Yes. But it was the next afternoon before I could get to a telegraph office within the Bulgarian lines. Then the censor said any long message was hopeless. I was allowed to send a bare 100 words. They reached London eight days later, a week after the battle had been fought, when London was interested no longer in anything but the armistice negotiations. The reason was that the single telegraph line was monopolised for military business. My account of the battle of Chatalja reached London a full fortnight after the event, though I had the advantage of the highest influence to expedite the message. Thus from a daily-newspaper point of view all the expense, toil, danger were wasted. Summing up, an accurate and prompt Press service as war correspondent with the Bulgarian army was impossible, because-- 1. The Bulgarian authorities were keen that correspondents should see nothing. 2. A rigid first censorship checked a full record of what little was seen. 3. The first censorship being passed, despatches often had still to pass a second censorship at Staff headquarters, a third censorship at Sofia. 4. Despatches passing through Roumania underwent another censorship there, and yet another in Austria, possibly yet others in other European countries. 5. In addition to these censorship delays the Bulgarian authorities made newspaper messages yield precedence to military messages, and at the front this meant that Press messages were sent on by mail (ox transport most of the way) to the Staff headquarters or the capital. 6. In the meanwhile the imaginative accounts written nearer Fleet Street had been published, and the accurate news was "dead" from a point of public interest. Most of these conditions will rule over all future wars. Therefore I conclude that the day of the war correspondent--in the sense of a truthful observer of a campaign--has gone, and he died with the Balkan War. He can only survive if newspapers are willing to incur the very great expense of sending out war correspondents not for the news, day by day, but for what observation and criticism they could supply after the campaign was over. To a daily newspaper such matter is almost valueless, especially as during the progress of the campaign the correspondents of the "new" school would be at work with their many inventions, raising the hair of the public and the circulation of their journals with bright feats of imagination. CHAPTER VII JOTTINGS FROM MY BALKAN TRAVEL BOOK These observations I will quote from my diary during 1912 in illustration of phases of Balkan character, dating them at the time and place that they were made. Belgrade, _October 21_.--The declaration of war has not set the Serbians singing in the streets. In the chief café there is displayed a great war map. Young soldiers not yet sent to the front lounge about in all the cafés and are lionised by the older men. They are the only signs of war. [Illustration: _Underwood & Underwood_ BULGARIAN INFANTRY]