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.