Meeting the Crime Wave

Meeting the Crime Wave: A Comparison of Methods

By Joseph Gollomb

From “The Nation” magazine January 21, 1921

This story is a lot more representative of the work of Joseph Gollomb than my previous post. I'll try and create a bibliography in the near future./drf

The crime wave now afflicting the whole world is a logical aftermath of the war. Economic distress—poverty, insufficient food, clothing, and fuel—the loosing of men’s animal passions, coupled with the general disorgani­zation of our social structure, are producing their inevita­ble effect. While its manifestations vary, subject to local conditions, the disease knows no geographic boundaries, but its treatment is still largely national. Moreover, the police power of the world has been rudely shaken by events. It needs reconstruction, revitalization, and above all in­creased international cooperation. The American has, of course, always taken it for granted that his police organiza­tion is the best on earth, his system of detection the shrewd­est, most scientific, most persevering. Present-day New Yorkers, in the face of a mounting epidemic of unsolved murder and robbery, may perhaps entertain a lurking doubt. But it is questionable whether we could ever justly boast of anything in this direction but a mistaken pride. The actual claims of France and Britain—in fact and fiction—seem more valid. What have we comparable to the great Bertillon and to M. Lecoq? What traditions to equal the famous Scotland Yard organization, what hero of detection superior to Sherlock Holmes? As for Germany, its “verboten” has become notorious as the symbol of the omni­present and ever-watchful arm of the law. We shall do well to study our neighbors’ methods.

The tracking by society of the men who prey on man is already something of a sport and sometimes an art—in fiction. In real life it is a crusade, a science, a profession; there is no sporting ethics in it as yet and police prefer the shortest way to the kill whether it is good sport, art, or neither. But the quarry has grown clever with science and technique, and the hunter has had to keep up with him. The result is that so infinitely complex, delicate, and manifold have become the means and weapons of crime and of man hunting with X-ray, dictaphone, micro-photography, chem­ical reagents, psychoanalysis, organization technique, card cataloguing, and ten thousand other devices that the modern detective has come to exercise something of the care of the artist in choosing weapon and trail in his hunt. It is inter­esting to observe, therefore, the differences in the manner of man hunting shown by the detective systems of London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, and how in their hunting they reveal their racial traits. Let us consider four actual cases.

In a half-asleep residential section of east London is a neglected three-story private dwelling with heavy shutters and doors, inconspicuous and unattractive. It was just the kind of house for which an old man, calling himself Smithers, had been looking. For twenty years he had been accu­mulating money by buying all kinds of objects and no ques­tions asked. He could drive a shrewd bargain and his busi­ness associates usually acceded to his terms, though not without many a curse and often more or less impressive threats. Smithers did not mind the former; but as he grew more and more rich he worried about the threats. He knew his customers. So he tried to hide his riches and lived penuriously. Fear of being murdered and robbed drove him from his business to a retreat. The house, by reason of its inconspicuousness, its strong doors and windows, attracted him and he bought it. He secured every possible entrance with bars and double locks and had his home wired so that nobody could touch a door knob, window sash, or grating without setting an electric bell ringing. In addition he arranged it so that if any one detected the wiring and cut it, the loosened wire, dragged down by a leaden weight, would fall on a cartridge and exploding it would give as effective notice of danger as the electric bell. He lived by himself, received no one, and attracted as little attention as he could.

Nevertheless, one day tradesmen began to wonder why he did not take in off the front steps the articles he had ordered delivered. The police were notified, an entrance was forced. Smithers was found murdered. The burglar alarm had been cut, under the fallen leaden weight was found a pad of cloth and the cartridge unexploded. A strong-box had been rifled. Whoever had done the business was no novice. There was not a finger-print to be found, the work having obviously been done in gloves. The only clue left for the police to work on was a small dark-lantern, a child’s toy without doubt, which had been contemptuously left behind by the burglars.

Scotland Yard went to work on the case characteristically. A conference was held of the Central Office Squad, consist­ing of four chief inspectors, ten detective inspectors, nine­teen detective sergeants, and fourteen detective constables. They went at their problem like a team, captained, but working as one. There was no star performer. With only the child’s lantern to work on as a clue, the problem became at first mere drudgery. A tedious round of manufacturers and toy shops followed to determine if possible where that lantern was bought. In this search team-work was every­thing, individual cleverness nothing. Finally it seemed probable that the lantern was such as a mother in one of several tenement districts in London would buy for a seven-year-old child.

A simple plan was devised as the next phase of the hunt. A detective who had a seven-year-old son was assigned to allow his boy to play with the lantern in the streets of the quarter from which it might have come and to see what hap­pened. For a week nothing at all happened, and father and son were asked to repeat their task in the adjoining district. Here the simple device brought no better results and again they were assigned new territory. This happened several times, until it began to look as though nothing at all would come of it. But with the doggedness of the race Scotland Yard hung on to the trail. Then one day a little boy of the quarter edged up to the policeman’s son, looked sharply at the lantern with which the youngster was playing, and set up a wail.

“I want mah lantern!” he said.

“’Tain’t your lantern!” the policeman’s son retorted in­dignantly.

“Yes, it is! I know it is!”

The detective came forward. “Are you sure?” he asked, gently. “Because my son has had it for many weeks, you know.”

“ ’Ere, I’ll prove it’s mine,” the stranger boy said. “W’en mah wick burned out I cut off a little piece of my sister’s flannel petticoat for a new wick.”

The detective opened the lantern and examining the wick found it to be of flannel, as the boy had said. “We’ll have to ask your mother about this,” the detective said. “If you’re telling the truth you shall have your lantern back.”

The three went to the boy’s mother, a widow who kept boarders. The woman, honest and hard working, con­firmed her son’s claim. The detective kept his word, re­turned the lantern, but questioning the widow further found out that the boy missed the lantern at about the same time that two of her boarders had left without paying their board bills. One had told her that he was an electrician, the other a plumber’s apprentice, and she remembered seeing tools of their trade, or what she thought were such, in their room.

Followed then another series of weary searches by the men of Scotland Yard; searches among young plumbers and among electricians; in the underworld for two young fel­lows answering to the descriptions the widow gave; in the files of criminal records in Scotland Yard; in more expen­sive boarding houses and in dance resorts. Nothing short of a big organization imbued with team work and bulldog perseverance could have accomplished that search. But at last two young men were found whom the widow, unknown to them, identified as her former boarders.

The police had as yet nothing more serious against them than unpaid board bills. So they secretly kept them under surveillance. It was thus they learned that the young men were fond of target shooting with a revolver at trees in the country. The bullets extracted from the trees proved to be of the same exceptionally large caliber as that found in the murdered miser’s brain. Tactfully, patiently, a corps of detectives searched into the past of the two men, each finding out some seemingly unimportant item. But the whole was becoming a net in which one day the two men found themselves inextricably fast on the charge of the mur­der and robbery of Smithers.

Now let us contrast with this man hunt another under similar circumstances in Paris. There had been a remark­able series of burglaries in the aristocratic Etoile section. In each case the burglar—for there was every sign that one man was committing them—took art objects of considerable value but never of such marked uniqueness that they could not be disposed of without difficulty or danger. Indeed the man’s skill in entering well-guarded homes, in gathering his loot, and in disposing of it was such that the Paris police had not a trace to work on. This man, too, worked with gloves, so that there was never a finger-print left of his visits.

The Paris police, so to speak, ran around in circles trying to find his trail. One theory was as little fruitful as another and each man on the hunt followed his own. One detective- inspector, let us call him Dornay, struck out on a lone hunt. Posing as a nouveau-riche art collector and bon vivant, he made scores of acquaintances in the fast set where his quarry might conceivably be found. In this way he became interested in a rather quiet, alert man who knew where good values in art objects could be had. Dornay showed more friendliness than the other accepted and, apparently hurt in feelings, the detective thereafter avoided the un­sociable man, whom he knew by the name of Laroche. Thus far Dornay had only a nebulous theory about Laroche’s connection with the elusive burglar he was hunting. It was so nebulous that the detective could not convince his colleagues sufficiently to secure the number of men needed to keep track of all of Laroche’s movements, for the latter had an uncanny way of eluding Dornay’s vigilance. There­upon Dornay determined to get Laroche unconsciously either to clear or to implicate himself. Watching one night outside Laroche’s hotel he saw the latter leave in evening dress. Dornay stole up to the man’s room, let himself in with a skeleton key, and made a thorough search. The only dis­coveries that interested him were a much-used pair of gloves and the water caraffe and drinking glass Laroche kept on a little stand to the left of his bed. With a file Dor­nay rubbed gently at a spot in the thumb of the left-hand glove until little more than a thin filament of chamois remained, which, however would not be noticeable at a care­less glance. Then the detective carefully polished clean the outsides of the caraffe and the drinking glass. He took noth­ing with him when he left. But next morning, when La­roche again left the hotel Dornay stole back into the room and eagerly examined the caraffe and the drinking glass. With a camel’s-hair brush he dusted some graphite powder on it until Laroche’s finger-prints showed clearly. Substi­tuting other glassware Dornay carefully brought Laroche’s to police headquarters.

Three weeks later still another burglary was reported, bearing all the marks of the elusive burglar. But this time the police found faint impressions of a left thumb—and only that. It was, however, sufficient. Dornay’s instinct and little plot had won. As he knew, the moisture of the human finger is sufficient to leave a print even through gloves if the intervening texture is thin. And the finger­prints on the scene of the latest burglary were identical with those on Laroche’s caraffe and drinking glass.

Call it Anglo-Saxon love of team-play, or a racial disin­clination of the individual to shove himself forward at the expense of the group interest, or whatever other trait it illustrates, the Scotland Yard treatment of the Smithers murder mystery was characteristic. Certainly the instinct for organization and organized effort, which has made Scot­land Yard the foremost man-hunting medium in the world, is the inspiration not of individuals but of the race. In contrast in method was the Paris police treatment of the Laroche burglaries. The Frenchman is keenly individual in his work. It makes him less patient, therefore less effi­cient in organization, and consequently throws him back again on individual effort. He is much more prone, as a detective, to hunt by himself than with his colleagues.

Like the Anglo-Saxon gift for organization is the Ger­man passion for it. But there is a vital difference between the two in the outcome of the organization, a difference which is illustrated in the treatment by the Berlin detective force of a murder mystery that occurred in that city sev­eral years ago. The under-secretary for one of the impor­tant governmental departments was found dead near his home in a Berlin suburb. He had evidently been seized from behind, garroted until dead, dragged into an alley and robbed. It was not till late the next day that his body was found; no one had been seen lurking about the scene of the crime; so that the police had practically nothing to work on, other than the manner of the crime.

But they have a machine in the Berlin police department that works almost automatically in the solution of such mysteries. It is typically a German product in the thor­oughness of its organization, in the ruthlessness of its oper­ation, in the vastness and at the same time in the minute­ness of its product. Its principal part is the Meldewesen. Every citizen and visitor in Germany, the former from the day of his birth, the latter from the day of arrival, is re­corded at police headquarters, a card for each individual, and every card is kept up to date. If, for instance, the police want to know something about Carl Schmidt, respect­able citizen, in three minutes after his name reaches police headquarters they know the date, place, and circumstances of his birth, a brief history of each of his parents—if Ger­man, a cross-reference to their individual cards will give a complete history; his education, religion, successive resi­dences, dates of removals, names of business and other asso­ciates—again cross-references afford fuller information on each of these; the name of his wife, date of marriage, names, and other data of his children; dates of the death of any of the family, place of burial; names and histories of servants, employees, etc. At Berlin this Meldewesen depart­ment contains over 20,000,000 cards today, occupies 158 rooms, requires 290 employees, and is daily growing in size. The cards of names commencing with H alone take up ten rooms, S requiring seventeen.

What happens to any individual in Germany who fails to register can be seen in the working of the Razzia system, which is used as a complement to the Meldewesen, and which the police of Berlin proceeded to use in the case of the strangled under-secretary. The Razzia consists of police raids without warrants on gathering places of every kind and even on private dwellings. Every person caught in such a raid is required to give a complete account of him­self or herself. This account is checked up with the record in Meldewesen. If there is a discrepancy, it means anything from a fine, for a first offense for failing to register, to prison if it is repeated.

In this particular case the Berlin police raided Jungfernheide, an amusement park. Of the people there, three hun­dred could not give a clear account of discrepancies between their status then and what the Meldewesen showed. They were all arrested and a minute investigation of each case begun. Out of the three hundred sixty were found to be “wanted” by the police of other cities for various crimes. At the same time that this sifting was going on a special “murder commission,” appointed to deal only with this par­ticular case, was proceeding with coordinating investiga­tions. Such a commission consisting of seven or eight men as a rule, but calling in as many others as necessary, usually includes three or four of the higher officials of the detective force, a police surgeon, a photographer, and one or two men from some highly specialized detective squad. There are thirty-one such squads, each sharply specialized. These squads are known by numbers and the classes of crimes they deal with. For instance: 1. Church thefts, counter­feiting, safe-breaking. 2. Thefts on stairs, streets, squares, hallways, cemeteries, gardens, lead pipes, zinc, etc. 6. Larcenies in flats, tenements, apartments. 7. Burglaries in flats, tenements, apartments. 11. Thefts of overcoats, umbrellas, canes, in restaurants, waiting rooms, institu­tions, etc. 24. Usury, postal frauds. 31. Perjury.

To the special commission in this case were added two members of a squad specializing on highway robberies and an expert on stranglers. These men sifted out the mountain of cards dealing with every individual who could even in the remotest way be suspected of a possible connection with the murder of Under-Secretary Rheinthal. Meanwhile forty-two individuals caught in the Jungfemheide were waiting in prison together with other suspects arrested without warrant or charge. The search revealed that one of the women detained was the mistress of a man against whom were recorded in the police departments of two cities three former highway robberies and a burglary in which the victim was found nearly dead of strangulation, and through the elaborate system of records of the man’s accom­plices, friends, and family, he was finally caught. Once in the clutches of the police the celebrated method of “sweat­ing” or “third degree,” which includes every possible means of coercion, pinned the man to the crime itself and he con­fessed.

Clearly, then, what solved the Rheinthal mystery was a machine, which is what the German passion for organiza­tion produces, rather than a team, as in the case of Scot­land Yard. With the Germans organization reduces its human elements to cogs and parts of an automaton. In Eng­land it binds human beings into a group, which retains initiative on the part of the individual and adds to it the increased competence of the group. In France organiza­tion is the minor fact, the individual is everything.

Aside from the emphasis which national and racial traits give to their different ways of man hunting, these things are also determined by the manner in which men are chosen in these countries to become detectives. In England the instinct is against the creation of a man-hunting class. Scotland Yard, therefore, looks for its raw material among the common people, preferably those near the soil. The Metropolitan Police send scouting teams into the country and offer sufficiently inviting terms to splendid physical specimens to join the police force of London. They investi­gate most carefully the moral character of the applicants, take the successful ones to London, and school them to become one of the world-famous force of “bobbies.” Then if a man shows special aptitude for detective work he has to pass an examination, is given a special training in the detective school of Scotland Yard, and is allowed to work his way up to the top of the system as fast as merit entitles him to promotion. Three elements in his education are con­stantly stressed—the jealously guarded right of every citizen to untrammeled freedom until sufficient evidence is available to justify arrest; the subordination of individual benefit to the good of the group; the duty of every individual to develop initiative and some degree of specialization.

In Germany the practice is to limit the detective force to men who have had at least nine years’ training in the regular army. By the time a candidate becomes a member of the detective staff he is usually past the plastic stage of life and set in his ways. His army life has drilled every vestige of individuality out of him. He is confronted with a future in which he can rise only a grade or two, no matter how efficient he turns out to be. The higher ranks in the service can be reached only through a university training. The result is that the German detective can be depended upon only to follow a routine. It is a machine that the German system demands, rather than an organization.

In Vienna the detective system can draw on neither a people gifted with regimentalized efficiency, nor the individ­ual efficiency of the Scotland Yard man or the French detec­tive. Yet the man hunting done by the Vienna police equals in efficiency any other in Europe. For, in the professorial chairs, the laboratories, and the research departments of Austrian universities man hunting has attained its highest development. In Vienna it is not organization or the indi­vidual detective or a marvelous machine that hunts the criminal most successfully, but modern science with its microscope, chemical reagents, the orderly processes of in­ductive reasoning, carried out by professors, and a minimum contribution on the part of the professional detective.

Let us illustrate with the murder and robbery of a mil­lionaire recluse who lived in a villa on the border of Wiener Wald. He was found dead in his barn, his skull crushed in with some blunt instrument which could not be found. The only clue left by the murderer was a workman’s cap. Dr. Gross in his celebrated work on criminal investiga­tion, which is the most exhaustive study of the science of man hunting in existence, stresses the importance of hairs and dust as clues. The inside of the cap, therefore, was carefully examined and two hairs found, which were not those of the murdered man. These hairs were placed under the microscope, experts called in, and the following was ascer­tained as the description of the man to whom those hairs belonged: “Man about forty-five years old; robust constitu­tion; turning bald; brown hair, nearly gray and recently cut.” The cap was placed in a tough paper bag, sealed, and beaten with a stick as hard as possible. When it was opened again there was dust at the bottom of the bag. This dust was microscopically examined and chemically analyzed. Disregarding the elements that came obviously from the floor of the barn where the cap was found it was discovered that wood dust, such as is found in the shop of a carpenter, predominated. But there were also found minute particles of glue. The combination pointed to a wood joiner.

There was such a man living near the scene of the crime, who also answered to the description derived from the two hairs, a man of morose temperament rendered desperate by drink and poverty. A search of his premises for the instru­ment which might have caused the death of the murdered man yielded a hammer and two mortar pestles. The ham­mer with its octagonal nose was found incapable of inflict­ing the shape of the wound in the man’s skull. The pestles fitted. There were two of them, an iron one rusted in spots and a polished brass one. The rust spots on the iron one were found on chemical analysis to be due to water. But under the metal polish of the brass pestle, when it was carefully scraped away, were found remnants of stains which on analysis and microscopic examination proved to be blood. By a system of reagents developed by Professor Uhlenhut the blood was found to be that of the murdered man. After the investigation had proceeded a little further the murderer broke down and confessed his guilt.

Nothing is too small or insignificant to furnish clues to the Vienna school of laboratory detectives. The marks of teeth on a cigar holder left on the scene of the murder were found to indicate unusually long canines, a clue which led to the murderer. The dust found in pocket knives or clasp knives with which crimes had been committed brought many a criminal to justice wholly through laboratory methods.

The readiness of the German police to search, arrest, and detain citizens on the slightest ground, and the methods em­ployed by the French police in extracting confessions from suspected persons vary fundamentally from the procedure followed in man hunting by the English. When a Scotland Yard man, backed with a warrant, makes an arrest he is compelled by law to say to his prisoner: “Do you wish to make any statement? I warn you that anything you say now may be used against you. You are not required to make any statement.” It is generally acknowledged that a confession extorted from an accused would be barred as evidence in English courts. In contrast to this is the brilliant record made by a Paris detective in tricking arrested suspects into confessions. This man would cultivate the friendship of the accused, say, of murder. Outside of prison the detective would spend most of his time investigating not so much evidence of the prisoner’s guilt but his grievance against the murdered man. Then one day he would rush into the ac­cused man’s cell, his face burning with indignation. “My friend!” he would exclaim. “I don’t understand why you hesitate for one instant in confessing that you killed that snake! I am not a bad man myself. But if any man ruined my business and outraged the woman I love and did a tenth of the vile things that snake did to you, I would kill him and be proud of it!” “Isn’t that so?” the accused would ex­claim—and find himself betrayed.

In England a man’s home is his castle and a detective is limited accordingly. No search can be effected, no arrest made without a warrant based on such evidence as will con­vince a judge in open court. In Berlin a police lieutenant boasted with truth to a student of European police meth­ods : “I can have my neighbor arrested, his house searched, and the man detained in prison for twenty hours even if he is innocent as a lamb. And I can do it without a process beforehand or being made to answer for it afterward.”

This free hand the German police has, together with the infinitely elaborate net in which the German public con­sents to live, gives its detectives a tremendous advantage over the English. A man’s house in Germany is not his cas­tle; an accused can be forced to testify against himself; the habeas corpus is not the institution it is in England. As Sir William Harcourt said: “You must not be surprised if the English police is sometimes foiled, baffled, or defeated. . . . It is the price England pays for a system which she justly prefers.” On the other hand the German system does not necessarily argue a slavish people. The German is equally surprised at the English lack of the institution of the Meldewesen and other aids to the police. “What do peo­ple in England do to find where a certain criminal is?” a German asked in discussing the Meldewesen. “And why should I resent the Meldewesen when it operates to protect me against the criminal? Also suppose I want to find out the address of any man in Berlin or Dresden. For a small fee the police will get it for me. As for the right of search and arrest, well, an innocent man will not suffer long. In return he gets the protection of a system from which the criminal undergoes a maximum of insecurity.”

As the criminal becomes more and more international in his operations, more and more cosmopolitan in his knowl­edge of the ways of man hunters, so the latter, too, are forced to become broader in their hunting methods. The science and some of the organization technique of the Aus­trians and the Germans are being added to the equipment of Scotland Yard. Republican Germany, on the other hand, is modifying some of the autocratic police abuses established by an imperial regime. Paris police are working in close harmony with Scotland Yard and are assimilating from them some of the lessons of team work. Vienna is borrow­ing German organization and Scotland Yard emphasis on the selection of the raw material of its detective force and has surpassed Scotland Yard in the educational training it now gives its operatives. Some day there may even come true the dream of several visionaries among police chiefs—an international police headquarters in The Hague or in some other city from where man hunting in Europe will proceed on a world-wide scope and with the combined skill of all nations.

Salvage—A Canadian Idea

Salvage—A Canadian Idea

Lacey Amy

From MacLean’s Magazine, June 1, 1919.

MOTORING in France along a road close enough to the fighting front to be broken by shell holes and at the moment under intermittent fire I was held up in the traffic by an empty lorry that recklessly bumped its way along the narrow strip of roadway left for the outgoing line by the ingoing loads of battle supplies. It was not quite empty. From the dusk beneath the cover there peered out at me the wizened, leathery face of an ancient French peasant woman, a refugee from the strife she had dared for four long years. And under her derelict visage, on the back-board of the lorry, stared a query I had read many times before without interest: “What have you salved to-day?”

Even my driver laughed—that youthful veteran of stony indifference to everything in war but meal hours and engine trouble. My eyes were opened to a story I had been reading without understanding. So quietly and unobtrusively had it been weaving its plot into the great theme of war that few noticed it, fewer spoke of it, and none gave it the credit it deserved as an essential factor in victory.

It Was Canada’s Invention

IF it is the last gun and man that wins a war, Salvage will bob up at the end with that gun. For Salvage is to the material forces of the army what hospitals are to the men. It has made the bottomless pit of war fathomable. It  was the life-line of millions of dollars’ worth of the raw materials of war—leather, steel, iron, brass, powder, cloth. It despatched the breeches buoy to brigades of guns of all sizes, to squadrons of saddles, to corps of rifles and boots and haversacks and uniforms. It fought the submarine menace with the most effective of weapons. It partially solved the transportation problem, the production problem, the man-power problem. It helped magnificently to defeat an enemy more independent of it because of years of preparation. It held down the colossal taxes of a world struggle and enabled the belligerent countries to step into peace with their wind good and their equipment fit enough.

Incidentally, but vital to this article, it was the product of Canadian brains, as were the trench raid, the tump line, the canthook as a war weapon, light railway construction, army farming, and a host of other members of the great family of victory. So proud a product was it that the British Army copied it entire. Which was no new sensation for the Canadians.

Economy is a fetich of the French. Among the peasants, as we discovered through that wonderful country, it supplanted the progress of invention and innovation. The flail repudiated the threshing machine. Conservation, economy’s modern cousin, was never more at home than in the Canadian heart and mind. And conservation developed, through the exigencies of the case, into that powerful arm of military service known as Salvage.

Conservation is an instinct of some Canadians. Now and then one came across it at the front in its extreme form. During the heavy fighting of 1918, after four years of ceaseless war had strewn France with its marks, a Canadian newspaper friend visiting the front for a few days entered the mess one evening with all the dignity of virtue. Solemnly holding aloft one of those little cartridge clips that will for years be earth of the very earth of France, he informed us that he had found it. Where, he enquired, should he hand it in? And not one of us even smiled.

An Invitation to Save

UP at Ablain St. Nazaire I noticed conservation first in organized form. There in the semi-shelter of Vimy Ridge was a welter of ruin unrivalled along the four hundred miles of battle line. Whole villages had been so completely levelled that in early 1918 one rode through them without suspecting they had ever existed. For years the Germans had been lobbing over destruction into that corner. So that the jagged remains of the church are perhaps more famous—in art, at least—than the Cloth Hall at Ypres or the Rheims Cathedral. It was while returning from the ruined church with a Canadian artist that I came on Conservation, the forerunner of Salvage.

Before an extensive area covered with engineers’ supplies was a huge sign which he who ran might read. Behind it a battery of big guns was lazily awakening to the afternoon strafe. The walls of the church stood dull white against the hills to the west. A mere trickle of water, dignified by the name of the Souchez River, meandered as a ditch beside the road. And only two or three miles away, around the curve of the hollow, lay Lens and its shattered suburbs, that town of evil but wondrous fame to Canada.

"Think," commanded the sign in a whole line to itself; and then: "before drawing R. E. stores, of the following prices:

                                                            £.         s.          d.

1 sandbag costs                                   0          0          8

1 large steel shelter                              17        6          3

1 small steel shelter                             5          18        9

1 roll wire netting                                1          4          0

1 sheet corrugated iron                       0          3          3

1 pick                                                  0          3          3

1 shovel                                               0          1          6

ECONOMIZE—

1. By not indenting for more than you need and can use at once.

2. By bringing back all tools taken out on working parties.

3. By salving all the material you can and using where you can instead of new.

4. By remembering that everything has got to be paid for.”

The official photographer has made a record of that sign for posterity as the idea behind Canada’s Salvage scheme.

Canadian Bravery and Salvage

SALVAGE entered again into my experience when the Canadian Corps was resting at Pernes to block the victorious path of the enemy in early 1918—or to be ready for one of those famous attacks which placed the Canadians by themselves in the eyes of the German Army.

Bethune had moved up so close to the front that its future was uncertain. Its citizens had been gone for months, and the soldiers who moved amidst its strafed ruins looked into houses and stores that had been left as they stood when the sudden terror of capture drove their owners to flee without the family penates. Life in Bethune was as uncertain as a feather in the wind. One felt it keenly when, drifting through the deserted streets, a whining shell in the next block and altered the skyline before one’s eves.

Back at Pernes, short ten miles away, an old barn had become an auction room where French officials sold to the highest bidder stoves and grain and hay, the unorganized salvage of Bethune. Then the Canadians took it in hand. Lorries made daily trips. They backed up to the empty houses and stores of Bethune, loaded with everything portable, and rumbled back to Pernes, where every available space was requisitioned for storage. From ugly lorries there poured into these barns beautiful mirrors of past centuries, ornate chandeliers, tables and chairs, stoves, anvils, paintings—the most intimate possessions of a people who love their country so passionately that they have never become emigrants. And everything was tagged with the number of the street from which it was taken. Dangerous work it was. To-day the lorries would plan their duties for to-morrow—only to find when to-morrow came that the street they were to work on had vanished. But with dents in their sides, and holes in their covers, they emerged from the shelled towns each night with another day’s record of Salvage.

The Wonderful Fruits of Salvage

BUT Salvage, with a capital S, I became acquainted with first at Boves, an uninhabited one-streeted village of ancient visage down there south of Amiens. In that fight Salvage almost wearied. Its muscles ached. It so nigh to over-reached itself that it threatened to hamper transportation instead of relieving it. For the unexpected appearance of the Canadians was successful beyond the power of any organization of Salvage to cope with it adequately. Hitherto booty had been a mere incident of success. But when it takes the form of a couple of hundred big guns, among them a half dozen of the hated long range, high velocity five-point-nines; of equipment enough to outfit an army; of weapons of offence and defence never before met—then it ceases to be an addenda and becomes part of the text.

When the Corps wiped the dust of Amiens from its feet there remained as its mark such a hoard of Salvage as had never before rewarded an attack on such a width of front. A whole field was covered with it—stacked and piled. It might have been an exhibition of the necessities of war. The big guns were off some miles nearer Amiens, for they merited separate mention and, technically speaking, are not included in the sphere of Salvage—though Salvage rescues them as it does the other equipment.

In the field of Salvage were great groups of machine guns and heaps of rifles, bayonets and swords uncounted, grenades and cartridges in boxes piled higher than a man’s head, shells of every calibre, helmets of both armies, stacks of khaki and field grey clothing, leather in its multitude of shapes as used in saddles, straps, carbine carriers, German haversacks, boots, and bayonet scabbards.

Amidst this litter men were producing order. Every item was in its own pile. Live German shells and grenades were being “dehorned” by delicate but seemingly reckless hands. Novelties were set aside for future study.

At this stage of the year’s operation I came personally within the broad horizon of Salvage and learned something of its ramifications. In the hurry of moving from Dury, the Headquarters town, back to the Arras sector, a careless batman neglected a haversack of mine. By the time I could return for it, it had disappeared with the troops that followed us. “See the Salvage officer,” advised everyone. I did. And the machinery he immediately set in motion made me feel like a joyride clergyman, visiting the front for the first time. I never recovered my haversack—but I have copies of a month of correspondence that continued long after I had ceased to care, and extended back and forward from corps to army in that interminable way of military efficiency. It ceased only when, oppressed with the necessity of getting on with the war, I insisted that I had found the lost detail of equipment.

Saving Ran Into Millions

SALVAGE emerged from the experience in my eyes a tremendous machine of bewildering efficiency, a great rolling of wheels that had long since passed from human control. One got those impressions sometimes at the front.

Salvage came into official existence only in March, 1917. Before that it had been merely Divisional effort, independent in its various units but ambitious enough to reveal its possibilities. The one exception to the detachment of its early history was during the Somme offensive of 1918. In those two months of August and September more than $2,000,000 worth of ammunition alone was salved, and $2,500,000 in ordnance. Six million dollars was the record of that short period of organized Salvage in the Canadian Corps.

Accordingly only a few months intervened before the system was permanently adopted as a recognized part of the military machine. Since then there are official figures that prove its value beyond cavil. From March 14th, 1917, to the end of that year the Canadian Corps was better off by $8,200,000 through -the benefits of Salvage. For the next year I have returns only up to the end of August, including, therefore, only the Amiens battle of the tremendous season of fighting. After that time the Canadian Corps was advancing so steadily through a welter of German booty and the surviving possessions of French refugees that estimate is impossible. But in those eight months of the year, with only one battle, Salvage turned in $4,500,000 in material. And it must be understood that the value of German and French materials was never included.

It might not be clear how such an amount could be represented by British Salvage alone. The explanation is the revelation of the true sphere of Salvage. Salvage, concerned as it was with German booty and the recovery of French property, was primarily the salvation of British equipment discarded or lost in the ordinary course of war. It followed close on the heels of a conquering army, of a moving unit. When a battalion changed its location it left behind bits of outfit, deliberately or carelessly. Salvage picked it up. When an advance was made it often happened that whole units dropped their equipment to facilitate the operation. Salvage came along and saved it all. In the trenches remained stores of bombs, iron rations, blankets, ground sheets, ammunition, when the soldiers had departed. Salvage neglected none of it. The battlefield was a store of equipment discarded by the wounded or dropped by the dead, by the attackers and attacked. Salvage pushed out in the fringe of the shelling and rescued it.

Salvage missed little; it closed its hand on things that seemed the antithesis of the needs of war. But one never knows. For instance, the army to which the Canadian Corps was attached at the time developed one of those unaccountable cravings that come even to the soldier. It wanted two chaff cutters. Well—the Canadian Corps Salvage Company produced them immediately.

Salvage in Small Things

SALVAGE turned up its nose at nothing. The ubiquitous petrol tin seemed to the soldier worth nothing save in its varied capacities for adding to the comfort of dugouts and tents.

It was his wash basin, his waterpail, his brazier, his chair, his protection from wind and shell.

War would have been a hotter hell without the petrol tin. But why Salvage should bother with it was apparent to no one but Salvage in all that petrol-tinned France. But the army suddenly called for 1,800 one day, and Salvage had a thousand on hand blocking the landscape.

But there is no intention of implying that the soldiers did not co-operate in salvaging. There were established dumps all along the Canadian front. There were, too, sufficient signs and appeals to remind the men of those dumps. And the Canadians responded by bringing back with them from the Advance areas enough rescued material and equipment and tools to make their co-operation a worthy addition to Canadian assistance in the war.

The system of Salvage was well organized for its work. Each Division, as well as the unit known as Corps Troops (that body of men required around the Corps distinct from the battalions), had its own organization for salvage. It followed its own forces, established its own dumps, received credit for its own salvage. The First Division salvaged $250,000 worth of recaptured British material at Amiens alone. The Third estimated its savings up to the week before the Amiens fight at $655,704. There was a profitable rivalry induced by such a system.

When the Corps arrived at a new area it was the duty of the Corps Salvage Officer to furnish each of the Division Salvage officers with maps showing the location of dumps. Small sub-dumps were formed under the Division aegis, and their contents were transferred back to the main Division dump as transportation became available. Here was undertaken the great task of sorting and classifying. Sorting was according to kind, classification to serviceability. This completed, everything was despatched to the Corps Salvage dump. Here what was serviceable and fit for immediate use was turned over to Ordnance; serviceable, but requiring repair was returned to the Base repair shops; and the unserviceable was sent to the Base for breaking up. There unserviceable clothing became rags, and broken rifles were examined for serviceable parts.

In the collection of the salvage care was taken to confine the initial work to perishable material. After that the field was more deliberately combed.

How Souvenirs Were Secured

THE sub-dumps were located where possible near a light railway or frequented road. The Divisional dumps had to be convenient to a light railway. The Corps dump was beside a standard gauge railway for transportation to the Base. Light railway trains that went up with ammunition or troops returned with salvage. Lorries were requisitioned on the return journey. Salvage had no transportation of its own but it had considerable powers of requisitioning.

Salvage collected the material left at casualty clearing stations. Rest camps were cleaned up by camp commandants and town majors, and when the accumulation grew to sufficient proportions Salvage carried it away to the dumps. If the Corps moved too quickly for Salvage to complete its job the Salvage Officer left behind him a map of the area not cleared.

An incidental feature of Salvage operations was its contribution to the War Museum to be built at Ottawa. Scores of packing boxes were despatched direct to Canada—and scores more would have gone had Salvage had the authority it should have had. In that case it might have prevented the peculiar situation that developed of Great Britain taking the choice of everything captured by the Canadians, for the Museum to be constructed in London, England—where very few Canadians will ever see some of the finest trophies of the war, captured by their own sons.

The personnel of Salvage was drawn from the Area Employment Companies, consisting mostly of B2 men. The objection to this was that the men trained in salvaging were subject to recall by the Employment Companies at any time. Towards the end of the war it was proposed to form a permanent staff, as the duties justified.

Salvage recalls to my mind several scenes during the later stages of the fighting. Out before Arras a wide plain was largely filled with heaps of the trophies of' war, much of it equipment, shells, and even guns recaptured from the Germans after they had captured them from the British during their early successes of the year. Such an abundance of material did the Germans lay their hands on in their drive that they had not had time or means of removing it. Now hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth returned unharmed to the original owners to be used as first intended. There were thousands of British shell boxes to help to solve the shortage of wood and labor; and there were shell casings in piles that needed only to be touched up to be ready for use again.

Corps Salvage dump was during those days a hive of industry and a centre of deepest interest. It was necessarily some distance in the rear because of the destruction of railway further forward. There it had settled down to show just what Salvage can do with the broken, dented, rusted, muddied stuff that accumulates on every battle front.

A GREAT heap of empty oil drums represented a distinct operation. It started when the Salvage Officer happened one time to see an empty drum overturned. The little bit of oil that dripped from it gave him an idea. And ever since the drippings have averaged 500 gallons a month of clear gain. In one shed two men were hammering at pieces of bent tin rescued from damaged petrol and oil receptacles. And in a corner of the shed a third man illustrated their use. Signs—the multitude of painted signs necessary through the areas of the armies—were growing under his hand. No more valuable wood or tin for the signs of the Canadian Corps! Another shed was devoted to the cleaning of British rifles. A heap of 150 lay ready to go back to the trenches, polished and bright, their action perfect, in as good conditions as ever they were. Knapsacks, cartridge belts, haversacks, and trenching tool carriers and even clothing were being cleaned for immediate re-issue. A home-made furnace was struggling to extract the solder from the heaps of tins necessary to the life of an army.

There were German cookers—better than our own—awaiting disposal. Two had been captured at Amiens that belonged once to the British Army and had been improved in German hands. German field kitchens and hot water heaters, German tip-carts—one fitted with British wheels—German camouflage—and the German pre-dated us in camouflage and always excelled in it—German folding and bicycle stretchers, were in the dump. A furnace seemed to offer no service. The casings of the shells that had once fired on St. Pol had been captured at Vis en Artois, thirty miles away, and were welcome souvenirs. German shaft blowers had already been utilized by the Corps in the Headquarters’ dugouts at Demuin. Rolls of German barbed wire, German gas cylinders, German wagons and limbers were mixed with the accoutrements of our own armies. Bicycles and motorcycles were in condition to be repaired. German corrugated iron was stronger than our ordinary variety and would be quickly put into service.

There was an atmosphere of efficiency, of completeness, of a confident solution of many of the most trying problems of war about that collection.

Canadian Salvage had handed on its lesson to the rest of the British Army. It had revealed its story to those best fitted to estimate its value. Thereafter it was content to work silently in its own way, replacing production in part by conservation, preventing the strain and perils of shortage, recovering what would mean the difference between exhaustion and mere weariness, shortening the war every day it was in operation.

Confidences of a War Correspondent

Confidences of a War Correspondent

By Lacey Amy

From The Canadian Magazine, November, 1920.

Digitized by Doug Frizzle, November 2015.

THE hectic flush that once bathed the work of the war correspondent passed into memory with the outbreak of the Great War. Like a change in the colour of the stage calcium light departed much of the nerve-breaking strain of news gathering in battle, all the endless conflict and uncanny ingenuity of news despatching. The correspondent became a part of the military machine—with unique privileges and freedom, of course—and the process of getting his “stuff” to his newspapers was as formally prescribed as the provision of food to the armies.

Nerve strain did not cease to be a daily diet. More ground than ever had to be covered by the man who sent out the news—the reading world demanded it—but he had his own car to do it with; or rather, General Headquarters rented him a car at sixty dollars a week if he were a Canadian correspondent, or part of that price was included in the weekly bill for keep at the Press Chateau, where the British correspondents resided. The strain was the result more of competition where “scoops” were practically impossible, of irritating censorship, of possible break-down of car or chauffeur, of greater physical danger within sight or sound of battle, and of that overhanging control which agitates the soul of every natural news-gatherer.

War correspondents in this Great War traduced all the traditions of the profession, even of newspaper reporting. They became gregarious even in their gathering of news. They exchanged items of interest as a matter of policy, not for mere friendship’s sake. Every correspondent at the Press Chateau, the headquarters of the men who reported the operations of the British Army, saw precisely what his fellows did and he heard almost precisely the same stories. He couldn’t help it. Lord Kitchener started the idea. The particular kind of war this was did the rest. So that, if Philip Gibbs, or Beach Thomas, or Phillips, or Nevinson, or any of the rest of them pleased the reader better than his mates it was only because of a more vivid imagination or a more fluent pen.

The Canadian war correspondent was a very different cog in the war machinery from the British correspondent, that prolific and hard-working writer who supplied the news to the world under difficult conditions.

In privileges, in authority, in location at the Front, in experiences, the Canadian news-gatherer was unique.

The two Canadian war correspondents during the fighting of the Canadian Corps in 1918 were Mr. J. F. B. Livesay—than whom there never was a more indefatigable and unselfish news-gatherer at the front—and myself. Mr. Stewart Lyon had preceded us. Our sleeping quarters were never more than seven or eight miles from the front lines. We were eye-witnesses of every “kick-off” in which the Canadian Corps was concerned. Every day, rain or shine, we looked on the actual battle from points of vantage, usually in front of the guns. We talked to the wounded as they staggered back, while they waited to be dressed, as they lay patiently awaiting their turns for the ambulances. We went unattended where we liked when we liked.

Our writing was done by night to the light of a candle stuck in its own grease. Often as I pulled the slim coverings over me during those vile weeks near Wancourt, Livesay’s typewriter was clicking from his tent; and sundry officers with red tabs were wont to make violent remarks about both our machines.

British correspondents were less—and more—fortunate. Owing to the necessity of being with the censors at the centre where the wires from the whole British Army con­verged, they slept and ate at what we called the Press Chateau, which was located for years before the 1918 fighting at Hesdin, and later moved to different points as the successes developed. At no time, however, was it less than thirty-five miles from the front lines. Their messages had to be filed in mid-forenoon or mid-after­noon, and their car capacity was lim­ited. They could not visit the Front without an attending officer. That they did so well under these handi­caps is one of the brilliant features of the war.

The Canadian war correspondents of 1918 probably saw more real fight­ing in two months than their British confreres did throughout the war. Yet only at one period to my knowledge did the men at the Press Chateau make errors in fact that were worth correcting. And that period was interwoven with brainstorms of the censorship that make another story.

My experiences commenced long before reaching France—seven months before. Having undertaken the assignment for a group of im­portant Canadian papers, the first wall I had to scale was precedent. Never before had there been with the British Army a war correspondent whose duties were confined to the writing of descriptive articles instead of news, and who sent them by mail instead of by wire. “Colour” writers were a new genus to the War Office, demanding as much ponderous rumination as a new type of machine gun or a new national policy. Besides, the Australians had no equivalent attached to them. And it was a recognized condition of internal harmony that when a ray of sunlight was permitted to shine on the Canadians a consignment of moonlight or rainbows had to be despatched by special messenger to the Aussies—and vice versa.

At first it seemed fairly clear sail­ing. The fact that the group of papers I represented covered Can­ada and included both parties earned me official backing. But five months passed before I even learned the reason why I was refused the white pass which is the open-sesame of the war correspondent.

For months I had been running a series of magazine articles on different phases of war effort in England. Naturally there was criticism as well as acclamation. It happened that in a treatment of the alien question there was more of the former, though the article presented every possible mitigation. And in the light of the revelations of a committee of investigation in 1919 that there were still 835 employees in Government Departments both of whose parents were enemy subjects; that a Lieut.-Col. Beichwald, whose father was for many years Krupp’s adviser in England, had been recently appointed to a liaison position in British affairs in Turkey; and that a naturalized British subject, Austrian born, who fought against the Allies in the Aus­trian Army, had been permitted to return to England and resume his business—my position in the article requires no defence. Indeed, the worst I said was as a mere acid drop to calomel compared with what the press of London was handing almost daily to the Government for its persistent kindness to enemy aliens. However it is much easier to exercise restraint over a mere Canadian in London than over the London press; and for months I was so busy in a war of my own, defensive and offensive, that the one over there in France seemed to have lost its nip.

Every wire within reach I began to pull. And finally I discovered that which has entirely altered my conception of English Government—that its faults are not in the men at the top but in the system that robs them of real authority and places it in the hands of bloodless and cut-by-measure assistants and departmental officials who bring to the consideration of every problem a mechanical device invented probably to relieve the real heads of the worry of government. The full significance of this came to light not long ago when it was admitted officially in the British House of Commons that a civil service employee cannot be dismissed for incompetence. England is “governed” by gentlemen of the first water. It is ruled by underlings who protect their authority more zealously than most men do their honour, who can work more destruction in a week than their nominal superiors can rebuild in a lifetime.

A wire invited me to a certain Government office. There occurred an interview with a general and colonel that was a pleasure from greeting to farewell.

“When do you want to go?” suddenly inquired one.

“Saturday,” I replied, and I said it as if I hadn’t to take a firm hold of my chair to keep me from falling off.

“Saturday, then.”

But I was not in France yet. On the morning before I was to leave the War Office called me up to read me a cable just received from G.H.Q.: “Canadian Corps now say that Mr. Lacey Amy must be regarded as an officially attached journalist and must have his own car. Corps cannot supply car. Canadian representative consulted says under these circumstances Mr. Amy cannot be received.”

Phew! Without divulging what steps were taken, I can say that that parley was cut so short that several of us had time only to get mad. But new papers had to be made out; and on Tuesday, June 25th, I almost sneaked to Victoria Station, climbed inconspicuously aboard the Staff train for Folkestone, unobtrusively handed my papers over at the boat, stumbled through the formalities at Boulogne—and after seven months of brain-racking uncertainty and worry struck across France towards Canadian Corps Headquarters in a high- powered car.

I was there.

The Corps was then in rest camp about Pernes, fifteen miles north-west of Arras and about twelve from the nearest point in the front lines. My first impression of war correspondence as a permanency—I had been across before on those Cook’s-Tour trips for newspapermen—came from the sight of several large fresh shell-holes close to my first billet. In part of my billet itself were sundry conspicuous chips. And that night the raiders came over and bumped me about disturbingly—though I had already experienced twenty-eight such raids in London. But then one is such a speck in London—and there were six women in the house there to lord it over. I began to wonder if war was really a proper place for a war correspondent.

Trouble visited me early owing to my ignorance of army regulations. The first exhibition might have earned me a bullet, the second a court-martial. With characteristic ignorance I failed to appreciate either escape.

North of Pernes was a hill from which was obtainable one of the finest distant views of the spectacle of war I ever saw. Every evening after dinner a Montreal artist friend, a Belgian artist then working with the Corps, and I used to climb to the practice trenches of the hilltop and thrill with it far into the night. In time I came to consider that hill my personal property. So that when I wandered up alone one night and came on a British battalion at night practice I simply looked on without a thought of the outward similarity between a spectator and a spy—until the whining of an occasional bullet about my ears warned me of the unreliability of blank cartridges and drove me to the edge of the hill where I lay in the grass overlooking distant Bethune and its strafing. Behind me the mimic warfare continued.

About midnight I rose to return to my billet, passed carelessly about the end of the first trench—and was suddenly halted by a shadowy figure. A company that knew me not had the trenches now. After explanations I continued my way. At the other end the silence was eerie, especially as I could see heads moving cautiously against the sky and long things protruding towards me. Once I heard the. click of a trigger. Then a stentorian voice—must have been a sergeant-major—roared: “Stop that officer. Don’t let even your own commanding officer pass in front of you without challenging him.”

Naturally I didn’t wait for the order. Once more I gave my pedigree and was permitted to pass. And just when safety was in sight, a voice called to me from the top of the hill. Looking up, two tremendous soldiers, capped by two tremendous rifles, were visible against the sky running for me. They took me back to the of­ficer, a mere chit of a child who pre­tended to examine my papers in the darkness. “Do you know you are in great danger?” he inquired solemnly, but with an indifference that appealed to me as unnecessarily hard-hearted. And with apparent disappointment that there would be no execution at dawn, he let me go.

I still contend that two smaller men and two ordinary rifles could have effected my arrest and sustained the dignity of the Army.

The other display was a terrible breach of Army—especially of First Division—discipline. Calling on General Macdonnell, whom I had met only once eight months before, I found him closeted with General Currie. To my credit let it stand that I waited. Leaning wearily on an urn at the front door—mentally polishing the introductory paragraph of an article in plan—someone passed me from behind. I was conscious of the officer beside me springing to the salute. Lazily, more by instinct than by consciousness, I waved a negligent hand towards my cap as the back of a gray-haired head moved out before me.

But General Macdonnell has eyes in the back of his head—he demonstrated it to me later; it was the reflection in his glasses. And I return­ed to Etrun and the Canadian Corps with a start when the gray head whirled and a pair of fiery eyes and fierce mustachios made the air crackle. I was ignorant of the orthodox line to pursue under the circumstances—but I noticed from the corner of my eye a wobble in the knees of the staff officers about.

General Macdonnell speaks fast. In moments of excitement he might be said to hurry. But he never trips.

“Who are you? . . . What’s your name? . . . Where do you come from? . . . What Division do you belong to? . . . Don’t you know how to salute . . .?”

That is all I recall—but there was more like it in Macdonell’s eyes. Once or twice I managed to ejaculate the first letter of a word, but gave up helplessly while he was pausing for breath.

Then I shot at him in a dash of words who I was, for I didn’t like the thoughts of a second spasm.

“No, General,” I added, “I’m afraid I don’t know how to salute.”

It was a trying moment for a general whose reputation in matters of discipline can’t be added to by any—with a very sensitive body and a vivid thing I can say—to say nothing of how trying it was to a correspondent without much reputation to lose but imagination. But General Macdonell was equal to the occasion. Swiftly but easily he did the only thing possible without embarrassment. Throwing back his head he laughed—and even with those eyes and that ruddy face and that moustache no smile is pleasanter; at least, that’s my opinion.

“Oh, it’s you, is it? I thought I had to knock someone’s head off.” And the knees about began to stiffen; circulation resumed its duty in blanched faces.

After lunch the General and I retired to a quiet place where I practised a salute that might pass me over the initial meetings with strange generals who had not yet learned that I knew no better.

The path of the war correspondent was beset by other trials. Thrown into the discomforts of the front without the hardening process of training, I was unprepared for tent life. By advice in London I neglected to provide myself with a sleeping bag, being assured that I would always be in billets. Fortunately for my adviser, his name has slipped my memory.

Tent life started for me at Molliens Vidame (or, as even the G.O.C. must have called it, Mollyann be damned). It was there we stopped for the first week after our unexpected flit to the Amiens front. The heat during the day was almost unbearable; at night there would have been frost in Western Canada. Thus the dark stained tents in the orchard were furnaces by day and refrigerators by night; and even the early morning sun was denied us by the trees in which we had pitched to escape detection by Hun planes.

By dint of the most pathetic begging I managed to borrow two blankets from the quartermaster. But there was not another to beg, borrow, or steal. I proved the hopelessness of begging and borrowing, myself; my batman experimented fruitlessly in the other. And when he failed to wangle anything I needed it was because it was chained down and guarded night and day. I recall his return to the incomplete tent “home” one day after a round of the town and tents, such a look of disgust on his Scotch face that I feared his category had been raised. “Everybody’s sitting on their kits!” he growled. Then, with that look of guileless indifference which served him—and me—so well, he sauntered into the yard of the engineers’ chateau and “picked up” sufficient material to make me a cot and wire mattress. A great find was that batman; especially fortunate was the officer who had him, in that he was protected from anyone else having him.

And so my first few nights in a tent were spent on the damp ground; and during that first week two blankets had to do duty under as well as over. The margin between freezing and the limit of human endurance was filled by trench coats and papers my friends contributing to the supply. I grew almost accustomed to awaiting the morning sun to thaw me out—but the other tents never grew fond of the rustle of paper when I moved or shivered.

But never was there a camp in all the last year of the war the equal, in dreariness and discomfort, of advanced headquarters out there between Neuville Vitasse and Wancourt, where we existed during the three weeks and more preceding the Bourlon Wood attack. The utter desolation of the waste that stretched to the horizon was appalling. When it blew, our tent pegs worked loose in the sand. When it rained most of the tents were flooded out and the batmen were busy for days rebuilding the walls and refilling the floors. One night’s storm tore down a half dozen tents and landed the occupants in a couple of feet of water.

By this time, thanks to my assiduous collection, my bed coverings, under and over, consisted of three blankets (my batman gave me his own and slept in his clothes), two British warms, a sweater coat, a trench coat and lining, heavy socks, a woollen cap, several layers of cheesecloth-backed maps—That is all I remember, but in late September and early October no heterogeneous assortment of makeshifts can take the place of a pair of good wool blankets when the frost is whitening the ground and the wind persists in filtering under the tent wall.

And the ugly lonesomeness of it! Out across the slopes the evenings settled to absolute lifelessness, though we knew that thousands lay there within bugle call. The drab spirit of it came up through the darkness in sad part-song from a hundred desolate funkholes. Someone broke out, night after night, on a cornet, and the rest of us shuddered. “If I could get hands on that fellow,” exploded an officer in the mess one night, after we had struggled in vain to ignore it, “I’d knife him. Makes me feel like the night before going over.”

After the move to the outskirts of Queant, following the successful Bourlon Wood battle, the two correspondents developed a fed-up feeling. We had reached our limit. The grind of typing by night in leaky tents, with our hands so cold we could not feel the keys, of living conditions that drove us to bitterness and overpowered our mental capacity by physical sensitiveness, impelled us to appeal to General Currie. Only the previous night I had spent hours dodging the trickling streams in my tent—and then failed. In the morning my underclothing was wet, a toad jumped on my face as I slept, and my typewriter case and paper were soggy. It was presented to a sympathetic Commander-in-Chief that the product of such conditions would be good neither for the Corps nor for the people of Canada.

We flatter ourselves that Canada owes General Currie an additional debt for responding immediately. Next morning an Armstrong hut was erected for us—and all our worries ended. Thereafter lots of table space, dry beds and typewriters and paper, an oil stove that made night work a comfort, canvas cots, ample transport, dignity. The Canadian war correspondents ranked now as Staff Officers.

It was the happy conclusion of a personal struggle which, during the six weeks when 1 was the only Canadian correspondent, the Camp Commandant and I had waged in a friendly, but none the less persistent, way to establish the position of the news gatherer of the Corps. To the Camp Commandant the war correspondent was a necessary evil; and as he arranged the billets and located the personnel of Headquarters there was ample opportunity to him of expressing his conception of values. I inherited from my predecessor the rear Echelon of Headquarters as the correspondent’s home. That was no serious disadvantage until the advanced Echelon moved a dozen miles away to Duisans. Appeals to the Camp Commandant failed on the plea that Duisans was full. So I carried the question to the Commander-in-Chief. But just then we flitted to Amiens.

When Headquarters was again split into two echelons for the battle, my name was down to remain at Molliens Vidame, fifteen miles from the front lines. Again an appeal to the Camp Commandant was useless. But General Currie was fortunately of a different mind. In just as long as it takes to walk four hundred yards at a good pace, orders were put through that I was always to be attached to advanced Headquarters. And that ended that. But the Camp Commandant, with a fertility worthy of his job, almost got even with me. The billet he assigned me in the deserted village of Dury was a filthy, shattered ground-floor cubicle not more than seven feet square—not a stick of furniture but a straw mattress that could have walked out by itself had it had the mind, window gone, stone floor. But a still hunt found me a fine house that had not been discovered by the billeters. It was locked but—

That very day, the day preceding the Second Battle of Amiens, came my introduction to the sleepless nights and midnight strain of keeping in touch with the Canadian fighting. All day we had been struggling at settlement in new quarters. Livesay, just arrived, had to be found billet, mess, and batman. At 11.40 we threw ourselves on our beds. At midnight we were tiptoeing through the streets to the car to start for the Front—for no one left in the village but three or four of us knew the exact hour of the attack—even the day of it. In disturbing darkness we rolled towards Boves, my eyes substituting for the chauffeur’s, who was night-blind from years of ambulance driving. We had never seen a foot of the way before. No lights were permitted, of course, The road was cluttered in almost endless stream with the traffic of battle. In a clear spot we lost our way.

Through the nights preceding every attack thereafter we were the sole “joy-riders” on the roads. Often it was raining. Now and then—as on the way to the Bourlon Wood battle— the burning of a distant dump was our only light. Once we drew up intuitively, to find the car within a foot of the end of the arm of a temporary bridge. Once the leg of a dead horse caught in a wheel. Often we were forced to back up in search of a wider spot for passing.

Our aim in the attacks was to choose the best points for observation. Sometimes, as at Amiens, we looked on from in front of all the guns; always we were ahead of most of them. At the fight of August 26th, before Arras, we narrowly escaped being blown over to the Germans from the muzzles of a battery of field guns which suddenly shattered the heavens in the darkness close above our heads. The flames seemed to sear my cheek. We ran—just plain ran. Only the barbwire about a deep overgrown trench prevented our outstripping the attacking party and perhaps winning Y.C.’s. On such slender threads, so to speak, do great achievements hang.

Our approach in the early morning to the kick-off that broke the Hindenburg Line was marked by a German plane bombing the slope behind us as we climbed towards the height overlooking Cherisy. For one attack we were awakened at midnight, following a dinnerless conclusion to a weary 150-mile motor ride; and hungry and weary we turned out into the rain. At Bourlon Wood we sat on the parados of the trench filled with one of the waves of the attack, until the barrage opened; and we accompanied the soldiers moving up, until depressions in the ground cut off the spectacle and induced us to return to the heights.

Of course it was fatiguing—those sleepless nights and hungry exciting days. The messes were rationed so closely that there never was sufficient for proper lunches to be made up for us. Had it not been for the chocolate, coffee, and biscuits of the Y.M.C.A. at the advanced dressing stations the post-war physical condition of two Canadian war correspondents would have entitled them to pensions. As it was, we ate bully beef sandwiches two inches thick, and great hunks of cheese, until we hated the sight of them and hunted round for the welcome Y.

Spectators were we of every daylight hour of the fighting around Cambrai. For hours we lay on the crest overlooking the city that we were not permitted to shell as a preliminary to attack, or dodged in and out of the villages that preface it on the road from Arras. The gas that soaked the region gave us colds in the head and prophesied certain influenza until we understood. A Brigadier and I removed from a dead German pilot the first aeroplane parachute taken intact—at least, he removed it; I never reached the point where I could handle dead bodies.

Incidentally I sent to the world the first despatch announcing the use of parachutes by German aviators. Within a few minutes of the fall in flames of a German raider one night I was in connection by telephone with a battery near the spot. And the news of the escape by parachutes of two of the crew of nine was sent out within a few hours. Unfortunately the Air Oificials seemed to take umbrage at the innocent suggestion that if parachutes were found serviceable the British would quickly adopt them, for I understand an official contradiction of their use by the Germans was issued. Within the next week thousands had seen them in use, and I had one in my hands.

The world does not appreciate the severity of the fighting in which the Canadian forces were concerned north of Cambrai on the last day of September and the first of October. But from my own experience there is a complete reply to Sir Sam Hughes’s charge against General Currie of “bull-head” recklessness and heartlessness. In the first place, Cambrai was not taken “by suburbs or street fighting,” as the former Minister of Militia asserted, but by the very means he advocated: “Agoing round the darn thing.” And far from General Currie’s attitude being marked by recklessness, there was on his face at that time the first shadow of faltering confidence. One incident—which General Currie will not mind coming to the light now for the first time—dispels any doubt of that.

On the evening of the first of October, while Livesay and I were seated at our typewriters in our hut writing up with heavy hearts the incidents of the day, General Currie opened the door and entered. It startled us for a moment. Accessible as he had always been to the war correspondents, he had never visited us. His eagerness that all the news should get back to Canada had been satisfied by our frequent conversations in his own office or billet. Now he entered slowly and thoughtfully, sank wearily into my chair, and leaned his arm on the table. Sober as is his ordinary expression, we had never seen him so grave, never so mentally and bodily fatigued. For once he had thrown aside every breath of the dignity of the Commander. A new dignity was there—the Canadian, responsible for the lives of a hundred thousand men and anxious that Canada should have the full story of their sacrifice. For twenty minutes he talked—and two mere correspondents were weighted with the responsibility that was their’s of giving Canada the proper perspective of the hardest days of fighting in the career of the Corps. When he had gone we looked at each other and in silence turned to our typewriters.

It is little use attempting to hide the fact that certain Imperial units on our flanks often held us up, either through unexpected obstacles in their path or through a leadership not quite up to the demands of the occasion. I could give several inside stories of this. But only once did I come on a case of what looked like sheer funk.

In the attack of August 26th a famous Imperial regiment was attacking on our right. An hour and a half after the capture of the outskirts of Neuville Vitasse I was creeping along the sunken road in the ruined village when a member of this regiment dashed down to me from over the bank, inquiring where his battalion was. I did not know; nor did the innocent query convey anything more to me. A few minutes later two more made the same inquiry. But when, twenty minutes later, after ducking shells along a knee-deep trench on the eastern edge of the village, in company with a Canadian officer friend whose duties kept him there until his time came, a group of this same battalion came into view seated on the parapet of the trench watching a rapid succession of shells falling about our ambulances—when at sight of us they ran towards us with the same question, I began to wonder.

Not long afterwards we passed along the sunken road farther east still and came on a cross-trench in which an entire company of this battalion was madly digging itself into funk holes.

In a burst of anger my companion demanded to see the guilty officer. We found him peering out carefully over the parapet at the Canadians attacking in a semi-circle before him. What was exchanged between them was not conducive to Imperial fraternity. The Imperial officer admitted that he was supposed to be attacking on our right, but insisted that he thought he was holding the front line at the moment; he explained that he had lost his way. The Canadian officer pointed in disgust to the ruins of the village all about him, to the Canadians going over in attack, to the map carried by the shirking officer. And the company slunk off southward to the flank of the Canadians exposed by their cowardice.

The bad taste of the thing was partially forgotten in the record event that occurred a few minutes later. I took a prisoner. It wasn’t exactly the sort of thing that wins the V.C. Indeed, the Censor thought so little of it that he forbade my using the story to lighten the tragedy of battle description. But it was a record for a war correspondent, at least in this war. As I stood on the parapet trying to pierce the secrets of the valley before me, marvelling that so much machine-gunning could continue without a visible German, a gray figure suddenly leaped from an angle of a partially shattered trench before me and rushed up the slope.

I was the only human being in sight this side of the attack, and in my trench coat I probably seemed to present the opportunity of capitulating to a Brigadier or a Major-General. For a moment I hesitated as to whether I could beat him running or not.

But when I saw his upraised hands and streaming white face, and heard his whining “don’, don’!” I decided to carry through my part. Never have I seen such terrible fear in a human face. It was inhuman in its abjection. I should have searched him as a primary fulfilment of a captor’s obligations. Instead I swanked back with him along the road until I met two Tommies. To them I presented the German and the duty of search. To do them justice, they accepted both with avidity. So now Canada knows for the first time that only the ineligibility of war correspondents precluded the addition of at least one to the list of decorations.

Our desire to see all there was to see kept us so close to the fighting that our car was not infrequently the first over some of the roads to the Front. It also brought sights that made me shudder to recall but meant next to nothing at the time. Another thing it did for us was to run us into suspicion and arrest.

On the second morning of the Amiens attack we reached Marcelcave. According to precedent I should have turned faint hundreds of times on that trip—a mere drop of blood has made me uncomfortable in civilian life. Dead Germans and horses lay everywhere, and in the heat were beginning to notify their presence in other ways than by sight. I do not care to remember that it was to me nothing more than a great spectacle—except the odour.

It was when it came to our own dead that I began to recognize myself. To that I never hardened. Always there came to me the thought that perhaps I was talking to these very men only a few hours back perhaps I knew them. Perhaps some of these living ones before me would lie like that to-morrow. Down the Amiens-Roye road, where our cavalry had superbly galloped its hopeless attack and the shelling was still too severe for burial parties, I passed them, lying as they fell, their arms thrown over their horses. Back behind Rumancourt, where the enemy looked down on us from across the Canal du Nord, I came on it again; and out there north-west of Cambrai—in Monchy, too, and a host of other places. Always I turned away, though I could look on a machine-gun post full of dead Germans without a twinge. It was all a part of the life.

From an observation post in the holed church tower in Rosieres we looked out over the ground that had been in German hands within the hour. And the signallers gaped at us as a new species. That day we tea-ed with a battery that was inclined to magnify our interest in the fighting. We swung our car along the road to Meharieourt, the first since the Germans moved back, twisting about dead horses and stared at as mental deficients by the soldiers in the trenches by the road, for the fighting was only a thousand yards away.

The prevailing idea, especially among the Imperial artillerymen with our Corps, was that the war correspondent was a swivel-chair gentleman who sat back among seven-course dinners and wool mattresses, and produced second-hand descriptions to the smoke of big cigars.

Arrest several times put a temporary period to our curiosity. In a wood near Demuin a motor machine gun officer satisfied his suspicions by inviting us to tea, and when he had us all alone a Major of the 18th received us suspiciously and conducted us through a long zig-zag trench to the mouth of a dugout, where he proceeded to shave. Nothing was said of arrest but I knew the symptoms. So excited was he that he gashed himself badly—but then he had the two spies. A mile walk to Rouvroy and we were ushered into the presence of Lieut.-Col. “Si” Peck. The most absorbing feature of the incident was that Col. Peck and his staff were eating. The most disgusting was that they didn’t ask us to join them. And we had not eaten for nine hours, had a ten-mile walk ahead of us—the car was away with despatches—and certain prospect of reaching home too late for dinner. But perhaps “Si” believed we were spies but didn’t want the bother of arresting us.

Two or three days later we had an afternoon of arrests. Leaving the car as far towards Z Wood, on the way to Roye, as we dare take it, we struck along the road to Damery, passing through a corner of the French front across the muzzles of several batteries of Imperial guns, and reached the ground held by the 7th Battalion. At a small wood before the tiny village I struck off to find the Battalion Headquarters, Livesay keeping on for the village and the sight we had come to see—the piles of dead Germans mowed down in a fruitless counter-attack.

In a tremendous dugout I found the staff of the 7th and was led by two of them to the village. Then, a strafe being due in a few minutes, I returned to the ear. Livesay was not there. In the warm sun I went to sleep, to the tune of a battery dropping pip-squeaks about our artillery horses near le Quesnoy, four hundred yards to the north. Two hours later I wakened—still alone. In something of a panic I started back on foot to look for my friend. And as I neared the protecting rise in the road he came wearily over it.

Three arrests had been his reward for curiosity. Up in Damery the 7th had laid hands on him. Released the Imperial artillery did not like his looks and invited him to explain. In the French lines they picked him up again, and as his French was not fluent enough to satisfy them and they could not read his papers, he was forced to wait for an interpreter.

Next day we visited the Tank Corps and the 11th Brigade, near Caix. Selecting a Y.M.C.A. stand as a good centre for news, I began to ask questions. An unusual coldness met me. A towsle-headed carrot-top came up.

“I know what I’d say if you asked me,” he growled “‘Go to hell!’ You seen that slip!” And he drew from his pocket a little folder, “Keep Your Mouth Shut”, that had been issued to the troops just before leaving for the surprise attack at Amiens.

“What rank are you anyway?” he demanded with the confidence of virtue. I humoured him. “And you wear a Sam Browne! That’s a new one on me.” I tried to get even by suggesting that he might find many new things before the war was over.

But he had the last word. A month later I saw General Currie pin the Military Medal to his tunic near Wancourt. There was more beneath that red hair than impudence to a war correspondent.

One of the group, a member of the 75th, volunteered to get me some stories and to show me a few interesting souvenirs he had collected in the fight. Leading me out of the woods, he took me to his own little funk hole in the side of the hill. Then he turned on me.

“Say, who are you? I don’t like your looks. You look to me like a spy.” It had at least the virtue of frankness.

But our most disturbing experience of this description occurred in the dead o’ night, in the deadness of a deserted village that hung together only as a tangle of beams and crumbling mud walls. Returning from the front on foot, having sent the car back with despatches, we were picked up by an officer who would pass within a mile of Headquarters at Demuin. As the Germans were bombing the Amiens-Roye road every night, he decided to keep to the side roads. Maps were useless in the darkness and we kept to the side roads hours longer than we wished. And all the time the raiders were about, the throb of their propellers, the bursting of the bombs, the darting searchlights, the roar of anti-aircraft guns, and the knowledge that out there on the road and in the woods along it thousands of Canadian soldiers were absolutely without protection, gave a thrill to the starlit night probably beyond any in my experience. We completely lost ourselves, even as to direction. Once we were stopped by a rushing soldier who warned us that the road ahead was blocked by an anti-aircraft gun about to fire at an aeroplane over our heads being searched for by a cluster of lights.

After two hours of blind running about we struck the Roye road almost where we had started. Opposite Demuin Livesay and I alighted to walk to Headquarters. It was a wonderful night from that hill, clear as crystal, windless, moonless, the black sky a ceiling of diamonds. All about us was the throb of raiding aeroplanes, and far to the east the night was slit with a score of searchlights feeling for more. Two miles to our left, over Domart, the raiders were trying for a great dump there. And they found it as we looked. Then they sped homewards straight above our heads, scattering the rest of their bombs indiscriminately.

By the time we reached the ruins of Demuin we were—at least I was—in the condition that sees ghosts and imagines strange things. The wild orgy of war by night had put me on edge. I might even have written poetry then.

In the deserted streets a French civilian and a French soldier passed us, talking volubly but low, and I wondered why they were there. Still swayed by the mystery and immensity of things, we were proceeding silently down a narrow street when a sudden and terriffic “halt!” brought me up so short it hurt. Never have I heard so much concentrated emotion in a single word. I could feel bullets puncturing my most sensitive spots, and I wondered hurriedly if one of us would be left alive to give the other’s address and the other things usually looked for in tragedies of that nature.

“Where the blazes are you?” I called, not feeling a bit as casual as that.

Livesay pulled us through. “A friend!” he announced. (I had forgotten that this was a real military war; it seemed to me like a little bit of hades).

“Advance, friend!” replied the voice—with, oh, so much of its feeling flattened out.

We found a soldier before a ruin ahead of us, revolver in hand. And if ever I see the terror of darkness again I will know it. His voice was trembling; so agitated was he that he almost wept as he talked with us. And yet I doubt if I ever met a braver man. He had seen the two Frenchmen, suspected them when it was too late to stop them, and was waiting there alone at midnight to satisfy his suspicions.

“I haven’t a gun,” he explained, “but I thought my old pipe would look enough like one in the dark to fool them.” It certainly fooled me.

I have an infinite respect for that brave terrified man. I would like to meet him in Canada.

The perils of a war correspondent were, compared with those of the man in the lines, scarcely worth considering. Even the Canadian correspondent might have taken no risks and still have sent back to Canada stories of real interest and importance. He might have remained with the rear Echelon. Advanced Headquarters were always within shellfire, though the danger was negligible.

Four shells dropped in rapid succession on the ridge above the camp morning after I arrived at the Wancourt camp. They exploded before my eyes as I shaved in the door of my tent. I had my doubts about that camp immediately. Every night some big German gun emitted the bark one came to recognize even in one’s sleep as sending over a shell worth listening for. Almost every night a long-range gun dropped a half-dozen or a score shells into Arras, four miles away. The brittle explosion of a facing gun would be followed quickly by the slow whistle of a big shell, then a moment of silence, and last of all a long roar broken in the middle by a violent shatter of sound. It was an atmospheric effect none could explain. At Queant the enemy developed a nasty habit of sending big shrapnel by night to explode above the town, perhaps in search of a huge railway gun that was there when we arrived but much more menacing to our hospitals, over which they burst without injuring anyone.

The greatest danger was from bombs. None dropped close enough to Headquarters in my time to damage things, but that was good fortune. It was the knowledge of that which made me—I have never confessed this before—funk the raiders one night. Wakened in my tent after midnight by the disturbing throb of two German planes, I listened as they came straight towards the camp. My dreams had been unpleasant. Three bombs crashed, each nearer than the last. And then I made for the sole dugout in the camp—where the Generals slept. A relic of German occupation, it was vast and snug. Its snugness appealed to me. But in the mouth of the dugout I realized that I alone of all the camp was astir. And I slunk back to my tent and talked to myself like a brigand.

Our real exposure came from a desire to see. One day, after a German battery had opened our day by sniping us with five shells as our car laboriously climbed a hill near Dury, on the Arras-Cambrai road, another group of three followed us all the way up the slopes from Rumancourt as we were returning in the evening to the car. That stretch of rising ground was under direct observation, and there was only a sunken road to hide it. Thus our only resort was to lie down when a shell was heard coming.

It filled up two hours of our valuable lives to get out of view. To be sure there were two machine-gun posts that might have concealed us, but they were just then crammed with dead Germans of the vintage of three days before, and we preferred the shells.

Just as we were within sight of the sunken road two of the Richtofen Red Squadron decided that we were important enough for their attentions, so they dived at us. But two of our 18-pounders broke loose at them when they were about seventy feet up, the shells bursting somewhere above our heads and showering the ground about us with metal. At the moment the Red Squadron seemed almost friendly by comparison.

Twice, in Arras and in Sains les Marquion, only a brick wall separated me from exploding shells.

Our worst experience was a mere movement of excitement compared with what, from our grand-stand seats, we saw thousands of the fighting men face without visible agitation. It was above Cherisy, that village of ill-repute, near which one of my best friends in the Corps, Lieut.-Col. McKenzie, of the 26th, was killed a couple of days before, and every officer of the 22nd in the engagement, except one, was wounded or killed. A battery of 5.9’s caught us with a half dozen officers in a sunken road, within direct observation from Hendecourt, and tried to wipe the road off the map to get at us. Only a minute earlier a soldier had dropped a few yards ahead of me with a gash in his thigh from “big” shrapnel, and I was prepared for the worst.

The shells landed everywhere but in the narrow sunken strip where we huddled tight against the bank. The explosion of one was so closely followed by the whistle of the next that I had no opportunity of telling my friends how frightened I was. Stray pieces were thudding in the bank about our heads; a weak one struck Livesay on the helmet and another stopped against an officer’s leg without injury. I knew a real nice dug-out a hundred yards back—and this seemed about the time to make its acquaintance. But I closed my eyes and left it to the officers to lead the way. And presently they did, with me well up with the winners.

I have said I saw only one wound actually received. Another came so fast that I only felt it. At the base of the little finger of my right hand

I carry the best memento of the war and a reminder of what might have happened were there not a special Providence for certain irresponsibles.

The day following the capture of Monchy, Livesay and I wandered up to the hill-top to see what was left of perhaps the most famous and hard-fought village on the Western front. From behind a huge block of stone I was watching the battle in the hollow and on the slopes beyond, when an officer crept up the hill to volunteer the information that the last officer who had looked from behind that same stone was in the hospital now. One doesn’t argue questions of that kind.

On the way back to the road I picked up one of those beautifully made and outfitted German ammunition boxes that make ours look like the efforts of a woman carpenter. Each of us seized a handle. Just as we reached the main road a gang of German prisoners carrying back a casualty in plain view of the German observation balloons brought on us a shower of whizz-bangs. The prisoners, beyond the shelling but nearer it than we, moved on unperturbed. Their example seemed worthy of emulation. But the shower came nearer. We turned to skirt the corner. And something tugged viciously at my hand and I looked down to see blood gushing. Even at the moment I noted that it was the hand carrying the stolen box—though the farthest from the explosion—and on the point nearest the box.

But that box is with me yet. It stayed with me until we found a friendly shellhole where we lay wondering what the brain of a soldier would advise under the circumstances. I clung to it when later I was forced to discard more valuable possessions for lack of space. Nothing the German can do will make me give it up.

Thus I established, through no effort of mine, another record for a war correspondent. Besides the unfortunate French newspaperman who was sniped, I believe I was the only correspondent on the Western front whom the Germans hated enough to damage.

The incentive of the old-time war correspondent to attempt the impossible may have been removed by the formal control under which the modern edition of the fraternity works. Individuality may have been largely smothered in official red tape—and red tabs. The war correspondent of to-day will be forgotten when his predecessor of the petty wars of the past still looms large in public memory and reverence. But when the next war comes—I hope it never will—I want to be there with notebook and pencil. For one thing, it’s ever so much more comfortable and remunerative than holding a rifle. For another it is a grand stand seat at all the world’s spectacles crowded into a few months of reckless expenditure and unstinted human ingenuity. And the third reason is that I am of the opinion that in the next war the war correspondent will be permitted to paint a picture less sullied by the bloodless hand of the Censor. I have a palette daubed with paint I was never permitted to use on my pictures. It grieves my heart that, with the end of the war the colours must lie there to dry and fade. But it was war—the Great War—and my fellows and I were but the smallest links in a great chain which was under too great a strain to worry about the eyes of the world.