Groups of native-born correspondents were likely to see rather more than outsiders, and the more authoritative home writers were attached not infrequently to an army corps or staff headquarters for weeks at a time. The Berlin and Vienna bookshops are filled with books and pamphlets written by such men, though, of course, little of their correspondence has ever reached America. A man like Ludwig Ganghofer, for instance, became so much of an institution that papers even joked about him, and I remember a cartoon--in "Jugend," I think--picturing him puffing up a hill where a staff was waiting and the commanding officer saying "Ganghofer's here. The attack may now begin!"
In Germany, however, as in France, at least during the first year of the war, each correspondent, particularly a foreigner, was merely a privateer, making his own fight for a chance to work, and pulling what wires he could. After his brief excursion he returned to Berlin, a mere tourist, so to speak, and had to begin the old tiresome round--his own embassy--the German Foreign Office--the War Office--all over again. There was no organization in which he could enroll, so to speak, he had no permanent standing. This drawback--from the correspondent's point of view--was met in Austria-Hungary by the Presse Quartier, an integral part of the army like any other branch of the service, whose function it was to handle the whole complicated business of war correspondence.
The Austro-Hungarians, prepared from the first for a large number of civilian observers, including news and special writers, photographers, illustrators and painters, and, to handle them satisfactorily, organized this Presse Quartier, once admitted to which--the fakers and fly-by-nights were supposed to be weeded out by preliminary red tape--they were assumed to be serious workmen and treated as the army's guests.
The Presse Quartier--the Germans later organized one on somewhat different lines--was in two sections; an executive section with a commandant responsible for the arrangement of trips to the various fronts and the general business of censorship and publicity; and a second, an entertainment section, so to speak, also with its commandant, whose business it was to board, lodge, and otherwise look after correspondents when they were not on trips to the front. At the time I visited the Presse Quartier the executive section was in the city of Teschen, across the border of Silesia; the correspondents lived in the village of Nagybicse in Hungary, two or three hours' railroad journey away. In this village--the most novel part of the scheme--some thirty or forty correspondents were living, writing their past adventures, setting forth on new ones, or merely inviting their souls for the moment under a régime which combined the functions of tourists' bureau, rest cure, and a sort of military club.