destroys them but want of a good memory , for if they escape contradiction they may be chronicled.” .80 But this plan can scarcely be generally adopted or if adopted it would not meet with universal acceptance.81 In the presence therefore of all of these increasing difficulties in describing actual warfare, the war correspondent turns to new fields of interest, and a new form of war correspondence has been developed .
Much of the correspondence now relates to the conditions and the questions growing out of the war rather than to war itself.
International relationships and the duties and rights of neutrals ; preparedness , standing armies, volunteer and conscript armies ; the surroundings of military camps including all questions of morals, or recreation and instruction ; the work of the Y . M . C . A .,
the K . of C .; all measures for ameliorating the horrors of war , Red Cross work , hospitals, and nurses' training camps; plans
for the rehabilitation of those maimed by war; the reconstruc tion of devastated territory ; questions of how war is financed , liberty loans, war taxation , taxes on incomes and excess profits; the part of the general public in food and fuel conservation , the high cost of living, new conditions of labor, - all the multiform ways in which normal life is compelled to adjust itself to abnormal
conditions. All of these questions are what war means to -day and are the subject of letters from the army of special cor respondents rather than war correspondents pure and simple.82 80 The Schoole of Complement, I , 1 .
81 The advantages and disadvantages of this plan have been hotly con tested on both sides. See S . Strunsky, “ War Notes from a Newspaper Desk ,” Atlantic Monthly, September, 1915, 116 : 401- 410 ; “ Skeletons in
the Newspaper Closet,” Literary Digest, September 18 , 1915, 51: 592– 93 ; Letter of Robert Herrick , and reply of Will Irwin who denies that the war correspondent must be discredited because he has not seen
everything himself and indignantly reminds his opponents that “ Gibbon never saw the Roman Army in action , and Taine was never received at
the court of Louis XV .” — New York Tribune, August 29 , September 2 ,
1915. Walter Hale also retorts that the stories of " faking " come from disgruntled journalists who can not get to the front. - New York Tribune,
September 2 , 1915 . The statement that “ the best war stuff is the soldier's
own letters home" seems to be contradicted by the planning of “ the truth tour." — Ante , p . 191. 82 The germ of this form of correspondence was of course found in the
letters of W . H . Russell since the real importance of his letters from the front lay less in his descriptions of battles than in his accounts of camp and
hospital conditions and in the effect that these descriptions had at home.
