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In London for a well-earned vacation when the big push came was Douglas Williams, a British journalist. Correspondent for Lord Camrose's Daily Telegraph, he had spent seven months at the front, twiddling his thumbs. Lord Camrose told him Europe was quiet, suggested a visit to the U. S. to cover the national political conventions in Philadelphia, Chicago. His bags packed, Newsman Williams was on his way to the railway station when he heard the Lowlands news. Without a word to his office, he sped to Croydon Airdrome, ran out on the field waving a card that looked official, swung aboard a plane full of astonished generals, hopped off for Belgium. By mid-afternoon he was filing dispatches from Brussels.
Two days later, all newsmen fled from Belgium's capital as a German column prepared to occupy it. It took Marcel W. Fodor of the Chicago Daily News and Frazier Hunt of Hearst's International News Service 30 hours to reach Paris, traveling over highways jammed with frightened war refugees. All Belgium was silent at week's end, except for stories filed through official channels, by newsmen with the French and British Armies.
Officers Without Arms. One month after war broke last fall, after much hemming & hawing over regulations, Britain's War Office authorized twelve crack U. S.
correspondents (TIME, Oct. 16) to join the British Army at the front. Wearing British officers' uniforms with special in signia, they were required to answer but not offer a salute, were forbidden to carry arms. By last fortnight all but one had slipped away. Some, like Edward Angly of the Herald Tribune, Drew Middleton of A. P., were back in London, angling for a chance to go to Norway. Some, like William Chaplin of I. N. S., had returned to the U. S. Webb Miller was dead (TIME, May 20), and North American Newspaper Alliance's Walter Duranty was in Bucharest. On guard remained only Mutual Broadcasting System's Arthur Mann when the real war began.
Back to the front last week flew four of the twelve: Edward Angly, Drew Middleton, New York Times'?, Harold Norman Denny, Chicago Daily News'?, William Harlan Stoneman. Richard Busvine of the Chicago Times took the place left vacant by the Baltimore Sun's, Frank R. Kent Jr.
Robert Nixon replaced William Chaplin for I. N. S.
The French Army withdrew all correspondents from the front when German planes bombed their headquarters at Nancy, 50 miles south of the fighting around Sedan. Last to return to Paris were A. P.'s Henry Taylor Henry, Percy J. Philip of the New York Times. After making their way northward to Cambrai, in the path of the Nazi advance toward the coast, they left on bicycles one morning last week, pedaling furiously toward Paris on roads choked with refugees, while bombs destroyed the town behind them.