War Correspondents Curbed.

New York Times 100 years ago today, November 3, 1912:
Bulgarians and Turks Keep Most of Them Away from Battlefield.
Special Cable to The New York Times.
    LONDON, Nov. 2.— No details of the Eastern war throw into more vivid light the thoroughness of the Bulgarian plans than their treatment of newspaper correspondents.
    King Ferdinand's advisers evidently realized to the full the advantages and disadvantages of newspaper correspondents in the campaign. One man could be employed usefully where 100 would be a danger. Lieut. Wegener of the Reichspost of Vienna profited. The rest of the correspondents have been kept waiting and gnashing their teeth where they could get no news the dissemination of which might interfere with the plans of the Bulgarian commander.
    Even yet correspondents who had been promised a week or more ago permission to go to the front are kept kicking their heels at Mustapha Pasha, where they can hear the guns at Adrianople and nothing more.
    Two days ago official permits were given them to proceed from Mustapha Pasha, but the latest news is that they have again been bidden to remain where they are.
    One of them, Philip Gibbs, sends this sadly satirical description of their plight:
    "The Hotel Bulgaria, at Sofia, called the I.C.C., or International Club of Correspondents, rang with laughter, but it was the laughter of men who find their position farcical. "Is this war real and sure, or is it merely an illusion, a fantasy? It has been no reality to me, because up till now I have not heard the sound of a shot, and in the Hotel Bulgaria the journalists are playing billiards."
    On the Turkish side war correspondents have not fared much better. The correspondents of The Times and The Daily Mail got messages through yesterday morning, but others have not been heard from save in complaints of their inability to get to the front.
    Donohue, the correspondent of The Daily Chronicle, sends a message, dated Tchorlu, Sunday, declaring that thirty-six representatives of the principal newspapers, who are there to tell the world the story of the war from the Turkish side, are practically prisoners in camp.
    "It is useless remaining here," says Donahue, "and we should all leave but that we are detained by force of arms. I myself intend to break away, even if shot in the attempt."
    The Vienna report of the shooting of a Bulgarian aviator over Adrianople, which was apparently cabled to a New York newspaper, is regarded here as a patent fake.