To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

We have just heard that Jack Belden has had to go up through the hill country of India--to Srinagar in the Vale of Kashmir--for a rest he badly needs.

Belden has long been a tower of strength for our News Bureau in the Far East, but last week Teddy White and Bill Fisher, our other two correspondents in New Delhi, cabled that Belden's pulse was jumping between 110 and 130, that he has to take it very easy for a while.

While Belden is getting his health back (the doctor says a few weeks will do the trick) perhaps you would like to know how he lost it in the first place.

China is Belden's special beat--but last April when Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek sent his Armies slogging down the Burma Road to help Britain keep China's back door open, Belden went along into Burma. When he reached Maymyo he found two other members of the TIME & LIFE News Bureau already on hand at General Stilwell's mission-house headquarters--Correspondent Clare Boothe and Photographer George Rodger--so he decided to keep on going, borrowed a jeep and a Tommy gun and jolted his way south into the bloody Jap-trap at Yenangyaung. (It's a habit with him; he's been in the thick of the fighting of almost every critical campaign since China was invaded.)

Belden's great advantage was that he spoke Chinese as fluently as English and consequently could go more places and hear more things than any other newsman in Burma. He took down the stories of Chinese officers and soldiers in range of the Jap guns --and when he came up with the British he pitched in and helped them dynamite the second biggest bridge in the Far East--and destroy their oil fields and refineries. He just managed to beat his way back to Stilwell's headquarters by the skin of his teeth.

When Maymyo went the way of Yenangyaung, Belden and a British doctor were last to leave--fired the scout-cars, burned the official documents, finally lit out after the General with a tin of cheese and no water at all. He was with Uncle Joe's polyglot army of 400 all through the desperate 140-mile trek through the almost trackless jungle and over the head-hunter-infested mountains into India. He tended the wounded, chorused Christian hymns and American jazz with the Burmese nurses to keep up morale, escaped getting dysentery but lost so much weight the rings dropped from his fingers.

Safe out of Burma, Belden hopped right back into danger with only a week's rest--rejoining General Claire Chennault and his Flying Tigers at the chief A.V.G. air base in China. He stayed on there with U.S. Army pilots when the A.V.G. was disbanded --ate with them, slept with them, flew with them while they strafed Jap ground troops all over eastern China--dodged Japanese ack-ack, dog-fought I-97s and Zeros, bombed ships, docks and factories up and down the Yangtze.

Thirty-two-year-old Jack Belden is no Johnny-Come-Lately in China. He went there right after Colgate in 1932 --soon won the title "ablest correspondent covering the China War." He was taking a war correspondent's holiday in India when the strain of his adventures caught up with him, but he is far too tough to let even a half dozen diseases keep him down. Odds are he will be back at the front for you before the fall campaigns really get going.

Cordially,

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