correspondent was giving a remarkable imitation of the bark on a tree, and my driver, my photographer and I were peering cautiously from behind the corner of a brick farmhouse.  I supposed that Miss War Correspondent was there too, but when I turned to speak to her she was gone.  She was standing beside the car, which we had left in the middle of the road because the bullets were flying too thickly to turn it around, dabbing at her nose with a powder-puff which she had left in the tonneau and then critically examining the effect in a pocket-mirror.

“For the love of God!” said I, running out and dragging her back to shelter, “don’t you know that you’ll be killed if you stay out here?”

“Will I?” said she, sweetly.  “Well, you surely don’t expect me to be killed with my nose unpowdered, do you?”

That evening I asked her for her impressions of her first battle.

“Well,” she answered, after a meditative pause, “it certainly was very chic.”

The third and largest division of this journalistic army consisted of free lances who went to the Continent at their own expense on the chance of “stumbling into something.”  About the only thing that any of them stumbled into was trouble.  Some of them bore the most extraordinary credentials ever carried by a correspondent; some of them had no credentials at all.  One gentleman, who was halted while endeavouring to reach the firing line in a decrepit cab, informed the officer before whom he was taken that he represented the Ladies’ Home Journal of Philadelphia.  Another displayed a letter from the editor of a well-known magazine saying that he “would be pleased to consider any articles which you care to submit.”  A third, upon being questioned, said naively that he represented his literary agent.  Then—­I almost forgot him—­there was a Methodist clergyman from Boston who explained to the Provost-Marshal that he was gathering material for a series of sermons on the horrors of war.  Add to this army of writers another army of photographers and war-artists and cinematograph-operators and you will have some idea of the problem with which the military authorities of the warring nations were confronted.  It finally got down to the question of which should be permitted to remain in the field—­the war correspondents or the soldiers.  There wasn’t room for them both.  It was decided to retain the soldiers.

The general staffs of the various armies handled the war correspondent problem in different ways.  The British War Office at first announced that under no considerations would any correspondents be permitted in the areas where British troops were operating, but such a howl went up from Press and public alike that this order was modified and it was announced that a limited number of correspondents, representing the great newspaper syndicates and press associations, would, after fulfilling certain rigorous requirements, be permitted to accompany his Majesty’s forces