By amazing
luck, combined with a natural news sense which drew him
instinctively to critical places at the psychological moment,
he had been a witness of the two most widely featured stories
of the early weeks of the war.
Arrested by the Germans in Belgium, and later by the French in
France, he was convinced that the restrictions on correspondents
were too great to permit of good work.
So he left the European war zone with the widely quoted
remark: "The day of the war correspondent is over."
And yet I was not surprised when, one evening, late in
November of last year, he suddenly walked into the room in
Salonika where William G. Shepherd, of the United Press,
"Jimmy Hare," the veteran war photographer, and I had
established ourselves several weeks before.
The hotel was jammed, and the city, with a normal capacity of
about one hundred and seventy-five thousand, was struggling to
accommodate at least a hundred thousand more. There was not a
room to be had in any of the better hotels, and for several
days we lodged Davis in our room, a vast chamber which
formerly had been the main dining-room of the establishment,
and which now was converted into a bedroom. There was room
for a dozen men, if necessary, and whenever stranded Americans
arrived and could find no hotel accommodations we simply
rigged up emergency cots for their temporary use.
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