Probably the Censor at this stage did not interfere much with his activities, content enough to allow fanciful descriptions of Napoleonic strategy to go to the outer world. But, in my experience, facts, if one ascertained something independently, were not treated kindly.
"Why not?" I asked the Censor vexedly about one message he had stopped. "It is true."
"Yes, that is the trouble," he said—the nearest approach to a joke I ever got out of a Bulgarian, for they are a sober, God-fearing, and humour-fearing race.
The idea of the Bulgarian Censorship in regard to the privileges and duties of the war correspondent was further illustrated to me on another occasion, when a harmless map of a past phase of the campaign was stopped.
"Then what am I to send?" I asked.
"There are the bulletins," he said.
"Yes, the bulletins which are just your bald official account of week-old happenings which are sent to every news-agency in Europe before we see them!"
"But you are a war correspondent. You can add to them in your own language."
Remembering that conversation, I suspect that at first the Bulgarian Censorship did not object to fairy tales passing over the wires, though the way was blocked for exact observation. An enterprising story-maker had not very serious difficulties at the outset. Afterwards there was a change, and even the writer of fairy stories had to work outside the range of the Censor.
We were all allowed down to Mustapha Pasha, and considered that that was a big step to the front. "For two days or so," we were told, it would be our duty to wait patiently within the town (the battle-ground around Adrianople was about twelve miles distant). Some waited there two months and saw no real operations. The Censorship at Mustapha Pasha was so strict that all private letters had to be submitted, and if they were in English the English Censor insisted that they should be read to him aloud; and he re-read them, again aloud, to see if he had fully grasped their significance. Then they could go if they contained no military information and did not mention guns, oxen, soldiers, roads, mud, dirt, or other tabooed subjects. An amusing "rag" was tried on the Censor there. A sorely tried correspondent wrote a letter of extreme warmth to an imaginary sweetheart. This began "Ducksie Darling," and continued in the same strain for two pages. He waited until there was a full house—the Censors had no private office, but did their censoring in a large room which was open to all the correspondents—and then submitted his ardent outburst. Other press-men did not see the joke at first, and began to sidle out of the room as, like a stream of warm treacle, the love-letter flowed on. But they came back.