AT THE CENSOR'S

Evening Post, Volume XCIII, Issue 101, 28 April 1917, Page 14

AT THE CENSOR'S

A STRANGE MUSEUM

LETTERS FOR THE KAISER.

An American paper tells the story of the work and workshop of England's war censor. Every letter American!* send or receive, as well as every package of "innocent" contraband;"- passes through his hands, and a lot of it goes no further. For all his enterprise and heartlassness, the British censor has a sense of humour.

"To the British Censor : Hands off This Parcel. It is Neutral Property."

The enterprising gentleman who attached this warning to a package of rubber gloves and entrusted the whole to the tender mercies of a mail steamer in the hope that the contraband gloves would reach Berlin is hereby notified that it didn't 1 woTk. The British censor (there are several thousand of him, mostly girls) cannot be frightened. He can be amused, and the proof of it is the. Censorship Museum, on the fourth floor of the immense building near Lincoln's Inn Fields which the chief postal censor occupies. ,

There are quite a few communications for the Kaiser. Some are in dead earnest, addressed direct to Berlin. Some suggest that if the addressee has moved, the post office shall redirect to St. Helena. O.ne contains a book on universal peace, inscribed by the author with the sincere hope that when ■ the war is over the Kaiser will turn his attention to the scheme suggested therein.

The prime exhibit in this department is a small. package., sent from America to the Kaiser, in which was carefully packed two chicken bones (of a most particularly small chicken) and four pieces of toast. They are being carefully preserved by the censor. At .the proper* time they will undoubtedly be forwarded to the addressee. In fact, at the end of the war all the. thousands of letters and various forms of contraband that have been seized by England's official nabob will find their way, wherever delivery is possible, to the persons for whom they were meant. ' .

The young women of the Censor's staff sit about in a ■ well-lighted room and fight' off boredom by .smoking endless cigarettes. For six months now this special department has been in operation, and the girls have read everything Americans have read from London and a lot besides. In their own words, they are "fed up." with war stories. But they go through every letter, always splitting- it open on the shorter side, because that does not spoil the envelope, taking, infinite pains that no enclosure shall be lost and •watching as faithfully as 1 The British. Navy watches lest any information of value slip by. The writer asked the affable gentlemaji in charge of the department wnether it. was worth while, whether the letter censorship has any .excuse for existence.

■■. 'If you mean whether we have to watch against spies, of course this department is something, special, and we know, personally every correspondent. What we watch against here is information which is sent out in good faith, but which may supply .precisely the last link in a chain of evidence needed by the enemy. You never can tell what is important and what isn't. I am in constant communication with experts in every-department of the service, and if anything is doubtful I ling the expert np at once and ask him.

. "As for information which is sent through intentionally for the enemy, well, of course " and the censor beA'me professional again. . The actual process is very .swift and very simple. All letters for neutral countries are brought to the building and are sorted—business letters, .personal letters, newspaper correspondence. Every letter is read and then sent on direct to the mail steamer. Letters not caught in the London pillar boxes are censored at Liverpool: There isa special loom of linguists' who are ready to tackle letters written in any language, living or dead—Hebrew, Croatian, Turkish, or Homeric Greek.

Whatever can't be shipped any other way can be labelled "newspapers," according to the adventurousi spirits who try to smuggle things into Germany. The newspaper has been accused, of many things, but, according to the censor, it is guilty of several more. Folded flat and about ten Sunday editions deep, the newspaper can be trenched very skilfully and in the receptacle so made precious stones can. be shipped—as far as the censor.. Tightly rolled, almost any thing can be put in. ' It is rumoured that fifteen pounds of lard were caught in one haul, made to look like a rill of papers. ■ There seems to bexa special factory devoted to making bags with rolls ' of newspapers at each end. The censor has picked out enough of these money, called after the maker, "Scherardisiert," guaranteed rustless, and already rusty. He has the Lusitariia medal and others, showing President Wilson on one side as an angel of neutrality and Uncle Sam on the other as the bargainer in munitions and death. He has Yon Kluck medals marked "Nach Paris," and the medal struck off when the first Indian troops landed at Marseilles,. with the ironic inscription of John Bull's words, "We are saved." Arid he has letters marked New York with the words, "By German Commercial Submarine."

The Deuts'chland plays a most significant part in the other division of the •museum,. the library. The librarian, who lias read every piece of propaganda issued in Germany, asserts that Paul Koenig, captain of the Deutschland, has written the simplest and the most decent piece of German propaganda in his "The Cruise of the Deutschland."

"Most of the German propaganda," says the librarian, who objects in a quiet voice to being called a "typical librarian," "is a bit blatant,*you know. Captain Koenig is an exception. But he is as thorough as the others. Look here!" And he exhibited pamphlets on India translated into Chinese for penetration at the Indo-Chinese frontier. The work of translation is exceedingly careful with the German propaganda; no spoken language is omitted, and the texts chosen are usually. printed without comment One of the finest is a perfect reproduction of a Dutch book printed 'at .the end of the eighteenth century and directed against Great Britain. It is reprinted from photographic plates of the original, wood cuts and all. Another is a series of cartoons, under the general title of "The Allies Condemned by; Themselves," beginning with the pictures Gilray drew of Napoleon and continuing to the time of the Franco-Russian entente.

In the museum are, held until afterthe war, when they will be forwarded to their addresses, many packages of coffee—enough for a big restaurant; sacks of rice, chewing gurri and rubber tubing ; copper and platinum wire, packed around photographs; lard; dozens of pairs of rubber gloves and quantities of sheet, rubber labelled "samples"; tens of thousands of picture postcards'; anfiGercnan cartoons from American papers and . pro-German cartoons sent out from Berlin; countless books of ■ German pTopaganda under innocent titles; American gold pieces and precious stones concealed in mica; piece of huge shell with name of "Verdun" added to Liege, Namur, and Maubeuge; thousands of letters, { which as . private correspondence are respected and kept from all prying eves until they can be delivered after the war. . ,