It will be obvious that the man with the pencil, not being ubiquitous, _cannot_ "take in" all that happens on a battlefield; he sees just as much as, and no more than, the man with the camera; for the rest--which forms so large a proportion of his sketch--he has to rely upon the testimony of others. Now, when the public have in their hands a result attained by this method, what is its value as an "accurate bird's-eye view of what a battle is like?" Absolutely _nil_. People at home want to see a battle as they would have seen it if they had been present, and no sane man will contest the assertion that the best medium for giving them that vision is the camera rather than the pencil. Try as he may after the actual, the man with the pencil thrusts his personality between the event he sees and the people at home for whom he wishes to reproduce it, and consequently his sketch becomes a miserable failure when considered as an "accurate bird's-eye view of what a battle is like." On the other hand, what does the man with the camera do? He and his lens see at least so much of a given battle as any man with a pencil, and what they see they see with unfailing accuracy. Take that battery in action which Mr. Wollen choses to cite as a subject wherein the powerlessness of the camera is supposed to be illustrated. The camera man does not fear the test. He can show the guns coming into action, record their unlimbering, depict the preparation for firing, and time a photograph at the actual moment of firing. It is true that his picture will not show quite such a volume of smoke as the sketch of the man with the pencil. But why? _Because the smoke is not there._ The man with the pencil puts it in because other men with pencils have been putting it in for generations. Perhaps, too, the public would not mistake the sketch for a battle-scene if the smoke were absent. Anyhow, what becomes of the boast of _accuracy_? Moreover, the man with a camera will not present his public with a twelve-pounder firing from the carriage of a howitzer. There is something more to be said for the man with a camera. Now-a-days he is in the habit of screwing a telephoto lens to the front of the camera, and with that lens he can immensely outdistance the vision of even that all-seeing man with the pencil. Objects a couple of miles off are brought near, and groups of men can be photographed at such distances as prevent them assuming any posing attitudes. In this way actuality takes on the added charm of natural grouping, and I shall be greatly surprised if some of the telephoto pictures of this war do not take rank as the most artistic as well as realistic records of its incidents.