They Were There

In 1914, four weeks after the Kaiser's Army swept into Belgium and World War 1 began, the U. S. still had only the vaguest idea how the war was going. When German troops crossed the River Somme, 70 miles from Paris, an official press release placed them on Belgium's River Sambre, 80 miles farther away. Wythe Williams, Paris correspondent for the New York Times (now a commentator for Mutual Broadcasting System in Manhattan) slipped a dispatch past the censor hinting that they were nearer, but his editors at home missed the point. Not until the Battle of the Marne was fought and won (on Sept. 9) did readers in the U. S. realize that the German Army had come within 30 miles of Paris.

No such blackout hid the news last week. Every paper in the U. S. knew how desperate was the predicament of the Allies in France and Belgium, watched the advance of Nazi columns mile by mile toward Paris and the English Channel.

Dispatches poured in by cable, wireless telephone and telegraph, from Berlin, London and Paris. Despite censorship, despite official obfuscation, the picture was reason ably complete.

No individual feat of reporting, it was accomplished by sheer weight of man power. In Europe were some 10,000 reporters and cameramen last week. From the German side, pictures of tanks and motorized columns going into action, from the Allies pictures of bombed nuns and refugees flashed across the Atlantic by wirephoto. Only drawings were scarce, for cameramen have generally succeeded the able draftsmen who used to follow armies. One of the few artists who has acted as a reporter in the field is Bernard Lamotte whose paintings of France in arms TIME presents on the four following pages, but he may not do so much longer. Last week in spite of his disabled foot he was trying to get a job as an ambulance driver.

Refugees. Until last week, Amsterdam was the most important point in Europe for news transmission. Accessible by wire and wireless to both sides of the front, with its own cables to the U. S., neutral Amsterdam had supplanted London and Paris as news centres. United Press had 15 men in Amsterdam, headed by Clifford Day, who first flashed the news of German invasion.

On Tuesday morning Nazi troops rolled into Amsterdam, and all communication with The Netherlands fell silent. Marooned there, with most of U. P.'s staff. were other newsmen who had stuck to their posts, including Reilly O'Sullivan and Max Harrelson of Associated Press. One was the New York Herald Tribune'?, 27-year-old Seymour Beach Conger, expelled from Germany six months ago (TIME, Nov. 27) for filing unfavorable dispatches. His wife, Marion Conger, meanwhile covered the war in Paris.

In London for a well-earned vacation when the big push came was Douglas Williams, a British journalist. Correspondent for Lord Camrose's Daily Telegraph, he had spent seven months at the front, twiddling his thumbs. Lord Camrose told him Europe was quiet, suggested a visit to the U. S. to cover the national political conventions in Philadelphia, Chicago. His bags packed, Newsman Williams was on his way to the railway station when he heard the Lowlands news. Without a word to his office, he sped to Croydon Airdrome, ran out on the field waving a card that looked official, swung aboard a plane full of astonished generals, hopped off for Belgium. By mid-afternoon he was filing dispatches from Brussels.

Two days later, all newsmen fled from Belgium's capital as a German column prepared to occupy it. It took Marcel W. Fodor of the Chicago Daily News and Frazier Hunt of Hearst's International News Service 30 hours to reach Paris, traveling over highways jammed with frightened war refugees. All Belgium was silent at week's end, except for stories filed through official channels, by newsmen with the French and British Armies.

Officers Without Arms. One month after war broke last fall, after much hemming & hawing over regulations, Britain's War Office authorized twelve crack U. S.

correspondents (TIME, Oct. 16) to join the British Army at the front. Wearing British officers' uniforms with special in signia, they were required to answer but not offer a salute, were forbidden to carry arms. By last fortnight all but one had slipped away. Some, like Edward Angly of the Herald Tribune, Drew Middleton of A. P., were back in London, angling for a chance to go to Norway. Some, like William Chaplin of I. N. S., had returned to the U. S. Webb Miller was dead (TIME, May 20), and North American Newspaper Alliance's Walter Duranty was in Bucharest. On guard remained only Mutual Broadcasting System's Arthur Mann when the real war began.

Back to the front last week flew four of the twelve: Edward Angly, Drew Middleton, New York Times'?, Harold Norman Denny, Chicago Daily News'?, William Harlan Stoneman. Richard Busvine of the Chicago Times took the place left vacant by the Baltimore Sun's, Frank R. Kent Jr.

Robert Nixon replaced William Chaplin for I. N. S.

The French Army withdrew all correspondents from the front when German planes bombed their headquarters at Nancy, 50 miles south of the fighting around Sedan. Last to return to Paris were A. P.'s Henry Taylor Henry, Percy J. Philip of the New York Times. After making their way northward to Cambrai, in the path of the Nazi advance toward the coast, they left on bicycles one morning last week, pedaling furiously toward Paris on roads choked with refugees, while bombs destroyed the town behind them.

At a railway junction, 40 miles south of Cambrai, Henry found a place in an auto mobile bound for Paris. Thin, tall Scots man Philip waited for a train, caught one four hours later. A few miles down the line the train halted while customs officers examined his credentials. Cried one, noting Timesman Philip's strange uniform, his blue eyes and sandy hair: "You're a dirty German parachutist!" A crowd collected, screaming imprecations. Ordered to undress, Percy Philip stripped to his under wear while soldiers inspected the soles of his boots, felt the lining of his tunic. Then a space was cleared beside the train. While a messenger went to look for gendarmes, two soldiers with cocked rifles, an old peasant with a shotgun made ready to execute him on the spot.

Said Newsman Philip: "At least let me die with my boots on." While he struggled with his boots, stalling for time, gendarmes arrived and put him under arrest. Through lines of indignant peasants, spitting insults at "the Boche assassin," the gendarmes marched him to the police station. There his credentials were examined again, found in order. Two young lieutenants took pity on the Times'?, Philip, escorted him back to the railway, and turned him over to the stationmaster's wife. She took him up to her kitchen while he waited for another train, made him an omelet, gave him wine and coffee. Two hours later Percy Philip was on his way to Paris, safe in a compartment.

*In a story featured by the Herald Tribune on page 1, Beach Conger wrote in November:

"Certain persons have been firmly convinced that Germany intended to invade The Nether lands. ... It was learned today that the con servative Army high command flatly refused to countenance any such action."

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