in the field.  These fortunate few having been chosen after much heart-burning, they proceeded to provide themselves with the prescribed uniforms and field-kits, and some of them even purchased horses.  After the war had been in progress for three months they were still in London.  The French General Staff likewise announced that no correspondents would be permitted with the armies, and when any were caught they were unceremoniously shipped to the nearest port between two unsympathetic gendarmes with a warning that they would be shot if they were caught again.

The Belgian General Staff made no announcement at all.  The police merely told those correspondents who succeeded in getting into the fortified position of Antwerp that their room was preferable to their company and informed them at what hour the next train for the Dutch frontier was leaving.  Now the correspondents knew perfectly well that neither the British nor the French nor the Belgians would actually shoot them, if for no other reason than the unfavourable impression which would be produced by such a proceeding; but they did know that if they tried the patience of the military authorities too far they would spend the rest of the war in a military prison.  So, as an imprisoned correspondent is as valueless to the newspaper which employs him as a prisoner of war is to the nation whose uniform he wears, they compromised by picking up such information as they could along the edge of things.  Which accounts for most of the dispatches being dated from Ostend or Ghent or Dunkirk or Boulogne or from “the back of the front,” as one correspondent ingeniously put it.

As for the Germans, they said bluntly that any correspondents found within their lines would be treated as spies—­which meant being blindfolded and placed between a stone wall and a firing party.  And every correspondent knew that they would do exactly what they said.  They have no proper respect for the Press, these Germans.

That I was officially recognized by the Belgian Government and given a laisser-passer by the military Governor of Antwerp permitting me to pass at will through both the outer and inner lines of fortifications, that a motor-car and a military driver were placed at my disposal, and that throughout the campaign in Flanders I was permitted to accompany the Belgian forces, was not due to any peculiar merits or qualifications of my own, or even to the influence exerted by the powerful paper which I represented, but to a series of unusual and fortunate circumstances which there is no need to detail here.  There were many correspondents who merited from sheer hard work what I received as a result of extraordinary good fortune.