liked to follow what the Boche was saying. As I dozed and ruminated
in the way a man does after fever, I was struck by the tremendous
display of one advertisement in the English press. It was a thing
called 'Gussiter's Deep-breathing System,' which, according to its
promoter, was a cure for every ill, mental, moral, or physical, that
man can suffer. Politicians, generals, admirals, and music-hall artists
all testified to the new life it had opened up for them. I remember
wondering what these sportsmen got for their testimonies, and thinking
I would write a spoof letter myself to old Gussiter.
Then I picked up the German papers, and suddenly my eye caught an
advertisement of the same kind in the _Frankfurter Zeitung_. It was not
Gussiter this time, but one Weissmann, but his game was
identical--'deep breathing'. The Hun style was different from the
English--all about the Goddess of Health, and the Nymphs of the
Mountains, and two quotations from Schiller. But the principle was the
same.
That made me ponder a little, and I went carefully through the whole
batch. I found the advertisement in the _Frankfurter_ and in one or two
rather obscure _Volkstimmes_ and _Volkszeitungs_. I found it too in
_Der Grosse Krieg_, the official German propagandist picture-paper.
They were the same all but one, and that one had a bold variation, for
it contained four of the sentences used in the ordinary English
advertisement.
This struck me as fishy, and I started to write a letter to
Macgillivray pointing out what seemed to be a case of trading with the
enemy, and advising him to get on to Mr Gussiter's financial backing. I
thought he might find a Hun syndicate behind him. And then I had
another notion, which made me rewrite my letter.
I went through the papers again. The English ones which contained the
advertisement were all good, solid, bellicose organs; the kind of thing
no censorship would object to leaving the country. I had before me a
small sheaf of pacifist prints, and they had not the advertisement.
That might be for reasons of circulation, or it might not. The German
papers were either Radical or Socialist publications, just the opposite
of the English lot, except the _Grosse Krieg_. Now we have a free
press, and Germany has, strictly speaking, none. All her journalistic
indiscretions are calculated. Therefore the Boche has no objection to
his rags getting to enemy countries. He wants it. He likes to see them
quoted in c
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