Remembers No Secrets
All delusions to the contrary, the censorship, though it learns an awful lot, doesn't care a tinker's hoot about nine-tenths of the stuff it learns. It isn't concerned with Private Jones's morals, with Corporal Brown's unpaid grocery bills, with Sergeant Smith's mother-in-law, with Lieutenant Johnson's fraternity symbols. It is, however, actively concerned in keeping out of correspondence all matters relating to the location and movement of troops, all items which pieced together might furnish the common enemy with information which would be valuable to him in the conduct of his nefarious enterprises.
[In addition to keeping such damaging information] out of soldiers' and officers' correspondence, the base censorship is lying in wait for everything and anything in the mail line which the senders hope to slip through uncensored. [It regularly goes over a large proportion of the] mail which has already been vised by company officers. It sifts through all mail for the army from neutral countries; [and finally it censors all] letters in foreign languages, written by men in the A. E. F.—letters which company officers are forbidden to O. K.
In the exercise of this last-named function lies perhaps the greatest task allotted to the base censorship. Our army is probably the most "international" in history, [and it sends letters] to the base written in forty-six different languages, excluding English. Out of 600 such letters—a typical day's grist—the chances are but half will be written in Italian, followed in the order of their numerousness, by those inscribed in Polish, French and Scandinavian. The censor's staff handles mail couched in twenty-five European languages, many tongues and dialects of the Balkan States and a scattering few in Yiddish, Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, Tahitian, Hawaiian, Persian and Greek, to say nothing of a number in Philippine dialects.