The war correspondents who were sent to this war knew it was to sound their death-knell.  They knew that because the newspapers that had no correspondents at the front told them so; because the General Staff of each army told them so; because every man they met who stayed at home told them so.  Instead of taking their death-blow lying down they went out to meet it.  In other wars as rivals they had fought to get the news; in this war they were fighting for their professional existence, for their ancient right to stand on the firing-line, to report the facts, to try to describe the indescribable.  If their death-knell sounded they certainly did not hear it.  If they were licked they did not know it.  In the twenty-five years in which I have followed wars, in no other war have I seen the war correspondents so well prove their right to march with armies.  The happy days when they were guests of the army, when news was served to them by the men who made the news, when Archibald Forbes and Frank Millet shared the same mess with the future Czar of Russia, when MacGahan slept in the tent with Skobeleff and Kipling rode with Roberts, have passed.  Now, with every army the correspondent is as popular as a floating mine, as welcome as the man dropping bombs from an air-ship.  The hand of every one is against him.  “Keep out!  This means you!” is the way they greet him.  Added to the dangers and difficulties they must overcome in any campaign, which are only what give the game its flavor, they are now hunted, harassed, and imprisoned.  But the new conditions do not halt them.  They, too, are fighting for their place in the sun.  I know one man whose name in this war has been signed to despatches as brilliant and as numerous as those of any correspondent, but which for obvious reasons is not given here.  He was arrested by one army, kept four days in a cell, and then warned if he was again found within the lines of that army he would go to jail for six months; one month later he was once more arrested, and told if he again came near the front he would go to prison for two years.  Two weeks later he was back at the front.  Such a story causes the teeth of all the members of the General Staff to gnash with fury.  You can hear them exclaiming:  “If we caught that man we would treat him as a spy.”  And so unintelligent are they on the question of correspondents that they probably would.

When Orville Wright hid himself in South Carolina to perfect his flying-machine he objected to what he called the “spying” of the correspondents.  One of them rebuked him.  “You have discovered something,” he said, “in which the whole civilized world is interested.  If it is true you have made it possible for man to fly, that discovery is more important than your personal wishes.  Your secret is too valuable for you to keep to yourself.  We are not spies.  We are civilization demanding to know if you have something that more concerns the whole world than it can possibly concern you.”