York Evening
outfit now considered indispensable demands highly trained officers to handle it and these are unwillingly detailed for such
a purpose in a time of life and death struggle . But the War Office not only finds their presence a serious inconvenience but it finds them positively harmful. Why , it asks, if spies are shot
for giving information to the enemy should war correspondents give the enemy gratuitous information in regard to the number
and location of troops, strategic plans, food supplies , provision for hospitals, or any other matter of warfare? The question has
apparently but one answer and the War Office , by whatever special name it may be known in the several countries, approves and even formulates the plans for the discomfiture of the war correspondent. The army itself has come to dislike the war correspondent. In the early days, he was a man on horseback who shared the
privations of the troops and was one of them . Now he travels
with an elaborate outfit of cooks, grooms, interpreters, and assis tants ; a special train must be provided for tents, stores, cooking apparatus, provisions, photographers' outfit, horses, pack ani
mals and fodder;34 he rides in an automobile with a chauffeur and is accompanied by a photographer with a camera ; the apparent luxury of his life and his extensive equipment tend to separate him from the rank and file of the army and he is equally
unwelcome to the officers; he seems to be an onlooker rather than a participant in the war, and to feel himself somewhat consciously in the limelight; his own accounts of his hardships are not taken too seriously and may indeed seem somewhat
spectacular 35 and they perhaps give color to the statement, " the
high-priced war correspondent is a form of window -dressing." 36 34 See the enumeration of nearly seventy classes of articles regarded as indispensable by G . W . Steevens. - F . L . Bullard, Famous Wor Correspon dents, p . 306.
The press quarters in Galicia were described in the New York Tribune, November 30 , 1914 .
Richard Harding Davis describes “ A War Correspondent's Kit " in Notes of a War Correspondent, pp. 239 - 263. Compare these accounts with the equipment in the Civil War. 36 “ The American correspondent who first scored an arrest was Captain
Granville Fortescue.” — Richard Harding Davis, New
York
Tribune,
September 4 , 1914.
36 Francis McCullagh, New York Evening Post, January
