THE war along India's northern frontier has nearly quintupled the foreign press corps operating out of New Delhi. Some are oldtimers returning, others are first-timers. Few match the experience of India possessed by the trio of TIME correspondents on the scene.

New Delhi Bureau Chief Edward Behr. 36, served for three years in the Indian army as a British officer during World War II. was demobbed as a major after India's independence in 1947.

James Shepherd, 41, New Delhi correspondent, has been reporting Indian affairs since 1946, for TIME since 1953.

Hong Kong Bureau Chief Charles Mohr, 33. who spent two years until last August as New Delhi bureau chief and traveled to practically every part of the subcontinent, flew back to work on this week's Nehru cover story; as he was packing in Hong Kong, his nine-year-old daughter Gretchen asked: "Why do you have to go home?"

Correspondent Behr is no stranger to covering wars. After five years of following the Algerian revolution, he arrived at his new post in New Delhi on the day that hostilities with the Chinese broke out. He found that many of his old friends, subalterns with whom he had soldiered in the Royal Garhwal Rifles, were now battalion commanders or higher in the front lines against the Chinese. Scarcely had Behr arrived before he was on his way to the forward headquarters at Tezpur. Soldier to soldier, an Indian commander told him: "We are hanging by our eyelashes." Emergency living conditions in Tezpur were primitive. "I slept in a tent, and one night a sacred cow ate my socks." reported Behr. After badgering authorities, he was permitted to visit the front lines. In Jeep and truck, the journey took 18 hours through nearly impenetrable jungles and over narrow, rutted mountain paths up to 13,000 ft. high. Says Behr: "No devilish imagination could ever plan any such testing ground for troops or transport."

For Correspondent Shepherd, the scene in Parliament as Nehru spoke on the war crisis recalled the night in August 1947 when he sat in the press gallery as India's independence was declared: "If history was made in Parliament House that night," he wrote, "it is now again being made. Parliament's mood has never so faithfully reflected the mood of the Indian people. India at war for the first time as an independent country is a country come to maturity. The mood is one of quiet determination."

Visiting again with Nehru. Reporter Mohr found him changed: "He looked a little more tired and aged than when I had last seen him in April. But at the same time he seemed more sturdy in personality than I ever remembered him in the past. The very fact that he was less sure of his old ideas seemed to make him more single-minded on the one main point: that India will endure."

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