In Paris in a rather small room on the second floor of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, at a methodically cluttered writing-table, on which one of the oddly-shaped French telephones lapses into occasional silence, sits a slender, suave, well-groomed Frenchman about forty years old. He has a glossy dark moustache, large and pensive dark eyes, a nicely deprecatory manner, and a beautifully conciliatory smile. He chats to his visitor in excellent English, if English be required, and smiles at him this almost tender smile. He is Monsieur P----, the war correspondents' Czar. He is the absolute ruler of their destinies. For it is he who picks and chooses among their waiting numbers, and decides to which to accord the privilege of a place in one of the parties which leave about every two weeks for a two- or three-day trip to the front. When an eager newspaper man has come over all the way from California, let us say, for such a trip, has waited in Paris a month or six weeks for such a trip and has seen colleagues favored above other men start off with enthusiasm and return with hauteur from such a trip, the transcendent importance of Monsieur P---- in that craving correspondent's eyes verges on the pitiful. When you think of this hungry horde of newspaper men collected from the ends of the earth on this one assignment, receiving curt cables and telegrams every few days from their papers asking where their stories are, all as suspicious and jealous of each other as prima-donnas, each trying to "put over a beat" on the other, and each terrified lest some other "put over a beat" on him, you can perhaps imagine that Monsieur P----'s official duties do not constitute a sinecure. Behind the back of Monsieur P---- they grouch; before his face they grovel. They try on him all the arts and practices of their profession, from bluff, through blandishments to supplication. And Monsieur P---- sits and smiles at them with tender sympathy and gives them their trips fairly and squarely without fear or favoritism. The room echoes with their pleas and protests, the telephone buzzes with their wheedlings and reproaches; but Monsieur P---- deals out even-handed justice among them and never turns a hair. There is probably not an hour of the day or night that some war correspondent in any language from English to Japanese is not calling down very horrible curses upon this autocrat's head. And yet they all cherish for him the most sincere affection and respect.