For the civilians a yellow card of disembarkation and for the military a white card.  The officers and soldiers walk off at once and the queue of civilians waits.  One civilian with a white card, who belongs to no regiment, who is not even a chaplain or a nurse, puzzles the landing-officer for a moment.  But there is something to go with it—­a correspondent’s licence and a letter from a general who looks after such things.  They show that you “belong”; and if you don’t belong on the road of war you will not get far.  As well try to walk past the doorman and take a seat in the United States Senate chamber during a session.

Most precious that magical piece of paper.  I happen to be the only American with one, unless he is in the fighting line—­which is one sure way to get to the front.  The price of all the opera boxes at the Metropolitan will not buy it; and it is the passport to the welcoming smile from an army chauffeur, whom I almost regard as my own.  But its real value appears at the outskirts of the city.  There the dead line is drawn; there the sheep are finally separated from the goats by a French sentry guarding the winding passageway between some carts, which have been in the same place in the road for months.

The car spins over the broad, hard French road, in a land where for many miles you see no signs of war, until it turns into the grounds of a small chateau opposite a village church.  The proprietor of a drygoods store in a neighbouring city spends his summers here; but this summer he is in town, because the Press wanted a place to live and he was good enough to rent us his country place.  So this is home, where the five British and one American correspondents live and mess.  The expense of our cars costs us treble all the rest of our expenses.  They take us where we want to go.  We go where we please, but we may not write what we please.  We see something like a thousand times more than we can tell.  The conditions are such as to make a news reporter throw up his hands and faint.  But if he had his unbridled way, one day he might feel the responsibility for the loss of hundreds of British soldiers’ lives.

“It may be all right for war correspondents, but it is a devil of a poor place for a newspaper man,” as one editor said.  Yet it is the only place where you can really know anything about the war.

We become part of the machinery of the great organization that encloses us in its regular processes.  No one in his heart envies the press officer who holds the blue pencil over us.  He has to “take it both going and coming.”  He labours on our behalf and sometimes we labour with him.  The staff are willing enough to let us watch the army at work, but they do not care whether or not we write about their war; he wants us both to see it and to write about it.  He tells us some big piece of news, and then says:  “That is for yourselves; you may not write it.”

People do not want to read about the correspondents, of course.  They want to read what the correspondents have to tell about the war; but the conditions of our work are interesting because we are the link between the army and the reading public.  All that it learns from actual observation of what the army is doing comes through us.