Land and Water

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Land and Water was a British weekly journal published from 1914 to 1920, edited by the well-known Catholic writer Hillaire Belloc and devoted to the progress of the First World War and the events in its immediate aftermath. Editing it was the only steady employment ever held by Belloc, who otherwise "lived by his pen".

Belloc was invited to the paper by Jim Allison, then advertisement manager of The Times, who initiated it. Belloc made numerous trips to the Western Front on behalf of the paper, and also collected information from well-placed friends in the ranks of the Army. The journal gained quick popularity and within a short time of being launched its circulation passed the hundred thousand mark.

Belloc, always a forthright and bellicose writer, excelled in warlike editorials and stirring articles. He had always had considerable dislike for the Germans, going back to his French antecedants and to having served in the French Army at the time when French bitterness over the loss of Alsace-Lorraine was at its peak. During the war, this was very much in tune with prevailing British attitudes. In various articles Belloc characterised the war being fought as a duel between "Pagan Barbarism" and "Christian Civilization", ignoring the fact that the opposite side was quite as Christian as Britain and France and that numerous fellow-Catholics were fighting on the opposite side, especially from thoroughly Catholic Austria.

The journal was charged with highly inflated estimates of enemy casualties, and Belloc's over-optimistic estimates of when the war would end with an Allied victory were several times proved premature - which did not harm its popularity. On one occasion during the war Belloc is known to have confidentially told G. K. Chesterton, with whom he was friendly, that "it is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation" (see [1]).

After the end of the war, the journal continued covering world events, such as the Treaty of Versailles and the Russian Civil War, where Belloc strongly supported an intervention to crush the Bolsheviks. However, in 1920 it ceased publication.