The Literary Digest

Two articles from 1917 heaped praise upon the laureled cranium of the British war correspondent Philip Gibbs (1877 – 1962). Having written diligently for the readers of the DAILY MAIL and DAILY CHRONICLE, who were also anticipating his book THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME (1917), Gibbs was admitted to the VANITY FAIR Hall of Fame (for whatever that was worth at the time):

He has been able to bring the wide, modern, romantic outlook to bear in his survey and analysis of fighting and the conditions of fighting…He is a war-correspondent of a ‘new dispensation’, giving ‘not a realistic or a melodramatic vision of war, but a naturalistic vision’.

At the close of hostilities in 1918, Philip Gibbs was filled with disgust concerning his cooperation with the censors and would begin writing NOW IT CAN BE TOLD (1920), in which he angrily names the bunglers in command and admits that he wrote lies all through the war.