ce them together. Each time that one gets a bit
from a newspaper he is for a sharper Press censorship on his side
and a more liberal one on the other.

We six correspondents have our insignia, as must everyone who is
free to move along the lines. By a glance you may tell everybody's
branch and rank in that complicated and disciplined world, where no
man acts for himself, but always on someone else's orders.

"Don't you know who they are? They are the correspondents," I heard
a soldier say. "D. Chron., that's the Daily Chronicle; M. Post, that's the
Morning Post; D. Mail, that's the Daily Mail. There's one with U.S.A.
What paper is that?"

"It ain't a paper," said another. "It's the States--he's a Yank!"

The War Office put it on the American cousin's arm, and wherever it
goes it seems welcome. It may puzzle the gunners when the
American says, "That was a peach of a shot, right across the pan!" or
the infantry when he says, "It cuts no ice!" and there is no ice visible
in Flanders; he speaks about typhoid to the medical corps which calls
it enteric; and "fly-swatting" is a new word to the sanitarians, who are
none the less busily engaged in that noble art. Lessons for the British
in the "American language" while you wait! In return, the American is
learning what a "stout-hearted thruster" and other phrases mean in
the Simon-pure English.

The correspondents are the spoiled spectators of the army's work;
the itinerants of the road of war. Nobody sees so much as we,
because we have nothing to do but to see. An officer looking at the
towers of Ypres Cathedral a mile away from the trench where he was,
said: "No, I've never been in Ypres. Our regiment has not been
stationed in that part of the line."

We have sampled all the trenches; we have studied the ruins of
Ypres with an archaeologist's eye; we know the names of the
estaminets of the villages, from "The Good Farmer" to "The
Harvester's Rest" and "The Good Cousin," not to mention "The
Omnibus Stop" on the Cassel Hill. Madame who keeps the hotel in
the G.H.Q. town knows me so well that we wave hands to each other
as I pass the door; and the clerks in a certain shop have learned that
the American likes his fruit raw, instead of stewed in the English
fashion, and plenty of it, especially if it comes from the South out of
season, as it does from Florida or California to pampered human
beings at home, who, if they could see as much of this war as I have
seen, would ap