than once, but there
were serious objections to hard-and-fast rules. Everything must
necessarily depend upon the interpretation placed on such ordinances
by the individuals who were to be guided by them. Thus a rigorous
enactment governing any particular type of subject, if strictly
interpreted by harassed censors, would prevent any tidings as to that
subject leaking out at all; while an indulgent enactment, if loosely
interpreted by the staff of the Bureau, might well lead to most
undesirable disclosures being made in the columns of the Press.
Censors planted down in London could not, furthermore, be kept fully
acquainted with the position of affairs at the front--a factor which
greatly aggravated the perplexities of their task. We of the General
Staff in Whitehall were in this respect very differently situated
from G.H.Q. Over on the other side, where the situation of our own
troops and of the French and the Belgians was known from hour to hour,
newspaper representatives could always have been instructed by the
bear-leaders in charge of them as to exactly what they might, and what
they might not, touch upon in reference to any operations in progress.

Matters in connection with the air service and the anti-aircraft
service--the two things to a great extent go together--are primarily
problems for experts; but it seemed to me, as an outsider, that
certain powerful organs of the Press made themselves so great a
nuisance over the subject of air-raids at one time that they
constituted an actual danger. Ridicule was poured upon the plan of
darkening the streets of the metropolis until an attack took place;
the first Zeppelin visit put an end to that. Then, when the threat of
raids became a serious reality, the demand for retaliation was loudest
from a combination of journals which happens to be extremely well
informed, although it was almost a matter of common knowledge that
anything of the kind was impracticable at the time because we had not
got the requisite long-distance machines. It was even contended that
the physical difficulties to be overcome in an attack upon the
Westphalian cities were far less than those which an enemy faced when
flying to London from the Belgian coast, although the distance to be
traversed over territory in the antagonist's hands was three or four
times as great in the former case as in the latter. (Not one reader in
fifty will look at the atlas in a case like this and learn, at a
glance, tha