The Spectator at war: Letters from the front

From The Spectator, 19 September 1914:

WE have no war correspondents present with the forces, to our great loss; and we are now in the quaintly topsy-turvy position of reading accounts of battles and of fighting in the letters sent home by individual officers and men—letters which might just as well have been written by the trained correspondents who have been forbidden to take the field. It is a contrary enough state of affairs; here we have hundreds of soldiers’ accounts of fights to choose from, and hundreds of wounded at home in our hospitals with their stories to tell their friends, and yet the men who could have made the charges of our cavalry and the serving of our guns living scenes for their countrymen to-day and for generations to come have been compelled to spend their time idly at home.

The greatest war of history and the severest engagements fought with modern weapons, and the trained observer and potential historian kicking his heels hundreds of miles away— will our descendants contentedly acquiesce in the decision which prevented the possibility of any continuous narrative by an eyewitness We have to do our best with scraps from private letters.