There were the Austrian attaché and the Roumanian attaché, and their duty was to report to their Governments all they could find out that would be to the advantage of the military forces of their Governments. The Bulgarians naturally would not allow the Roumanian nor the Austrian attaché to see anything of what went on. The attachés were even worse treated than the correspondents, because, as the campaign developed, the Bulgarians got to understand that some of us were trustworthy, and we were given certain facilities for seeing. But we were still without facilities for the despatch of what we had seen. But the military attachés were kept right in the rear all the time. They were taken over the battle-fields after the battles had been fought, so that they might see what victories had been gained by the Bulgarians.
The Bulgarians were much strengthened in their attitude towards the war correspondents by the fact that they admitted receiving much help in their operations from the news published in London and in French newspapers from the Turkish side. The Turkish army, when the period of rout began, was in the position that it was able to exercise little check on its war correspondents; and the Bulgarians had everything which was recorded as being done in the Turkish army sent on to them. They said it was a great help to them. I think the outlook for war correspondents in the future is a gloomy one, and the outlook for the military attaché also. In the future, no army carrying on anything except minor operations with savage nations, no army whose interests might be vitally affected by information leaking out, is likely to allow military attachés or war correspondents to see anything at all.
The Balkan War probably will close the book of the war correspondent. It was in the wars of the "Near East" that that book was first opened in the modern sense. Some of the greatest achievements of the craft were in the Crimean War, the various Turco-Russian wars, and the Greco-Turkish struggle. It is an incidental proof of the popularity of the Balkan Peninsula as a war theatre that the history of the profession of the war correspondent would be a record almost wholly of wars in the Near East.
Certainly if the "war correspondent" is to survive he will need to be of a new type. I came to that conclusion when I returned to Kirk Kilisse from the Bulgarian lines at Chatalja, and had amused myself in an odd hour with burrowing among a great pile of newspapers in the censor's office, and reading here and there the war news from English, French, and Belgian papers.
Dazed, dismayed, I recognised that I had altogether mistaken the duties of a war correspondent. For some six weeks I had been following an army in breathless anxious chase of facts: wheedling censors to get some few of those facts into a telegraph office; learning then, perhaps, that the custom at that particular telegraph office was to forward telegrams to Sofia, a ten days' journey, by bullock wagon and railway, to give them time to mature. Now here, piping hot, were the stories of the war. There was the touching prose poem about King Ferdinand following his troops to the front in a military train, which was his temporary palace. One part of the carriage, serving as his bed-chamber, was taken up with a portrait of his mother, and to that picture he looked ever for encouragement, for advice, for praise. Had there been that day a "Te Deum" for a great victory? He looked at the picture and added, "Te Matrem."
Exclusive News Agency
BUCHAREST
The Roumanian House of Representatives
It was a beautiful story, and why should any one let loose a brutal bulldog of a fact and point out that King Ferdinand during the campaign lived in temporary palaces at Stara Zagora and Kirk Kilisse, and when he travelled on a visit to some point near the front it was usually by motor-car?