Partly it came of the nature--which could not be helped by that time--of war correspondence. In the first months of the war our General Staff, being what we had made it, treated British war correspondents as pariah dogs. They might escape arrest so long as they kept out of sight; that was about the sum of their privileges. Long before the end of the war the Chiefs of Staff of our several armies received them regularly on the eve of every battle, explained to them the whole of our plans and hopes, gave them copies of our most secret objective and barrage maps; every perilous secret we had was put into their keeping. A little later still an Army Commander would murmur, with very little indistinctness, if he thought the war correspondents had not been writing enough about his army of late. After the Armistice Sir Douglas Haig made them a speech of thanks and praise on the great bridge over the Rhine at Cologne, and at the Peace all the regular pariah dogs were offered knighthoods. The Regular Army had set out by taking a war correspondent to be, _ex officio_, a low fellow paid to extract kitchen literature from such private concerns of the military profession as wars. It harboured the curious notion that it would be possible in this century to feed the nation at home on _communiqués_ from G.H.Q. alone or eked out with "Eye-Witness" stuff--official "word-painting" by some Regular Officer with a tincture of letters. With that power of learning things, only just not too late, which distinguishes our Regular Army from the Bourbons, it presently saw that this plan had broken down. About the same time the Regular Army began to recognise in the abhorred war correspondent a man whom it had known at school, and who had gone to the university about the time when it, the Army, was going into the Army Class. That was enough. Foul as was his profession, still he might be a decent fellow; he might not want to injure his country.