Frank H. Simonds

Many a worker in the newspaper profession, after years of comparative obscurity, has won sudden distinction by his handling of some unexpected episode for which he possessed particular editorial background, and which called into action his latent editorial powers. That opportunity came to Frank H. Simonds in August, 1914. To readers of the news the European war, the alignment of nations, the plans of campaign, even the initial movement of the hostile armies, opened the picture in an atmosphere of complete bewilderment. No one who lived through that extraordinary period can have forgotten how the European cables contradicted one another; how the dispatches convinced us on one day that the Belgians had beaten back the Germans, on another that the British reinforcements had blocked the road to Paris, on another that the capital was about to fall, on the next that Von Klück and his army were surrounded and must surrender. The military situation seemed to be impenetrable.

This was Simonds’ chance. Even when a youngster, he had acquired particular interest in historic campaigns. Sir Edward Creasy’s “Decisive Battles” had been a text-book; so had dispatches from the front in bound-up newspapers of our own Civil War period, which Simonds read as an interested boy. One of Simonds’ favorite avocations, later on, had been to walk on foot, with careful restrospective attention to what military critics call the “terrain,” over the old battlefield of Waterloo or Gettysburg or Gravelotte. In August, 1914, his task of editorial writing on general topics was immediately dropped, and he thenceforth wrote, first for the Evening Sun, then for the Tribune, an illuminating column on the military news. During many months, readers of his clear discussion were able to visualize the realities of World War campaign strategy.

In his view of a military situation, notably in 1914, Simonds was not infallible. Any military critic, writing four thousand miles away from the scene of action, was bound to make mistakes. None of them predicted just what was to happen at the Marne. Simonds had his prejudices; he never quite forgave the British Expeditionary Army for not fulfilling his prediction that it would enable the French to arrest the German forward movement. In his writings since the war, he often seemed to start with the presumption, not only that there would be another general war, but that it would come in six months or a year. Yet Simonds endeavored to be scrupulously honest with his readers; not long ago he confessed in print that he was coming to think that another early conflict of the kind was not inevitable.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1937 Century Association Yearbook