ding passageway between some
carts, which have been in the same place in the road for months.

The car spins over the broad, hard French road, in a land where for
many miles you see no signs of war, until it turns into the grounds of a
small chateau opposite a village church. The proprietor of a drygoods
store in a neighbouring city spends his summers here; but this
summer he is in town, because the Press wanted a place to live and
he was good enough to rent us his country place. So this is home,
where the five British and one American correspondents live and
mess. The expense of our cars costs us treble all the rest of our
expenses. They take us where we want to go. We go where we
please, but we may not write what we please. We see something like
a thousand times more than we can tell. The conditions are such as
to make a news reporter throw up his hands and faint. But if he had
his unbridled way, one day he might feel the responsibility for the loss
of hundreds of British soldiers' lives.

"It may be all right for war correspondents, but it is a devil of a poor
place for a newspaper man," as one editor said. Yet it is the only
place where you can really know anything about the war.

We become part of the machinery of the great organization that
encloses us in its regular processes. No one in his heart envies the
press officer who holds the blue pencil over us. He has to "take it both
going and coming." He labours on our behalf and sometimes we
labour with him. The staff are willing enough to let us watch the army
at work, but they do not care whether or not we write about their war;
he wants us both to see it and to write about it. He tells us some big
piece of news, and then says: "That is for yourselves; you may not
write it."

People do not want to read about the correspondents, of course.
They want to read what the correspondents have to tell about the
war; but the conditions of our work are interesting because we are the
link between the army and the reading public. All that it learns from
actual observation of what the army is doing comes through us.

We may not give the names of regiments and brigades until weeks
after a fight, because that will tell the enemy what troops are
engaged; we may not give the names of officers, for that is glorifying
one when possibly another did his duty equally well. It is the
anonymity of the struggle that makes it all seem distant and unreal--till
the telegram comes from t