The war as it appeared in the American press was a gorgeous tapestry of romance and swashbuckling adventure--frenzied Nazi rallies, weird religious rites in Japan, hairbreadth escapes on overcrowded trains teetering along mountain ravines, nights sleeping in haystacks in the backcountry of France after the fall of Paris, journeys in remotest Yugoslavia where the reporter "spent hours watching the army, with its wagons, horses, and guns, file past the minareted village in the moonlight."