The government is regulating everything, the icing a housewife may not put on a cake, the number of courses one may have for dinner, even the conversation at table. Let an American with the habit of free speech beware! Notices conspicuously posted in public places advise, “Silence.” In France they put it most picturesquely, “Say nothing. Be suspicious. The ears of the enemy are always open.” Absolutely the only safe rule, then, is to learn to hold your tongue. Everybody’s doing it over here. Very well, I will not talk. But what about all the rest of this silent world that will not, either? For those under military orders, the rule is absolute. And you’ve no idea how many people are under military orders. This is a war with even the women in khaki. I begin to feel that to get into so much as a drawing-room, I ought to have my merely social letter of introduction crossed with some kind of a visé. Wouldn’t a hostess, even the Duchess of Marlborough, be able to be more cordial if she knew that I had seen the Government before I saw her? Even the girl conductor on the ’bus this morning, when I essayed to ask her as Exhibit 1 in the new-woman-in-industry I was looking for, how she liked her job, turned and scurried down her staircase like a frightened rabbit. So, this is not to be the simple life for research work. And though I come through all the submarines and the lines of steel, and the Zeppelins have not got me yet, what shall it profit me to save my life and lose my assignment? I am bound for the front and for certain information I am to gather on the way. Now, what should a journalist do? Well, a journalist, I discovered, should get one’s self personally conducted by Lord Northcliffe. There were those of my masculine contemporaries already headed for the front whom he was said on arrival here to have received into the bosom of his newspaper office and put to bed to rest from the nervous exhaustion of travel, and sent a secretary and a check and anything else to make them happy. And then he asked them only to name the day they wanted to see Woolwich or to cross to France. But nothing like that was happening to me. So what else should a journalist do?