Horrors

ARMY & NAVY

The seamy side of war is something which the army of no nation can afford to have extensively advertised. Most governments suppress all official photographs which would give their citizens a visual idea of the bloody horror of actual combat and thus build up a mass repugnance to fighting. That the U. S., for all its diplomatic efforts towards peace, is no exception to this fundamental military rule was revealed last week when George Palmer Putnam, Manhattan publisher, tried unsuccessfully to get the War Department's permission to print some of its Signal Corps photographs other than those glorifying war.

No pacifist himself, Publisher Putnam served as a lieutenant of field artillery during the War. He helped the American Legion start its weekly in 1919. Lately he has been collecting for publication in book form pictures of the War's gory realities. Many of them came from private collections. Some were bootlegged out of Government archives. All are authentic, horrible. Last week Mr. Putnam went to Washington where he requested Major General Irving Joseph Carr, chief of the Army's Signal Corps, to open its files to his publishing venture. General Carr refused to release a single "horrible" photograph. His reason:

"To give out any such pictures would be against public policy. It would not be ethical. It would not be decent. Think of the Gold Star Mothers the country sent to France. Over there they saw the lovely cemeteries in which lie the dead of the A. E. F. These mothers carried home in their minds beautiful pictures of these well-kept resting places. That is what they should have--we cannot spoil these memories. The War Department has a moral obligation to the Gold Star Mothers, so only those photographs which show the pleasant features of war can be released."

Undeterred by the War Department's attitude, Mr. Putnam returned to New York, prepared to issue his volume of War photographs next week.* Among its 89 grisly pictures is a sprinkling of ironic War verse. Soldiers are shown in all the contorted agonies of death. War's backwash is represented by deserter executions, famine victims, mutilations, cripples. Only "atrocity pictures" are excluded.

Aware of how public morbidity has been exploited by the publishers of such gang-war books as X Marks the Spot, Publisher Putnam is shrewd enough to attempt to elevate the moral tone of his volume by making it a "document against war." He hopes that peace societies will buy and distribute The Horror of It on the theory that war is the best propaganda against war. To add to the book's respectability, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, Rockefeller pastor, and Carrie Chapman Catt were enlisted to write forewords on the peace theme. Dr. Fosdick:

"This book says in effect that if the militarists want realism, we will give it to them. Here is war not seen through the lenses of anybody's prejudice but caught in the act by the camera. . . . Back of the camouflage of uniform and music, oratory and popular cheering, this is the gist and essence of war at the point where it specifically operates. . . . Let this book, then, do its quiet work. Let it say . . . that war is a mad and barbarous business."

* THE HORROR OF IT. Camera Records of War's Gruesome Glories--Brewer, Warren & Putnam ($1.50).

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