e opening two or three weeks,
realizing that the moment when the Expeditionary Force was being
spirited over to France was no time for visitors in the war zone. But
after that the Fourth Estate became decidedly restive. Enterprising
reporters proceeded to the theatre of war without permission, while
experienced journalists, deluded by past promises, remained patiently
behind hoping for the best. The old hounds, in fact, were kept in the
kennel, while the young entry ran riot with no hunt servants to rate
them. Some unauthorized representatives of the British Press were, it
is true, arrested by the French, and had the French dealt with them in
vertebrate fashion--decapitated them or sent them to the Devil's
Island--we should have known where we were. But as the culprits were
simply dismissed with a caution the situation became ridiculous,
because no newspaper man bothers about marching to a dungeon with
gyves upon his wrists and tarrying there for some hours without
sustenance. It is part of the game. So the military authorities were
openly flouted.

One result of the abrupt change of policy also was that, instead of
the supervision of messages emanating from the front falling upon
officers at G.H.Q. who were in a position to wrestle with them to good
purpose, this task devolved upon the Press Bureau in London, which
naturally could not perform the office nearly so well and which was,
moreover, smothered under folios of journalistic matter originating in
quarters other than the theatre of war. Furthermore, editors and
managers and proprietors of our more prominent organs considered that
we had broken our engagements--as, indeed, we had. At the very fall of
the flag, the Press of the country was in my opinion gratuitously
fitted out with a legitimate grievance. This could not but react
hurtfully from that time forward upon the relations between the
military authorities and British journalism as a whole.

There was one direction in which the Fourth Estate did serious
mischief in the early days of the war. As being behind the scenes
during those strenuous, apprehensive months, when the process of
transforming the United Kingdom into a great military nation at the
very time when the enemy was in the gate was making none too rapid
progress, I have no hesitation in asserting that one of the principal
obstacles in the way was the excessive optimism of our Press. Every
trifling success won by, or credited to, the Allies was ha