y of the
happiness of retaliation which stirs the blood of the latter; the
correspondent must sit quietly on his horse in the fire, and, while
watching every turn in the battle, must wear the aspect as if he rather
enjoyed the storm of missiles than otherwise. When the fighting is over,
the soldier, if not killed, generally can eat and sleep; ere the echoes
of it are silent, the correspondent of energy--and if he has not energy
he is not worth his salt--must already be galloping his hardest towards
the nearest telegraph wire, which, as like as not, is a hundred miles
distant. He must "get there," by hook or by crook, in a minimum of time;
and as soon as his message is on the wires, he must be hurrying back to
the army, else he may chance to miss the great battle of the war. The
correspondent must be most things to all men; he must have the sweet,
angelic temper of a woman, be as affable as if he were running for
office, and at the same time be big and ugly enough to impress the
conviction that it would be extremely unwise to take any liberties
with him.

The career, no doubt, has some incidental drawbacks. No fewer than five
British correspondents were killed in the recent campaigns in the
Soudan. General Sherman threatened to hang all the correspondents found
in his camp after a certain day, and General Sherman was the kind of man
to fulfil any threat he made. I suppose there was no correspondent
taking part in the Franco-German and Russo-Turkish wars who was not in
custody over and over again on suspicion of being a spy. I have been a
prisoner myself in France, Spain, Servia, Germany, Austria, Hungary,
Russia, Roumania and Bulgaria; and I may perhaps venture to remark in
passing that I cannot recommend any of these countries from this point
of view. But the casual confinements, half irritating, half comic, to
which he may be subjected, do not bother the war correspondent of the
old world nearly as much as do the foreign languages which, if he is not
a good linguist, hamper him every hour of every day. He really should
possess the gift of tongues--be conversant with all European languages,
a neat assortment of the Asiatic languages, and a few of the African
tongues, such as Abyssinian, Ashantee, Zulu, and Soudanese. But how few
in the nature of things can approximate this polyglot versatility. Often
in Eastern Europe, and in Afghanistan, I have envied Messrs. Swinton,
Smalley, Whitelaw Reed, and the other notable war c