Crossing on the same steamer with me from New York was a well-known
novelist who in his spare time edits a Chicago newspaper. He was
provided with a sheaf of introductions from exalted personages
and a bag containing a thousand pounds in gold coin. It was so
heavy that he had brought a man along to help him carry it, and
at night they took turns in sitting up and guarding it. He confided
to me that he had spent most of his life in trying to see wars, but
though on four occasions he had travelled many thousands of miles
to countries where wars were in progress, each time he had arrived
just after the last shot was fired. He assured me very earnestly that
he would go back to Michigan Boulevard quite contentedly if he
could see just one battle. I am glad to say that his perseverance
was finally rewarded and that he saw his battle. He never told me
just how much of the thousand pounds he took back to Chicago
with him, but from some remarks he let drop I gathered that he had
found battle-hunting an expensive pastime.

One of the great London dailies was represented in Belgium by a
young and slender and very beautiful English girl whose name, as a
novelist and playwright, is known on both sides of the Atlantic. I
met her in the American Consulate at Ghent, where she was pleading
with Vice-Consul Van Hee to assist her in getting through the
German lines to Brussels. She had heard a rumour that Brussels
was shortly going to be burned or sacked or something of the sort,
and she wanted to be on hand for the burning and sacking. She had
arrived in Belgium wearing a London tailor's idea of what constituted
a suitable costume for a war correspondent--perhaps I should say
war correspondentess. Her luggage was a model of compactness: it
consisted of a sleeping-bag, a notebook, half a dozen pencils--and