There is no time to bother with civilians during an offensive, and, if a retreat is likely, no commander wishes to have country described which may presently be in the hands of the enemy. Hidden batteries in action, reserves moving up, wounded coming back, flyers, trenches quiet for the moment--this is about as close to actual fighting as the outsider, under ordinary circumstances, can expect to get on any front. The difference in Austria-Hungary was that correspondents saw these things, and the battle fields and captured cities, not as mere outsiders, picked up from a hotel and presently to be dropped there again, but as, in a sense, a part of the army itself. They had their commandant to report to, their "camp" and "uniform"--the gold-and-black Presse Quartier arm band--and they returned to headquarters with the reasonable certainty that in another ten days or so they would start out again. Another advantage of the Quartier was the avoidance of the not uncommon friction between the civilians of the Foreign Office and the soldiers of the War Office. The Foreign Office runs things, so to speak, in times of peace and it is to the Foreign Office that the diplomatic representatives of foreign powers apply for favors for their own fellow-citizens. But in war time the army runs things, and the Foreign Office official who has charge of correspondents is continually promising things or wishing to do things he is not sure of being able to carry out. The result is often a rather unpleasant sort of competitive wire-pulling between correspondents, some trying the Foreign Office, some the War Office, some attacking both at the same time--one would even hear it said now and then that the surest way to get anything from the soldiers was to complain to them that the Foreign Office civilians wouldn't do anything for you! In Austria-Hungary the Presse Quartier acted as a bridge between the two. It was the definite court to which all applicants were referred and a good deal of aimless waiting about and wire-pulling eliminated at once. And having cleared away the preliminary red-tape, the correspondent had, in the Quartier commandant, an agent more likely to push his interests than the civilian officials back in the capital and more likely to be listened to by those at the front.