circumstances and most unnerving experiences. The Press is likely to become more and more the book of the people, and to its staff will fall the duty of enshrining the annals of the nation in language "understated " of the common folk; and that this in its turn will have a beneficial effect on the Press and its writers goes, of course, without saying.