It was most wearing, irritating, nerve-racking work.  You knew you were on the level.  In spite of the General Staff you believed you had a right to be where you were.  You knew you had no wish to pry into military secrets; you knew that toward the allied armies you felt only admiration—­that you wanted only to help.  But no one else knew that; or cared.  Every hundred yards you were halted, cross-examined, searched, put through a third degree.  It was senseless, silly, and humiliating.  Only a professional crook with his thumb-prints and photograph in every station-house can appreciate how from minute to minute we lived.  Under such conditions work is difficult.  It does not make for efficiency to know that any man you meet is privileged to touch you on the shoulder and send you to prison.

This is a world war, and my contention is that the world has a right to know, not what is going to happen next, but at least what has happened.  If men have died nobly, if women and children have cruelly and needlessly suffered, if for no military necessity and without reason cities have been wrecked, the world should know that.

Those who are carrying on this war behind a curtain, who have enforced this conspiracy of silence, tell you that in their good time the truth will be known.  It will not.  If you doubt this, read the accounts of this war sent out from the Yser by the official “eye-witness” or “observer” of the English General Staff.  Compare his amiable gossip in early Victorian phrases with the story of the same battle by Percival Phillips; with the descriptions of the fall of Antwerp by Arthur Ruhl, and the retreat to the Marne by Robert Dunn.  Some men are trained to fight, and others are trained to write.  The latter can tell you of what they have seen so that you, safe at home at the breakfast table, also can see it.  Any newspaper correspondent would rather send his paper news than a descriptive story.  But news lasts only until you have told it to the next man, and if in this war the correspondent is not to be permitted to send the news I submit he should at least be permitted to tell what has happened in the past.  This war is a world enterprise, and in it every man, woman, and child is an interested stockholder.  They have a right to know what is going forward.  The directors’ meetings should not be held in secret.

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