In reporting the great war the newspapers were under great disadvantage in consequence of the censorship. It was the more exacting in the European cities, for there it included the censorship of comment as well as news; but much more important war news was permitted to pass through the Atlantic cables than was permitted to be published in London, Paris, or Berlin. Nevertheless, every cable message, every mail letter to America was carefully scrutinized. The letters found objectionable were destroyed; the cables were changed or suppressed at the censor’s will. Dispatches from Paris to America by the way of London were censored in Paris and again in London and also on arrival in America. Messages from Vienna were censored in that city, in Berlin, in London and again in America. But with our entrance into the war all messages from Germany and Austria ceased, practically. At the time Servia was crushed, American correspondents telegraphed some fifteen thousand words describing the conquest, not one word of which reached New York. The reports reached London and were held there because thought to be news damaging to the cause of the allies. An American correspondent early in the war sent four reports of the Champagne advance. One third of one of them was delivered. Other correspondents had the same experience at this time.
In justification of censorship and in appeal to the press for its aid, the War College in Washington, in the late war, cited instances of mischief done in other campaigns. In the Crimean War the English newspapers gave the Russians most valuable information about the nature of the trenches and the condition of the armies. Wellington complained that the English press gave to Napoleon full details of his troops and movements. The result of the battle of Sadowa, in the Austro-Prussian War, was largely determined by a report in the London _Times_ which told that the Austrians were encamped on the right bank of the Elbe. Napoleon’s letters from St. Helena attested that he kept accurate track of the movements of the English fleets and armies by London newspaper reports. The English had always given him credit for a crafty spy system, not appreciating that the letters of English officers which filled the newspapers, were a part source of his information. In the Franco-Prussian War the French journals gave the Prussians full particulars of McMahon’s concentration at Châlons, his march to Rheims, and his advance to the Meuse. The Prussians so directed their army movements that the French surrender at Sedan was forced. The advance of the French army for the relief of Bazine at Metz, the success of which depended on secrecy, became known to the Prussians through the French and English newspapers. In our own Civil War, General Sherman’s famous march through Georgia to the sea was largely directed by newspaper reports and by President Jefferson Davis’s speeches explaining how Sherman was to be cut off, which were printed in the Southern press. And the War Office warning told how in the Spanish-American War of 1898, the success of the American expedition that concentrated at Tampa was seriously menaced. Every military movement was reported in our newspapers and the Spanish Government had within a few hours complete accounts of the American preparations for war.