captured palace or
barracks or museum of antiques. At noon the guard is turned out in
honor, at four you are watching distant shell fire from the Belgian
dunes; at eleven crawling under a down quilt in some French hotel
where the prices of food and wines are fixed by the local
commandant. Everything is done for you--more, of course, than one
would wish--the gifted young captain conductor speaks English one
minute, French or Italian the next, gets you up in the morning, to
bed at night, past countless sentries and thick-headed guards
demanding an _Ausweis_, contrives never to cease looking as if he
had stepped from the bandbox, and presently pops you into your
hotel in Berlin with the curious feeling of never having been away
at all."

There were a great many trips of this sort under the auspices of the
German General Staff, and every neutral correspondent who came to
Berlin with letters establishing his position as a serious workman
in good standing in his own country, could hope, after a reasonable
interval for getting acquainted, to obtain permission to go on one
of them. It was not an ideal way of working, to be sure, yet the
"front" was a big and rather accidental place, and one could
scarcely touch it anywhere without bringing back something to help
complete the civilian's puzzle picture of war.

One man would get a chance to spend a night in the trenches, with
the sky criss-crossed with searchlight shafts and illuminating
bombs; an automobile party might be caught on some East Prussian
road with the woods on either side crackling with rifle fire as the
skirmishers beat through the timber after the scattered enemy as
after so many squirrels. Our moment came one afternoon in the German
trenches at Givenchy, when, with the English trenches only a stone's
throw away, both sides began to amuse themselves by shooting
dynamite bombs.

Groups of native-born correspondents were likely to see rather more
than outsiders, and the more authoritative home writers were
attached not infrequently to an army corps or staff headquarters for
weeks at a time. The Berlin and Vienna bookshops are filled with
books and pamphlets written by such men, though, of course, little
of their correspondence has ever reached America. A man like Ludwig
Ganghofer, for instance, became so much of an institution that
papers even joked about him, and I remember a cartoon--in "Jugend,"
I think--picturing him puffing up a hill where a staff was wait