using casualties. From a prisoner
taken the enemy learns what battalions were present at a given fight;
he adds up the numbers reported killed and wounded and ascertains
what the fight cost the enemy and, in turn, the effect of the fire from
his side. But the British public demanded to see the casualty lists and
the British Press were allowed to gratify the desire. They appeared in
the newspapers, of course, days after the nearest relative of the dead
or wounded man had received official notification from the War Office.

Officers' letters from the front, so freely published earlier in the
war, amazed experienced correspondents by their unconscious
indiscretions. The line officer who had been in a fight told all that he
saw. Twenty officers doing the same along a stretch of front and the
jig-saw experts, plus what information they had from spies, were in
clover. Editors said: "But these men are officers. They ought to know
when they are imparting military secrets."

Alas, they do not know! It is not to be expected that they should. Their
business is to fight; the business of other experts is to safeguard
information. For a long time the British army kept correspondents
from the front on the principle that the business of a correspondent
must be to tell what ought not to be told. Yet they were to learn that
the accredited correspondent, an expert at his profession, working in
harmony with the experts of the staff, let no military secrets pass.

At our mess we get the Berlin dailies promptly. Soon after the
Germans are reading the war correspondence from their own front
we are reading it, and laughing at jokes in their comic papers and at
cartoons which exhibit John Bull as a stricken old ogre and Britannia
who Rules the Waves with the corners of her mouth drawn down to
the bottom of her chin, as she sees the havoc that von Tirpitz is
making with submarines which do not stop us from receiving our
German jokes regularly across the Channel.

Doubtless the German messes get their Punch and the London
illustrated weeklies regularly. In the time that it took the English daily
with the account of the action seen from the church tower to reach
Berlin and the news to be wired to the front, the German guns made
use of the information. Neutral little Holland is the telltale of both
sides; the ally and the enemy of all intelligence corps. Scores of
experts in jig-saw puzzles on both sides seize every scrap of
information and pie