Than the courtesy of the French officers nothing could have been more correct, but I submit that when you earnestly wish to help a man to have him constantly put you in prison is confusing.  It was all very well to dissemble your love.  But why did you kick me down-stairs?

There was the case of Luigi Barzini.  In Italy Barzini is the D’Annunzio of newspaper writers.  Of all Italian journalists he is the best known.  On September 18, at Romigny, General Asebert arrested Barzini, and for four days kept him in a cow stable.  Except what he begged from the gendarmes, he had no food, and he slept on straw.  When I saw him at the headquarters of the General Staff under arrest I told them who he was, and that were I in their place I would let him see all there was to see, and let him, as he wished, write to his people of the excellence of the French army and of the inevitable success of the Allies.  With Italy balancing on the fence and needing very little urging to cause her to join her fortunes with France, to choose that moment to put Italian journalists in a cow yard struck me as dull.

In this war the foreign offices of the different governments have been willing to allow correspondents to accompany the army.  They know that there are other ways of killing a man than by hitting him with a piece of shrapnel.  One way is to tell the truth about him.  In this entire war nothing hit Germany so hard a blow as the publicity given to a certain remark about a scrap of paper.  But from the government the army would not tolerate any interference.  It said:  “Do you want us to run this war or do you want to run it?” Each army of the Allies treated its own government much as Walter Camp would treat the Yale faculty if it tried to tell him who should play right tackle.

As a result of the ban put upon the correspondents by the armies, the English and a few American newspapers, instead of sending into the field one accredited representative, gave their credentials to a dozen.  These men had no other credentials.  The letter each received stating that he represented a newspaper worked both ways.  When arrested it helped to save him from being shot as a spy, and it was almost sure to lead him to jail.  The only way we could hope to win out was through the good nature of an officer or his ignorance of the rules.  Many officers did not know that at the front correspondents were prohibited.

As in the old days of former wars we would occasionally come upon an officer who was glad to see some one from the base who could tell him the news and carry back from the front messages to his friends and family.  He knew we could not carry away from him any information of value to the enemy, because he had none to give.  In a battle front extending one hundred miles he knew only his own tiny unit.  On the Aisne a general told me the shrapnel smoke we saw two miles away on his right came from the English artillery, and that on his left five miles distant were the Canadians.  At that exact moment the English were at Havre and the Canadians were in Montreal.