3. The first censorship being passed, despatches often had still to pass a second censorship at Staff headquarters, a third censorship at Sofia.
4. Despatches passing through Roumania underwent another censorship there, and yet another in Austria, possibly yet others in other European countries.
5. In addition to these censorship delays the Bulgarian authorities made newspaper messages yield precedence to military messages, and at the front this meant that Press messages were sent on by mail (ox transport most of the way) to the Staff headquarters or the capital.
6. In the meanwhile the imaginative accounts written nearer Fleet Street had been published, and the accurate news was "dead" from a point of public interest.
Most of these conditions will rule over all future wars. Therefore I conclude that the day of the war correspondent—in the sense of a truthful observer of a campaign—has gone, and he died with the Balkan War. He can only survive if newspapers are willing to incur the very great expense of sending out war correspondents not for the news, day by day, but for what observation and criticism they could supply after the campaign was over. To a daily newspaper such matter is almost valueless, especially as during the progress of the campaign the correspondents of the "new" school would be at work with their many inventions, raising the hair of the public and the circulation of their journals with bright feats of imagination.
CHAPTER VII
JOTTINGS FROM MY BALKAN TRAVEL BOOK
These observations I will quote from my diary during 1912 in illustration of phases of Balkan character, dating them at the time and place that they were made.