Crossing on the same steamer with me from New York was a well-known novelist who in his spare time edits a Chicago newspaper.  He was provided with a sheaf of introductions from exalted personages and a bag containing a thousand pounds in gold coin.  It was so heavy that he had brought a man along to help him carry it, and at night they took turns in sitting up and guarding it.  He confided to me that he had spent most of his life in trying to see wars, but though on four occasions he had travelled many thousands of miles to countries where wars were in progress, each time he had arrived just after the last shot was fired.  He assured me very earnestly that he would go back to Michigan Boulevard quite contentedly if he could see just one battle.  I am glad to say that his perseverance was finally rewarded and that he saw his battle.  He never told me just how much of the thousand pounds he took back to Chicago with him, but from some remarks he let drop I gathered that he had found battle-hunting an expensive pastime.

One of the great London dailies was represented in Belgium by a young and slender and very beautiful English girl whose name, as a novelist and playwright, is known on both sides of the Atlantic.  I met her in the American Consulate at Ghent, where she was pleading with Vice-Consul Van Hee to assist her in getting through the German lines to Brussels.  She had heard a rumour that Brussels was shortly going to be burned or sacked or something of the sort, and she wanted to be on hand for the burning and sacking.  She had arrived in Belgium wearing a London tailor’s idea of what constituted a suitable costume for a war correspondent—­perhaps I should say war correspondentess.  Her luggage was a model of compactness:  it consisted of a sleeping-bag, a notebook, half a dozen pencils—­and a powder-puff.  She explained that she brought the sleeping-bag because she understood that war correspondents always slept in the field.  As most of the fields in that part of Flanders were just then under several inches of water as a result of the autumn rains, a folding canoe would have been more useful.  She was as insistent on being taken to see a battle as a child is on being taken to the pantomime.  Eventually her pleadings got the better of my judgment and I took her out in the car towards Alost to see, from a safe distance, what promised to be a small cavalry engagement.  But the Belgian cavalry unexpectedly ran into a heavy force of Germans, and before we realized what was happening we were in a very warm corner indeed.  Bullets were kicking up little spurts of dust about us; bullets were tang-tanging through the trees and clipping off twigs, which fell down upon our heads; the rat-tat-tat of the German musketry was answered by the angry snarl of the Belgian machine-guns; in a field near by the bodies of two recently killed cuirassiers lay sprawled grotesquely.  The Belgian troopers were stretched flat upon the ground, a veteran English