onflict of an official _communique_ that
had been issued by the French military authorities in Paris being
bowdlerized before publication on this side of the Channel.

Few of the detractors of the military Press Censorship, on the other
hand, gave evidence of possessing more than a shadowy conception of
the difficult and delicate nature of the duties which that institution
was called upon to carry out. There is little evidence to indicate
that the critics had the slightest idea of the value of the services
which it performed. Nor would they appear to be aware that the
blunders committed by the censors, such as they were, were by no means
confined to malapert blue-pencilling of items of information that
might have appeared without disclosing anything whatever to the enemy.
As a matter of fact, cases occurred of intelligence slipping through
the meshes which ought not on any account to have been made public
property.

When, for example, one particular London newspaper twice over during
the very critical opening weeks of the struggle divulged movements of
troops in France, the peccant passage was, on each occasion, found on
investigation to have been acquiesced in by a censor--lapses on the
part of overworked and weary men poring over sheaves of proof-slips
late at night. Nearly all our newspapers published a Reuter's message
which stated the exact strength of the Third Belgian Division when it
got back by sea to Ostend--not a very important piece of information,
but one that obviously ought not to have been allowed to appear. At a
somewhat later date, a journal, in reporting His Majesty's farewell
visit to the troops, contrived to acquaint all whom it might concern
that the Twenty-eighth Division, made up of regular battalions brought
from overseas, was about to cross the Channel.

It will readily be understood that incidents of this kind--those
quoted are merely samples--worried the officials charged with
supervision, and tended to make them almost over-fastidious. Soldiers
of experience, as the censors were, remembered Nelson's complaint that
his plans were disclosed by a Gibraltar print, Wellington's
remonstrances during the Peninsular War, the details as to the
siege-works before Sebastopol that were given away to the enemy by
_The Times_, and the information conveyed to the Germans by a Paris
newspaper of MacMahon's movement on Sedan. They were, moreover, aware
that indignant representations with reference to the