Officers’ letters from the front, so freely published earlier in the war, amazed experienced correspondents by their unconscious indiscretions.  The line officer who had been in a fight told all that he saw.  Twenty officers doing the same along a stretch of front and the jig-saw experts, plus what information they had from spies, were in clover.  Editors said:  “But these men are officers.  They ought to know when they are imparting military secrets.”

Alas, they do not know!  It is not to be expected that they should.  Their business is to fight; the business of other experts is to safeguard information.  For a long time the British army kept correspondents from the front on the principle that the business of a correspondent must be to tell what ought not to be told.  Yet they were to learn that the accredited correspondent, an expert at his profession, working in harmony with the experts of the staff, let no military secrets pass.

At our mess we get the Berlin dailies promptly.  Soon after the Germans are reading the war correspondence from their own front we are reading it, and laughing at jokes in their comic papers and at cartoons which exhibit John Bull as a stricken old ogre and Britannia who Rules the Waves with the corners of her mouth drawn down to the bottom of her chin, as she sees the havoc that von Tirpitz is making with submarines which do not stop us from receiving our German jokes regularly across the Channel.

Doubtless the German messes get their Punch and the London illustrated weeklies regularly.  In the time that it took the English daily with the account of the action seen from the church tower to reach Berlin and the news to be wired to the front, the German guns made use of the information.  Neutral little Holland is the telltale of both sides; the ally and the enemy of all intelligence corps.  Scores of experts in jig-saw puzzles on both sides seize every scrap of information and piece them together.  Each time that one gets a bit from a newspaper he is for a sharper Press censorship on his side and a more liberal one on the other.

We six correspondents have our insignia, as must everyone who is free to move along the lines.  By a glance you may tell everybody’s branch and rank in that complicated and disciplined world, where no man acts for himself, but always on someone else’s orders.

“Don’t you know who they are?  They are the correspondents,” I heard a soldier say.  “D.  Chron., that’s the Daily Chronicle; M. Post, that’s the Morning Post; D. Mail, that’s the Daily Mail.  There’s one with U.S.A.  What paper is that?”

“It ain’t a paper,” said another.  “It’s the States—­he’s a Yank!”

The War Office put it on the American cousin’s arm, and wherever it goes it seems welcome.  It may puzzle the gunners when the American says, “That was a peach of a shot, right across the pan!” or the infantry when he says, “It cuts no ice!” and there is no ice visible in Flanders; he speaks about typhoid to the medical corps which calls it enteric; and “fly-swatting” is a new word to the sanitarians, who are none the less busily engaged in that noble art.  Lessons for the British in the “American language” while you wait!  In return, the American is learning what a “stout-hearted thruster” and other phrases mean in the Simon-pure English.