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 château opposite a village church. The proprietor of a dry-goods 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 some 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 a part of the machinery of the great organisation 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. We may not give the names of regiments and brigades until weeks after a fight, because that will tell the enemy what troops were engaged; we may not give the names of officers, for that is glorifying one when possibly another did his duty equally well. It is the anonymity of the struggle that makes it all seem distant and unreal--till the telegram comes from the War Office to say that the one among the millions who is dear to you is dead or wounded. Otherwise, it is a torment of unidentified elements behind a curtain, which is parted for an announcement of a gain or a loss, or to give out a list of the fallen.