red sources
to the great news centers far from the front. And there is the story
of personal experience, the sensations of the individual as he looks
into the face of war. The first tells what happened, the other how
it felt. For the one, the correspondent is too near, for the other
too far away.

The division of the enormous battle fronts into innumerable little
news-tight compartments, so to speak, understood in their entirety
only by the commanders in chief at the centers of the telegraph and
telephone network far behind the front, makes it impossible for a
correspondent to see very far beyond his own nose. Even were he
permitted to understand the general plan of his own army he could
scarcely know, while still at the front, the general plan of the
enemy. A well-informed observer working comfortably at his desk in
one of the capitals, with the news of the world at his disposal,
with experts on every subject within easy calling distance, and with
every sort of map and reference book, is much better able to write a
story of the war--such a story as this, for instance--than any
correspondent actually at the front, however fortunately situated.
There have been many such "correspondents at home" and reporters
returning from first-hand glimpses of this and that, have often for
the first time understood the significance of such details when they
were seen through the broad perspective and leisurely analysis of
such long-distance observers.

The nourishing flavor of such a little book as Fritz Kreisler's
"Four Weeks in the Trenches"--scarcely more than a magazine article,
with no sensational adventures and no attempt at rhetorical effect,
and of several little collections of published letters--reveals at
once the correspondent's other disability. People feel that this man
really was _there_--this is what one real man with a gun in his hand
did feel, and not what some civilian, sitting safely out of range,
imagines crowds of men might have felt. Its very incompleteness,
things left out because of sensibilities so stunned that events made
no mark as they whirled by, is often more impressive than the
conventional war correspondent's cocksureness and windy eloquence.
There are scores of men like this gifted violinist--playwriters,
painters, journalists, men trained to see things in various
ways--drawn in by universal service and now buried in the mass, but
destined some day to emerge to normal life.

From them the story of