Then there were Benedetti, Baccio Bacci, Fraccaroli, Gino Piva, Giovanni Miceli, and Aldo Molinari, the black and white artist and photographer, to cite only a few names in the brilliant attroupement of Italian journalistic talent.
The French Press had six representatives: the Temps, Jean Carrère, one of the best known and most popular of foreign correspondents, who speaks Italian like his mother tongue; the Petit Parisien, Serge Basset; the Echo de Paris, Jules Rateau; the Journal, Georges Prade; the Illustration, Robert Vaucher; and the Petit Marseillais, Bauderesque. As genial and typically French a crew as one could meet anywhere.
The English Press was also well to the fore. The Times, as the most powerful of British journals on the continent, was appropriately represented by a giant in stature, W. Kidston McClure, as amiable and erudite a gentleman as ever stood six feet eight inches upright in his socks, and who, by reason of his great height, raised The Times a head and shoulders above the rest of us.
W. T. Massey was the Daily Telegraph, a good and solid representative of the older type of modern journalism; J. M. N. Jeffries the Daily Mail young man, a slender stripling with brains, and bubbling over with a sort of languid interest in his work, but who, in his immaculate grey flannels and irreproachable ties, somehow gave the impression of just going on or coming off the river rather than starting on a warlike expedition; Martin Donohoe, the Daily Chronicle, the very antithesis of Jeffries, burly and energetic, and in every way a typical representative of Radical journalism, which was further represented by Ernest Smith of the Daily News.
Gino Calza Bedolo, one of the youngest and most talented of rising Italian journalists was “lent” to the Morning Post for this occasion by his paper, the Giornale d’Italia, and a very able and spirited representative did he prove, as the readers of the Morning Post must have found.
And lastly, the Illustrated London News, by your humble servant, sole representative of English pictorial journalism with the Italian Army in the Field.
There were no Americans, as with the somewhat curious exception of the two Swiss, only the allied nations were admitted. I may add that everyone had to wear a white band round his coat sleeve bearing the name of the paper he represented.
We were received by General Porro, Sub-Chief of the Italian General Staff, on behalf of the Generalissimo, and he made a cordial speech of welcome, in which he introduced us to the officers of the censorship and detailed the arrangements that had been made to enable the correspondents to see as much as possible of the operations.
Everything for our big journey had been planned out with true Italian thoroughness, even to providing every one of us with a set of large and reliable maps, whilst on the head of giving permission to see all we desired there was no cause for complaint, as we were to be allowed to go everywhere along the Front; the only reason for disappointment being in the information that immediately after the tour was finished we should be obliged to leave the war zone until further orders.
It was therefore to be a modified version of the modern method of shepherding the war-correspondents as initiated by the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War; however, the latitude given as to freedom of action was very generous.