WOUNDS ; WAR ZONES. And consult Bord well, Percy, 'Law of War between Bel ligerents) (Chicago 1908) ; Holland, T. E., 'Laws of War on Land) (Oiderd 1908); Higgins, A. P., (War and the Private Citizen: Studies in International Law) (London 1912) ; Beaty and Morgan,
WAR, Censorship of the. One of the many paradoxes of the Great War foug'ht for freedom and democracy against autocracy and irrespon sible authority was, that the democratic cham pions were themselves compelled, for the pur poses of their war of liberation, to adopt many of the methods and principles against which they fought. In all the belligerent countries, in democratic America as in autocratic Ger many, there was built up a vast bureaucratic machinery, a veritable college of ?propaganda, having for object the shaping of pohlical opinion by the centralized govertunent This result was achieved mainly by manipulating the dissemina tion of information; autocratic and generally secret bodies deciding that the lcnowledge of such and such facts should be withheld from the public, such and such other facts emphasized and perhaps especially prepared for their con sumption. In this way governments were in a position to determine the opinion of their citizens through control of the knowledge on. which such opinion was ba.sed. This was the method, in all its purity, pursued by Prussia for so long, the very cornerstone of the system which gave the conscience of her people into the keeping of her government, and made pos sible certain moral results which appalled the world.
The official justification of a censorship as it affected both the individual and the press of the Entente countries was that its object must be realized if the war was to be won. This
object was threefold: To prevent information of military value from reaching the enemy; to acquire similar information for the home gov errunent; and to check the dissemination of in formation useful to the enemy or prejudicial to the home government. In the course of the vrar it became apparent that in the censorship there lay ready to hand a weapon, the full value of which was perhaps not anticipated prior to the war. It was used to restrict commercial and financial transactions intended for the benefit of enemy governments or persons residing in enemy countries.
As might be anticipated the censorship regu lations of the several belligerents differed some what In Gertnany, due to the predominance of the military caste, the press afforded no problem, nor indeed in France. On the pretext of preventing the leakage of military informa tion, Germany established a censorship which was constantly employed for the suppression of opinion and the stifling of political criticism. Foreign correspondents, in the early years of the war at least, were permitted to visit the ad vanced German lines, but their dispatches were subjected to the stringent regulations of the mili tary authorities, and persons so visiting the fronts were not permitted to leave Germany before a period of six weeks had elapsed.
One of the results of the German censorship was the dissemination within Germany of a considerable body of clandestine literature, nzost of which onginated among German revo lutionists in neutral Switzerland. In occupied Belgium, where the German calsorship vras more rigorous than even in Germany itself, Belgian journals were smuggled in and import ant passages were copied and circulated by un derground routes. The most interesting and defiant of these secret journals was La Libre Belgique, which the German authorities were unable to suppress despite the utmost vigilance.