for a person untrained in military tactics to know what is taking place , and they are far too extended , too immense, too intricate for even the best trained correspondent to under stand and interpret them . Battle flags, gay uniforms, and martial music have disappeared from the front and their place
is taken by smokeless powder, khaki, trench warfare, and all the arts of concealment suggested by the word camouflage.
The change from a desperate pitched battle of a few hours to a prolonged contest extending over weeks in the same locality makes it impossible to appreciate changes in situation . He can see and describe only isolated, local incidents and brief episodes ,
but these are subordinated to a great unified action , the purport of which he can neither see nor understand. He sees only “ the
emptiness of the battlefields,” never any great, decisive event. Ignorance of the geographical features of the countries from which he writes confuses his accounts. Unfamiliarity with
strange languages makes communication sometimes uncertain . Climate and weather conspire against him ; and dust, smoke, wind , fog , rain , snow , blinding sun, and darkness may prevent him from receiving accurate news. Mental conditions growing out of hunger, sleeplessness, bewilderment, privation, illness, and over- exertion affect his attitude toward his work. When all has
been said for and against the war correspondent, the one indis putable fact remains that there is to -day very little the war correspondent can see even if he were permitted to see it. But in still greater measure it is undoubtedly true that the
public is responsible for the meshes in which the war correspon dent has becomeentangled .78 The public has an insatiable appetite Melton Prior complained , " making sketches is one thing but getting them away by post is quite another," while at one time in Turkey his sketches were not forwarded for six weeks. - Campaigns of a War Correspondent, pp . 264, 55 - 56 . " A ſwar) correspondent must not only collect his news; he must devise means for getting it through . In this branch of his art Forbes has never
perhaps been equalled .” - F . M . Thomas, Fifty Years of Fleet Street, p . 171. Forbes himself says that while MacGahan was head and shoulders
above him in descriptive power, he was superior to MacGahan in organiza tion . His various volumes of war correspondence are filled with illustrations showing his remarkable ability in forwarding his despatches.
78 “ Primarily , of course , the public is to blame. Its craze for strong sensations has led to the present low status of war correspondence.
