The "Daily Mail" sent William Beach Thomas to France as a war correspondent during the First World War. Many newspapers were keen to support the war effort and to take advantage of the demand for news from the front. The British military authorities were opposed to the presence of journalists, preferring instead to control the media by issuing official press releases. Lord Kitchener in particular was opposed to their presence, having had bad experiences of journalists during the South African War. He formed a press bureau headed by , and demanded that all reports be channelled through the bureau, for review by censors; the resulting output was bland and impersonal. The newspapers countered with subterfuge. Thomas was one of several journalists who managed to reach the front lines in Belgium. He was discovered there and imprisoned for some time by the British Army. He described the episode as "the longest walking tour of my life, and the queerest". Even these early unapproved reports, which consisted mostly of human interest stories because there was little opportunity for contact with the British Expeditionary Force, were censored at home owing to a paradox that Thomas described: "the censors would not publish any article if it indicated that the writer had seen what he wrote of. He must write what he thought was true, not what he knew to be true."