Just who was responsible for annihilating the elementary rights of the British Press never became quite clear. Some blamed Kitchener. His hostility to journalists and journalism was notorious, though "With Kitchener to Khartoum," by the most distinguished special correspondent of our time, the late G. W. Steevens, who died in _The Daily Mail’s_ service during the South African war, probably did as much to give "K." a reputation as anything which England’s War Minister ever did in the field. Others said Joffre was the man who had put the lid on. Whoever laid down the law saw that it was relentlessly enforced. Petitions, protests, cajolings, threats, complaints, abuse--all were in vain. The antics of the "Press Bureau" became more exasperating and inexplicable from day to day. Also more domineering, if common report could be believed, for presently Fleet Street heard that "K." had intimated to a mighty newspaper magnate that if the latter did not mend his ways, and abate his insistence, "K." had the power, and would not shrink from using it, to incarcerate even a peer of the realm in the Tower and turn his entire "plant" into junk. That dire threat, I imagine, was just one of the myriad of chatterbox rumors with which the air in England, all through the war, fairly sizzled. At any rate, it failed utterly to curb the stormy petrel to terrorize whom it was said to have been uttered, for his onslaughts on the censorship grew, instead of diminishing, in intensity as the "war in the dark" proceeded.