as an imprisoned correspondent is as valueless to the newspaper
which employs him as a prisoner of war is to the nation whose
uniform he wears, they compromised by picking up such information
as they could along the edge of things. Which accounts for most of
the dispatches being dated from Ostend or Ghent or Dunkirk or
Boulogne or from "the back of the front," as one correspondent
ingeniously put it.

As for the Germans, they said bluntly that any correspondents found
within their lines would be treated as spies--which meant being
blindfolded and placed between a stone wall and a firing party. And
every correspondent knew that they would do exactly what they
said. They have no proper respect for the Press, these Germans.

That I was officially recognized by the Belgian Government and
given a laisser-passer by the military Governor of Antwerp
permitting me to pass at will through both the outer and inner lines
of fortifications, that a motor-car and a military driver were placed at
my disposal, and that throughout the campaign in Flanders I was
permitted to accompany the Belgian forces, was not due to any
peculiar merits or qualifications of my own, or even to the influence
exerted by the powerful paper which I represented, but to a series of
unusual and fortunate circumstances which there is no need to
detail here. There were many correspondents who merited from
sheer hard work what I received as a result of extraordinary good
fortune.

The civilians who were wandering, foot-loose and free, about
the theatre of operations were by no means confined to the
representatives of the Press; there was an amazing number of