The young lady on horseback below is Mary Barber, TIME Inc.'s string correspondent in Athens. On the morning this photograph was taken a few weeks ago she was returning from a twelve-hour night patrol with a complement of Greek Army cavalrymen in the "bandit-infested" countryside south of the town of Komotine, Thrace. The purpose of her night ride was to observe the workings of the officer observer-advisers of the U.S. Army Group in Greece. Cabled she:

"As our cavalcade of 50 horsemen, armed with six Bren guns, eight Thompsons and rifles, trotted down Komotine's cobbled streets, the inhabitants hung out of their windows to see what was happening. Curfew was in force because the rebels had shelled the town with 65 mm. cannon a few nights before. Out in the countryside the scent of almond blossoms filled the damp air. Overhead the sky was clear and stars shone back from puddles of water and the shallow streams we crossed. Occasionally, glowworms, kicked up by the horses' hooves, lit the path.

"The American Army observer, descendant of a long line of U.S. Army cavalrymen, trotted back down the line and reined in beside me. 'A white horse in the advance guard,' he muttered. 'Officers smoking cigarettes. Troops chattering. No security patrols out on the flanks. We're a sitting target if anyone cares to ambush us.'

"Actually, the ride went off smoothly until my horse got tired, sat down and rolled over in an icy stream. Apart from the usual stiffness a 52 kilometer ride--on a giant ex-German cavalry horse--can bring on an amateur horsewoman, I seemed O.K. the next day. Then I made a perilous four-hour jeep ride with the American officer-observer, after which I could no longer walk, sit or breathe.

"I wanted to file from Kavalla, but the telegraph official had never seen a cable in English before and his apparatus seemed to date from pre-Edison days. I tried to get back to Salonika by rail, but the train blew up before I got in. I tried to go by bus, but the busses were not running because one of them had smashed up on a mine the day before. The airplane was the only solution, but, although we went to the airfield daily, the plane did not come in until Thursday."

This episode is not necessarily typical of the daily activities of all of TIME Inc.'s string correspondents overseas, but it does serve to illustrate Mary Barber's conception--in which TIME'S editors concur--of how to cover today's news in Greece. Says she: "The journalistic snake pit of Athens is the bar of the Grande Bretagne Hotel. From there one can comfortably, if inaccurately, cover the Greek story. But to get the best copy here you have to get out into the field."

Mary Barber's qualifications for covering "the Greek story" are many. She was born in Athens, where her father was a physician, and lived there until 1924, when her parents moved to England. In 1939 she returned to Greece with her mother to spend the summer holidays--and remained five years. During the Greco-Italian war in Albania she was a nurse in a military hospital; during the first two years of the occupation she worked in a children's soup kitchen. She spent the last four months of the occupation in Haidari Concentration Camp ("It had all the usual attractions of such places"), where the Germans deposited her for "having aided Allied airmen and agents."

When her husband, Stephen Barber, Middle East correspondent of the London News Chronicle, was transferred to Palestine and it was found that British wives could not enter the Holy Land, Mary Barber became a journalist through sheer necessity. Now, says she, "because of paper rationing in England--and to my husband's everlasting dismay--I am getting more printed than he does."

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