to the troops. How indignant a line officer at the front was one day to
hear a visitor from the American G. H. Q. say that he had forgotten to
bring the mail bags down on his train. Sometimes delivery by airplane
resulted in dropping the sacks in the deep woods to be object of
curiosity only to foxes and wolves and white-breasted crows, but of no
comfort to the lonesome, disappointed soldiers.

Ships foundered off the coast of Norway with tons of mail. Sleds in the
winter were captured by the Bolos on the lines of communication. These
troubles in getting mail into Russia led the soldiers to think that
there might be equal difficulty in their letters reaching home. And it
certainly looked that way when cablegrams began insistently inquiring
for many and many a soldier whose letters had either not been written,
or destroyed by the censor, or lost in transit.

And that leads to the discussion of what were to the soldier rather
terrifying rules of censorship. Intended to contribute to his safety and
to the comfort and peace of mind of his home folks the way in which the
rules were administered worked on the minds of the soldiers. Let it be
said right here that the American soldier heartily complied in most
cases with the rules. He did not try to break the rules about giving
information that might be of value to the enemy. And when during the
winter there began to come into North Russia clippings from American and
British newspapers which bore more or less very accurate and descriptive
accounts of the locations and operations, even down to the strategy, of
the various scattered units, they wondered why they were not permitted
after the Armistice especially, to write such things home.

And if as happened far too frequently, a man's batch of ancient letters
that came after weeks of waiting, contained a brace of scented but
whining epistles from the girl he had left behind him and perhaps a
third one from a man friend who told how that same girl was running
about with a slacker who had a fifteen-dollar a day job, the man had to
be a jewel and a philosopher not to become bitter. And a bitter man
deteriorates as a soldier.

To the credit of our veterans who were in North Russia let it be said
that comparatively very few of them wrote sob-stuff home. They knew it
was hard enough for the folks anyway, and it did themselves no good
either. The imaginative "Scoops" among the cub reporters and the
violently inflamed imaginations an